“Asfeh,” I said, in my halting, odd Arabic, “il-walad bidi aruch,” “the boy would like to go.” I didn’t know the word for “turn,” didn’t know if “go” would indicate what I meant, and was pretty sure that I was conjugating everything wrong. The girls looked at me. One of them dimpled into a smile, her eyes pale green and her cheeks plump. “You speak Arabic!” she said, as if that was as strange as anything in the zoo. She stood up and her friend reluctantly followed, dragging her hand away from the rope. Sam ran to the swing and grabbed it.
“Does he know Arabic too?” she pointed at my son.
“Not really,” I said, “shwaya shwaya,” which meant, “just a little bit.”
“Mmmhmm” she said, her gaze sweeping me up and down, and her friend pulled her away by the hand. Their voices behind me were musical, amused.
The children were happiest in the petting zoo beside the park. Noor tried to feed the baby goat the car keys, but Jenna stopped her. Past the sculpture garden were the hills of Jerusalem, brown now after the long summer. On the bench two girls were taking off their robes and headscarves. They were part of a school group; as I looked around I could see a number of the girls disrobing. The robes and scarves were Arab dress, but the girls were speaking Hebrew, sighing with relief as they divested themselves of their hot, cumbersome layers. I went over to one of the girls on the bench. She was finger-combing her curly dark hair, and with her walnut skin she could have passed for Palestinian before the scarf came off.
“What’s up?” I said. “Why were you all dressed up?”
She looked up at me, surprised to be addressed. “You know, it’s one of those things. Dress like them, see how it feels. And then we have to write an essay.” Her friends were calling to her, flashing mocking glances at me. She rolled the robe into her backpack, slipped it over her shoulders, and stood up. She wore a long skirt now, and the three-quarter length sleeves of an orthodox schoolgirl. She leaned over and grabbed Sam’s chin. Sam, resistant to being claimed, shook his head away.
“What a sweetie! A blondie!” she said, looking at my son and then at my dark hair. She rejoined her friends.
I knew a man who had survived the Holocaust because of his blond hair. He had false papers, and because of his pale skin, his blue eyes, his blond hair, he was able to pass as a non-Jewish child and stayed at the house of a farmer who had been a friend of his father’s. I had never imagined having a blond child.
“Not blond,” Sam told me once. “I have gold hair.”
These religious Jewish girls dressed as Arabs at the zoo could have easily walked through the Arab market in the middle of the day in their costumes without anyone realizing they were Jews. At least, I thought they could have done. They had the same Semitic features: dark, thickly lined eyes, long black hair peeking out under their headscarves. Did it make it worse, that we looked like sisters and brothers? And Jenna, dressed as she was in jeans and a T-shirt, just looked American.
I wondered what people saw when they saw Jenna and me together, what they imagined we were. Even before I opened my mouth, people addressed me in English. How did they know? I asked Jenna, and she said, “Well, look at you. It’s obvious.” She refused to explain herself further.
We stopped to see the lion tamarins in the monkey house before we left, in an indoor enclosure where the air was heavy and stank. They were a new acquisition at the zoo—tiny golden monkeys with leonine manes who stared at us, gripping their bars, their faces masks of accusation. Zac clung to the rope and would not move. Suddenly he was laughing as I had never seen him laugh before. He was delighted by the monkeys, and their acrobatic flips and feints. He pointed and hooted at them, and ducked under the rope to get closer to their cage.
“Out,” said Jenna. “Out.”
She pulled on his arm and he darted down with his toothless mouth and bit her. Her other arm flashed out, fast as a snake, and slapped him.
“You bite me, I’ll break your arm,” she leaned down and hissed. She saw me watching, shrugged her shoulders. “They have to learn,” she said. Without thinking, I had covered Sam’s ears. He hadn’t taken it in, anyway, was still looking at the monkeys.
Zac wasn’t crying, which surprised me, but he gazed at his mother in black fury. I wasn’t sure what to say. I thought about taking Sam home but we were stranded—we were in a zoo in the middle of Malha. Even the bus was a hot walk up the hill.
I tried, “Aren’t you worried that you’ll scare him?”
“He’s used to it,” she said. “Come on, he doesn’t think I’ll actually do it. But the threat, you know, it gets him to stop biting. He’s too old to bite.”
Too old to use a pacifier, I thought, looking at his mouth, now stopped up again in the constant suck. Too old to drink from a bottle. Too young to drink Red Bull. Too old to be silent.
And me?
18.
It felt as if someone was taking me apart, brick by brick. It suited my mood that all of central Jerusalem was under construction. Clouds of yellow dust hung in the air and it seemed that every other block some building was in the process of being destroyed or rebuilt. Down the street from the YMCA a massive hotel was rising from the ground. The builders had been told by the city to preserve the historic Ottoman facade, so the outer wall still stood, arches onto nothingness. You could look through and see the pit. The air was loud with the sound of diggers and cranes, and on the safety wall around the construction site the builders had wrapped a banner depicting the street as it would appear when the hotel was completed. The dream of the city was wrapped around the incomplete skeleton of the real one.
Then every so often, in the middle of a golden mile, beside a condo of multi-million dollar apartments and a four-star hotel, was an abandoned lot, overgrown and strewn with rubbish. The empty plots were contested land: in some cases, they had been in the courts for decades. And many of the beautiful apartments were empty. They called them ghost apartments, because they were inhabited for only a few months a year, Passover, summertime, when their wealthy French or American or Canadian owners came to Israel on vacation. The new mayor had said he’d impose a special tax on the ghost apartments and empty neighbourhoods in order to dissuade these wealthy squatters, who had left no space for local residents. Prices in the city were unaffordable, and University students had been driven to live on the very outskirts of Jerusalem in ultra-orthodox areas where they were often unwelcome.
To get downtown from the YMCA, I often cut through the old Muslim cemetery. It was in a shocking state of dilapidation, the ground hairy with weeds and sparkling with broken glass. Plastic bags were caught on the branches of leafless shrubs, and gravestones were tilted and tattooed with the faded, ineradicable markings of old graffiti—“maavet l’aravim,” “death to Arabs”—which seemed, in this case, redundant. There was a small mausoleum with a domed roof, and on the wall someone had drawn the ghostly outline of the figure of a man. At night, it was a hot spot for pick-ups. Even in the day I saw young men lurking off the path, their gazes filled with dark intent.
The Wiesenthal Centre had appropriated part of the cemetery to build a museum of tolerance: it was like the punchline of a joke. So far they had disinterred four layers of bodies, and the bulldozers plowed up gravestones by night. Their defence had a kind of kettle logic—Freud has a story about a man who borrows a kettle and returns it with a hole, claiming he’s returned the kettle undamaged, and the hole has always been there, and that he never borrowed the kettle in the first place. The Wiesenthal Centre said the museum was not to be built on the cemetery, but would be adjacent to the cemetery; that those weren’t real bodies under those tombstones, but tombs placed over empty ground to claim the land; and that the cemetery had been desacralized by the mufti long ago, when part of it was sold to build the Palace Hotel, and moreover, that the cemetery was shamefully neglected by the Waqf, who only cared about it now to spite the Wiesenthal Centre. Anyway, they
said, they weren’t building the museum over the cemetery but over what used to be an old parking lot.
I’m guessing the bones disagreed.
Frank Gehry had been commissioned to build the new museum in the shape of a fruit bowl. Simon started a petition and wrote them a letter of protest against the desecration of the cemetery. In response they had put him on their email list and now sent him fundraising pleas.
Sometimes I walked through the cemetery, past downtown, and all the way to the market. The fruit market was one of my favourite places in Jerusalem. Back home in the winter almost all of the fruit and vegetables were imported, and I was accustomed to carrying pineapples home in the snow. In Montreal in the wintertime none of the fruit tasted right; it tasted like a thin, watery approximation of itself—tomatoesque, or mangoish. In Jerusalem the produce was like the weather; it swept through the stalls and then vanished like a cloud. It was frustrating when you needed a zucchini, say, or a lime, but it was exciting to see oranges give way to pomelos. And there were fruits that I had never tasted, or because I had only had imported versions, had never really tasted: guavas for instance, which I had never understood before, peppery and sweet, perfuming my hands and my house.
A neighbour came by in guava season and saw a bowl of the pale, green fruit on the table.
“Ugh,” he said, “I hate guavas. I can’t stand the smell of them. My wife buys them occasionally, but she keeps them wrapped in the fridge. You have to be careful with guavas or the smell will take over the whole house.”
But that was precisely what I wanted: to fill my house with these delicate, vanishing smells—jasmine when it was in bloom, guavas when they were in season. I could not retain the scent or taste of a guava when it was gone, so I gorged on them when they were available, frequently bringing my hands to my face to sniff the perfumed, intimate scent because it made me so absurdly happy.
For a long time, people were afraid to go to the central market in Jerusalem. There were frequent terrorist attacks, documented with graphic pictures in the newspaper, and the destruction seemed more devastating surrounded by all of that abundance, the gorgeous, ripe, indifferent pyramids of fruit. And then there were the bodies in the aisles, surrounded by fallen fruit from the toppled stalls: a foot, an orange, a head, and the broken carcass of a melon. But it had been several years since the last bomb, and the market was now full again.
I went on Fridays, when the foot traffic was shoulder to shoulder. There was a cheese store, where they sold two hundred kinds of cheese and held giddy wine tastings on Friday mornings; there were candy shops with long tables of brightly wrapped sweets, and bins filled with jellybeans that looked like rocks, jawbreakers that looked like eyeballs, sweet and sour worms.
The night before, when the children were finally in bed, I had sat down at the kitchen table, the laptop in front of me. I wasn’t writing but I was trying to ready myself for writing, or for not writing, which I’d been doing much more of recently. Simon came in and went straight to the fridge. “You won’t believe who I saw today,” he said, scattering sandwich supplies over the counter.
“I’m working,” I said.
“Right,” he said. I could hear the flinch in his voice. “You’re working.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I said, too quickly. “You know I have to finish this by the summer. I’m not going to get another extension.”
“I didn’t say anything,” he said. “Get back to work, that’s fine.” His voice was like the voice of a stranger.
In the market there was an “etrog man,” who sold elixirs based on what he claimed were rabbinic recipes that promised to restore fertility, end insomnia, cure temper. The next day I stopped and bought the etrog juice for marital harmony, a thick, bright green citron potion that was more bitter than sweet. I didn’t believe in it, but it couldn’t hurt.
In the early years of our marriage, Simon and I had this game we played where we imagined being other people—the Lycra-clad couple speeding past us on matching bikes as we walked in the park, their bodies greyhound-sleek, bent forward in mutual diligence; the old man and lady with their matching berets and walking sticks, strolling slowly in companionable silence. We saw ourselves especially in the couples with young children, back before we had children, tossing a ball, pushing a stroller up the street. And then life got busy and we didn’t have any time to play those games, couldn’t imagine being other people, it was so exhausting being ourselves. Though I kept playing the game on my own, trying on other lives like other outfits, slipping them on and off in the secret chamber of my head. As I drank the syrupy, bittersweet juice I wondered if we had been better off when we imagined being other people together.
The market had shifting, kaleidoscopic displays of produce, and darker seamier alleyways that smelled like death, where stripped carcasses hung from hooks and butchers wiped their hands on blood-stained aprons. Boys carried samples of halva on trays with their arms raised high like waiters in a Chaplin film, men played backgammon in the alleys, and tourists with cameras hunted Chasidim buying challah. There were baskets of rose petals, heaped cones of spices, and dizzy, lucky, glutted flies.
One day a mild drizzle meant the lanes were almost empty. Strawberries had just come into season, and the bins were overflowing with that red, beefy, heart-shaped fruit. Squashed strawberries stained my sandals
underfoot. I heard a man singing from behind his stall. He didn’t have any customers; there was no custom to be had. He just sang for the pleasure of it, for his strawberries—“Tut Sadeh, tut sadeh, gam bezol vegam yafeh....”—“Strawberries, strawberries, both cheap and beautiful….”
I was about to leave the market when I saw an old woman standing on the sidewalk, looking lost, her hands full of shopping bags. She was as wide as she was tall, though she only reached about up to my chest. Her face was like a piece of paper that had been creased again and again. She was overdressed for the weather, but it was difficult to tell if that was out of modesty or just old age, hidden under layers and layers of clothing.
“Do you need help?” I said. I had an hour before I needed to be back at the daycare.
The woman looked up at me from under her wool beret. Her eyes were pale blue and bulbous, like a toad. She also had a toad’s wide mouth, leathery skin, and disapproving glare. Her voice was hoarse and low.
“Yes,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you.”
We were speaking Hebrew, and her voice was so thick and deep that it was difficult to understand her, though her words were simple. “Take these bags for me,” she said. “I live right here, near the market, not far. It won’t take long, no, it won’t take long.”
She dropped her bags and dug her fingers into my arm, and I was shocked at her strength. The bags were heavier than I had expected. I sagged under them and under the pressure of her fingers. She pulled me down the street, and for a moment the stalls on the street were like the trees in a forest, and I was like a child in a fairy tale, led to some obscure destiny.
After a few blocks, she stopped at a small blue door. There was no number; it was so unobtrusive I would have never noticed that there was a door at all. I dropped the bags, my fingers cramped, tie-dyed red and white from the weight of the plastic. “Have a good day,” I said nervously, but instead of picking up the bags the woman said, “Please, can’t you take them upstairs for me? I’m a very old woman.”
Her staircase was dark and windowless and smelled of shoes and garbage. The woman had an enormous keychain, and it seemed like it took every key she had to unlock the door at the top of the stairs. “You can put the bags in the kitchen,” she said, and gestured into the gloom of the apartment. The curtains were drawn, and the lights were off. But I could see that the walls were covered in newspaper, and there were piles of newspapers and letters on the floor. The sink was full of dishes, and the table was also covered in books and papers. She cleared a space for the bags with h
er hand. The room was sad and reeked of old age and neglect. I couldn’t wait to get back outside.
But the woman grabbed my wrist again. I would wear those circular marks for the next three days. “Come,” she said, “let me show you my son.”
Instead of pulling me deeper into the apartment she pulled me to the wall, where I realized that the yellowed newspaper was not many pages but one page, taped again and again and again so that it papered the room. There was a faded photograph of a boy in a soldier’s uniform. The headline said he had been killed. I couldn’t read the date.
“My son,” she said, and stood there, hanging onto my arm like a dog with a bone.
I stood still, as if I had been turned to stone. “I’m sorry about your son,” I said. “I’m very sorry.” I stood there, thinking of Gabriel and of Sam. I was going to be late to pick them up, and though it wasn’t reasonable, I was suddenly afraid for them.
“You’re sorry?” The woman said. “Is that all you can say, that you’re sorry?” Her eyes seemed to grow ever larger in her face and out of her mouth poured a torrent of words, an excremental river in which I could catch only passing curses and phrases as I backed away towards the door and down the long staircase and into the lemon sunshine and clean air of the street. The next week I looked for her blue door again and could not find it.
But few of my days were that dramatic. Sometimes instead of going downtown or to the market I’d walk down through Yemin Moshe and up the ramp to Jaffa Gate. Yemin Moshe hugged the hillside and was impossibly picturesque; no matter how many times I walked through the alleyways I never saw an actual resident, as if real life would mar the perfection of the miniature stone houses, the famously colourful doors, the flowerboxes overflowing with geraniums and laburnum and the walls feathered with vines. I did bump into tour groups, often on photo safaris, each angling towards the same iron-grilled
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