Uri and the Priest

The Arab priest had hung an oil painting of the Christ over the doorframe when he moved into the apartment.

In the painting a crown of light shone above his wounded head, and the words, "I have come into the world to be a light so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness" were inscribed beneath him in Syriac. Every day Uriyah and his mother saw it. Occasionally Uri's steely eyes inadvertently brushed past the painting. His eyes were cold and slate-colored on a pallid face that was washed of color and void – weary, aged beyond this thirty-some years, and parched of joy. His mother loved him. She once told the priest,

"Since the day I left Dachau I wanted to name my oldest son Uriyah, 'the Lord is my light'." She had grinned widely to expose her gapped and chipped and yellowed teeth.

Uri's mother was very old; she had had him when she was nearly forty. Her name was Ester. She was a Holocaust survivor – a German who had escaped the horrors of Dachau and its deadly pogrom of medical experiments. Once she had been called in, but an old man who had once been a physician stepped in front of her and surrendered himself to her place. He had his liver and kidneys extracted from him without an anesthetic, and died from the loss of blood. Ester emigrated to Jerusalem after the war and married an Israeli.

Ester and Uri moved into the aged stucco apartment in Tel Aviv after the priest. It had been a summer day. Most of the windows in the apartment had been shoved open to let the Mediterranean breeze fill the dank, stagnant halls. The air was muggy and thick with the smell of salt.

The priest introduced himself as Father Bulus. He was an intensely quiet man with a long black beard and glasses that concealed much of his round, olive-complexioned face. His fingers often wandered over the heavy gold cross that hung around his neck against his priestly vestments as he spoke, but he spoke little. He woke early and said his prayers, came and went from the church, and shared every Sabbath dinner with Uri and Ester.

After Ester died, Uri rarely stayed at home. He went out most nights and he avoided the priest. Once he brought a young woman home with him named Natale. He had met her in a disco and she made her living singing Broadway songs in nightclubs. The relationship did not last long. Uri came home at two o'clock in the morning after breaking off the fling with Natale, drunk, and fell asleep on the couch. The priest awoke early and read from Jeremiah.

Uri and Father Bulus had Sabbath dinner together once after Ester died, but under a suffocating oppression of silence.

"How are you?" Father Bulus asked. He cut three pickled kosher sausages at once with his fork and piled four leaves of steamed cabbage on top of them.

"Fine," Uri said.

At night the priest went to bed but Uri stayed up. Often he stayed up all through

the night and slept a few hours during the day. He drank a lot and he read German philosophers like Nietzsche and Kant, and French literature. He taught piano lessons from his house, and he taught two teenage girls who were from a Canadian family that owned a jewelry shop, the Silbermans. The older one was Laurel and the younger one was Jessica. After their lessons, Jessica would walk back along the coastline alone to the Silbermans' apartment, but Laurel would stay and joke and laugh with Uri for an hour or so. Uri got a job at the university music school teaching Music Theory. When Laurel graduated from secondary school she enrolled in the school.

The girls' father had an Arab employee at the jewelry shop from Hebron who moved downstairs from Uri and Father Bulus with his wife and divorced sister. Adel and Hamida had been married a year and still had no children. He had turned her into a shy, self-hating woman who he slapped and yelled at most every night. Hamida also came to despise Adel's sister, Salwa, because Salwa was beautiful and fat but Hamida was hooked-nosed and thin. Salwa had had two boys, but her husband and taken them with him to Damascus after the divorce. She had not seen them since.

One day the two women were arguing and the bickering inflamed to the point where Hamida threw an iron cooking pot at Salwa. Salwa ran from the apartment to the back alley. Father Bulus saw her as he was coming back from Vespers and handed her some sweets wrapped in a napkin that one of the old women at the church had given him. When Adel found out, he was enraged and humiliated that his sister had been with a man alone – especially a non-Muslim man.

One Sabbath near Christmas, the Silbermans came over for Sabbath dinner and the priest invited Adel and Hamida and Salwa. As Uri was talking with Laurel Silberman in Hebrew – which Salwa spoke only marginally – Salwa's eyes began wandering over towards them and Adel grabbed hold of her hand and jerked her.

"Why are you staring at the Israeli man?" he said, loudly enough so that only Hamida could hear him. Salwa shook her head and her round, hollow dark eyes fell to her feet. Once Adel was no longer listening Hamida snickered and jabbed her, jubilant at her humiliation.

Uri often played the piano late into the night. Father Bulus went to bed early and never complained about the piano – he was deaf in one ear anyway from the time that a bomb had exploded next to him in Jerusalem as he was coming back from seminary in Cyprus. But Adel got angry and came upstairs and started yelling at Uri to stop. Uri yelled back at him – emotions inflamed from the excess of alcohol that he had consumed with his dinner. Adel called Uri an ape and a pig and told him that if it were up to him all Jews would be dead. At some point the altercation became a physical one, which woke the priest, who stumbled out in his off-white robe to the shoving and yelling and slapping. He intervened to break up the fight, and Uri backed away. But Adel aimed his fist at Uri, missed, and accidentally hit the jaw of the priest, who fell to the ground, knocking over a lamp.

Uri ordered Adel to leave, and he did. He looked down at the priest, ashamed, and helped him to his feet.

As Christmas drew near, the priest spent most of his time deeply immersed in meditation and fasting. During the Advent weeks he preached on the prophecies of Jeremiah and Zechariah. Uri had been at a friend's house one night and reconnected with Natale. She was also the offspring of survivors, but buried her family's tormented heritage in the tombs of her hedonistic life – one that was a clamor of fun, nonsense, and nothing. She had dyed her hair red and wore cheap plastic beads around her neck. That night she and Uri both drank too much, and they went back to his apartment together. She slept over several times a week that winter. They would always stay up late into the night and laugh and talk. One of those nights Father Bulus stayed up late as well finishing his last Advent sermon he entitled, "The Righteous Branch". He had called another "The True Light Who Gives Light to Every Man".

Once Uri stopped for lunch at a deli across from the Silbermans' jewelry shop. Laurel Silberman was walking past and saw him in the window and joined him, interrupting his solitude with his lox and bagels and the daily edition of Ha'eretz.

"I am going traveling in Europe at the end of this month," she announced in a blatant attempt to impress him. "I know you have been there many times."

He nodded. "Yes, especially Germany and Austria. For concerts … "

He had once been a concert pianist and toured many countries, but he had thrown it all away … somehow. He had let wild parties and his slovenly lifestyle take it away from him. Once in Berlin a group of anti-Semitic hecklers had blockaded the concert hall, jeering insults.

As Uri and Laurel were talking, a red-haired figure in fitted jeans and black faux leather boots ambled unsuspectingly through the front doors, then stood in the back, giving the two of them a frigid glare. Finally she spoke up.

"Uri, who is she?"

"Natale …" he looked up, surprised. "This is Laurel, a student of mine …"

"Oh," Natale held her maroon leather purse close to her side. She stared at Laurel … a critical, hostile stare.

On Christmas Eve, Father Bulus was away at the church. Christmas in Israel was quiet outside of Bethlehem because of the sparse Christian population. That night Uri discovered that all four tires on his car had been slashed and he suspected that Adel had done it. Adel did not own a car; perhaps it had been out of jealousy as well as spite.

The air dropped to a crisp and arid chill. A thin frost formed on the car windows and the window sills. Salwa stood outside the entire evening, immersed in a heavy black jacket and crying. As Uri walked past up the stairs to his apartment she did not look up. Adel had warned her, "Stay away from the Christian priest and stay away from the Israeli." A while later Hamida yelled at her to be quiet.

The next day Adel split his hand open on one of the machines at the jewelry shop and could not work for weeks because of the heavy bandage that constrained it. The priest brought them boxes of tea leaves and rolls of sausages, though he did not have much to spare. He went back upstairs to his apartment where Uri was sitting on the sofa. Before Christmas dinner he burned frankincense and chanted in a low voice from Isaiah in Aramaic, "Only if the heavens above can be measured and the foundations of the earth below searched out will I reject all the descendents of Israel because of all they have done". After that he cooked for Uri.

The day after Christmas Adel and Hamida argued loudly and their voices penetrated the thin floorboards. Adel slapped Hamida but she was too proud to cry in front of him. Father Bulus brought them two heads of cabbage from the marketplace. That morning he had gone early to the vegetable vendor and bought three cabbages, one for himself and two for Adel and his family. On his way back to the apartment two Muslim young men taunted him from behind, then came alongside of him and spat in his face and pulled on his long beard. One yanked at his cross until it broke, then ground the shards of shattered gold into the ground with his shoe while the other grabbed one of the cabbages and smashed it in the priest's face. Father Bulus brought the remaining two cabbages to Adel and Hamida and Salwa. Salwa was the only one to say thank-you for the cabbages, but Adel stepped on her foot and later scolded her for speaking to a man.

A few weeks later Uri got off the phone and announced to the priest that he was going to be leaving for Europe. He was going traveling.

"Have a very good trip," Father Bulus said quietly, looking up from his bowl of hot grains and sugar.

He planned to meet up with Laurel Silberman and spend the following three weeks or so with her in Switzerland and Germany and Austria, but the plans were a secret between them that was not uttered to the rest of the Silbermans or the priest. He left with little more than a Jerusalem-issued passport under the name "Uriyah Shamesh".

The day that he left for Europe, Father Bulus had put up a new painting of Christ on his way to Calvary, languishing under the weight of the cross's heavy bars. Underneath was inscribed in Hebrew and Syriac, "For he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors."