Qian Qichen’s face brightens. “Now you’re speaking my language!” he says.
ONCE ADELSON IS safely installed in the car back to the airport, Qian Qichen stares at the empty Hall of Purple Lights with its tawdry porcelain and its cracked tiles. The lights have gone up and they expose centuries of the termites’ gnawing. The oriental potentate reflects upon a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.
“Sire, now I have told you about all the cities I know.”
“There is still one of which you never speak.”
Marco Polo bowed his head.
“Venice,” the Khan said.
Marco smiled. “What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?”
The emperor did not turn a hair. “And yet I have never heard you mention that name.”
And Polo said: “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice . . . To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me it is Venice.”
“You should then begin each tale of your travels from the departure, describing Venice as it is, all of it, not omitting anything you remember of it.”
The lake’s surface was barely wrinkled; the copper reflection of the ancient palace of the Sung was shattered into sparkling glints like floating leaves.
“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”
IT’S AUGUST 2007, and the CEO of the Sands Corporation is talking to the press. “The Venetian represents that first massive step in changing Macao . . . to a full-fledged international, multi-day, multifaceted destination resort,” he says. “It’s like truncating the 76 years of development of Las Vegas into one place under one roof.”
Or a millennium and a half of Venetian history, perhaps. A week later, Adelson hands a beautiful woman down into a gondola. She smiles at him, and he chuckles a little, because it is Diana Ross who reclines on the cushion by his aging side. Their gondolier sings to them as he steers through the canals, and on the hour the deep bell of San Marco resounds in the night air. They scarcely notice the waves of the South China Sea lapping on the sands of the Cotai Strip outside.
The Western Wall, Jerusalem
In Which Nothing, and Everything, Has Changed
THE ARCHITECTURE OF FAILED DIPLOMACY
Scheme for Palestinian access to the Haram e-Sharif, prepared
by Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal (detail).
INHERITANCE
The last place whose secret life is recounted in this book is older by far than the Parthenon, and in some quarters much better known; but it makes an odd sort of tourist attraction. It is surrounded by a security cordon tighter than most airports. Closed-circuit cameras focus on its ancient walls, and every visitor must pass through a metal detector manned by soldiers. The T-shirts sold by local hawkers are not just the usual cheery souvenirs. “Guns ’n’ Moses,” some of them say; “Uzi Does It, Israel.” Many guided tours around the excavations at this site culminate in communal prayers and group photographs under the Israeli flag. Nearby, exhibits are inscribed with the names of soldiers who died to make it possible for Jews to visit this place at all.
The Parthenon is a ruin in two senses. Its stones are crumbling, and the original reason for its existence has receded far into the past; it has become heritage. This place is, on the other hand, for better or for worse, a living inheritance. It is so controversial that no one even knows what to call it, for every name is loaded with sectarian significance. To the Jews the site is Har Habayit, the Temple Mount; to the Muslims it is Haram e-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. The British administrators of the Palestine Mandate referred to its western boundary as the Wailing Wall. The name used by BBC newscasters today is the Western Wall. On Al Jazeera the broadcasters call it the Al-Buraq Wall, after Muhammad’s winged steed. To Jews, it’s simply the Kotel—the wall.
Jews are forbidden by rabbinical edict to visit the interior of the Temple Mount; anyone who does so, dissident Jew or curious Gentile, is subjected to the most stringent security checks. The bridge that leads into the enclosure is scattered with confiscated Bibles and Torahs, for it is forbidden to take them onto the Muslim Haram. Riot shields are stacked by the door, ready for the next bout of sectarian violence. Once you’re in, there is no museum, no guidebook, no souvenir shop. The Noble Sanctuary is a rare thing in the contemporary world: a historic site that has resisted the siren call of tourism.
At the Western Wall just outside the sanctuary, meanwhile, are people who have traveled thousands of miles to touch its stones. If they can’t come themselves, they e-mail messages, which are posted between the cracks on their behalf. Dumpster loads of them are burned every day. In Colorado Springs, an evangelical Christian organization is building a fifty-ton scale model of the wall at their headquarters. It expresses their solidarity with Israel, they say.
The cities of western Europe have turned into a realization of the architect’s dream: the buildings of their past have become static exhibits in a monumental museum. Elsewhere, however, ancient buildings are still stolen, appropriated, copied, translated, simulated, restored, and prophesied. They still change as they have always done, and they do so because they still excite passions beyond the merely aesthetic. In a reversal of the story of the Parthenon, Hindu extremists tear down a mosque in Ayodhya and build a temple in its ruins. In Japan, Shinto devotees rebuild the holy house of the Ise shrine every twenty years to exactly the same design—they have been doing so for nearly two millennia. In Indonesia, whole villages are dismantled, transported, and rebuilt as dining pavilions in luxury resorts, where the waiters are dressed like peasants in some eighteenth-century capriccio. Outside the confines of the West, historic buildings are not imprisoned in the timeless rapture of the architect’s dream but overflow its fixed frame and impose themselves on the present. History has not come to an end.
IN THE AFTERNOON of 14 February 2004, the sky turned dark over Jerusalem and it started to snow. In the middle of the city there was an open plaza, with an ancient wall on one side of it; and high up in this wall, at the summit of a cobbled ramp leading up to it from the plaza, there was a door. As the snow turned to rain, the walls supporting the ramp started to bulge and seep. Two days later they crumbled, exposing a huge scar of raw earth and scattering a heap of rubble on the shiny pavement of the plaza.
The authorities closed the door and cordoned off the area at the base of the ramp. It was too dangerous for tourists to use it, they said. The problem was, the ramp had been the only way that tourists could get to the door that led to the other side of the wall. The authorities couldn’t just leave the ramp the way it was; but they couldn’t make up their minds as to what to do about it, either. Nothing happened until December, when they announced that they’d be building a timber walkway between the plaza and the door in the next few months.
This wooden structure was only a temporary solution, and about a year after the storm a local architect submitted plans for a more permanent replacement. The remains of the collapsed ramp would be removed, enlarging the open space at the foot of the wall, and the walkway would be replaced by a concrete bridge over the plaza that would take visitors right up to the door.
The only difficulty was that the ramp, like everything else in Jerusalem, was an antiquity. It was known as the Mugrabi path, and a thorough archaeological survey of the site would be required before work could begin. This was another source of delay; but the interim wooden walkway was still in place, and the wall had been standing there for two thousand years. There was plenty of time, it seemed. Then another blizzard in early 2007 raised the specter of further collapse, and the archaeologists were forced to begin on 6 February.
Suddenly things started to move very fast. On 7 February thousands of Palestinians gathered around the ramp to protest against the excavations. The imam
s threatened an uprising, and the Palestinian Authority claimed that Israeli bulldozers were trying to undermine the great Al-Aqsa Mosque on the other side of the wall, inside the Noble Sanctuary. Abas Zkoor, an Arab member of the Israeli legislature, supported them: he visited the excavation site and pointed out the remains of a modest medieval mosque buried amid the ruins of the ramp earmarked for removal. There was a riot at Friday prayers, and the police fired rubber bullets into the crowd. On 9 February a crowd in Nazareth waved banners accusing Israel of starting the Third World War.
The prime minister of Israel was forced to make a statement.
The restoration of the Mugrabi path after the place collapsed and was declared a dangerous structure was done in complete coordination with all parties, including foreign countries, relevant Muslim officials, and international bodies. As has been explained, this work is being carried on outside the Temple Mount, and the repairs do not constitute any damage to the Mount or Islamic holy places.
But that didn’t seem to satisfy anyone. Ayatollah Khameini, the religious leader of Iran, thundered, “Islam should show a serious reaction to the Zionist regime’s insult.” The Israeli ambassador in Cairo was given a dressing-down, while Egypt’s parliament discussed whether to rescind its 1979 treaty with Israel. One member of the ruling Egyptian party proclaimed that “nothing will work with Israel except for a nuclear bomb that wipes it out of existence.” King Abdullah of Jordan called on the United States to prevent Israel from continuing the excavations. The president of Turkey sent a group of Islamic archaeologists to inspect the site; they found no wrongdoing but were dismissed by the rest of the Arab world as Zionist patsies. UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations, demanded that the excavations cease until it had been able to prepare a report.
A week after the archaeologists had begun, work stopped, and the scheme for the replacement bridge was withdrawn. An Israeli minister suggested that the project be suspended to avoid compromising Israeli interests at an upcoming Middle East peace conference. But once that conference was over, it was back to business as usual. Another plan for the bridge was submitted, it too was denounced at Friday prayers, rubber bullets were fired once more, and the head of UNESCO had to be called in to mediate. At the time of this writing, the excavation, conservation, alteration—call it what you will—of the Mugrabi path remains incomplete. It’s an insoluble problem for now, but a stalemate cannot be sustained for long. The temporary wooden walkway itself is deteriorating, and all it will take is another storm for the whole structure to collapse.
Still, neither side in the dispute will budge. The wall, and the holy sites on the other side of it, exercise an awesome fascination and power over both of them. For the Jews, the wall is the boundary around the habitation of what they call the Shekinah. The Muslims speak of Sakina. It is something for which there is no word in modern English; we used to call it the Glory of the Lord.
IT’S NOT THE first time that archaeology has sparked a dispute between Israel and Islam. The Waqf, the Muslim authority that controls the day-to-day affairs of the Noble Sanctuary, has consistently opposed Israeli attempts to excavate the wall that surrounds it.
There is a warren of tunnels running alongside the foundations of the Western Wall, hollowed out by an Israeli archaeological team under the leadership of Benjamin Mazar. They had started by digging at the southern end of the Western Wall, cutting away Ottoman, Mameluke, Crusader, Umayyad, Byzantine, and Roman remains to reveal a paved street running along the base of the Kotel. Both street and wall, they claimed, had been built by King Herod the Great in biblical times.
Farther north, these Herodian remains are buried under the heart of the old city of Jerusalem—the Muslim Quarter. If Mazar’s archaeologists had tried digging from the surface there, they would have provoked the same sort of apocalyptic reaction that later attended the archaeological dig around the Mugrabi path. Instead, they proceeded horizontally along the base of the wall by clearing out one ancient cellar after another, removing tons of rubbish from Roman vaults entombed beneath the Muslim Quarter buildings. The underground passage thus excavated stretches for half a mile or so, until the wall turns at the northwest corner of the Noble Sanctuary.
The Western Wall tunnels, as they are known, are open to the public. To tour them is to map the city from beneath: here and there a hole cut into the vaults overhead indicates the location of a well in a square above, or perhaps a trapdoor into somebody’s house. The gigantic stones of the Kotel appear huger still when discovered in the rat runs that lead from cellar to cellar. Eventually the tour comes to an end. “There is a door out here,” says the guide, “but it’s closed”—she pauses—“for security reasons. You’ll have to go back the way you came.”
The Israeli authorities tried to open the northern exit from the tunnels in 1996, but the inhabitants of the Muslim Quarter erupted in protest at what they saw as an Israeli incursion into their part of the city. Fifteen Israeli soldiers and seventy of their own people were killed in the ensuing riots. Eventually the Israelis reached a deal with the Waqf. They would be allowed to open their door during daylight hours, and in return the Waqf would be granted permission to create a new mosque in the Haram.
The Waqf sent in the bulldozers, and by 2000 some six thousand tons of earth had been removed from the southwest corner of the Noble Sanctuary. Now Israel reacted with outrage. An archaeologist at Bar Ilan University demanded to know, “Would anyone in the civilized world agree if some bulldozers were working on the Acropolis in Athens or the Pantheon in Rome, particularly without any type of archeological supervision?” The director of the Waqf replied that all work “has been done under the close supervision of a team of professional Palestinian archaeologists . . . They have examined samples of the excavated dirt and found no structures, artifacts or archaeological remains from any era.” But the Israeli authorities placed an embargo on the Waqf, ordering them to stop all construction.
To this day the Haram is piled high with rubble and soil, which the Israeli authorities have decreed will remain there until Israeli archaeologists have been given access to sift through the evidence. The Waqf won’t let them anywhere near it. Again and again the Muslim authorities have obstructed Israeli archaeology around the Western Wall. It raises the question, doesn’t it, of what it is that Israel is trying to dig up—of what is buried under the Noble Sanctuary of the Dome of the Rock.
EVERYONE KNOWS THE answer. About halfway down the tunnel that runs along the side of the Kotel, there is a small cave furnished with religious books. “This is the holiest spot on the wall,” the guide whispers in the darkness. “You can say a prayer if you like. There was a rose garden here, whose petals were used to make the incense the priests of the Temple of the Jews used in their ceremonies. It was just behind this section of the Kotel that the Holy of Holies once stood. The room behind this wall was the dwelling place of the Shekinah.”
The Palestinians are convinced that the Israelis intend to restore the Temple of the Jews, and they point to a bewildering array of organizations established to that very end. The Yeshiva of the Crown of the Priests exists to conduct research into the rituals of the temple. The society of the Temple Mount Faithful raises funds for the reconstruction of the temple from fundamentalist Christians in the United States. The Temple Institute runs a museum in which all the ritual vestments of the temple are on display, waiting for the day when they can be put into use; they have been adorned with gems and jewelry collected from the devout by the Temple Women. Another group runs a rotational system to ensure that there will always be a rabbi standing by the entrance to the Temple Mount dressed in the white robes of an ancient Levite; and yet another meets to discuss the breeding of a perfectly red heifer, the sacrifice of which was considered by all the ancient texts of Judaism to be the highest form of offering. Every few years, these groups gather under the auspices of the Temple Lovers to discuss their research and to organize visits to the temple site. They dream of rebuilding the temple and of
making it ready for the Shekinah, so that God may once more dwell among men.
This is not an innocent affair of restoration: unlike the Acropolis in Athens, the Temple Mount is not covered in obsolete ruins. The Temple of the Jews cannot be rebuilt unless the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque are demolished. That’s all part of the plan of the Temple Lovers. There have already been countless attempts to destroy the shrines of the Haram e-Sharif with mortar attacks, machinegun fire, and arson. It’s not just mindless aggression; some of the attacks have been deliberately encouraged by rabbis who mutter that, in their observation of historical niceties, “the archeologists sold out to the enemy.” Leaflets handed out by activists are clear in their demands: “The time has come to do what should have been done a long time ago. Government of Israel, remove the Gentiles and the Arabs from the Temple Mount.”
The government of Israel officially condemns this sort of extremism and tells the Waqf that it has nothing to fear. The Waqf doesn’t believe it. Of all the assaults on the Haram e-Sharif, the most extreme was that committed by the government of Israel itself.
AT DAWN ON 7 June 1967, the third day of the Six-Day War, the Israeli army invaded the Arab part of Jerusalem. By eleven o’clock the chief army rabbi, Shlomo Goren, was blowing the shofar at the Kotel. His young soldiers, exhausted and bloodstained, fell on the stones and wept. Then they went up to the door high in the ancient wall and forced it open. They found themselves in the Haram e-Sharif, standing before the Dome of the Rock; but to them it was the Temple Mount, the site of the Holy of Holies, the dwelling place of the Shekinah. One young man later recalled: “I stood there in the place where the High Priest would enter once a year, barefoot after five plunges in the Mikveh [the ritual bath] . . . but I was shod, armed and helmeted, and I said to myself: this is how the conquering generation looks.”
The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories Page 28