“Myra, you promised: no name-calling and none of this primitive stuff. He is here to do an important job.”
Myra nodded, but promising nothing went back to her soup.
Dressed in black leather trousers and an expensive-looking woollen coat, with amber worry beads, dreadlocks, and a woollen beanie of some Middle Eastern weave, the kabbalist looked more like an uptown drug dealer than a man of mystical wisdom. As Miriam opened the door he was speaking in fluent Hebrew on his cell phone, seemingly oblivious to the tribe of Fleischmann children gathered in a curious mass behind him.
“Hello, I’m Hillel from Queens,” he said in a thick Israeli accent, flicking shut his phone and smiling at Miriam. “I’ve come about a haunting.”
“Shh!” Miriam said. She glared at the children who, not unlike herself, must have been amazed to see that Miriam’s brother from Chicago was black.
“Jacob,” Miriam said loudly to the eldest, “say hello to my half-brother Hillel from Israel!”
“Hello,” Jacob muttered shyly, then scampered off, his siblings following like starlings. After checking the street Miriam pulled the kabbalist into the house.
She took Hillel’s coat, then led him toward the kitchen.
“Maybe you would like some refreshments, Rebbe?”
“Please, I am not a rabbi, Mrs. Gluckstein, I am simply a kabbalist. But I do speak fluent Aramaic and am well versed in both the Zohar and the Mishnah.”
They entered the kitchen where a shocked Myra stared solidly at Hillel for a good two minutes.
“You know, I marched in the civil rights movement and I personally shook the hand of Martin Luther King,” she finally announced solemnly. Miriam blushed to the roots of her hair.
“Mother, Hillel is Israeli, a Yemenite.”
Myra’s body language went from reverence to irreverence in a minute.
“Sorry, I mistook you for African-American. So, you are here to rid us of the snore. What hokey-pokey rubbish are you going to serve up—and more importantly, what do you charge?”
Hillel, who Miriam had noticed was a charming man of about thirty, winked lasciviously at the old woman, which won her over immediately.
“You see, these Sephardim know how to flirt,” Myra cackled loudly.
“If I succeed I charge, if I fail I don’t. But if I do succeed there is one condition: that you allow me to publicize the case—anonymously, of course—on my Website,” Hillel concluded.
Myra nodded imperiously and the kabbalist reached into his rucksack and pulled out a small lump wrapped in gauze. He turned back to Miriam, his face now quite serious.
“The possession is of an aural nature, I understand?”
“It is the loud snore of my dear dead husband.”
“And he has been dead for…?”
“Three weeks.”
As she spoke the kabbalist unwrapped the lump to reveal a moist mass of clay, which he started to knead with his fingers.
Miriam continued, “We sat shiva, he was buried according to custom, his grave is undisturbed as far as we know, and yet every night, at the time Aaron himself would have gone to sleep, about ten or so, the snore starts up.”
“I have heard of weeping haunting a room,” Hillel mused, “and I have dealt with several dybbuks, including one that was Ladino, but I have never had a snore before or a dybbuk that wasn’t looking for a home to lodge itself into.” His fingers teased out two legs and one arm from the soft clay.
“What did your husband look like?” he continued.
“He was tall…not thin…”
Hillel created a head and another arm, then wrapped a belly around the middle.
“My son was fatter than that, believe me,” Myra chipped, fascinated by the quick-moving fingers that flashed across the small clay figure.