Don’t Go There: From Chernobyl to North Korea—one man’s quest to lose himself and find everyone else in the world’s strangest places

by Adam Fletcher

  I looked across at the man to my left. He was rocking and wailing with great intensity, his eyes closed, his head tilted slightly towards the heavens. I mimicked his stance and reached out with my palms to the cold limestone surface of the Western Wall.

  I felt…

  Well…

  I felt something!

  I felt a little bit sick, mostly. Like there was a knot in my stomach. A feeling that the things contained within it were going to hastily exit and I had little control of when that might occur. Was this a message from God? If so, it was certainly a strange one. I closed my eyes. That seemed to help. Ah, was that a clue? I opened them again. The feeling returned.

  Oh.

  I wasn’t experiencing a religious awakening after all. People travel from all over the world to place prayers into the cracks of the Western Wall. Thousands of pieces of paper cluster in its deformities. This was the problem. I suffer from something called trypophobia, a (completely irrational) fear of clusters. Google it, but only if you want to see some pretty harrowing pictures of the insides of kiwis, melons, and beehives. Warning: it’s the stuff of (my) nightmares.

  This was what was making me feel queasy. God wasn’t talking to me after all. It was time to leave, still Godless, alone, and burdened by existential angst. This was not my tribe. I was not one of the chosen ones. It would remain just a wall, to me.

  That night, back in the hostel, Annett and I went conversation surfing once more. An American in a wide baseball cap advertising a beer talked to a Belgian dressed in specialised outdoor wear. They were playing a very popular travellers’ game that I call Authentic Experience Tennis®.

  The American served. “Have you been to the Wailing Wall yet?”

  “Yeah, twice,” the Belgian parried, without hesitation.

  “Twice?” A slice-backhand response. “Well, I had a conversation with a local, bearded man today. It was just fantastic.”

  “Was he a rabbi?” the Belgian’s forehand answered.

  The American lunged towards the baseline. “No, he was a baker. He sold bread. But very authentic bread.” A skilful return from a difficult position. The Belgian had not met a baker of very authentic bread. 15–0 for the American.

  Annett had gone to the lobby to get closer to her God: Wi-Fi. She sent me a Skype message that suggested absurdity was taking place there and I should make haste. I joined her to find a portly blond man in a short-sleeved white shirt. A shirt that had not made the acquaintance of an iron for quite some time. He was pacing the hostel entrance, looping the beat-up sofas, half-empty vending machines, and a reception desk staffed by a volunteer not older than fifteen. Extravagant creasing was not the most attention-grabbing part of this man’s get-up; that was his tie—his tie featured the Israeli flag.

  It looked like the sort of novelty tie you’d buy spontaneously with your last loose change, at the airport, for your wacky Uncle George. The man didn’t seem to be wearing the tie as fancy dress. It seemed to make sense to him to be wearing it. And it did, of course, in Jerusalem. But Jerusalem has a pretty low threshold for logic. I’m sure Jerusalem makes perfect sense to itself, but it leaves many others scratching their heads and pulling at their novelty ties.

  The top half of the man’s face asked questions the bottom couldn’t answer. He went to the payphone, made a call, paced the lobby some more, muttered, sat down a few seats over from us, scratched at his arm, rubbed his temples, and then got up and did the whole thing again. While doing this he repeated the same phrases:

  “Can you imagine what it’s like to not see your family for five years?”

  “I have to call the embassy.”

  “I support the State of Israel!”

  A woman entered the lobby from the street. She was short, middle-aged, squirrelly, and wore a grey shapeless smock that made her movements ghostly. “They took my family. I have to call the embassy,” he said, as she sat down next to him.

  Her hand flew to her chest. “Who took your family?” She looked around the lobby frantically, as if maybe they’d been bundled out the entrance, wrapped in sheets, into an unmarked van, just this minute.

  “The Norwegian government!” he said, digging his nails into his arm.

  She raised an eyebrow. “They took your family? Where did they take them?”

  “To Norway. They kicked me out. Now I’ve lost my family.”

  She thought about this for a moment, considering how best to help. It was kind of her. To take the time. To offer assistance. Not everybody does. We’ve all grown so busy. Her solution was quite innovative. “Did you pray on it?” she asked.

  “Yes, you bet I prayed on it.”

  She sat up straighter. “If you prayed on it, God will give you your family back.”

  Annett and I exchanged an open-mouthed is this really happening? glance. We’d been using this glance quite a lot since arriving in Israel. It had usurped all our normal couple glances: you know I hate it when you do that; oh, it’s you again; get me something from the kitchen that is made out of chocolate—for example, chocolate.

  The woman stood up. I thought she was going to hug the man. That would have been nice. Hugs, not drugs. Instead she leaned over him, or rather tried to, but found herself too short, even though he was sitting down. She then held one outstretched finger over his head, at a forty-five-degree angle, and began making circles.

  “MMMMH…” she hummed. “Do you accept the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, as your Lord and Saviour?”

  “Yes,” he responded, without hesitation.

  She circled faster. “Can you feel the fire? CAN YOU FEEL THE FIRE?”

  The man’s eyes met our own.

  “Ooohhh Jesus Christ…” she murmured. “Our Lord, our Saviour. CAN YOU FEEL THE FIRE?”

  He was feeling something. Awkwardness, mostly, I think. He looked like a man being sold an ostrich that he really wasn’t sure he had a use for.

  “I don’t know, maybe,” he said, meekly, his shoulders slumped.

  “MMMMMMH… Can you feel IT! Praise Jesus! Can you FEEL the FIRRRRRE?” Her finger circled faster and faster. “Accept him. Praise him. Pray to the Lord Jesus. Can you feel the fire? CAN YOU FEEL THE FIRE?”

  “Well…” He looked as though he really wanted to feel the fire. Would have gladly welcomed its heat. “M-maybe,” he said, staring down at his feet. “But then, there’s a lot of fire within me.”

  The woman smiled, satisfied with this tepid response. Another job well done, another soul saved, she sat back down. “Pray to Jesus and he’ll give you your family back.”

  To me, the obvious rebuttal to this would have been “Why did he take them in the first place?” Instead, the man chose, “I have prayed,” and put his head in his hands. Presumably to do so once more.

  “Not hard enough,” she replied, packing up her things. “I have to go. I have to go now. I have to pray at the church.” With this she disappeared back out into the street, the heavy glass door juddering closed behind her. The man got up and headed towards the payphone. Annett and I sat completely still, rendered mute—who were these people, and more importantly, could we book for their matinee performance?

  “Oh. My. God. I love this country,” I said, after recovering my powers of speech.

  “Me too. There’s nowhere that offers this much entertainment for your money.”

  “Could you imagine living here though?”

  “No way in hell. Too much FIRE,” she said, getting up and circling my head with her finger as she passed. “I’m going to go get some more wine. You want something? A wine, maybe? I’ll get four. I think the happy hour ends soon.”

  Later that night we were upstairs again, enjoying the common area. Larry the conspiracy theorist had returned. He was making his rounds, proselytising his own religion—The Truth—to some traveller sheeple and Singaporean Christians. “I’ve been getting these really bad headaches lately,” he told a young German couple. “So I thought maybe the government had planted a radio transmitter in m
y mouth.”

  BullshitFM: all the conspiracy theories, all the time.

  “So I went to the dentist, who did a scan, but he didn’t find anything. Weird right? I thought maybe I was going crazy, but then I read about this new remote mind-control technology on The Mind Unleashed. The US government created it. No chip. So that explains the headaches. Do you know The Mind Unleashed? I’ll send you some links.”

  The couple got up from the table and left, saying something about Larry being a nice guy but that he believed some very strange things. I guess it’s well and good unleashing your mind, but you have to be careful it doesn’t wander off.

  “Yeah, well, not everyone is ready for The Truth,” he shouted after them, before returning to his beer. He was right about that, something he didn’t seem to be making a habit of.

  Ever since I’d seen Mr Israel Tie downstairs, I’d been hoping for one thing, and one thing only. Then it took place. It’s wonderful when that happens, right? When the Universe does what you want. It almost makes you believe in…

  Never mind.

  Yep, Mr (Maybe) I Can Feel the Fire came upstairs, still sporting that novelty tie, and walked directly into Conspiracy Larry’s den of quarter-truth. I wriggled in my seat in delight. This must have been what it was like to watch Lennon meet McCartney. These two could combine their talents to produce the Sgt Pepper of governmental conspiracy.

  “They stole my family,” Mr Israel Tie said, standing at the edge of Larry’s table.

  “Yeah, they’ll do that all right,” said Larry, slamming his beer bottle down on the table. “Sit down, man. Tell us about it.”

  “They stole my family. I have to call the embassy. I need to get them back.” His shoulders collapsed forward, giving him the appearance of a neglected plant.

  “Which embassy?” Larry asked.

  “Norway.”

  “Norway stole your family?” he said, one eyebrow arched. “Why?”

  “Because I believe in the State of Israel!”

  Larry tucked a tuft of hair behind his ear. “Wait… this makes no sense.” Yes, Larry had picked this moment to suspend his suspension of disbelief. Perhaps willingly, perhaps because he was under the influence of chip-less mind control. “I believe in the State of Israel as well. No one stole my family.”

  “Well, Norway stole mine. I was living there, and people from the government came one day, to see my wife.”

  “Pfft. Don’t get me started on the government, man. Bunch of fucking terrorists.”

  “They said to her either she has to divorce me, or they would take our kids away from us.”

  Larry shook his head. “Why would they say that?”

  “Because I support the State of Israel!”

  “You can’t force someone to get divorced like that.”

  You know you’ve fallen quite far down the well of logic when Conspiracy Larry refuses to bail you out.

  “Are you calling me a liar?” Mr Israel Tie said, standing up from his chair.

  “No, man. Sit down. I’m just wondering if there’s a bit more to it, to make the Norwegian government deport you?”

  “Because I’m a supporter of the Jewish state!” he repeated, as if this really did clear everything up.

  Larry leant back in his chair. “Obviously it’s a sad story and I hope you get your kids back, but it just sounds… I don’t know, a bit far-fetched to me.”

  Mr Israel Tie flinched. “Well I’m here, aren’t I. They kicked me out of the country.”

  “Are you Norwegian?”

  “Yes, I have a Norwegian passport.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense. They can’t kick you out of your country. Even the government wouldn’t do that.”

  This is the point where a normal person might have gotten angry, but Mr Israel Tie had simply reached the end of his tape, and so looped back to the start. “I have to go call the embassy,” he said, shuffling off downstairs.

  “Crackpot,” quipped Larry, after Mr Israel Tie was out of hearing range. He turned to me. I may have been listening in a little bit too zealously. “Can you believe that guy?” he said. “Some people, right?”

  I nodded, although actually I had no problem believing Mr Israel Tie. I also believed Larry, the Gatherers, the trainee rabbis, and the Orthodox Jews rocking out at the Wailing Wall. Not in their stories and beliefs, but that their stories and beliefs made perfect sense to them.

  Because I felt it too. This… hole.

  This what’s the point of this hole.

  This none of this makes any sense hole.

  It’s perfectly normal and rational to try to find something to fill that hole. Wasn’t it why I was sitting there in the first place, in a random hostel, in a random country, surrounded by strangers? Whether it’s with work, religion, drugs, hedonism, model trains, love, friendship, sex (see hedonism), or travelling to weird places (my latest drug of choice), we’re all looking for something to fill that hole. It’s very possible that if you meet the wrong people, or read the wrong book, or have a harrowing experience on the way, you can get very lost and end up joining ISIS, drinking spiked Kool-Aid with Jim Jones, or attending an Elton John concert. The mind is a fragile thing; life is its blunt-force trauma.

  That said, I did feel a little guilty that we were watching all these people with such fascination when they were clearly lost, confused, ill, or isolated out on life’s fringes. “Is it wrong how much we’re enjoying this?” I asked Annett, who was furiously thumbing at her Lonely Planet on the nearby sofa.

  She paused to consider it. “Disrespectful, you mean?”

  “Yep.”

  “That we’re entertained by, rather than respectful of, people of faith?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She shrugged. “They don’t seem all that respectful of us quiet heathens either. We’re just happily sitting here not starting any wars, not trying to control any minds, not wearing novelty ties.”

  “That’s true.”

  She stood up. “Let’s think about it over another drink,” she said, heading for the bar. “I think happy hour ends soon.”

  The next day, we joined a special outreach program offered by a nearby synagogue. Usually Orthodox Jews interact with the secular world as little as possible. Judaism doesn’t proselytise. It doesn’t want new members. Jews are chosen, they don’t choose. It’s not a buffet. But this particular synagogue did believe in meeting outsiders to explain its way of life.

  A middle-aged woman with an aquiline nose sitting under a heavy black shoulder-length wig met us in the hostel’s lobby. Getty had been born in America but moved to Israel in her early twenties and was now a practising Orthodox Jew with a large family of her own. It’s quite a weird thing to be in the presence of someone who thinks human life is only six thousand years old, which was one of her opening lines.

  “Do you believe that in the literal or symbolic sense?” asked Julius, an Austrian theology teacher who was part of our group of six. He was in Israel doing Christian missionary work. I hoped it didn’t involve handing out school textbooks.

  “The literal,” Getty replied. “We Jews can trace our lineage all the way back to Adam and Eve. At home I have a family tree showing that my family are direct descendants of King David.”

  The group shuffled nervously. People looked at their shoes. Someone coughed. This was a brave woman, coming out every week to meet people like us, to tell us things we’d think were ridiculous, all in a noble attempt to convince us they weren’t.

  She walked us around an Orthodox Jewish neighbourhood, took us to a synagogue so that we could see a Torah, then on to a Jewish bakery, a yeshiva, and finally a kind of Orthodox department store stocked full of all your daily, devout needs. I was surprised to discover the marketers of these products used similar techniques to that of the secular world. One prayer shawl had the snazzy tag line “The prayer shawl you’ve been praying for.” There were prayer books in multiple colours. I pulled out a hot pink one. “Well, women have to pray t
oo, right?” she said, blushing, ironically near a book entitled Doesn’t Anyone Blush Anymore?

  The tour ended at her home. An American called Andrew, on his first-ever trip abroad, looked towards the ceiling and said, “What’s that?”

  Getty followed his eyeline. “The curve of the roof?”

  “No, that.” He pointed.

  “The design of the tile?”

  “No, that object.”

  “That’s… an air conditioner.”

  It was just a standard rectangular air conditioner.

  “No way, really?” At this moment, we learned Andrew still blushed, too.

  “You’ve never seen an air conditioner before?” Getty asked.

  “Not one that looks like that.”

  “It has a heater function as well…”

  “You’re kidding me! Really? Man, I’m so out of my depth. I don’t even know how to get hot water out of the shower at the hostel. I’m pretty sure I’m supposed to twist something but it’s always cold. Then the toilet, I couldn’t find the flush. There’s just these two buttons. I was standing there like an idiot, afraid to press them. Why do you need two buttons?”

  “For big business and small business,” Julius’s wife Sarah replied.

  “Wow,” said Andrew, exhaling in wonder. “That’s the future. We’ve got nothing like that in America.”

  This felt like another perfect, surreal Jerusalem moment. Sitting in the home of a woman who believes human life is six thousand years old, that God has a plan for us all, that all Arabs have jihad on their minds, and that the Messianic Age is coming and with it we’ll have peace on earth. On the surface, everyone in the room shared a language, used the same words—yet in reality, we were irreconcilably far apart in our backgrounds, experiences, and understanding of what those words meant. We were all Andrew, looking at other cultures’ air conditioners, showers, and two-button toilets, bamboozled.