Elisa Albert: How This Night Is Different: Stories

“But it’s Shabbat,” Debra says, torn between relief (that there is no issue with either her footwear or face) and incomprehension (that there could indeed be a synagogue where Shabbat goes unheralded). Her voice is plaintive, whiny, keening: embarrassingly revealing of her deepest needs and impossible to accept as her own. She wonders for a brief, flickering moment if perhaps this is in fact a sort of Marrano protocol — if these people might automatically deny active practice of Judaism for the sake of their own sense of safety and well-being. If, somewhere beneath the synagogue “museum,” there might still be a system of tunnels opening up into a dank cave where women in lace head coverings thrice waved their hands over freshly lit candles and sang the blessing together. If only she knew the secret code! Could she wink a few times? Slip him a twenty, tell him Al sent her, give him a choreographed handshake?

“There are not enough Jews left here for a minyan,” Sergio says. “Not for a long time. There are only about eighty of us in total, and most are not observant at all.”

“Oh,” says Debra, glancing around at the neighboring houses. Quickly, so he can dismiss it as a tic if he so chooses, she catches Sergio’s eye and blinks twice, theatrically. I’m one of you, let me in.

“Many tourists come here,” he says. “It is a shame, because the tourists probably could help for a minyan.” He shakes his head and paraphrases for Ms. Muumuu, who rolls her eyes and walks back into the building without another look at Debra. “You’ll come back on Monday, yes? I hope?”

The sun has almost completely disappeared now, and Shabbat has officially begun. Fuck this, Debra thinks. She has come all this way, over oceans, through tourist traps, bearing her aloneness righteously, and the Jews of Lisbon have let her down by allowing themselves to disappear into thin air, like spots you see when you stand up too quickly. She will not, as she hoped, be welcomed into the bosom of a familiar language-and-culture-gap-defying entity. She can scream it from rooftops: I’m a Jew! But here is another way in which it does not amount to crap, does not entitle her to anything tangible.

So, okay, screw it. Instead she will go back to her pensão, she will put on some lip gloss, she will go to a club in the Barrio Alto and listen to fado and drink port and let some Italian tourist hit on her. This will be her own personal Shabbat observance. She will go where her phrase book can help her. She will pick up her literal and proverbial backpack and move on.

“Are you here alone?” Sergio smiles benevolently at her. He checks his watch. Looks around at the empty, silent street.

Debra winces at this question, hates that he will not understand why a nice young girl would travel all by herself, that he will pity her the way her parents do. “Don’t you want to go with some friends or something, honey?”

“Yes,” she says, affecting hardness for his sake and her own. She continues, defensively, the same way she might admit to a roomful of Sisterhood ladies that her mother converted. “Lots of American women travel by themselves. It’s perfectly normal.” Of course she would rather have gone traveling with some friends. But her friends were starting grad school, or working eighty-hour weeks at new investment-banking jobs, or broke.

“Yes,” he says. “Of course. You are staying in Lisbon?”

“Yeah.” Debra wants to use the phone to call a cab or something, but she knows that use of the phone is prohibited on Shabbat. So she’ll have to turn her back on the synagogue-cum-museum, which remains dark inside even though the sun is gone, and walk to one of the houses. “But don’t worry, I have a cab coming back for me. I’m just going to go wait on the sidewalk.”

It’s the old counterprerejection ploy, so useful in her dealings with various ambivalent boys and men over the years: Once the whiff of rebuff is in the air, act fast and make it all seem like your idea. No thank you, vanished secret Jews and ritual-laden converts of Lisbon; I have many better things to do than pay my respects to the last vestiges of your existence! No thank-you, drama department of Taft Junior High, I think I will join the madrigal society! Really, Tom, Dick, Ezra — I am not ready for a serious relationship quite yet!

“Okay, then.” Sergio holds out his dead-animal hand and heads around the back of the building. ”Shabbat shalom,” he says over his shoulder, an afterthought. It’s sweet, the way he says it: soaked in nostalgia, trying it on for size.

“Obrigada,” Debra says, even though it has a thick, unwieldy feel coming out of her mouth in speaking to someone who knows her entire language; makes her feel like a fraud for attempting the proper pronunciation of this one paltry word.

She walks up to the door of a house across the street and opens her phrase book to the Emergencies section, where she finds the words for “I need to use your telephone” before ringing the bell. Nothing is at stake here; unspoken international human kindness dictates that she will be allowed to use a phone, will be helped safely back to her pensão, will continue to write postcards and amass ticket stubs, will go home and make a scrapbook. But perhaps, in molding this story into an anecdote, Debra will modify it so that the woman who answers the door appears at first to have a fantastical halo of light around her head, which, after a beat, Debra sees is just the overhead light in the entry hall of the house. Perhaps she will say that she could see from the door two candles in old silver candlesticks, burning in the window.

“Entrar!” the woman will say with a smile in Debra’s retelling: “Come in.”

My best friend, Rachel, now insists she be called Ra-chel. “Ra” as in the sun god, “chel” as in “hell” pronounced by someone drowning in their own phlegm. Emphasis on the “chel.” She’s been born again.

“My Jewish neshama was in hiding all this time,” explains Ra-chel, who’s wearing an ankle-length skirt and long-sleeved shirt even though it’s mid-August, almost ninety degrees out and humid. We’re sitting in a salon, waiting for her hairstylist to come and fetch us.

“What the fuck is a neshama ?” I ask.

“It’s the essence of your soul,” she says. This from the girl who, in the ninth grade, using a peeled cucumber, taught me how to give a proper blow job.

“Oh,” I say.

We’re here to cut off all her hair. Specifically we’re here to cut off all her hair so that she can cover her head with a wig made out of someone else’s hair. It’s like a bad Twilight Zone.

On the plus side of having your best friend get swept up into religious extremity are the following: nonmodest wardrobe inheritance (“It’s not tzniut, ” Ra-chel says, holding her favorite black tank top out to me. “What the fuck is tzniut? ” I say, taking it happily) and the runoff of all her newfound information (“Modesty,” she says. “Women’s bodies are sacred”). This from the girl who, in the tenth grade, flashed a tit at the hot math teacher and got suspended.

She’s getting married in a few days.

“Mazel tov,” I said brightly when she told me the news. Limited as my knowledge of Judaism might be, I knew, at least, that “Mazel tov” is what you say in such situations. I grew up way more observant than our sweet born-again. She didn’t even have a bat mitzvah. At mine she skipped out on the Torah service to sneak a cigarette with Ethan Zacharias in the parking lot. So you’ll forgive me if this zero-to-sixty religiosity of hers is a bit hard to swallow (so to speak — we’re talking about a girl who, in the eleventh grade, told a department store makeup lady that semen was the secret to her luminous complexion).