The Pillars of Hercules

I followed the Hasidic boys for a while, just to see where they were going—up to Mount Carmel or over to the crumbling buildings of Wadi Salib. Seeing them in the bus or the train, in the desert heat, these black-suited and bearded Hasidim always made me perspire. Dressed for chilly nineteenth-century Poland, they made no allowance for being in the desert of the Middle East. They also seemed out of place because Israel was so secular—Christian or Orthodox churches were more numerous in Haifa than synagogues. People were polite but pieties were rare, courtesy scarce. It was not rudeness; it was more a sort of truce. Everything was practical and measured. What was the fear? Was it that generosity, which is also goodwill, exposed you to strangers and thereby put you at risk?

Back at the Akdeniz all the Turks were on board. They were relaxing. After the tension and the seriousness of Israel, these Turks seemed the soul of jollity. The food was Turkish, the music was “Arabesque” syncopation and Turkish movie themes. It was at a distant pier, a twenty-minute walk from Gate Five, Port of Haifa, the turnstile where we had to show our passports. For the passengers, the ship was Turkey.

I was still reading the Trollope novel, Dr. Wortle’s School, about the fuss in an English village over an apparent impropriety. Tonight the embattled doctor was reflecting, “It is often a question to me whether the religion of the world is not more odious than its want of religion.”

Emile Habiby had arrived back in Israel. When I telephoned him he said that he would get into his car and meet me in Haifa. I protested—no, he had jet lag. I would come to Nazareth. On my map, Nazareth was about halfway to the Sea of Galilee—about thirty-five miles, less than an hour.

“But how will I find you?”

“Everyone knows me. Just ask anyone, for Habiby sofer.” Sofer is writer in Hebrew.

I found a taxi driver, Yossi Marsiano (“Like Rocky Marciano”). He was a Moroccan Jew, from the north Moroccan town of Ouezzane. He was edgy and impatient. He had a way of grinning that showed no pleasure at all, only pure hysteria. I told him Habiby’s name.

“He’s an Arab?”

“He’s an Israeli.”

This was true, and more than that he was a Christian and a Palestinian as well. Yossi was confused, and for a moment it looked as though he regretted having agreed to take me. Then he told me to get into the car, and to hurry.

“How much?”

We agreed on one hundred and sixty shekels.

“Get in. We go,” he said. “In, in.”

Leaving Haifa and passing the populous bluff of Mount Carmel that dominates the city, it was impossible not to think of Habiby. He had written about those specific heights a number of times in his novel Saraya the Ogre’s Daughter (translated by Peter Theroux, 1995). One of the glimpses is fanciful, Mount Carmel as “a bull with its snout turned up, ready to lunge at a matador come to him from the land of Andalusia. He disregards him in anticipation of matadorial carelessness; if he ignores him, thebull will not give him a moment’s respite…. [But] he is as patient as the Arabs.”

In another part of the novel, Mount Carmel is remembered by the narrator as the wilderness of his childhood, “still a virgin forest, except for its lighthouse, which was, in our eyes, closer to the stars in the heavens than to the houses of Wadi al-Nisnas…. The wild melancholy of al-Carmel took our breath away.” Returning hopefully, he sees it as it is today, a promontory covered with apartment houses and condominiums, and fenced-in mansions. It is now denuded of trees; gone are the flowering plants, the terebinth, hawthorn, fennel and paradise apple that had protected it. The old spring has dried up, and the narrator reflects on “how mountains die—how Mount Carmel is dying!”

It is an oblique reference to the way that modern Israel has spread its new buildings over an ancient landscape, turning familiar contours into unrecognizable (and unmemorable) urban sprawl. The growth was still in progress. No sooner had Yossi and I reached the north end of Haifa than we were in a traffic jam.

“Road fixing,” Yossi said.

While he reassured me that this was nothing, a matter of minutes, he continued to fret. That was an Israeli paradox, a person obviously troubled and anxious saying, “No problem!” Yossi was fretful. We inched along. He banged the steering wheel in anger and became self-conscious and said in his unconvincing way, “It’s okay. Don’t worry.”

I was not worried. Nazareth was not far. But to take Yossi’s mind off the traffic jam I asked him how he had come to Israel. Every Israeli had a migration story. In the 1950s, Yossi’s parents had not seen any future for themselves as a minority in the remote Moroccan town of Ouezzane, surrounded by Arabs, and so they had decided to take their small children and settle in Israel.