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  “It’s not like you, sister,” Shuli says.

  “Isn’t it?” Shuli’s expression clearly says he doesn’t think so. “Well, no matter. Rashi’s daughters were already wearing tefillin in medieval times.”

  “But, sister, don’t you remember our fight over the Kaddish? In the past, you’ve been resistant to adopting the ways of men.”

  His sister laughs and laughs, so that the stool rocks on uneven feet.

  “Seriously, Larry? What are the ways of men? It doesn’t even make sense. Why would there ever be a difference among the practices of Jews?”

  Shuli is thrilled to see her in such fine form. He feels so loving, so happy, he asks if it would be all right, arms and all, if he gave her a hug.

  “Oh, how I’d have enjoyed that, my Larry,” she says. “But here I am pure, as in the times of the Beit HaMikdash, when the Holy Temple stood. And you, my brother, are as yet tamei—tainted by your transgressions. Still, I want you to know, you and I are good, brother. Fixing things between yourself and our father fixes them with me. It’s other accounts that need settling.”

  “Do you mean with Miri?” he asks.

  This she doesn’t dignify with an answer.

  It was the fish, he knew. Their puckered mouths. Their fierce, dumb hunger. It was the fish feasting and the defilement of his sister’s home.

  “Is it about your house?”

  “A home has no feelings, Larry. That’s your guess? Always shortcuts with you. Always, with emotion, you take the easy way out.”

  “Whatever it is, I’ll fix it for you,” he says. And reading his sister’s face, the familiar roll of her eyes, Shuli tries again. “I mean,” he says, “I’ll fix it for myself.”

  Shuli walks around Dina to where he knows another door must stand, obscured. Finding it, he turns that handle and pushes through. He crosses the threshold with his eyes pressed shut, squeezing them tight in the dream, so that he may open them on the other side, in the waking world, so that he may discover himself flat out in Chemi’s cot, eager to do what must be done.

  He’d committed to his father.

  He’d taken a pledge before his sister.

  Opening his eyes, Shuli unleashes a howl that echoes around that same empty room, no different from the one right before and the one again before that, aside from a peculiar shimmering light in the edges of his vision, a sort of blanching glare bouncing up from the floor.

  Seeking wisdom, he looks to where his father sat and his sister sat, but there’s no one, and nothing there, not even the stool. He can see right to the door on the other side, poised outside the glare. Shuli’s sure that the cot, that his sleeping self, must lie right beyond.

  He hurries for the exit, only to bump into the back of a deep downy chair, with a large downy pillow, fluffed as if for the seder, as if Shuli was meant to drop down, in his holiday kittel, and recline.

  Shuli goes around and melts into the chair, so unsteady are his legs, and so great is his exhaustion—which has returned with a vengeance. Seated, the light shines more brightly, nearly blinding. But that’s nothing next to the chair’s comfort, and the sharp contrast of all that physical weight lifted against all the personal pain he shoulders.

  From his new vantage, Shuli makes out a table in front of him, the source of all that brilliance. He sinks deeper into the chair, so that he might prop his tired feet up on the table’s edge. And there it is, a sea of glass set atop it. Not the light’s source, but what catches and reflects it, kicking it back Shuli’s way and making for that curious shimmer.

  As his eyes continue to adapt, Shuli can make out more and more, and is startled to see a pair of feet on the other side of that round table, propped up on the edge, like his. A mirror.

  The more he stares, the more the brightness dims, and the feet, smaller and narrower, appear to be a woman’s. Raising his gaze, Shuli can see that it is indeed a woman, in a chair identical to Shuli’s, sitting across. She, like his sister, and like his father, is wearing the white kittel. But on her, it is wide open, the sash undone.

  He does not recognize her face. And does not know if it’s rude in this place to ask her who she is. Was it possible, as the third person to appear, that she’s the last of the Heavenly Tribunal? That maybe this is indeed his chance to take witness, and the reason he’d finally—so weary—been offered a chair? Shuli races through all his learning, trying to decide if he’d ever read of a tribunal where the three judges weren’t seated in a row.

  Shuli concentrates on this question while struggling to recognize that face and fighting to keep his gaze away from the body, naked beneath that open robe.

  “Who are you?” he says.

  The woman makes no move to answer.

  And Shuli, failing to resist, looks to the woman’s breasts and to her belly and then right between her spread legs.

  Shuli does not know who she is, until he does.

  How disgraceful! The face he couldn’t recall, but now, looking down…Sitting across is the woman who had once looked out at him (without seeing), who had performed for Shuli (without knowing) using that giant glass dildo.

  With her own elbowless arms, she motions to the table, sort of waving a hand above, so that he might focus on the array between them.

  The table is set with a rich assortment of blown glass. Dildos of differing heights, with differing tapers to their rounded tips. It’s a beautiful and well-crafted selection with which one might pleasure oneself.

  Without the years separating them, and without the shield of his religious transformation, without the ether of the Internet and the anonymity of his one-sided screen-fed view, Shuli can’t bear to sit before her, himself appraised.

  Shuli looks to the door in the wall, through which he might escape. But this time, when he looks, there’s no door there. He does not turn around, knowing what’s already happened to the one behind.

  This room, this was it. It was just as his father had taught him. For some maybe it was Heaven, but for Shuli, boxed in, it was Hell. Here he was facing this woman, shamed for what could be all of interminable time.

  Shuli turns to her as she reaches, with her rigid, unyielding arms, to the table.

  With great control, and great delicacy, she takes up a spiral, glass dildo, containing all the colors of the rainbow. Smiling, signaling, Reb Shuli knows, as with so many things in that sphere, that she means for him to lean back and away.

  Yes, it was like Passover, as he’d assumed. Shuli sighs and relaxes; he leans into that deep cloud of a pillow on his chair. This lowers the trunk of his body, bringing his torso forward, so that, with his feet pressed to the table’s edge, his knees bend further, rising higher than before.

  He does not quite comprehend what she’s now asking. With the limited mobility in her arms, it’s more difficult for her to cue the pulling up of his robe. When he grasps what she wants, he raises the kittel’s skirt, tugging it open along the snaps, and the woman leans forward, reaching toward him.

  But the parts? Shuli’s parts? Still, he scooches further and does what he thinks he’s being told.

  And, do you believe it? With the robe unfastened, when looking down between his legs, Shuli sees that—though he’d always known himself to be a man—he’s also a woman too.

  Shifting this way, and shifting that, he makes room in himself to receive the kindness the woman across now offers.

  And feeling himself full up, the wand brimming him, there’s a wonderful sort of tightness and a wonderful sort of pressure, and a sensation in places of himself that he—or “she,” Shuli thinks, possibly she—hadn’t previously known might be excited.

  So relieved is Shuli, so pleasured and stimulated is Shuli, so transformed is Shuli by this back-and-forth, sea-like rocking inside, that Shuli only wants to return to this woman the peace and pleasure that she gives.

  Tipp
ing his torso forward so that Shuli might reach with those rigid arms, Shuli takes up from the table an instrument of appropriate height and appropriate gauge, offering what Shuli hopes might be just the right amount of comfort.

  And as she had inserted in Shuli, Shuli—meeting her gaze, marking her approval—inserts into her. It’s an act that only increases the rewarding fullness Shuli feels within.

  As Shuli’s eyes turn heavy and slowly close, weighted as they are in delight, Shuli can see that the woman, her good turn requited, is also on the way to sleep.

  In this way, maintaining a rhythm, and in this way, gliding back and forth, Shuli finally understands what it is to find one’s place in Paradise.

  XXVII

  It’s the middle of the day when Shuli wakes. He knows if he’s to achieve what he’d pledged in his sleep, he’ll need to move with great speed. He also knows that before he attends to ethereal matters, there’s an earthly debt of gratitude still to be repaid.

  Shuli rushes straight from Chemi’s apartment to Mea Shearim, to the street where the silversmiths ply their wares.

  He has no idea which shop is best, or which artisan has more talent than any other. He can’t tell anything from peering at the window displays—aesthetics is not where Shuli shines. In the end, he settles on the store with the biggest sign in English.

  The woman behind the counter leaves Shuli to browse. But Shuli doesn’t want to be left alone. He wants advice. He catches her attention and sees that her eyes, like his, look tired in a way that no rest would ever erase. She offers him a businesslike smile and Shuli smiles back at her, twice as hard.

  “Can I help you?” she asks, addressing him in English from the start.

  “Do you ship to America? I want to send something there.”

  “That’s what you’re looking for? Good shipping?” she says, tucking a loose lock of hair back into her snood. “That’s your big concern, before you buy your soon-to-be daughter-in-law her wedding silver?”

  “There’s no daughter-in-law in the works,” Shuli says. “And for me, yes, shipping to America is, my apologies, the number one concern.”

  “Our business is shipping to America. It’s our specialty,” she says, planting her elbows on the counter. “You name it, we pack it up good and ship it out. Big and small. Any value.” Straightening up, she calls through the archway behind her, to what appears to be a backroom workshop. “Tell him! Do we pack it up good, Shmulik?”

  “We pack it the best,” Shmulik yells in return.

  “We insure it here,” she says. “And on the customs form, we put ‘zero dollars.’ No trouble on either end. You don’t worry. It’ll get there, and get there unbroken and unstolen. Not a dent either. Chick-chock, they’ll have it. Two days, even, if you want to pay for the DHL.”

  “Good,” Reb Shuli says. “Excellent.” He looks around at the treasures in the room, scanning the shelves. “I need something special.”

  “Special is our other specialty,” the woman says, again tucking at the same lock of hair that keeps escaping from the bottom of her snood. “Do you see anything you like?”

  Shuli makes a quick show of perusing candlesticks and mezuzot, silver trays and Torah crowns.

  “I don’t see exactly what I need.”

  The woman again yells to the back, calling for Shmulik, who trudges out in a heavy apron, looking like he’s been working in a mine. “This one wants special,” she says, pulling at the apron’s bib and bringing Shmulik right up to the edge of the counter. From the way she speaks, and the way she pulls, Shuli assumes he is her husband.

  To Shuli she says, “This is the silversmith. He makes everything here.”

  Shmulik the silversmith pokes around in a display case, hunting for something, and then, giving up, wipes his hands on the apron, fronts and backs. There is no discernible change in their cleanliness as far as Shuli can tell.

  “You looking for custom work?” the man says.

  “Maybe,” Shuli says. “I think so. I’m after a Kiddush cup. Something to stop the breath.”

  “And you don’t see it out?”

  Shuli stands quiet.

  “You think I’m sensitive? I’m here to work. Show me something close to what you want and we’ll go from there.”

  “Can you put things on it?”

  “Like images?” he asks. “The cluster of grapes? A pomegranate?”

  “Like words,” Shuli says.

  Here the woman waves a hand as if to say, katan alav, that there is no challenge the silversmith can’t meet. She does this with a flourish, with the ease the bent-elbowed have at their disposal.

  “You want him to engrave?” she says. “He’ll engrave. You want raised? Bas-relief, high relief—you know, high relief?—he’ll do anything you want. Once, for a customer in Tzfat, he carved the whole text of the Pirkei Avot into a small silver egg. It took a magnifying glass to read it. Every letter, perfect.”

  “I want big,” Shuli says.

  “With letters, big is easier than little,” she says. “That’s the point. If he can do the egg, he can do the cup.”

  Shuli again surveys their wares, overwhelmed. And the woman, a good salesperson, says, “Take your time,” and returns to her work. The silversmith remains at her side staring at Shuli, but after she gives him a shove, he studies the floor.

  Finally, Shuli spots a chalice sitting on a high shelf. “I want like that,” Shuli says.

  “That?” she says.

  “That?” the silversmith says.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Shuli wants to know.

  “That one’s not for Kiddush,” the woman tells him. “That’s for Pesach. That’s a cos Eliyahu,” she says of the oversize goblet, in which wine is poured for the prophet Elijah during seder.

  She drags a stool over to the wall and, climbing up, retrieves it for him. Before handing it over, she rotates it so Shuli might see the intricate filigree that was its centerpiece. It did indeed read “Cos Eliyahu” in large Hebrew letters.

  “Yes,” Shuli says, undaunted, and measuring its heft. “I want like this, but for Shabbos.”

  “You want a Pesach cup for regular Shabbos?” the silversmith says.

  “No, I want a Kiddush cup. But big like that. Where it says ‘Cos Eliyahu,’ in the middle, I want it to say ‘Cos Gavriel.’ ”

  “You want a cup for the angel Gavriel?” the woman says.

  “More or less,” Shuli says, admiring the one he holds. Looking up, he says, “It’s for my friend.”

  The way they gawk at him in return, Shuli feels he should explain. “A friend that’s a child,” he says. “A present for a boy going through a rough time. I want the name nice and big. Something you can read from across the room.”

  “Sure,” the silversmith says. “Not a problem.” And he turns to the woman that Shuli is now sure is his wife.

  “Not a problem,” she says. “When do you need it?”

  “As soon as possible.”

  “A week,” the silversmith says, without hesitation.

  “You sure, Shmulik?” the woman asks, giving him the eye. When he makes clear that he is, she says to Shuli, “Done. A week.”

  “If you can do the shipping—”

  “We are known for the shipping. I already said, our strength!” Then she raises an eyebrow and tucks at that hair. “Don’t you want to know what it costs? That cup you hold is a real beheimah. That’s a lot of silver.”

  “Whatever it is, it is.”

  The woman takes the cos Eliyahu back and, tipping it over, she shows Shuli the price tag taped into the curve of its base. “That’s for this one,” she says, and Shuli can tell she wants him to look stunned. When he doesn’t, she turns to the silversmith. “How much extra for custom?”

  The man looks at the price on the cup and then sizes up Sh
uli.

  “I’ll do it for the same. No extra.” And, looking proud, he says, “I’ll make something special for your friend.”

  The woman produces an order form and begins to fill it out. The silversmith recedes into his workroom, and almost immediately Shuli hears the sound of an engine’s whir.

  “Where’s it going?” the woman asks.

  Shuli gives her Gavriel’s name and the address of the school.

  “Do you want a gift card?”

  “No,” Shuli says. “He’ll know who it’s from. Just send it to the school, at his attention. That’s all.”

  “A lucky boy,” she says. “Is it his bar mitzvah?”

  “Soon,” Shuli says.

  The woman reaches under the counter and produces a credit card machine.

  “Cash,” Shuli says, and takes out his envelope, with the money he’d planned to return to Miri, to show how carefully he’d saved. “Are dollars OK?”

  “Cash is always OK. You want to do euros? You want to do pounds? I’ll take rupees if you’ve got them. Money is money.”

  Shuli empties his envelope and hands it to the woman. She counts it out. He’s three hundred dollars short.

  “Would you trust a man to pay it off?” Shuli says.

  The sound of the machine’s engine stops. Shuli is amazed that the silversmith even heard.

  “We don’t do that,” Shmulik calls from the back.

  “This isn’t a car dealership,” the woman says. “There are no payment plans.”

  “It’s silver,” the silversmith yells.

  “He’s right,” the woman says. “The object is money itself. Kesef zeh kesef,” she says in Hebrew, which is the same as her “money is money” but now with a different intent. She does not like his plan. “Why not put it on a card?”

  “It’s complicated,” he says. “A moment of transition. But you can trust me to pay.”

  The woman taps the counter with her pen, considering. Shuli, self-conscious, looks around the shop at the smaller Kiddush cups and all the tiny silver thimbles, the kind that one might send to a newborn child. When he meets her gaze, she shakes her head, as if disappointed with herself.