The Pillars of Hercules

Negu shrugged. He did not want to pursue this. He was thin and tall and quite black, with piercing eyes and an odd sloping walk, with a twitch of alertness in it, always seeming to be aware of what was happening around him.

“When did you come here?” I asked.

“Six years ago.”

“From Addis Ababa?”

“My village is eight hundred kilometers from Addis Ababa.”

“This must be quite a change from that.” Eight hundred kilometers had to be the remote bush, the very edge of the country, on one of the scrubby borders—of the Sudan, or Kenya, or Somalia.

We were walking through the busy precincts of West Jerusalem, where there were offices and agencies and shopping districts and hotels. Ahead I could see the domes of the Old City, an ancient skyline, but here it was all bustle—people, traffic, the same hectic anxiety that I had felt in the bus station, an air of apprehension; each person walked just a beat faster, and voices were more insistent and a few octaves shriller.

“In some ways, Israel is better.”

But he was doubtful.

“Better than your village in Ethiopia?”

“In some ways only. In other ways, no. Ethiopia is good.”

“You’re a Jew, though?”

“Yes. I am a Jew. We do not use these things on our head,” he said. He pointed to a passerby wearing a yarmulke.

“You have a family?”

“Yes. Wife. Children,” he said. “We are Jews.”

“Will you stay here?” I asked. “Do you like it?”

He shrugged, the same shrug, irked by my curiosity, wondering who I was and why I was asking.

“That is the gate you are searching for,” he said, and left me.

It was the Jaffa Gate, which took me through the Armenian Quarter to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. I went inside, jostled by hurrying visitors, and then walked to the real treasure of the city, Temple Mount, the Dome of the Rock and, a little farther on, the Al Aqsa Mosque. There I met Fikret, from the Akdeniz, who had lost the others.

“I was at the Crying Wall,” he said. “I cried!”

“Where is Bible Man?” That was our nickname for Onan.

“He is looking for Hebrew books,” Fikret said. “He has already bought one for sixty dollars.”

We walked together through the Lion’s Gate, to the edge of the Mount of Olives. Fikret reminded me that this was a city that was sacred to Muslims, which all believers tried to visit.

Jerusalem was a little jewel in the hills, a lovely city, certainly one of the most beautiful I had seen on my trip. But as a place of pilgrimage, inspiring a sort of breathless pilgrim, eager to possess it, with that special intensity, Jerusalem merely glittered for me. I found myself resisting its power to cast enchantment. Praying there seemed like theater, requiring a suspension of disbelief or a self-conscious fakery. And the city was a symbol. In Israel symbols were always useful shorthand, and so they were chosen as targets—they were exaggerated, or destroyed; either way, they lost their reality.

Fikret stayed, saying he was going to look at the mosque again. I decided to return to Haifa. Back at the bus station I tried to buy a ticket to Gaza.

“No, no, no,” the ticket seller said, and waved me away.

I asked a policeman. He shook his head. He said that, because of the recent shootings and bombings, the territories were closed. I would not be able to get through a checkpoint at the border.

“That’s too bad.”

“That is not bad,” he said. “You are lucky you can’t go to Gaza. It is dangerous.”

At the bus station, asking directions, a man heard me speaking English and took me aside. He was thinking of emigrating to the United States. Did I know anything about Orlando? He wanted to become a driver there—not necessarily a taxi driver, but something a little more colorful, perhaps a limo driver.

“I think I could be a success there, with my English accent,” he said.

It was true, he had the ghost of an accent, but though his reasoning seemed preposterous, I said, “Sure, they’re bound to think you’re David Niven, but how is Israel going to manage without you?”

“There’s no money here,” he murmured, and slipped away.

To reassure myself that the Akdeniz would not leave Israel without me I talked to the purser. No, the day after tomorrow, he said; and so I was free to go to a concert, the Haifa Symphony Orchestra: Elgar’s “Introduction and Allegro for Strings,” Tippett’s “A Midsummer Marriage,” Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini,” and Stravinsky’s “Symphony in C.”

Afterwards I saw six decorous prostitutes crouched at the corner of Sederot Ha’atzma’ut and little Lifshitz Street, and they were laughing and making kissing noises at me. I attempted to talk to them—they were bound to be fluent in English—but realizing that I was not interested in anything else they turned away. Besides, they saw some potential customers hurrying along, two young Hasidic Jews with big black hats and black frock coats, velvet yarmulkes, side-curls and black pants tucked into black socks. They walked in a flapping flat-footed way, and quickened their pace when they saw the prostitutes, who just laughed.