By Erin Israel“So how many times will you have been to Jerusalem?” J’s colleague asked us wistfully, leaning back in his chair, as J. looked up the train schedule in the office. I told him it would be the third time. “Well, you will have seen much more of it than I have,” he replied.
He’s lived here for at least twenty years.
So now I don’t feel so badly about living here for two years, and failing to get to Eilat, Abu Ghosh, Nazareth, or Beer Sheva. Naively, perhaps, I figure I can always come back and visit them.
We ended up in Jerusalem around lunch time, took a taxi to Kikar Zion (or as close to Zion Square as it’s possible to get, at noon in commercial West Jerusalem), and headed to Solomon Street, a pedestrian lane lined with restaurants on one side, and jewelry and ceramics boutiques on the other. Yes, I’m aware that it’s wholly touristy, but (some days) I’m a tourist. And, as J. can attest, ravenously hungry tourists aren’t much fun until after they eat.
And eat we did: hot lunch, as in Europe, is an institution, here. One mixed Jerusalem grill later, we went back to Jaffa Road and had coffee at Café Hillel.
“One shekel for security?” the waitress asked, as she tallied our bill. Ok, we said uneasily. Would two be better? Maybe fifteen? Here, take thirty!
Jaffa Road leads back to Jaffa Gate. We went back to the Old City, and decided to check out our lodgings, nearby. I had visions of staying in the Old City, and absorbing a completely different night atmosphere, full of muezzin calls and choirs, and maybe a candlelight procession. To everyone we knew, I bragged that we would stay in the Old City.
The hostel I chose was reputed to have great views of the Old City, and it did. However, in every other aspect, it was a dump. Next time, it’s the King David or nothing.
“They could have at least changed the sheets since Herod slept here,” J. mumbled, as one of the cheerful owners showed us our tiny windowless room on the rooftop, past other rooms, where the doors were open, and seasoned, gray-haired hostel travelers were writing in their journals, underwear flapping on the line, outside. Downstairs, some guests were gathered on the couch, watching a soap opera in Arabic, as the owner of the hostel translated into English. “Goodbye!” they shouted to us. “See you later!”
To really appreciate a hostel, you must be an extrovert, evidently, and not one with pretensions toward a traveling lifestyle that involves little bottles of complimentary shampoo and lotion, either. We fled with the key.
“Maybe it will look better in the dark,” I suggested.
“When I stayed in the Renaissance Hotel, in West Jerusalem, for the conference, last year,” J. said sadly, “they left little chocolates on the pillow, every night.”
“But look at the view,” I told him, sweeping a hand across the horizon. We could see David’s Tower in the Citadel but, come to think of it, the skyline itself was rather hard to find below the hundreds of black-painted hot-water heaters, and satellite dishes.
“You can’t eat the view,” J. said, and we headed for the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
This time, we absently followed some tourists into a side chapel, to the right of the main entrance to the church, and wound up on the rooftop, where the Ethiopian church holds sway. Women swathed in colorful fabrics and draped in white cloths gathered around a priest wearing a cylindrical black hat that bore a distinct resemblance to the rook piece in a chess set.
Downstairs, a hundred people were lined up before the wooden inner chapel, and slowly processing in—but not out.
We went on to the Via Dolorosa; to properly follow it, and observe the stations of the cross, you have to start in the Muslim Quarter and head west to the Christian Quarter, as the path ends inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Across from the Second Station, the Chapels of the Condemnation and Flagellation, there’s a blue ramp leading up to a school. Inside the school courtyard, you can see (through a wire fence) the Dome of the Rock.
At the steps leading down into the courtyard for the Second Station chapels, a guide stopped us and offered his services for ten shekels.
“No, thanks,” J. said.
“I will tell you all the secrets of the place,” the guide, a man with dress pants and a short-sleeve shirt, said. He spread out his hands in welcome. “Only ten shekels.”
“I have a guidebook,” I said, and walked down to the chapels.
“I can tell you all about the games the soldiers played,” he persisted with a smile.
“Do you have ten shekels?” J. asked me.
“No, I have a guidebook,” I said, waving it around for emphasis. That ended our good-cop, bad-cop routine.
Both chapels are small, dim, and silent.
Outside, on the Via Dolorosa, the shopkeepers (all men; the women were nowhere to be seen) practically tugged on J’s sleeves to get him to come inside. In one of the covered market streets, little boys no more than six years old spotted us and instantly started shrilling in English, “Five shekel, mister! Hello! Buy!”
If you’ve grown up with the image of Christ as blue-eyed and golden-haired, walking around the Old City is bound to shatter it.
Following the Via Dolorosa is mystifying. Since the Herodian level of the city actually lies far underground (as we found out, that night, on a tunnel tour of the Western Wall), the Via Dolorosa itself must, as well. Yet pilgrimage tours process down the street, with pilgrims praying aloud, fanning themselves in the heat, and stumbling on the slippery rock streets.
Off the Via Dolorosa, we stopped in St. Anne’s Church and the excavated Bethesda pools, where Christ healed the sick. The church was converted into a school for the study of the Koran, at some point, so it is unadorned outside, with Islamic architectural additions and stark, inside.
Eventually, we made our way back to the Jewish Quarter and walked down to the police station across from the Western Wall, where we had to pick up tickets for the tunnel tour. Comfortably seated in a shaded plastic chair in front of the police station, facing the ticket counter, was an older man in white shorts, sneakers, white polo shirt and a baseball cap. He looked like he was waiting for someone to bring him a martini.
“Are you here for the tour?” he asked me. “The sign says he’ll be back in five minutes, but if those are Israeli five minutes, we’re in for it.” The man had a wry smile. “Where are you from?”
“I’m from the U.S.,” I told him.
“Abe Moskowitz,” the man said, with a marvelous grin. “Pleased to meet you. How long have you been in Israel?”
“Two years,” I said. “And you?”
Mr. Moskowitz one-upped me. “This is our eighteenth time here. We come every year. What are you doing here?”
I explained the saga. Mr. Moskowitz looked duly impressed.
“So you’re from New York?” he asked, and continued, before I could correct him. “Do you know the difference between an Italian actuary and a Jewish actuary in New York?” I shook my head. Mr. Moskowitz gleefully went on: “The Jewish actuary can tell you exactly who died, and where, and how, last year; and the Italian actuary can tell you who will die, and where, and how, in the coming year.” He slapped his leg and I laughed, along with the rest of the English-speakers in line.
The ticket man returned, and the few of us in line paid for our tickets.
“See you on the tour!” Mr. Moskowitz said.
Even though the Jewish Quarter is largely populated by Americans who made aliyah, Mr. Moskowitz was the first and only American ever to strike up a conversation with us, in the Jewish Quarter. In Jerusalem, for residents, religion trumps everything else.
We returned to the Western Wall plaza at six-thirty, and joined the group standing near the entrance to the passageways. A girl with blond hair pulled back in a barrette and wearing a plain, longsleeve blue shirt and long black skirt rushed in ahead of us to stand behind a waist-high model of the landscape of the Old City. She waited while everyone bunched in around the model, under the close, cave-like rock ceilings, which dripped, in places. When everyone had grown quiet, the girl began to describe the history of the Old City, focusing on the events surrounding the Temple. The model was an effective demonstration of how many times the Temple landscape was cleared: the tour guide dug around beneath the model to find the scale-sized copy of the Second Temple, hoisted it up to the table model, and efficiently knocked it into place.
The tour winds through tunnels created during excavation of the ground near the Western Wall plaza; massive, five-hundred-ton Herodian stones are stacked along the length of the Wall. Visitors see only the sixty meters of the wall above ground, but the length of the real foundations of the wall, underground, are staggering. The passageways follow the length of the wall closely; there’s barely room enough for one person, in some points. People passing along the wall, here, sense that they’re in a sacred space, as every crevice is tucked with notes. One point in the wall faces the point where the Holy of Holies (the foundation rock of the Temple) is thought to be concealed, and it serves as the only place to stop and pray, along the wall.
Here’s a sample of who was on the six-thirty tour in English: Mr. and Mrs. Moskowitz, Catholic me and my atheist husband, a trio of curly-haired Canadian sisters in their sixties (one of whom balked at the plexiglass walkways and gripped the walls on either side, saying, “Oooooh, these things make me nervous”); and a girl wearing a clingy, longsleeve white shirt with the Zara logo spelled out in gold-sequinned script, long white skirt, a white headscarf with gold threads, a white purse, and matching white-and-gold slippers. I was often behind her, on the tunnel pathways, and was mesmerized as she walked. She was clearly Jewish, but she clashed wildly with the usual dress of the Old City, as a tourist: she was covered according to the Orthodox rules, but every inch was carefully styled. Her English was Eastern-European or Russian –accented; she didn’t say much, but gazed at the wall, and stopped to pray, often. She seemed very serious, until the end of the tour, when our tour guide earnestly suggested that the Temple would only be rebuilt when Jewish people of all nations displayed more love for each other. The girl in white then said dryly, “Group hug!” and laughed.
After the tour, we waited for the Moskowitzes, but they had stayed behind; we climbed back to Jaffa Gate and steeled ourselves for the hostel.
J was consoled about the lack of amenities in our room when he discovered the six-hundred-channel satellite offerings, including Al-Jazeera, a handful of stations in English, two-hundred-and-fifty channels in Arabic, and two hundred and forty-nine channels in Italian.
There was no telling what the Herodian-era dust under the bed was capable of; we tested the bed gingerly and spread out a giant swath of a quilt remainder I had stashed in my backpack. This was enough for J, but I wrapped myself in a sarong and tried to sleep like a mummy.
Guess what? Mummies don’t sleep. They lie awake until two-thirty in the morning, convinced that bugs of all centuries are biting them. In any case, this was my experience, minus the dying part. I finally fell asleep, but not after hearing tiny mosquito squeals in my ears, for hours.
At seven-thirty, I opened one eye and shrieked, “It’s light! Let’s go!”
J. was not amused.
We rapidly decamped from the hostel and stumbled out into the traffic zooming around Jaffa Gate, into a café, and had breakfast.
We climbed up to the top of Jaffa Gate, and bought tickets for the ramparts. This is an underrated way to see the Old City; or, at least, part of it, anyway. When my family roamed around Europe about fifteen years ago, this was the first thing we did, in nearly any city that had ramparts remaining.
The ramparts walk from Jaffa Gate passes along the Christian Quarter, where children at the Greek Patriarchate elementary school looked up from the basketball-court-playground and yelled to us, in English, “Wake up, New Mexico!”
I figured they probably knew every state’s motto better than I did, but we didn’t stop to check.
The Christian Quarter turns into the Muslim Quarter, and the view away from the Old City, into East Jerusalem, at this point, became more interesting: all the women in view were covered from head to toe, but sparkled and fluttered. Inside the Old City walls, we could see down into a courtyard bazaar, where women were snatching undergarments and robes in hot pinks, purples, turquoise blues off the racks. This was where one exit from the ramparts-walk was supposed to be, but, instead, we were stuck above the bazaar, since the exit gate was rusted away. Ribars for reconstruction sat on the stones above the precarious narrow stairs leading down into the Muslim Quarter. We had to turn around and retrace our steps for half an hour…without water.
This sort of walk really tests one’s character. And one’s marriage.
After banning the word “ramparts” from the family lexicon, we headed for West Jerusalem, and lunch at another place on Solomon Street (Luigi’s, with its nearly infinite permutations of sauce and pasta combinations). It occurs to me that perhaps Solomon Street’s restaurants have taken on mythic proportions of taste, in part because we collapsed at their tables after long, hot, dusty treks…but I still maintain that Luigi’s Italian food would hold its own, anywhere.
We wandered around Ben Yehuda for a while, stopping in the ubiquitous J-Crew-wannabe shop, “Golf,” where a woman emerged from a dressing room and promptly asked me (first in Hebrew and then in French, when I offered languages I actually speak), “Do I look fat in this?”
I’m convinced that it’s because of the divine presence in Jerusalem alone that I had the presence of mind to respond only, “Do you like it?” Too bad I didn’t know the French for what I would have really said, if a friend had asked me this: “Honey, that skirt would make Kate Moss look like Pavarotti.”
For some reason, we couldn’t bring ourselves to leave West Jerusalem; we went to the 70s Bar, with its funkified décor, and sat down for iced coffee. A couple in their twenties, a few tables away, sat with legs and arms entwined and came up for air only when the waitress (a tall teenage girl with long, straight brown hair; a serious expression; and wiry arms) came over to tell them that one menu item they’d asked about would cost three shekels. The couple wanted to know if they could pay cash for lunch. The waitress turned away and went back to the kitchen. Then she returned and told them they could. They then ordered something complicated and sat back to make out some more. The waitress clenched her fists at her sides and glared at them. She spun around and steamed back to the kitchen, where we heard something crash in fury.
A minute later, the same waitress appeared at our table and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Can I help you?” she asked sweetly.
“Two iced coffees, please,” I said.
“That’s it?” she blinked. “Nothing else?” We shook our heads. She beamed with relief.
The iced coffees that arrived at our table were far more decorated than any others we’ve had in Israel, with chocolate syrup drizzled liberally around the inside. As we were finishing them, about twenty minutes later, the waitress returned with the make-out couple’s order and practically slung it at them, from across the room. Some salad bumped off the plate and fell on the table, which caused the couple to look up and yelp in surprise. The waitress dusted off her hands and sauntered away.
Some days, you’re the windshield; some days, you’re the bug.
We left her a big sympathy tip.
And then it was back to Rehovot. Most of the next two weeks or so passed in a blur of packing and doing “last things”, and then trying not to think about how they would be the last things: the last falafel at Falafel Yerushalemi, the last view of the sunset from the top of A.G. Gordon Street; the last iced coffee with K and Son at Café Mada; a last visit from Ben H. (I promise I’ll come back to visit Abu Ghosh!).
Ironically, as we were preparing to leave, the brother of a friend arrived at the Weizmann to start a summer program and a Master’s Degree. Taking him around town was like seeing things, from the perspective of two years ago, when everything was foreign, dusty, noisy, and complicated.
Pale Ivan trailed along, as we hit the Atrakcia store, the shouk, and the Karl Berg market, where he seized a bottle of brown soda with Cyrillic writing on it and exclaimed happily, “We have this in Russia!” J. and I smiled benevolently.
“How old is he?!” I asked J.
“Twenty-two, I think,” J. replied, watching Ivan, and then revised his guess. “Twenty?”
Ivan looked so baby-faced and wide-eyed that it was hard not to feel parental.
“Oh, jeans! I will try them on, ok?” Ivan looked at J. hopefully, in the Energia clothing store.
“No, you really don’t need them; it’s the middle of summer,” J. replied, with his arms crossed. “Did you say you needed pens?” Ivan looked crestfallen.
“Would you two excuse me?” I went outside and sat down. It felt like we’d fast-forwarded to a son’s orientation week at college, twenty years from now, and we would soon be heading to the local equivalent of Target, to equip his dorm room. Where was my martini?
We invited Ivan to dinner, along with Czech friends who, unlike J., were willing to speak Russian. I wondered briefly if pasta salad would strike someone from St. Petersburg as a completely weird dinner.
“I came here a few years ago,” Ivan told me, at dinner, and then said something I couldn’t understand.
“Sorry?” I asked, and handed him a plate with cheesecake. (The last cake from Eyal’s cake shop!)
“Taglit,” Ivan said. “I came here with the Taglit Birthright program.” This is the program that allows Jewish teens from anywhere to travel to Israel for free, once they’re eighteen, and participate in a program of Jewish heritage.
“Oh, that’s a terrific program,” I replied, but I was awfully confused. I thought, first, “Taglit? But only Americans go on Taglit.” (Wrong.) My second thought was, “I didn’t realize Ivan were Jewish; I thought most Russians weren’t Jewish…” (Wrong.) My third thought was “Wow, two years here were not enough…” (Right.)
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Source: Erin Israel. Not shalom, but lehitraot. Rehovot.wordpress.com (last viewed 20 September 2007)
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