“A pub in Tel Aviv,” I type into a fresh document that has been staring at me like a pristine canvas stretched in its wooden frame. Though it’s Friday night, a popular evening for the locals to go out, it’s only six o’clock, and save for a handful of customers the place is empty.
There
is something informal, almost improvised in the local pub scene. I scrutinise
my surroundings, trying to pinpoint the causes for this vague notion. It might be the unassuming furniture.
Yes, that and the casual atmosphere. Take for example the young man with tight
braids raining down from his head like the supple branches of a willow tree.
Straddled on his stool as if horse riding, he nonchalantly angles himself toward an older gentleman two stools
to his left, who is slowly imbibing his beer with a gaze fixed on the large plasma
screen. Now the older man turns toward his new mate and a chat ensues.
My
eyes wander to the door through which another man, in tandem with a thin and
long-limbed woman, a headscarf
tied over her short hair, walks in and stops by the dreadlocks guy. The two greet each other in a ritual of arms and
palms, Dreadlocks introduces the
newcomers to his freshly gained pal, and all four move to a table near
me—uncomfortably near—and so my eyes travel back to the bar, where I find an
additional point of distinction: the bottle display is not crammed full, as if
the booze is just an excuse for a social gathering. In Europe and the U.S. the
shelves overflow with alcohol, and the patrons usually
keep to themselves. Common to pubs everywhere, a pleasant wave of
wood and hops reaches my nostrils, awakens my taste buds.
“Nice
computer!” I am startled out of my ruminations by a young woman who plants
herself in the chair beside me, eying my laptop. A bright smile illuminates her face from within, and her ebony
curls fall onto the table in
long strands, spreading a rush of flowery perfume. The white summer dress
shines against her dark skin. No jewellery or make up, and none are needed; she
wears her youth and effervescent demeanour like diamonds. I push away my envy.
“I want to get one just like that,” she
conveys, “but they’re crazy expensive.”
“They’re
not cheap,” I reply.
“Your
keyboard has English characters,” she realises. “You got it abroad?”
“Yes,
I live abroad.”
“Oh, lucky you!” she says, then adds without
extending her hand, “I’m Maya.”
I
introduce myself as well.
“I
really like your laptop,” she repeats and leans in, peering over my shoulder. “Oh, wait, you’re writing our chat,
translating it from Hebrew to English.”
“I
am.”
She
leans back in her chair, a thin crease forms on her brow. “But why?”
“It’s
a writing exercise, to sit in a public space, describe what I see and, record
conversations I have or overhear.”
“Oh,
cool,” she says with a smileless nod, clearly baffled.
“I’m
a creative writing student,” I explain, “practicing during summer vacation so I
won’t get rusty.”
“Ah,
okay, I get it.” She glances around. “What’s to write about here? Not very
interesting.”
“I
would love to write about you,” I say
in the soft tone of invitation.
“Really?”
A spark is lit in her dark brown eyes, and her curls bounce a little. “Let me get us some drinks, and I’ll tell
you anything you want to know.” She hesitates. “Well, almost anything,” she
adds with a blush.
She
points at my empty glass, asking, “What are you having?”
“That
was Diet Sprite,” I admit, sensing she won’t approve of my virgin beverage.
“How
about some beer?” she asks, I nod, and she adds with a simper, looking pleased
with herself, “On the house, the barman
is my boyfriend.”
I
follow Maya with my eyes. The bartender’s face shines when he notices her at
the counter. He’s a tall man, probably a few years older than her, with a light
brown ponytail brushing his nape, and a slightly receding hairline. His blue
tank top—another noted difference between pubs here and elsewhere—reveals a
large tattoo adorning his right shoulder: flower, butterfly? I can’t tell from
this distance.
With
smooth and flowing gestures he seems at ease with himself and his surroundings.
Handing Maya two spume-dripping pints he
brims at her the way boyfriends smile
at their girlfriends, with that sweetness on their lips and tenderness in their
eyes, and she sends him an air-kiss in return.
“Guinness!”
Maya announces, banging the glasses on the table. “I like my beer dark and
strong, like my men,” she adds with a giggle.
I
smile as if it is the first time I’ve ever heard this phrase.
She
takes a swig from her glass, sweeps the foamy moustache off her upper lip with the
back of her hand, and says, “So, what do you want to know?”
“Anything,”
I answer, eyeing my beer; the last time I had a Guinness I woke up with a throbbing
hangover the following morning.
“Well,”
she opens and pulls herself up in the chair; her shoulders push back, and her
chin lifts up a smidgen higher. “I’m about to finish my army service in a week.
In fact, I’m on my discharge vacation.”
“What
do you … what did you do in the
army?”
“I
served in the Air Force,” she says, looking at me as if to examine my reaction,
then goes on in a speedy flow of excitement, which my fingers cannot
follow, describing the thrills of working
alongside pilots in a squadron’s
operations-room.
When
she breaks for a breath I get a chance to say, “That’s remarkable! It was
a long time ago, but I too was an operations-room sergeant in a
squadron. I’ve actually started writing
a memoir about my time in the army, and maybe—“
“Seriously?”
she asks with widening eyes.
“Well,
so far I just sketched an outline, but—“
“No,
I mean, did you really serve as an operations-room sergeant?”
“Yes.
Why?”
The
air seems to be seeping out of her. She hugs her beer with both hands, eyes
lowered. “Well,”
Maya says, her voice just above whisper. “I wasn’t exactly what I just said.”
“Oh.”
“I’m
sorry … you seemed … so interested, and I wanted to give you a good story.
Nobody is ever interested in me.”
“The
guy in the bar is,” I remind her.
“We’ve
been dating for only a month,” she says in slight dismissal, glancing in his
direction. “They’re always excited in the beginning, aren’t they?” I murmur in
sympathy, and she looks at me with doe-like eyes. “But you, you were interested
in me, know what I mean?”
“Yes,
I think I do,” I say.
“Just
for the record,” she says with an index finger pointing up, “I did serve in the
Air Force in some boring office.”
“Okay.
And just for the record, being an operations-room sergeant isn’t as glorious as
one might imagine. It was mostly clerical work, and the pilots were outright
annoying. But why won’t you tell me something else, like where you live?”
A
tentative smile spreads on her lips, then quickly shifts to a playful smirk.
“Can I tell you where I want to
live?” she asks.
“Sure.”
I know people’s fantasies are just as telling as their biography, and often
more.
With
head tilted sideways, eyes half-closed, she says, “North Tel Aviv, looking at the Mediterranean from a penthouse
in one of those fancy tower apartment buildings; every morning I wake up, open
the windows, breathe the beautiful smell of the sea, listen to the seagulls, catch some sunshine,
and feel super happy.”
“I
doubt all those who live in expensive towers are happy,” I comment,
disappointed with her cliché choice of accommodation. “But why won’t you tell
me where you’re actually from? I bet it’s far more interesting.”
Maya
shrugs, looking a tad deflated again. “I bet it isn’t,” she slices out the words through her teeth. “South
Tel Aviv, where all the Africans
live.”
The resentful way she pronounces “Africans” makes me cringe; I dread where this conversation
might lead, though her reply also piques my curiosity.
“I
read a lot about that situation,” I say with the lightest tone I can muster.
“I’d be happy to hear about it from a local.”
“It’s
awful,” she grumbles. Her shoulders droop. Her face turns sombre. “I know you
can find them all over the city, even sleeping in parks, but many of them live
in my neighbourhood, which wasn’t great before they came, and now it’s even
worse, much worse.” She draws a deep breath and takes a mouthful of beer,
neglecting to wipe the foam off her lips.
“You
know,” she carries on, “we live in slums, houses falling apart, lots of folks
unemployed, some kids go to bed hungry. We just don’t need those Africans,
they’re not our problem, even if they had it bad wherever they came from, and
most of them aren’t refugees as they claim, they just want to find jobs, but we
were born here, we deserve the jobs,
not them.” She briefly pauses for
air. “Not to mention all the assaults on women that’s been happening. My
parents always call me when I’m out in the evening to make sure I’m okay, and
they send one of my brothers to fetch me like I’m a little girl. Those people
illegally come into our country and then attack
us?” She shakes her head. “No, no, they should go back to where they came
from!”
Oh my, she is as I feared. Though her views
are not uncommon in this neck of the woods, it is my first time to
converse with someone from her camp. Ironically, during Israel’s early days droves
of Jews were brought here from Muslim counties, and Maya’s family was most
likely among them. Alas, as soon as these Sephardic Jews arrived in the Holy
Land the dominant population of East European Jews perceived them as culturally
inferior and even a safety threat. I wonder if my grandfather, who emigrated
from Romania in the early 1930s, was among the discriminators.
Maya
gulps the rest of her beer. I take a hesitant sip from mine while she signals
to her boyfriend, who appears at our table with a generous smile, a fresh pint
of Guinness for Maya, and a friendly nod for me. I somehow get the impression
he isn’t the talkative type, but being a bartender he’s probably a good
listener. I take another swallow while I wait for Maya to continue, surprised
to find myself enjoying the beer’s rich heaviness with a hint of coffee flavour.
Maya sinks into thought, and I give my fingers a break. Besides, nothing she is
saying is new to me. I resist my desire to reply to her accusations and remind
her that only about a handful of
those Africans were found guilty of sexual assault, which is a relatively small number for a population of
tens of thousands. But I hold my tongue and keep a straight face. I invited her
to tell me her story, not to enter an argument.
“Sorry,
I … I was …” Maya finally says.
“I was thinking about Baby Kako, the …“
She
stares into space again.
“Yes,
I know about her,” I say, and on intuition ask, “Are you familiar with the
family?”
“Well,
that’s the thing. They live just two streets away from us, but I never noticed
them until … how terrible … what kind of monster stabs a baby in the head with
scissors, and only because she’s black? Thank goodness she didn’t die, but she
will never …”
Her
eyes glisten with tears as her voice fades away, and she falls silent again,
face crinkling in thought. She snatches a single lock of hair, coils it around
her finger, and just as absentmindedly uncoils the long curl and sets it free.
She hasn’t touched her second beer yet; the thick milky froth at the crown of
her glass is firm, the white and the
dark holding each other in balance.
“They
say the man who did it is crazy, but I don’t know,” Maya says when she regains
her composure. “There was so much talk against the Africans, even people from
the government came to the neighbourhood and said terrible things about them.
So maybe that man is insane, but he turned his craziness to that baby after he
heard all that talk. He did say to the police he wanted to kill a black baby,
didn’t he? That’s what I personally believe, but I keep it to myself. People in
my neighbourhood don’t like to hear anything nice about our black neighbours.”
She sighs. “That’s just the way it is, what can I do? We are squashed from all sides.” She pauses before
adding, “Just like them.”
Surprised
with this U-turn, I dare ask, “Would you consider helping them somehow?”
“I
don’t know, probably not. My family won’t approve of it, anyway.”
I
say I understand, and thank her for sharing her story. She swills down
her Guinness and returns the empty
glass gently to the table.
“Well,” she says and gets to her feet, “I
gotta go, but it was nice talking to you and good luck with that army book.”
I
wish her the best of luck with civilian life; she thanks me with a mock salute
that sends her ringlets frolicking, and slips into the gathering darkness
outside.
After
Maya leaves I drink some more of my beer, hoping I won’t regret it tomorrow,
and think about the demographic shifts in Israel since I had left in the early
‘90s.
Having
grown up here during the ‘70s, the only black people I knew of were American
NBA players recruited by Israeli basketball teams. These extraordinary athletes
boosted our national pride and were naturally admired. In fact, one of them
lived on my street and was the only black man I had met as a child. He was
married to an Israeli woman, and they had a daughter who was a little younger
than me. With her golden-brown complexion and a wave of soft Afro the colour of
café au lait, she was
unusual-looking, but as far as I can recall the neighbourhood kids didn’t treat
her any differently. I was curious about her, but kept a shy distance.
From
2006, until very recently, about sixty thousand undocumented Africans, mostly
Sudanese and Eritreans, had entered Israel by way of the Sinai Desert, often
falling victim to cruel smugglers. By and large Israeli authorities have been regarding
them as infiltrators, and refuse to
consider the vast majority of their asylum requests. More recently, a few
thousands have been confined to a detention camp in the depths of the Negev
Desert.
The pub, by now
teeming with chattering folks, has turned stuffy. I tuck a tip under my half empty
glass, click shut my laptop, slip it into the backpack,
and walk out to the refreshing dusk outside, marvelling at the magenta-tinted
sky peeking between heads of buildings.
I round the corner, enter Rothschild
Boulevard, and amble along its
sandy central strip lined with ficus trees, shikma
in Hebrew. The long arms of entwined branches hold up crowns of green bouquets;
the curly canopy of the old trees a fresh breath of air in this dense city. I
move my fingers on a heavily veined
trunk; the ropes pipe up and around toward the boughs, their skin smooth and
cool against my skin. A feeble breeze plays with the treetops’ leaves. Crickets
serenade with their seductive tunes in the bushes. Farther down, random clusters of concrete picnic-tables with no diners,
and a fenced pond, rich with green
as if transplanted from a different landscape, houses well-fed goldfish.
Beyond
the ficus trees, along either side of the street, refurbished
Bauhaus buildings stand proud; some are elegant, others flashy. Named The White City, Tel Aviv, other than
this area, is rather grey. Yet with these gorgeous residencies, the city has been reinventing itself. Alas, rendered
unaffordable for most locals, these abodes are mostly owned by wealthy
foreigners who reside here only partially. The spacious rooms are vacant more often than not; the sizeable windows
remain shut.
But
not all of this street’s early 20th century architecture has been restored:
some buildings are tarnished with car fumes; others have their crumbling walls covered with graffiti. A worn
out awning shields a grimy second story porch.
The
posh and the fatigued live shoulder to shoulder.
It’s
no coincidence the social justice movement has sprouted right here during the
summer of 2011, choosing the French Revolution’s emblematic date of 14 July to
mark its kick off. Though the municipal authorities had
dismantled the movement’s encampment a few short months after its inception,
now, three years later, the ghosts of
that community are anything but gone.
As
I snail down the lane, the
shadowy outline of that
long-gone tent city rises in my path. I hear fragments of heated
discussions—accompanied by energetic hand gestures—in the improvised living
rooms, sofas and all, scattered under the trees. Traces of hope and rage, mixed
with smells of sweat and outdoor cooking, move in the air in flashing waves.
Among
the inhabitants were residents of South Tel Aviv, demanding improvement to
their forsaken neighbourhood.
The
bitter echoes of the dismay that followed this remarkable summer reverberate
along the avenue, and far beyond, to this day. A probable correlation between
the Occupy Movement in the U.S. and
this Israeli movement had been pointed out. The latter most likely inspired the former, as it preceded it.
I see him before he
notices me, sitting on a bench, his long legs stretched forward. I let go of my
backpack’s left strap, hug the bag with my right arm, and glance around. Rotten luck, nobody’s anywhere near. I could turn
around, or cut into a side street … no, that might prove counterproductive. Well, I’ll just put on my combatant
demeanour. As Maya mentioned, you can see them everywhere around the
city, so no big deal, just keep a steady pace.
As I pass him, I realise he is looking at me,
and my eyes can’t help but meet his. I issue a tiny smile and keep walking,
hoping my steps seem poised.
“You
Israelis think we Africans bad people,” I hear him complain behind my back.
I
stop and slowly swing around.
“I
beg your pardon?” I say.
“You
hear me,” he replies, turning his face away from me.
“Well,
I don’t know you, but I don’t think
you’re a bad person,” I say.
He
nods with exaggerated motions. “You do, you do, all of you.”
“No,
really, I don’t.” I take a step in his direction. “Look, I know about all the
trouble your people have been going through. I read about it in the newspaper
all the time, and I’m really sorry. I
wish it was different, you don’t deserve to be treated like that.”
“If
you care, you tell government,” he says in disdain with his face still turned
away.
“Right,
the government,” I sneer. “If only
they had ears.”
His
eyes meet mine again; I see a hint of amusement in the corners of his mouth.
I
take a step forward, saying, “It’s not an easy country, you know. Even for
Israelis.”
“Better
than my country,” he mutters, then
asks, “You no like it here?”
I
suppose for him Israel is a version of the Promised Land.
“Well,
I don’t live here, I’m just visiting,” I reply.
His
brow springs up. “Where you live?”
“America.”
His
face softens as he gets up from the bench. Glancing at my left hand, he grins.
“No
husband?”
Caught
off guard I say, “No.”
“Ah,”
he exclaims, his eyes glimmer with warmth, then narrow when he inquires,
“boyfriend?”
“Eh
… well …” Hesitant to lie, I search for an elegant way out.
”You
marry me and take me to America,” he announces, taking a confident step
forward. “I make you very happy.”
I
observe him more closely. Not a bad looking guy: pleasant features, broad
shoulders, and that smooth coffee-tinted skin. I could be his Stella, and he
will bring back my groove. Well, he’s not that much younger, but he probably
has some groove for me, even if it lasts no more than five minutes.
He
looks at me and his face gives off fumes of fondness. He takes another step
forward.
“I’m
a lesbian,” I hear myself declare as I flinch back, embarrassed for my false
statement, yet relieved to have found an exit.
His
face freezes for a brief moment, then twists into revulsion.
“I
no marry you!” he spits the words at me, his arm slicing through the air as if
pushing me away. “You be shame to yourself!”
Feeling
obliged to defend my declaration for the sake of those it represents, I say,
“There’s nothing wrong with being gay, it’s perfectly normal.”
“No,
no normal,” he retorts. “The Bible says—“
“I
know what the Bible says!” I cannot
help but cut him off, my voice sharper than intended. “Do you really want to
live by the Bible? You might not like all
the rules and regulation in that book, you know.”
But
the exchange is clearly over; he
flounces himself around and
slumps into the bench facing up street. I walk away feeling ill at ease though uncertain as for what I could have
done better.
“You’re
hungry?” I hear a woman’s voice behind me as I slow down to admire a
particularly veined tree about ten steps from the bench. “Here’s twenty shekel
for some food.”
“I
no beggar,” the African’s voice rise
in indignation.
Unable
to resist the temptation, I stand in the tree’s deep shadows and eavesdrop.
“I
just want to help,” she mutters.
“We
want job, no donation!”
“I
know,” her voice turns gloomy. “I participate in the demonstrations for the
asylum seekers, I volunteer with the refugee kids. I’m sorry things aren’t
working out as we hoped.”
“Is
okay.” His voice is softer now. “You are good woman, is okay.”
“I
wish you the best of luck,” she says. “Really.”
“Thank
you,” he replies, and then suddenly asks, “You live in America?”
“No,
I live here, in Tel Aviv.” She sounds surprised.
“Ah,”
he utters in disappointment, then says, “But you no lesbian, right?”
“What?!”
With
a hand tight on my mouth to stifle a chortle,
I scurry off, sorry to miss the rest of
the encounter. I’m still
grinning when I reach the borrowed car at the bottom of the leafy avenue,
already missing this vivacious city.
