Hyssopus Aba always said and sometimes even When I’m feeling adventurous as the Queen would say when she’d added ginger grated or else a few chilies or at other times maybe a very small pinch of pepper Cayenne then mixed them all up together and they’re called a salad these agglomerates of different vegetables liquids and spices this amalgamation of diverse produce sprinklings and oil is called by just the one word Salat meaning prayer in Arabic the most important word to the Queen this Salad prayer the Queen always said to Eat your salad to grow up strong and live forever with your health as if a wife and so we did my Aba and I ate our salad and then the fish which fish I didn’t know because while it’s easy relatively easy to say that this is a chicken and that this is a cow that this is a lamb and that this is a turkey it’s difficult Relatively difficult as Aba always said that even meat it was Einsteinian or arguable at least for me to differentiate between fish like the two unrelated indistinguishable Dagim I had one I flushed the other I hope’s still swimming around Lake Kinneret is what I called his bowl the Sea of Galilee whose fish we had with a dill and lemon juice and paprika and mayonnaise homemade mayonnaise sauce to dip then for dessert a platter of fruits dates figs apricots and pears dried and fresh and nuts that was a present for my Aba from An elderly admirer all the way out in Gilo whose piano the previous week he my Aba had tuned for free then cleared the table to leave the dishes Yesterday you forgot the pots and pans to the Queen so that Aba he could give me my bath in the water he first had to negotiate with always first had to negotiate with negotiations were always going on in my house our apartment because our water was strange or rather it was that the process necessary to obtaining a temperature of the water or waters appropriate to desired for any given purpose say bathing me was A process as strange and involved as that of any political negotiation Aba always said what exactly it was was that the hot water tap produced only the most hot water gave forth the height of hot water and that oppositely the cold water tap gave forth only the coldest of cold waters almost freezing though not scientifically freezing as Aba once explained was o° Anders Celsius of Uppsala and so to achieve a livable median an acceptable if mud-died middleground of water temperature for conducive to let’s say bathing me required An artful and experienced manipulation of both taps and so both temperatures the boiling and the freezing to A happy medium Aba always said the two taps those twinned faucets pouring individually because it was An old porcelain tooth bathtub Aba always said it had to be replaced soon enough Any day now the Queen always said and so the mingling and so the mating of the two waters As if husband and wife was accomplished not down at the Dead Sea Desalinization Plant or in the Jerusalem Reservoir then through a unified pipe up through the length of a solitary faucet but in the tub and on me and around me and over me splashing in the tub having my bath with my splish toys the boats and the buoys and the frogs those many rubberized squeezies that I leaped enormously as if they were ADD/ADHD lambs mated with the most unmedicated of rams from the wilting lilies of the gunky green faucets to crash the cruising ships and tankers to bob the buoys transmitting their blip bleeping signals of distress gurgling as the soap became drowned in the whirlpool lost between my thighs just as my Aba wanted To wash my punim Aba always said then to wash my hair and rinse the stinging yellowgreen snot from out of my nostrils and hair which he said resembled a certain bush Moses once talked to in the wilderness of Sinai the wide purple towel the Royally purple one the Queen’s extra I always got to use when she didn’t need it when its Purpler twin wasn’t in the wash and smelling of her and even feeling of her skin that softness it was Aba’s as he pinched at me still dripping running from his pinches and dripping still soapy water to darken the hallway’s Oriental rug actually Persian Sultanabad and dizzyingly ornamented with various flora that as dead didn’t require my watering as Aba chased and cornered me against the wall of the hall under the photographs of relatives dead themselves but interred as image in wood under glass then picked me up upside down to walk more like stagger with me hanging my wet head down between his legs to my room banging my head then one of his bad knees usually always his weakest one that he hurt once in East Jerusalem and once again in Eilat on the door to my room and saying a word I know but I’m not allowed to repeat as he my Aba began with the story he always told me about the Rabbi of Polyn or with the stories he always now told me about the Rabbi of Polyn or else the one he always told me too about an eagle or sometimes a hawk or a raptor or maybe even a raven at other times that flew down when Aba was out on incursion excursion or exercises up in Lebanon that flew down and stole off his helmet which got him into serious trouble Another story he said it flew with it off and away because Birds Aba once said are the first to disrespect national sovereignty because birds are always the first to disregard territorial borders flew with Aba’s helmet straight to Jerusalem and there to Tchernichovsky Street our building and its third floor to the Queen’s kitchen window which was always open because as Aba would always say We should always keep everything open Aba always said Our windows our doors our minds and our hearts and the Queen who took it of course Aba said as a sign that Aba was dead either killed by the enemy or else in quote friendly unquote fire how he was hostaged or missing in action until Aba came home a week later because Aba he always came home and found Aba said that the Queen had not only just found out she was Pregnant with me he said but had also just used his helmet as a bowl in which to mix up the batter of a cake in some versions an apple cake in others a plum or plain bundt of any cake she was making for the old women woman Or maybe it was a man Aba said Aba didn’t remember and often told it either way who then lived downstairs in what was later the Maier’s apartment but who now was dead and is still who Died a day before or else After your bris Aba would alternately say after the first mohel he didn’t show up with the guests waiting around like pent livestock then the second mohel the first mohel’s son didn’t show up either by the time they’d already gorged themselves on the rugelach all ten trays of the stuff I’d had to order in from Marzipan down on Agrippas Street Only the best meaning only the most costly for the Queen as she wasn’t just then in any shape to slave in the kitchen for all these guests drunk with the schnapps and Wodka I’d laid out and some even felt it necessary to leave early and others to go to sleep to take a nap on the couch by the time the third mohel he showed up the son of the second mohel and the grandson of the first his grandAba who finally did it and did it well though he and despite his having been brought up as a Kotzker a Gerer anyway insisted on sucking away in surprise Aba said I was nervous it being the third mohel’s first bris yours I mean being the first er um putz the Rav ever cut though all turned out fine better for you than for me I mean what with the amount of drinking I did even after it all was over and you were back to bed sleeping soundly Aba said as you should be sleeping right now it’s so late and so instead tonight that night I mean to say he my Aba told me no story at all not the Polisher Rebbe story and not the story of Lebanon Aba said it was after all Altogether too late and said further that if I was good and went to sleep right away meaning not much later than now then he would owe me not one but amazingly two stories for tomorrow night we had begun bargaining haggling handling like this was the Shuk as if this were a table I had had in a past life in the marketsquare at Peshischa and not my very own bedroom in which Aba would be beholden to me for both the story set in Poland and the Lebanon story and so I said to him Aba OK which is an American word we liked to say to one another I said 10-4 B.ravo C.harlie Fine by the movies agreed to his terms You’re the boss I said which we liked to say too because what else could I do besides what I did which was to try to get to sleep right away because now at least it felt like I had something to think about something to remember to preserve like pickled pomegranate or like the jellies the preserves and spreads that downstairs Misses Soloff flecked with the rusty rind of the etrog both sour and sweetened them the many versions of these manifold stories I remembered or tried to remember To compare and contrast them as my teacher Moreh Kulp at the school terribly next door on Tchernichovsky Street always said to hold them both up as if the two tablets of the Ten Commandments to smash against Aba’s fivefold versions on the night that would begin not tomorrow but the day after that hasn’t yet dawned but when Aba he said the Shema O Israel the Adonai our Elohaynu the Adonai is One both Adonai and Elohaynu and many other names just as much I didn’t know as he kissed me goodnight Laila Tov Yom Huledet Sameach as he turned out the light I found much to my astonishment dismay mystification perplexity too all at once I couldn’t just then remember any version of either of the two stories he my Aba most often told whether it be the Poland story or the Lebanon story or even the occasional Time the Taxi got me Lost in Queens and I Missed your Cousins’ Wedding story I couldn’t remember any of them that night not even my favorite which was the Polisher Rebbe story my favorites which could have been on any one occasion any one of three Polisher Rebbe stories none of which I could remember that night that in one of them the Polisher Rebbe was asked by a Prominent Gentile though it’s not known as the Prominent Gentile Story “Do gentiles have souls?” and the Polisher Rebbe answered him “that since you a gentile and a Prominent Gentile at that asked that question that that question must then stand as your proof and as ours that Yes you indeed