Gluten Free Moshiach – part 2

Read chapter 1: https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/gluten-free-moshiach/

Swedish Duality

Monday morning. You are going to be 40 next Monday morning, a fair maiden sweetly did sing. The maiden did sing, but the elbow was gone quiet, sulking under Clive´s sleeve.

This is a good enough reason to ignore it entirely, he decided, and this is how he ended up at Ichilov, dragged by his sister Dahlia, who didn’t believe in “wait and see.”

And this way, he ended up in a waiting room smelling a mix of disinfectant and someone’s leftover shawarma. A ceiling fan spun without conviction.

The doctor, Dr. Noa Lindqvist-Cohen, according to the badge, had a tricky multicultural genealogy: Swedish mother, Israeli father. She was the kind of blonde that looks accidental, like she was not trying, but it happened anyway. White coat, clipboard, entirely unbothered by the heat, extremely large breasts. She asked the normal questions in the normal order. “Any trauma to the arm? Any family history of talking elbows?

Clive said no and no, but did not mention the shul, the screaming, or the dream with the blue light, because how do you say that to a woman holding a stethoscope?

She pressed two fingers to his elbow and inhaled, making her Scandinavian thoracic cage expand like the climax of a Wagnerian aria. Nothing happened. The elbow only screamed whenever he was in the mood.

“There’s nothing here,” said Dr. Noa Lindqvist-Cohen, in the absent-minded tone of a doctor already halfway through the next appointment. “Could be tendonitis. Ice it. Come back if it persists.”

Clive rolled his sleeve down, thanked her twice. Everything in the room was banal, the humming lights, the eye chart, her large breasts. Everything except him, and the small hot thing living just beneath his skin, waiting for the next holy event he is not supposed to see.

Clive lingered a second at the door, and it was the small, easy- to-miss mezuzah, on her office frame that did it.

“You’re Cohen on the badge”, he said, “but Lindqvist first. That’s not the name you’re born into, is it? Not the Jewish half of it.”

“No”, she answered. “I converted. Fourteen years ago. Malmö to a beit din in Jerusalem, which is a longer story than you have time for.”

“Why?”

It was not a smooth question. But she answers anyway.

“My grandmother kept a candle in the window every Friday and told everyone it was decorative. I was eleven before I understood what I was looking at. By the time I did the research, half the family was gone. So, I converted.” She tapped her pen against the chart. “Hebrew exams. A year of Shabbatot with a family in Katamon who fed me until I nearly needed this hospital myself.” Almost a smile. “I still check the window. Every Friday. For a candle I know isn’t there.”

Clive thought about his own grandfather, two beats behind on every prayer, always. “Maybe it is there,” he said. “Maybe you’re just early to see it.”

She looked at him a beat too long, and Clive, emboldened by whatever chemistry the moment had conjured, proximity, honesty, the strange feeling of having just been let in on something, decided this was a window. A small one, the kind that Clive had learned, closed fast.

“That’s, actually, that’s a lovely thing to have gone through alone,” he said, aiming for tender but landing somewhere closer to a man reading cue cards. “You shouldn’t have to check the window by yourself. Someone could check it with you. Hypothetically. I’m free Fridays, as it happens, my calendar’s mostly just—”

“Clive.”

“—shul, and then nothing, so if you ever wanted company for the candle situation.”

The door opened without a knock, filling the frame, the way certain doors are filled by certain men. Six foot three, easily, shoulders built for a sport involving ice and consequences, a gym bag over one arm and a coffee in the other that he handed to Noa without either of them looking at each other, the automatic gesture of a long marriage.

“Habibi forgot his badge,” he said, then, clocking Clive: “Sorry, am I interrupting?”

“Mikael, this is a patient,” Noa explained, taking the coffee. “Clive, my husband. He plays hockey. Professionally. National team.”

“Right,” replied Clive. “Of course he does.”

“We’re ranked higher than people assume,” Mikael said, mild and wounded.

Clive nodded, recalibrating, while his elbow, with impeccable, humiliating timing, gave one sharp, told-you-so throb, the closest thing he has to a friend in that room. He could hear the elbow laugh.