jacko ohana had two different wardrobes and four different names, all for separate occasions. When he stood behind the coolers at his fish stand in the shuk, he wore a long, denim-blue smock spattered with carp blood and a velveteen turquoise skullcap, traced with silver thread. These two garments (the workaday gruesome and the colorfully ornate) combined to give him the look of a high priest preparing a sacrifice at the Temple altar.
Then, after his retirement, on the days when he would hold court opposite the stand and greet old customers and friends as his two grown sons, Chaim and David, attended to the usual work of stocking, cleaning, bagging, selling the fish, and arguing bitterly with one another, he appeared decked out in his best pastel dandy-wear: pressed cotton shirts in creamy sherbet shades, light seersucker or khaki pants with tidy creases and cuffs, a trim windbreaker, and his trademark open-toed orthopedic sandals with clean purple or pale blue socks. “You’re looking very nice today,” I would tell him. To which he would usually respond with a combination of bashful pride and the troubling new weariness that had crept into his voice since he’d stopped working and taken up the job, instead, of being a semi-invalid.
“I was at the hospital today for my treatment. It’s only right I should show my respect for all the professors.” He punctuated the final word with both a lilting French flourish and a tired shake of the head.
Jacko’s cosmopolitan ability to balance at one and the same time several languages, deportments, and haberdashers was what first endeared him to me, though in truth I hadn’t then fathomed the full range of his past: his middle-class, moderately religious, French-and-Arabic-speaking, Casablanca background didn’t announce itself explicitly in the here-and-now but simply stamped the present tense of his demeanor with a mild grace, as much a product of his own personality as his mother tongue or the country of his birth. From the outset he seemed a decent man and responsible fishmonger, the most considerate and least aggressive or lecherous of the several I dealt with regularly at the shuk. And though I bought sardines or bacalau, trout or rascasse from him at least twice a week for several years, it was only later that I learned about his three other names, his father’s Moroccan shoe factory, his eleven brothers and sisters, the childhood afternoons he spent on the docks of Casablanca, his two years on a Zionist collective farm in Tours, and how he arrived in Israel forty-five years ago at age twenty-one, miserably lonely and dejected.
I was masquerading, at the time, as a halfhearted sort of ethnographer and had decided to write a book about the shuk (an idea since abandoned). In preparation, I bought myself a compact tape recorder and spiral-bound notebook, which I would bring with me on my shopping trips and fill with flurried scribblings in a laughably hopeless attempt to capture the constantly changing sights, sounds, and scents all around me.
As I wrote, I also couldn’t help feeling I was grossly altering the environment I sought to depict. Armed with paper and pen, I’d be assaulted by questions from all sides. Merchants, customers, even the illegally employed Palestinian boys, miniature scowling men who worked hauling boxes of fruit and garbage — everyone wondered what I was setting down in that notebook, such an oddity in this most oral of places. Is it a love letter? one tomato vendor asked me. Still checking? asked another man. You’re from Income Tax, one announced, and several narrowed their eyes and accused me of working as an inspector for City Hall. Several times a particulary suspicious passerby would march right up and put his face between me and the paper, peering at the English chicken-scrawl there, as if to locate his own name and tear the page out (or maybe he would be flattered? I could never say for sure). The few times I admitted I was writing “a book” about the shuk, I was treated to a set of elaborately preprogrammed declarations about the heroic life of a shuk merchant who, much like the mythic American mailman, delivers the letters — or cucumbers, eggplants, bunches of dill — come rain or come shine, day in, day out. And with much false modesty. We work hard, very hard. In the cold and the heat. It’s our job. But we don’t complain, here on the front lines. This response, it bears saying, doesn’t necessarily reflect the true feelings of the merchants so much as it does the down-home spiel they imagine a writer wants to hear, and the rote nature of the local-color stories they had come to expect from the newspapers, especially around election time, when the sentiments of a Mahaneh Yehudah pickle salesman were said to be a perfect indicator of how “the folk” would vote. Of course, if I pushed a little harder, I might be treated to the bilious flipside of this rosy picture: The shuk disgusts me, declared one vendor with a wilted inventory. My dream is to get the hell out of this shithole. Another paunchy middle-aged man announced himself proudly the mob boss of the market: I keep no records! I pay no taxes! The authorities are terrified of me! he declared a little too loudly to be true while his son, with one glass eye, bellowed into a cell phone that he’d just been pickpocketed on the bus. The man proceeded to lean across the heap of watermelons he was selling and spell his name, grabbing the notebook out of my hands to look and make sure I’d gotten it right.
Jacko was different. He seemed eager — even relieved — to find someone curious about his background, and the twenty years he had spent selling fish in the shuk. His own sons, for their part, couldn’t have cared less. When they weren’t screaming at each other, they would curse their father at the top of their lungs. Then Jacko would mutter his purse-lipped invective and I would turn my eyes away: I felt for both the gray-haired little man and his grown boys, who each had his own wife and children to support and who wanted nothing more than to be his own boss. (The shorter, older brother, Chaim, in particular, was sympathetic, in a taciturn way.) But neither my well-intentioned empathy nor anyone else’s could help in the slightest to soften the painful public spectacle that took place as they thundered and fumed at one another, framed by the proscenium door of the fish stall. Several times, I arrived on the scene prepared to ask Jacko if he wouldn’t mind sitting and describing for me how he had first come to work in the shuk … yet before I even drew close to the stand, their bellows filled the covered alleyway and made me wince. I never knew the precise subject they were wrangling about. It often seemed technical and petty, the quantity of St. Peter’s fish and gray mullet ordered an excuse to let rip their darkest, most primal complaints. And although they made no attempt whatsoever to hide the intense hostility of their noisy arguments, I would slink away on these days, preferring to speak to father and sons when all were in a better mood, which is to say: separately. I had no desire to take sides or find myself caught in between.
But eventually I managed to eke out my request and Jacko didn’t even blink before ordering me gently — Come on Sunday, at eleven o’clock — in a smooth, contented tone worlds away from the raw one he used with his sons. Then we’ll talk. Although Jacko always sounded a bit hoarse, the slight pinch in his larynx periodically threatening to rob him of speech altogether, I was amazed at his cool command of several registers. The way he would shift in the course of a few seconds from an angrily bleated whisper for his children to a vigorous, clarion greeting for an old customer or friend seemed, like so much about him, a product of both willful dignity and an unconscious, almost naive frustration that his sons and his business were now for the most part out of his control. Jacko did not seem bitter. Most times, in fact, he stood his small square of ground with remarkable poise and humor. But when he was tired or when his sons were especially outspoken in their contempt for his cautious, Old World manners, his quiet perplexity took shape as a stunted sort of rage. I think they saw him as unmanly, a useless antique — and in some horrible sense he contributed to this caricature, and learned to play the part. Then his voice dwindled to a gnarled rasp and his body seemed to shrink. His shoulders lifted tight at his ears, his chin sunken to his chest, his gaze averted, he would play the role of wizened victim, frail and distracted as he shuffled and mumbled to himself.
Just as speedily, though, on the days when Chaim drove to the coast to buy fresh fish and the lazier, cross-eyed son, David (or Dudu, as he unfortunately preferred to be called), slept late and left the pudgy Palestinian teenager who worked as an assistant to open the shop, Jacko would spring into action and take up his vital old posture behind the counter, glinting fish cleaver in hand, suddenly restored to his former health and pluck. As I came to understand, his anger toward his children at once burdened him and egged him on, and he used these radical changes in his physical bearing and tone of voice as a flamboyant way of punishing them, showing them just how much they had hurt him. What is THAT? (He’d wait till they were near enough to hear his scornful words but would rarely address them head-on.) Leaving the worker to open up? These children, they don’t know what it MEANS to WORK. They think everyone OWES them. Although I didn’t doubt for an instant the genuine anguish the sons and father had caused one another over the years, Jacko’s hyperbolic flipflops of tone and appearance occasionally bordered on the absurd. Once, for instance, as I approached the stand, I saw how his skin had loosened around the cheeks and jowls and taken on a grayish, unshaven hue. Edging toward the counter to say my tentative hello, I was sure that Jacko was dying right before my eyes of some hideous wasting disease. But when I asked him gingerly how he felt, he gave me a broad wink and explained in a playful stage whisper that he was fine except that he had gone to the doctor for a checkup and left his dentures there; they’d been thrown away by accident and now he was waiting for a new set. Hence his ghoulish demeanor, which he seemed happy to parade in front of his children, as a further sort of lashing, as if to say: You have made me old. I can’t eat! He complained loudly. I CAN’T CHEW!
And now, when I asked Jacko if we might sit and talk, he used his tightened vocal chords in a different, calculated way. Even though we were alone at the fish stand, whiny reed music playing from a nearby radio, he answered my request in a hushed, conspiratorial tone. Would I like to visit his house? It might be quieter there. Did I know which bus to take to Mevasseret, the suburb where he lived? Could I find the place on my own?
At first I stood there, momentarily dumbstruck by his immediate enthusiastic answer and the series of questions he’d posed — which seemed almost comical in response to my request to ask him questions. And before I even had time to think, he flashed me a big lady-killing grin and assured me that I shouldn’t worry, I would be safe. His wife would be there too. “Of course,” I stammered … eleven o’clock sounded fine.…
“Be healthy,” he dismissed me with a brisk blessing. “All the best. Feel fine. I’ll see you Sunday, God willing.”
“I studied, studied … really STUD-IED — and not just any old studies … First … I studied Torah, how I studied!” Jacko insisted, his one-man call-and-response style gaining momentum as he went on, his voice pitched solidly now in the depths of his chest, and now at the top of his head, the syllables stretched or shortened as the body of an accordion, to shade a word’s meaning. “And then … then came the time, my father decided to register me in a regular school, a French school, l’Alliance … For this, people slept two nights on line.” In staccato: “Two-whole-nights-on-line.” And more gradually again, low, from the sternum: “It wasn’t like here, where school is required, an obligation. What’s that, an obligation? WE are obliged, WE should be grateful to study, to learn. GRATE-ful!” In the course of one sentence, he would alternate between baritone and falsetto, pianissimo and forte. Though the sound of Jacko’s monologue was distinctly musical, it was the intricate dynamics and syncopation of his speech, not a simple melody, that gave it the quality of song. His talk was soft but percussive, modulating from sentence to sentence as an Andalusian orchestra does, speeding, slowing, then accelerating again as it moves through the proscribed rhythmic phases.
“All in all there was … one class: room for thirty-five, forty students. But two hundred children were waiting in line.… Two HUN-dred CHILD-ren! What can you do? There were other schools, around the city — we’d have to be split up. So. So they sat us down, they tested us. My turn came and they asked me questions. Then … then they said to my father, Sir, where did this boy study? Where? WHERE? So he answered: He studied Torah. If he studied Torah, they said to my father, he’ll have no problems. NO PROBLEMS, nothing will be a problem for him if he studied Torah. No-thing … So they sent me to a Christian school, a school just for Christians, La Flamme Blanche, very high level, a school for foreigners.… We didn’t agree at first, but they said: On-ly a place like this is right for you. What will you do there, at that other school? You know many things, many things that they don’t yet know in that class … what will you do there? WHAT?”
As he spoke of being seven years old, Jacko pulled plastic soda bottles from the refrigerator and arrayed them on the spotless counter. There were at least eight different kinds of soft drink, the totality of which he offered up with a distracted shrug, interrupting his almost-sixty-year-old reminiscences to ask me if I preferred regular or diet. With ice or without? Was I hungry?
“During the war” — he lingered over the word, pausing to pull a plastic container from the freezer and empty the contents into a saucepan — “they got us ready for the Germans, taught us German and things. They didn’t know I was Jewish. I was the only one, but they didn’t know, we didn’t stress it, see. What for? They taught us to walk, walk like soldiers, they taught us German songs. At four o’clock, when school was over, we’d go down to the cafeteria and march, back and forth and back and forth, like little soldiers, back and forth … I told my father and my father, he listened, and then he said enough. ENOUGH. He took me out of that school and put me in another school. In the end, everything was fine. It all worked out. No problems. Do you like hot peppers?”
Aside from a mute canary that sat in a cage in the middle of the large living room (“A neighbor’s cat snuck in here last week and scared the bird,” claimed Jacko, without irony; “now she’s too frightened to sing”), we were alone in the cool, cavernous house. His wife, he explained, had been called off to help a sick aunt at the last minute … he hoped I wouldn’t mind. “Not to worry, I’m harmless,” he winked and then immediately emitted a protracted geriatric sigh and shuffled off to pull plates and forks from the tidy piles his wife kept in her glass-fronted cabinets.
We had traveled together on the bus from the shuk. Jacko insisted he pay for my ticket, and we wound out of town, onto the curved highway bound for Tel Aviv and around the once-barren, now-overpopulated slopes that marked the entrance to the city, the valleys still cut through with green. Then as we arrived at this peculiar, hilly suburb, the driver downshifted and the bus lurched into its overweight mode, heaving and puffing up and up past dozens of pale, new or half-finished “villas,” drooping palm trees, and bulbous aloe plants. When we got off the bus there was no sound save the steady, distant whoosh of trucks on the road below and an occasional cricket chirp. In the street, we met an acquaintance of Jacko’s, a flirtatious little Moroccan grandma. Jacko bowed slightly and the woman giggled, then demanded to know who I was. “A client of ours.” He introduced me with a friendly sort of formality. “She is writing a report on the shuk and I am helping her. I have offered to help her with her report.”
“Why not?” The wrinkled slip of a coquette laughed again then squeezed my hand with surprising force and ordered Jacko to give me something to drink. “She’ll dry up, Zakie. Poor thing, let her drink!”
This was, it turned out, the diminutive by which his wife and older friends called him, and of all the monikers that applied to Jacko Ohana — “Isaac Zakie Jaques,” as he transcribed his names for me in the loopy Latin letters of a diligent schoolboy — it always struck me as the best suited to his personality, or at least to his spryer and less self-pitying side. The slight French zip of the Z and the youthful ie both fit his dashing manner. His wife, Rachel, turned out to be a pretty, round-hipped redhead, far too vivacious and girlish-looking to be a grandmother twelve times over, though she was. When she called his name, Za-kie, she sang it out across a harmonic interval and sounded like she was tickling him. The way she affixed his name to every sentence seemed part of an intimate understanding between the two of them, a means of taking the bite off the constant orders she issued: Zakie, open the blinds. Reach me that plate, Zakie. Others referred to him as “Zakie” as well but they were all elderly and Moroccan and appeared to have known him since he was young enough to have earned such a bouncy name. For me to do so seemed almost rude, assuming too close or disrespectful a bond. I continued to address him as Jacko, also a nickname but somehow more neutral.
“How I studied!” he resumed the refrain. “I would finish school at four, I’d go to the yeshiva to study Torah, many things, all kinds of things, important things. Afterward, I’d go to another place, a club, Na’im Zemirot, do you know what that is, Na’im Zemirot? What a place, what … a … place … We’d learn songs and prayers there, how to pray in synagogue, we learned things, ma-ny things, many many good things …” Jacko trailed off, his tone grown foggy and limply nostalgic as it sometimes would when I hadn’t asked a precise enough question: Describe the house you grew up in. Or: Where did you spend your first night in Israel? Have you heard of the town Ocaña in Spain? I wondered if Ohana came from Ocaña, if his ancestors had once lived there. This suggestion on my part, of a family tree whose roots stretched back more than five hundred years across the Mediterranean, to Morocco, over the Straits of Gibraltar, and inland, back toward a pre-Inquisition Spanish village not far from Toledo, was met with a confused squint from my host. He had an uncle once, he said, his mother’s brother, who vacationed in Spain.… No, he’d never heard of Ocaña.
“Did you — like it, all that studying?” I asked rather thickly as Jacko continued to putter in the kitchen. Again he shrugged and pulled two white rolls from a plastic bag.
“Pah. What’s that, like it? I had no choice. That’s the custom, that’s the practice, and that’s the way it’s done.” This last proclamation emerged from his lips as a single, memorized rat-a-tat-tat, one I imagined he’d heard many times as a boy and had wielded against his own children when they were younger and had whined about some religious rule or early-bedtime order. “Like it or not. No one ever even asked me, Do you like it? Did I like it? That’s the practice. Nothing to be done. If you want to learn you have to study. WORK! That’s that. That’s life.” I nodded, feeling a bit literal and American as Jacko brought forth our lunch: rich fish fritters stewed in spicy tomatoes, along with four or five bowls of colorful fried peppers and olives, cracked green and shriveled black. He began to eat by pulling off a piece of roll and dipping it into the sauce. I found myself doing the same.
“When I was young, we wanted to build ourselves a club. We had no money. Our organization, the Zionist Youth, I was in the Zionist Youth — we wanted to build a club, for the members. A club. So we brought two Arabs, professionals, and we worked with them. They knew the profession and we worked with them, we learned to do hard work: We dug, we built, we worked, worked hard there. HARD! After that, we went to France for training, we were trained in Tours.… There’s a city, Tours. Do you know it? Where is it?” He stopped chewing to check my answer.
“That’s correct. Dans l’Indre-et-Loire. Right right right. So near Tours there are towns, villagim” — he used the French word with a plural Hebrew suffix — “agricultural villages. So they sent us to one village, a little village called Runi, and there was a — how do you it say in Hebrew — a ferme, une ferme. Qu’est-ce que c’est, une ferme?”
“Yes, une ferme … a farm,” I answered in English, my Hebrew also momentarily gone.
“Like, like what Arik Sharon has … they say he has une ferme — a farm, chavah.” He found the Hebrew word. “That’s it, a chavah, a farm.… So they took us there and they taught us things, many things, about agriculture and all. Cows. Chickens. Tractors. We were there for two, almost three years. I learned all kinds of things.…
“Then we came here, after two years. From Marseilles. They sent us to a kibbutz … ach, the first day I could already see already I couldn’t handle it. I’m used to business” — and here he chose the English word. “To work like that, you know. Kibbutz, it’s not for me. I’m urban, a city boy. My father owned a shoe factory. My grandfather was the head of the union, the shoemakers’ union. They would come to him, the workers, with their complaints, for him to decide. Like a judge he was, they listened to him, his word was like law. An important man! Now, Casablanca … Casablanca was something wild — something wild! — Where are you from?” Again he stopped and turned the question back at me.
“From the United States.”
“From the United States.” He sounded doubtful, or maybe a bit disappointed. “So how do you know French?”
“From school, you know —”
“Ah, I see, you studied French in school.” He paused for a minute over his fish, and seemed for a minute to be very far away, caught somewhere between Tours and Marseilles, Casablanca and Mevasseret. Then, just as quickly, he returned to his thought, without waiting for a question. “You know my father, may his memory be blessed, he always thought that I’d do something big, some-thing, some-thing BIG with my life. That I’d be at least a lawyer. He thought there should be at least one lawyer in the family.…”
Jacko never finished his sentence. He looked flushed and intent for an instant — filled briefly, perhaps, with the need to make a declaration, to give some official accounting of how it was that his father’s promising little boy, the lawyer-to-be, had come to spend the past half century as a manual laborer. (Before he opened his fish stand, he explained, he had built roads, been a dock worker, and packed eggs for Tnuva, the government agricultural cooperative.) Instead he turned his eyes to his plate and switched in a determined, upbeat tone to a list of brothers and sisters, eleven all told. He was the fifth child. One brother was a dentist. Another brother was a dentist. One had to have open-heart surgery. Two still lived in Morocco. Some were in France — he had visited there last year, it was just a week, not long enough — and a few others lived in the south of Israel, in Dimona.
He seemed eager to recount certain stories he had already rehearsed — about the ordeal of leaving Morocco, for instance, and the three times he’d bid his whole family good-bye then boarded the train filled with happy Jews singing Hebrew songs, made the long trip to the Algerian border only to be turned back, and back again, and one more time before finally crossing over. “All for l’idéalisme,” as he put it, a little wistfully. I could sense almost instantly when he was resorting to a well-worn anecdote and when he was pushing to think his way through a particular response, as when he admitted the other half of this picture-book, Zionistic story (“it was a lot of propaganda”), and confessed that he’d been miserable at first, a young man alone in a strange place. He had even decided to leave, and had booked his passage back to Casablanca, but then had another change of heart, standing on the dock at Haifa, and convinced himself to try and stick it out a little longer — not because of l’idéalisme but because he was afraid. His mother, by then a widow, had written to warn him that the situation in Morocco had taken a turn for the worse. She could not be responsible for what might happen if he returned. (She sent him newspaper clippings to make sure he saw that what she said was true, and not just maternal fretting.) The Jews were no longer wanted there, after the French had gone, and Casablanca was a different place, dirty, chaotic … I let him talk on, rarely interrupting or asking him to finish a labyrinthine tale that he’d abandoned in the middle or rounded off with a truism — That’s the way it is … Nothing to be done … Everything will be all right. Following out the beginning-middle-end of his various stories seemed secondary to the immediate fact of his posture in the present, his echoing cadences, and the unaware but elegant way he zigzagged between decades and continents. I was also amazed by his almost breathless readiness to recount for me, a mere acquaintance, all these far-off pieces of his past. Most of these memories seemed to have been corked up inside him for a very long time, and now they crowded each other, demanding to be let out, to spill. Although I’d intended to ask about the shuk and the years Jacko spent selling fish there, we barely touched on the subject: The rest of these remembered details seemed far more urgent in the telling, while the particulars of how he’d passed the last two decades were reduced in this free-associative version of his biography to no more than an afterthought.
Laughing, he told the story of how he worked as a teenager at an American military base in Casablanca “As a chef! A certified chef! And what does that mean? There was an American there, in charge. He was my friend, Mister Max Bund. A Jew! He said to me” — and here he tried out a few words of muddy English — “Zakie, he said, I geev you a certificate, un certificat professionnel, you work in ze kitchen, yes? But I can’t cook! I said. Forget this! says Max Bund. He was right! I didn’t need to, you see.… For eight hours a day I poured juice from cardboard boxes, into a big tank.… Every day the same thing, every day the same juice!”
Max Bund figured in another tale, too, about a date Jacko made to take “his girl” to the beach for the day.
“Your wife?”
“This was years before my wife!” he smiled crookedly. But he had no money and so he challenged Max Bund to a game of 7-11. “I rolled seven-eleven, seven-eleven … I cleaned him out! What a game!”
And then (would I like some more fish? Another glass of soda?) he told of the afternoons he’d sometimes spend as a boy on the docks of Casablanca (“we couldn’t study all the time”), watching the ships sail in with nets and nets of the freshest fish, “every kind of fish you can imagine. Any fish you could want.” The shuk there, he said, was nothing like the shuk here. “It was, how do you say, civilized, organized, so beautiful.” The fixed prices were listed on a huge blackboard at the entry gates, and a porter would follow you and haul your purchases — all the way back home! They locked those gates at night, heavy iron gates, with fancy colored metalwork. “I don’t believe, I do not believe that in two thousand years — two thousand years — we’ll ever come close to the kind of order that they had there. I don’t believe it!”
Then there was the time, around Jacko’s bar mitzvah, when his father was sick, paralyzed, “almost dead,” but was cured by Dr. Ben Zakane, “a ve-ry, ve-ry important man, his son married my sister. He was minister of health in Morocco, in those days.”
The doctor’s cure? “STOP DRINKING It is FORBIDDEN to drink alcohol.… But then my father, may his memory be blessed, he got it into his head that he wanted to go to a holy man’s grave, to make a pilgrimage to the grave of Avraham, Master of the Miracle, in the village of Azzemour. So we went, I went with him, we were on our way to pray when he heard shouting, singing, laughing. What happened? we asked. They told us: There was a woman, crawling on all fours — and she walked! On her feet! Eight days she sat beside the grave — without food, without water, without anything. And after eight days, she stood and she walked. People were happy! Singing, celebrating, drinking arak, cognac, passing the bottle for a toast, l’chaim! So what could my father do? He said he had to drink, that’s the way it’s done: The holy man will do what he wants. If he wants to kill me, so I’ll die. Faith! And he drank, and then he drank some more and more and SURE ENOUGH — he was sick again, and my mother was angry at me, she said WHAT IS THIS? How could you let him drink? Dr. Ben Zakane was mad too, an important man, he didn’t have time to waste on a patient who wouldn’t listen. He told us, There is NO cure for stubbornness!
“I am sick too, you know, not a healthy man …” he wiggled down into his chair and lowered his voice for effect. “It’s my children, you see, they make me ill, REALLY.” And just as suddenly as he’d slouched over, he sprung up and opened a kitchen cabinet, from which he pulled a hefty black briefcase. “AND THIS” — he gestured like a magician as he snapped open the latch — “is my emergency medical kit.”
He showed off the electronic heart monitor with its automatic ambulance-summons button and tangle of colored wires. “Red goes on the left,” he explained, a wicked gleam in his eye. “Do you know how I remember that?” He placed the little suction on his breast pocket and grinned. “Red — for communists — on the left! Do you see?”
We chuckled at his joke and I said that I had probably better be going. He had been very generous but now he was tired, and maybe we should continue this some other time — “Wait!” Jacko looked startled and a bit sad, as if he couldn’t bear to be left alone. Would I like to see the house first, before I left? He would give me the grand tour.
After he demonstrated the electric blinds behind the dining room table, he showed off the picture window in the living room, that faced onto “a real American lawn.” This modest patch of green, bordered with purple petunias, was his reason for living here, he said, outside of the city and away from the crowded neighborhoods where he’d raised his children. One of these neighborhoods turned out to be our own: He and his family had lived for more than fifteen years just around the corner from what was now our apartment, in the public housing project where we had visited Meir and Yaffa, something I hadn’t known before but which seemed, when I heard it, to account in part for the instinctive affection I’d felt toward Jacko when I first met him. That he had spent so many years surrounded by our neighbors in this landscape made him a sort of neighbor-once-removed. (As it happened, he had also worked for years at the Tnuva warehouse, a building now converted to the airless headquarters of the newspaper for which I worked. Jacko explained in his thoughtful singsong that the eggs were once packed where the printing presses are today, the fish took up the editorial offices, and the chicken coops filled the newsroom.) He wasn’t sorry they’d left the city. “I’ve had enough of the noise, the tiny rooms. I’m too old for that now, it’s time to relax a little, stretch my legs out.”
Up a carpeted flight of stairs, the master bedroom looked across a ridge at the sprawling municipal cemetery, several steep hillsides packed tight with pale, blocky gravestones, an entire neighborhood populated by the new city’s Jewish dead. The opposite wall was covered with ceiling-to-floor closets, which Jacko flung open to reveal no less than twenty neatly pressed men’s suits, hanging in a row. “If I lived abroad,” he said, in a proud but factual way, “I’d dress up every day.”
He led me into a small side room, with a TV set, a sofa, and another freestanding closet, which contained, it turned out, dozens and dozens of men’s cotton shirts, a full Jay Gatsby array in Jacko’s favorite shades — pink, light yellow, powder blue, cream, lavender, pistachio green — alongside a hanger of immaculate silk ties. He fingered the cuffs of one peach shirt and smiled faintly. “I could dress so nicely … if I didn’t work, you know, with the fish it’s so messy.”
“You do look nice, though —” I started to protest, but Jacko waved his hand through the air as if to brush my silly words away.
“That’s nothing,” he insisted, his voice now more distant. “But that’s how it is. That’s life.”