Authors: Barbara Rogan
They came to a major intersection, where an arrow to the left indicated Tel Aviv, an arrow to the right, Jerusalem. Micha turned right.
“We’re going to Jerusalem?”
“Through it, on the way to Ein Gedi.”
Grace rested her head on the cool glass, staring out at the countryside. Her eyes felt gritty and her head ached. She’d sat up for most of the twelve-hour flight, and when she finally fell asleep, had been awakened, it seemed minutes later, by an otherworldly chanting: a group of black-frocked men with wide-brimmed hats praying in the back of the plane.
Outside, the sky was ashen and the land lay flat on its side, like a parched yellow dog waiting for the rains. They passed scattered orchards and irrigated fields, verdant outbreaks on the arid face of the earth that nevertheless had not the same hectic greenness as the trees in Lily’s garden, but tended rather toward olive or yellow tones, as if their roots had sucked up the essential color of the earth.
Gradually the land about them grew hilly. They entered into a wide valley dominated by what looked like an ancient fortress surrounded by vineyards and groves of olive trees. “The monastery of Latroun,” Micha announced in a dutiful manner. “The bloodiest battle of the War of Independence was fought here.”
Beyond the valley the road rose steeply, threading through pale stony hills covered with pines that seemed to grow out of bare rock. Micha cut the air conditioner and opened the windows, and the scent of mountain pine wafted into the car. On the right shoulder they passed a red-rusted ruin of an armored vehicle, then another on the left. Relics, Micha said tersely, of the War of Independence, left to rust as memorials to the men and women who died breaking the siege of Jerusalem. Grace, who had never heard of the siege of Jerusalem but didn’t care to ask, glanced upward at the sheer cliffs surrounding the road. If the enemy had ambushed convoys from up there, it was a miracle that anyone had gotten through.
The road took a sudden turn, and suddenly Gracie saw before her a city of shimmering gold, crowning the hills like a celestial oasis. She gasped. Micha glanced over. A slow, sweet smile transformed his face. “Jerusalem,” he said.
The illusion of golden light did not dispel as they entered the city, but rather intensified. All the buildings were built of the same pale stone that made up the surrounding hillsides; under the intense midmorning sun, they glowed with a lustrous sheen. The air was hot and dry and mountain-sweet, the light possessed of a clarity that made Grace feel as if she’d lived all her life underwater and never known it till now.
Micha drove to Zion Square, the heart of the city, throbbing with an astonishing and one would think unstable variety of people. Hasidim in black and striped caftans rubbed elbows with Bermuda shorts-clad tourists, bare-legged young Sabras, soldiers, Arab men in keffiyahs and dusty gray suits, peasant women in Bedouin dress, portly matrons arm in arm, schoolchildren in cotton shorts and blouses, gesticulating merchants in shirt sleeves, made up a kind of human crazy quilt.
Micha pulled up in front of a clothing store on Jaffa Street whose jumbled wares spilled out onto the pavement. Without a word, he left the car idling and dashed inside, emerging minutes later with a plastic bag and a wide-brimmed straw hat. “Try this,” he ordered Grace, passing the hat through her window.
“I don’t need a hat.”
“Put it on.”
Glaring, she put it on her head. It fitted snugly. Micha nodded approval and got back into the car.
“How much was this thing?” Gracie said.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Thanks, but I don’t need you to buy me stuff. Especially stuff I didn’t need to begin with.”
“If you’re going to be any use at all,” he said in a tone of grave doubt, “you have to acclimate yourself. This isn’t New York. One hour, two at most, in the sun without a hat, you’ve got sunstroke.” He tossed her the plastic bag. Gracie opened it and found a metal canteen encased in green burlap, with an adjustable shoulder strap. “Rule number two,” Micha said. “Never go out without a full canteen. I bet you didn’t even bring one.”
“There was hardly time to pack, they hustled me out so fast.”
“Why? What did you do?”
“None of your business.”
They had left the commercial center of Jerusalem and were now approaching the Old City, whose massive fortress walls seemed to stretch out in all directions. There were turrets atop the perimeter wall, and apparently an inner rampart, because people were peering over the top. Minarets, church steeples, and terraced rooftops rose within the walled city, and a silver dome sparkled in the sun. From the outside the Old City looked vast; Grace was ashamed of the miniaturized, Disneyesque conception that had been her expectation. She’d had it all wrong. Though overwhelmingly strange, Jerusalem was real, solid, rooted not only in place but also in time. One could tell just by looking that the walls of the Old City extended below the ground as well as above it, as if the portion above the ground were merely a reflection of the portion below. Old lessons from Sunday school, long forgotten, came back to her: during three thousand years of continuous occupation, usually as the locus of armed struggle, the city had been borne aloft on the tide of history—razed and rebuilt, conquered and reconquered countless times, but never abandoned.
They turned left at Jaffa Gate and drove parallel to the wall until they reached the Damascus Gate, where Gracie shouted, “Stop the car!” so urgently that Micha veered sideward and slammed on the brakes.
“What is it?”
“I want to go in there, inside the walls.”
“No way.” He reached toward the ignition, but Gracie caught his wrist in a grip that awakened his respect.
“It’s important,” she said.
“Tamar will take you. If you walk there with me, you are a target.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“Because you’re ignorant.”
“You wait here, then. I won’t be long.” Before he could stop her, she was out of the car.
“Wait!” he shouted. But she ran without looking back. Cursing, Micha grabbed his rifle from the back seat, locked the car and chased after her. Halfway down the sloping path to the gate, he caught up and grabbed her arm. “I heard you were smart, but you’re acting stupid.”
Gracie felt a rare sense of embarrassment. “It’s just so different from what I expected. We don’t have to stay long—just a minute, to see inside.”
Micha sighed. “Okay,” he said. “But you must stay beside me all the time, do what I say, and go only where I go. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
They continued down the slope; Micha kept one hand distrustfully on Gracie’s arm, the other on his rifle. The broad plaza in front of the Damascus Gate swarmed with Arabs, Bedouins, tourists, donkeys bearing enormous loads. When they reached the city wall, Gracie obeyed an impulse, mysterious yet compelling: she laid her open palm against the stone. Something that felt like electricity but wasn’t passed through the wall into her hand.
She wasn’t imagining. She hadn’t that sort of imagination, and in any case, her expectations were very different. She’d thought of Israel, dismissively, as a Jewish-American colony, a distillation of the Borscht Belt and the Eden Roc. The Jerusalem of her imaginings was a sum of abstractions—a political problem, a nexus of competing religious visions, the otherworldly focus of a Passover prayer: “Next year in Jerusalem.” But when she touched the wall, abstraction became, not flesh, but stone.
She and Micha passed through the Damascus Gate. As if the quality of the light had affected all her senses, Grace seemed to see, hear, and smell with hyper-clarity. One impression did not displace another, but rather piled on, until little room remained for any sense of self. The smell of the souk was utterly strange yet strangely familiar: a piquant blend of roasting meat, tobacco, incense, spice, and dung. Its music was the singsong of vendors and the sibilant, polylingual babble of shopkeepers enticing customers: “Please, miss, come look.
Venez ici, mademoiselle. Ich sprechen sie Deutsch.”
No one called to Gracie. With Micha, she walked in a pocket of silence and sullen glares.
“This used to be the busiest market in Jerusalem,” he said, “but Jews don’t shop here anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Too many incidents. Stonings. Knifings.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “If you were a Palestinian, what would you be doing?”
He resumed his tour-guide voice: “This is the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Tears. Jesus walked through here, carrying the cross on the way to his crucifixion.”
The stone-paved streets, too narrow for cars, were worn to a smooth gloss. Gracie, never prone to mysticism, had to fight off a persistent, illusory sensation that seemed to rise through her feet, a spectral thrumming, a deep vibration like the unseen passage of countless sandaled feet. A distant male chanting reached her ears, and this too seemed illusion, until they turned a corner and came upon a procession of dark-bearded men in black wool cassocks, who held aloft a silver crucifix and chanted as they walked.
“I will take you to one place,” Micha said, “and then we must go. I have to return to my base today.”
“Where are you based?”
“The West Bank.”
Gracie forced herself to hold her tongue, but couldn’t control her eyes. Micha dropped her arm.
They turned off the Via Dolorosa and entered a narrow alley lined with small stone houses and shops. Behind the latticed iron gates of the houses, and atop their terraced roofs, Gracie caught glimpses of grape vines, lemon trees, and flaming bougainvillea. Small children, playing in the street, ran into their houses as Micha walked by.
Wherever she looked, her eye touched on nothing that could not have existed in the same form one thousand years ago. Her family, their problems, seemed infinitely remote in time and space. She was lost in both dimensions, her only anchor the stranger beside her.
Their path led through twists and turns. Once they passed a spice shop that illuminated the street with the scent of unlimited possibilities. Beyond, the alley curved sharply and opened up into an unexpected white square. They sat on a stone bench. Gracie looked about, enchanted by its architectural harmony, the pale stone houses that looked more like natural outcroppings than constructs. There was not a soul in sight, nor a voice heard, only the unfamiliar calls of the birds perched in rooftop gardens and a faint strain of Arabic music that wafted over the fragrant square.
“What is this place?” Grace whispered.
“Just a place,” Micha said, smiling faintly. “If it has a name, I don’t know it.”
“It’s so peaceful, so lovely. How will I ever find my way back here?”
“Jerusalem is full of beautiful spots. You don’t need to come into the Old City. Sometime I’ll take you to Ethiopia Street.”
“What’s there?”
“A convent of African nuns who’ve been here so long even their church has forgotten them. Every day, at dawn and sunrise, they have services; they sing, and their voices are like manna from heaven.”
Suddenly Micha froze. He raised his hand to silence her. Someone was running toward them, down one of the alleys that opened into the square. The clatter of footsteps echoed off the stone houses: impossible to say where it came from. Micha jumped up. Rifle in hand, he spun around. The sound stopped; there was a momentary silence followed by a low whine, a sharp crack. A rock the size of a baseball flew past Gracie’s ear.
She wheeled around. In the entrance to the spice alley, a skinny boy of thirteen or fourteen shifted a rock from his left hand to his right and drew it back.
Micha shouted and ran toward him. The boy let the rock fly, not at Micha but at Gracie. She ducked and felt a searing pain race along the top of her head. Then she was on the ground, and blood was dripping onto the stone pavement. Grace touched her scalp and her hand came away bloody.
The boy ran. Micha started to follow, looked back at Gracie, hesitated, and returned. He knelt beside her. “Where are you hurt?”
She touched the crown of her head.
A woman came out of one of the houses bordering the square and slowly approached them. She asked a question in Arabic. Micha answered in her language. She pointed to a doorway and they spoke for some moments.
“Can you walk?” he asked Gracie.
“Of course,” she said haughtily. She raised a hand, and he hauled her to her feet. The little square spun around her, and she would have fallen but for his strong left arm. His right, she noticed, remained on the stock of his rifle, and behind the dark glasses his eyes darted about the square.
Across the threshold the light was wonderfully dim, and the temperature dropped twenty degrees. The stone walls of the house must have been two feet thick, more effective than air conditioning. The Arab woman led them into her kitchen and seated Grace beside a primitive sink. Beneath her shapeless dress she was thin to the point of gauntness and her face was deeply lined, but Gracie perceived that she was younger than she’d thought, no more than thirty.
Her cousin disappeared. They heard him moving quickly through the rest of the house, opening and closing doors. Gracie lowered her eyes in shame, but the woman seemed to accept the intrusion as a matter of course. She soaked a clean white towel in cold water and began sponging blood off Gracie’s face and head. Micha came back into the kitchen. Gracie said at once, “Why did you search her home?”