As he wraps up the gift in paper and sets it in a little plastic box, the first jeweller walks into the shop, sees me, and grins.
“So, you go to my brother’s shop, eh?”
*
Swimming in the Dead Sea is weird. It’s like physics is broken when we lie on our backs in the water. It’s impossible to sink or dive. It feels slimy, and it stings Lyera. In under half an hour the novelty has floated away, which is okay because they tell you not to swim in it too long. It’s not refreshing, just neat, and they make you shower in freshwater afterwards. We almost miss the tour bus back to Jerusalem because I shower so long, and the driver has to come find me: “What the hell happened?”
The bus drops us at the wide entrance of the Beautiful Gate, which faces west out of the Old City onto massive hotels and the rich quarter, Mamilla. They have a store there called Lord Kitsch. Vehicles and pedestrians pour in and out by the great stone fortress that announces the Armenian Quarter.
It’s an hour’s walk from the student village, and I nearly fainted climbing a mountain before our flotation in the Dead Sea. So we duck into little hole in the wall called Sammy’s something or other for French onion soup and hummus—everything is with hummus in Israel, for better or for worse—and then go to scout out taxis. By the gate we peer out at the spread of palms and traffic. I’m almost refreshed enough to think I can walk back, but Lyera is adamant. So we retreat to the row of white Mercedes-Benzes.
A driver jogs up to us. “Where are you going?” he asks. A few others lean on their doors—all these beautiful cars beneath the towering stone wall—and wait for their turn to feed.
“Mount Scopus.”
“Fifty shekels,” he immediately replies.
We’ve taken taxi rides this distance and longer for forty, so we tell him forty.
“Standard is fifty,” he says.
“Okay, well, there are like seven or nine other taxis. We’ll just get one of them for forty.”
“Ask! Ask!” he says. “Look, I ask for you.” He jogs over to one of his colleagues and says, “Hey, Youssef, how much for Mount Scopus?”
“Fifty shekels,” replies Youssef.
“You see?”
“We’ll go for forty.”
He pauses to evaluate the impasse.
A grizzled old taxi driver with a grey beard steps away from his own car under the bright sunlight and walks slowly over. He puts one hand on my shoulder and one on Lyera’s and starts walking us to his cab. “I will take you for forty-five,” he says.
We let ourselves be walked, but I’m still uneasy. “We’ll go,” I insist, “for forty.”
We’re at his car. A man from the restaurant sits on his chair, watching us from a distance. Our driver turns around, puts his hand on the hood, and looks at us. Shrugging, he says, “Eh, five shekels discount for you, it’s five shekels discount for me, too.”
I have no reply—in fact I’m still only on the cusp of understanding what he means by “discount for me”. Lyera opens the door and ushers me into the taxi. “Come on,” she says. “It’s all right.”
The old man nods, climbs in, and pulls out of the Beautiful Gate, down into the sunlight.
*
Towards the end of my time in Jerusalem, I become nostalgic. I get the urge to acquire a prayer shawl. So much of Jerusalem is fake—fake as the stone façades on every wall. I came here expecting to find the little walled village on a hill David conquered or the Roman town where Jesus told Pilate about a non-earthly kingdom. I’ve been to so many religious sites without feeling anything, I’m beginning to doubt they can really be where the thing happened. But though buildings and plaques are dead, the spirit is alive. If it’s worn by someone who really believes when they pray, then a prayer shawl is the real thing, the habit of prayer. That’s the mindset I’ve wandered into. I have the crazy idea that I’ll actually get my hands on the shawl of an Orthodox Jew, perhaps a rabbi. What am I gonna do, ask?
It’s days before I make a serious attempt to buy one. It’s early in the morning, maybe a Friday, in the Old City near Chain Street. It’s as hot as ever. I wonder if it ever spontaneously rains here. Clouds do stop by from time to time. Where can I find a shawl? I pass a woodcarver’s shop and instantly recognize a dozen of the figures I’ve seen scattered in shops around the Old City; I assume this guy is the Source, the Origin of all. I walk in.
The shop is one little room that bends around a corner, but there must be a thousand wooden creatures on the shelves. A patient old man sits behind the counter, watching me walk along the walls. I pass people, emblems, animals—mostly animals.
Here are some tiny sheep, each made of two different woods, or just one wood stained. One of them looks like a good fit for our nativity scene; our incumbent sheep is missing one of its hind legs. “Twenty shekels?” I ask the woodcarver.
He chuckles and shakes his head. “Ten.”
Outside his shop is a fabric and clothing seller, his narrow, brightly lit shop filled with shirts, rugs, and prayer shawls suspended from the ceiling. The overweight middle-aged man looks very realistic on his chair at the back. I go in and ask to see a prayer shawl, a real prayer shawl.
“Is this a prayer shawl?”
“No, that is a rug.”
He retrieves a prayer shawl from a box in a secret storage area and lets me look. It’s white with blue edges, blue stripes, and blue Hebrew letters. Looks kind of fake to me, some kind of nylon. I bite my lip and consider it. No, I think, there must be some more authentic shawl somewhere in this place. I can find one.
I thank him, promise I’ll probably be back, and lose my train of thought. Walking down the street, the colours and smells, the faces are like those of a dream. Surreality sets in and I shamble off to the Christian Quarter in search of adventures. There are some odd streets in the Christian Quarter, nestled off to one side and somehow perpetually ascending.
I find a huddle of antique shops and step into one; perhaps I’ll buy a rusting copper dagger from millennia ago and stuff it into my suitcase.
The store is dark and musty as a vision. The Hebrew-speaking owner keeps his eyes on me while I scan various epochs. There’s a dagger: “That one is iron,” he says. “Before nine hundred BC.” I peer closely at a weirdly hooked implement: “Persian. Yehud Medinata.”
“What century is that?”
“Fourth century BC.”
“And these here—are they older or newer?”
“Pardon me?”
“Are these, uh, weapons here older than that one or newer?”
He smiles. “I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”
“Are they from an earlier age? Or later?”
“Pardon me, sir?”
“…than this other one?”
“I don’t follow, sir.”
I realize he doesn’t really speak English; he speaks sales pitches insusceptible to variation.
I go back to the evil instrument. “How much for this one?”
“Oh, yes, I see. Pardon me. Twelve hundred dollars.”
“Not shekels but—?”
“Dollars.”
I can see in his smug look that he knows I’m too young to afford it. In fact, as it happens, I am not. But I slowly back my way out of the understanding that I’m interested. He says, “The government has authorized our antiques to leave the country.”
The next trial comes in another of these odd alleyways, another of these grey, dingy dry canals whose stairs are made into slopes by the pouring of asphalt. But the top of this one, I can see, is a dead end. The trial comes in the form of a group of young men sitting around a table smoking.
I try to be inconspicuous. “Hey, American,” one calls out. “Hey, come over here.”
“No thanks.”
“Come on! I have something to sell you.”
“No thanks,” I repeat, walking by.
“Hey! Hey! I’m talking to you!”
But I walk on.
At the top of this alleyway I find a
little candy store, one of dozens or hundreds. I perceive a little exit to the alleyway after all, snaking away into a residential area.
No one is in the close-walled shop to guard its tables and wooden bins of unusual candies. Most of the candies are coated in powdered sugar. I walk from table to table and examine them for the next three minutes, debating whether or not I’d get away scot-free if I took a single candy and ate it.
Instead I withdraw five shekels from my wallet.
Finally a greasy young man emerges from around a corner painted light blue, wiping his hands on his pants. A stink accompanies him. When he sees me, his face registers surprise and concern. I will never forget this. I try to ask him which candy is best, but he cannot understand. I ask again, but he doesn’t even have sales pitches. At a loss, I pick up a gelatin candy that leaves little white marks on my fingers and hold it up so he can see. He nods.
I reach out my handful of shekels. His eyes go wide in astonishment and he raises his hands, palms to me, shakes his head. “No!” he says. “No!”
A true Israelite, in whom there is no falsity. Something in his face, not in the words he doesn’t have, tells me this is what he means. I have not touched his possessions, and so they are mine. I smile my gratitude, place the candy in my mouth, leave the store, and head back down the way I came. The haze of the afternoon horizon thickens.
As I pass, one of the young men gets up from the table and steps over to stand in my way. He says, “Hey, American.”
I stop.
“Why did you just walk away? While I was talking to you, why didn’t you stop?”
The riddle of the Sphinx, I think.
“Because… I know I don’t want what you’re selling me.”
He hesitates. He throws a glance back to his friends. They smoke and look at each other.
I have spoken truly. He stands aside that I may pass down the sloping alley.
The foot of the alley becomes an intersection.
Impossibly, it is the entrance to the Jewish Quarter.
*
Of all that passed that day, this I remember. Somehow I have acquired an XL—it’s as common as Coke—and a block of slippery halva in plastic. On my left is a big shop with a narrow door. On my right shawls and shirts hang all the way up the wall.
A boy who can’t be my age stands in his shop, and I enter.
“What are you looking for, my dear friend?” he asks gently. “Ah: I know. You are looking for a prayer shawl!”
“Well, yes.”
“You can put down your XL—ah, yes, you love XL!—and your halva. Here. They’ll be safe.”
I comply and step into the shop. Why not now? I think. It’s about time I bought a prayer shawl.
“But not just any prayer shawl,” he coos. “You are, I think… a Christian!”
“Well, yes.”
“Ahhh! Jesus loves you!” He is grinning from ear to ear.
He bends over backwards and reaches into a box. Soon a large shawl unfolds in my hands. It feels very fake, and it has a verse from the New Testament stitched into it, right in the middle.
“No, no,” I say firmly, “not a Christian one. A Jewish one.”
“Ahhh! The real thing!”
He replaces the shawl in some mysterious location and produces a new one from nowhere. It is the same blue and white one the realistic man had in his narrow shop. But I don’t see any Hebrew on it.
“I’m interested.”
“Six hundred shekels, my dear friend. The best price.”
I have become a seasoned haggler. Do well once and you know it all. “Absolutely not.”
“You are very wise, my dear friend. Five hundred and fifty shekels.”
Somewhere in the back of my head I feel the sickening realization that I don’t know the value of the shawl. “Much less than that. Two hundred.”
“I love you!” he bursts out. “But not two hundred. Five hundred.”
Confusion and amusement pass over my face. “Yes, two hundred.”
“I love you!” he says again, apparently unable to contain himself. “Two hundred and fifty.”
I hesitate. It’s less than half of what he began with. This is the best I’ll get, I decide, so I accept.
“My dear friend, you want something else?”
“No, I…”
“A shirt!”
After a second, I let him show me a shirt. He pulls one down from above, an innocent white shirt with blue running down the front, and a low neck. He holds it up against me.
“Oh! I love it!” he cries. “It looks so good on you!”
I flub the opening: “How much is it?”
“For you? Nine hundred shekels.”
“T—” I start. “One hundred fifty.”
“Four hundred fifty. And I buy you XL next time I see you. We will drink XL together.”
I begin to doubt myself, and feel my feet physically slipping, but spending a total of only seven hundred shekels seems somehow pretty good. “Uh… I don’t have that on me.”
“Ha ha! I love you! My friend has a bank. You have credit, yes?”
“Debit.”
He’s taken aback for a second. Finally: “Come with me.”
“You know, you shouldn’t be so happy about haggling when you’re so bad at it,” I advise him.
He takes me over to the “bank”, a dark shop and a high counter behind which a grubby man waits. I hand over my card. The man behind the counter doesn’t speak English, and asks the man whose dear friend I am to tell him what I must pay. A dubious transaction is made. A shawl and shirt are mine.
We walk back to the shop to pick up the goods. I reach for my XL and halva. “My dear friend,” he gloats, “don’t you want to buy something else? A kippeh, to go along with your shawl!”
“Well…”
I look at the pile of kippehs of all colours. He picks up a crocheted blue and white one with a Star of David in the centre, the colour of the Israeli flag. “Twenty shekels,” he coos.
Twenty is nothing compared to seven hundred, I reason. And that much I have in my pocket.
He waves me out the door, calling for the millionth time, “I love you!”
*
The next few days are a haze. I remember walking back from the Old City on a late, weary night. A taxi driver on the Mount of Olives who warned me of fighting in the streets that required me to go with him to save my very life. I remember roaming the Armenian Quarter, descending into ceramic shop after ceramic shop, Lyera telling me even if the shirt was cotton it wouldn’t be worth a hundred dollars, nor it and the shawl together a hundred and seventy-five. A children’s street band in Mamilla. Countless evenings in the cool of the streets trying vaguely, frantically to pray. Giving the shirt to Simmon for his mum, forgetting I already promised it to my own mum, reclaiming it, the generous smile she put on when I gave it to her. Staggering from stall to stall in the blazing sun, buying in place of my heart a taqiyah, a keffiyeh, a black kippeh, searching and apologizing to everyone; the dinner Seoren cooked for the family that night, hawks and vultures who screeched at me and pushed and pulled me into their stores, who begged me to see that I needed their wares; returning to the bank to ask stupidly had I really been charged only seven hundred.
Camel rides. Forgetting my halva in the shop of the pythonic young con man, returning intentionally for it—stumbling unintentionally in more times than I care to count, facing the horrible countenance of competence; being lured and trapped in the shop across from his by a big man whose girth blocked the exit, squeezing past at last. Telling the young Hebrew he had cheated me: it was a woman’s shirt! “We will drink XL together,” he told Lyera and me, and I hissed, “I don’t like you!” The anger, the shame, the lowered voice; the sitting in my lonely Jerusalem room: the sympathy of my apartment family.
I remember the scene a thousand different ways. “I’ve seen the price tag on the shawl. Twenty-four shekels and sixty agorot. I’ll give you twenty-five for it.”—“Look! Th
ere is Hebrew on it! It begins ‘Baruch atah’! So you not only cheated me, you lied to me.”—“A hundred, maybe a hundred, for both shirt and shawl. And kippeh too!”—“How dare you tell me Jesus loves me!”
How dare you!
The long and winding maze I can’t escape that leads always to your door. Flashes of sliced sunlight through the metal blinds on my window, the heavy iron door. Hot mornings, cold nights, and the elevator stuffed with seven drunken students on Shabbat, a call home across Lake Ontario, across the Atlantic, across the Mare Nostrum. Canada. My father.
“Seven hundred shekels? That is kind of hard to swallow. … Think of it this way. It had to happen sooner or later. You learned an essential life lesson, and you could have learned it the hard way. You could have spent ten thousand dollars on a car worth three hundred. Or even a fancy dinner you could have had with Lyera, a really fancy dinner, that’s all a hundred and seventy-five dollars is. Think of it this way: it must cost a fortune to own a place in the Old City. They have to overcharge tourists just to survive. You’re helping him out, in that sense. Hey, don’t take it so hard.”
“I should have known not to go in when he said Jesus loved me. That’s when I should have known, right off the bat. That’s what they all tell you.”
“One dinner, that’s all you’re losing.”
Yes, dinner with a snake, dinner and the XL he said he’d buy me. Good God, what a fool! Yes, I helped him out, furnished him with seven hundred shekels for shawl and shirt! And a goddamn crocheted kippeh with a blue Star of David on it! Call me a philanthropist. Yes, plant me a little shrubby garden with my name in Hebrew on a plaque! In the student village, beyond the laundromat, beyond the lovers and laptop-users, beyond the gritty bench and the exercise machine park, beyond the courtyard with its high wall, the low hill like a lion’s back, to the Golden Dome, to the Source and Origin of all—pick a spot—plant my garden!
The Tobacco Defenestration
Trevor Abes
I’m sitting in a vanilla bean office chair next to my bedroom window on the twenty-eighth floor of my postmodern apartment complex, Sonatina, where there’s never any music playing. The chair used to belong to my uncle: he died from asbestos in the university where he served as professor, from drinking whiskey and from smoking cigarettes. He liked Dunhills, the ones with a crimson stripe on the filter.