Born on the Sabbath
It wasn’t so long ago when young Ezra, sleepless eyes all bloodshot and bleary in the wake of another morning-of research paper, found the gray-haired man with the tiny back wheel of his chair caught in a sewer grate. The afternoon sun, like the neighborhood around him, was dying fast. Strains of evening news themes turning over the hour echoed from open co-op windows up and down the block. Soon the voices of anchors would populate the empty street like ghosts at a mausoleum. Birds perched listlessly on fire escapes, unwilling to take wing in that heat. Red lights spun from the back of an ice cream truck on its long descent into the city. In his daze he’d thought himself alone in the center of a desolate world beyond redemption, until suddenly he wasn’t.
For a minute or so, Ezra stood and watched the man’s hunched spine for signs of breath. He didn’t want to be the one to make the dead body call. He was too afraid of cops and their thousand questions. When at last he saw a clear rise and fall in the dandruff-speckled tweed shoulders, he carried on walking.
“You may pass me by but you’ll not pass me again, young miss,” wheezed the old man.
“Who, me?” said Ezra. “I’m a boy. Man.”
“Ah. My eyes fail me. You’ve heard that one before, young boy-man?”
“Heard what?”
“It’s an old story. The shepherd and the gold-fleeced sheep. ‘You may pass me by but you’ll not pass me again.’ Some say it was Hashem he met on the road. Others say… it was the – Oh for Christ’s sake this wheel! These farkakte things, I can’t… Good God…”
“Do you need help?”
Ezra hoped he’d say no.
“Would you rather I didn’t?”
“No, sir.”
“Then I’m going that way. Push, please.”
Ezra lifted the wheel from the grate and walked the old man through the neighborhood. They exchanged little more than the odd “left here” or “mind the squirrel.” After a while, their conversation was reduced to gestures of the thumb and a few solemn “uh huh”s in reply. Two separate gaggles of dogwalkers crossed the street and back to avoid them.
Outside a small synagogue wedged between high-rises, the old man raised his right hand and Ezra understood they’d arrived at his destination.
“Alright then,” said Ezra. “Good night.”
“Is it?”
Perhaps he’d expected some sort of compensation, if not in cash then at least in paternal wisdom. Maybe a wink and a pat on the shoulder. But the old man just creaked along down the path to the double doors without so much as a nod of thanks. If it wasn’t Ezra, he supposed, it would’ve been another much like him. No righteous God would leave an old man stuck in the street all night. What a happy thing it would be, thought Ezra, to feel so entitled to the goodwill of others, and what sadness to feel so dependent on it.
From the balcony above the entrance, a younger Orthodox man with a tefillin box on his forehead pointed down at Ezra.
“You Jewish?”
“Technically.”
“How Jewish?”
“On my mom’s side.”
“Bar mitzvah?”
“I had one.”
“Good enough. We were waiting on a tenth and here you are. Come on up, I’ll meet you inside.”
Ezra neglected to mention the last time he’d stepped foot in a synagogue was on that same bar mitzvah morning. He tried unsuccessfully to block memories of nervous puking in the basement bathroom so profuse it postponed the afterparty at the Turkish restaurant he hated indefinitely. There were certain cousins of his who still grabbed their stomachs and fell to the floor laughing at the sight of his sorry face nearly seven years later. His throat seized and he forced himself to walk on if only to keep from gagging.
Inside, it smelled vaguely of a soup Ezra couldn’t place. The man from the balcony hopped down a set of rust-chewed stairs to meet him, long beard bobbing ahead with each step.
“It’s just this way. Put these on.”
He handed Ezra a blue felt yarmulke and a tallit of yellowed wool with a Hebrew inscription which meant nothing to him.
“I’m Yakob. Your name is?”
“Ezra.”
“Ezra. Huh. You know the old man?”
“We just met.”
“What a piece of work. A couple more screws loose and he’d be the Cyclone, yeah? Frighteningly old, too – hard to look straight at.”
Then Yakob led him into a dingily lit library where the other eight men had already begun to wobble in silent prayer. The open Torah ark around which they were gathered looked more like a plywood child’s coffin propped against the room’s eastern wall. Above it hung a watercolor rainbow covered in small gold handprints and misshapen Stars of David. A few men wore vests, others suspenders. No one looked younger than 35, though their beards might have deceived him. Through the occasional grunt and mumble he could hear a baby wailing away in the back.
Unsure of the correct way to participate, Ezra stuck his hands in his pockets and waited. He noted the water bubbles in the walls and the discolored patches in the carpet. He listened for changes in the wind outside and tried to piously meditate on the impermanence of his brief existence, but kept getting distracted wondering where the old man’s story about the shepherd could have possibly been headed.
He couldn’t remember whether he’d left his phone on silent so he clicked the switch the other way. Then it occurred to him that if it had been set to silent it would now ring and only embarrass him further, standing there ridiculous in his sweatpants and hoodie in a place of worship for a God he didn’t believe in. He clicked it a few more times, leaving the matter to chance, until he noticed that everyone besides him and the rabbi had begun seating themselves in the semicircle of folding chairs around the makeshift bimah.
He stepped forward to join them, but before he could sit down he felt a tapping on his shoulder and heard a voice whisper in his ear, “Follow me, please.”
He looked around and saw a many-shawled woman hurrying out the door. Yakob and the other men didn’t seem to notice, so he followed her.
The walls of the backroom were dominated by a poster for something called “Shalom Sesame” and about two dozen stickers of baseball team logos and assorted IDF insignia. The baby was now cooing contentedly in its bouncer as the woman wiped away jelly splotches from its chubby pink fingers.
“Shouldn’t I–”
“Shh.”
“But I thought they need–”
“They don’t need you, it’s fine. Look at you. Feh, but look at him, this mess. Ay-yi-yi… Sit down. Please.”
She pointed to a big rocking chair with a bib and a blanket on either arm. Ezra fell into it with a woody croak.
“You can take off the tallis. If you knew where it’s been you’d be thanking me. Now, the blanket goes on like this…”
Then she made an elaborate sweeping gesture over her shoulders as if donning a toga.
“Like this?” said Ezra.
“Eh, good enough.”
“Why am I wearing a blanket?”
“Why do you think? Hand me that. The bib, please.”
Ezra handed it to her. In a single motion, she slid the bib over the baby’s head and swept him up out of the bouncer and into Ezra’s arms.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
In the minutes of waiting, neither Ezra nor the baby made a solitary sound. He’d never held a human baby before. The weight of the head shocked him, and as he balanced it on his elbow, image after horrific image of babies splayed bloodily on the ground like poor fallen birds rushed through his mind. His arms quivered like leaves in a rainstorm as he tried to avoid the wide brown eyes staring up at him, searching.
She returned wheeling the old man ahead of her. She sat him opposite Ezra, and for a moment the two watched him with what he felt was a certain degree of unwarranted suspicion.
“Uh hey,” said Ezra. “Again.”
“So you’ve met. This is his grandfather, Yakob.”
“Another one.”
“What’s he saying now, Lotte?” asked the old man.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to take him back?” asked Ezra.
“No, please, I insist. What a picture you two make. I said, ‘What a lovely picture they make,’ yes saba? Do you agree?”
“Heh?”
“He pretends not to hear. It’s a game he plays from time to time – don’t ask… Just the other day, I come into the house out of the rain – I was at the salon for an hour, maybe two (not for me, I was there to support Rachel… that’s Rachel, Avi’s wife, not Rachel S.), okay maybe three hours, but no more than that – and so here I walk in and what do I find but this very same Yakob, babe in arms, parked in front of a stereo which, no, I didn't even know was there an hour earlier, this stereo playing some kind of… how do you call it, saba?”
“Fleetwood Mac.”
“Now you hear, do you? ‘Flea something or other,’ he’s listening to – maybe you know him? At a volume I can’t even begin to… I mean, it was… But so and of course I switch it off for my own sake, you know, when I find the switch, that is, and what do I ask him? I ask, ‘Yakob, you really need this music at this volume at this time of night?’ So maybe it was four hours. It was night by then – what of it? And so I go on, ‘Old man, you’ll make the whole city deaf with that racket. And the baby? What were you thinking?’ And what does he say to me? ‘I didn’t notice.’ Ha! He doesn’t notice, he says… To his own poor Lotte no less, and to think with what I’ve had to suffer with this baby these last months. A shonda, no? Just embarrassing. Awful.”
The elder Yakob made a loud gulping sound and then pointed at the baby.
“Born on the sabbath. Like me. Born on the sabbath, both of us.”
“I don’t…” said Ezra.
“He thinks it means something. ‘Born on the sabbath.’”
“Which one?”
Yakob chuckled. Lotte frowned.
“Hebe.” It sounded to Ezra like a cartoon mouse had hiccuped from somewhere deep inside the baby’s belly.
“What was that?”
“So it begins,” said Lotte. “The tragedy of my life. Now he’s started, he won’t stop. I’m like Job…”
Then a bit louder: “Heeeeeebuh.”
Yakob started to laugh and Lotte patted his back as if forcing a burp out of the old man.
“This is not funny, saba. I can’t take him anywhere. Not even to temple!”
“I’m confused,” said Ezra.
“Now you’re confused? You’re just like this putz, not hearing…”
“Hebe! Hebe! He-he-he-he-BUH!”
“Shake him a bit more, man, maybe he’ll stop this time.” The other Yakob entered the room and leaned on the back of Ezra’s chair. “Kidding! He’ll be on like this for hours, anyway – just forget it.”
“And what do you know about it?” asked Lotte.
“About my own son, you ask me this? My own flesh and blood and the rest?”
“I’m the one feeding him all hours of the night. And where are you? Here with your farkakte books and your farkakte… whatever else.”
“Are we not people of the book, my heart?”
“Not the books you’re reading.”
“HEEEEEEEEEEBE! Hebehebehebe. Hebe.”
“Should I go? I have like… so much homework,” said Ezra.
“It’s fine, he’s fine. Who invited you back here, anyway, Yakob?”
“I bring wine! Young Ezra missed Kaddish! What of it?”
“But I’m not old enough.”
“Really? You hearing this, saba? ‘Not old enough.’”
The old man doubled over in laughter.
“Hebe? Hebey hebey?”
“Feel free to take him anytime,” said Ezra.
“I should be saying the same to you, kid,” said Lotte. “Please, take him! Take little ‘hebe’ boy! To think of me, with all I’ve had to endure in this life around these jokers and now to be cursed with this… this Cain. Over and over, with this… this vile, this… this hateful word, this ‘hebe hebe hebe,’ neverending.”
“Hebe…”
“You make good points, Lotte,” said Yakob. “I hate to admit it but your reasoning is sound. If there’s an evil in the house, you don’t coddle it, you don’t nurture it – you cut it out! You protect yourself.”
“Wait a minute,” said Ezra. “What’s going on here? Protect yourself from what? Your own baby? What the hell is–”
“Take the wine and loosen up, Ezra man. Here, say it with me, it’ll be just like Hebrew school: Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, borei p’ri hagafen. Okay, your turn.”
“HEEEEEEEEEEEBE! HEEEEEEEEEEEBE!”
“L’chaim!” said the old man.
“I should go. I should really go.”
“Think on it,” Yakob the younger continued, “how do you remove the thorn without destroying the rose? It's simple: you go and you plant it in somebody else’s garden!”
“HEBE. HEBE. HEBE.”
“Oh stop it, Yakob,” said Lotte, “can’t you see you’re scaring him? You always take things too far.”
“I’m not saying anything we’re not all thinking! He’s a Jew just like any other… more or less. It’s in him like it’s in us.”
“Hebe. HEBE! Hee buh. Hee buh… HEBE!”
The old man was wiping away tears when he said, “Oh Ezra? I think the shepherd has found his golden sheep, my boy!”
“Stop!”
Ezra stood up and in an instant the room went silent. He looked around him and found the whole congregation had descended upon them. Dark hats and beards inundated every passage. Under their unflinching gaze he felt the fire of expectation burning within him. He couldn't be what they wanted him to be; he didn’t even know what it was they wanted in the first place. He was trapped, buried beneath centuries of tradition in which he wanted no part. He looked at the baby, so tiny and scared, so helpless and alone in his unqualified arms. He looked into his eyes and saw a light shining unlike any he’d ever seen. He felt he understood something now, something far beyond understanding.
Then, like Gabriel’s horn, his phone began to ring and that’s when he knew his time was at an end.
#
For years to come, Ezra would avoid the synagogue and the street where he’d found the old man as bus riders do a wet seat. Some days he’d walk past playgrounds and wonder if he’d ever see the baby again. He wondered if he’d even know his face. In time, he’d abandon the city and leave behind all memories of that strange summer night. His days were filled with minor joys and lesser disappointments. He met people who took little offense at his presence. One married him. They made a boy and they named him Isaac. And when Ezra found a job at a city college, they moved right back to where his life began.
One Friday night, on the eve of his thirty-first birthday, he showed Isaac all the places he still remembered from back when: the garden where he laid to rest his final baby tooth, the bouncing pony ride outside Nonno’s Pizza where his dad wagered petty bets on domino games most Saturdays, the flat tire chained to the fence above the riverbank where the grass grew twice as high and in its shade he’d sit and name the roly-polies in retreat and dream up rollercoasters tall as any mountain, wide as any ocean. There beside young Isaac, the world was big again. In those eyes so like his own, he was the man from whom all men descended, the man towards whom all men invariably returned.
And when the day was done, Ezra walked the long way up the hill back home with his son half-asleep in his arms. And they found the spot on the old stoop in the glow of the old streetlamp, his North Star. And they sat and listened for the jingle of his wife’s keys as she’d come round the corner to meet them. And they waited, and they waited. And then there he was, right there where Ezra had left him in the endless shadow of the dying day – there he was: the gray-haired man with his back wheel caught in a sewer grate, awaiting him once more.
Joel Henry Little is a writer and musician from New York City. He received a B.A. in English from Hunter College, and his work has appeared in Maudlin House, Heavy Feather Review, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety.