The American Colony
by MOLLY YOUNG
We get on our flight from Newark, an eleven-hour trip to Tel Aviv. You can pay for the onboard cocktails in shekels. PA announcements are made in English and Hebrew, and the cabin is polka-dotted with yarmulkes. I am still thinking about the hotel in Tel Aviv, and whether it will have a pool, and whether there will be cute boys.
These things repeat on a loop with the quote from David Copperfield that "trifles make the sum of life."
We get to Tel Aviv and the first thing we see is a sunset that looks like a painting. Our hotel on the beach is glossy and normal, except that you flash your passport to enter and a loud alarm goes off sporadically in the lobby.
I sit in a recessed lounge area drinking tasteless Maccabee beer and eating pretzels. It is the Sabbath and everything is closed; I can’t put on my swimsuit and explore the pool.
Our travel group is my father, my stepmother, and my stepmother's mother. I am assigned to share a room with Lois, the step-grandmother. She has traveled everywhere at least twice (I remember a large map riddled with thumbtacks on the wall of her condominium) and is sharp for her age. I like her: she has clear blue eyes, a wary look and the posture of a turtle.
At 6 a.m. the sky lightens over the Mediterranean, which looks like Cape Cod. Planes fly low over the water. There are a few guests in the lobby reading The Jerusalem Post. It is beginning to smell like breakfast rolls. I bet the rolls will be hard and tasteless in the way that many things in travel are worse than expected yet (because of their novelty) are not disappointing.
Another example of this is the marble-floored lobby bathroom that smells overpoweringly of human shit. Or the difficult European showers. Or the plentiful but wilting flowers in the lobby.
A pianist at night plays Phantom of the Opera on a nougat-colored instrument. I am eating candy bars for dinner and watching him play, this old man who looks unhappy and checks his cellphone between songs.
We visit the spot where the Israeli Declaration of Independence was signed.
"How does statehood feel?" I ask my dad as we step back into the sunlight amid fluttering stars of David. Later we have salads at a corner café, containing what Lois determines the finest feta cheese she has ever eaten.
That night I wake at 1 a.m. to Lois' snoring. Take a sleeping pill and when that doesn't work, I get up. The air in our room smells of old people - that mixture of BO and sour breath and something sweet. I wish for mini-marshmallows to plug in my nose and ears.
People keep asking me for my impressions of Tel Aviv. Mostly I think it is a funny intersection of familiar and unfamiliar cultures: surfers and soldiers. Surfers, I notice when I walk down the beach, look the same everywhere. Blonde hair and skin the color of beef jerky. The soldiers wear green uniforms and carry M-16s; they are younger than me and it is true that a man looks more virile in uniform.
The hotel breakfast buffet is heaven for a culinary anthropologist.
The meal takes place in a large room that overlooks the Mediterranean. The buffet, like any display of American-style abundance (Manhattan delis, Super Safeways) is remarkable only for its variation, not its quality.
There is a bar of smoked fish next to a cheese spread with butter and "margarina." Canned fruit cocktail, coffee cake, chopped cucumbers, cocoa pops and stuffed grape leaves. The Asian tourists eat plates of canned peaches and tea. The Germans marshal every pastry in sight (and confirm every undistinguished stereotype associated with them.) I look around the room and imagine that I can spot the predictable markers of every nationality: the Americans acting cheery but provincial; the Germans eager but piggish, and the Asians methodical but withdrawn.
The next morning I wake up even earlier. 2 a.m.. I take a sleeping pill and slither back into bed, but am up and dressed five minutes later, heading down to the lobby to read and write. Can never resist snatching a few hours of insulation from everyone else.
At 5 a.m. the air smells again like rolls, and I look for something to eat. There's a tray of chocolate croissants left over from a banquet, so I take one and eat it with orange juice. This reminds me that I've just woken up from a dream in which I was eating melted butter. Whole sickening cups of it. I was glad when I got up to find my stomach empty instead, though I felt greenish, still; the color of the Israeli militant's jacket.
Soldiers walk along the streets with their guns and I do not know whether it is the gun itself or the gait necessitated by the gun (loping, territorial) that is so glamorous. Any man carrying a large object provokes similar response: surfers with their boards, musicians wielding guitars and workmen hauling 2 x 4s.
Do women find it attractive because they identify with the object being manipulated? I don’t. I'm just envious of the skill. The independence of ability.
Then we fly from Tel Aviv to Eilat, and from Eilat we cross the border to Jordan and drive to Petra. Our check-in girl at the tiny airport in Tel Aviv is named Inbar and she looks like a luscious rodent. My dad buys a bottle of soda from the snack counter. What is it? I ask. I don't know, he says, I just asked for something orange. I take the bottle and read the label. "500 ML Orange Drink."
We are asked a series of questions by an Israeli security guard, and though I have no bomb or liquid explosives, it is unnerving. Have you been here before? Yes. Have you learned Hebrew? No. Never? Never. Why are you here? To see relatives. What are their names? Menachem and Aya. And have you been here before? Yes. And have you learned Hebrew?
Then we sit at a table in the airport and the elders begin talking about feet. "I remember you used to visit a chiropodist to get your corns removed," I hear my stepmom saying before I tune out. And then, "They were a really nice group, the podiatrists. They loved to dance. Do you remember Ira? Ira Bobkiss? He's from Slovenia or one of those countries. He married Carol."
We fly to Eilat, at the southern tip of Israel, and cross the border to Aqaba in Jordan. The desert beneath us is a flat plane, like cheese pizza, with mountainous crust. The sand is marked with patterns that look like bird claws or capillaries or crystals. I think for a second about organic forms, and then I think about what a nice tan I could get here.
The next day we hike at Petra. It is grand but wearying. Monuments, like movie stars, are either exhausting or bereft in person. There are sheep and crags and cliffs, caves dotting the mountainside like butterscotch chips in a blondie. The caves are perplexing.
Families lived in small rooms attached to tombs containing the bodies of their relatives. It would be like sleeping and eating in a studio apartment with six to ten corpses in the closet. Wood-colored men in keffiyehs – red for Jordan and black for Palestine – kick donkeys and sell postcards along the way. I think about how the men live in government apartments and I wonder how they keep clean. The logistics of hygiene.
All the things that you forget about and rediscover in every poor country are here: pregnant dogs, squashed roaches, sour Coca-Cola.
Cleanliness is a luxury again, and even the highest standard in Jordan is miles below the average dorm room at school. “Under no circumstance should you drink tap water in Jordan,” warns the guidebook. When I accidentally swallow a pill with tap water, I spit out the pill, scour my mouth and drink a glass of whiskey to kill bacteria.
After Petra I come home alone, order room service and leave a tip so extravagant (on my dad’s bill) that the waiter comes back to make sure I have calculated correctly.
Dusty from the caves, I strip and condense my clothes into a watermelon-sized ball, eat half a dozen rolls from the service cart and a king’s ransom of Danish butter, then fell into bed in a digestive haze.
At night it takes two washcloths, five Kleenex and the sleeve of my robe to remove all the black eyeliner around my eyes. The Jordanian women wear a ton of makeup – to compensate for head-to-toe shrouding? – and it looks so good that I’ve culturally immersed myself through imitation.
Sleep is still difficult, and I’ve begun to use the old trick of scattering things across the bed (books and scarves and camera) so that when I lie down, it feels not so much like rest as pause. From which point I fall asleep, if I am lucky. Sometimes I go to bed in my jeans for the same purpose.
To get to Petra you first walk through a broad valley for twenty minutes. Then you enter the Siq, a mile of gorge that narrows until you come upon the façade of the Treasury.
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In school my professors are always harping on the postmodern irony of observing something in real life and then being vividly reminded of seeing it first on TV or in a movie. I wonder where my reaction to the Treasury might be theoretically classified.
It looked, I thought, just like Indiana Jones, a movie which I have not even seen. Milling outside the Treasury were tourists and a duo of sickly camels. Later I found out that all camels are sick-looking. This dampened, though did not extinguish, my desire to eat some camel meat. (In the way that some people collect Lladro figurines or pursue the goal of seeing every Douglas Sirk film, my organizing principle of spare time is to find and eat exotic meats.) Camel, I know, is not too difficult to find. The loin is the choicest cut, and the hump is all bone and fat.
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All along the way, as I walk with my father, the local boys stare. “How many camels?” they shout, mock-bargaining for my hand in marriage. One man offers only a donkey. “That’s not so bad,” my dad considers. “I wonder if I could get him up to two.”
Later I walk home alone, knowing that I am asking for unwanted attention. And it comes. I wrap the scarf around my head, prop up the collar of my coat, cover my eyes with sunglasses. But this is no less a provocation. “Would you like to ride a donkey? For free? To my cave?” someone asks me, and I think how all boys are exactly the same.
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I like going to the hotel bar because it feels like something Joan Didion would do. Her hand would be trembling on the highball glass and she’d have a nervous headache where I am robust and refreshed, but the referent is a useful one. I think of Didion when I drink alone and of M.F.K. Fisher when I eat alone (“There are few people alive with whom I care to pray, sleep, dance, sing or share my bread and wine.”)
Breakfast at the hotel is bad and I learn to just drink the coffee and wait for lunch. Dishes are set out on marble tables–– carafes of low fat milk and “long life milk”, suspect meats and overboiled eggs.
Joan
The hotel is Swiss, and everywhere you look there is evidence of perplexing Swiss tastes. At breakfast, for instance, alongside the fruit cocktails are platters of elaborate pastries shaped like violins or mountain tops with sugary snow.
The sundaes I order from room service are topped with whipped cream thicker than Brie, and the generic Ottoman art on the walls hangs next to surrealist interpretations of the Mona Lisa. There are Toblerone bars in every room, a clothesline in the bathroom, and the nicest imaginable gym.
After coffee I shower and put on a robe. When I see my face and wet hair in the mirror, I ache for him. The feeling is unexpected and it is poignant for just that reason. I am not usually hit with emotions; I conjure them myself with prompts. Here is sadness that could be longing.
I dress and go downstairs to the internet console to write what I feel before it can be romanticized or obfuscated in the impenetrable eloquence that makes most of my correspondence a muddle.
(This is always the danger for one who likes language for its own sake. I used to invent words and chant them to myself. A lot of the things I’ve said and written–– even accusations, apologies, exonerations–– have been like these invented words. I realized this last year upon reading a snippet of Virginia Woolf that included the advice to “write exactly what you feel." I had never done this, and I tried to start. The language habit, rather than disappearing, just started to manifest itself more innocently. It sparks up when I see certain phrases – this morning it was ‘English cake’ on a card at the buffet table – and they spin around in my head like a gyroscope until they run themselves out.)
Virginia Woolf
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I go to the hotel library, an empty room where I can read uninterrupted. From the window I watch men trailing donkeys and soldiers smoking cigarettes. I note without guilt that I'd rather sit indoors with a book all day rather than go out sightseeing and collecting memories. I think again about Ruth when she wet herself the other day. It happened in the taxi on the long drive to the hotel, I guess, and she was without complaint in the hotel lobby while we waited for our room assignments. I wonder if the indignities of old age cease to be jarring and simply become hassles after a point. If I were her I would probably observe my body with a sort of rational detachment, as though it were failing and not I.
But speculation is one thing and experience another. Perhaps she was mortified. It is not something I can easily imagine other than by comparison to the times when I've gotten my period unexpectedly and bled through my pants. This has happened at school, at movie theaters, at restaurants. It still happens. When it does, a sort of clinical voice in my head assumes the mental reins. "It's OK," the voice says, "Go to the bathroom. Now tie your sweater around your waist." And step by step the voice leads me to calm down until a change of pants can be found.
This is what empathy is made of, these imperfect comparisons. And yet there are other experiences I've never had - not even close - but which I can also invoke. Everyone has these. The most vivid is that of getting hit by a car. It is a sensation so lucid that I almost expect, crossing the street, that it will happen. I know the sound of impact, the thump of my body and breaking of glass.
What makes me wonder whether it is more than a morbid imagining is the fact that I can hear and feel the car crash without seeing it. This is how I know it isn't a holdover image from a movie or a dream, but instead maybe a kind of fate. It is like arriving in Los Angeles for the first time and finding out that the city fulfills its stereotypes precisely - you feel like something of a prophet, and what should have been a grave disappointment turns out (perversely) to gratify you instead. So I am always prepared to be hit by something.
The second day I go to Petra it smells overwhelmingly of horseshit. This is because it is 3 p.m., and the shit has been accumulating all day. At the entrance the guard inspects my ticket and asks if I am alone. Yes. ‘Good luck,’ he says, and I wonder if this is the standard greeting or if it is tailored to my circumstance.
When I reach the Treasury I sit down on a bench and rest. In front of the carved sandstone is an arena for camels, tourists, toilets and a snack shop. Looking around I see that no one is alone but me. I invent a story and imagine revealing it to the man sitting next to me on the bench.
‘You here all alone?’ he asks with a friendly Texas accent (I imagine.) ‘I am,’ I say with a civic smile that recognizes our shared nationality.
‘Family back at the hotel?’
‘Oh no. I’m traveling alone. I work for the government,’ I say, with the modest smile of someone who has repeated an interesting fact numerous times.
‘You do? Now, how old are you?’ he asks with pleased surprise.
‘Twenty-three,’ I say, adding a few years to my age. ‘They get us right out of college. It’s the Department for Cultural Observation, they call it, sort of like the friendlier face of foreign policy. We collect informal data on daily life in areas of interest, like the Middle East.’ Sensing his interest, I continue. ‘They train us in a sort of boot camp, like the CIA, only it’s not as cool as it sounds. It’s only cool because I can’t tell you what goes on there. After that – and they weed out the kids who just want a vacation on the government’s dime – we get our assignments and go. And here I am, observing.’
‘Well that’s something. That’s really something. Sue, did you hear that? This young lady works for the government. She’s an undercover tourist.’
This is how I imagine the conversation. But the man next to me doesn’t strike up conversation, and when he gets up to talk to Sue he speaks in Russian.
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That night in the hotel bar I eat salty nuts and whiskey for dinner. It feels like Casablanca, and I think about affecting a husky voice and brusque manner. Of course I identify with the male character of the film.
An incongruous mosaic of a tiger on the wall reminds me of a tiger attack reported in the news shortly before I left. A tiger leaped over an empty moat and scaled a wall to escape her enclosure at the San Francisco Zoo. The victim, specified in the papers as a seventeen-year-old-male from San Jose, may or may not have been teasing the tiger. It did not specify whether the tiger ate the boy. She was gunned down near the concession stand where I used to eat French fries as a kid. Near the food stand was a monkey habitat, and a smell of piss was always mingled with the fries and corn dogs. Seagulls gawked about there too, their beaks tipped in red, and I thought it was ketchup until I realized that it was an indigenous mark.
When Dad, my stepmother and Ida appear in the bar to see if I want dinner I am drunk enough to go to the buffet with them. ‘What an expansive Jimmy Buffet,’ I say loopily as we fill our plates. There is Russian salad and other things pastel with mayonnaise, and a dish of boiled eggs latticed with ketchup. We all fork a portion of the eggs onto our plates, for novelty’s sake. Hotel food, inseparable from its context, is a group not without funny virtues.
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Over coffee the next morning Dad explains the history of the Jews to me. ‘The Jews fled Egypt and came to Canaan led by Moses.’ It is real basic stuff. Stuff I do not know. Afterward I go to the lobby restroom and when I come out, across from the service elevator, I see the door close on eight or nine hotel employees. All crowded in. I take the stairs back up to my room because the elevator seems indulgent.
In the library I take the tourist pamphlet out of my bag and read about Petra. I have not yet been to Ad-Deir, the Monastery, a structure that sits atop a flight of 800 rocky steps. Huge in size yet beautifully awesome, reads the pamphlet.
A small photograph shows the toast-colored Monastery surrounded in rubble. The sights of Petra are sublime in person but in photographs they remind me of many other exotic things that have depreciated in value over the centuries: tapestries, ivory, cinnamon.
It is the functional details that snag my attention when I am walking through the ruins. The design of a water filter, or a tiny channel used to drain the blood from animal sacrifices. The fact that people lived in the caves until just recently, when the government moved them into apartment blocks out of sight. From the valley you can still spot locals way up in the hills, moving like raisins from place to place.
I think again about the living spaces with their adjacent tombs. The graves are carved right into the floor, some full-sized and some very small, not for children but for the dead who have been dismembered. The tombs are right next to the beds. What would it be like to live with the dead? Were they really dead, then, if they were so near, or just more quietly alive? And the smells – they must have prepared the bodies somehow. Children sleeping next to their dead parents. Wives cooking dinner with their dead husbands, the food smells mixing with the body smells.
It is too dim inside the caves to take good pictures but my stepmother is snapping away in the darkness. She tells us about her brother Mark who takes digital photographs of his family on vacations and then photoshops the other tourists out of the picture. Fantastic! I think. Photoshopping his own memories, editing experience as though it were a piece of fiction that could be revised to perfection.
My dad wanders into the library where I am reading to tell me the Plan. Every day there is a Plan. While he is reciting it I cross my eyes gruesomely and interrupt, asking if he’d still love me if I looked like this. He makes ambivalent noises. One thing I love about dad is how uninhibited he is about making noises. Often I will hear him in the kitchen preparing a snack, beeping or imitating a car horn. Sometimes we do nonverbal call and response routines, trading sounds like cavemen.
After the noises and the Plan we sit silently for a moment. Dad examines his midsection, poking the flesh that billows slightly over the waistband of his jeans, palpating it disapprovingly. ‘Everyone has a muffin-top,’ I say, exhibiting my own. I am acting very daughterly, which is something I do too often for my age.
Even when I am not with Dad, I tend to act like Scout Finch. Boyish, loyal, charmingly impertinent. It is a good defense against sexual attention, albeit one not convincingly maintained past the age of sixteen. Yet I revert to it often because it is the only way for a pretty girl to be friendly but not inviting; generous but not suggestive.
If I looked anything but the way I do, the daughterly act would be a freakish one. Like Baby Jane with her strawberry ice cream cones. But it works because I am small and small-featured. So many of our habits and experiences are determined by these details of physiognomy.
At the hotel, this daughterly act also has the advantage of smoothing over the uncomfortable distance between the guests and employees. I have to pretend a child’s unawareness of the difference between rich and poor as I order room service sundaes. Otherwise I’d be too humiliated to sign the bill. If I clap my hands and giggle when the tray arrives, I can pretend that the waiter does not know that I perfectly understand the chasm between us. We can enact, instead, the universally delightful circumstance of a child receiving sweets. I know this is ridiculous for a 21-year old in eyeliner, but now it is instinctive.
I spend all day in the library again, looking through history books and maps. One book designates Muslims among the most photogenic and perplexing people in the world. I learn how to be a good Bedouin dinner guest, molding balls of rice, meat and bread like donut holes to pop into my mouth without touching fingers to lips. (Repeat until sated.) This is desert hospitality.
Another passage explores the drama of feminine aesthetic expression reflected in Jordanian dress. A lot of the women here, I notice – although shrouded head to toe – wear piles of makeup. The application reminds me of porn star makeup in America. Those striations of purple, silver and black eyeshadow, liner and mascara. Blush, gloss, all of it. There is a television program in Arabic that shows women undergoing makeovers. The cosmetic applications are like a millefeuille cake. So many thin sweet layers.
I flip through the book and eat chocolate bars that I have pocketed from the mini-bar. The Muslim costume is erotic, I am thinking, distractingly erotic when you start to dwell upon it. There is the stringent covering of the body and then the naked face with its cartoonishly inked womanly features.
The tension between exposed and hidden flesh leads my imagination in all sorts of wild directions. When I get to a chapter that covers Islamic hygiene, I am surprised to find that the prophet Muhammad recommends the shaving of female pubic hair (along with the cutting of nails, etc.) Even apart from contemporary pubic trends this detail strikes me as intensely provocative.
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We spend the day Jeeping through the desert of Wadi Rum, about which you can only say ‘Boy that is an amazing rock,’ over and over. The driver, Salem, pulls up next to a rock formation to show us ancient Nabatean carvings. The four of us––Dad, stepmother, Ida and me–– sit on a sunny ledge eating pizza-flavored chips while the guide builds a small fire and cooks tea.
I get my period at noon and have to curl up behind a rock to examine the situation. While I’m examining, I spot something crushed beneath a nearby rock. It is a pair of lady’s underpants with a bloodstain. Out here in the desert, someone else has her period. I do not have anything with which to dam the flood, so I take off one sock and line my underpants with it.
The tea is ready and the guide pours it into plastic cups that burn our palms. It is strong and sweet, so sweet that when I use my pen to stir it, the pen becomes sticky and covered in sand. I lie on a rock holding my stomach while the others read out loud from a guidebook. I feel like a piece of melting wax and I’m thinking about the fluid dynamics of period blood as it trickles down into my sock.
Peeing for the first time in the desert is a better experience, a little triumph like winning bingo or bowling a strike. The pee-stream mixes with the red sand on contact and froths up like a tomato-colored milkshake. I wonder if some sort of desert plant will blossom where I’ve sprinkled the ground. Part of the wonder of the experience comes from witnessing myself pee. In the normal toilet-bound posture, the whole process is invisible. But curled low, hugging my knees, I can watch and wait until the stream rushes forth, and feel an infant’s pride in my wastes. I drink and pee as often as possible.
That night we sleep at a Bedouin camp, which my stepmother has orchestrated along with a camel ride out of the desert. It is freezing when we sleep and when we wake up, and I cry with self-pity on my camel. The jouncing of the hump disturbs the most delicate area of my body, and the cold turns my lips to parchment.
Our camels eat twigs from the ground, making a platonic crunch with their wooden teeth and drooling green slime. They travel slowly, and when we move through the cold patches of shadow cast by the mountains, my fingers ossify and slip from the saddle. The grand necessity for our bodies is to keep warm, I remember from Walden, and I observe this again and again with every step.
A few hours later we are on the beach at Eilat, the Israeli beach town right across the border from where we left Jordan. Dance music is playing uncensored on a loudspeaker at the Zion Cafe. North African teenagers smoke cigarettes by the water and I am in a plastic chair, defrosting. The experience of intense discomfort from which we’ve all just emerged does not lend itself to writing, so I close my eyes and think that I am happy to be awake and no longer cold.
Won’tcha loosen up my buttons, babe, the music blares, and I am almost warm enough to laugh at the lyric. It is such a technical mandate. I order hot tea and a double espresso. Sitting outside I quickly sunburn and am happy to know that after the sand and wind of the desert, my skin is still tender enough to burn.
While we wait for our plane in the tiny Eilat airport, I buy a Magnum ice cream bar. It is my first meal of the day and it turns into a sojourn of taste one doesn't quickly forget. A column of pale ice cream, white chocolate shield cracking under my teeth like an ice pick on frozen water. Melting and coolness. I buy three more for the others and deliver them wordlessly. I could survive on these: one for lunch, one for dinner, one for snack, and the rest of the diet filled in with coffee and vodka.
My old history teacher, a booming fudge-colored man named Walter Turner, used to conclude every class with the same quote: It's a cold world, he'd say, quoting Redman. Better pack your own heat.
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If it nearly seems that I am traveling alone from all I've written about my three companions, this is almost true. Wherever we are, I go off alone. If we wait in a lobby, I read on a separate couch. If we go to a restaurant, I often sit at my own table with a book. It is the only way I know of to maintain my patience and clarity when I am with others, at least physically, at all times. They pardon it. My dad writes it off as eccentricity, my stepmom writes it off as oddness, and I have no idea whether Ida passes judgment.
I read once that Sigmund Freud took all his meals alone as a child so that he could have more time to read, and this factoid makes me feel better about the urge to be alone. My reputation in my family has hardened into that of the studious and demanding member, but I always return from my solitary periods in a good mood, so nobody attempts to change me.
We are back in Tel Aviv for a few days. I spend time walking along the beach and streets observing Israeli women. They are bolt upright, beautiful, militant even when pouring a glass of Coca-Cola. Is it because they all served that they are so efficient and purposeful? The sense is that of a replicant from Blade Runner, only the women here are not subhuman but superhuman, seemingly weathered against everything and come out unruffled. Maybe that is why everyone pegs me at fifteen, sixteen years old. I'm transparently much, much less than my peers here.
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"Good morning," says Ida when she hears me get up. Her voice is very quiet, determinedly quiet, and one must listen carefully in conversation to net all her words. "Good morning, Ida." She is bundled in the hotel blankets, lying as straight and slim as a Moroccan cigar. Eighty-one years old. Ida rode the camel yesterday with fewer complaints than anyone else.
Mounting a camel is a treacherous process. You sit yourself in the saddle and hold on tight while the animal rouses itself up on its knees, then rears back and lurches to standing position. Ida got into the saddle and when the beast rose up, she careened forward, destined to fall but for the 11-year old boy guarding the camel, who stuck out his palm square against her chest and knocked her back into the saddle.
Ida's expression did not change throughout (nor did the boy's), and I watched with near horror at how the crisis had been averted by a little boy's instinctive motion, unacknowledged by Ida even as she might have broken her neck in the middle of the Bedouin desert. It was this that made me begin to take the measure of her, to add to the known unknowns of her past a whole battery of unknown unknowns.
I dress and go downstairs. The morning is difficult. I have finished my book and feel as though I've been ditched by a close friend. It was Philip Roth's The Human Stain, which title I kept misreading as The Hummus Stain. My stomach is knotted with cramps, my hair greasy and the day is to be filled with visits to infirm relatives whom I do not know. Despite all the draining - of energy, blood - I feel turgid.
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Today we'll drive to Jerusalem after breakfast. I go to the dining room alone, as usual, but this time one of the hostesses is very nice and gives me a window seat, even though I am "table for one" and the peripheral spots are designated for groups. It is forty degrees outside, cold enough for me to wear a Russian hat to breakfast and for the paddle ball players on the beach to bundle up in coats.
One old man is actually entering the water. He wears black briefs with a saggy waistband, his mating materials weakly encased, arms dangling aside as he wades in and wades out. In an old guy this swimming seems less an act of fortitude than of stubbornness; or that is what I tell myself to redeem the fact that I would never, ever do it?
We motor to Jerusalem in a taxi that smells of tooth decay and head for the Museum of the Book, where the Dead Sea Scrolls are displayed. Dad doles out historical quizzes as we trot through the sculpture garden. Who burned the Second Temple in 70 AD? The Romans. And why? Because the Jews were disobedient.
The museum has bits of scroll and old sandals, even a bowl of ancient charred dates. There are photographs of the Bedouins who found the scrolls in 1947, and of the archaeologists who subsequently discovered more of them. Archaeologists with dark tans and expressions of scholarly appraisal.
"The Qumran sectarians believed that God had granted them knowledge of profound cosmological secrets," reads a plaque. What confidence!
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According to a cookbook in the gift shop, Israelis eat small bowls of fruit jelly for dessert, as though toast were too much of an impediment to bother with. I walk back to the hotel through Me'a She'arim, the Orthodox Jewish section of town. It is an interesting place to visit but not a fun place to be. There are signs posted in the streets: "Please Do Not Pass Through Our Neighborhood in Immodest Clothes", and signs posted on the doors: "Please Enter My Store in Modest Clothing."
Religious solemnity feels a lot like hostility when it means that no one will look you in the eye except to glare. The men wear black hats, the women wear black stockings, and everyone is shaped like a matzoh ball, except for the skinny and hyperactive kids.
There must be a direct relationship between piety and sugar consumption, because I have never seen so much candy. Candy in the Jewish quarter of the old city, candy in the Muslim quarter, candy in the Christian quarter. Tourists are not allowed in the Armenian quarter but there is probably candy there too. Next to the yarmulkes are bins of liquid-filled grape suckers. Beside the keffiyehs are jelly blocks of Turkish Delight. Candy shops everywhere, selling long pipes of taffy and bulging sacks of complicated sugary wheels. There are bags of glace, apricots and blocks of halvah solid enough to built a temple out of.
One of the stranger sweets I taste is a pastry called knafeh. You can find knafeh in every bakery being pulled forth from the oven on hot round trays, doused in sugar syrup and sliced into squares. There is a layer of white cheese at the bottom; it is the texture of calamari and pistachios, syrup, and a mystery grain that feels like gravel. It is a specialty of the region, and it is very good.
In Me'a She'arim Orthodox Jews stand around in head-to-toe black filling plastic sacks with pizza-shaped gummies and chocolate stars. It appears as though these pious men have outsourced every speck of color from their lives into the candy stands only to buy it all back and fill themselves up with it. Perhaps the flame of religious conviction acts as an incinerator, burning thousands upon thousands of fudgy calories.
Lauren Bacall and Graham Greene stayed at our hotel (not together), and the bar this time is identical to Rick's Cafe. It will probably be decades before I get to stay in another place like this, I think. We go to the bar and Ida orders an Old Fashioned. The rest of us have champagne, and it tastes just like honey.
At breakfast the next day there is no one but me. "Excuse me, would you like to have more coffee, maybe?" asks the waiter. Yes. His name is Jihad. Gentle Jihad with a mustache like black toothpaste squeezed across his upper lip. I imagine if my name were Jihad Young, or the English equivalent, Holy War Young.
This reminds me that I dreamt, last night, of learning to fire a gun. It was so lucid a vision that I believe I could do it, in real life, if someone handed me a weapon. When my stepmother and Ida arrive and start fussing over the buffet I can't concentrate on my newspaper.
I explore the corridors after coffee, looking at displays of Islamic pots and old photographs. I pick two apples from a bowl of fruit. I am so lucky at this moment, I think. I'm warm, not hungry, I have no cramps or headaches, my clothes are clean, and best of all there are things to look forward to.
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The guide who takes us through the old city is a zealous Jew named Mark Sugarman. He repeats over and over again that he remembers the Holocaust every time he sees a beautiful Jewish child. My secular dad nods. Never forget, says Mark, for the fourteenth time. We spend hours twining through the different quarters of the Old City. African churches are built in the round, I learn, so that Satan can't hide in the corner. The logic is impeccable.
Israeli soldiers are lounging around in the sun. A Jordanian king sold one of his London apartments, Mark tells us, to purchase twelve million dollars worth of gold for the roof of the Temple Mount. We go to see it and are quickly ejected; it is Muslims-only for most hours of the day. There are stands and shops everywhere selling cheap clothing and confectionary.
Just as the mixture of old and new is surprising in Jerusalem, so is the neighboring of sacred and profane. The place where Jesus stopped to rest while dragging the cross to Golgotha is three feet from a kiosk selling Kodak film. I hate the way tourists are alternately disdained and coerced.
A few times a day there is a Muslim call to prayer. The sound system is dodgy and the prerecorded incantations sound like someone burbling through a tub of syrup.
After our tour I break off alone, charging up and out of the Old City through the Damascus gate and heading back to the hotel for coffee.
I sit down and think for a while. Jerusalem has struck me architecturally and historically, but not spiritually. I wonder if growing up without religion has made me less receptive to Big Ideas. I do not understand ideologies or movements. This may be the reason why my little appetites preoccupy me more than anything else. It isn't the Church of the Holy Sepulchre I dwell upon but the graffiti on the way back: AHMAD WAS HERE, in red paint on the wall. Beneath it is a crudely-drawn weenie.
It should be the other way around, I think. But I have no ethnic or group affiliations to speak of, no cause to further and nothing really to push against. Which is nice, of course, and I'm happy. But plucked out of the usual environment, I feel a bit like Tonio Kröger. Everyone dancing and I can't hear the music.
Molly Young is the contributing editor to This Recording. Her website is Magic Molly, and you can read her past work on TR here, here, here, here, here, here and here.
PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING
Happy and Sad with Tess.
Molly found J.D. Salinger.
Gosh, we loved the second season of Dexter!
