Israel Book Shop presents Chapter 70 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.
Shimon Weisskopf, standing in a corner of the arrivals hall, did give the impression of being on the ball. His curled peyos reached his shoulders, and he wore a broad, friendly smile as he lowered the sign that said “Yosef Schorr” and shook Martin’s hand. “Hi, how are you?” he asked in English, with a faint accent that Martin could not identify.
“Baruch Hashem, good,” Martin replied in Hebrew.
“You don’t look like the Yosef I remembered, but it doesn’t matter. The main thing is that you both have gray eyes.” He winked and took the handle of Martin’s – er, Yosef’s – large suitcase. “How was the flight?”
“I slept the whole time.” Now Martin answered in English, slowly and deliberately. He had no idea if any one of the dozens of people around them had come here, at Skulholt’s behest, to keep an eye on him. He needed to act as Yosef from now on.
At least he was free from having Kornblit on his tail. He’d bought a second ticket to America under his own name, so that Kornblit could be assured that Martin Posner had truly left Israel, as he’d been ordered. And if the detective would come and check if Martin had actually made that flight? Well, Martin was already out of Israel—albeit under Yosef Schorr’s name—so there was nothing Kornblit could do to him anymore.
“Good, shall we go out to my car?” Shimon said.
“Where are we going?”
“To my house.”
“Are there other people there?” He needed to put himself in Yosef’s mind. And even if that was a tall order, at least he had spent enough time with Yosef to know what kind of response was typical of him.
“No, I live alone.”
“You’re not married?”
“No.”
“Good,” Martin replied, with absolutely no tact. “I don’t like people who I don’t know.”
Shimon Weisskopf was quiet for a minute, but then he apparently grasped the extreme caution that his guest was taking. “Yes.” He smiled broadly again. “Your mother told me. It’s good for us both.”
“I never figured out exactly how we’re related,” Martin complained as Shimon pressed on his key fob and the lights on a black car in the third row began to flash. “My mother and your father—”
“Are cousins,” Shimon filled in. “You know Michoel, your mother’s uncle, right?”
“Sure. I’m going to him now.” Martin beamed.
“He’s also my father’s uncle.”
Martin was quiet. “Do you know him?”
“Know him? I was the one who always took him around to collect donations when he was in America. I also planned his home system, because he was so afraid of things that would happen when he wasn’t at home in Israel.” Now they were in the car, and it was hard to believe that the staff at the Skulholt Medical Center would be thorough enough to place a listening device in the car of this Boro Park cousin.
“We spoke about it on the phone,” Martin noted, “when I called you from his house. Remember?”
“Right.” Shimon chuckled. “I was very surprised when my father’s cousin called me with this crazy story. Listen, I really didn’t end off well with Michoel the last time I spoke to him, but he’s not the type to hold a grudge, and it was strange to me that he didn’t contact me for months, especially since the system in his house started doing all kinds of funny stuff…”
“From what I understand, he’s quite the suspicious type.”
“Yes, and I realize why it took you so long to figure out that perhaps he really was in trouble. I also wouldn’t be surprised if you discover that this place he’s at is totally above-board, and that Michoel really had a stroke or an accident that makes him see the whole world in a worse light than the reality…”
***
Shimon Weisskopf’s home turned out to be a pretty nice, spacious basement apartment, accessible by steep and ugly stairs at the back of a two-story house. He warmed up a late supper, and he and his guest sat down quietly to eat.
“So you’ll call them tomorrow,” Shimon said as he cleared the plates.
“Yes,” Martin murmured. He stood up.
“Hello, what about bentching?”
Martin turned to him.
“Wait a second, are you frum?” Shimon asked.
“I don’t know what I am,” Martin admitted. He leaned on the door frame. “I certainly didn’t used to be. Today…a little bit. I guess I have a few different parts to me.”
“And the part that is frum—do you bentch?”
“I never have. Just a few brachos before eating food, to respect my hosts.”
“I suggest that as Yosef, you should become familiar with bentching. Actually, not only as Yosef, but as Michoel Perl’s nephew, because Michoel is rather demanding of those around him.”
“I haven’t figured out the guy yet.” Martin shook his head and went back to the table, where he gratefully accepted the bentcher that his host handed him. “Even after seeing him a few times in the street and then actually living in his house, which I got to know well—he’s still quite the enigma to me.”
“It will take you a long time,” Shimon promised. “So I hope that by the time you figure him out, as you say, your mission will be long over. Unless he wants your services past just rescuing him, like to be his driver. It would be just like him to leave that place and then continue right on to his fundraising, picking up where he left off before the accident.”
“Accident?”
“The stroke, the robbery, the accident, the abduction—whatever did or did not happen to make him land up in that facility.” He yawned, and without further ado, he announced, “I’m going to sleep. Good night.”
***
“Hi, Ima?”
“Mali, how are you?”
“Baruch Hashem, fine. Ima…”
“Yes, Mali?”
“I heard that Chani came to you for Shabbos this past week.”
“That’s right.”
“Can…can I come this Shabbos?”
Hinda’s feet suddenly felt rooted to the floor, as if with some invisible, powerful magnet. But the floor in the bungalow on Moshav Dalton was made of wood, and Hinda’s slippers were plastic. And yet, she remained standing in the same corner where the phone call had caught her, under the arch-shaped molding outside the door to the small bedroom.
“For Shabbos?” she replied with a smile. “You know I’m always happy to see you, Mali, but this Shabbos we are not home, and I’m trying to think if you’d have decent transportation all the way here…”
“Where are you?”
“We’ve gone away to Moshav Dalton for a few days.”
“Oh.” Mali’s voice sounded more distant. “I don’t want to disrupt your vacation as a couple.”
“We’re not here alone. Yosef is with us,” her mother replied calmly.
“Isn’t he in the hospital?” Mali asked. “That’s what I heard from Chani.”
“He was, but he’s been released.”
“Oh…so then I don’t want to come.”
“It’s all up to you, Mali,” Hinda said. “Just remember that we’re always happy to have you, wherever it is.”
“And if I would have wanted to come last week, when you had Chani and Eli there together with…his daughter and her family?”
“What was the problem?”
“There would have been no room for me.”
“Mali, we would have figured it out.”
“How?”
“Sweetie, when it will be noge’a, you can ask thse questions. Do you want me to invite you next time we have two couples coming so I can prove to you that there there’s room for you, too, always?”
Mali was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “All my roommates are going away for Shabbos, so I thought I’d come to you. But I thought we’d be alone… Yosef won’t be very happy to see me anyway.”
“That also depends on you. To remind you, he has a pretty easygoing nature.”
“So which part depends on me?”
“If he sees that you are not ignoring him and trying to cut him out of your life, then…” She fell silent as the door of the bungalow opened, and Dov and Yosef came in after an enjoyable tour of the cow farm. “So how was the tour?” she called out to them.
“Great,” Dov declared. “Yosef’s become friends with the people in charge, and they are ready for him to come every day to help out.”
“Is it a reasonable walk from here?”
“Sure.”
“Why should I walk?” Yosef looked at them both. “Why don’t you take me in the car tomorrow, too?”
“Tomorrow morning I’m going to Haifa, to work,” Dov explained as he walked over to the sink to wash his hands. “I’ll only be back in the evenings.”
“But I don’t want to go to shul here myself!” Yosef’s distress was apparent.
“But we told you this from the start, Yosef,” Hinda said. She sat down next to him, forgetting that Mali was still on the phone.
“So what? If he leaves, then I’m also leaving!”
“Where to?” his mother asked gently.
“To Ma’ayanei Hayeshuah. I don’t want to ruin Martin and Uncle Michoel’s plan, so I won’t go back to Tirat Hacarmel. But I can go to Bnei Brak, and there are nice people there who would help me.” His lips pressed together as he went over to the large futon bed near the entrance and picked up his backpack from the floor next to it.
“If that’s the case, maybe I should also go home,” Hinda said, with a small, somewhat pinched smile. Suddenly she remembered the phone in her hand. “Oh, Mali? Sorry, I got distracted… We’ll talk later, okay?”
“Fine, see you.”
“Why go home?” Dov shook his head from side to side. “We’ve signed the contract for four days, and I think that you need the rest anyway.” He sat down on a chair and folded his arms. “We’ll stay here, Hinda.”
“And what will I do here all day?”
“You brought two or three jobs with you, didn’t you?”
She smiled in response. “Two. But one of them, the Frankfurters’, is as complicated as four jobs. I’ve sat on it for three hours at home already, and I wasn’t able to think of a single solution.”
“I imagine that the fresh air and greenery outside will do it for you, Hinda. Now Yosef, do you want me to take you to Bnei Brak tomorrow morning, or do you want to go by bus from Haifa?”
“I’ll go on the bus myself,” he replied tightly, after a minute. “I don’t want to ruin your vacation, even if it only happened because of me. But Ima, ask Avidgor to come and take me to the hospital, okay? I don’t want to go there by myself.”
“I’ll ask him if he can,” Hinda promised. “I’m just remembering about Mali,” she said two hours later, as Dov closed his Gemara and got up to get ready for bed. She was still bent over the plans for the Frankfurters’ hallway. “Maybe we should invite her to come here for Shabbos?”
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