by J. S. Margot
I was annoyed by their conspicuousness, by the way they drew attention to themselves. Did I harbour ill will towards these Jews? No. Did I, right now, harbour goodwill towards these Hasidim? No. I wished the world wouldn’t make things so difficult for itself.
My thoughts drifted off to the two gay friends who’d brought me to the airport and would pick me up again in ten days’ time. Since the day Thomas came out, his father had wanted nothing more to do with him. On the way to the airport Thomas told me that his parents had suddenly split up after thirty years of marriage. His mother had filed for divorce after finding out that, for decades, his father had been leading a double life. He was attracted to men. “Car park sex would be his speciality,” Thomas had said sourly.
That was what I was thinking about, besieged by Hasidim, listening to an airport voice announcing that our flight would be delayed by at least two hours. Thomas’s father had hated his son because he carried within him the same thing that he did, but whose existence he’d never openly acknowledged or wanted to admit. Perhaps he and I shared something. Who knows, perhaps I admired the courage of these Hasidim more than I wanted to admit. Who knows, maybe I was jealous that they had the guts to just do their own thing.
Inside the Boeing, the Hasidic hullabaloo that had raged at the gate continued unabated. People constantly swapped seats like a game of musical chairs. Men climbed over men, women joined other women. The Hasidim and the less religious Jews argued about the use of the cabin baggage space. Hasidim shoved their suitcases, bags and coats into every available space, grumblingly moved people’s belongings to other lockers without asking permission, summoned stewardesses, pushed unwanted luggage into their hands “so we can put our hats here”. They handled their hats as carefully as if they’d been cream cakes. Noisy children of all ages blocked the aisle. “They think this is Gaza,” Nima would have said if he’d been there, but he wasn’t. Even so, I couldn’t help getting angry about the hoops we’d have had to jump through to get him a visa for Israel. Assuming he was actually granted one. Israel was Israel, just as Iran was Iran: Jewish Israelis could likewise forget about going there.
I sat by the window, next to a Hasidic woman with an attractive but suspicious face, and hands as pale as milk. I tried to start a conversation with her, but she didn’t seem to want to talk, which was fine by me, as it meant I could concentrate on the travel books I’d borrowed from the city library. What a hope! The buttons to call cabin crew were in constant use. I couldn’t read three sentences without one of the faithful summoning a steward or stewardess. They bloody well think they’re God Almighty, shot through my head.
My neighbour did tell me, though, that El Al didn’t just stand for Every Landing Always Late, but meant “skywards” in Hebrew. And that I must pay a visit to Eilat: “The best place in the world for diving.”
Four
Mr Schneider had warned me: as soon as my feet touched Israeli soil at Ben Gurion airport, I’d never be the same again. Which was true, but not in the way he meant.
He was alluding to the intense joy and pride that fills every Jew when they set foot on the soil of the young Jewish state. To the deep-seated emotions that overwhelmed him and his fellow Jews when they “came home” again: really came home, to the roots of the tree of their history, to their origins. To the significance of the Holy Land, the country where Jews are allowed to be “just Jewish”. Israel, that narrow, elongated plaster on the many wounds of his people; Israel, the decisive answer to a history of persecution and isolation; Israel, home base in a history without Heimat. To Mr Schneider, whose patriotic fervour for Belgium was such that he’d hung up official portraits of the Belgian King and Queen in his office, Israel was a home country of a completely different order. Israel was the father and mother country in one. It was a homecoming in the true sense of the word. Medinat Yisrael: the only country in the world where taxi drivers spoke Hebrew, he said: if that fact alone didn’t make you feel right at home, well…!
I made the acquaintance of such a taxi driver. He came running up to me as I, bent double under the weight of my rucksack, scanned the terminal. I was to stay three of the nine nights at Simon’s place. The rest of the time, including my first night in Tel Aviv, was my own to fill in.
I’d planned to go to the tourist office on arrival at Ben Gurion. But there was no one at the desk. It was already growing dark outside. I didn’t know the city; I wouldn’t be able to see where to get out or where I was. Though excited to have arrived, I also felt tired. And hungry: I longed for some tasty hummus. Counting the drive to Zaventem airport, I’d been travelling for ten hours.
So when the man called out “Taxi, taxi”, I didn’t wave him away. He, persistent but friendly, said something to me in Hebrew, but even before he’d decoded the message of my raised eyebrows he’d switched to English: where was I going, could he take me, did I know where I was staying the night? If not he could help me, he knew what young people like me wanted, he drove them to basic, clean hotels in the city every day of the week.
“Could you take me to a youth hostel?” I asked. By now I was pushing thirty, but since becoming single again I’d started acting younger out of sheer survival instinct.
“Better than a youth hostel,” he said. I nodded cautiously in approval, by which time he’d already grabbed my rucksack.
“For the same price as a youth hostel?” I wanted to know.
“Of course! You have money on you?”
“Preferably a hotel by the sea,” I instructed him. I felt in the front pocket of my bag for the envelope with shekels the Schneiders had given me.
“No problem. Welcome to Israel!”
I’d travelled enough to know that you always paid dearly for blind faith in a taxi driver. But I stifled that thought. Just go for it, I reasoned with myself: at worst you’ll pay over the odds for the journey, if you don’t like the hotel you can get him to take you to another, there’ll be plenty around, it’s late, you still need to eat, tomorrow is another day.
The blast of heat outside Ben Gurion’s automatic doors was fiercer than I’d expected. “God is a woman and she’s drying her long hair,” Nima had said, as we entered the steamy hothouse that was Cuba.
The taxi driver was a tall man with a big nose and brilliantine in his hair, which grew abundantly, not just on his head. He didn’t wear a yarmulke. The taxi was an official one—with air con—and he set the meter properly. That last fact, especially, reassured me. I couldn’t say the same for his driving: he drove like a maniac, the violent jerks and screech of brakes bringing back long-forgotten childhood memories of bumper cars. Yet he seemed to know what he was doing.
From the signs and the increasingly crowded neon-lit streets and pavements it looked as if we were nearing the centre. I was struck by the near total absence of Jewish people like the ones in Antwerp. I couldn’t spot a single man with a yarmulke; there were no hats, beards, or long coats to be seen. Instead, the men were mostly dressed in shorts or jeans. The women were like their counterparts in the West: they wore short skirts, little tops, looked fashionable and self-confident. Where had all the Hasidic Jews from the airport gone?
I was almost disappointed by this vision of modernity. But straight away my brain’s autocorrect kicked in: if anything, I should be disappointed at seeing almost no Muslim men or women. Where were they? It was their country too, wasn’t it? Why did I see almost no street signs in Arabic, while signs in Hebrew were everywhere? Had all the airport signs been bilingual? I couldn’t remember, and that shocked me.
The sea was fringed with tall, ugly hotel blocks. There were a few classy buildings, but many had a dilapidated look: walls full of cracks; wires and cables dangling from the facades; whitewashed balconies streaked yellow and brown. The Malecón esplanade in Havana was a thousand times prettier. Was this what so charmed Elzira?
The shops were still open. The hubbub from packed p
avement terraces wafted into the taxi. “This city never sleeps,” the driver called over his shoulder. That’s what every taxi driver says, in every metropolis, I thought, but I nodded and went on staring out of the window to signal that I didn’t feel like talking, especially if it meant shouting to make ourselves heard; he’d switched from playing schmaltzy hits to some kind of klezmer music at ear-bleeding volume.
At bars and restaurants people queued, glass in hand, waiting for a table. I hadn’t yet set foot in the centre, but I could already feel the city’s positive, infectious vibe. The young soldiers—men and women with M16s—slightly dampened my excitement, but even they appeared good-humoured. Was Israel one gigantic eruv, I wondered. Was the whole country surrounded by this symbolic enclosure that made Shabbat more bearable? Were soldiers allowed to carry weapons on Shabbat? Allowed to use them?
The driver suddenly turned off down a side road, then another and another. The roads got narrower and narrower, though they were still quite busy. Just as I was about to tap the man on the shoulder to ask why we’d left the esplanade, he stopped unexpectedly in front of a terraced house, flanked left and right by a brightly lit, antiquated furniture store. Its window displays clearly hadn’t changed in decades, its wares dated from a bygone age.
“One moment,” he said. He leapt out of the car, opened the garage door of the house, switched on a light, retrieved my rucksack from the boot and opened the car door for me.
Bemused, my bag clenched under my arm, I got out.
“This is your hotel,” he announced, pointing to the open garage. “You can spend the night here for 50 shekels.”
Only now did I see it. On the concrete floor lay a neatly made mattress; in the corner there was a makeshift shower cabin.
“I live upstairs. You won’t find anything cheaper and safer. A lot of backpackers sleep here. They sleep well here.”
*
I didn’t hesitate a second before ordering him to drive me back to the coast. On the way to this dingy neighbourhood we’d passed a Mercure hotel. For a while I’d worked as a translator for the Accor hotel group. Mercure was part of Accor, as were Ibis and Sofitel. After six months of employment, all permanent members of Accor staff were issued a card entitling them to a considerable discount on any of the group’s hotels. I didn’t have such a discount card as I’d only been a freelancer. But that wasn’t how I approached the check-in desk. I told the receptionist that I headed the group’s Brussels office but had unfortunately mislaid my card—“probably stolen on the way here, because when I left I still had it, I can’t imagine how my pocket was picked, no idea where, hope I haven’t lost anything else, I’ll check that in a minute, just want to do this first.”
I reeled off the names of all the big cheeses I could remember from my Accor days, and when I saw that the receptionist was impressed I laid it on even thicker: advised him to ring these ladies and gentlemen—mainly gentlemen—the very next day; they would certainly express their gratitude for the way he’d helped me. I said I’d ask my office to fax a copy of the discount card to him. I had the receptionist copy my passport and my identity card.
For a sum only slightly higher than the one charged by the taxi driver for his garage I was given a luxurious room, breakfast included.
So did I, from the moment that my feet touched Israeli soil, feel like a different person? Indeed I did: until that moment I’d never known I possessed such chutzpah.
Five
I took the bus to Bnei Brak, where Simon and his wife lived. Simon, the elder Schneider boy, was by now not only a doctor—an ear, nose and throat specialist, no less—but also the husband of Abigail, his brand-new wife. At the end of the year the young couple would move to the Netherlands, where Simon had got a job lined up in a hospital. At the moment he was still working in a clinic in Tel Aviv.
When I boarded the bus, I showed the driver the address Mrs Schneider had written down for me on a piece of paper: “Could you please tell me when to get out?”
The man, who was eating an orange, looked me over from head to foot and nodded. When I went to sit down across the aisle just behind him, so as to make communication easier, he shook his head and gestured that I should sit at the back of the bus.
Only from my seat on the back row—and it took a while before the reality dawned on me—did I see that all the men were sitting in the front half of the bus, and all the women in the back half. At the stops, the women got in and out of the rear door; the men used the door at the front.
As far as I could tell, the passengers covered the entire spectrum of Judaism, from secular to ultra-Orthodox. To judge by the sidelocks and tzitzits, the wigs and tights, the latter were in the majority.
Maybe my mood was distorting things, but throughout the journey I felt I could sense the tension between these poles of Judaism, as if a nerve lay exposed.
It appalled me that this system of segregation was apparently openly applied on a regular bus. It was 1997; hadn’t apartheid been abolished seven years earlier? How could the government of a country that called itself democratic not only tolerate a measure that discriminated on the basis of gender but officially introduce such a rule? Or was public transport in this country in the hands of a private company, and if so, weren’t they obliged to comply with basic human rights?
My outrage about this state of affairs was the first thing that burst out when I greeted Simon at the door of his apartment. He was happy to see me, but taken aback by my tirade.
“Buses like these were introduced—after vocal protests from more modern Jews—at the request of the ultra-Orthodox community of Bnei Brak. A lot of Haredi Jews live here, a splinter group of Hasidic Judaism. Haredim are so strict that sitting under a tree without a religious book in your hand is regarded as disobedience to the Almighty. They have one single task on earth: to pray and study. Don’t get so het up, there are very few such buses. You could have come in an ordinary bus, where you could have sat wherever you liked. You were just unlucky that you ended up in one of those apartheid affairs.” He laughed. I couldn’t quite gauge his laugh. I didn’t know Simon like I knew Jakov.
“Did I understand that correctly? Do you live in an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood?”
“City: Bnei Brak isn’t a neighbourhood but a city. And you’ll certainly see how Orthodox it is here tomorrow and the day after: Friday and Saturday. But let me show you our home and your room. And I’ll introduce you to Abigail. At the moment she’s at a heavily pregnant friend’s place, helping her with the housework. She’ll be back about nine. Have a shower. Freshen up. Relax.”
It wasn’t till then that my heart rate slowed down and I was able to study Simon properly. There were only a few years between us. The man standing before me was muscular, serious and self-assured. He looked more grown-up than me. He already knew what he wanted from life, it seemed, and usually I found that kind of self-confidence suspect, but in Simon’s case there was something encouraging about it. There wasn’t a hint of the macho posturing that Jakov sometimes went in for, or the evasive way he’d fob me off in our conversations. Simon, whose still waters ran deep, had served in the Israeli army. Jakov, the bigmouth, would probably never dare do anything that put his life at risk.
Outwardly, I now saw that Simon took more after his mother than his father. He possessed her refinement, her aristocratic way of moving and talking, her intriguing glance, which seemed to see everything and which I’d so often vainly tried to fathom. I thought: if he’s not already about to become a father, it won’t be long. Yet I couldn’t imagine him as a soldier.
Their apartment was on the ground floor of a yellowish, four-storey building halfway up a sloping street. It was small, neat and comfortable, with low ceilings. The furniture looked both new and cheap, a random collection of items—no particular style.
“Don’t you have IKEA here?” I couldn’t help asking.
&n
bsp; “No, not yet. But if there was, I wouldn’t go there if I could help it. The founder of IKEA is an anti-Semite,” Simon answered. “During the war he raised funds for the Swedish fascist movement. But nobody knows that. IKEA sells everything, except the truth about its founder.”
I looked at him suspiciously.
“When the truth about his wartime past came to light, the Swede did apologize. He wrote a letter to every single Jewish member of staff, calling his involvement with fascism ‘youthful stupidity’. Could have happened to anyone.” He grinned. “And before you ask: our things are in a container, waiting until we settle in Amsterdam. There wasn’t any point in shipping all that nice stuff over here. It’d only get damaged.”
The bathroom—with a shower, but no bath—looked immaculate. There was only one sink and one cooker in the kitchen. From the open bedroom door I could see that the couple slept in a double bed next to which, behind a screen, stood a made-up single bed: for the nights when Abigail had her period and, in that unclean capacity, wasn’t allowed to sleep with her husband.
The guestroom contained two single beds, separated by a bedside table, as well as a clothes rack and a dresser that could serve as a table. Three light-blue towels lay folded in a neat pile on one of the beds. On a tray in the middle of the other bed there was a bottle of water, a glass and silver-coloured platter with pretzels. Next to a bowl filled with water I recognized the square shape of a bar of Sunlight soap.
Simon put my rucksack carefully in the corner of the guest room. He felt in his back pocket and proudly showed me a photo of “my dearest Abigail”: an attractive, rather heavily made-up brunette with full lips and eyes like black olives. She looked modern and fashionable, even in her little hairnet and pretty, long-sleeved blouse, buttoned up to her slim neck. I poked him in the ribs: “Wow, you did well!” He grinned and took a step away from me.
