I let Trine enjoy tormenting me for a while, then I said, “Can we go somewhere with a little more privacy?”
“Ooh, listen to you, talking about privacy. That’s a pretty rare commodity around here. Sometimes when all the best rooms are taken, I’ve got to make like a lovebird in the same room with two other people.”
“Hey, you’re talking to a man who sleeps in the same bed with two other people.”
She smiled wryly. Then she led me up some narrow stairs past the kitchen to a covered walkway that bordered a square courtyard. The rain was picking up again.
We passed through an archway into a dark hallway on the far side of the building. There were only three doors, with no light coming from any of them.
This was as private as it was going to get.
I was about to make my move when the room at the end of the corridor erupted with inarticulate howlings. I started, which made Trine laugh. It sounded like someone was tearing apart a sheep, until I realized that the sounds were rhythmic, repetitive, and distinctly happy.
“He must have heard us coming,” she said.
I was about to ask who “he” was, when she opened the door and a giant of a man in a dirty white shirt jumped all over her, flapping his arms and making those same happy ahooo ahooo sounds like a big baby.
“They call him Dumb Yosele,” she said. “Not dumb as in stupid, but dumb meaning he doesn’t speak very well. But I understand him, don’t I, Yosele?”
“Yess.” The big man spoke quickly. It turned out to be his clearest word, besides “cookie.”
“And I thought I told you not to scratch your flea bites,” she said, checking the scabs on his arms. “He won’t stop till he’s bleeding, unless we keep reminding him.”
“Ow-sigh.”
“You want to go outside?”
“Ow-sigh.”
“All right.”
“Ow-sigh.”
“Yes.”
She let him go skipping out in the rain. I’d never seen anyone over the age of five get so excited about running around with his mouth open to catch raindrops. He was getting soaked, and he loved every minute of it, laughing and letting out what for him was a joyful sound: gaaa, gaaa, gaaaaah.
Trine smiled just watching him.
“You should see him when he takes his weekly bath,” she said. “We have to tell him everything. ‘Wash under your arms, Yosele. Both sides. Now wash your face. Use the soap, Yosele.’”
“He bathes for Shabbes?”
“What are you, crazy?”
“Not yet, but I’ve been studying with a couple of real experts.”
She ignored that. “Every day he fetches water from the well and food from the market, sweeps out the rooms, and carries hundredweight sacks of grain up three flights of stairs. What do you think? He doesn’t get dirty like everybody else?”
So even Dumb Yosele bathed every week like a good Jew. I wondered if he could be included in a minyen.
I said, “You know, there are enemies of Israel who bathe only twice in their whole lives, on the day they’re born and the day their bodies are washed for burial, and yet they say that we are the ones who have a distinctly ‘Jewish’ smell.”
“Is that so? Well, we’ve got girls here who go to the mikveh every day and still don’t feel like they’ll ever be clean.”
Her face had grown stern, and I was very much aware of the sound of falling raindrops all around us.
I listened to the raindrops for a while.
Yosele started screaming so loudly that anyone who didn’t know better would think something horrible was happening to him: ah-ha-haa, ah-ha-haa, ah-ha-haaah!
“He’s got to let it out somehow,” said Trine. “But if he’s happy, God’s happy.”
I had to agree. Watching him cavorting in the rain and loving every minute of it almost made me envy the big fool.
“We found him chained up in a stable, behaving no better than an unbroken horse,” she said. “But we cleaned him up. Taught him how to wipe his own butt, make his own bed, and wait his turn for the bath. And one of these days he’s going to learn how to chop wood with a sharp ax, because that’s a damn heavy job for us in the winter.”
Yosele finally came in out of the rain, dripping wet and leaving a trail of tiny puddles all the way back to his room, where Trine had him take off his shirt. Then she helped him dry himself with a towel. She had to keep prompting him to dry his chest, his arms,