Free In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist by Ruchama King Feuerman

distracted by the good smell coming from the cottage. What was it? Maybe the same wonderful scent from the Golden Lady shrine. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the round plastic container in the rabbi’s arms.
    “Chicken soup.” The rabbi passed the container to him. “For you.”
    “What about me?” demanded the beggar lady. Her black eyes flashed with hurt. “Don’t I get?”
    “Do you want, Mazal?” The rabbi leaned toward her in a kind way. “Would you like soup?”
    “No,” she decided, with a sharp shake of her head. “I don’t like Ashkenazi soup. No flavor.”

    What the beggar had said was true, Mustafa thought, when he later sampled the soup on the bus ride home. It was not as flavorful as a good Arabic soup. Still, the warm liquid gave him a nice feeling. He smiled, remembering how Rabbi Isaac had bent toward him, like a kind father, and given him the soup like any good mother would make for her child. He wondered why the rabbi had given it to him. Was it possible the rabbi wanted him to talk bad about his own mother? The rabbi would tell others he came from a terrible home. And Mustafa had said bad things. But his mother was better than others who had
moak
children! He knew of a Bedouin family in the village who kept their crazy daughter in a cage outdoors, even in the winter. He shook his head, recalling the shrill barks that came from the girl’s mouth. His mother had never locked him up, not even once. And if she had, his father would’ve set him free.
    When the bus lurched to a halt, he took another taste of the rabbi’s soup. His tongue began to remember all the soups his mother used to cook, especially the one made of green wheat—
freka
. She used to make it on special holidays. It was the most wonderful soup he ever had, and a longing thickened in his chest to return home. Back at his village, thefruit trees—green almond, peach, and pomegranate—were just starting to show their leaves. Would he ever return to his village again? Maybe only in shrouds, he thought, and took another sip of soup.

CHAPTER SIX
    The bus rattled along Jaffa Road, then King George Street. Isaac glanced at a middle-aged Ethiopian woman in an aisle seat chanting a nursery rhyme to a toddler, maybe even her grandchild. He watched the woman mime a house, then a table, then a chair with her quick brown hands. His gaze swung over to the little boy at her side who was trying to imitate her hand motions. He felt a tightening in his rib cage. He, too, would’ve liked to be playing hand games with his own child. Many men his age were in fact grandfathers. Why not himself? he thought with a stab. What if he never married? Then he shook his head, shooing away these thoughts. What-ifs and if-onlys implied God didn’t know what he was doing.
    A dark-skinned man in a worker’s cap got onto the bus, his bulky yellow knapsack bobbing against his back. Isaac noticed how immediately everyone on the bus began to follow the man as he made his way toward the back. What, did they think the poor fellow was a terrorist? Like a radar going off, Isaac’s elbow began to itch. The big yellow knapsack did look out of place. A bomb could fit inside one. In fact—Isaac’s throat turned dry as smoke—hadn’t the last couple of terrorists used knapsacks? Isaac scratched harder. The air seemed to fall away around the dark-skinned man who was humming some mindless tune—and sweating, too. Isaac felt his own palms and neck go damp with sweat. It’s nothing, nothing, he tried to calm himself. A man couldn’t live this way every time he got on a bus to buy a pair of socks or fill a prescription across town, as was the case today. But he felt his stomach stitching and unstitching underneath his suit jacket as if it had a life of its own. Just when he was about to whisper something to the bus driver, the dark-skinned man lazily unzipped his knapsack and took out a miniature Talmud. He began to pore over it, rocking slightly in the