Fiction: Soap?

By Rita Plush
arttimesjournal February 25, 2020

What!!! Zane Kaplan? He died?

The rabbi had just made the announcement after Sabbath services. I’d been attending synagogue since1995 when my mother passed away. Zane Kaplan was also a regular. He had looked perfectly healthy when I saw him the week before. I was floored. I scanned the pews to see if others were as shocked as I. Zane?Dead?

Some folks like to chat up their fellows during services; I keep my eyes (if not my mind) on the prayer book and shush! anyone who does not comply with my way of worship. But that day I made an exception and moved over to a couple a few seats away. Had they heard? Did they know? They had. They knew.

His car had not moved from where it had been parked in front of the synagogue for three days. Calls to his cell remained unanswered. The rabbi phoned the police. They broke down his house door and found him dead in his bathrobe. An only child with an aunt in another state, he had one known friend whom the rabbi could not reach.

I learned from this couple that Zane had often been a guest at their home. A guest unexpected and unbidden, it seemed, ringing their doorbell and standing there till they asked him in. Many evenings they made room for him at their dinner table. They told me that many members of the community had taken him in for meals and holiday celebrations.

A single fellow who arrived about a half hour before the festive lunch that follows the Sabbath services, Zane would stand in back of the sanctuary apart from the seated congregation till the dining commenced. I don’t remember him sitting during lunch, as if he might be called away at any moment, or for that matter having lunch. He would mill around the buffet table talking to other congregants. Perhaps he was there for the socializing rather than the food.

Of average height, a bit on the stocky side with a short tight beard and eyeglasses on his roundish face, he dressed without flair or nod to fashion in standard issue shirt, tie and jacket. To my mind, there was nothing standout about him, by any stretch of the imagination.

What he did for a living, I don’t know (at sixty-six, perhaps he was retired). I do know he frequently traveled abroad; often he made trips to Israel. There was talk he was, or had been, an agent for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence organization. But in a synagogue there is always talk.

He was friendly to me and tried to engage me in conversation. Once he asked where he might dispose of some old, perhaps valuable, furniture. (I had been in the interior design business for many years.) I told him I’d not kept up with my contacts (true), wished him Good Shabbos and made a bee-line for anywhere but there. He always seemed to appear out of nowhere telling me I looked lovely or what a pretty dress I was wearing. He never came on to me or made an outright pass but I felt something intimate coming from him, a want or a need that made me uneasy.

Another time, when I was saying kaddish for my husband (the memorial prayer for the dead), the rabbi welcomed Zane back from his recent trip to Israel. After the service Zane came over and said he had something for me. Something for me?

I was in the vestibule getting into my coat when he approached. “I bought you this,” he said. His voice had a personal ring to it, as if he’d always brought me gifts from his travels. He slid his hand into his pants pocket and drew out a wrapped bar of soap. Soap? I drew back as if attacked, put up my hand. “I don’t want that from you!”

“You don’t want it?” He seemed surprised. Offended even.

“No! Thank you!”

Unnerved, I walked to my car, sat a minute before I started it up. Soap? He brought me soap? More than the item itself, it brought to mind that he’d thought of me on his trip. That alone disturbed me. Then I wondered if he had envisioned me using the soap. Naked in the shower! I shuddered and chased the thought from my mind. Looking back on my then-recent widowhood, I remember how defenseless and unprotected I felt. Convinced I was the target of every car on the road, I had not yet begun to drive outside my immediate neighborhood.

Now I know how the community had extended themselves to Zane, how they regarded him—a kind and wonderful man, a thoughtful generous person, a shomer, (a guardian of Israel). Now I know a food bank has been set up in Zane’s honor, to supply Israeli families in need. So, now I’m thinking, maybe I was the one who was off. Maybe Zane with all his giving was a lonely man, trying to connect with me, perhaps awkwardly, but in the only way he knew. Now I’m thinking … maybe I should have accepted the soap.

The End