This Business with Elijah

by Sheldon Oberman

Turnstone Press Winnipeg ISBN 0-88801-174-1

Chapter 1

I asked him what he wanted behind my parents' store, and he sang out he was the Prophet Elijah. He shook his sidelocks and he danced among the garbage cans. As I watched his hands coiling above his head, watched his fingers kissing his thumbs, I wanted to dance as well, to close my eyes and sway and let my voice bleed with his into the endless sky.
Instead, I ran.
I skittered over gravel, and crashed up the back stairs to our apartment over the store. My mind was burning with his eyes and burning with his hair sparking blue and green and with his thin body spinning on a fence post faster, faster, and his crooked back splitting wider, wider, billowing out fiery wings.
I slammed the door shut. I crouched against it. A long moment passed and I began to breathe. The inner hall was hot, airless, the exhaust of traffic fogged the window.
"It just gets worse and worse." My father's voice was rising from the kitchen. "We'll never get out of this hole."
"That's not true, Murray." My mother was straining to keep calm. "Once we catch up on our payments, we'll get back our line of credit from the bank. Then wholesale will give us the new spring stock --"
"And what'll we tell my ma? That we have to borrow from her -- to pay back the bank -- so we can go even deeper into debt?"
"If we don't get new merchandise, who'll come to the store? Who'll want to shop?"
On and on.
I looked up at the painting on the wall: it was a dime store reproduction of Millet's Angelus. A peasant farmer and his wife stood in their field, heads bowed in prayer as the Lord's land turned golden with the setting sun. I would often imagine how they had been digging the earth, the wet clay sticking to their boots, their hands as rough as their crude tools, labouring without word or thought until the distant church bell rang the evening's Annunciation of the Angel, how they paused, glanced at one another and began the shy singing of their prayer.
My father's voice seemed to groan from behind the painting. I followed his distress along a crack in the wall that ran from the picture frame, back along the hallway into the living room. There the crack disappeared under the wallpaper, a pattern of flowers and grains swirling out of cornucopias. I saw my father sitting beyond the border of that land where the wallpaper met the white glaze of the kitchenette. He was bent over the table spread with bills and receipts, frowning at the ledger on his plate.
"And then Ma said that we should sell the store, otherwise we'll end up even worse."
"And then what'll we do?" my mother snapped. "Go back to the factory? Is that what you want? Or maybe you want to move back home to her? Did your ma say that, too?"
My father sat with a sigh and brooded at the book, underlining figures on the page, row after row.
I said nothing. My parents were working. Their clothing store was with them from the moment they woke up to the moment they lay down. They were especially busy, for it was the Eve of Bank Day, their day of reckonings. Also, it was Passover. They had closed the store early, hurried upstairs, and had me put on my good clothes and go outside while they finished their mid March accounts. I, being only ten years old at the time, was expected to wait outside the store, to watch the people on the buses heading home, to toss stones at the No Stopping sign; but most of all to stay clean, to stay quiet and to be ready to go to Baba's.
But not to see Elijah. And not to interrupt with any news of miracles.
So I shuffled back into the hallway and past the other apartments to the window at the end of the hall. It had a view of nowhere -- only the brick wall of the next building little more than an arm's length away.
The promise of miracles drew me out that window. I hesitated on the window-sill. I clenched my teeth, leaned out and caught a rung of the fire escape.
I was looking for Elijah in the clouds. That was where I thought he'd gone, shaping and reshaping, rising through the net of telephone wires, so far above the garbage cans shining in the sun. I climbed up the rusty ladder onto our second storey roof.
The sky was empty. But our block of Main Street in Winnipeg's North End was full, shoppers were everywhere searching for the latest marvel, hopefully reduced in price. Across the street, inside The Fantasy Salon, Liz was circling, charming up someone's beehive hairdo for the weekend. Next door to her was Saint Joseph's Bingo Hall and Legion, where the city workers were hustling in, always the first ones there and the most devoted, calling for draughts of Black Label beer, kubasa and pickled eggs. Then City Butchers, with its crowd of customers in the front, flies buzzing in the back. The crumbling Babylon Apartments was at the south end of the block. Its cracked windows blared a half-dozen different songs, all with the same heavy-hearted throb.
Across the intersection at Borkow's Funeral Chapel the shoppers kept a respectful distance. But even there, the limping man with the chauffeur's cap was hurrying in, delivering somebody's funeral clothes in a cardboard box, a loose pair of shoes shuffling on the top.
On my side of the street I could only see the store signs: Chaplin's Pharmacy, Gustaf's barber pole and, directly under me, my parents' sign, Stein's Style Shoppe. Next, a hanging shingle --Instant Alterations. Invisible Repairs -- belonging to the emphasemic tailor whose wife had fled back to Hungary leaving him to rave and sew and mend. It obscured the sign at the north end of the block, so I could read only the POP of POPULARITY GRILL. Past that was the SPECTACLE THEATER, already switched on and trying to dazzle in the fading light though everyone had seen its feature,The Last Days of Pompeii, with Steve Reeves, when it was first released a year ago downtown.
"They shouldn't call it a business section," Mr. Werner, our caretaker, once said. "They should call it a busyness section."
I knew I'd never find Elijah on this street.
I crossed the flat top of our building and slid halfway down the back porch roof, catching onto an air vent. Grey nubble from the shingles tumbled to the eavestrough but I gripped my legs around the vent and scanned the lane and side streets.
What I found was quietude. Not silence: the air was alive with screen doors and clothes lines, dogs and hammers, a service truck rattling down the lane. But these seemed separate and harmonious sounds quilted into a patchwork of yards and houses. They spread upon a stillness.
Yet no Elijah though I felt him close at hand as if his voice was spiralling in the song of a knife-and-scissors man hawking down a side street or in the break of pigeons rising from their coop.
Something hovered behind the movie house.
I raced toward it. I scaled the slant of the porch roof, across the flat top, down the metal rungs, through the window, the flights of stairs, the spread of gravel, concrete, broken glass. But it was only the shadow of a back lane scavenger, a bloated woman who'd bagged her life into a shopping cart. She was as dusty and layered as the bundles she was pushing like a punishment. Even her eyes were layered. She could never be Elijah. She'd have to moult for a hundred springs even to see Elijah.
Behind the cafe, a delivery man was snickering to the cook. "You should have seen that crazy bugger. He was in back of the bakery juggling three hard loaves of pumpernickel, singing out some nutty immigrant song. And kids were jumping up and down like there was no tomorrow. I tell you, if I'd had a camera, I could have sold that picture to a magazine!"
I hurried past.
(one line section break - useful)?

Only later, as I climbed back up the stairs, the delivery man's words echoed back to me and I realized he had seen Elijah. Elijah was moving through other back lanes, trailed by other children, ones who did not run away. I curled against the topmost stair, and my chest ached with emptiness.
I ached long and full before I heard the whispering sing-song, "Danny, Danny." and the slippered steps of Old Mr. Werner. It was he who'd first told me about the wonder working Elijah, and the Ba'al Shem Tov's magical adventures. "Danny, I'm all dressed up," he said. "This is something new for me." He was climbing up from his basement workshop where he kept his bed and hot plate, climbing up to the Passover, God's Days of Redemption. "I'm telling you, I am doing this just for you." Standing two stairs below me, he reached out to my shoulder, and I uncurled to his touch. "Danny, you got to tell me the truth because I don't know. Am I looking good enough for your family?" He wore a loose and faded suit. His tie showed three blue swallows flying above a sunset. His skullcap was balding velvet.
"You look terrific, Mr. Werner. You're like a model or an actor in the movies."
"Yah, yah. I can guess which one. Curse of the Mummy. I know the movies you like to see."
"No, Mr. Werner. You're great. You're like that wise old guy in Charlie Chan."
"Okay, so now we're both wise guys. So help me button my collar." He smelled of shaving soap and talcum powder, though his face still bristled with patches of racoon grey. I found myself bending to him, not only from the knees but from the heart, wanting to kiss his cheek. And wanting to tell him about Elijah, but I hesitated, because I was ashamed that I had run away. Then I heard my parents behind the door, rattling keys and rushing on their coats. They'd be looking for us.
I patted down his collar. "Mr. Werner," I said. "I'm really glad you're coming." For we were all going to Baba's: my parents and I and Mr. Werner, whom I had begged to come and then had begged my parents to invite and finally, had begged Baba to accept by making the old man out to be a lonely widower whose children left the faith and who would feel most alone on these holy nights. Somehow I had managed it. My first miracle of Passover.

I'd never thought, back then when I was only ten years old and ruled by whatever ruled my parents, that Passover seders had anything to do with God. I thought of them as ceremonies of submission to The Family. My parents rehearsed me for days beforehand -- not in the meaning of the ritual meal or the blessings or the four questions that I, as the youngest male, was supposed to ask, but they prepared me for the snares of my uncles and aunts, the taunts of my cousins, and how to please my baba.
Baba above all. Baba above everything. The very
entrance to her MacGregor Street apartment block proved her power -- stand in the lobby with its broken mailboxes, its tattered rug and smell her herring, her bubbling corned beef, her boiling chicken. These were Baba smells. Climb her stairs. Knock on her greasy brown door. Listen for her Baba sounds.
"Rena!" Baba's voice was a high, strained gargle from the kitchen. A clatter of pots. "Rena, somebody's at the door! You deaf?"
"I'm going, right away. I'm going." Thin and gloomy, Rena opened the door. She was always the first at the Passover meal: setting plates and taking coats, catching what she could of others' words and looks, being extra hands, extra ears and eyes for Baba -- Baba who was so large, especially when I could not see her. Baba who was enormous on the telephone, her voice hoarse and shouting. And who grew larger still in my parents' telling and retelling of her demands, her judgements, her displeasures, until she became a giant.
Baba stomped down her hallway. She swallowed me in a fatty hug, laughing that she had me. My parents searched the floor to find their smiles, and all the while Mr. Werner watched and watched. "This here's my Danny!" Baba bragged to us all. "He's my favourite grandson." She turned to Mr. Werner. "And you? You are Murray's landlord?"
"I am Yossel Werner. A good holy day to you."
"Where you from?" Baba was suspicious. "You come from Poland? Or maybe Hungary? You got some kind of different accent."
"I came from Otvotsk, not so far from Warsaw."
"Warsaw? One of Hitler's ovens, pah!" Baba did her ritual gesture of spitting out the evil word.
"But now we're all Canadians," Mr. Werner said. "And we are all here alive and well."
"It's good you brought two books," Baba said. "We only got a couple. Next year, somebody better bring more."
"Mr. Werner knows how to read all the blessings for the meal," I announced. "He can make sure we'll have a real good seder."
"Good -- you show my boys what to do," she laughed. "You get them praying and I'll get them eating. But first Danny, you come with me." I was pulled away, into her soup ladle kitchen with its paint and linoleum curling in the steam of her thirty-year soup. She pinched my flesh and sat me on a stool where I was to watch her stir her pot. Baba's skin was loose, bleached as a boiled chicken's, soft as gefilte fish. I wondered if it had ever been firm like mine. They said she used to lift weights, real weights. The family ran a steam bath where the sons lifted barbells as if to prove that nothing could keep them down. The steam bath was their sanctuary where they would heat and strike themselves with swatches of oak leaves and groan under a pummelling massage. Three of her sons became weightlifting champions and she would at times work out beside them, mastering both iron and steam to keep her boys her allies.
Zaida, my grandfather, could take neither weight nor heat, at least not directly. The Depression which kept him poor also offered him escape. He travelled to far-off cities where he worked for years, sending back everything he could, like a man trying to buy his time.
Baba ran the family. She faced all problems with a hard eye, a closed hand and a dirt floor peasant's crudeness which further dismayed her gentle husband. In Russia, she'd been a victim of hunger and hate; here, discreet abandonment. She used the only powers she understood to keep her children close. She set each child against the rest with petty jealousies, resentments, hidden fears, and this kept them all clinging to her for support. It was clear to me, as a boy or now, these many years later, how well she understood her methods or whether the others realized their roles, but such things work even without understanding.
Eventually Zaida returned, to sit and sigh by the radiator, trying to rescue the family from the tangles of their plots and counterplots. He offered reason, compassion, humility and a painful display of self-blame. What they wanted was power. At last, exhausted, Zaida found his final, quiet way out. From then on, he was referred to as a saint, which simply meant that he was dead and had never been a threat.
Saul, the first son, preferred distraction. Family folklore had it that he had just missed being crushed by a piano dropped by movers. He interpreted this as some sort of revelation on the dangerous nature of burdens. He chose God instead. A mothering God. A worrying God. A God so anxious about Saul's frailty that He sent him criss-crossing the world in a quest for perfect health.
Whenever Saul ran out of money, he worked as a collector for religious charities. Wise in the manufacturing of miracles, he'd make his rounds on two trembling canes, and within a week or two he'd be springing, full of his God's blessings, into an overseas travel office. I never met Saul in the flesh; he moved away before I was old enough for memories and his returns were always unexpected, brief, almost apocryphal. The only proof I had of his existence were exotically stamped letters crammed into Baba's sewing drawer. They offered cures for depression, heart disease and cancer. They decoded ancient prophecies and begged immediate support.
Rena poked into the kitchen. "Ma, they're all here now. You coming out, or what?"
"How can I come? Look at everything I got to do!"
"Okay, okay, I'll help. But get Danny out of here, there ain't no room."
Rena never had words for me; only glares. While I may have acted afraid of her, I was mainly going through the motions. She simply could not raise Baba's forceful smells. Rena had only a mustiness and a trace of something burnt.
The wives, armoured in backcombed hairdos and black lace, chatted empty-handed in the hallway. The three brothers -- my father, Steve and Leo -- grunted and gripped one another with iron handshakes. They laughed hard and shoved each other until chairs scraped and their wives cried out.
"Stop it! It's enough already."
"Murray! The lamp!"
"For God sake, Steve, that's your good suit!"
It was Passover, a time to recall our history.
(section break needed?)
The family settled at the extended table; Baba's chair empty at one end, then Rena and her children, the three brothers and their wives. At the far end on a stool was Mr. Werner. The other cousins and I got the added card-tables. My aunts and uncles flipped through the Passover prayers in grudging recognition of Mr. Werner as a stranger and a guest; someone who might report on us to a larger world.
Mr. Werner lifted his cup for the blessing of the wine, his eyes dark with memory. He chanted in the way of his father and his father's father. All dead. All dead.
Other eyes glazed with boredom, wandered over the frill of a blouse, the fabric of a shirt, the jewel in a ring, they darkened only with suspicion. This table also had a history.
Sammy, Rena's son, rose to stammer the first ritual question, the question that was mine to ask since I was the youngest male. But I did not know the Hebrew.
"Ma nishtanah ha lailah hazeh, mee kol ha laylot? Why is this night different from all other nights?"
"Because," sang Mr. Werner in the ritual response, "we were slaves of Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Eternal One, our God, brought us out with a strong hand and an outstretched arm."
He uncovered the matzoh, our bread of hasty departure. But Baba was already pushing it to the side, along with the ceremonial herbs and salt water, making room for supper. So Mr. Werner had to rush through the Questions and the Commentaries, to skip over the Tale of the Four Sons and the story of Jacob. Still, Steve yawned, as his mind shuffled playing cards. Leo slipped away to the bedroom phone to make some 'connections', and before Mr. Werner could sing of the writhing rod of Moses and the Pharaoh's broken will, Baba burst through with a flood of soup and roast, sweet chicken and stewed fruit, cutting off The Exodus entirely.
We grabbed at the dishes. We heaped one serving onto another. At first we tore and chewed without tasting, as if the food might soon be snatched away. We were not hungry as much as aroused. It didn't matter that we were decades from the poverty which shaped these habits, or that there was far too much food; we grunted for the weight of meats and fishes. We called for more.
Only Baba did not eat. How could she? This was our communion with her, proof of our needy love. We ate of her. Later, in her own time, she would eat the eaters.
We tired. Ached with heaviness. I could only suck and savour. I lifted my fragment of the matzoh which Mr. Werner had ritually broken then passed to each of us, brittle as old parchment. I chewed it into sweetness as I watched him mourn into his seder book while the radiators hissed murder, pogrom, persecution. I mused about ghosts, wondering if my zaida could be a ghost trapped behind the wallpaper. I pretended my Aunt Rena's dead husband was a tiny ghost hovering over a wine stain on the tablecloth. Another plate boomed down and the spirit fled like a frightened insect.
Steve studied the braised beef drowned in gravy. He rubbed his lips with a napkin. "So, Murray. How's the store? You pulling in the big bucks?"
My father flinched from behind his mound of salad and jelly. He tried to remember Deborah's advice, how he should answer when Steve went for the cuts of heart and liver.
"Well, you know how it is in the clothing business, Steve. Lots of sales but lots of overhead."
"Aw, come on, Murray! You're making a pile. Your Deborah's got you working day and night. You don't even get time off to spend it. Hey, Ma, how about some more cream soda?" Steve looked pleased at drawing first blood on his brother. He liked scoring high and fast, which made him Big Steve at the poker club, the big winner rolling in the dough, the dough he peeled off in fives and tens to toss at flattering kibitzers or to slip to his high-styled wife from Montreal who laughed it all away. But at the family table, he gave nothing away to anyone except to Baba because here Big Steve was still Little Stevie scraping and scrambling for his mother's soup pot love.
Baba set down a half-dozen bottles of soft drinks. "What kind of money can Murray make? Whenever I'm in their store, nobody's buying. Who's going to buy at those prices? I ask you, Deborah, what makes you think my Murray is a fancy businessman? He had a good job as a packer. Now, you'll make him lose everything."
My father lowered his eyes. He pushed bits of salad around his plate. Either way, business success or business failure, he'd be condemned.
Baba poured the drinks into heavy tumblers. "Murray," she said. "that blouse you gave me, it's no good. It tore under my arm. Maybe you'll bring me a better blouse?"
Rena burst out at her daughter, Shaini -- "Stop spitting food, Shaini. Stop it or I'll get mad!" -- becoming even angrier that she was missing Baba's and Murray's words, words she could keep to cook in her own oven, words she could serve at their next dinner. She poked Shaini's lips with a spoon of baked carrots. "Now eat!... Look at you. Three years old and you don't listen to nobody!"
"Ma, never mind the blouse. How about some stockings?" It was Leo smiling over his palm-sized address book thick with pencilled notes. "I'm meeting with a guy tomorrow night. I can get you all you want." Clever Leo who claimed he never needed any sucker job, not as long as he had contacts. "Hey, Murray. I'll get some for you, too, cheaper than the wholesale. How many do you want, two gross, three gross?"
But what if they were hot? My father didn't deal in heisted goods. "That's okay, Leo. I got plenty of women's hosiery. A big order came in just last week. Where am I going to put any more?"
Leo stiffened. He would sulk for Ma. "Fine! Go try to help a brother. I don't even get a 'thank you'."
"What's the matter, Murray?" Baba leaned over the clutter of plates. "You can't return the other stockings? Jacky Winestock won't take back his merchandise? I used to feed him right here at this table!"
My father lowered his head. His hands groped for words. Until my mother spoke. "It's a business situation, Ma. But it was great that Leo wanted to help us out. We appreciate it, don't we, Murray?"
Baba drew in her resentment. Leo tapped his out upon a plate. Steve was grinning, pleased with this new rift. He knew that now my parents could not ask Baba for a loan. "Hey, let's forget it, already!" He cracked a laugh. "Murray must be sick of women's stockings, brassieres and girdles. Jeeze, peddling that stuff would drive me nuts. Look, tonight's a holiday. Let's have a toast to my ma!" Steve lifted the silver goblet, full to the brim. "Ma, you made one delicious meal! Here's to good times!"
"No! You don't drink!" It was Mr. Werner, his glimmering eyes fixed on Uncle Steve. "That's the Prophet's cup. Don't you know anything?" The goblet was set in a special place to await Elijah's invisible visit to the seder, the prophet who had risen to Heaven on a whirlwind and descends upon heaven's wind to honour every home's Passover meal.
"I saw him," I said without thinking. "I saw Elijah." Mr. Werner, Steve, the whole table turned to look at me. "He was behind the store. He was dancing and singing and getting ready to fly. He was going to fly!"
Even my cousins were still. Then, as if balancing something delicate between us, Mr. Werner asked, "Danny, what did your Elijah look like?"
"He had long curls and a long beard and a black coat. And his back was all hunched at the top. I wasn't the only one who saw. Max, the guy who drives the bakery truck, he saw him too." What if Elijah would really visit our seder? What if He would sit right next to me?
Uncle Steve's laughter broke overhead. "I'll bet he saw that crazy Dukhobor! The one with the dirty beard that the guys call Castro. He sleeps on the river bank wrapped in newspapers. You're lucky he didn't grab you."
More voices clattered overhead.
"Naw, it's the rag collector, Zaivi. You know the one -- he's always sneaking into weddings for the booze."
"A shame! Jewish welfare should do something."
"Some prophet. He collects bottles in back alleys. What you got there is a nickel and dime profit! Ha! Ha! You get it, Ma? It's a joke."
Their laughter turned my hurt to anger and I broke away from the table. "Let me go! Let me get by!" I had to edge along the wall, pushing past their chairs and their swollen backs that grumbled and twisted with tufts of hair and creasing necks, past smells of cigar and sweat, bites of perfume and hair spray. I was coughing out the worst words I knew even as I tangled in the straps of my mother's purse. It spilled out Kleenex smeared with lips, compacts of powder, a gaping mirror. She reached towards me but I slapped her hands away. "Leave me alone!" as I crossed the no man's land of shouts and warnings.
Until I was held by Mr. Werner's mild voice threading through it all. "Who knows what the boy saw? Do you know? You don't know." All other voices dropped into broken mutters. Mr. Werner's voice was deep and strong. "My father, Isaac Werner, may his name be blessed, he saw an angel. It was the day the peasants came with axes to make a pogrom against the Jews. An angel appeared and showed my father where to hide his family in the bushes. And all the time that we were hiding he saw the angel shining down, protecting us inside a great fire. And what did the peasants see? Maybe bushes. Maybe a pile of dirt. But my father, he saw an angel."
The tablecloth rustled. A chair creaked and straightened into silence. A knife was laid quietly upon a plate. Mr. Werner raised his finger. "So Steve, you want to drink wine? That's good. We are supposed to drink wine on this night. And with our wine we make our prayers. Danny, you open the door for Elijah."
It was the prayer of Shfoch Chamatcha spoken as the door was opened. It welcomed the spirit of Elijah, the prophet of reconciliation, herald of the End of Time. I felt the cool rush; Elijah's spirit was tinkling and laughing, flying over stains and bones, dancing on the silver rim of the wine cup, sweeping out the hot, stale air. It pushed me, too, back into the room, to Mr. Werner who rocked over his leather book, one finger crooked above the page, motioning, "Come, Danny. Come."
His hands slipped around my shoulder, scratchy against my shirt, and when the prayer was ended, I sat down next to him pressing against his bony knees. Everyone else left the table. Some clattered in the kitchen or shook open newspapers around the coffee table, others whispered in the hall, and glanced at us and glanced again. But Mr. Werner was close beside me.
"Danny, this is Hebrew. Can you read it?" Black twisted letters. His book was not like the other ones. It had no woodcut illustrations of long haired Egyptians with their whips or bent slaves wrapped in ragged sheets.
"I don't know how to, Mr. Werner."
"That's okay," he said. "Do you know what Egypt is, eh? What's Egypt?"
"It's a country in Africa."
"Is that right? That's very good! And what else? What else do you know about Egypt?"
"We all lived there once, like thousands of years ago."
"Yah, Danny, so was it a good place or a bad place?"
"The Egyptians were mean. They made us work way too hard. We had to build the pyramids."
"You know a lot about Egypt. But did we stay there? Did we stay in that bad place forever?"
"No," I answered. "There was Moses, the one in the movie, The Ten Commandments
"In Yiddish, he's called Moishe. God loved us so he sent Moishe."
"Yah, and Moses made the Egyptians let us go."
"It took a miracle. It took ten miracles!" Mr. Werner began a weaving love prayer, a circling song without beginning or end as he rocked and I rocked along beside him, humming into his breath, warm and sweet from Manishevitz wine. And when we stopped, or, rather, when we let it go to sing somewhere else without us, he opened his eyes and asked, "Danny, you know what Ma nishtanah means? It means "What's different"
"Ma nishtanah," I repeated.
"And ha lailah hazeh means 'this night'."
"Ma nishtanah ha lailah hazeh."
"Yah, Danny, you said it just right. You're a smart boy. Mee kol ha laylot. That means "from all the other nights". Put it all together and it means "What's different about this night from all the other nights?"
"Because we're not in Egypt?"
"That's right. And because tonight we learn how we can get out of all the bad places."
I pressed closer into his book and into him, my shoulder under his arm, my ear rubbing against his dry whiskery chin as if he could carry me, light as smoke, light as words up to the clouds. We gazed into his book of stains, and tears and twisting letters, singing, "Ma nishtanah ha lailah hazeh, mee kol ha laylot?" Our voices entwining, we swirled above the table and out the window in a shy thin song, a strong brave song as we creased and folded, sighed and swayed into one another.
"Ma nishtanah ha lailah hazeh, mee kol ha laylot."

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