Vox Humana Literary Journal

By Chana Leah Dror

On the way out of Modi’in towards Jerusalem, eternal construction surrounds the bus. Gravel, high places turned low, artificial stairs, classy lighting, dirt packed down for a park with mini-trees trying to perk up and look beautiful despite the prolonged drought and the brassy, scorched earth. We ride, turning between the hills, in awe at the million stone terraces draping the land like intricate dresses, like land-ripples. Halfway to Jerusalem is a wet spot off the shoulder of the road, an underwater spring which became exposed when the workers cut through an obese hill while building the new road. Two rocky walls rise up on either side, slicing the hill to allow the black tongue of asphalt to snake through.

Like an oasis, the spring draws life and conflict to it, as each party tries to suck water from bone-colored stone. The spring dribbles out of a PVC pipe that an anonymous drinker has stuck in the rock, in order to fill bottles more easily. Graffiti is everywhere in synthetic blues and artificial reds, expounding on political nuances or simply noting that “I was here”. Sometimes Charedim (ultra-orthodox Jews) are here with their trembling, grey vans, sweating under velvet kipot (head coverings) and black-and-white clothes. Sometimes it is the Arab truck drivers, stinking with industrial sand and sweat. Their skin is brown and shines under a mid-morning sun. We are giraffes, elephants, zebras, and hyenas in the bush, bound together by the need for clear water, sifted and filtered through biblical sand and rock until sinless enough to be drunk by angels. The white sun hangs in the sky, ruling like a dictator, bringing us non-celestial beings to our knees as it has since the fourth day of creation.

I wonder what soul-brother Jack (Kerouac) would think on this road, “On the Road”, of this road. Would he be crying with me about the cigarette-smoking soldier-babies who assume the world comes with guns? Or would he cynically laugh and watch the world decaying around us, like the deafening finale of an orchestra piece?

The checkpoint down the road used to be temporary, made with half- materials, unfinished. l preferred this ignorance. It gave the sweet illusion (stupid really) that this would be over soon. That the road would open up, that the fridge-size cinderblocks blocking the Arabs’ entrances to the main road would be whisked away, that we’d make believe things were normal.

Now they’ve renovated the checkpoint to prevent it from collapsing. The corrugated metal was all but disintegrated, exposed metal wires twisted here and there like question marks, the concrete disintegrating in the merciless summer sun, equipment blowing across the road, and soldiers freezing in the winter wind and rain, holding their jaws square against an onslaught of naked weather.

What seemed like a quick, godless situation stretched into months, and months yawned into years. During this time our emotional nerves ceased to feel. Death became ever-present, and so did retaliation. When a seemingly pregnant woman blew herself up in the line for the checkpoint, it didn’t seem so odd to keep laboring women waiting in the line of cars, sweating with pain in dusty clunker cars until they were inspected. It didn’t seem strange to distort propriety, to hallucinate threats in a bag of figs or a crate of prickly sabra fruits. Normal is relative, and perhaps it will return here someday, after its prolonged vacation. In the meantime, weirdness masquerades as typical.

I watch from up high, the soldiers seeming like a show, like a play from the raised, wide, plasma TV-shaped windows of the bus. I am inside on a throne of plush and foam. The drab-green, homesick soldiers peer up at our glassed-in faces, squinting into the sun with expressions of jealousy and puzzlement. The sun has just peeked over the hills, sending the universe back to square one, back to Adam, uphill like a resigned Sisyphus.

We ride on, down and up and around the slow roller coaster of hills. Titanic trucks filled with stone and concrete ride painfully slowly on the right shoulder of the road, trudging up the grade with their deafening engines, sounding like the children of Israel or Ishmael putting one heavy foot in front of the next, year after year in the desert sun.

Finally we reach the suburbs of Jerusalem, all concrete multi-story houses covered with Jerusalem stone, red tile roofs, 2 cars in each American-dream driveway, where you can have it all and possibly pay for it too, on credit, with the salary from your hi-tech job in the Jerusalem outskirts. Progress is all around in its strange and degenerative state. Lovely mansions spring up like post-downpour mushrooms, while the garbage around them grows exponentially in color, volume, sheer artistic value, like a drug-induced installation at the Whitney Biennial.

The white bus hurtles forward into reality, into the clanging crock-pot of Jerusalem, first speeding through the corporate neighborhood of Har Hotzvim, then directly into the pulsating heart of the charedi Bar-Ilan intersection. Hoards of children dressed in white shirts and black pants (boys) or calf-length skirts (girls) carpet the area like the masses at a train station in Calcutta. There are only two ages here: child and child-bearing. These contrasting stations in life are precariously close to each other. Children, flashing lights, and cheap toys are in abundance. Baby strollers on the seventh kid roll by, bold colors turned beige and brown in the sun and rain. The men hurry, shuffling and ducking, while the women drag rafts of children and double prams in small parades down the steep hill of Bar Ilan street, threatening a human avalanche into Ramat Eshkol.

The bus climbs up towards the central bus station, twisting and turning, straining towards the shrinking piece of sky which inhabits the space between the roofs of identical, shabby concrete buildings. Finally getting arriving at the station, familiar beggars blindly ask for money. They have been here for years, like characters from medieval Venice, their hands frozen in the act of asking, their skin and eyes fixed in an expression of supplication bordering on prayer.

The empty hand asks the primal, basic question: “Can you help me“? Beggars in the holy city ask for relief, seek a way to clamber over the hilltop of another dusty day where nothing is obvious. In this graceful but pitiful gesture, Arab, Jew, soldier, civilian, Charedi, (religious Jews) and secular are united in pain, and possibly in hope. This morning the sun beats down on all of Israel equally: we are equally charred, equally humbled, watching the rabid dance of life pass by: as quiet as a sunfish in a pond, as loud and black as the black soot bellowing from the exhaust pipe of my bus as I roll into the next episode of Jerusalem.