Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (23 page)

This subculture was on the far fringe of the ultra-Orthodox movement, he was careful to add, but on the other hand there was probably no spot on earth where religious fantasy had more combustible potential than the small area in Old Jerusalem encompassing the mosques and the Western Wall. Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount in September 2000, a deliberately provocative assertion of Jewish prerogatives on what is now sacred Muslim ground, had set off the second intifada. An attempt to build on it could very easily ignite a third world war.

*   *   *

Breakfast in the leafy courtyard of my hotel. The guests at the other tables appear to be mostly Scandinavian or African. I stayed up late reading the Singer novel, which was unexpectedly gripping, and a residue of its narrator seems to be lingering over me, making me feel oddly conspicuous, as if his dark hat and ritual garment were glimmering spectrally over my Banana Republic tee shirt and khakis.

It surprises me to find myself hospitable to this character, Joseph Shapiro. I’ve had no serious religious feelings since I was a teenager, and have no interest in developing any. But before Shapiro becomes that pious figure on the book cover he is a regular flawed and fallen human being, which is of course what makes him appealing. Furthermore, in the process of transformation he undergoes his own version of precisely the trials I have felt ghosting my own ever since these events began. He too, it turns out, is a Gawain, a Lawrence, a Guy Haines.

The turning point in his story comes one night after he discovers he is being cheated on by both his wife and his mistress. All his vague disgust for the life of cheap titillation that he has been living in America boils up inside him, precipitating a crisis. Barely aware of what he is doing, he goes to the airport and buys a ticket to Israel, carrying nothing more than an overnight bag and a couple of religious books.

On the plane a young woman, Priscilla, sits down next to him, carrying a volume of Sartre. “She smelled of eau de Cologne, chocolate, and other scents enticing to a male. I was reading about abstinence and sacred matters…”

She glances at his book and asks if the letters are Hebrew. They are, he replies. She had been sent to Hebrew lessons as a child, she tells him, but now the language “is a completely strange element to me.” His reply is innocent enough on the surface: “No matter how strange an element may be, it can become familiar,” but even as he speaks he acknowledges that his words “carried a sly reference, as if to say ‘Now I’m a stranger, but tomorrow I may sleep with you.’” The girl orders a whiskey. He joins her, assuring himself he is doing so purely out of politeness, but the dance has begun, the “dere dalyaunce,” and he is well aware of the real reason. She mentions a fiancé but at the same time lets Shapiro know that she doesn’t believe couples are under any obligation to be faithful to each other. Shapiro, feeling the old sweet responsiveness rising inside him at this flagrant invitation, struggles to resist it. The adjacent seats have become his version of the room, the roomette, that private but violable space in which one’s most intimate conflicts act themselves out: “I sat there baffled by the dramatic turn of events my life had taken and by my own lack of character. I had abandoned everything to flee from the lie, but the lie now sat next to me, promising me who knows what joys…” It is cold on the plane, and at Priscilla’s suggestion Shapiro spreads a blanket across his lap. Soon he feels her hand moving under the blanket. Their fingers touch, entwine, and at once they are entangled in a session of furtive petting and groping. But there are limits to what you can do on a plane, and after a while they pull apart, strangers again, Shapiro filled with rankling physical dissatisfaction while at the same time overcome with shame: “We were left sitting there like two whipped dogs…”

Just then a man in full Orthodox garb walks down the aisle beside them. Priscilla, modern and assimilated, grimaces. “Her eyes reflected embarrassment and scorn.” But to Shapiro the figure is a sign, a revelation that crystallizes his hitherto rather vague spiritual yearnings into their final, inflexible form: “I realized at that moment that without earlocks and a ritual garment one cannot be a real Jew. A soldier who serves an emperor has to have a uniform, and this also applies to a soldier who serves the Almighty. Had I worn such an outfit that night I wouldn’t have been exposed to those temptations…”

*   *   *

It is proving difficult to find Palestinians willing to talk about the Hurva synagogue. I leave messages but nobody calls back. When I do finally make contact with someone, a professor of urban studies at Al-Quds University, his response is a volley of polite excuses: “You see I am very busy now because Ramadan is coming to an end and I have many things to do but I wish you the best of luck with your article, goodbye.”

I mention the difficulty to a cousin of mine at her house in the German Colony, where she has lived since the seventies. She nods, unsurprised. She volunteers for an organization that helps Palestinians with legal problems, but even this limited contact between the two communities has become strained in recent years, and increasingly rare. Contact of a purely social or intellectual nature is virtually impossible. She tells me the following story.

She and her husband were friendly with a Palestinian housepainter from Bethlehem who often did work for them. His wife needed dialysis and had a pass to get into Jerusalem for regular treatment at the Hadassah hospital. After the second intifada broke out, the twenty-minute drive from Bethlehem turned into a half-day trip with all the detours and checkpoints. Then, mysteriously, it became further complicated by entirely new bureaucratic obstacles. One day a mutual friend called my cousin with grim tidings: the Israeli authorities had made it impossibly difficult for the man to get his wife to the hospital and she had died. Furthermore, the man’s son had been killed, shot dead while visiting a settlement to collect payment for a carpentry job.

Some time passed, and then the mutual friend called my cousin again. The circumstances of the son’s death were not, after all, as he had first reported. The boy had in fact been shot in a supermarket, where he had been about to detonate a suicide vest. The father had been unable to come to terms with this fact, hence the version of events he had originally told the mutual friend, but it was indeed the case, and it was also the reason why the Israelis had made it so difficult for the mother to get her dialysis.

If I were writing the story I would want to end it there: a bleak equipoise of mutual ill will. But it doesn’t end there. The man remarried and started a new family. A year later the army came with bulldozers and demolished his house.

*   *   *

The scene is convivial at the garden bar; most of the customers are on first-name terms with the barman, Fadi, who laughs obligingly at their banter as he mixes their drinks.

Next to me is a woman with stringy gray hair and weathered features, talking in Italian-accented English to a couple of Arab men in jackets and open shirts.

Listening in, I gather that she is a journalist and they are civic officials of some kind. I try to edge into the conversation, sensing an opportunity to get some impromptu Palestinian reaction to the Hurva. But my polite gestures and smiles go unnoticed, and I can’t quite bring myself to do anything more forceful. I read the newspapers instead, peering at them in the dim candlelight. The
Herald-Tribune
has a story about the taxi driver in New York, Ahmed Sharif, who had his throat slashed by a passenger for being Muslim.
Haaretz
has an article on a poll released by the Spanish government showing that “one in three Spaniards is anti-Semitic, maintaining negative opinions about Jews.”

By uncertain processes of association, I find myself thinking of another of Saul Bellow’s remarks from his Jerusalem book, to the effect that “evenhandedness” is not a useful or even commendable attitude to take in this city. Visitors who are always judiciously observing on the one hand this and on the other hand that infuriate him. Support for the Jewish state, he implies, is worth nothing if it doesn’t come out of strong emotional conviction, because the corrosive logic of the situation will eat away at any attitude founded on mere “evenhandedness,” devouring arguments until there is nothing left. Better to be outright hostile.

I recognize that equivocating tendency in myself. So much depends on where you begin the story you are trying to tell, which in turn, as far as I can see, depends on whom you happen to like most, or dislike least. The army bulldozed the Palestinian’s home. But his son tried to blow up a supermarket. But it was a supermarket on land illegally occupied by settlers. But the land was part of ancient Judaea. But the Jews have been absent from Judaea for more than two thousand years. But the Holocaust …

I make my way under dark palms to my room, in an annex away from the main building. The air is warm, scented with night blossoms. As I reach the annex door, a woman appears from another direction. We enter together and stand in the empty vestibule, waiting for the tiny elevator. She looks about thirty-five, black hair cut short, smooth pink cheeks. She seems a little uncomfortable, finding herself in this deserted space with a strange man. I smile, trying to signal my harmlessness, and make a comment about the nice evening. She appears to relax. “Isn’t it gorgeous?” she says.

In the slow, creaking elevator, which we are both taking to the same floor, we exchange further remarks to cover up what would otherwise be an awkward silence. By the time we arrive at our floor we are having something more like a real conversation. She seems interested in the article I’m writing, and in fact subscribes to the magazine that commissioned it. She herself is here with an NGO that does psychiatric work in a Palestinian refugee camp in Ramallah. She goes to the door of her room, and I move along the narrow landing to my own door, but she seems to want to continue talking, and for several minutes we linger across the landing from each other, talking in the thin brass glare of the night lights. She lives in Atlanta, she says, but she comes here every year to work in the refugee camps. She likes to bring visitors, to show them what conditions are like for the Palestinians. “I mean, I give them things to do, people to talk to. They don’t stand around just staring.” “It sounds interesting,” I say. “You should come, if you have some free time.” “Well, I’d like to.”

The hotel is moving her into the main building tomorrow, and she gives me the number of what will be her new room. “I’m Nadia,” she says, opening her door. She is wearing a blue dress with white polka dots. I tell her my name. We smile at each other and say goodnight.

In my room I feel the encounter reverberating inside me, a pleasant aftereffect in which the impression of her pink cheeks and blue dress are present, jumbled together with a feeling that I ought not to pass up an opportunity to visit one of these camps.

I write down the room number she gave me, intending to call her in the morning.

At the same time I am aware of something delicately treacherous in the air. The phrase “moral resort area” rises up at me from the Bellow book next to my bed. Beside it Joseph Shapiro grimaces from the cover of the Singer novel. I remember the way he describes his conversation with Priscilla on the plane, his unabashedly archaic terms: “I knew very well that this was the Evil Spirit talking through her…”

I turn out the light, telling myself not to be ridiculous. Being happily married doesn’t mean you have to behave like some misogynistic ascetic, any more than being Jewish means you can’t look at things that reflect badly on Israel.

*   *   *

I had intended to spend the afternoon at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum, but I couldn’t face it, and am in the Garden of Gethsemane instead, thinking about Judas Iscariot.

The garden is a small, enclosed olive grove with gravel paths leading among twenty or so olive trees. Some of these are said to be over two thousand years old. They are tremendously wide, like very large and ancient women, their twisting bodies at once bulbous and cavernous. Their silver-and-green leaves—all eyes, as the Greeks observed—wink in the breeze, and it is impossible not to think of the scene they witnessed when they were young. This is where Judas of the Thirty Pieces of Silver becomes Judas of the Kiss, the gesture transforming him from petty money-grubber into the great antagonist of the Passion, the necessary betrayer.

In Provence K—— and I and the kids did a walk that led along the Levens valley to the fifteenth-century Chapel of Notre Dame des Fontaines, a small white building in the middle of nowhere that happens to contain one of the great masterpieces of early Renaissance art, Giovanni Canavesio’s fresco cycle of the Life of Christ.

Judas first appears in the panel depicting the Last Supper, where he sits in profile opposite Jesus, in blue-and-brown robes. Alone of all the company he has no halo, but his unruly reddish hair has something windswept and romantic about it, and his bearded profile, in contrast to the bland baby faces of the other disciples, is full of dashing individuality, with a hint of amusement about the lips and an appealingly manic exuberance in his eye. Apparently Jesus hasn’t yet informed this fiery disciple of the ignominious role he has been chosen to play in the coming drama. He is gesturing eloquently, one arm raised high, clearly speaking about some matter of passionate concern to him. Jesus and the rest look at one another with uneasy sidelong glances.

One interpretation of “Iscariot” identifies Judas as a member of the Sicarii, a group of Jewish assassins intent on driving the Romans out of Judaea, and there is a tradition of Judas as an insurrectionist who had hoped to win Jesus over to the cause of armed revolt against the occupying power. Certainly Canavesio would have known that Judas went in for political grandstanding. There is the incident in John where Judas scolds Jesus for allowing Mary of Bethany to annoint him with a whole pint of expensive perfume instead of making the woman sell it to help the poor. John is quick to assure the reader that this outburst isn’t as noble as it might appear. According to him, Judas just wants to pilfer the money from the communal kitty, which he looks after: “This he said, not that he cared for the poor; but because he was a thief, and had the bag, and bare what was put therein.” But the comment sounds suspiciously catty and after-the-fact revisionist (I can’t help thinking of how Nasreen only started accusing me of theft after she had turned against me). At any rate, judging from Judas’s upraised arm and the misgivings on the faces of his fellow diners, it would seem that the urging of some kind of extreme rebellious action is being imagined here by the painter.