In a tiny café, that had been selling cheesecake to the residents of Jerusalem since the days of Ben Gurion himself, a man of about fifty years old, with a tidy beard and a large black yarmulke, pushed back the old wooden chair and got up. His business partner left a few minutes ago, but Reuven, being a religious man, stayed back to say the prayer after eating foods that are made to sustain a human being – namely, foods that contain flour, but yet aren’t bread. The nameless café had the best cheesecake in town, but because it was so small, and lost in the bendy streets near Meah Shaarim, only the locals knew of its delicious secret. And it was cheap, too. In other places you’d pay at least double. Of course, the cheesecake was not such a healthy lunch – Malka never ceased to remind him of his awful habits – but, what a wife doesn’t know, can’t hurt her. There were exactly three steps between the shaky black table, balancing precariously on one leg, and the counter. Reuven waited for David, the owner, to finish weighing up exactly 50 grams of cake for a hungry kid, who shyly left a five shekels coin on the counter, asking if he could bring the thirty agorot he owed after tomorrow. Of course, it wouldn’t occur to David to doubt his customers, even if they were all of seven years old. In the pizza place next door, a child was wailing, dragging out the word ‘eeemmmaaa’, Hebrew for ‘mother’, on the same unwavering note, sounding like a handle of an aluminium bucket from Reuven’s childhood, when the bucket would get old and creak when he carried water in it. Reuven cringed, both with his face and his shoulders, secretly delighted that his years of having little kids were long past. If only Malka would give up her crazy ideas of having ‘just one more yingale or meidale”… she was windowed so long ago, that both of her children were married and fully independent, and now, luckily, she was married to him. It is not good for a man to be alone, the Torah says, and oh how true that is. Since the day of their chuppa, Reuven woke up every morning to freshly ironed shirts, smelling of starch, and a healthy breakfast of fruit and porridge with honey. She gave him everything he wanted, she was his home and his neshama sang at the sight of her. Yet, the only thing she really wanted, that he could not give her… He sighed. Everything is God’s will. He pulled up the ever-escaping belt over his bulging belly, and took out his wallet. Maybe it was time to start wearing suspenders, like an old man.
“How much do I owe you?” – he asked David.
David caressed his long beard, and bent down to check the register. “Twenty-six shekels”, - he replied.
“Oh! That’s a special number! Thank you, you made by day, and not just with your delicious cakes this time! This is clearly a message!”
“Yeah, it’s not every day that your bill comes out to be the same number as Hashem’s holy name in gematria!” – David accepted the money, put it away, and dragged his hurting legs – the whole town knew how he suffered from gout, and nothing ever helped, and the doctors were useless – to the chair behind the counter.
Reuven thanked him again and walked outside. The sunset wind was just beginning to rise up, sweeping up the dust on all West – to – East oriented streets into great swirls. The heavy blanket of summer air lifted off towards Mamila and the valley that gave hell its name, then settled down there for the night. Malka was waiting at home… he needed to hurry. But first, he had to stop at a shul to pray mincha. Turning into the street of the Prophets – not towards the side that ended in that despicable new hotel, but the side that winded back towards the holier neighbourhoods – he hurried towards his favourite “prayer factory”, a one-room synagogue with nothing extra, just a room filled with tables and chairs and prayer books. Strong gusts of wind were still flapping around the signs with “Vote for Moshe Leon for a mayor of Jerusalem!” and “Donate to Ohr La-Chayal to help our soldiers!” There were other signs, colourful and with strange words in them, always some kind of “festival” or some “DJ Uplift Apollo” – which he could not comprehend and suspected of being deeply unkosher. One of the larger signs almost hit him in the face, but he caught it in time with his hand.
When he was but a few steps away from his destination, a woman suddenly stepped in front of him. Her snood was pushed back from her hairline, and some long hair strands had managed to escape from it, spilling all over her shoulders. She was dressed in a typical settler style, many layers, none of them matching, her brown toes sticking out from under the third skirt. Her appearance reminded Reuven of the ragged tea doll his mother used to place over the samovar pipe, to keep it from cooling down too fast on Shabbos. The woman held a bottle of sweet Kiddush wine, wrapped neatly in a torn supermarket bag. About half of it was gone.
“A sgula! Do you want it?”
Carefully avoiding any touch with her, as any religious man would, Reuven stopped in his tracks. Even the most conservative members of the Ultra-Orthodox community knew about Jerusalem syndrome. Either way, those affected were nearly always harmless.
“What kind of a sgula?”
“For having children, of course! What else?”
“Why are you giving it away?”
“My daughter just gave birth over there, in Bikur Holim Hospital. So, she doesn’t need it anymore. It was blessed by the holy Rav Baruch himself!”
Doubtfully, Reuven turned around to gaze at the gouged out windows of Bikur Holim. As far as he knew, it closed down about eight or even ten years ago. Nobody had given birth in it for a very long time… Perhaps a part of it, on the left side of the street, with intact windows, was still operating? Was that righteous man and kabbalist from Netivot still alive? Reuven didn’t know.
“So, do you want it or not? Your Malka would pay any money she had for a sgula this powerful!”
“Wait… how do you know? Are you a friend of hers?”
The current of people streamed all around them, avoiding them carefully, like two pebbles in a spring downpour. Nobody complained, even though the pavement was barely half a meter across, and only a woman with a double stroller threw an angry look over her shoulder, but then the stroller was wider than the pavement, anyway.
She hesitated.
“You could say that.” – she answered at last, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, and nervously biting a dirty nail on her left hand. “She wants a child, but you don’t. So how could it happen, you tell me? How could a neshama come to a father who doesn’t want it?”
“I never said…” – Reuven began, horrified. “How could a Jew not want a precious new baby to come to his family? A child is always a blessing. Even a sick child!”
“You didn’t have to say it”, - the woman snorted. “Everybody knows it here, anyway.”
“It’s not true,” – Reuven made a gesture, as if to push her away. “And where is ‘here’?” He was beginning to feel the first stirrings of anger somewhere around his stomach, and a constriction in his throat, as if he wanted to cry and yell at the same time.
“Here.” – she waved her arm up and about, in the general direction of the hospital.
“But Malka is forty-eight years old. By the time this baby grows, she will be old, and I will be ancient. It’s not fair to the baby, to grow up without any siblings his age, just with his old parents...”
“More unfair than not being born at all? Hashem is angry at you right now! For those words.”
Reuven took another step back, fearful that the mysterious lady would just hit him with the bottle. But instead, she just pushed it into him. A twisted smile distorted her features.
“Take. And light a candle in memory of Sara bas Yaakov when the baby comes. Promise!”
Numbly, Reuven nodded.
The woman turned around and walked away back to the hospital building, in a slow shuffling gait, without looking back at him.
The bottle stood by his side all the way through Mincha and the evening prayer. If his fellow shul-goers were surprised by him having a half-drunk bottle of kiddush wine with him, they did not show it in any way. There was an old man who always showed up with a bag containing a freshly killed and dripping carp, bought at the Machane Yehuda market, barely a kilometre away. There was also a man who never washed. That was way worse than just wine, but nobody mentioned it to them, either.
A smell of pumpkin soup greeted him as he opened the door, and something inside his heart melted when he saw his wife, so simple and yet so special, standing by the stove. Really, Hashem had been very kind to them. If finding a spouse the first time is as hard as the splitting of the sea, what’s to be said about a second time, when both are burdened by kids and burnt so badly by life… he sighed. “I will be ready in a minute, wash your hands!” – she called to him, pouring the soup into his old and cracked crème coloured bowls with a fancy ceramic ladle she brought from her home. A loaf of freshly-baked spelt bread was resting in the middle of the table, a king of this meal, surrounded by an entourage of dips.
“Sara was my school friend…” – Malka said, barely holding back tears. “She was killed by a bus on a street in Bnei Brak in the early nineties… and she had been pregnant. The baby was saved by the doctors, but not her… And I never dared call her family or visit, I didn’t want to remind them of their loss. I never even visited during the week of mourning… Her parents probably were very upset with me. I should call. She used to like dressing like a settler, even though she wasn’t…” Malka sat there, transfixed, massaging her left hand with her right, and staring into space for a few more minutes, then she seemed to reach a decision.
She sat down by the phone, a clumsy beige deal of a landline, for a long time, gathering her courage, and hugging herself round the shoulders. Reuven went away into the kitchen to avoid embarrassing her, and drank his evening green tea staring into the tiny window, at the view of Geula neighbourhood, strangely quiet in the evening hours. Downstairs, two teenage boys in long black coats and hats were discussing today’s lessons in Yiddish. He wished he could have some more cheesecake, but of course Malka would never allow such frivolities on a weekday… it was not good for his health, unlike this bitter tea. He sighed. It was good to be married and taken care of again. A bit of cake is really a small sacrifice, that’s for certain.
A loud “Mazal tov!” interrupted his musings. Indeed, as he figured out, Sara’s daughter had a baby today, but not in Bikur Holim, of course. That had been closed for over a decade.
Reuven felt a chill crawling up his spine. He looked hesitantly at the bottle of wine, waiting on the table, still in the torn bag. Maybe he should not have taken it. Maybe it’s all a crazy coincidence… They would have to move to a place where a baby would be more comfortable… Nobody would ever, ever believe this story. He really couldn’t tell it to anyone.
Malka finished her conversation and came to hug shoulders from behind. He tensed, because he hadn’t realized she had visited the mikve, and now they could touch again. Some things never become old, even if your body is as old as Metushelach’s. He got up and pulled the curtains closed against the night and the neighbours. He really hoped no smell of the cheesecake had lingered on his face, and that he would only smell of the pumpkin soup and the dips.
“Pour me some of that wine,” – she asked, at last. He obliged.
