TObe alive is to be caught in a wheel of acquisition and loss. Mazal had abdicated her hometown of Gondor, where lay a hundred generations of her family, including her husband and three of her ten children. Ethiopia was now a mystic place. In the lowlands, the jagged mouth of Gehinnom gaped; in the highlands, rumors of Keruvim muttered. In Gondor, abandoned brown castles sat overgrown, engraved with three-thousand-year-old stories. Their rough geometry cut shapes that she would never see again, except in dreams.

“Ima,” Moshe called from across the room.

From one day to the next, her country seemed to wake to the realization that the Jews were inexplicably, insubordinately, unacceptably still alive. And they decided to take that personally. Three thousand years, and she, Mazal, was the generation to ascend to the Holy Land.

“Ima.”

The cumulative loss is enough to make a person wonder if monks had the right idea all along. Just when she thought she had nothing left to lose, when her land, language, and a good chunk of her limbs had vanished, she had somehow managed to lose a friend. Why, after everything, did this one loss feel calamitous? Leaving rehab meant leaving Karen, who had gone to her own home in Rechavia. After two weeks in Moshe’s Netanya home, Mazal pained with the absence of her friend.

“Ima,” Moshe said again. He exchanged looks with his wife, Levana, a communication that would have annoyed the old Mazal. This new Mazal waved a lazy hand at him.

Karen had understood the loss of everything familiar, and what it is to live in two worlds: before and after. Karen had spoken of her librarian job in Philadelphia with the keening that Mazal felt for the extinct sounds and smells of Gondor. Karen had—

“Ima, there is someone here to see you. From the hospital. Should I send her away?”

Mazal had been sending the therapists away for the past two weeks, preferring to sit in hypnotic memory. She recognized the slow sinking that she’d seen in her parents: dusk of life. These therapists tried to haul her into the roaring modern world. Mazal would not have it. A person from an old, old country will respect the natural order of things.

“Away,” she murmured at Moshe.

“No,” Karen said.

Mazal looked up, and in that instant, understood life after death.

“Mazal, get up this instant. Those doctors say I need to walk every day or I’ll be back in that hospital, and who needs that? Come walk with me. I need someone to lean on.”

Moshe stepped between Karen and Mazal. “My mother is ill,” he said, at once humble and firm. “Please, come back t—”

Karen swiftly moved her walker to one side, sending Moshe back in a balletic leap. “Tell your son to stop babying you,” she commanded.

Mazal’s lips twitched. “Do not listen to that boy. He was born legs first, and he has been getting things backward ever since.” To Moshe’s astonishment, she hauled herself up and thumped to the garden apartment’s door, calling grandly over her shoulder, “My friend is here.”

She closed the door on her son’s gaping face, caught Karen’s eye, and grinned. For a person in her eighth decade, it was a remarkably youthful expression. The women thumped along the sun-washed pavement, laborious and euphoric. So this was how light chased away shadows.

“Inside my heart, a museum,” Karen said. “That’s from a popular Israeli poet. But I think it’s all older people. You live. Your heart becomes a museum.”

Mazal nodded vehemently. Like most museums, her heart did not really want many visitors. But she would make an exception for a high-quality person like Karen. “I think you also have a library in your head,” she said. “And I — I have a complaint in my legs.”

“And screws in my hip. Who needs that? But! We keep on trucking.” Seeing Mazal’s face, Karen explained, “We keep on going, for a long time, even when it’s hard. Like trucks. We keep on trucking.”

Mazal nodded at this good sense. “Trucking,” she said. “Yes.” The women decided to go trucking together two or three times a week. Netanya was suddenly beautiful.

“Talk about in loco parentis,” Moshe muttered. “I have never seen anything this loco in my life. Three weeks ago, she needed help getting across a room, and now she’s out without even telling me. Restless feet lead to snake pits! Ice cream, she says. Shopping mall, if you can believe such a thing. Loco! I should get her a”—he spoke with even more precision than usual—“psychological exam. That white woman is a bad influence. No, no, not you, Levana! That other white woman. Mrs. Weiss-Wasser.”

At these words the glare intensified rather than abated. But Levana nodded, too. “I asked Karen if I could link her phone to track them. She said no. She was all like, I need my privacy. I’m like, lady, you are seventy-eight years old, and you volunteer at the library, so stop clowning. Privacy. Unbelievable. Eighty years old, and they’re prancing around like teenagers. Ridiculous.”

Mazal chose that moment to sail into the room, and despite his annoyance, Moshe had to admit that she moved with increasing grace. “Karen is not ridiculous,” she said. “She is a library and a museum, and together, we are trucks. And Moshe, she knows that you don’t like her.” Mazal waved her cane in the direction of Moshe’s face. “You must be more polite. I did not raise you to disrespect an old woman.”

“Ima, I am worried about you. Even with two legs, you cannot climb two trees at once.”

“Pfft. I am not climbing trees. I am walking with a friend. Goodbye.”

Moshe had several follow-up comments, but he was an Ethiopian son standing before his mother. All he could do was bow his head and watch his mother leave the apartment. Regret, like a tail, comes at the end, he thought.

“Today,” Karen said, as they left Mazal’s apartment, “we are going to try a bus instead of a taxi. No beating around the bush, it’s much cheaper.”

“I should have beat around the bush that bit my leg off,” Mazal said.

“It means to be direct, not to hint,” Karen said. “Anyway, the bus. My taxi fees are getting out of hand. Who needs that?”

Mazal nodded. “I cooked kitfo last night, and it got out of my hand,” she said. “Not a bite left in the end.”

They trundled companionably to the bus stop. On their left was a stone wall topped by tall, thorny plants. To their right, a wide street, then a sidewalk, and further away, several apartment buildings. In the midday heat, on a school day and workday, the world was still and silent but for the thump and roll of stick and walker.

It was an orange, blistering day. Heat and dust became almost solid around the two women. In the quiet, the absence of birdsong or rustling plants became eerie. They could have been the last two people on Earth.

But a figure appeared, walking toward them. Karen’s heart lifted. They weren’t alone after all. The man was a faceless shadow, his back to the sun. The women reached the bus stop just minutes before him.

Karen considered sitting on the bench before deciding that she did not want to feel what the sun did to that metal. Instead, she set her picnic basket on the seat.

“Hello,” Karen chirped at the man. “Hot d-d-d—”

The man spoke in words that neither woman understood, despite five languages between them. But the gestures he made, with his thumb and forefinger, were universal. He pointed to pockets and to Karen’s handbag.

“One minute,” Karen squawked, holding up a shaking finger. She waved to the basket on the bench. “In here. Money. I get. Okay?”

The man squinted and smiled, revealing uppercase gums and lowercase teeth. A two-story town mouth, Karen thought with a tinge of hysteria.

Karen looked into Mazal’s eyes. Mazal gave a tiny nod.

These past few weeks, Karen had watched, from the corner of her eye, as Mazal had prepared to leave her apartment. She had seen the orderlies help Mazal in rehab. No, she had never done this herself. But she understood the principle of the thing.

Left hand holding on to the walker, she bent, and with her right hand, unstrapped Mazal’s prosthetic leg.

Rising again — even at the worst of her injury, she had never felt herself move so slowly — she lifted the plastic limb and bought it down on the thug’s head. It made a hollow thunk, bounced off the shining cranium, and landed upright on the metal bus stop bench.

René Magritte would be jealous, Karen thought absurdly. The sandal is still on.

Even through her adrenaline, she realized that she could not possibly have hit the man very hard. Still, the women watched, as if in slow motion, as he folded like a lawn chair.

Later, they would learn that he had congenital heart defects. Certainly, that whack was not strong enough to release an olive from its knobby branch. Shock, the coroner would say. Shock and heart defects had led the man permanently offstage.

But at the time, as he crumpled to the ground, the women could not know that he was already dead.

Together, they lifted Karen’s walker and placed it over the heaped body. Together, they leaned on this improvised cage.

“No shame, no honor,” Mazal hissed at the body.

“Hang in there, Mazal,” Karen quavered. Mazal duly hung on to the walker.

“Help will come soon,” Mazal said. “And then — then I will pull myself together.”

Officer Boaz Degel had seen a thing or two in his time, but this was a day to remember. How had two little old ladies — severely disabled, by the looks of things, barely even mobile!  — managed to dispatch a— a— a weaponized lawbreaker?! Even a pathetic little hooligan, as this one seemed to be? Degel could not help stammering a little.

“He — he is departed,” he said.

“Good riddance,” said Karen, watching the police van pull away. “A criminal. Who needs that?”

Later, Degel would interview five eyewitnesses, including several people in the high-rise buildings across the road and a driver who had been passing. Not one could give a coherent summary of what they had seen. Degel had never seen such a clear case of people not believing their own eyes. He didn’t blame them.

At the time, though, he held a synthetic limb in his hand, wavering. Then he knelt before Mazal. “Here, Geveret. It’s criminal evidence, but still. Take it.”

Karen twirled her walker to the side, causing Officer Degel to leap backward. “Give me that. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Mazal leaned against the walker as Karen sat on the bench and reassembled her. “Here,” Mazal said, handing over her metal flask. “Take a sip. It’s hot soup.”

Another day, another headline. It must have been a slow week indeed, if the papers were still mentioning the incident ten days later.

It had started with local news outlets and spread in ripples, like a stone in water. In two days, national channels were giving mentions, and now, some helpful old friend had sent her a screenshot of a news item stateside. Who could mind the demise of that insufferable swaggering swine? What was so exciting about two strong, independent women defending themselves? According to the papers, everything.

Break a Leg, read a headline, and Karen seethed at the incorrect use of the idiom.

Bite the Bullet was hardly better. That’s How They Roll was insulting and infantilizing. Assault and Babbery, a heimish paper wrote, and Karen wondered if anyone would even understand the play between robbery and babby. Ramat Post claimed that Mrs. Weiss-Wasser had given the man a “good ol’ Brooklyn howyadoin’.” In fact, Karen had barely even touched him, and she had never lived in Brooklyn. Mazal would be having a field day with these phrases.

Here was the latest, from a far-left paper that Karen never normally read:

The Pirates of Netanya Will Not Act Their Age

The criminal case against Mrs. Karen Weiss-Wasser has been thrown out of court, as circumstances show the elderly woman was defending herself and her friend, read the article. Bystanders were accused of pulling reporters’ legs when they recounted how the senior citizen, who could not stand robbery, whacked a gumshoe over the head with her friend’s prosthetic leg. How this curb-stomping ended in a death left us stumped, but a review of the deceased’s rap sheet made us realize that he deserved to be kicked out of the human race. Having legged it from prison for various felonies, the criminal, who remains unnamed, did not have a legal leg to stand on. Despite being disabled, the women performed a citizen’s arrest, proving that even minus some limbs, they still run better than the government. “Walk a mile in their shoes,” a gobsmacked witness said. “They did what they had to do. Still, the legal counsel must have cost an arm and a— and a—”

Karen heaved a sigh that was 40 percent sob.

Nine days earlier — after being given a clean bill of health, physical and mental — Karen had appeared before a judge. He had been snickering. Karen laughed along, had even been vaguely disappointed when the case was dismissed. She would have liked, at age 78, to introduce herself as a convicted felon. It would have been a conversation opener.

But the next day, when she went to the makolet, people had openly pointed. Two young women had whispered, then alternated between laughing and shushing each other, all while sneaking peeks. When she left the grocery with her bag of peppers and rice, a boy of around eight had pointed at her, then grabbed his baby brother’s shoe and slammed it onto his younger sister’s head. It seemed like the entire street had exploded with laughter. Karen had tried to laugh, too. But when she got back to her apartment and closed the door, she sagged with relief.

Pull yourself together, she told herself briskly. You’re a big girl. Then her phone pinged. It was the first of many links — a news item about her misadventure.

The pings continued through the days. And Karen came to realize that she never wanted to open the apartment door again.

She sighed again now. Could this really be her, Karen Weiss-Wasser? In the 80s, she had created a literacy program for underprivileged Philadelphian children, and it was still running. In the early aughts, she had expanded it to include adults. She’d been the recipient of an award from the mayor. Once or twice a year, she still received emails from adults who told her how the program had helped them, even changed the trajectory of their lives. When she retired to make aliyah, the city council had named a local library for her.

The sneering headlines infiltrated like noxious gas. Now, when her name was mentioned, if someone should happen to Google her or her children, this is what they’d see. Not a servant to the public, a dedicated grandmother, a lover of language. Just a violent old loony swinging plastic limbs.

“Ma, please,” her daughter Miriam had said over FaceTime. “These papers are garbage. Last week they ran a headline saying that the city can’t explain why the sewer is smelling. Two weeks ago, some lowlife was suing a jury for ruining his reputation. No one will remember this or care.”

Karen had put on a brave face and chuckled with her daughter. But she stayed in her apartment.

Moshe watched his mother. To her left, the brown armchair, once home of her ruminations. To the right, the door to the apartment, now bereft of Karen.

“Call Karen,” Mazal commanded Levana.

Levana picked up her phone. “No answer,” she said after a few moments.

“Try again later.” Moshe heard a quaver behind the imperious tone. To his surprise, he felt his heart swell. His mother, who had once sat and waited for Death, was resisting the armchair. Karen had been a good friend, after all.

“Moshe.” He jumped slightly to hear his name, as though he were eight years old again. His mother had seemed able to see him through walls back then, too. “Go find Karen. Rechavia.” Mazal waved the address on a scrap of paper.

He was expected at work in an hour. But… but his mother hovered between the armchair and the door. Moshe nodded and took the paper. He could be late. This was Ima’s life.

A little over an hour later, he was at Karen’s home. A young woman opened the door and raised her eyebrows.

“My mother is good friends with Giveret Karen. May I come in?”

Across the room, Karen blinked sluggishly.

“Oh. It’s you.”

Moshe cringed. “Giveret Karen. I was a fool. You brought water to my mother while I insisted she stay thirsty. I am a fool, Mrs. Karen. Please. Come to Netanya and walk with my mother again.”

Karen turned her face to the wall.

“Mrs. Karen, I am a man who has been robbed at knifepoint in Sudan, and I am telling you, I have never begged for anything in my life. But I am begging you now. Please. Please, walk with my mother again.”

Moshe saw Karen’s shoulders bunch, watched her lift a knobby hand to obscure her face. I am causing her pain. Bowing his head, muttering his thanks to Karen’s granddaughter, he left.

“Ima, I tried,” Moshe said when he returned from work.

Karen was not coming.

“She was embarrassed, Ima. I think people were making fun of her.”

“Fun of Karen? Pfft. No one could ever.” Karen was made of stronger stuff than that. Wasn’t she?

Mazal sat at the dinette table and stared at the brown armchair. All she had to do was lower herself into it, and her days would close around her once more. Death and armchairs were patient.

Karen was not coming.

Once, Mazal had been ready to let the world go. “Live,” the doctors and therapists in rehab had commanded her. Live, a still small voice inside of her had insisted. But there were eyes that had seen her black, rotten limb. There would be eyes watching as she tried to stand and flailed and fell. The risk was too great to push past.

And then Karen had come. My soul recognized you from another time, a younger Earth. I learned friendship by reading your face like a holy book. Karen, sitting there, talking, had bolstered her into a sturdier unit.

“Live,” Karen had suggested. “Live,” she’d snapped, when she had found Mazal at Moshe’s place. “I’m not saying it again.” And Mazal found she could. When she was part of a double act, she lost the fear of looking foolish. Like a dandelion, Mazal had blossomed into a second life, absurd and unexpected.

There was a small mirror hanging by the front door. Mazal could shift in her seat and see her reflection. Here she was, as alive as she had ever been.

Mazal remembered rolling weeks of aloneness. Karen was not coming. If she could hear the voice of G-d now, Mazal wondered, would He still demand that she live, even without a friend?

No, Mazal decided. She could not.

Days blended together. Karen put her phone on silent, and eventually stopped charging it. Married grandchildren drifted in and out with Karen barely noticing.

Even her memories of the library had been ruined. What would her former colleagues be saying about her now? She could hear them discussing her mental demise. They’d probably take her name off the archway leading to the children’s room. That would be for the best.

“Karen.”

Who could understand what it was to be so publicly shamed? True, the Internet must have created entire tribes of such victims, but among the elderly? Those with dignity and accomplishment?

“Karen, get up.”

“Go away,” she murmured.

“No,” said Mazal.

Mazal. There was someone who could understand. Mazal had been photographed being carried like a baby while her foot festered and dangled. For the first time, Karen realized how brave her friend was, to face the world after such humiliation.

“Karen. In rehab — in Moshe’s home — I was understanding how a person can die from being alone. And you came and made me walk. Get up and walk with me now. Because — because — I am on my last leg, Karen.”

Mazal was here. Mazal had made her way from Netanya to Rechavia. By bus or by taxi or by Moshe — Mazal had come.

Karen felt her lips twitch, felt something heavy lift and fly away. She had a library in her head, a museum in her heart, a rap sheet in her arms, and the cradle of life burning in the center of it all. She was 78 years old, way too young to call it quits.

From across the room, a granddaughter watched, open-mouthed, as Karen leaned on her walker and rose, saying, “My friend is here.”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 922)