***

“You have changed.”

He nods. They are sitting in what is known as the café; it is nothing more than a couple’s back yard, adorned with a single sunflower and a bright orange umbrella. They boil the kettle on the paraffin stove in their kitchen and serve Turkish coffee and a bowl of salted sunflower seeds to those who can bear marching through their tiny home and settling onto mismatched chairs in the small patch of green they call a garden. The sunflower nods dizzily in the spring breeze.

He gestures to their surroundings. “A bit different from the cafes in Prague.”

Chasya dips her head and drinks from the coffee they are served.

Felix sips. “And this is different, too.”

Coffee in Prague was a mouthful of warmth and richness and a flavor that was not so much bitter as bold. Here, the coffee is a dark sludge, and all the sugar in the world cannot allay the bitterness.

Chasya does not seem to mind. Her long fingers cradle the glass. Her eyes dance from him to the children, who play quietly in the corner of the garden, and back to him.

“I tried. At first I wanted to be a farmer. There was something noble about working the soil. Conquering the land. Like the first man, put in the garden of Eden to work it.”

She opens her mouth to speak but closes it again.

“Tin huts. Leaking roofs. Guard duty. Those around me were lit up with the idea. These Russians, with beards and peyos, who think Rothschild is second only to the Almighty. A new Jewish settlement in our land. Grand ideals.”

“It was not for you.”

“One day, after spending hours clearing rocks from the soil, I wrenched my back.

“Three days in bed and then I realized what the fog of tiredness had obscured all this time. I hated it. I hate soil. I hate rain. I hate rocks. I asked if they wanted a lecture after work, but they said only Gemara.”

He looks up at her, and her eyes are sympathetic.

“They want poetry? Fine. Philosophy? Of course. Ideas on the dignity of man? Exile? The identity of the Jewish people? All this I can give them. But the only things they want —Gemara and the beastly burden of removing the rocks from the soil — this I cannot provide.”

“So what happened then?”

He waves his hand.

Does she have to know? How he approached newspapers, writers, the intelligentsia. How they laughed at his ideas, calling them stale, European, bourgeoisie. They held up his old-fashioned style against the new, spare prose that is coming out of Russia. Asked him if he wants to be part of a revival of Hebrew, and he shook his head. Hebrew is the chant of tefillos, half understood, expansive in their ambiguity. Besides, he can not bear the clumsiness of trying word after word, none of which match the luminous strands that weave through his mind, needing only the perfect words as a garment.

Still, they had waved a copy of Jules Vernes’ Journey to the Center of the Earth — in Hebrew, no less.

“I do not see how it could match the German,” he had said. The way not just the book, but each sentence took you on a journey, clause after clause, until meaning dawned and all the words were tinted a different shade. He had stood there, unsure of whether to try to convince them — I was a journalist in Prague, center of culture. I uncovered stories that brought men to court, that saved Jewish girls, that brought a whole community to examine the unseen stains on its collective soul. But the moment is lost. The conversation had turned. He walks away and they do not even notice he has gone.

Does she have to know? How he wandered the streets. Strangely detached from his life, and not wanting to reattach himself. How he lost not just hope, but even the idea of hope.

He pauses. Looks up at her. Waits for her to understand all the things he hasn’t told her. Waits for her to save him from himself. But she simply lifts her glass and sips.

He drinks, too. The coffee burns the back of his throat and he forces it down.

She reaches into a bag and pulls out a brown paper package. “I came to bring you this from home.”

He nods in thanks.

“Are you not going to open it?”

His mother’s writing is on the outside. He slides his finger under the seal. There is no paper inside. No note. Just two small boxes. He takes out the first. Snaps open the long, rectangular case: nestled in blue velvet is a fountain pen. He picks it up, feels its heft in his fingers. He unscrews it. A fine gold nib.

A pen like this would feed him for a month, maybe two. And the words that will be written from it are not worth the cost of the drops of ink from which they are formed.

“Your mother said you do not write. You have a pen. Why do you not use it?”

“I have nothing to say.”

He does not look at her, just strokes the pen with his forefinger.

“I cannot believe that of you.”

The anger is like lava, roiling up from deep inside, too hot to touch, too bright to see. “Believe it, Chasya. I have no more words. I have nothing left to say.”

She shakes her head. “Then find the words.”

He laughs, mocking. “How easy it is for you to say that.”

Her face grows tight. “No.”

“You have children.” He looks over to the corner of the garden. Leibele and Ruchelle whisper to each other. “You are surrounded by words. Little people who love you. You do not know what it is like to have nothing.”

It is a lie and he hates himself. He has written her story. He knows the words that she uses to describe a husband set on fire, a journey into the unknown, friendless, penniless. While he, he is just a spoilt little boy. A spoilt little boy defeated by rocks of the field.

He snatches up the package and stands to leave.

“I… I will be traveling to Teveria,” she calls after him. “I have cousins there.”

He nods. “Bon voyage.”

He does not look at her face as he strides away from her.

“Wait!”

He turns. She gestures. He steps towards her.

“I know what it is to have no home,” she says. “You get smaller and smaller.” She holds her arm wide, then her hands draw closer together, bit by bit. “At first you are your country, then your city, then your street. Then you are your home, and it is still possible to be comfortable, though you are trapped.”

“Yes.”

Is that pity in her eyes? Or sorrow? Well, people change. Life is cruel.

“But sometimes this is also not a home, and it’s only your skin. Your fingertips. But then your back aches and your skin feels old and you must still be at home in your heart.”

She looks up at him, pleading, as if her wisdom can help him, as if this little speech could change anything at all. “But hearts, too, can get narrower and narrower, until there is no room for anyone else.”

It’s not until he returns to the boarding house that he remembers the second box in the large, brown envelope. He sits on the low cot, with the scratchy sheets that torment him night after night, and opens the second box. He blinks. He tips the contents onto his palm.

A heap of gold and sparkling blue. He lifts it gently with pincered fingers. A bracelet. His heart beats faster. Mama sent him not words, but a bracelet.

He looks at it carefully, examines the links, counts the stones. If this is Mama’s, he does not recall this treasure around her thin wrist. And she would not have kept it hidden away — on Pesach and the opening season at the concert hall, she decked herself with the jewels that Papa had given her over the years. Emmy had always begged Mama for a necklace or bracelet, but Mama had said no, these are special, given to me from Papa; one day you will receive your own precious stones.

He holds the bracelet up to the light. Perhaps it is a family heirloom. Oma in Vienna passed away a few months before, it could have been left for him by his grandmother. For him. To give away. His stomach, empty all day without complaint, suddenly cramps.

Or maybe not. Maybe it is a new purchase. He returns the bracelet to the box, arranging it on the black silk. How typical. That through Chasya, Mama sent him the means of…. well, a gift.

He snaps the lid closed. So much for Mama’s ideas. If the pen would buy him rent and food for a month, this bracelet could buy bread for a year, with a new pair of shoes thrown in if he negotiates correctly.

Past the harbor and the dock. Past the smoke, the sound of men coughing and smoking and spitting, is a small cove. On Shabbos, it is overrun by little Arab boys, diving under the waters and staying there for so long that Felix, looking on from above as he walks through the town in search of some fragment of holiness, bites his lip, sure that someone has drowned. And then, a froth of bubbles and turbulence and a face appears, chapped lips gaping open, like a fish gasping for air.

During the week, though, the place is nearly deserted. He likes to go there after dark, armed with matches, a candle stuck in a glass lantern. The black is so thick that you can disappear. It is torture to enter the water, it sends shivers through his body.

At first, the sea is cold and the air is warm, then it changes, and the air is cold and the sea is warm. He does not dive, just swims in circles, waiting for the night to penetrate his limbs, and spread through his skin.

Years ago, he thinks as he pulls himself through the darkness, he had thought that he could marry her. It is a joke. How can he deserve her, she who left the grave of her husband and went to shepherd her children to safety. Who chooses her dreams over comfort, and does not crumble. If he ever thought himself a hero, those days have long disappeared. He is a no one in this new land.

When he tires, he turns over to his back, but the starlight is bright and he closes his eyes. Chasya’s words come back to him: You have a pen. Why are you not using it?

If all the seas were ink.

He shivers suddenly and dives under the water. If all the seas were ink then the world would be aflood with darkness. It takes light — white paper, cream parchment — to find words.

Still, when he returns home, he fills the new pen with ink.

He writes: I am drowning in the squalidness of this existence

He gives a bitter laugh. Quite an achievement. Both pretentious and banal. He screws on the lid and replaces it in its case, letting his fingers graze the box of the bracelet.

Better no words than these failed consonants.

After that, his load is heavier than usual. The rope cuts into his flesh and he feels entrapped, imprisoned in weight, bricks, the tawdry struggle for food and water and shelter. Nothing to redeem it. His old professor was right. He had never known transcendence.

But now, maybe, he knows that there’s something he was missing.

A letter arrives. He looks at the handwriting. Emmy. He slits it open with his finger and shakes out the contents. A stone.

And a note.

This is what Mama said when she saw me: Felix with his words and you with your beautiful penmanship, and you both insist on sending each other odd things instead of letters — a leaf, a dried fig, a stone. I want to tell her that words say too little or sometimes too much or sometimes fly away, a swallow on the wind.

This stone is from the wall of our girls’ home. The wall crumbles. The girls grow.

Emmy

He holds the stone in his hand, tosses it up and down. A crumbling wall. A home.

He closes his eyes.

The bracelet is hers, by right. She was the messenger to bring it to him; who would be a messenger to return it to her?

That bracelet, either she will sell it and set herself up with a small business. Or she will keep it and think of Mama and Prague and feel like there is someone in the world who cares for her. Either way, it is not his. Returning it would be the one thing he could do to release himself.

The next morning he asks his landlady the way to Teveria. She looks at him strangely. “You have a horse? A donkey? A carriage?”

“No.”

She shrugs. “Straight up the coastline to Haifa. Then across to Teveria.”

“How long would it take?”

She bangs a pot on the stove. “By foot? I have an uncle who does it. A week, perhaps?” She sniffs. “Should I hold your room?”

He thinks for a minute. There will be no wages earned for a week of walking. Unless he pawns the pen. But he wants it with him.

“No. I’ll pay to the end of the week and set off on Sunday.”

After Shabbos, he places all his worldly belongings in his leather satchel: the pen, the bracelet, two shirts and his Shabbos belt. He pawns a pair of shoes for two leather drinking flasks that he ties onto a rope around his waist and buys a loaf of bread and a small hunk of cheese. It takes only half an hour of walking to leave Jaffa behind.

That night, Felix lies down on the sand to sleep. Close to the cliff face, he is safe enough. If the tide comes that far in, he will wake up and the water is not cold anymore, not this time of year.

He wakes to the giggle of children and blinks before he remembers where he is. Somewhere. Nowhere. On a journey. Traveling up the coast, following the sea until he hits Old Haifa, and there the confusion will begin. The old maps he saw in the Jaffa marketplace are more art than navigational tools.

Where is he now? Does it matter? The children run off, dark-skinned and thin, clothed in wild combinations of adult shirts and children’s shorts, leather boots and sandals. He hears the cadence of Arabic. He stands up, brushes the sand from his clothing, ambles down to the sea to wash his hands and face.

On his second day of walking, a stretch of sand beckons and Felix wades into the sea. When he reaches his waist, he moves to a slow crawl, allowing the waves to carry him back and forth. As he floats, a small silver flash leaps out of the water.

Fish. Why had he never thought of fish?

He treads water, pulling his arms through the sea as if they are a net. No fish. What should he do? Dive into the water and chase after them, like they are schoolchildren playing tag? He swoops under the water, swimming further out to sea where there are more flashes of silver.

He swats at them with his hand, tries to grab a tail, a fin, a slippery body. Nothing. He will exhaust himself this way.

He stills, kicking his legs just occasionally. The silver flashes return. Calm descends upon him, through him, washing his mind of all its endless thinking. The fish swim around him now. He could reach out and grab one, two. But he doesn’t. He stays there, as they circle him.

A long time later, he reaches out, grabs two fish, and clutches them to his chest as he paddles on his back to the shore.

A fire, throwing out sparks of blue, as the salt-soaked jetsam burns. He pierces through the fish with a twig, holds it over the flame. The days are warm, but the nights are cold and the wind that blows from the sea often chills his bones. Now he holds his fingers over the flames and feels the cold fall away.

When the fish is ready, he pops the boiling white flesh into his mouth. So much work for a little sustenance. But the fish brings him strength. When he finishes, he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and looks out at the water. Two fish and he is a rich man. And the sea? How many thousands of fish are out there. How much goodness. The wealth of the world, ripe for the taking. All that is needed is to be still and wait.

He walks. He is alone, but it’s easier to be alone among the sky and the sea than in the chattering, clattering city. Already the terrain is changing. The sky seems different. Larger. All he wants now is to put one foot in front of the other, with no thoughts coming through his head apart from the strange and insistent one that tells him to keep going, keep going.

This is the most irrational thing he has ever done. At least he should have sold the bracelet somewhere in Jaffa, to some rich Arab, so that he could bring her the money. That’s what she needs, after all.

The sun burns his skin, it crinkles and first becomes too tight, then too loose. Some hours he thinks he is no more than an animal. Others, he imagines himself an angel, dispatched to help one in distress. He does not know if that person is Chasya or himself.

At Haifa, he turns away from the sea. Now he must cross the country. Look out for Mount Tabor, some have told him. An Arab on a donkey stops to offer him a ride. He shakes his head and makes a show of turning out his pockets. No money. No money, no ride. The Arab thrashes the donkey and they trot on, as if to show Felix how fast the journey could take.

No money for donkey rides. Only a gold and sapphire bracelet in his leather satchel.

In the last few days he has become accustomed to the roar of the sea, the hiss of the waves, the suck and pull of the tides. Here, the silence is broken by the patter of tiny animals, the call of birds overhead, the wind whistling through the trees. The undergrowth is dyed a thousand shades of orange: deep brown, umber, bronze, copper. There are few flowers, gorse bushes peek out through the rocks. There is nothing to eat.

He shakes out his bag and finds a crust of bread. It is too hard to bite, so he sucks on it until it softens, bit by bit.

As the sun sets on Thursday evening, he sees the blue-purple waters of the Sea of Galilee in the distance. So he is not far from Teveria. He will sleep here tonight, and in the morning, will deliver the bracelet. Next week, he will return to Jaffa. Or perhaps he will first visit Safed, pick his way through the rubble and find an old synagogue.

It is good to run on a Friday. He sprints and trips, lurches and sprints. The great hump of Mount Tabor is behind him now, and the land slopes gently down so that he is almost flying as he heads toward the small crop of houses he sees in the distance. Teveria. Nestled on the banks of the Sea of Galilee, waters of healing.

His mission is almost complete and then something will be put right. His food has gone, all of it, but it does not seem to matter. If he is light-headed, it is not from lack of food.

He stumbles into the little town and when people stare, he is surprised until he looks down at himself. His clothing has been through sea and sand, rocks and grass. His skin is dark and his beard has grown long and curled. In his leather satchel there’s another set of clothing, ready for his journey’s end. But he cannot change now: he feels faint and something between his eyes pierces like a needle.

Or maybe it’s a sunray.

When a Jew arrives at a new town, the first place he goes is the shul. Shneur.

He looks around. Again, pulled toward the water, though this time it is fresh and clear. Even in the late afternoon, the sun is still bright, and the heat makes the houses shimmer. There are men dressed in Shabbos clothing, streimels on their heads. His head aches. The hunger, so intense this morning, is gone, replaced by a hollow.

A space is good. It can be filled. It waits to accept from the outside.

The shul. The shul. He follows the men, one turns to talk to him but his friend pulls his elbow, hurrying him along. Pay no heed to the tramp, he is surely saying.

He does not go inside the beit knesset when he arrives. He sinks down so he can lean his back against the stone. The wall is warm and the warmth travels through his shirt and into his skin, holding him even as he feels his mind floating up toward the stars. He closes his eyes. There is song and it cradles him between the notes.

Hisna’ari m’afar kumi…

Shake off the dust and arise.

He wakes to find himself in a warm bed in a small stone room. He blinks, not knowing where he is. But it does not matter. He tries to turn, but his body does not obey.

Soon enough, a long-bearded man enters. He hoists Felix up and spoons porridge into his mouth. Felix opens, swallows, closes. The man puts down the empty bowl, lays Felix down, and pulls the blanket over him.

The tears come.

The man places a hand on Felix’s cheek.

The next time he wakes, there is someone sitting beside him. He blinks.

She speaks. “Rumor came that there was a man from Germany here.”

“Bohemia,” he whispers.

“Of course.”

“I came… I came here to bring you something that is rightfully yours.”

“Ah.” She waits.

“It is… somewhere.”

What is it? It is something, somewhere. Something beautiful. His body feels heavy. In the darkness of his closed eyes, he sees the stars that followed him on his journey. They shone through the night sky and when he turned down, were reflected in the water.

If all the seas were ink then there would be words after all, for there was light on the open sea — not at dusk, but when the moon rose and the stars came out, lanterns floated on the waves. They would help him find the words again. They would help him find home.

They will help him as he turns his face to her and tries again to find the words to say something vast and deep like the Sea of Galilee, whose waves lap gently around his heart.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 736)