“Sure, no problem,” I said, because I had both no choice and nothing to hide. As for Israel being special, I already knew that; it was why I was going there. China and Ghana had been memorable, without being enjoyable, and I knew that unless I wanted to travel alone, I needed to find somewhere that struck a better balance between delight, danger, and drudgery. Many of our friends had raved about Israel, which promised trash-free beaches, great food, interesting people, and intensity. After Ghana, I wanted to see somewhere with even less separation between religion and state. You don’t choose Judaism, you are simply born Jewish. They are their religion. It’s a country that’s all politics, all the time.
“Why are you flying from Germany and not from England?” Levi asked.
“Because I live here in Berlin.”
“How long have you lived here in Berlin?”
“Three years, I think.”
“You think?”
I cleared my throat. “Three years.”
Levi’s eye twinkled. “You know, you look a little bit Israeli?”
I didn’t know what to say to this because I didn’t really know what the average Israeli looked like. I’d only ever met one. Levi flicked through my stamps. He lingered on the ones I’d collected from Muslim countries that Israel doesn’t like. Which is all of them.
“Thank you, Adam. Please just wait here a second. I’ll return shortly.”
I relaxed. It was over and I could now enjoy an interesting holiday. Levi approached a scary-looking man standing to the side of the check-in counter. This man had the appearance of a nightclub bouncer. He was wearing an earpiece, the cord of which disappeared into his tight blue EL AL shirt. The shirt looked stressed in its attempts to retain all of the man’s muscles. He had at least three times as many as I did and had successfully exercised all of them to tautness. He didn’t have a face like thunder—he had a face that seemed able to produce thunder, amongst other bad weather, all of which could be unleashed upon you at his discretion.
Levi approached him warily, like Oliver Twist asking for more gruel. The buff man eyed me like a lion might a badly wounded gazelle. The two exchanged words, and the man shook his head, slowly, keeping it perfectly level. Levi returned, smiling, as if absolutely everything was perfect and this was, in many ways, the best day of his life.
“Fantastic. Thank you for waiting,” he said, as if I’d had a choice. “I’m going to need to ask you a few more questions today. Is that okay?” My shoulders slumped forward. “Can you tell me what your occupation is, Adam?”
This was a difficult question. I prided myself on my ability to function as a human without anything resembling an occupation. You may have heard of the concept of a Renaissance man. Well, I’m a pre-Renaissance man, stubbornly devoid of any skills. Technically, I could have said “journalist” or “writer.” However, admitting to these professions is like uttering a special secret password to Travel Hell. No one wants journalists or writers in their country because they have a habit of writing things, and sometimes these things are even true.
“I’m a small business owner,” I said. “I have a few different websites.” Which was true and paid the bills better than any of my flirtations with the written word.
“What do these websites do?”
“I have one called The Hipstery, where I sell products, and one called TheTeeDirectory where I recommend them.”
He cocked his head. “This is your job?”
“I know, right? But, yeah, it is.”
“Do you intend to work on these websites while in Israel?”
“No. I barely work on them while I’m here in Berlin, to be honest.”
He folded his arms. “Huh. Fascinating. I’m here all day in the airport asking questions, and some people are just living from their websites. The world is pretty strange, isn’t it? Do you think you’d be able to show me these websites?”
“Sure,” I replied. BECAUSE I HAD NO CHOICE IF I WANTED TO GO ON HOLIDAY. Levi walked me in the direction of the Hulk. Hulk watched me closely. I thought I saw him lick his lips. I showed Levi my websites on a special EL AL Laptop of Extravagant Paranoia sitting on the countertop near Hulk. Levi went to consult Hulk again, and Hulk shook his head again. I felt as if I were taking part in a game show—The Game of Nations—where everything I said triggered a loud “Wrong!” sound. Levi skipped merrily back to me, a wide grin on his face, as though it were my birthday and he’d prepared strawberry sponge cake.
“Just a few more questions.”
I sighed. I’d heard that Israelis were paranoid, but I didn’t know they were this paranoid. I just wanted to go on holiday.
“Don’t sigh,” he said, hurt. “You’re doing just fine. We’re nearly there. Next question. Where will you stay?”
I retrieved the Airbnb booking from my bag. He held it as if it were sacred. “It says here that the accommodation is for two people.” He exhaled theatrically, pointing. His face cracked like an egg thrown from a roof terrace.
Gotcha #1. “You told me you were travelling alone!”
We were a team. He had my back. But now… this... Hulk wasn’t going to like this. He wasn’t going to like this at all.
“I did?” I shifted on the spot. “Well I am travelling alone. My girlfriend is on a different flight.”
An egh-ugh buzzer sounded.
“We’re coming back at different times. She’s on the Lufthansa flight that left a few hours ago.”
He wrote down her name, and took it to Hulk. Hulk didn’t move. Trees don’t move, either. Neither do walls. Levi bounced back across on the front of his feet. There’d been a few speed bumps on the Yellow Brick Road to check-in, sure, but nothing we couldn’t manage if we just worked together and told each other the truth.
“Everything is going great,” he lied. “Just one or two more questions. Do you know anyone in Israel? Do you intend to visit the occupied territories?”
I tried to excavate myself from the box marked irregularity. “I do not, nor will I. A friend from Tel Aviv did send me a list of recommendations. My girlfriend and I will probably just work through that.”
Gotcha #2. The colour drained from his face. “You said you don’t know anyone in Israel, yet now I’m hearing you have a list of recommendations from an Israeli friend?!?!”
“I, err, don’t…” I stammered. “Well…” I tried to continue. “Erm. The other day I met a girl at a conference. We got talking and I told her I was about to go to Israel and so she sent me this list.” I unfolded a piece of A4 paper and handed it to him.
“What is this girl’s name?”
I could only remember her first name. This seemed to upset him on a very deep, personal level. I didn’t tell him I was actually only 62 percent certain that this was even her first name. The list itself was just a collection of bars and restaurants, with comments like “Be sure to try the eggs Benedict!” I might as well have printed out an Internet listicle called “Seventeen ways to Tel you’re in love with Tel Aviv.”
Levi checked every word on the list closely, as if deciphering a secret code. He then took the list, the Airbnb booking, and my passport back to Hulk. Hulk shook his head once again.
Seriously? Was I that atypical? With my slightly Israeli face, lack of job, invisible girlfriend, and first-name-only eggs Benedict conference contact?
Levi bounded back like a lamb in a summer’s meadow. “We’ve decided to send you for advanced luggage screening,” he said, making it sound as if I’d won an Airport Oscar. “It’s nothing to worry about, of course.”
It’s funny how often people say “it’s nothing to worry about” precisely when it’s exactly a point in your life deserving of concern. It’s like they’re trying to convince themselves. It’s right up there with other classic human self-denial statements such as “It’s just a small lump,” “I’ll get around to fixing that soon,” and, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you.”
Hulk certainly could hurt me. His glances had already been quite bruis
ing; one long, piercing stare had left me winded. Levi disco danced alongside me across the check-in area and over to a metal chair outside an ominous, unmarked door. We were about twenty metres from the—now quite full—check-in area. I was trying to remain calm but found I no longer knew how. I went to where calm was normally stored within me, but everyone there said they’d never heard of it. They recommended I try something called anguish instead. Levi left me on a chair and entered the room.
My brain scurried around unlocking the vaults of my memory, searching through all the things I’d ever done wrong, presumably, so it could confess to these upfront before the waterboarding really got going. It was a long list: I stole a pencil sharpener from a shop when I was twelve; I pretend to be a real journalist to attend sold-out events; I illegally download. Okay, that’s quite a short list, but that’s only because I’ve suppressed all the really damning stuff.
Levi returned, retaining his the-Queen-will-see-you-now demeanour. I followed him into the small, windowless space. Inside, a hairy man on an office swivel chair met my gaze as he snapped on a pair of rubber gloves.
“You do that when everyone walks in, right?”
He jutted out his chin and narrowed his eyes.
“I’ll just be outside,” said Levi jovially, as if dropping off his kid at playschool. “Good luck.”
Wait, why would I need luck?
The door closed with a click.
I laughed at the absurdity of all of this.
“Remove your clothes,” the man said.
I stopped laughing. “A-all my clothes?”
“No. You can leave your underwear on.”
Oh, the kindness. I stripped down to my boxer shorts. The man looked in my mouth, made me cough, and swept everything I owned with some kind of futuristic anti-terror RoboCop wand.
“Can you demonstrate your phone to me?” he asked. “Take a photo, maybe?”
While not a professional photographer, I turned, instinctively, to take a photo of the computer in the corner, behind us. It wasn’t the roof of the Sistine Chapel, sure, but it was the only thing worthy of framing in this drab room. The man lunged for the phone. “Not that,” he shouted. “It’s classified.”
This whole experience was only serving to remind me that there is no limit to the number of things you can do wrong, just as long as you’re trying to do right. I got dressed and was told to wait outside. About twenty minutes passed. The door opened, and the man shouted across to Levi. Levi waltzed over, his enthusiasm for life making him as conspicuous as an Inuit on a camel in space. He disappeared into the unmarked room. The door closed. The lock clicked.
I sat heavily in my chair. A few minutes later he returned, holding my laptop. It was the illegal downloads, I knew it. They’d found the pirated copy of the new Lego movie. I was done for. “The screen appears to be loose,” he said, grasping it.
“Yeah, it’s a bit broken. I’ve taped it.”
“The battery also appears to be taped?”
“Yeah, that’s also broken. I’ll get around to fixing it soon.”
Another lie. I was a pre-Renaissance man, after all.
The check-in area had now emptied and just one or two late-arriving passengers remained. The final boarding call had been made. The whole process had taken just short of two hours. I was stressed, thirsty, and tired of being an object of unrelenting suspicion. Levi visited Hulk again. I couldn’t look, unable to take any more rejection. He returned giddy as ever. “Great, Mr Fletcher, we’re finished with the security check now! I hope it was not too invasive.”
Was it really over? I didn’t believe it. It was the night bus to Wuhan all over again. Any second a puppy was going to appear.
“It was pretty invasive,” I grumbled. Levi rocked back on his heels. “It was? Oh… well… sorry about that. My colleague will take you to the boarding area soon. Enjoy your stay in Israel.”
With no puppy in sight, I let out my own little yelp of relief. A stocky woman strutted over to me. “Stand up,” she said, addressing me as you would a dog that had climbed on the couch and needed to be put back in its place. “I will escort you to security.”
Off we walked. At first in sync, then I fell a step or two behind because we walked past a newsagent and I got distracted by all the things in it made of chocolate. I always want chocolate when stressed, and even more when not.
She spun around to face me. “DO NOT walk behind me.”
“I’m sorry?”
Her voice lowered. “You MUST walk IN FRONT of me.”
I swatted the air. “Come on! This is just ridiculous now.”
She clamped her hands onto her hips. “You think international security is ridiculous?” She held the pose. It was not a new pose for her. I cleared my throat. Decided words wouldn’t help. Stepped past her. Wordlessly we moved towards the security gate. I was a pace ahead. I hated this woman. I hated flying. I hated Israel, which was a bold opinion to hold considering at this point I’d never actually been to Israel. But that wasn’t my fault. I was trying. I was doing my bit. She escorted me all the way to the plane door. I collapsed in my seat and began quietly seething, an activity that kept me busy for the whole four-hour-long flight, during which I avoided looking at anyone, since the other passengers probably assumed I was one of Osama Bin Laden’s inner circle.
Annett was waiting for me in the arrivals area of Ben Gurion Airport. She looked much more relaxed than I did. Possibly for the first time ever. I told her the story in the taxi, on our way to the city. She was crying genuine tears of laughter by the time I reached the strip search. “I’m never flying EL AL again,” I said.
“Well, it doesn’t sound like they’d let you anyway.”
Fortunately, the intensity level did drop once we reached Tel Aviv. For brief moments it even felt as if we were on holiday, and had not merely reached a new place where I was to be ritually humiliated.
Broadly speaking, Tel Aviv should be a relaxed place. Its standard of living would be remarkable were it not for its cost of living. Holding up a pot of yoghurt in the supermarket, I could only conclude it had been priced deliberately to antagonise me. A short note from capitalism: “Fuck you, Adam.”
There were also guns. Lots of guns. That didn’t really help with the relaxation. Especially since these weapons were being carried around by people so young you wanted to stop them, point at the machine gun on their shoulder, and ask, “Do your parents know you have that?” These heavily armed people were soldiers on compulsory military service, two years and eight months for men, two years for women. The city felt full of them.
The other thing that let the city down, relaxation-wise, was all the people who lived in it. It’s only logical that living under the existential pressure that haunts every Israeli, every day of his or her life, will have an effect on your disposition. It’s simple cause and effect. If you think, at any moment, that you’re going to be vaporised by a weapon from Iran or Saudi Arabia, you’re probably going to stop holding your tongue. If you think you’re going to go out anyway, you might as well go out with a bang, or a drink, or a smoke, or some sex, or a raging street argument with some guy in a car who didn’t wait long enough for you to cross the road. It seemed to me that the country’s real currency was not the shekel but the heckle: a quick release of frustration in a small, overcrowded city in which the traffic sucks, the buildings are long past their peak, everything costs three times the price that it should, and the devout have to live directly on top of liberals, atheists, agnostics, and people more interested in the stock market than the Torah.
Sipping offensively priced pomegranate juice on the chairs of a street cafe, as the first perfect day began to dusk, we saw this friction playing out again and again: an Orthodox Jew on a bright orange mountain bike whizzed down the hill, his long beard flapping in the breeze as a car overtook him, leaving insufficient room, and he began shaking his fist at the driver; a group of baby-faced armed soldiers strolled past; a young girl walked in the other di
rection carrying a “I wish I were a lesbian” bag; three catwalk models (sorry, I mean average Israeli women) stopped to get coffee. Thick curtains of wild curly black hair hugged their irritatingly symmetrical faces. The genetic lottery had certainly been won here. It was late summer, and people in their mid-twenties sauntered around loosely wrapped in board shorts, vests, and tank tops paired with Ray-Ban sunglasses. Some had arms and legs speckled with tribal tattoos. I’d describe the aesthetic as “I don’t care how I look. But I look good, right?”
We were having a lovely time, even with all the guns. Next we were going to visit the famously less relaxed city of Jerusalem. Upon hearing that, our Airbnb host, Adam, offered us a little of his own opinion soup. “Don’t go there. There was an attack like three hours ago. Palestinians are killing themselves just to get two minutes of media coverage. It’s stupid. Like going to Jerusalem.”
It was an especially sensitive time to visit the country, since there had been waves of terror attacks in the previous weeks from Palestinians crossing into Israel. There were even suggestions of a looming third intifada, a full-scale Palestinian uprising. Back home, we’d been a little nervous watching the news coverage, but since our flights to Israel were non-refundable, we’d decided to take them anyway. We weren’t sure about Jerusalem now though, the place where most of the attacks were taking place. We shrugged, and told Adam we’d think about it over dinner.
That dinner was to be shared with an Israeli man called Oded. He was a friend of a friend. I knew nothing about him other than that he was a journalist for a left-wing Israeli newspaper. We hoped he’d be able to give us a second, better-informed opinion. We agreed to meet at a trendy new restaurant and microbrewery favouring exposed copper and steel.
Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places Page 8