The Pillars of Hercules

I walked off the ship and around the harbor and looked for the Seabourne Spirit. It was due in Haifa the following week, I was told. That was a pity. I had thought I might see Jack Greenwald again. I continued walking into town to buy some envelopes so that I could send some accumulated books and maps back to myself.

Walking along, I kept seeing the same series of books, the repeated title, The Land of Jesus, Das Land Jesu, La Tierra de Jesus, La Terra di Gesù, La Terre de Jésus.

The woman at the stationery store said, “Nine shekels.”

It was a word I never got tired of. I found it a slushy and comical word, filled with meaning. Shekels was like a euphemism for money, but it had other similar-sounding words in it—shackles and sickles and Dr. Jekyll, all money-lenders’ meanings. It was impossible for me to hear the word and not think of someone demanding money. At this point, I had no shekels.

“You can change dollars into shekels at the bank, or on the street—the black market,” she said. “The rate is three shekels and twenty agorot.”

But when I asked on the street, fierce men—Russians, Moroccans, Poles—said, “Two shekels, ninety agorot! Take it! That is the best price!”

“I want three shekels,” I said, though I did not care. I liked saying the word shekels.

A man selling hard-core porno videos from a pushcart on the street shouted, “No one will give you three shekels! You change money with me!”

The way these Israelis spoke to me had more significance than what they were saying. It was as though they were always giving orders, never inquiring or being circumspect. Other Israelis I dealt with that first day in Haifa were the same, and I noted the tone of voice and the attitudes, because they did not change in the succeeding days.

They were gruff, on the defensive, rather bullying, graceless and aggrieved, with a kind of sour and gloating humor. They were sullen, somewhat covert, and laconic. They seemed assertive, watchful and yet incurious; alert to all my movements, and yet utterly uninterested in who I was. I did not take it personally, because from what I could see they treated each other no better.

This abrupt and truculent behavior surprised me, especially as I had become accustomed in my week on the Akdeniz to elaborate Turkish courtesy, the greetings, the gratitude, the rituals of politeness. Turks almost never raised their voices in polite company, and they had a number of expressions for taking the blame for a mistake rather than risk causing offense. Dealing with other people, Turks tended to seek permission. Casually bumping into someone they said, Kasura bakmayan, “Please don’t notice my mistake.”

Some Israelis were as elaborate and Semitic in these courtesies as Turks and Egyptians had been, but there were few of these. They were silent or else muttering Sephardis, Moroccans, Algerians, Spaniards, with dark expressive eyes, and these people could be very polite. The rest were familiar in a Western way—European, Russian, Romanian, Hungarian; urbanized, exasperated. They sweated, they complained, they peered with goose-eyes and raised their voices. They looked uncomfortable and overdressed; they looked hot.

An address I had to find in Haifa was on Tzionut Street—Zionism Street. About ten years ago it had been called United Nations Street, because at the time Israel had been befriended by the U.N. and this was one of the ways they showed their thanks, crowning a city street with the name of the helpful organization. But in 1981 a resolution was passed by some countries in the General Assembly, equating Zionism with racism. The Israelis were so annoyed, they changed the name of Haifa’s United Nations Street to the hated word Zionism.

I was looking for the writer Emile Habiby, but he was not in his studio in Tzionut Street. He might be out of the country, a neighbor told me. Or perhaps I should try his home in Nazareth.

Haifa had the look of a colony, which is also the look of a garrison. Its new buildings looked out of place—imported, like foreign artifacts—on the heights of the hills, among them Mount Carmel, that bordered its harbor and its sea-level town of merchants. There were of course soldiers everywhere, and many people—not just the obvious soldiers—carried sidearms. The city did not have an obvious religious atmosphere either, and its secularism was jarring after all the expressive pieties of the Islamic world I had recently seen. The most conspicuous place of worship in Haifa was the enormous Baha’i temple—jeered at by Onan as “a ridiculous religion—not even a religion.” (He had the same disdain for Sufism: “They take the Koran and just fly away with it!”)