Tuesday, May 17, 2005

repertory

I thought the brothers were going to be the leading characters.  They stood like ‘dum and ‘dee at my left and right knees, respectively, thick shaveshadow stark against the pallid skin of their fully-packed jowls.  One wore dark blue jeans and a black shirt; the other, black denim pants and a shirt of blue.  Their coarse hair was similar in color, length, and style; their eyes peered with similar suspicion out the window over my head from under similar low broad brows.  Both stood midway between five and six feet, and both carried, I’d say, around 200 pounds of solid sullen weight.  Occasionally one would mutter a desultory word or two to the other in Russian, to which the other would reply with a weary shrug; their two weathered backpacks rested at my feet like obese, moribund dogs.  The broad reaches of their double-barreled bellies blocked my view of most of the bus, and they stood, insensate and immovable, as others struggled past them to find roomier places to ride.  I was all set to set upon them with my most unflinching observational skills… and then the hasid got on.

I’d seen this particular hasid many times before; he cut a distinctive figure.  He seemed barely old enough to shave, and his sidelocks had just begun to curl into spirals that brushed his high, delicate cheeks.  He was tall, six foot two or three or four, with creamy skin and ruddy hair that thatched his head like ryegrass in a windstorm.  He wore the traditional black leather shoes below the traditional black gabardine trousers that matched his traditional double-breasted black gabardine greatcoat (worn right over left); a traditional big black fedora perched extravagantly on his head and, when I looked more carefully, I could see his skullcap under it, held in place with a metal clip. He worked his lanky way through the bottleneck of standing riders, earning squints of aspersion from the brothers chunkyrussian as he wormed past them.  He took up a spot just a few feet farther down from them, arranged himself and his shoulderbag, pulled out a book bound in soft, well-worn leather, and began to read it and daven - to pray and sway, expressing the words with his mouth, mind and body all at once.  But as he prayed and swayed, he glanced, too - glanced around to the other riders, appraisingly, as if he were watching for something, or someone. 

It wasn’t long before he found someone, too - brother chunkyrussian #1, who sidled over with a question mumbled quietly so I couldn’t hear.  Words were exchanged, first with somber seriousness, but soon the short fat man warmed up to the tall young zealot and a smile melted its way through his face.  They began to look at the sidur - the prayerbook - together.  Tallboy asked the fireplug something; the fireplug grinned shyly and nodded his cheese of a head.  Tallboy swiftly closed and kissed the sidur, put it in his bag, and pulled out his phylacteries.  He selected shel yad, removed the protective cover from its small black wooden box, kissed it and laid the cover aside; he told his new friend to roll up his left sleeve above the elbow as the hasid placed the box just inside the joint and wrapped the slim black strap up his arm, thrice around the bicep, down over the base of the box to hold it in place and then around the forearm and wrist and hand and middle finger, and then back… the headpiece, shel rosh, came out next, the cover removed and kissed, the loop already nearly placed on the neophyte’s head before the hasid realized they’d forgotten the kipa, which he swiftly plucked from under his own hat and perched on the older man’s balding head before resuming with the t’fillin, placing the looped leather strap over his forehead and arranging the black wooden box of holy words on his brow, literally a frontlet between his eyes.  The book came out again, was kissed perfunctorily, and then was cracked open to a prayer in which the hasid led and the thick russian man followed, a distant look of serenity on his face. 

The prayer was brief.  We were coming up on my stop, and the hasid was getting off too.  He unwrapped his straps from the other man’s arm, undraped them from his head and shoulders, replaced the protective covers and kissed them, and then finally put them back into a carrying case and scurried off the bus behind me. 

I stepped to the corner curb to cross to the south; the hasid stood waiting beside me.  We exchanged a quiet smile, a smile of simulated fraternity.  The light changed again and I went to cross the intersection eastward; I checked over my shoulder to see if I was being followed by a too-tall jew.  I wasn’t.  Instead, I saw him turn to board another bus that was just pulling up, another 38, going back east, the way we’d just come.  As he hoisted himself up the steps and into the bus, he looked over across the parkway to me, ambiguously.  Then he turned back and disappeared into the doorway of the new bus.  I noticed, as he ascended, a yellow plastic toy flag stuck into his deep coat pocket, decorated with a woodcut-type image of a fabulous crown, with Hebrew lettering underneath.  First he disappeared into the bus and then his flag followed him, briefly unfurled against the setting sun.  The doors closed on him and he was gone.  The chunky russians, needless to say, were out of the picture.  This didn’t turn out to be about them after all. 

for more information on this mitzvah, click here.