“I’ll give you my chavrusa slot.” Nachum was the only bochur in yeshivah who had a chavrusashaft with the rosh yeshivah. “Tell Pinky you’ll be a little late tomorrow, which shouldn’t be too much of a problem because he has the Goldstein wedding tonight in Telz Stone, and he never makes it to the yeshivah minyan when he stays for the second dance, which he must be planning to do if he brought his fire-blowing equipment to seder this morning.” Pinchas Greenblatt was my morning seder chavrusa.

“Yeah, okay. I’m just going to put my head down for a bit.” I eased myself down into a Keter chair and slid my arms forward onto the kitchen table.

“I’ll try to keep it down, then,” said Nachum.

The table felt cool on my sweaty forehead as I reflected on Nachum’s remarks.

My first thought was that it’s not easy to accept dating advice from someone on an indefinite dating break.

But I couldn’t deny that Nachum had a point. I get headaches when I’m stressed; I was feeling very stressed lately; and the source of the stress was probably — okay, fine, definitely — the fact that I was in my first serious dating relationship, and we (Leah and I) were either about to get engaged or break it off, and the worst part was that I didn’t know which of those two possibilities terrified me more.

With my eyes closed, I imagined I was sitting not in a plastic chair in the kitchen but in the tattered armchair Nachum’s clients sat in when consulting with him on a case. I saw myself telling Nachum the details of my relationship with Leah — which started with coffees at the Ramada — as Nachum sat there with his fingers pressed together under his chin, listening intently and nodding along.

“You can’t marry someone because you’re too scared to hurt her feelings and end things,” I could hear him saying matter-of-factly, his long, thin finger pointed sensibly in the air.

I staggered to my feet and the scene in my head vanished.

“Was I moving these blood smear slides too loudly?” Nachum asked as I passed the desk on my way to the bedroom. “I’ll try to be quieter.”

“No,” I said, “You were thinking too loudly.”

“Believe it or not,” said Nachum, pointing a slide at me, “you’re not the first person who’s said that to me.”

“I believe it,” I mumbled, heading straight for my pillow.

Idon’t like to clean, but I threw myself into our Pesach cleaning with a frenzied sort of energy — anything to keep my mind off my dating woes. And there was certainly no shortage of messes to clean.

My roommate had the rather strange habit of stashing chometz in the unlikeliest of places: I found two Shugi bars, for example, in each of his slippers. On top of that, he had never actually cleaned up from his mishloach manos. Nachum’s theme was our recent cracked cases, so there were still leftover gummy snakes (The Case of the Speckled Hand) and oranges (The Case of the Five Orange Seeds) strewn all over the apartment. (It had all been packaged, of course, with a grammen he wrote to the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet.)

As I appraised the inordinate amount of clutter that still remained, I marveled anew at the paradox of someone being so absolutely methodical in his thoughts and behaviors but so incredibly disorganized with his stuff.

“There’s a reason for the messiness, Rosen,” Nachum said with his uncanny ability to read my unspoken thoughts as the two of us attempted to clean our living room, “and it all comes down to the brain-shrank.” He handed me the bottle of Sano cleaning spray.

“Remind me?” I said, glancing wearily at the five full garbage bags already on the floor.

“You know, you should really do a Substack post about it. It would be a service to our readers.”

“So just give me the roshei perakim,” I said, directing the bottle’s head at a smattering of gray spots on our wall that looked suspiciously like mold.

“Right, so the idea behind the brain-shrank is as follows. Let’s imagine that you, Rosen, are walking down the street on a sunny day. You’re not really paying any attention to your surroundings. In fact, we’re lucky if you don’t walk straight into a pole — stop spraying me with Sano, you know it’s true — and suddenly you notice a pashkevil announcing that so-and-so passed away. Next, you overhear a snippet about someone of interest to you. So you’ve walked two feet and encountered two potentially important pieces of information, and where did that information go? I’ll tell you where it went, Rosen. It got swallowed up into the folds of your squishy American marshmallow brain, where you’ll never be able to pull it out again even if your life depended on it.

“Now take me, Rosen. Any time I deem a detail worth remembering, I carefully sort it into my brain-shrank. I do not move on to a new thought until the thought at hand has been put onto its appropriate spot in its appropriate shelf, with each shelf housing a different category of information,”—here he paused to pick up a sponge—“for example, my shelf dedicated exclusively to all current changes to Jerusalem bus lines. Then, when I need to retrieve a piece of information, I pull it out as easily as one would walk over to the halachah shelf of a seforim shrank and take out a Mishnah Berurah. The system requires constant mental upkeep, though, and to keep the shelves absolutely and meticulously clean, with not one piece of information askew, one will almost inevitably find himself growing a bit lax about the organization of his physical possessions.” Nachum paused to wring out the wet sponge he was running across his desk.

“You might want to mention that, Rosen — that there is a bit of an inverse relationship between the organization of the brain-shrank and the organization of one’s personal belongings.” He extended the sponge towards my face, dripping grimy water onto our speckled tiles. “Emphasize that it’s a small price to pay, though, and that I advocate the method wholeheartedly.”

“A small price to pay? Depends who you ask.” I gestured to our living room.

“No, Rosen. It’s only the fool who forgets that his mind is among his most valuable possessions. And”—the dripping sponge was now parallel with my face—“I give you full permission to quote me as such on the Substa—”

Nachum’s words were interrupted by a faint scratching sound coming from the direction of our door.

“A client?” I asked. “This late?”

Nachum was holding a finger to his ear. The faint scratching continued.

“Unless our client knocks with his beak,” Nachum said. He strode over to the door and carefully opened it. We both looked down and saw a gray-green pigeon with a small metal tube attached to its leg. Gingerly, Nachum lifted the bird up from the floor, carried it across the room, and set it down on the (freshly cleaned) desk in our living room.

With the uncertain gait of one still getting his bearings, the bird tottered in circles across the desk, bending down occasionally to peck at the stripes of foam missed by Nachum’s sponge.

“Let’s lighten your load,” Nachum told the bird as he gently loosened the tube from its leg. At this, the bird chirped.

“I think,” he said to me, “we can safely assume this message is from Myron, as I’m pretty sure that besides him, the last meaningful use of carrier pigeons in this country was during the War of Independence.”

Myron is Nachum’s older brother, a Mossad agent who uses his smarts and spy gear to both foil terrorist activity and torment his younger brother. (Let’s just say that whenever I get annoyed by Nachum, which happens not infrequently, I try to think of the fact that he grew up with Myron, and my annoyance is quickly replaced by extreme sympathy.)

“What does he want?” I asked.

“First, he wants me to show you this ad about a writing workshop at the National Library.” (Myron is always harping on my poor writing skills, which, frankly, I find a little uncalled for; everyone knows I’m a yeshivah guy with a basic English education — no one’s expecting our Substack to win a Pulitzer.)

“And second,” Nachum continued, “he wants to invite me to his ‘Professors Pesach program’ in Givat Ram. A unique Pesach experience tailored for the Israeli intellectual. The average IQ of the attendees is 165. I’m not guessing, Rosen, it says so here on the brochure.” He held up the glossy paper to me. “Guests need to take an IQ test before registering.”

“I can always tell my aunt that you—”

“No way,” cut in Nachum, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I’m spending Pesach with you.”

I had initially hoped to fly back to Silver Spring to spend Yom Tov with my family, but once I saw that tickets were too expensive, I invited Nachum to come with me to my aunt in Ramat Beit Shemesh. (She lives next door to Leah and was actually the one to suggest the shidduch.)

“Besides,” Nachum continued, “there are about three activities I would enjoy less than going to Myron’s program, and they are all forms of Chinese torture.”

Nachum picked up a pen and a scrap of paper from the corner of his desk. “Don’t worry, Rosen, I won’t mention the Chinese torture to Myron, as I assume such a comment wouldn’t pass the ‘Aryeh Rosen Guide to Social Skills.’” He gave me a withering look from over the paper.

I confess I had taken to giving my roommate little pointers on how to better follow social cues. (For example, Rule 1: Even if you can deduce the first, last, and middle name of someone you’ve never met before, do not call them as such until you’ve been formally introduced. I don’t care what Nachum says; it’s socially off.)

I watched Nachum scribble a message to Myron, roll it up, and slide it back into the metal tube that he refastened to the bird’s leg. “Thanks, little guy,” Nachum said, stroking its head with his thumb. “But first, let’s give you some tzeidah laderech.” He walked over to his viola in the corner of the living room and, with the pair of tweezers perched on top of it, pulled out a small metallic bag from inside the instrument’s F-shaped hole.

“Aha!” he cried, delighted. “I knew I had some leftover Kariot in here.”

He crushed a couple of the pillow-shaped cereal pieces in his palm, and I winced as I watched the chometz dust fly in different directions. I made a mental note to sponja the area again in the morning.

After energetically eating its fill from Nachum’s palm, the pigeon seemed ready for its journey back to Myron’s apartment in Arnona. Nachum cracked open our window and released the bird into the starry Jerusalem sky.

“Well, that’s settled,” he said, dusting his palms and somehow managing to get even more chometz on the floor. “I got hungry when I was practicing last night.

“Speaking of music, Rosen, you’ve been humming Od Yishama, Yasis Alayich, and Invei Hagefen, in that order, since you came back from night seder, so in case it’s at all relevant, I just wanted to offer my services in planning and implementing a surprise proposal. You would be far from the first chassan I’ve helped.”

I did not doubt this at all, as Yaakov Meir Ginsburg, a third-year guy from Florida, recently told me how Nachum helped him parachute from a plane to propose to his kallah; just as she stepped into the room for a meeting, he flew by her office window with a “Will you marry me, Ita?” sign.

And Leah had been dropping little hints about proposal ideas and had conveyed more than once that she wanted it to be a complete surprise.

Come to think of it, if there’s one upside to sharing a dirah with a super-genius like Nachum, it has to be the chance to give your future kallah the surprise proposal of her dreams.

Which reminded me: I had another meeting with the rosh yeshivah tomorrow to hash out some more— uh-oh.

Did I feel another headache coming on?

Ireached for the knob to our dirah, hoping against hope that a certain pair of piercing blue eyes would not be staring at me as soon as I came in. But alas, with two feet up on the desk, leaning back leisurely, one hand in a can of pickles and the other holding a pocket-sized concordance to his nose, Nachum blinked at me like an all-appraising owl.

At once, all the resolutions I had made on that long way home to play it cool until I had more time to process melted under the intensity of Nachum’s stare.

“I— we—” I faltered.

Nachum held up a hand to stem the tide of my words.

“I know,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, Rosen.”

Even in my state of complete and utter emotional distress, curiosity got the best of me: “You do?” I asked. “But… but… how?”

Nachum lowered the book so that his eyes no longer seemed to be floating midair.

“If I’ve told you once, Rosen, I’ve told you a million times. A good deduction is nothing more than the collection of simple but suggestive facts. Fact number one: There has been a Ramada receipt for two coffees with a sixteen percent tip on your night table for the last three months — you should know, for future reference, that the standard tipping rate in Israeli cafes is around twelve percent, and you’ve been woefully over-tipping. Regardless, that receipt has been sitting on the table for months, but today, I noticed it was in the rubbish bin. Fact number two: You’ve returned to the dirah with two unopened water bottles, though you put them in the fridge last night to chill, so it seems she didn’t take it as well as you had hoped. Fact number three: What you have opened is a package of tissues, and the one in your pocket has been recently moistened. Your eyes are red-rimmed and there are tiny tissue fibers visible on your glasses and small abrasions in the skin under your eyes, so you’ve been wiping away your tears in the rough and hasty way of one who is trying unsuccessfully to hide — you know what, Rosen?” Nachum’s voice was like a train that had been hurtling along the track only to come to a sudden, startling break. “I think— I think I should stop here, shouldn’t I? That would be the socially astute thing to do, would it not?” He put a finger to his chin and looked up at me thoughtfully, waiting for my response.

“Umm,” I said, feeling oddly touched by this unexpected display of sensitivity. “Yes, actually — it would be.” And then: “Thank you, Sparks.”

Nachum said nothing more, and I noisily busied myself with getting ready for bed, but from our room, I could hear strains of Nachum playing my favorite MBD songs on his viola, which I took as his way of showing his support.

Sleep did not come easily. I tossed and turned and sat up in bed about an hour later. The memory of the night’s events came crashing over me with force, and my stomach felt like I was on a plane during that final, bumpy descent into Ben Gurion.

I staggered out of bed and came into the living room, where Nachum was bent over a Talmud Yerushalmi.

I cleared my throat. “Yes, Rosen?” Nachum said, not looking up from his Gemara.

“I just realized something, Sparks.”

Nachum turned his neck slowly around to face me. “You just realized that we’re going to need—”

“New Pesach plans,” he and I finished at the same time.

“You could always go with Myron to his professors’ program,” I told Nachum as we stood in our kitchen, washing our dishes before putting them away for Pesach. “I’d go with you, but I don’t think I’d qualify.”

Nachum’s towel scrubbed the frying pan feverishly. “I already told you Rosen: I’m not going to that program with Myron.”

“We could go to my aunt and I could wear a bag over my head,” I joked, to which Nachum kindly replied that just because I had the object permanence of a four-month-old, it didn’t mean that my aunt’s neighbors did.

“Yeah, I know,” I sighed. “Wouldn’t work.” I watched the stream of water from the spout spill over the sides of the pot like a waterfall. “It’s a shame. My aunt’s such a good cook and my uncle runs an amazing Seder. You know, you could go to my aunt, and I could go with Pinky. I think he mentioned he has space for one at his cousins in Afula.”

“I told you, Rosen. I’m spending Pesach with you,” Nachum said loyally.

I grabbed a spatula and began rinsing it off. “But where will we go?”

Nachum shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not worried. I’m sure something will work out.”

“Well, that makes one of— Whoa. What is in this pot?”

“What do you mean?” asked Nachum, peering over my shoulder.

“Please tell me this isn’t the brisket Mrs. Pessin gave us from her grandson’s siyum. Wasn’t that like—”

“Three weeks, five days, eleven hours, and twenty-four minutes ago,” Nachum finished.

“No wonder it’s purple and growing fur.” I dumped it into the garbage, where it made a strange hissing sound.

“By the way, Sparks, Eliad’s convinced you’re trying to avoid him. He said you haven’t answered any of his calls recently.” Eliad was Jerusalem’s chief police inspector. He always turned to Nachum for help solving the city’s more complicated crimes.

Nachum suddenly seemed very interested in his towel. “I’m not trying to avoid him. He’s just been calling at inconvenient times.”

“And you haven’t been responding to his emails either.”

Nachum threw the towel down onto the counter. “He wants me to take on the matzah factory vandalism case. I tried telling him there is no case! The owner waited too long to call; clearly he vandalized the factory himself for the insurance money. Tell Eliad that that’s my final answer; he can waste his time interviewing the factory workers himself, and when he finds out they’ve been framed, he doesn’t need to be in touch to say I told him so. Oh, and also wish him a chag kasher v’samei’ach and remind him that we’re on vacation over Pesach and should be contacted only in cases of extreme emergency. Like Iranian-ballistic-missile levels of emergency, not three smashed matzah ovens.” I committed that message down to memory, already thinking of the tweaks I would make to soften its tone.

Over the next few days, the beis midrash started to empty out, with many bochurim heading to family overseas. I didn’t mind the quiet, though, and I found that it was only in the beis midrash, with the comforting familiarity of bending over an open Gemara, that the pain of the breakup was less acute and that the world felt like it might one day be normal again.

With about two and a half weeks left until Pesach, I walked back late one night to 221 Rechov Ofeh (the rosh yeshivah had come specifically to see me in the Beis Medrash to give me chizuk and we ended up speaking for quite a while) to find Nachum at his desk, studying a piece of paper with a look of intense thought on his face.

“What do you have there, Sparks?” I asked.

“Hmm…” was all Nachum said, apparently too engrossed in the letter in his hand. He folded it gently and put it down on the table.

“I think,” he said at last, a smile slowly spreading on his lips, “that we might have found our Pesach plans.”

I reached for the letter and scanned it quickly: a Mr. Aryeh Rosen and a Mr. Nachum Sparks had been invited to serve as mashgichim at the Yahalom, a Pesach hotel up north. The dates and salary were detailed in bold.

“I can’t make out who it’s from,” Nachum said. Frankly, I didn’t care, as long as our Pesach plans were finally figured out.

“Let me see,” I said, glancing at the bottom.

The signature was a bit smooshed, but after looking at it closely, something suddenly clicked: Perry Almog. That was the owner of the hotel Nachum and I had worked at this past bein hazmanim in Ashdod. The truth is we had gone undercover as mashgichim to recover a guest’s stolen jewels (see podcast episode #54, The Case of the Purple Carbuncle), but the pay was prompt, the job not too labor-intensive, and I would totally be up for a stint at another one of his hotels. I said as much to Nachum, who agreed with me.

Though we didn’t have a lot to do with Almog over the summer, from what I could recall, he was an older man who smoked a pipe. “He’s the type to send snail mail,” Nachum remarked, reading my thoughts.

“And to seal it with a wax stamp,” I added.

“Curious that the emblem on the stamp is two interlocking knives,” Nachum observed, holding the envelope up to the light.

“Yeah, a bit strange,” I agreed.

“The letter says to write back promptly by Israel Post to the address of the hotel: 41 Rechov HaGefen, Teveria.” Nachum took out a paper from his desk drawer and began scribbling. “I’ll deliver this to the post office tomorrow on my way to morning seder. You ready for the Pesach of a lifetime, Rosen?”

I thought of the near-empty package of Dexamol in the kitchen; the Mazel Tov balloon Leah got me when I finished Nedarim that I still couldn’t bring myself to throw out; the turbulent plane type of stomachache that still hadn’t let up even though the only thing I could really bring myself to eat since the breakup was a bag of Beigel & Beigel pretzels I had to finish before Yom Tov.

“You know what, Sparks?” I said, suddenly realizing how desperately I needed a change of scene. “I’ve never been more ready.”

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1102)