Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 59 of a new online serial novel, Outside the Bubble, by Esther Rapaport. Check back for a new chapter every week. Click here for previous chapters.
Copyright © Israel Bookshop Publications.
“The biggest problem is that time is very, very short, and we’re afraid he won’t be able to get a passport in time to leave in a normal way,” Dov told Hinda later that evening.
“A passport?” Hinda, mending the hem on Dov’s Shabbos pants, raised her eyes to look at him. “How did he get into the country?”
“With his passport, of course. But after the accident, when he ran to Michoel’s house, the passport disappeared.”
“He had it that evening?”
“Apparently, but in the emergency room he discovered that it was not in his pocket. The lawyer, Schwartzman, looked into it, and the police say they didn’t take it. And that no one else did either.”
“If you can believe them… So maybe he left it in the dorm that evening?”
“Could be. We called and spoke to the secretary there, and they sent a few boys to look in the storage room, where Martin’s belongings that he left are being kept.” Dov watched the needle moving in and out of the fabric. “They didn’t find anything, so he’ll go tomorrow to look himself, and to collect his things. It sounds like he’s happy to have a chance to say goodbye.”
“Is there a possibility that the wallet is there, just none of the boys happened to find it?”
“Very slight.”
“So what do we do?” Hinda threaded the needle with more thread. “Is it possible to ask the government for an extension?”
“That’s what Schwartzman is trying to do, but there’s a risk that because of the hide-and-seek games that he played until now, they’ll be too edgy and won’t let him wait even one more day.”
“But it’s a very legitimate request. I mean, what do they want him to do? Do they have another option for him?”
Dov nodded. “For sure. They can keep him in detention until everything works out. Or they can deport him without a passport.”
“Without a passport? But then they won’t let him into Canada!”
“Regardless, Martin does not plan to go to Canada. He claims it’s a bit dangerous for him there. He had a story with some petty criminals, and that’s one of the reasons he came to Israel. He’d be better off going to America; his Canadian passport allows him to do that.”
“If he finds it, of course.”
“If,” Dov agreed. “That’s the big question. Without a passport, he can’t get into America either.”
“What a story… Poor guy.”
“Right. You know, I really appreciate your involvement, Hinda,” Dov said suddenly. “Especially as you have other worrying things preoccupying your mind much more right now.”
“It’s not a contradiction,” she said. Still, the compliment made her smile. “The fact that I’m worried about Yosef doesn’t mean that I can’t try to think of how to help Martin.”
“If not for that ridiculous deportation order, I would find him a good place to learn here. I feel bad about him. He’s really taken an interest in Yiddishkeit ever since, out of boredom, he read three quarters of Michoel’s library… I even thought about a yeshivah for potential ba’alei teshuvah. I had a few good options for him.” He paused. “I don’t know what will be with him in America—if he does end up there. I’m afraid that everything he gained here will go down the drain.”
“I can speak to Weisskopf, my cousin,” Hinda suggested, but she wasn’t sure they would click. Dov got along great with Martin, but the boy definitely was a certain type, and his rich record of entanglements would not go over well with her family in Boro Park, at least to the extent that she knew them.
***
It had been three weeks already since all she ate each day was half a slice of bread in the morning, a piece of potato for lunch, and a small yogurt in the evening. In the interim, when no one was looking, she also ate candy, and what she was most interested in knowing was whether someone who really, really wants to be anorexic can end up like that, emotionally. Because if so…maybe she needed to stop this. Mike wasn’t responding to the faxes she sent in the middle of the night. It seemed like he didn’t really care, and barely remembered that he had a little sister in the world named Becky.
And maybe…maybe he’d already died, of malnourishment?
Becky didn’t mean to burst into tears in the middle of the night; it was involuntary. And when she did it, the two housekeepers burst into her room, sleepy-eyed, and tried to calm her down, to no avail. They offered her cake, ice cream, and tea. Actually, the tea sounded tempting, but a moment after she took the cup, with the steam curling above it, she pushed it away. “This has sugar, doesn’t it?”
“Of course!” Sue said.
“Then I don’t want it.” Becky put the cup down on her pink night table. “Sugar is fattening.”
Poor Mike probably hadn’t tasted sugar in a long time. Maybe he hadn’t died, but his condition was surely deteriorating. Otherwise, why wasn’t he answering her? Or was it that, as she’d thought before, he wasn’t interested in her anymore?
Becky wavered between fear for her brother, and deep fury. “I hate him!” she suddenly shouted, and pushed away the plate with the melting ice cream. “He’s bad! He’s bad, bad, bad!” And she threw herself onto the floor and wailed and kicked her feet, just like any six-year-old would do. And as much as the two housekeepers, and her mother, who also ran in, reminded her that she was so smart, and it didn’t make sense for her not to understand that this was not appropriate behavior, she did not calm down. She just shrieked in response that, “Even if I have lots of brains, my therapist said that my emotions are on par with my age! And sometimes, six-year-olds kick and scream and lie on the floor!”
***
Yosef leaned on the fence of the sheep pen, listening to the sounds. There were “maaas” and “baaas” from the sheep, and a bit of quiet talking among the people who were with him. He turned his back to the two youths standing there and filling the animals’ food trough from a large sack.
“What’s doing, Yosef?” Ronny, the one in charge of the sheep, slapped him on the shoulder in a friendly manner. “Did you come to teach our sheep some math?”
“I already taught one boy today; he’s fourteen,” Yosef replied. “But they learn complicated stuff these days. It’s okay. He was happy to do multiplication tables. He needed lots of practice on that, anyway.”
“Nice! Who was it?”
“Omar something. Don’t remember the name.”
“Oh, Omar Darwaseh.”
“Right.”
“And what’s now? Won’t you help me out a little bit with the sheep?”
“I don’t think I can now.” Yosef took a step back. “I have a shiur in the shul, for religious people, and then they said someone will come to teach us how to use Otzar Hachachmah.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a computer program with thousands of sefarim downloaded on it, and we can search for whatever sefer we want and learn from it. That kind of thing.”
“Oh, you learn Torah? Like in the yeshivos of the Chareidim?”
“Sometimes. I’m not really able to learn right now in a real yeshiah, but I try to do my own learning, depending on how much time and energy I have. And concentration.”
“What do you learn? Talmud?”
“We call it Gemara. I learn a little of that, but more Chumash, the parshah… In better times, I used to learn Gemara with someone every evening, but I stopped.”
“It’s a shame to stop good things.”
Yosef chuckled. “You’re in favor of learning Gemara?”
“If it does something good for you, then sure.”
From the sheep pen, Yosef went to his parshah shiur, to hear the nice thoughts shared by the maggid shiur who came each week from Kiryat Ata. At the end of the shiur, when he went over to say thank you to the maggid shiur, the man grasped his outstretched arm. “Have we ever met?” he asked Yosef.
“I was here a year and a half ago,” Yosef replied. “Or maybe more—I don’t remember so well. Your shiurim are really nice—that much I remember.”
“Thank you. What is your name?”
“Yosef.”
“Nice to meet you. I’m Yaakov.”
Again Yaakov! Like the man who played chess with him! “It’s not a good name,” Yosef told him dully. “You should ask a rav to change it for you.” And without waiting for a response, he walked out of the room.
From there, he went to the computer room, along with three other religious men; the oldest among them was fifty-two. The instructor showed them the ins and outs of the Otzar Hachachmah program. The older man, who turned out to be a bank clerk, was the one who managed the best of them all. Yosef, though, kept getting confused and kept clicking the wrong things. After half an hour of failed efforts to grasp the program, he left, frustrated with computers and with a maggid shiur by the name of Yaakov.
“Computers is obviously not for me,” he later told Hinda on the phone. “That’s how it is. There’s nothing to do about it.”
“Computers are overrated these days, aren’t they?” she consoled him. “It’s okay if you didn’t get it. B’ezras Hashem, when you get released, you won’t work in computers, right?”
“Don’t know.” Yosef didn’t respond to the smile in her voice. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to go back to helping out in the emergency room. Maybe I’ll stay here till I get old, and then it would be worth it for me to get to know this Otzar Hachachmah, without it shutting down on me every minute. Because the shul here doesn’t have so many sefarim. Also, there often isn’t a minyan.”
“Um…maybe there’s someone here who can help you with the computer,” Hinda said quickly, choosing not to address his last few sentences. “You remember the American boy who mistakenly came to Uncle Michoel’s house, and is staying in Zaid’s studio apartment upstairs?”
“Oh.” Yosef was quiet. After a pause he said, “Are you sure he’s not following me, Ima? Because that is what it looked like at first. I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t totally balanced, but…why does he come after me wherever I go?”
“He isn’t following you, Yosef. He’s running away from others.”
“Why does it always get to me?”
“Because while he was fleeing, he was looking for Uncle Michoel, and then our family.”
“And now that he will come to me here, it will be to escape from the others?” Yosef sighed. “I have to think about it, Ima’le.”
And when Hinda heard his “Ima’le,” she relaxed, despite Yosef’s previous remark about staying in Tirat Carmel forever. Because it sounded like he was starting to come back to himself.
Whether or not he agreed for Martin to come to him was a small and nearly irrelevant question, especially as she hadn’t even heard Martin’s opinion on the idea.
***
“No problem, I’ll go help him out with the computer program, sure,” Martin said. He shifted the yarmulke he had bought for himself in recent days, out of consideration for his hosts, back and forth on his head, unable to hide his mounting impatience ever since the lawyer had filed a request in his name to postpone his departure. “Maybe it will help distract me from this pressure… But are you sure he wants me?”
“Nothing is sure,” Dov replied, after glancing for a second at Hinda. “Depends on his mood. Look, I’ll take you. At worst, we’ll come back sooner than we’d planned.”
“Will it be okay for you to go there without me?” Hinda fussed with her bag. She needed to go out this evening for her collections in Kiryat Chaim; she had regular donors who were expecting her.
“I believe we’ll manage.” Dov took his car keys out of the drawer. “Do you have anything to send him?”
She took a few rugelach out of the freezer and packed them up. Martin took the bag from the table, and Hinda davened that this visit would only be beneficial for Yosef. She hadn’t asked him again if he wanted Martin to come and help him with the program, but she sufficed with the fact that Yosef hadn’t explicitly objected; after all, he’d promised to think about it.
As Dov had said, they could come back quickly, if need be. And it was hard for her to imagine that Yosef would erupt at Martin there. He had sounded good in the recent phone calls, and even if Martin would somehow arouse some unexplained anger in him, he should be able to control that anger. It wasn’t uncontainable anymore.
But she did not imagine that Yosef would actually welcome them warmly. He was polite, courteous, and so filled with gratitude, that Dov wanted to speak to someone on the staff to ask if they’d changed something in his medication. But just to be safe, he stayed in the computer room with him and Martin, dozing on a green, upholstered chair and listening with half an ear to Martin’s explanations. The program was foreign to Martin, but he grasped it very quickly, and discovered that it was quite interesting. Together with Yosef, he searched for the gematrios of his name in all the parts of Tanach.
“You explain things very well,” Yosef complimented him. “I’m sorry that I once thought you were following me.”
“I really was acting suspicious,” Martin agreed. He was also surprised at the big change in Yosef.
“You look different now.”
Martin gave a half smile. “The yarmulke?” he suggested.
“Maybe.” Yosef studied him. “Is it real?”
Martin took it off for a moment, looked at it, and then burst out laughing. “And not what, made of plastic?”
“I meant—is it permanent?”
“Permanent for now.” Martin looked at Dov, sitting a few feet away. “As long as I’m staying there, I need to respect them, right?”
“Will you be there for much longer?”
“Depends. I’m supposed to be leaving already, but my passport disappeared. I went yesterday to the dorm where I was studying, and searched for it but couldn’t find it. Let’s see what happens…”
“So get a new passport, and that’s it.”
“It takes time, a long time. Especially now in the summer, when lots of people want to travel.”
“I don’t know. I got a passport when I was about six years old. We went with my mother to America when her cousin married off one of his children. He invited us and paid for the tickets, maybe because my father passed away and he felt bad for us.” He paused. “If I would need to fly someplace now, I’d also need a new passport.”
“Why would you need to go anywhere?”
“My uncle, Michoel Perl, invited me to come to him. Didn’t my mother tell you?”
“Oh, yeah, I heard something about that.”
“But my mother says she won’t let me fly, because it’s not clear to her what’s with him, and if he really needs my help. And who know if I can even be of help to him? Definitely not when I’m here…”
“Yes,” Martin agreed.
“Hey, you also grew a small beard.”
“Oh.” Martin fingered the fuzzy stubble. “It’s because I’m not using my regular shaver. It got lost. And…your mother’s husband is lending me his hair clippers, and it’s nothing to write home about.”
“But the beard looks good on you.” Yosef studied him. “You look much nicer this way.” His eyes clouded for a moment. “It’s not because you want to be her son instead of me, right?”
“Whose son, your mother’s?”
“Yes.”
“Not at all. My mother passed away when I was very little, and I’m not looking for substitutes.”
“Oh,” Yosef said. “Because there are all kinds of people who are trying…who want my mother to become like their mother.” He jerked his head in Dov’s direction; his stepfather seemed to be asleep. “H-his children, for example.”
“Well, I’m not. Although I can understand his children, no? You’re also a bit like his son now.”
“A bit. But not instead of them.” His eyes looked troubled, and Martin felt a frisson of anxiety that perhaps Yosef would start screaming again, like he had in Perl’s yard that day. But Yosef just sighed and turned his eyes back to the keyboard. “Fine. I understand how to search for gematrios and all that. What do I do when I want to find a sefer on the parshah? How do you look for, say, something easy for children to understand?”
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