We crept forward. We passed a frail man who relied on his faith to compensate for his size. He was sitting under an olive tree, which was not enough to protect him from the advancing afternoon sun. He shouted at Julie and told her off: “Cover your head, woman!” But Julie didn’t understand what he’d said, and took no notice. If she had understood, she would simply have said something that the frail man wouldn’t have understood: “That’s funny, what’s it got to do with him?” When Julie didn’t turn toward him or pay any attention to his rebuke, however, the man supposed that Julie was ignoring him, so he repeated his shouts and his reproaches: “Curse the man who brought you up, and the one who keeps you in his house!”
When Julie and I caught up with Salman and Aida, who had already gone down the few steps in front of the Damascus Gate and had almost reached the gate itself, the Jerusalem I remembered had deserted me, remaining only in the school books that had introduced it to me. I stood like the others, astonished, in front of the great gate, ready to enter the heart of the city amid the glances of three Israeli soldiers and the watchful protection of their weapons.
I thought back to our arrival at the foot of the Mount of Olives. After parking, we had left the place together and moved a little away, leaving our two wives to finish a private conversation they hadn’t had time for on the drive from the Ramada Renaissance Hotel. Salman had turned to me, his finger pointing off to the side.
“This is the tomb of the prophet Zechariah, peace be upon him.”
“Peace be upon him,” I repeated, then asked him about the olives, whose name the hill bore. But Salman didn’t answer. I looked around for the sacred trees, but I could find nothing but hundreds of Jewish graves, which it seemed had swallowed up the olives of the mountain.
I looked again at where Salman had pointed a few moments before. There were actually two tombs. I had read about them in the course of my intensive studies on Jerusalem in the weeks before Julie and I had come to the country: one belonged to the prophet Hizr and dated from the second century BC, the time of the Second Temple (though no one has yet discovered the first Temple). It sat in a massive face of rock, with three Greek-style pillars at the front of it, and no place for a body—though it was big enough for people to believe it was a tomb. According to Christian belief, it was the place where the Messiah appeared to his disciple, Saint James.
The second tomb, the one that Salman had pointed at, was that of the prophet Zechariah. “Peace be upon you, Prophet!” I repeated again as I contemplated the tomb: a monument carved from the solid rock, topped with a pyramid. I climbed the three steps that led up to it. Its outer edges were decorated with pharaonic designs. As for the pillars, I was struck by the cocktail of history and civilizations that I saw there, and would see in most of the buildings and streets in the Old City: Greek, Byzantine, Roman, Egyptian pharaonic, Arab, and Islamic.
But that was all ancient history, and in the clear light of the present, the soldiers of the Occupation drew my focus. I saw no more prophets in the city. I had come back hoping to find answers in the City of Peace, to find out what they had done for it from the time they had settled there to the time they had left, but they were long gone.
At the entrance to the Khan al-Zeit market, we were met by some peasant women from the villages around Hebron. As usual, they had come surreptitiously by the back roads, away from the Israeli military roadblocks. They’d smuggled themselves in, with their smells of mint, thyme, and other greenery, away from the eyes and noses of the soldiers, and now scattered their wares wherever they went in the city. As we crossed it, the market appeared to be decorated with peasant women, who were in turn decorated with their clothes, and their clothes with local silk. Women who looked like my mother squatted in cramped spaces in front of bundles of vegetables and soon became a familiar part of the attractive scene.
We passed by the women. We were joined by several other smells, which wandered with us along a street in which there was more scope for wonder than for visitors’ feet. As I tried to take in the details of the place, Salman busied himself explaining the things that held my attention. Julie and Aida were absorbed in contemplating the nuts, herbs, and spices, discussing which were best, what they were all used for, and what Julie could take back with her to London.
“This is Jaafar’s, my friend!” Salman told me. “Didn’t I tell you to remind me we should eat kunafa there? Of course, you’ve forgotten!” he went on, pouring scorn on my weak memory. We all slipped in between the crowds of bodies and the sound of the kunafa knife touching the bottom of the large tray in a succession of beats, as it counted the number of customers.
“How many trays of kunafa do you make a day, my friend?” I asked the swarthy young man, his muscles taut from using the knife.
“On a Friday like today, a couple of hundred. People finish praying, have a bite or two to eat, then come to us to enjoy the kunafa,” he answered between the knife-beats, which only stopped when one tray was exchanged for another.
“You know, Abul Silm,” I whispered in Salman’s ear, “Israel could go through a thousand right-wing or left-wing governments, sane or crazy, and Jerusalem would still smell of sesame cake, kunafa, and thyme. And it would still
