A Face In The Crowd

by Lloyd B. Abrams

Anybody who says that “dry heat ain’t really hot” has no clue about the reality of a summer in Jerusalem during a record heat wave.

There had already been nine days of relentless heat. The temperature topped 100 during the day, instead of the usual 85 or 90 or so, without so much as a respite at night. I had to keep drinking fluids to avoid becoming dehydrated. I continually checked the color of my urine – if you’ve been there, you know the drill. To keep cool, I dipped my cheap cloth hat in a water fountain to let the liquid dribble down my back. So what if my shirt got wet? It’d be dry again in minutes.

I was walking the uneven city sidewalks, hugging old stone walls, desperately trying to stay in what little shade there was. I felt like an animal whose method of staying cool was the topic of a show on the National Geographic channel. Even though my Coolmax t-shirt wicked away perspiration, the shirt still absorbed my body odor and I stank but good. I could barely stand the way I smelled, but I agonized more about my reason for being in Jerusalem.

I was plodding through the narrow streets of Me’a She’arim, the ultra-orthodox Jewish enclave. Large, forbidding signs warned visitors to dress modestly. I had heard stories about those who didn’t heed the warnings being cursed at, spat upon, the target of rocks being thrown. Moreover, these targets were not Arabs, mind you, but people who shared my own religion – except that those ignorant Jewish tourists did not adhere to the strict haredi codes of modesty.

I was searching among the sea of pasty white faces, looking for the one face that would gladden my heart, that would extinguish the fire of remorse, that would finally set me free: The face of Abigail, my long-estranged daughter – I knew she had to be here somewhere after listening to her cryptic phone message left on my answering machine six years ago – six interminable years ago. And I’m so disgusted at myself that it took me all these years to finally get to Jerusalem to look for her. To swallow down the remnants of anger that have been replaced by grief.

I’ve always wondered how Abigail was. What was she doing? Had she gotten married? Would she be one of the many mothers, rushing along in a long skirt and long sleeves, pushing a baby carriage with one or two small ones clinging to her skirt? Was she happy? Or, at the very least, was she not unhappy?

Maybe I’d spot her in the shuk, the open-air marketplace, shopping for vegetables. Maybe I’d recognize her getting off a bus. Maybe I’d see her buying bread in a crowded bakery. Maybe I’d run into her in the old city on the way to the Western Wall. But maybes to me were just the same as probably nots.

“Keep searching,” I kept on whispering to myself. I’d just about given up hope. I couldn’t ask God for help because I didn’t believe in Him anymore. Don’t tell me I should never have stopped believing. I didn’t believe – probably never believed – in a supernatural being – a vengeful, wrathful God who somehow forgot all about his “chosen people” and allowed six million of them to be annihilated in the death camps. But no doubt you’ve heard this diatribe before.

If only I could have taken back the words. If only I had never said them – the hurtful, hateful words of disparagement, of intolerance, of disrespect. So I said then what I thought I needed to say – and, boy, did I get my point across – but in the end, I lost my only daughter, my only child. What a poor tradeoff – my ego then versus my own flesh and blood.

So you want to know what I said to her? Well, it was something along the lines that she was going to absolutely fuck up her life. That she was making religious choices that forced her into a very narrow, and, to me, disgusting, life style. She had opened up the issue by once asking. “What would you say if I got married and wore a sheitel?” I’ve often seen some of the hideous-looking wigs worn by Orthodox women. This was back when she was still in college, and her orthodoxy was just emerging. I knew she was testing me but I thought her religious fervor would eventually pass when she got out into the real world. Boy, I was wrong. And so, therefore, you have the right to ask, “What did you expect, schmuck? You thought that arguing against a set of firmly held beliefs would actually work, instead of strengthening them?”

Walking the streets, I sometimes thought that I was doing penance. I couldn’t even speak Hebrew, and I had to trust the kindness of strangers, although I was often met with thinly disguised hostility when I tried to ask a simple question in English. When I showed a bus driver the picture that I was carrying, I got a vague shrug in return. I showed her picture in a market place and I was immediately suspect. I tried the police, but got the run around. I thought I might eventually have to hire a private detective. But then, right there, I was pounding the pavement, looking for a needle in a haystack.

I decided to take a break from the tumult of Me’a She’arim, and worked my way over to Ben Yehudah Street, the tourist area. On the way, I stopped at the Sbarros for a bite to eat. It’s amazing how you couldn’t even tell that the place was ever blown up by a Palestinian terrorist. You had to hand it to the Israelis – just fix it up and get right back to business.

It was a Friday afternoon, and some of the businesses had already closed in preparation for the Sabbath. The ones that hadn’t yet were in the process of doing so. The fat weekend editions of the Jerusalem Post were being sold near a fold-up table where several young Hasidic Jews were asking male passers-by, “Would you like to lay tefillin?” I had walked by many times before but I had usually ignored them. I had always considered the practice of wrapping oneself in leather straps as primitive and pagan, a throwback to ancient times when men humbled themselves before God. But this time, I figured, why the hell not? I didn’t have anything better to do, and it couldn’t hurt.

Instead of standing passively, I asked them to explain to me what they were doing. I took off my wristwatch, and let them pass my left arm through the loop of the hand-teffilah. I repeated the blessing that they asked me to say, and they pulled the loop tightly around my upper arm. Then they twisted the leather strap seven times around my left arm until they got to my hand, where they wrapped the remainder of the strap tightly around my palm. They had me repeat another blessing and then placed the head-tefillah around my forehead. It felt quite odd to have the bayit – the little black box – secured against my forehead.

After that, the strap around my wrist was unwound and they said that they were going to make a “sign” for the Hebrew letters Shin, Dalet and Yod, which make up the word “Shaddai,”the “Almighty.” They quickly and intricately wound the strap around my fingers and had me recite a third blessing. Once they were done, each of them shook my hand and then removed the two tefillin in reverse order. The whole thing lasted just a few minutes. I thanked them in English, and they answered back in Hebrew. I took a twenty-shekel bill out of my wallet and handed it to them, which they accepted graciously.

I expected to feel different, somehow – cleansed, perhaps – but things had not changed at all; they remained as they were. I sagged down on a bench that was, mercifully, in a shady spot. At the far end of the bench, an old bearded man sat, hunched over. I thought he was dozing, until he turned to stare at me. He gazed into my eyes, peering at me, as if he were examining me. I started to feel uncomfortable and wondered what the hell he wanted. I was about to accuse him of being an annoying pain in the ass, but my first visceral reaction was interrupted when he asked, in heavily accented English, “Vatsa matter mit you? You look like somet’ink’s troub’link you.”

This was the first time, it seemed, that someone actually gave a damn about me. Usually, my questions and requests for help had fallen on deaf ears, as if nobody wanted to give me the time of day. I was taken aback, and said, “Excuse me. What?” And he repeated his question, this time more slowly: “Vatsa matter mit you?”

By this time deep in the afternoon, when it was getting really hot, the last thing I wanted to do was to expend the little energy I had left trying to explain my helpless predicament. But, what the hell, I figured. Let me give it one more try.

So I started the long story from the very beginning. He listened intently as I went through the whole sad narrative, from start to finish, and showed him pictures of my daughter. I told him everything that had happened, leaving nothing out. Not once did he interrupt, though he nodded or sadly shook his head a couple of times. Occasionally, he muttered to himself.

When I was finished he sat and stared at me. The catharsis should have made me feel better but didn’t. He stroked his beard, as if lost in thought, and just at the point when I was getting really annoyed and was about to say, “So, already?” he asked, “Do you really vant to do vind your daughter?”

“What do you mean – do I really want to find her?” I flared back at him. “I’m here, in this infernally hot city, searching for her. Sweating my ass off. Even sitting here wasting my time telling you all this.”

He ignored my outburst. “That’s not vat I meant. Have you ever vondered vat you vud say if you saw her again? Vat you vud do?”

That threw me. I had never thought about that or planned that far ahead. I only wanted to find her. I figured that the rest would take care of itself.

I sighed. I felt deflated, and I realized that that was the crux of the matter – what I would say and what I would do. And would we ever be able to be as close as we once were?

“I knew you din’t,” he said after a few moments. He had read the obvious dismay on my face.

Another few silent minutes went by. There was almost no one left in the plaza. The city was closing up shop and the sun was lowering in the sky.

The old man lifted himself from the bench and put his hand on my right shoulder. “Come vit me,” he said as he trundled off. So I got up and ever so slowly accompanied him across Yafo Street, several blocks up Harav Kook, then across Hanevi’im, where Harav Kook turns into Etiopiya St. At any moment, I expected him to collapse or, at the very least, to ask to stop for a few minutes to catch his breath. He neither slowed nor said anything to me. When we crossed Chazanovich Harav Shmu’el in the gathering dark, I knew where we were. Back in Me’a She’arim.

* * * * *

Because I was not one of them, and never would be, I never felt totally comfortable walking the streets of that particular quarter. I made it a point to avoid being there on the Sabbath. It was daunting enough to be there on a weekday in the daylight; to be walking there on the almost deserted sidewalks at the beginning of the Sabbath, at dusk on a Friday evening, felt awkward and disconcerting. I was glad that I was not alone there with only my shadow as company.

We walked several more blocks, made a few turns, and we were in a section that seemed not even vaguely familiar. I noticed the flicker of candlelight in several windows that looked out at the back alley in which we walked.

The old man turned and tottered up three uneven stairs into the foyer of a nondescript building. An unlocked door creaked as he pulled it open. I followed him into the unlit hall, where the dilapidation and poverty, even in the semidarkness, was palpable and oppressive. I was assailed by cooking smells that made me want to retch. Was this the kind of place my daughter lived? My heart sank as I pondered that possibility.

We walked towards the back of the building, though it may well have been the front – who knew what was where in those convoluted buildings? I heard low voices and the murmurs of men from a room several doors away. Dim yellow light escaped into the barely illuminated the hall. The old man pushed the door wide open, and walked in. I hesitated at the threshold as the murmuring subsided. “Come in, come in,” said an even older man who sat at the head of a large wooden table. “Come in, already.”

I never before felt so naked, dressed in khaki bush shorts, the stained cloth hat, and a reeking T-shirt, as I did in front of the twelve old men, in black suits and black hats, sitting around a table piled with books, when they looked up at me. I flashed back to the picture on the Home of the Sages of Israel calendar my grandmother kept on the kitchen table next to her blue and white tzedakah box. I didn’t know what to say, except to nod an uncertain greeting to the men.

I waited uneasily, standing before them. Time seemed to stand still. Finally, a silent decision must have been made, since one of the men got up and opened a folding chair, as several others grudgingly slid their own chairs sideways to make room for me. “Here, sit,” said the man. There was hardly enough room for me to get around to my place on the other side of the table. When I sat down, I was sitting so close to the men on either side that my bare arms brushed up against their clothing. I took a deep breath to steady myself and then looked around at the religious books haphazardly piled from floor to ceiling on rickety bookcases on three sides of the windowless room. A bare lightbulb hung from a wire that disappeared into a hole in the ceiling. I quickly glanced around at each of the bearded men. It was then that I noticed that the old man who had listened to my story with patience and understanding and who had brought me to that tiny, stuffy room from Ben Yehudah Street had gone.

The room was so still that even the dust in the air hung motionless. Minutes passed. Finally, the silence was broken. The oldest man, who sat at the head of the table, coughed, cleared his throat and asked, “What’s to be done?” Not, “What can we do for you?” or “How can we help you?” or “What do you want?” or even a simple “Hello.”

I waited. “What’s to be done?” he repeated. The way he put the question to me – the intonation, the inflection – sounded so familiar, yet I couldn’t put my finger on it. And even more strangely, the voice was totally without accent.

“I don’t know what you mean,” I stammered.

“Is it that you don’t understand what I am asking, or you don’t understand what you want to be asking?” he asked mockingly in reply. That voice was so familiar!

This was getting me nowhere. “I don’t know exactly what to say,” I answered. “I mean, I want to find my daughter, but...” My voice trailed off as I got choked up.

“So, I’ll repeat the question again. What’s to be done?” It was like he was mimicking me; the similarity to my own nasal voice was so weird. But it couldn’t have been; it must have been just my imagination.

“I don’t know what can be done,” I replied. “First, I have to find her. Then, somehow, I have to try to make amends. To apologize. To tell her how much I love her. To tell her how much I miss her. I know I hurt her. I was so disappointed and furious with the choices that she was making that my anger degraded, diminished and humiliated her. That’s why she left. And I don’t really know if she’ll ever forgive me.”

“Maybe you don’t deserve to be forgiven. To have her back,” he challenged. “What gives you the right to expect to get back what you once had when you so ignorantly threw it away in the first place?”

I didn’t know how to answer that question for it never had it put to me exactly that way. The last thing I needed was a lecture. I had always thought of myself as a good husband, being as supportive and loving as I could be in my grief even as my wife was succumbing to a devastating illness. Mercifully, she went quickly. And I was a good father to our only daughter before and after her death. We had only Abigail, and we would never have the chance to have any more. I never drank, never gambled, never ran around. I worked hard and tried to raise her the best I could. I was admired by my friends and colleagues and I thought I was the epitome of the virtuous man. Until that horrible blowup with my daughter.

So I answered, “I am a decent man. I did the best I could. I should not be eternally punished for one horrible transgression.”

It grew slightly darker in the room, as if someone were controlling the bare bulb with a dimmer, though I knew this would not be tolerated on the Sabbath. The gloominess in the room started to match my growing despondency. Once again, there was silence. So I asked, simply, “What’s next?” I wanted to get it over with already, whatever “it” was.

Several more minutes passed. I squirmed uncomfortably in my seat. I felt claustrophobic. I had trouble breathing. I needed to get out of there.

The light grew even more faint until everyone and everything was in shadow. And then, out of the mouth of the old man came a voice – my daughter’s voice! – though it couldn’t have been! – and the voice said the one word that I missed so much, and that had once meant so much: “Dad.”

I started to sob. I couldn’t hold back the tears. “Dad. Don’t cry. You never cried, except when Mom...” and the voice trailed off.

“Oh, God,” I yelled out. “What are you doing to me? You’re tearing me apart.”

“You hurt me so much, Dad,” the voice continued. “I hated you. Like poison. I couldn’t take it any more. I had to get away from you. Far away.”

“But you left without saying a thing. You just disappeared, like you dropped off the face of the earth. I worried so much about you. I got sick over it.”

“You just couldn’t understand,” her voice continued. “I had found something that I needed. Something that made me feel whole. And you rejected not only what I believed, but you rejected me. Your own child. Your own daughter. Without even listening to what I had to say.”

I dried my eyes with my handkerchief. I sighed, and took a deep breath. “I apologize, Abby. From the depths of my being. What more can I say? What can I say or do to make it up to you?”

The physical change in the old man was so subtle it was hardly noticeable, especially since there was almost no light left in the room. He stood up and began to morph, slowly at first, and then, more quickly, into a slender woman in a long bride’s dress. But no, not just any woman. Oh my God, it couldn’t have been … yet it was my wife, as she looked on our wedding day! She smiled at me and dreamily reached out to me, beckoning me towards her. I got up from my seat and moved towards her. But the apparition – that’s what it had to be – held up her hand, as if to stop me, and began to transform again, and this time became my daughter, wearing a white wedding dress, just as my wife had.

I pushed my chair back and started towards her but I could barely move; I felt like I was rooted in quicksand. With all the strength I could muster I moved towards her and finally stood before her. I reached out and put my left arm on her shoulder, and then my right around her waist. I pulled her close and faintly caught the scent of baby powder, just like when she was young and helpless, and then the more womanly scent of how she smelled the last time I hugged her after her college graduation. I tried to clear my head; the unmistakable and unforgettable odors were so utterly reminiscent. I looked into her deep, sad, wet eyes and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

We were both weeping. “Tell me,” I said. “What’s become of you? Are you okay? Do you have any children? Am I a grandpa?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine. I got married to a nice man. A religious man. And there are three children so far, baruch Hashem. Two girls and a boy. Eliyahu’s the youngest.” She was crying and laughing at the same time.

But slowly, very slowly, my long-lost daughter was becoming less substantial, less tangible. She felt increasingly more weightless in my arms and I knew I was losing her – yet again. “I miss you!” I cried out. “Please, don’t leave me. Please don’t go!”

I looked into her eyes, but there was nothing left except blackness, nothingness. Yet from her lips, she was still able to utter, with the little strength she had left, “Dad, I forgive you. I love you. And I’m sorry, too.” And then she was gone.

* * * * *

After that everything was a blur. I can’t remember anything except being led from that dank, stifling room by my guide from the night before, who had just as mysteriously reappeared, and out into a late Jerusalem evening. There was even a chill in the air for the first time in days.

I don’t know for sure whether I had actually been holding my daughter and speaking with her or I had somehow dreamed the whole incident. But you know what? It doesn’t really matter either way. I was there and she was there. Together again, but for an instant.

That is what I believe, what I have to believe. And that she loves me and forgives me.

Up to the beginning of the story

April 2003 .. rev September 2014…Copyright © 20014, Lloyd B. Abrams

-- Appeared in Grassroot Reflections Number 45, February 2018