“What did Ima say?” she asked.

“That if he didn’t waste so much money on foolishness and restaurants and luxuries, he’d have an easier time covering his mortgage.”

“What about the usual argument about the privilege of supporting a learner, like Shua or Moishe?”

“Oh, of course she said that. I didn’t bother mentioning it, I didn’t want to bore you.”

Yossi distracted himself by building a tower of Duplo, selecting only the red bricks.

“And then Ima mentioned the pictures,” Nechami guessed, knowing her mother was still hurting, still scarred. And knowing Dudi had wounds of his own.

“Of course.” Chaya confirmed. “And she made sure to point out that they’d used the most expensive photographer in the country, so it was no wonder they couldn’t pay their mortgage after that. And Dudi growled that with friends like that, Ima didn’t need enemies, and that she should find herself some new friends with shorter noses.”

“Ha, that’s really funny!” Nechami couldn’t keep from laughing. “What’s going to be with him?”

“What’s going to be with my linens, that’s what I want to know. And my apartment. Today we went to see one like you’ve never seen in your life. An attic under a shingled roof, built for midgets! I couldn’t lift my head in those rooms, no joke!”

• ••

Leah Silver was feeling besieged on all sides.

Her friends were making a frontal assault. She had to put her son in his place, they claimed. Well, most of them at least. Yocheved Beigel actually wasn’t saying a word. But you couldn’t take her as an example — look how far her son had gone, and that Inge he’d ended up with.

Her husband was on the right flank, waging a campaign of peaceful resistance. He couldn’t find anything in the Shulchan Aruch, he said, that prohibited taking family photos. And he wasn’t going to risk losing his son completely because of social conventions and what will their friends think.

Dudi was on the left flank, refusing to revoke the permission he’d given the photographer to post the pictures in her online gallery. She’d given him a discount in exchange for that permission, it turned out.

“For three hundred shekels, you sell your mother,” Leah fumed.

“There aren’t any pictures of you there,” he retorted.

And she was surrounded by apartment owners who’d formed a cartel against her and raised the prices of their ruins to ridiculous heights. And the Shpinders, too, who demanded an apartment davka in Yerushalayim. What was wrong with the Torah in Beit Shemesh or Neve Tzinobarim? Those places had talmidei chachamim, too.

Yossi was jumping around her in the kitchen, chattering away. Well, at least she could take care of that. “What would you like for supper?” she asked, bending down to him.

“Egg’n’cheese,” he said.

“Hardboiled egg?”

“Yeth. Peel in d’garbage.”

• ••

At 1 a.m., Shua emerges from Milkov and passes quickly through Mekor Baruch. The streets are quiet, deep in slumber. At the vending machine, he stops. He takes out his phone. The battery is trying to tell him it needs charging. He doesn’t take the hint. He dials Nechami.

“Hi, what’s up?” he whispers.

“I’m down in the office, working,” she whispers back. After a moment she realizes she can speak normally. “Everybody upstairs is sleeping, baruch Hashem. Bentzi needs a Kovetz Mefarshim for yeshivah. I promised him you’d buy him one tomorrow.”

“Can I bring you something to drink? I’m right by the vending machine.”

“No, thanks.” Her gaze lingers on the lavender wall with the birds in flight. “I’m on a diet now, for Chaya’s wedding.”

“Okay.” He represses a smile, knowing how long these diets last. “Anything else?”

“My whole family is going nuts. It’s like somebody put them all in a big mixer and turned it on.”

Now he laughs. “What is it this time?”

His family is so quiet and serene. Abba is a kashrus supervisor at the local food plant, his sisters are stay-at-home mothers. They’re all calm and content. But when it comes to the Silvers, dramas seem to crop up with astonishing regularity.

“Dudi and my mother are upset with each other — some silly business about studio pictures and permission to publicize them. Gedalya is feeling down because the fundraising for Tovi’s surgery hasn’t gotten past the first few thousand. Chaya is afraid she’ll be stuck in some awful hovel in Yerushalayim instead of a nice apartment in Neve Tzinobarim for the same money.”

“They’re still looking for an apartment in town that’s within their budget?” He crosses the street. A street-sweeper from the Department of Sanitation rumbles by, spraying water, its brushes turning furiously.

“Yes, totally. And all they’re finding is places the size of broom closets, or sooty little apartments built out into parking lots. Today they saw an ad that looked really promising — a three-room apartment in the city center, and when they called, it turned out to be in the shuk. Abba said it was out of the question. A young woman can’t live in such a place, he said, where people come to eat and drink every night, and you have drunks wandering around. Chaya couldn’t take it anymore, and she started crying. Ima said they’d have to convince the Shpinders to give up the idea of buying in Yerushalayim. They could buy somewhere else instead, rent that place out, and rent a place for themselves here in town.”

“That sounds sensible.” Shua hears his voice echoing in the empty street. Beep, says his battery. Beep.

“But it wouldn’t really work,” says Nechami. “Because even if they do that, Chaya will still have to work very hard to pay the mortgage, and on top of that they’ll have to make up the difference in rent — they’ll pay much more here in town than they can charge tenants out of town.”

She gets up, leaves the office, locks the door. The clean, cold air hits her hard. She puts her free hand in her coat pocket and starts walking in Shua’s direction. “My father suggested that they take a small, decent rental unit for now, at a price that could be covered by renting out a proper apartment in Neve Tzinobarim. Chaya wanted to know what they’re supposed to do in two years’ time, when they have two babies im yirtzeh Hashem, and Abba said she needs to have a bissel emunah. Chaya said you can’t put kids to bed on emunah, you need actual beds. And then Abba finally got mad and said, ‘Is this what comes out of all the chinuch I gave you?’ and she got insulted….”

A final beep, and then dead silence.

The shver and the shvigger should put aside the apartment hunting, Shua thinks into his lifeless phone. You can’t let a kallah prepare for her chasunah under such pressure. They should find a little rental unit for her for half a year, and meanwhile look for a proper apartment without all this anxiety.

A figure in a headscarf appears from around a corner. Shua lowers his eyes. A moment later, the figure is standing beside him. “That phone of yours is useless,” she complains, as if her own battery-eating device were any better.

“Oh, Nechami! You came to meet me. What do you think of the idea of taking a break from this mad apartment chase?”

“I was thinking of suggesting something along those lines to them,” Nechami says as their eyes meet. “But just when I was about to speak up, Ima starting peeling a hard-boiled egg for Yossi’s supper.”

“And…?”

“And it turned out to be a raw egg, but she only found that out when she cracked it on the edge of the counter.”

“So you didn’t say anything about the apartment.”

“Well, no. Yossi started smearing the egg all over the floor and showing off his finger-painting talents. So I just took some paper towels and wiped up the mess, bundled Yossi up and ran home.”

In the middle of a frigid side street in a frozen capital city, they laugh.

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 876)