In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist by Ruchama King Feuerman

oh why was she asking him these questions when she had already disqualified him? “I can certainly afford my own place. But what a privilege to be able to assist the rebbe. When I marry, I’ll rent my own place. Or maybe buy.” Scratch, scratch.
    Mrs. Edelman nodded and let out a big yawn of her own. “Excuse me for saying this,” she threw out as the bus rounded the corner, “but I can’t see you ever getting married, if you’ll forgive me.”
    A lump of silence. Then, “Just because you and I are probably not a match,” he said stiffly, “doesn’t mean I’m unmatchable.”
    “I know a serious man when I see one,” she stated, and a flush traveled from his itchy sock all the way to the black hat on his head. It was true. All his setups ended like this. Why he even bothered to date was a mystery to him.
    “So why waste my time?” the widow went on, reading his mind. “Or anyone’s?”
    He pondered this. “A single person can be compared to a captive held in jail, waiting to be redeemed,” he said at last. “He could be saved the nextminute or in another twenty years. One never knows. Don’t the sages say that redemption can come in the blink of an eye?”
    Mrs. Edelman let out a faint snort. “I fail to see how that answers my question,” she said, and boarded the bus.
    Then he took his own bus back to the courtyard.
    At the cottage on Ninveh Street, he hung up his jacket in the tiny hallway closet. Certainly he could afford his own place—and a bigger closet—what with the $15,000 he got in interest every year from his old business he had sold. But a good atmosphere enveloped him here in the home of Rebbe Yehudah and his wife, Shaindel Bracha, not too hot, not too cold. Like a womb, he supposed, that was always the right temperature. When he married, he could always take a job as a clerk somewhere, to supplement his income.
    Rebbe Yehudah’s wife stuck her plump head out of the kitchen doorway, though it was late, already past ten in the evening. A piece of classical music played softly somewhere in the cottage—Dvorák? The rebbe favored the work of that composer. “How did it go?” Shaindel Bracha asked, her tightly woven snood covering every speck of hair. She glanced down at his arms, and her pale brown eyes went wide with alarm. “
Oy vey
, you’re bleeding!”
    He glanced down and past his scabby bloodied elbow toward a memory, the school Gitty and Heshy had started, modeled so closely after his own (they even had recruited his former students). It was a great success, he’d heard. The school had saved many a teen and young man. As for himself, he never did get his rabbinic ordination.
    “It’s nothing,” he said to the rebbetzin, pulling a tube of hydrocortisone from his pocket. He shmeared a fingernail amount onto his elbow, asked after the rebbe’s health, and shuffled off to sleep in his own room next to the study.

    On the way back from synagogue the next morning, Isaac saw a small man in a Russian-style cap waiting in the courtyard. “Where do I put this?” the man asked, a pencil tucked behind a cauliflower ear. He pointed to a crate at his feet.
    Isaac bent and read the return address on the box. Shaindel Bracha hadbeen expecting a delivery of white silk fabric for the factory that she and the rebbe oversaw a few blocks away. War veterans stitched intricate pictures of wine goblets, candles, doves, and flowers onto Shabbos challah covers, using a special device that allowed amputees to work with their feet to operate the sewing machine. From this small business and German reparations from the rebbe’s Bergen-Belsen days, the courtyard survived.
    “I’ll take it,” he told the delivery man.
    Inside the cottage, Shaindel Bracha was stirring about, preparing a hot lemon drink for the rebbe and setting up a huge pot of chicken soup. The rebbe’s flu symptoms had lifted slightly. Isaac set the box against the wall in the hallway. He glanced out the kitchen window while