Short Fiction | ‘The Artist’

Tsachi isn’t a bad person (although there are many who would dispute this, chief among them my wife), but he does have remarkably bad luck. 

When I told Amalia over dinner that Tsachi had lost his job, she managed to look sympathetic enough, even though I could see the triumphant vindication swimming just below the surface. We were trying out a new place, more high-end than our usual three or four spots. It had been a nightmare to get a reservation. I had called every day for a week, speaking to the same bored-sounding hostess on the phone. I would insist she check the system again, and she would assure me that there were no reservations available for the next two months. I almost jumped out of my seat when she finally whispered to me in hushed tones that she’d had a cancellation, no doubt trying to keep it from all the pushy would-be diners who’d just showed up for lunch without calling to see if there was anything available. I felt victorious. I even cleaned out the car while Amalia was at work—or at least, I tossed out the worst of the crumby snack bags and empty water bottles. Now that we were here, though, I couldn’t stop thinking of Tsachi and his bad luck. Every attempt I made to distract myself by staring at the funky, try-hard decor and the couples shivering on the patio failed me. 

“Can you believe they would let a reservist go in the middle of a war?” I asked, fidgeting with the cream linen napkin, unable to keep myself from picking at the topic like a scab. 

She ignored my question and took a bite of her salmon. “Wow,” she said, her eyes popping open. “It’s just as good as it looked on Instagram.” 

“I hate that app.” Everything was so shiny and fancy and fake. I could always tell when she’d been spending more than an hour or two scrolling through soft-voiced influencer videos, 60-second hypnoses packed with breadcrumbs of a fantasy life that might be one or two products out of your reach. She started looking at everything around her as something that could be improved by a swipe of her credit card or a quick coat of paint—even me. “When are you going to get rid of it?” 

“If it wasn’t for Instagram, I wouldn’t have heard about this place. Here, try some.” I waved her away and glanced over at the couple next to us, taking a selfie with too-wide smiles. Probably to post on Instagram. 

“Don’t you feel bad for him?” 

“I don’t want to talk about Tsachi on our date.” 

“Why not?” 

“We got a babysitter.” 

“So?” 

“So, I don’t want to pay the babysitter just so we can fight about Tsachi.” 

“We don’t have to fight. We can just talk about him.” 

“Ouriel…” she sighed. It was a sigh that every husband knows, one that means you are testing your wife’s patience tremendously, despite your complete and total innocence. She’s never liked him. Even at our wedding, she begged me to ask my brother to give the best-man speech. She wouldn’t listen no matter how many times I told her that Tsachi felt much more like a brother to me than Gilad ever did. 

Tsachi and I grew up in the same building. We were always in the same class, always sitting side-by-side in the Rabbi’s office while we endured a seemingly endless lecture about whatever rule we’d broken. How many times did we get distracted on the way home from school and wind up deep in conversation, kicking rocks in the courtyard until our mothers were forced to come looking for us? How many summers did we spend attached at the hip, eating only popsicles and potato chips and riding our bikes through the dusty, sun-soaked city? Tsachi was the one who held me while I cried deep, snot-nosed, aching sobs after my grandfather died unexpectedly the week before my twelfth birthday. He was the one who later pushed me to get my degree. Gilad was out of the house by the time I was ten years old, and who remembers anything before that? 

“Maybe they have something for him at your office,” I pushed. Amalia was a project manager for a big start-up, where she made substantially more money than I did. 

“He’s not qualified.” 

I didn’t want to admit it, but she had a point. Since getting fired from his nighttime security job in the hotel on Yirmiyahu, he’d pretty much only worked retail. Cell-phone kiosks, posh clothing stores for men. When Tsachi told you that you looked good in a suit, he managed to make you actually believe it, the fifty pounds you’d gained in the last ten years notwithstanding. Still… 

“They don’t need people to clean the building?” 

“He’s not qualified to clean the building,” she said with a flat look. “Maybe they have something for him at the yeshiva.” 

I gave my head a slow shake. “He’s not qualified for that, either.” 

“How is it there?” she asked, attempting to change the subject. “Did you meet with the Rav like I suggested?” 

I took a long sip of my drink and lifted one shoulder. If I was being honest, I had begun to resent that she had given me any advice at all. 

True, I had probably spent hours complaining to her that the boys didn’t take my class as seriously as I’d like. The week before, while I was in the bathroom, one of them had scrawled a quote from a young firebrand on the board about the uselessness of secular subjects. When I returned I stared at it briefly, wondering if I should try and figure out who’d done it. As I looked around the room, though, I realized that it could have been any one of them. Most of my students agreed with the vandal, so what was the point in punishing only him? In the end, I just erased it. 

Over a beer that night, on the small, crowded balcony where Amalia stored our extra chairs, Tsachi reminded me that all fifteen-year-old boys are extremists. He insisted that we hadn’t been any different at that age, that it was just something that teenagers went through and that it had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t sure he was right, but it made me feel better. 

Amalia’s suggestion that I reach out to my boss for help, while more productive than Tsachi’s warm reassurances, left me feeling distinctly emasculated for reasons I couldn’t name. “I just think it’s shameful that they would let him go after he spent so many months serving the country,” I continued, ignoring her question about my situation. 

She motioned to the waitress that she wanted the check. She always ate so quickly, as if our babysitter would leave the kids alone if we didn’t return home by ten o’clock. Well, now that I thought about it, the Herzog girl maybe would…but she had been busy tonight, anyway. And where was the rush? I hadn’t even touched my soup. 

“I thought he was just putting boxes on trucks in the south somewhere.” 

“And isn’t that important, too? Wars are won and lost by supply lines,” I argued, retreading a conversation I’d had with my father when I’d tried to convince him to hire Tsachi at his accounting firm. Even though I really loved Tsachi, I thought his best bet at getting a new job was probably to rely on how much time he’d spent in the reserves since the start of the war. 

“Why did they fire him, anyway?” 

I shrugged evasively. It wasn’t worth telling her that he had been taking money from the till as an advance on his paychecks. She would call it stealing, and while the owner certainly saw it that way, in my opinion it was really more like borrowing. Tsachi would give it all back, I knew he would. If he could, anyway. 

Nor did I tell Amalia that he had needed the money to cover a bad investment, or that if his wife knew he had lost both his job and their savings (most of which she had contributed), she would almost certainly leave him. Amalia would see all of this as further proof that Tsachi was a bad person, instead of proof that he was only terribly unlucky. 

But what can I say? People see what they want to see. 

“I’m thinking of hiring him to paint the new apartment,” I said, finally taking a spoonful of my soup. The flavors were sharp, soothing. Like the bowls my mother would ladle out to us on Friday afternoons in the summer, when Shabbat came so late that we would fall asleep on the couch before Kiddush and all the kids would swear that it was too hot for soup, so hot you would die if you ate anything but salted cucumbers and maybe a slice of Ima’s fresh challah, brown and crusty from the too-hot oven. In the end, though, we always ate it. The orangey-sweet broth and chunks of salted potato and squash would call to us until we gave in, scooping hunks of chicken so tender they would fall apart as soon as you separated them from the bone. 

Of course, I couldn’t tell Amalia that the soup at the restaurant reminded me of my mother’s. She forcibly resisted any reminder of the fact that I still preferred Ima’s cooking to hers, even after all these years. I did, however, silently thank her for getting the babysitter and picking the restaurant. 

To my surprise, Amalia agreed with my suggestion regarding Tsachi and the apartment. “What’s the worst he could do?” she mused aloud. Unwilling to make catastrophic suggestions, I paid for the food instead of answering her.

The next day, I called Tsachi and offered him the job. He wasn’t too enthusiastic, but he agreed to do it. I gave him the key to the apartment, which was still covered in construction dust and pockmarked with gaping holes in the concrete walls where the electrician had installed the plugs. 

“You can patch those?” I asked him. 

“Sure, sure.” 

“Have you done it before?” 

“I’m sure it’s not hard.” 

As he walked around the apartment, his boots left distinctive tracks on the floor. His dark, coarse hair had gotten a little longer lately, but it suited him. You wouldn’t know it from looking at him that his life was falling apart. 

I showed him the color sample that Amalia had picked, which looked no different to me than flat white. I gave him a key and some money for supplies, and I left him there, thinking that it would be done in a day or so. 

Later that week, I called to ask him how it was going. 

“I got started,” he answered. 

“And? How is it looking?” 

“Fine.” 

The day after, I called him again. 

“How is it? Did you finish?” 

“Not yet.” 

That was when I started to worry. The apartment had only four rooms. Surely that couldn’t take more than two days, could it?

“Look,” he said with impatience, “I’ll call you when it’s finished, okay?” 

“Okay.” 

I decided not to push him about it. After all, it wasn’t like we were paying him an hourly rate. No matter how long it took, the apartment would be painted and we would be out the same amount of money. And Amalia hadn’t asked me for an update, so I tried to forget about it. 

Meanwhile, things at the yeshiva deteriorated considerably. Every strategy I implemented seemed to provoke in my students a kind of feverish resistance, an anti-authoritarian streak that was immutable to the tips and tricks I had picked up at teacher’s college. I attempted to transform their enthusiasm for populism into a positive environment for learning, allowing them to vote on what we would study for the rest of the week. Unfortunately, they quickly coalesced around the idea that their first order of business should be to remove me from my position as instructor and install one of their fellow revolutionaries instead. For two days I sat listlessly at my desk, watching fifteen-year-old Noam Segal give speeches to his fellow students with all the enthusiasm of a young politician in the opposition, full of a kind of idealism and verve that I could only dream of inspiring. 

I suppose I had inspired it, in a way, by giving them a common enemy against which to unite. So that was something. When I finally wrested control of the class back on Sunday, it was to wide dismay. I began to get calls from concerned parents, and after answering the first two or three I began not-so-carelessly misplacing my phone. What did parents know, anyway? Parents always blamed the teacher for their children’s bad behavior, I told myself. Two weeks later, Tsachi called the house. 

“Bring Mali,” he said, using my wife’s childhood nickname. “It’s ready.”

At first, she didn’t want to go, protesting that she was behind with work and we didn’t have anyone to watch the kids. 

“I’ll go ask the neighbor.” 

“No, don’t.” Natan, our one-year-old, reached for me from his place on her hip, babbling his first distinct word–”Abba”–over and over. “She gave them too much chocolate last time.”

“So, call your sister.” I took Natan and began hunting around the kitchen for a biscuit. 

“There,” she suggested, pointing to the drawer where we dumped all the snacks and treats our older kids brought home from school and extracurriculars. There was a half-crumpled package at the bottom, but Natan was happy with his broken prize. 

For the first time in weeks I looked at her, really looked. Her eyes were ringed with tired circles. Everything had been hard on her lately, like it was on everyone. Running with the kids to the moldy, thick-walled miklat in the basement, avoiding the news, combing lice from our five-year-old’s hair for the third time since the school year had started, organizing a tehillim group for her little brother, who was sweating in a tank in the desert somewhere. Trying not to cry when the black-and-white death notice of another boy from the neighborhood flew through the WhatsApp groups, putting on a brave face while she hugged the soldier’s mother at the shiva and told her about the time he helped her with her groceries or gave all of his pocket money to the neighborhood charity fund when she was collecting. Even the little flickers of normal life wore on her as they reappeared, reminding her that she would never return to the world that existed before. That everything would exist as before and after, forever, for the rest of our lives. 

“Come on. You need a break.”

To my surprise, her face relaxed. “Fine,” she sighed, putting frozen french fries into the oven for whatever babysitter was unlucky enough to agree to our last-minute request. “But not for long.” 

We drove in silence, the close streets of the old neighborhood slipping by. The new apartment was on the outskirts, in a recently expanded part of the city. Tall buildings with glassy exteriors showcased large penthouses and exclusive parking garages. Even the wide roads felt like they were boasting about their modernity. 

When we met Tsachi at the entrance to our building, I should have known from the look on his face that something was off. He was too nervous and excited. He was smoking. That should have given me a clue. 

We followed him inside, past the sleeping bag that indicated he hadn’t been home in a while, and stared at the wall in the center of our new living room. Both of us were silent as he chewed on his thumb, waiting to hear what we thought. His shoulders curved inward, his beard shorter than usual and scruffy around the edges. He seemed to be waiting for something, for us to tell him that he was a genius, or else a lunatic. 

“What is it?” I asked finally. 

“It’s me,” he answered, gesturing at the painting he’d made. 

I tilted my head. “It doesn’t look like you.” It didn’t look like anything. 

“But why?” Amalia asked, turning now to stare at Tsachi. 

He shrugged. “I felt inspired. It’s art.” 

I watched Amalia grow more and more agitated as her eyes roamed over the mess of color splashed where our custom bookshelves were supposed to go. 

“But…we didn’t ask for art.”

“Who asks for art?” he retorted. 

“I’ll fix it,” I told her on the car ride back to the old apartment. 

“How, Ouriel? How will you fix this?” 

“I don’t know,” I answered, “but I’ll figure it out.” 

I was determined. Tsachi’s life was disintegrating, and the painting seemed to be the only thing of substance he’d done in months. Years, maybe. But I couldn’t take his side against my wife’s. 

Having exhausted my inner circle, I started calling people I vaguely knew and begging them to hire Tsachi. Maybe if he had a real career, he wouldn’t care so much if I painted over the painting that was him. 

I reached out to an old army buddy, then my chavruta from the small yeshiva where I’d spent two years after high school. I called the sister of my neighbor, who had a headhunting firm. I even swallowed my pride and called my boss from my last job, which I hadn’t left on the best of terms. 

But in the end, it didn’t matter. No one wanted him. No one cared. 

An old man approached me in the cafe, where I had been on the phone with my cousin pleading with her to get Tsachi a job in the municipality. I had tried everything to convince her, even going so far as to explain to her the whole mess about the paint job and the apartment, but she wouldn’t budge. 

“But you hire brand new Ukrainian immigrants,” I protested. “They can’t possibly be more qualified than Tsachi.” 

“They’re hard workers. Is he a hard worker?” 

“It depends,” I answered cagily. She saw right through me.

The old man was wearing soft leather shoes and a bright blue T-shirt. He had that kind of leathered skin that made it impossible to guess if his parents were born in Lithuania or Morocco, and a trim white mustache. 

“I want to see the painting,” he said without preamble. 

“What?” 

“The painting your crazy friend made. Can I see it?” 

I don’t know what came over me at that moment—the exhaustion, the stress, or maybe just the fact that he’d caught me off guard—but I agreed to take him to the apartment. I made him look away while I retrieved the spare key from the top of the box that held the electrical meters, since Tsachi still had mine. 

In the living room, he looked at the painting for a long time. I was forced to find other things to keep myself busy with since I couldn’t very well leave a stranger in the new apartment by himself. I flipped through an old newspaper that one of the workers had left behind. I found a package of light bulbs under the bathroom sink and started screwing them into all the light fixtures. I measured the floor in the kids’ room by placing one foot carefully in front of the other, recording the number of steps I took in my phone so that later, when I measured my shoe at home, I would know what size rug to buy. 

When I returned to the living room, to my utter bewilderment, the old man was clutching one arm across his chest and crying in a sort of silent catharsis. I froze, not sure what to do—for a miserable moment, I almost called Tsachi, thinking that he always knew what to say in these strange situations. He always had stories about strangers ready to go for the Shabbat table or over drinks. But this time it was me in the story, me with the instinct for chaos that had led me to allow this perfect stranger to break into pieces in my living room.

“Are you okay?” I asked, trying to sound soothing even though I mostly just wanted to get out of there. 

“Your friend,” he said slowly through his tears, “has a beautiful soul.” 

Honestly, I started to think maybe there was something wrong with the old man. I knew that Tsachi wasn’t a bad person, but his soul? I wasn’t sure. 

“Do you think my dog walker could come and look, too? She lives very close to here, and I think she would find it incredibly moving. She’s had a hard year.” 

I threw my hands in the air. “Why not? Invite the whole neighborhood.” 

I didn’t expect him to take me literally, but that must have been what he did. There’s no other explanation for the way our apartment suddenly became a must-see destination for the awkward and broken among us: tall, spindly men and women with short hair, people of all ages speaking English and Arabic and Hebrew and Russian and some other, more melodic language that I didn’t recognize. It wasn’t only the old man who cried, it was also the heavily pregnant woman with tightly curled hair and the teenager with the dog. It was the middle-aged medical professional in scrubs and sensible shoes. They just kept coming, so much so that I wound up leaving the door open with a leftover brick from the construction company, and they just kept breaking down in front of the wall. I didn’t have any food for them, and the tap water had a rough taste from the newness of the building. But none of them seemed to be hungry or thirsty, or at least they didn’t seem to mind the unready state of the apartment. 

I called Amalia a few hours later, telling her that she had better come straight over after work.

“They’re crazy,” she said as soon as she arrived, staring at all the people who had come to see Tsachi’s painting. “They’re out of their minds.” With her long dress and her mitpachat piled high on her head, she looked a bit out of place among the tank tops and nose rings. 

“Maybe it’s us,” I replied uncertainly. “Maybe we just can’t see it.” 

She considered that for a minute, then shook her head. “No, it’s not us. It’s them. It’s Tsachi.” 

The next week, the Rav called me into his office and showed me a newspaper article. It was a long piece, many paragraphs, and it had a color photograph of me and Amalia standing in our living room looking perplexedly out at the crowd of art enthusiasts who had come to see Tsachi and his painting. 

“The disorder in your classroom is one thing,” he said, shaking his head. “The phone calls, I mean, Noam Segal’s mother said she called you four times last week. But this is too far, Ouriel. We can’t be associated with this type of thing.” 

I felt indignation rise in my chest. The painting had nothing to do with me. The students…perhaps I’d encouraged them in the wrong direction. Perhaps I should shoulder a little of the blame for their misbehavior—only a little. But Tsachi’s painting? 

“It’s not even mine.” 

“It’s in your house.” 

“We don’t even live there yet!” 

“I’m sorry,” he said, more firmly. “The subject matter is completely inappropriate for a teacher at this school. It just isn’t in line with our values.” 

“But…” I looked around the office, deflating. “But it isn’t even a painting of anything!”

“Ouriel, please,” he said, with an air of finality. “You and I both know that isn’t true. It’s affecting. It’s good, even. But it doesn’t belong in the home of a member of the staff here. I have to draw the line somewhere.” 

I gaped at him. “But why here?” 

He stroked one hand down his long, gray-streaked beard. “Have you seen it? The painting.” 

“Yes, of course.” 

“But did you really look?” 

“I…don’t know.” 

“If you’d really looked, you’d know why.” 

I felt my heart rate pick up, but I took a deep breath. This was salvageable. He liked me, the Rav. He always had. 

“I’ll paint over it. I’ll speak to Noam Segal’s mother. I’ll…” 

He shook his head. “Ouriel, we’re letting you go. I’m sorry.” 

He slid a piece of paper across the desk to me. It was an official dismissal. I stared at the printed notice, glaring up at me with absolute finality. I felt all the fight drain from my body. I took the letter along with the newspaper, which detailed the new commissions that Tsachi had received around the country and his recent reunion with his wife, and left the Rav’s office. I walked down the hall in a daze, past the classroom that used to be mine, trying to puzzle it all out, trying to understand what had just happened. My whole life I had felt that as long as I was following God’s path for me, I didn’t need to worry. He would give me everything. Hadn’t I kept every Shabbat, even when I wanted desperately to know the score of the football game? Hadn’t I given tzedakah to everyone who asked? Not a lot, sometimes, but I always tried to give something.

How could God do this to me? There were so many other people who didn’t even try to do the right thing, and their lives seemed to be going fine. And here I was, trying my best, trying to be a good friend, a good husband, a good teacher, only to have everything blow up in my face with spectacular brutality. What, exactly, was the meaning of all of this? 

Panic clawed at my chest. What was I going to tell Amalia? How would we get by on just her income until I could find another job? Would our son’s principal call us in over the painting, too? Would I ever find another job in a yeshiva after all this? Did I even want to? 

I stepped outside into the muggy late-September haze, fully prepared to air my grievances to whoever would listen, when the sky broke open and I felt something shift deep inside myself. The sun shone through the clouds, right at me, like a blistering spotlight. As much as I wanted desperately to hold tight to my own sense of undue hardship, I found I could no longer summon the anger that had fueled my indignation only a moment before. It was as if my resentment had simply evaporated, swept up into the clouds like so many free-floating water molecules in the air. I was struck by an immediate and senseless gratitude. 

The world ceased to hum with that incessant confusion that had become such a part of my daily experience in this life—no more anxiety, no more dread, no more questions. Like someone had hit a light switch in my brain. I finally knew what Tsachi felt when he looked at my wall and heard his painting calling to him. For the first time in a year, maybe ever, I felt completely and totally free. 

I got into the car, and I just started to drive.

It’s not that Tsachi is a bad person. Really, he’s not. But things just seem to happen around him, things that are almost too absurd and illogical to be explained by anything remotely resembling the aimless entropy of luck.