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

  As Annett and I walked back to the hostel planning to fully avail ourselves of the last of its happy hour, I was feeling pretty good about myself. We’d had a really interesting few days full of extraordinary people and beliefs. The novelty in Israel didn’t stop at ties. The slight skip in my step was the satisfaction I felt at having reached adulthood, broadly rational, mentally functional, with a girlfriend I could more than tolerate. I could enjoy these people and their wacky beliefs comfortable in my certainty that I wasn’t one of them. I felt a little smug about that, and not paying attention to the street, I walked across two interconnected drains, swerving just in time to avoid the third.

  Annett stopped abruptly. “What was that?”

  “What was what?”

  “Why did you swerve like that?”

  I pointed back at the drains. “I nearly walked over three drains.”

  She looked down at the drains, back up at me, then back at the drains again. It was a hostile, wordless interrogation. She waited for me to explain myself. I felt I already had, and so waited for her to do the same. Couples spend a lot of time in such conversational deadlocks, waiting for the other to say something. A problem solved quickly in our relationship by Annett’s compulsion to share every thought in her head, the second it arrives.

  “What’s wrong with crossing three drains?”

  “Crossing three drains is bad luck, obviously. Everyone knows that.”

  She did a double take. “Why in the name of what the hell would it be bad luck?”

  “You’ve never seen me avoiding three drains?”

  “No! What happens if you cross them?”

  I fingered my collar. “BAD THINGS.”

  She rolled her eyes. “This is absurd. You’re just doing this to annoy me, right?” Annett was convinced that everything I did was designed deliberately to irritate her. As if it was my only joy in life (in reality, it was just my biggest).

  She grabbed me by the arm and attempted to pull me back across the three rectangular harbingers of doom, unaware she was goading the wrath of the entire known universe.

  “NO!” I shouted, as we began an impromptu street-wrestling match.

  I managed to wriggle free. She walked forwards and backwards across the drains.

  “You shouldn’t do that.”

  She kept doing that, adopting increasing outlandish walking styles as she paraded back and forth atop the trio of drains. A flagrant expression of cosmic defiance that looked like something out of Monty Python’s “Ministry of Silly Walks.” She seemed desperate to unleash damnation and destruction upon herself. I had to cover my eyes.

  “You’ve just inviting some seriously bad juju upon yourself.”

  “Oh no!” she shouted. “Shit! I better stop…”

  She didn’t stop. Instead, she attempted a moonwalk. Yes, a moonwalk. The heresy. “I really don’t want the God of Three Drains to smite me. Scary!”

  I grabbed her arm and tried to pull her off the drains and towards safety. People were staring at us.

  “You understand how irrational you’re being, right?” she said. I’d been playing the three drains game ever since I was a kid. I’d never really thought about it. I suddenly felt less smug about myself. I guess we all have our own irreconcilable beliefs. Mine seemed harmless enough. We continued walking, in silence. It didn’t last long. Annett broke it, as always.

  7

  Hebron, Palestine: “I don’t need sex, the government fucks me every day.”

  Dual narratives, hidden atheism, the blame game

  We hadn’t planned on visiting Palestine during our Israel trip. However, after I arrived in Tel Aviv, my inbox was kind enough to inform me I had a missive from a heavily bearded man called Anwar. Anwar was a Couchsurfing member and lived on the Palestinian side of Hebron. He was offering to host us at his house in an adult-sleepover type arrangement. This was nice, and unexpected. We mostly used Couchsurfing for its meetups because being really, really old, I have a back that gets angry when I sleep on anything but the finest Egyptian cottons. It’s also rare for people on Couchsurfing to proactively offer to host you—usually you have to badger them with bribes of cheesecake and promises to do all the washing up. Possibly Anwar was having trouble attracting would-be sofa sleepers because of where he lived. Hebron was intense. Since 1995 it has been divided into two parts: H2, “supervised” by Israel, and H1, “belonging” to Palestine. Everything political here is a question of perspective.

  We asked our Airbnb host Adam about the idea of dropping by to see Anwar, our new friend/Internet stranger. While he’d forcefully warned us against visiting Jerusalem, he didn’t even dignify the Hebron question with a response. He merely laughed and continued to clean his kitchen. We might as well have been suggesting strapping ourselves to a rocket and firing ourselves at his now gleaming fridge-freezer. Oded proved similarly doubtful. But that was a state he reserved for almost everything, including existence itself.

  On the other hand—specifically, my hand—I kind of liked the idea of visiting Anwar. Since we’d arrived in Israel, everyone had been trying to convince us that the Muslims on the other side of the border were all knife-wielding jihadists bent on the destruction of Israel. Here was a chance to prove these people wrong. Palestinians are people you hear a lot about but rarely meet because they aren’t free to travel. Now that we were nearby and being offered a chance to get to know one of them, it felt wrong not to at least entertain that possibility. The risks? Well, yeah, but there were always risks, right? Coming to Israel had already been a risk. What was a bit more risk? Or so I told myself. I was getting good at convincing myself I was a fearless traveller. Sofa Me of Berlin was long gone. I was a little embarrassed by him. Not that I’d become suddenly brave; merely increasingly, willingly, risk blind. Annett was less keen on the Anwar plan, however. “They have no problem with foreigners,” I said, as we climbed into bed that night. “Their fight is with the Israelis. They’ll be happy to have someone visit them and show an interest in the conflict.”

  She chewed her top lip. “Pretty words, but you’ve not done any actual research. You’re just assuming everything will be fine, as per usual.”

  “Okay, maybe,” I confessed. “But everything has always been fine, right?”

  “Yeah. But that’s what everyone says until the thing that isn’t fine.”

  I squished my head back into the pillow. “What do they say then? Almost everything has always been fine?”

  Her voice lowered. “No, they can’t say anything. Because they’re dead.”

  We slept on it a night. Not the bed, the decision. Well, both really. The next morning over breakfast, looking up from the generous quantities of cream cheese she was spreading onto brown bread, she said, “I feel like you’re just doing this stuff to write about it later.”

  I tried to find a way of not admitting this. Then I tried to find a way of not admitting that I couldn’t find a way of not admitting this. “Well… there might be some truth to that,” I admitted, albeit reluctantly. Not that I did much writing. I was the sort of writer who talked about writing much more than getting around to doing any of it. Like an armchair sports fan, I preferred to cheer literature on from the safety of the sidelines, where I didn’t have to get myself sentence sweaty.

  “I don’t want to take silly risks so you can try to convince people you’re some sort of adventure traveller,” she continued. “You’re not.”

  “I know,” I said, munching on a mouthful of banana. “Yet, the more of this sort of travelling we do, the more I like it. I don’t want to stop.”

  She sighed. A sure sign her defences were lowering.

  Once we reached Jerusalem, we saw that the kind people of the Abraham Asylum Hostel were offering something called a Dual Narrative Tour of Hebron. On the tour, we’d spend the morning being led by an Israeli rabbi. Then for the second half, we’d cross into the Palestinian part of the city and hear from a local student there. The tour would be the perfect opportunity
to visit Anwar. At the end of it, equipped with our new dual narratives, we’d not go back with the other (sensible) people, and instead spend a night or two with Anwar, or go explore some other cities in Palestine and make some new narratives of our own.

  Annett agreed to the tour but refused to commit to visiting Anwar, saying that decision could wait until the last possible moment.

  At 8am, on a Wednesday morning, we found ourselves seated in the hostel lobby. I was yawning about once per minute; mornings and I had long stopped talking, like siblings in a bitter inheritance feud. It was very quiet in the lobby. All the “touched” people who had been entertaining us so brilliantly thus far were still asleep. It was just us and the eight other risk-blind tourists willing to plunge themselves into the uncertainty of Hebron.

  Our guide blew into the room fifteen minutes late, looking as if he’d been pulled through a hedge but didn’t know by whom. His name was Elijah. He was about forty years old, portly, and wore a white yarmulke. Traditional curly sidelocks (peyot) framed his round face. Around his neck was a crumpled prayer shawl—perhaps the one he’d been praying for.

  We took public bus #160 to Hebron. The bus was just like any other bus, other than the fact the driver carried a revolver on his hip, and that all its windows were bulletproof. Elijah sat just in front of us, and gave the group a crash course in Hebron’s troubled history. “Funnily enough,” he began, “Hebron actually means ‘to connect’ in Hebrew. Did you know that?” He smirked. “There’s a certain irony there, of course.”

  Two police cars, their sirens wailing, overtook the bus. We all turned to look, except Elijah, who acknowledged their existence in the same way an elephant might a mosquito. “Yes. There will probably be a lot more of that, everyone. Don’t be concerned. Hebron is really a microcosm of the whole Israel-Palestine conflict. You can learn more in one day in Hebron than in one year in a university.” He then told us about Hebron University, which of course begged the question: How much can you learn in one day in a university in Hebron? A lot, most likely. Although probably still not enough to understand how the city had ended up in such a precarious state.

  “A brief word about what you’re going to see.” He raised his voice so the people a few seats back could hear. “It is quite shocking. Not to unnerve you. Just to prepare you. It’s probably quite unlike anything you’ve seen before. I know, also, that there’s a lot of people out there in the media making out that every Jew in Hebron is a colonialist. That we’re the bad guys.”

  His eyebrows lurched towards his forehead at the sheer absurdity of this notion. “Actually we’re indigenous to Hebron. The problem is that there are too few of us left now. Those who remain, and settler is the wrong word for them… well… they need protection, so, at present, Hebron does sort of resemble, security-wise, a European colonial outpost you might find in India or Africa.”

  The group traded nervous glances, brows furrowing into maybe-this-has-all-been-a-big-mistake creases. The nearer we got to the city, the more the security presence spiked. We crossed several military checkpoints. Sitting like urban birds’ nests on the roofs of seemingly abandoned houses were numerous lookout towers. The only vehicle that passed us during the final minutes of the journey was an armoured van. It felt like we’d entered a forsaken city. But that wasn’t the weirdest part. The weirdest part was seeing the Israeli flags everywhere; textile trophies of sovereignty flapping down from rooftops, out of barred windows, and draped down from lamp posts.

  Looking at them, I was struck by how prone to overcompensation humans are. The more tenuous our right to power, the more stupendous the title we give ourselves to try to obfuscate that. The less safe we feel in our throne, the more bombastic the crown we cast upon our head.

  We stepped down from the bus onto King David road. The only people on it were soldiers. Some sat on nearby roofs, others guarded a checkpoint. Elijah called it “the centre of the centre of the conflict.” At one end, behind a checkpoint, was Palestinian Hebron. The other end, where we stood, amongst all the flags, and abandoned buildings, and bullet holes, and silence, was Israeli Hebron.

  “This street is known as Apartheid Street. I guess I don’t need to explain why,” Elijah said, ushering us to put down our cameras and hurry along. “There might be clashes here later. We won’t linger too long.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said, sensing both his mistake and our apprehension. “It’s just part of daily life here. There are always small skirmishes. After all, there’s no bowling alleys, no bars, no clubs in Hebron. So what are the Palestinian youth going to do for fun? Well, come over here and throw some rocks at Israeli soldiers, that’s what. It’s a rite of passage for them. If you get arrested? Even better, more respect.”

  Previously, Palestinians had been allowed to walk across a small part of this road to get to a nearby school and the border to the main Palestinian part of the city. However, last week, a seventeen-year-old had come down some steps, pulled a knife, and tried to stab an Israeli soldier. The Palestinian media questioned whether he’d really had a knife, or whether one had been placed on him later. Elijah stood on the bottom of that staircase and recreated the incident for us.

  “The guy, he comes down here,” he said, hopping theatrically off the bottom step. He seemed in little doubt of what had happened. “He’s probably on drugs, and then he takes one, two, three steps and pulls out the knife.” He mimicked this action, holding out an invisible blade. Just two metres away, three soldiers watched on. Elijah thrust his invisible weapon in their direction. This didn’t seem wise. He approached the soldier nearest to us. This soldier was a handsome young man with olive skin and high, wide cheekbones. He couldn’t be older than twenty-two, and so a veteran by Israeli Defense Force standards. “It happened like that, right?” he asked the soldier. “I’m telling them about the attack here last week.”

  The soldier stood erect, chest out, chin high, like a flag made human. His face was chiselled and a little ruddy from the sun. A machine gun rested idly across his chest like a dozing lover. He looked at Elijah, but also beyond him and up the staircase into the hills, where there was a small smattering of Palestinian houses.

  “It was similar to that, yes. I wasn’t here, so I can’t speak to the specifics.” Bizarrely he had a perfect English accent, a southern accent very like my own, in fact. His r’s were flat but his th’s morphed into f’s. “The guy who killed the terrorist, he was a good friend of mine. A really good friend. Honestly speaking, I fink it’s really messed him up. Doing somefing like that, well…” He sighed. “It’s not somefing we do lightly. No matter what you might hear in the media, or the Palestinians might say about us. We’re not like that.”

  The soldier was called Gideon. He’d lived in England until he was twelve. Then his parents decided to make aliyah, and returned to Israel. The rest of his youth he’d spent here, and he was now finishing his mandatory military service.

  “We don’t want to ’urt anyone, not at all,” he continued. “That’s the last fing we want. There are protocols. Only if they freaten our lives in some way can we shoot to kill. Those who do attack us, they’re usually on something. To hurt another human, knowing they’ll be killed after—usually they have to take somefing first. The ones I’ve seen, anyway, they’re not in control at that point.”

  In the distance came the sound of whistling and chanting. “Attacks might be about to start,” said Elijah, stoking the fire of our anxieties. Gideon turned to the two other soldiers in his company. One threw down his cigarette. They moved slightly closer together but still appeared placid, as if this were just a normal part of their job. Time for the weekly team meeting. Soldier 3’s turn to prepare tea and biscuits.

  Elijah nudged us further up the road. We would have been just fine with that, were we not moving towards the sound of the protests. Instinctively we huddled a little closer together as well, and nearer to Elijah, our senses heightened. Cameras disappeared back into pockets. Very few selfies were taken. That w
as nice. A hundred metres from Gideon we reached Tarpat Junction, another of the border crossings into the Palestinian side. One of the soldiers guarding it strode out towards us.

  “Are you with us or against us?” he asked Elijah. That’s how simple it was here. For or against. Black or white. We heard a helicopter buzz overhead, and with it, the noise of the protesters increased.

  “With you,” Elijah answered.

  We quickened our pace and headed up into the hills as the Muslim call to prayer sounded from a nearby minaret. Usually I found it beautiful, but at this moment it felt more like an incitement.

  Once we’d reached the safety of the hills, and were just starting to relax, Elijah informed us that “after the Temple Mount, the hilltops of Hebron are probably the most contentious place in the whole country.”

  Thanks, thanks a lot, Elijah. He then showed us a small ongoing archaeological excavation which he said proved there was once an ancient Jewish city of Hebron here. “I even sneaked a Palestinian into this tour once and showed him this,” he said, holding up some kind of rock. “But he wouldn’t accept it. He said it must be fake, placed here by Israeli archaeologists.” Elijah sighed. “I guess he just couldn’t look past his own biases.”

  I didn’t get the feeling Elijah could either. Not that any of us can. We’re lucky if we can even identify what they are. Elijah alternated between being really quite nice and really quite irritating, depending on the conviction he had in whatever he was saying at any particular moment. I liked him when he was uncertain. Certainty he wore less well. Especially when that certainty was about Israel and its right to do things that seemed to me, with my pre-existing narratives, questionable.

  “We have to get past the blame game,” he added, moving this small rock back and forth in his hands before returning it respectfully to the ground.

  We then visited the (alleged) tomb of Jesse and Ruth. Elijah casually dropped a lot of biblical names, as if we were all dedicated Bible scholars. I couldn’t remember who Jesse and Ruth were, most likely because I’d never known. They sounded like a husband and wife breakfast-TV presenter team. I thought about asking but didn’t want to look ignorant. Or, more ignorant. One of atheism’s strongest selling points is that there’s nothing to remember. It’s a real boon for the absent-minded.