Gabardine

We buy festive clothes at Romano House, but our journey begins at Florentin. Years later, I realize that Mother has a method for this. In the first round, she enters all the stores in the neighborhood, rummages through the goods, checks the price, and then rushes away. Usually, the poor wholesaler chases her for dozens of yards, offers her grand discounts, swearing by his children or by his own eyes that “There’s no such other merchandise on this street.” But Mother doesn’t even turn back to look at him.

In the second round, after we’ve already passed Florentin and Levinsky and Ha’Aliyah, as well as a few other nearby streets, we return to the stores that Mother has earmarked in her mind from the first round.

Right before the first store, she stops. She hesitates, mumbling to herself, repeatedly examining the clothes dumped in the shop window, and then grabs my hand and warns me not to open my mouth, not to complain that I feel too hemmed in or too hot, and most certainly not to get excited about any clothes she’s about to have me try on.

The wholesaler lurking at the entrance welcomes us with a gleeful smile. He tells Mother that he was sure we would come back to him, and pulls out the measuring tape. But Mother is quick to cool his enthusiasm. She stands in the middle of the store, looks at the shelves crammed with cheap pants, wrinkling her nose. When he approaches, she pushes me away from him, and says that it’s really a shame, that she doesn’t know what happened to him, that every year she buys from him but he has never been that expensive. And again, he swears that his goods are the best and that his prices are already after a discount. “Well,” says Mother, squeezing my hand, “If so, then I’m really wasting my time.”

“Wait a minute, ma’am, wait a minute,” he catches up with her at the door. ״Let’s measure the boy first, then we’ll do another discount.” Mother turns around and looks him in the eye. “Don’t tell me later that you’ll only do ten percent.” “Okay,” he mutters angrily, “Okay, we’ll do it for you. You’ll get a discount, ma’am.”

She returns to the center of the store and makes me stand in front of him. He unrolls the measuring tape, deftly wrapping it around my waist, pulls the pencil from behind his ear, and jots down a few numbers on an odd piece of paper. Immediately afterwards, I enter the fitting room and undress.

A few minutes later, Mother also enters with three pairs of pants. She stays with me in the room, sticking her fingers into the narrow gap between the fabric and the skin of my stomach, asks the wholesaler if they shrink in the wash, and orders me to stand up straight because it drives her crazy that I move all the time (even though I’m standing in front of her like a statue). “No, ma’am,” the seller promises, “it doesn’t shrink, this fabric.”

The second pair of pants is too short. Mother unbuttons me, pulls them down forcefully, and buttons them again, but they still don’t cover my ankle. “With you, they’re either too short or too wide,” she mutters furiously. “It’s a nightmare, a nightmare to buy you pants.” She waves the last pair of pants off the floor and asks me to lift my leg.

Three months earlier, morning, noon, and night, Mother reminded Father that he had to buy clothes for the bar mitzvah, that it was already late, that she was tired of telling him so. She didn’t understand why he was doing this to her and why he was waiting on purpose, torturing her like that and shortening her life. And after he had gone two and a half months before the bar mitzvah and bought himself clothes for the bar mitzvah, he went again at the behest of Mother and exchanged them. As the bar mitzvah date approached, Mother promised again that tomorrow they would buy clothes for the bar mitzvah for me, too, and that if we didn’t find everything in one day, then we would go back there a second time. She said I wasn’t to complain (even though I never complained) that I was hot, or tired, or sick, or give her any problems with the measurement because this bar mitzvah had already driven her completely crazy and she had no patience for anyone.

The fitting room was a small, dusty warehouse with a pile of brown sheets of paper on one side, and rags, broken toys, and old left-over pieces of soap on the other. In the center of the room, behind a filthy cloth partition, hid the toilet. The stench of urine that erupted from there, along with the dust, the crowding, and Mother’s sweat, made me nauseous. I told Mother that the pants were really comfortable and that I wanted them, but she had just found a defect in them, an unnecessary white thread that was somehow sewn between the right pocket and the zipper. The frightened wholesaler, despite his efforts to find an explanation that would calm Mother and despite his insistence that such a thing couldn’t happen to him, was finally forced to admit that in this case indeed we were talking about a small defect.

At the next store, there was no shirt that would be suitable for pants that could be suitable for a bar mitzvah, and at the third store Mother couldn’t find the merchant she knew and could trust. The new salesperson seemed like a liar to her, and even though there were pants there that she liked, she preferred not to buy from him. “If something happens later,” she explained to me as we left, “if your zipper rips or they shrink in the wash, he won’t replace them for me. I don’t even know that it’s not stolen goods, everything he has there.”

At noon we stopped at Ozeri’s on Ha’Aliyah and bought drinks: I, carrot juice, and Mother, grapefruit. I swallowed the sweet juice in one gulp, looked at Mother and said I was still thirsty. “We’ll drink at home,” she determined, and looked away from me. “It’s terribly hot today, damn it. Terribly hot.” She wiped the sweat from her forehead. “It has already ruined my health, this bar mitzvah.”

Three times a week I come to their house, to my Grandpa and Grandma’s house, to study my chapter for my aliyah. Grandpa got me the best teacher, Rabbi Haim, who had married Father and Mother fourteen years earlier. He also bought me the tallit and the kippah, showed them to Mother, and motioned with his finger to her to place them on me. I stood in front of him with the large kippah on my head, the tallit on my shoulders, and the small siddur, on the cover of which appeared a cast model of the Temple, decorated in silver and gold colors.

I didn’t really understand what he wanted from me. I looked at his face, smiling at me with a vague expectation, hoping to find some sign or hint, but I already knew that salvation wouldn’t come from him. In fact, I had never heard him speak. I mean, really speak. Most hours of the day he lies in his armchair in the corner of the living room and keeps silent. But every now and then he gathers his strength and growls something in Grandma’s direction. A kind of a rapid, decisive sequence of dry syllables, like a rusty machine gun, firing a short burst and recoiling back. Grandma of course knows his language and shouts back at him in harsh Arabic. Usually, he’s content with her scolding and falls silent for a few more hours. However, it does happen that he responds back with a terrible growl of his own, and then Grandma, cursing her dark day, puts aside her chores in the kitchen, and rushes to fulfill his wish.

At Eddie’s in Lucky Star Fashion, I finally thought it was over. The pants, as Eddie said, were “truly elegant” and fitted me “as if to order.” Mother pulled me out of the fitting room, asked me to stand straight in front of the mirror, to stop swaying like a lulav, and complained that the pants were too tight. But Eddie was unmoved. He ran his hand over his moustache and determined that they would expand over the body. Mother muttered to herself that the fabric indeed did look really original to her. “With me you only get originals, ma’am,” Eddie was quick to confirm. She had already asked him to fit me with a belt, but then, despite his many years of experience, Eddie made one serious mistake. He told Mother that they didn’t do discounts on Jordache. Mother quickly unbuttoned me, shoved the pants into Eddie’s hands, and told him that at Miro’s, his neighbor, she could get exactly the same thing but for fifty percent of the price. “Then go to Miro, ma’am,” he said, putting the pants back on the shelf. “Let’s see what merchandise he’ll give you. Only in your dreams you’ll get Jordache.”

At Yaffa at Hollywood Clothes, we don’t find pants my size. “His proportions are not good,” Yaffa sums me up, sending a jet of thin smoke into my face. “If you want, take the black pants you tried on for him,” she suggests to Mother, “and we’ll make a small adjustment to his waist.” Mother wavers a minute and Yaffa already pulls the pants off the shelf. “Come in two days, honey,” she approaches me, “you’ll have it ready by then.” But Mother doesn’t want to wait two days. The bar mitzvah is approaching and we must not wait until the last minute. “All of Rivka’s children are already set for your bar mitzvah,” she told me as we were leaving the store, “and only we,” she quickens her pace, “because of the sluggishness of your father, who always waits for the last second, we don’t have any clothes yet. I hate going in like that and buying very quickly, just to get it over with. But this doesn’t move your father. At the first store he buys everything. Good, not good, beautiful, not beautiful, cheap, not cheap, it doesn’t interest him. Within ten minutes he chooses, pays what he is told, and leaves. That’s not the point, to finish and go,” she concluded, opening the glass door of Montana Clothes.

The last Yom Kippur we spent at Grandpa’s synagogue. Every time El Melekh Yoshev ended, Father sat down. And immediately stood up. He’s truly afraid of her, of Mother. “People of faith have been lost,” the cantor calls out. “They come by the power of their deeds,” respond the worshippers, still on their feet. I checked the siddur: El Melekh is about to begin again. That’s why they keep standing. But Father doesn’t know that. He also reads without comprehending. I hear it. He says, “Before they called you, anitem,” instead of anitam. Even though the vowels are spelled out. Vekol oznakh is “oznekha” with him. And wherever it is written that if it falls on the Sabbath one adds, for example, “Our God and the God of our Fathers, please grant us rest,” he adds, even though it is a Monday, and twice Shimon Haviyah — whose daughter had slept with another man in the middle of the living room two months after her wedding, and every time I see her in the synagogue my face burns and I run to wash it in water — commented to him about this. On Yom Kippur, however, it is forbidden, it is forbidden for even a drop of water to touch the lips, otherwise everything is wasted, it’s worth nothing, this entire fast, if one drop of water trickles into the mouth. That’s why Mother cleans her face in the morning with a damp cloth. But Father says you can brush your teeth without swallowing water, that that’s what he used to do until he met Mother, and Mother tells him that if he wants to make a fool of himself then he might as well drink and eat and be a complete infidel, why just brush his teeth? So, Father asks her quietly, without Grandpa hearing, whether she thinks it’s really important to God, this stench that comes out of everyone’s mouth — if this seems to her the purpose of the fast, or whether you should also use your head a little sometimes.

Nisso of Montana Clothes stood and listened silently to Mother’s demands. When she finished speaking, he placed the cup of black coffee on the counter, disappeared for a long minute in the warehouse and returned from there with the winning pants. “It scratches,” I said as soon as the fabric was on me. “Shh… be quiet for a moment!” Mother scolded me quietly and knelt down. “There’s no choice,” she whispered under her breath, “there’s no choice.” Her hands groped at me, hard. “We’ll need them to make you another hole here, tuck your stomach in a little!” She pulled the belt tight. “But you won’t be able to tuck it in all evening… it will also ruin the fabric.” She stood up and pulled me out of the fitting room.

Every time I felt I couldn’t take it anymore, that I was breaking down, that this fast was too hard for me, I thought of Yoseph Teshuvah. His son was killed a few years ago in the army, and since then he has been buying the Kol Nidrei book every year. He always starts with five hundred liras and ends up buying the book for two thousand. Every year there’s someone else who competes with him over this book, and everyone knows that Yoseph Teshuvah will never give up. In the last two years, since his wife got cancer, he has also been buying the Opening of the Ark. He doesn’t care about his money anymore. He wants the most precious things, those closest to God. When the cantor invites him to open the Ark, he places the tallit bag and the siddur on the chair, uses Grandpa’s hand to climb to the Torah Ark, moves the curtain to the side, slowly opens the doors of the Ark, looks at the holy Torah scrolls — I immediately imagine the pomegranates I will place on top of them on Simchat Torah — and then wraps his head in the tallit, touches the Torah scrolls with trembling hands, and says a silent prayer heard only between him and his Maker. At this moment, I always look at his sick wife and two daughters in the women’s gallery. I see how all the other women step aside so they can make their way to the front row, and how they stand there crying, and his wife, alone of all the women, her head wrapped in a black kerchief, extends two white hands towards her husband or towards the Ark that he has opened for her, so that she could ask God to cure her cancer.

“Why is he standing like this?” Nisso pointed to my spread legs. “Stand up straight!” Mother ordered. “He needs to see what to do with your belt.” “It scratches,” I protested, but closed my legs anyway. The burning was terrible. Intolerable. The dark, opaque, purple fabric was interwoven with glowing dots that pricked like thousands of sharp pins. I knew that my skin was already completely red, and the thought of those pins stinging my swollen legs, and that nothing I said or did would change the fact that we had finally found pants that fit, and that throughout the entire bar mitzvah I would have to stand and separate them from my skin with my fingers, and when they served the burekas filled with minced meat—well, maybe she’d ignore this dish, after all—but when they served the tongue in mushroom sauce, she’d force me to sit down, because she’d never give up on a main course, and certainly not at my bar mitzvah, so while all this was running through my head, a hard cough that brought down a few tears came out of my throat.

At my bar mitzvah my legs were shaking and I didn’t know if it was from weakness or embarrassment. Still, I held on to the chair in front of me and pulled myself up to stand. Black spots drifted before my eyes like little clouds. I took a deep breath, concentrated on breathing, only on breathing, as they taught us in first aid class, and very slowly the clouds turned gray and white. I opened the siddur again, but apparently not at the right place: there are gates of redemption, gates of rejoicing, gates of joy, they run fast through all the gates and there’s always someone, I think it is Shimon Haviya, who raises his voice, literally shouting “the gates of” to “until best,” specifically “until best of all the gates,” and then I’m a bit on edge to find out whether everyone will shout the gates of good livelihood together this year, too, and wonder why they’re more important than all the other gates, even more than the gates of complete healing, which Yoseph Tshuvah says in a very strong but also slightly broken voice.

“What fabric is it?” Mother asked Nisso. “Gabardine,” he replied. “At first it really scratches a bit but you get used to it in no time. By the bar mitzvah, he’ll dance for you like Fred Astaire,” he smiled and patted my cheek. “Because I don’t want him to make it a nightmare for me, this bar mitzvah,” said Mother. “Ma’am,” Nisso admonished her, “I took exactly these pants for my son. What, would I give him something that will make him suffer?” “Okay,” conceded Mother, “come, fix his belt and see if you have a matching shirt. It has already ruined my health, this bar mitzvah.”

I’m getting weaker, already feeling foggy, the siddur flutters in my trembling hands, I close and open my mouth, close and open with dry lips, with a stuffy head, heavy as a ball without air, dizzy, thirsty, very thirsty, flung dazed on a chair. I imagine a huge chandelier falling on my face from the ceiling, I breathe deeply, inhaling with my mouth wide open, rich and light air enters, penetrates and expands in my lungs, dozens of light bulbs float like white ballerinas, thin-necked and delicate, they fall down, carrying me away, but I am thirsty, parched, dizzy. Everyone comes to me, everyone to me, having a good look, wishing me good luck. They look, they don’t hear, they shout, hands over their ears, there are guitars and drums, glittering shirts and purple earrings, black, long like a snake crawling to the microphone, thousands of lights hanging down in balls from the ceiling, they will take me, lift me up on a chair, a three-tiered cake with marzipan tablets of the Ten Commandments, orange candles with flower arrangements with red cloth napkins inside glass cups, count only eight rounds when laying tefillin and then on the forehead, Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, tie everything tightly with your fingers, tie the words that keep coming, flying, whole birds on trays lying decorated with slices of damp oranges, half a pear lying dead in the dessert bar, stabbing, blinding lights, burning skin, quiet, tension in the face,

“Distinguished audience and dear guests…”