Part 2: Some Things Starting with B
Baka sits a few kilometers south of downtown Jerusalem, and the apartment I am living in looks down on a small, gated public school with a goat pen. The official name of the area is Ge’ulim, which means “redeemers” in Hebrew. But that name appears only in official records and some traffic signs; like the sprawling compounds of its earlier inhabitants, the name Baka (“valley” in Arabic) remains. Arabs, Christians, and Armenians established the area around the Jaffa-Jerusalem train line during the late-19th century, but abandoned it during the war. The area became Jewish, flourishing around the now defunct station and drawing pockets of French and English speakers. One of the roommates, Lior, tells me this as a hand-rolled cigarette dangles from his mouth and his arm rests casually on the lip of our balcony. He is a philosopher-in-training and speaks about Plato and Socrates as fluidly as though they were a kind of weather. I am sweating as we eat a salad and pita and drink wine, the sun sinking into the buildings beyond the square.
A moment on salads and sweat. Everyone eats salads here, and seemingly at any time. Breakfast, lunch, a quick snack. I have lost weight not from restriction, but the fact that food is not food without a raw vegetable in the Holy Land. Additionally, I am constantly covered in a sheen of sweat that doesn’t disappear until night comes and surprisingly cool breezes whip through the streets from the northeast. I swear I am the only one who sweats here. As I wipe my forehead, Lior tells me that the wind comes from Emek Refaim, the Valley of the Ghosts or the Giants — he says it could be either.
It is the first morning I am here and I am locked in the bathroom. Like a dream where everything looks the same but works differently, so too Israeli doors. Whether it is the heat or my idiocy, they either refuse to stay shut or resist being opened. Luckily, Lior hears me and gets the extra key, but not before I feel sure that I am going to be locked for the day in a bathroom four floors above the ground, slowly roasting, or braising, I suppose, since I’m already sweating.
After dressing, I walk up Derech Bet Lechem — Bethlehem Road. It is a quaint business district with candy-bright fruit stands and crowded cafes. The street winds past Tachanah HaRishona — The First Station — a converted hub on the tangent line of the old railroad track; it’s now a biking/walking path lush with flowers. Here I encounter a crow. In Israel, they are not jet black, but sport collars of a soiled khaki color. I take a picture as one pecks at a piece of plastic. The crows keep to themselves. Not so the green myna birds that race past occasionally, raising hell, and certainly not the one that perches above me as I watch the crow. The mynas are a menace, accidentally let loose by amateur ornithologists in the 90s and now, apparently, threatening the ecosystem. I care nothing for the ecosystem, however, as one drops a turd on my shoulder.
“סבלנות. סבלנות,” the bus driver is muttering as he tries to add money to my Rav Kav bus card. Savlanoot. I can’t figure out how the hell to buy rides. He speaks no English (which is fine), but refuses to say anything more in Hebrew (not so fine), and thus resorts to hand motions he thinks are perfectly clear to finish the transaction (oy).
If I were to point out a silver lining from a Hebrew learner’s perspective, when said in context, you don’t need a dictionary to understand the meaning: the flat hand moving like a mime patting the head of an invisible child, the slight condescension of the drawn out “oooot,” half closed eyes that are dangerously close to rolling. It’s practically onomatopoeia in Israeli Hebrew. It means “patience” or “chill the hell out dude,” depending on the intonation. And this is dizzyingly ironic to me. Patience is about as common as pork here.
Earlier today, I heard סבלנות from my Hebrew instructor — not to me necessarily, but to the class. In Hebrew she said we wouldn’t always understand at first — give it time. סבלנות. Her voice rolls out in a rich alto — as do most of the Israelis I hear chatting in the streets. Whether from the constant glottal attacks or cigarettes, there’s something secret, ancient, seductive in the way their vowels move, sounds plucked from deep in the chest, punctuated by guttural squalls. Pauses and “ums” seem rare here, and I understand little. Unless they hear my terrible accent, and then they switch effortlessly to English. Israelis begin learning English in elementary school. At home and in the street they are inundated with English through movies and music and signs that spell English words with the Hebrew alphabet. For example, the apartment is walking distance to a supermarket called סופר דיל — “Super Deal”; it is neither super, nor a deal, but I often go there to buy vegetables. While their grammar sometimes sticks, the music of their English is mesmerizing. Unlike the German airport workers whose tenses and vocabulary were crisp but lifeless, Israelis have a roundness in their words, a vitality and an ease with slang. A man at a bar I went to was particularly taken with creating puns in English. He asked me what you call a conversation about nothing. A non-versation. I am jealous of this — humor and prepositions are always the hardest to learn.
סבלנות.
I have seen many things in Jerusalem so far: lots of men and women who must be very warm with their modest black and white skirts, pants, shirts, and jackets, enough hand-rolled cigarettes to make a Brooklyn hipster blush, and the beeping. It is incessant; every vehicle has a horn, motorized or not. Even the pedestrians say “beep, beep” to me as they weave through Ben Yehuda, an avenue that bisects the downtown triangle going toward the Old City. Both sides of the street are cramped with Judaica shops, pharmacies, restaurants, a kosher McDonald’s. Children, no more than seven years old, run about unsupervised; the strings of their tallitot fly behind them. On the eastern side of Ben Yehuda a side street shoots south and the boutique shops below are shaded by a phalanx of umbrellas.
Outside nearly every door sits a cat — the population here is epic. My roommates describe them as the Israeli squirrel. Similar to the green myna birds, the cats are an import, brought by the British during the mandate period. The British left, but the cats pressed on. They are the earthiest cats I have ever seen: gaunt, scarred, tough; they will kick your American cat’s ass.
