In the Courtyard of the Kabbalist by Ruchama King Feuerman Page A

pouring himself a glass of tea. People began drifting into the courtyard—a balding scribe, a depressed matchmaker, a businessman from South America, a Sephardic former soap opera actress. He always told them to come after eight thirty, but some couldn’t or wouldn’t wait.
    The morning began. Isaac fielded questions from a portly rabbi who hit his children and wanted to mend his ways, an ex-convict, an eighty-year-old woman who couldn’t sleep in the same room with her husband—the cries emanating from his nightmares destroyed her sleep. How did they all find their way? They just did. Isaac went back and forth, relaying people’s questions to the rebbe and then passing back the answers. And all the while, Shaindel Bracha cooked the food in the tiny kitchen and organized the volunteers who delivered the food packages at the end of the week to needy people. Twice a day, she checked on the sewing factory. The rest of the day she tended to her husband.
    Midday, a barren midwife got into a scuffle with the ex-convict, and Isaac had to intervene. Mazal the beggar kept releasing short blasts of flatulence, followed by softer, more elongated rumbles. Whenever she lifted one of her substantial haunches to one side, Isaac noticed how the courtyard people scurried to give her a wide berth. Before Isaac could properly address this situation, he caught sight of thirteen-year-old Dalya, just let out of school. She looked nearly starved, as she always did.
    “Here,” he said to the lank-haired girl, “have a banana.” He kept one in a paper bag, reserved for her.
    “I’m not hungry.” She brushed her limp brown hair off her cheeks, and her pinched hands and the boniness of her wrists made him avert his eyes.
    “Please eat it,” he entreated her.
    She rolled her blue eyes. “Why can’t the rebbe watch me eat it like he usually does?” Dalya was the only courtyard person who regularly got allowed inside since the doctor’s no-visitors edict. Usually she came in the morning when the rebbe was awake.
    “Dalya, Dalya, dear girl. The rebbe’s sleeping this very moment. He needs his rest. Please, I beg you—eat!”
    She rolled her eyes again as she grabbed the fruit and shoved it into her backpack.
    Oh, for goodness sake. He watched her open the iron gate. She wouldn’t eat it on her own in a million years. But how could he wake the rebbe?
    Later in the day, when the rebbe was up and about, Isaac entered his study. The window shutters were closed, and a single lamp with a filigreed base let off a small halo of light. Books lined the shelves, wall to wall, as far as the eye could see, books that told the reader how to live as a human being and as a Jew. They were old, they were new, they were written in English, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish.
    “So, what do I tell the young man who has given up, thinks he’ll never get married?” Isaac gazed down at Rebbe Yehudah who lay half-propped on a couch fitted with a sheet, his fluffy white beard fanned out on his upper chest.
    The rebbe emitted a splintery cough. “Tell him to keep talking to girls,” he said, as Isaac patted his back to bring up the phlegm. “If he keeps doing that, he will get married.”
    Isaac nodded and scribbled a note. Truthfully, that’s all the fellow needed, the lightest hand of encouragement. “What about the woman who is praying for her grandchild to die?” He looked up from his notepad. “The baby was born with fingers missing.”
    The rebbe closed his eyes. “Such prayers are automatically disqualified in heaven. Give me both their names. I will pray for them.”
    “But … why the grandmother? Why does she need your prayers?”
    The rebbe shrugged his thin shoulders. “She must be suffering, too.”
    “But what do I tell her?” he said, his pen hovering above the pad.
    Rebbe Yehudah looked puzzled. “You cry with her,” he said.
    Here, Isaac set down the notepad and checked the rebbe’s pillow fordampness. Sometimes the rebbe got