It's funny how your love for a city can foment while you're absent from it, growing stronger, more complex, more layered. It was like that with Germany, with Berlin in particular. I saw it first in 2000, and then was absent from it for a year. But during that year, it was continually on my mind, the grayness, the cold wetness, the stately marble buildilngs of Ku'damm, those walls with bullet holes... the fog that curled around the Fersehturm, the bored-looking urbanites on Alexanderplatz, the leather-clad hipsters walking around the Frier Uni. I think it was in being away from Berlin that I really fell in love with it.
And here, it is the being away from Jerusalem that makes me want to go back, that hilly city, white city, the city where, from an aerial view, it is as if all the houses and streets were built haphazardly and in danger of falling down any minute (see photo above); the city where every rock, every stick could be (and probably is) an artifact; that utterly chaotic, self-contradicotry city with five-thousand-year-old walls and ramshackle buildings and noisy Arabic markets and that hot, dry smell of the desert. And yet in the evening, when the sun sets, the city suddenly settles into a softness and almost sorrowful silence.
And the people! I had never seen so many people walking around with vehement, determined expressions. The language you overhear always sounded urgent, and everyone smoked as if there was no tomorrow. And then the women have such lovely olive skins...
Imagine spending August in Jerusalem! Even the hotness and driness sound appealing right now.
I wrote to a few professors whom I thought might have connections in the Middle East. Some have written back. Some have not. We'll see.
Off to grocery shopping!
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