by Yasmin Uriel

The trees and stones there softly slumber,
A dream enfolds them all.
So solitary lies the city,
And at its heart--a wall.

I am the least of all your children,
Of all the poets born.

Your name will scorch my lips forever,
Like a seraph's kiss, I'm told,
If I forget thee, golden city . . .

- Naomi Shemer

I like to think I stepped off the plane into the hot Israeli air with no preconceptions about the country. But my first night there, I dreamed about soldiers shooting at desert-dwelling Bedouins from warm, windy bunkers, and women in black head scarves being raped. I woke up, thinking I heard a woman screaming just outside my window. The night was bright from moonlight reflected on the white stone walls of buildings outside.

I got up. There was a ceramic mug somewhere in the room. I filled it with cold water and pressed it to my sweating face.

There were other dreams that night. The last one repeated itself several times—a nightmare of soft brown babies being smashed against stone walls until their brains dribbled down to the dust like pink oatmeal.

I had difficulty sleeping with the sun shining in bars of light across my face. I could hear students outside, speaking loudly and rushing down the stone steps. The dorms were several blocks down the road from the university where I studied that summer.

It was impossible to bike uphill to the campus, and hard to keep balance while walking back down. I kept slipping on the smooth stone steps.

I hated my Hebrew language class so much that, one day, I decided to skip and go for a walk. I scuffed my bare feet at the loose rocks in dusty roads around the citadel of Old Jerusalem. I had heard of Jaffa Street—that it was down near the marketplace. I had some hope of finding a bookstore that sold Le Monde, or another out-of-place publication. What I really wanted was to find a darkly foreign, yet bourgeois café, where I might meet and be seduced by my first European lover. Instead, I found a bookstore. It was almost an accident: it was not very clean-looking, yet the dirty white walls were bright enough to reflect the midday sun blindingly. I had to shade my eyes while walking by. There were baskets of worthless books outside. It didn't seem to matter if passersby bought them or paid the requisite two Shequalim for them.

After spending a quiet, happy afternoon among the dusty English classics section, I began to frequent the shop. The man who ran the bookshop, a watery-eyed Jew from Romania, was not often there, and a thirty-something man was usually there in his place. I noticed this man quickly. Probably it had to do with his being quiet, and the fact that I myself was quiet then.

But it also had to do with his height. Like many tall people, he tended to curl into himself, ducking away from imaginary ceilings as if he were afraid, somehow, of not having enough space to extend fully. He had very long arms, and could reach anything. He was skinny, but strong. On one of my first visits to the shop, I saw him lift an enormous box with one hand and toss it across the floor—while holding an ice cream bar in his other hand. Ice cream was big in Israel. So were popsicles. There were iced-treat vendors on almost every street, and soon I got in the habit of putting just enough thick silver coins into my jean pockets that I could buy exactly two every day.

The old man who ran the shop liked ice cream, too, and one day he asked me to buy him one and keep the change. When I brought it back, he motioned with his hand: Come here, come here. He asked my name, and when I told him it was Mona, he smiled. "Ah! Like the Mona Lisa, no?"

"Ah, no!" I felt myself copying his Eastern European accent.

"It is a beautiful name. Do you know why?"

"No," I caught the skinny man looking at me from where he sat on a box of books. We began to laugh.

"My dear, you don't know what your name means?" I shook my head, strained and bristling, though he looked at me kindly. He seemed to be a sweet old man, and as I stood there he kept talking.

"Most of the big scholars of etymology believe that the original, the root word, was used as a declaration of the unfulfilled need of humanity. It is used to describe a want that is lacking. Did you know that? Your desire is strong! But unclear!" the owner laughed. The skinny man frowned and stood up.

"Really, Doru, I think that it is something else," he cried. "Perhaps it simply comes from a wish for something more. A good want! You cannot say that it is something which lacks—no, I think it is more of an asking, or a seeking. It is like heartache, or what man wants to feel from God."

"It is a desire!" the old man cried back.

"It is a want," I interrupted. "That's me. I want."

That afternoon the skinny man walked with me to the bus stop nearby. I asked him when he had come to Israel, and he glanced up at the wall behind us. There were rows of posters of Princess Diana on it, and someone had drawn black X's over her soft, milky eyes. The ill-fated woman's close-lipped smile seemed too quiet for the busy street.

"When did I come to this place? I was older than you at the time," he frowned. "But still just a kid! It took me two years to learn how to really speak the language." He didn't remember what year it had been. He grinned, telling me in accented Hebrew that he was from Tiraspol, the capital of Moldova. It was so bad there that living in Israel was like a vacation. He went on: "They—my people—would never believe this," he began to laugh, "that I am so tan. They are all the time white, with hair so thin, and skinny, skinny!"

"You're skinny," I said.

"Yes," he said. "Good. You are right about that. But you must remember that to be skinny in this place is different. At least here you are allowed to eat. I am skinny because that is how my body, well—" he lifted his shoulders, gesturing down with his arms. "That is how my body is. I will always be that way."

I nodded, accepting him, though not really seeing what he was getting at. He was leaning against the dull aluminum pole holding up the sign with all of the bus stops on it. In Modern Hebrew print, there were the stops Aleph 14, 32, Dahlet 53, and the university stop—Gimmel 19. His collar had begun to stick up on one side, and he was rolling up his sleeves so that his elbows showed.

Our romance started when, one afternoon, he grabbed my wrists, folded my arms against my chest, and kissed me on the forehead. He pushed at my shoulders so I would sit down on the bench next to him. "I have a place," he said, looking down the street as the first bus of the afternoon approached. "What do you say, would you like to come?"

He could not stretch out in any of the beds that we made love in. His bedspread was dark blue and woven finely, and he talked about how his mother had woven it from sheep's wool. I saw her once or twice—she was thin and wore eye makeup that was thick like black clay. She sold metal amulets to tourists in the market near the university, and also made soap from animal fat to trade to her neighbors for strong local liqueurs and hand-rolled cigarettes.

I don't remember our first time. I went to his apartment almost every night, and he said his joints ached when we were apart. He had so much pain in him that it was hard to know what he really thought. His pain was selfless and sweet, a slight groaning as he stood up from the bed, his knees weak and prematurely arthritic. There was the dark scar of a healed, but deep, wound in his left side. There were also tiny, thin shrapnel scars on his neck that I could not help touching when we were making love and I had to reach up to hold on to him better. Sometimes he would pick me up with one arm and carry me like a little child, and then pretend to drop me, laughing at my joyful screams.

Not too long before, he had finished his mandatory three-year tour of duty with the Israeli Defense Force. That was why his hair was very short, but not sharply buzz-cut like a fresh recruit's. He planned to grow out his hair "hippie-style", as he loved to say. Now he was no longer a "slave to this crazy fucking world!" He drank all of the time and carried himself brilliantly through each day.

"Jerusalem is a beautiful city," he said once, looking at me, "beautiful but old before her time. That is why we must take care of her and not blow her into many pieces. You have to, how would you say, separate yourself from all that is going on? In order to see her as she really is?"

His favorite writer was Dostoevsky. "You must read him in Russian," he urged me. "Learn Russian, and then all of Dostoevsky's secrets will be your secrets, eh?" He tapped a finger to one of his temples. "Nah," I answered, having only read part of Crime and Punishment. "Dostoevsky was a crazy man. I am interested only in truth!"

"Watch out," he teased. "Everyone has his own truth. Everyone is crazy in this land! You are crazy just to be here! You must be crazy in order to survive!"

I hated it when his mother visited. She always smelled musty, like some nasty wine no one wants to serve the guests, or even drink with a light lunch. Her name was Miriam, and she often said her son was a beautiful light for everyone. "Look at his light!" she would cry in Hebrew. She reached out for my arm, accidentally scratching the skin on my wrist with her torn fingernails and scratchy gold jewelry.

Her son hugged her with one arm, unembarrassed. "Shh, Mama," he smiled over at me. "I'm hiding the light for now."

Then it happened. There had been explosions in the city before, but none like this one. I was tying my shoes, sitting on a stone step near the university, when the loud boom sounded. There were a lot of construction projects at the university that summer, and my first impression of the sound was that some movers had dropped a refrigerator nearby. Uh-oh, I thought. Somebody's in trouble. I waited for the inevitable sounds of workers yelling at each other, but for a few minutes there was only silence. I reached in my pockets, looking for some coins so I would have an excuse to go around the corner to the ice cream shop near the university café. It was where the sound had come from. By the time I realized there was no money in my pockets, I began to hear the screams.

I ran across the street, but saw nothing. I was suddenly afraid to go around the side of the building. It has to be a bomb, I thought. But why just outside the university, by the student café, with an Arab neighborhood nearby? It didn't make sense. There were no embassies, no road blocks, and no hectic streets. Then it hit me that there was a marketplace nearby, where a lot of Jewish students bought their vegetables and my boyfriend's mother sold her wares.

I began to run away from the university. A few streets down, the traffic stalled in chaos. People were getting out of their cars, yelling to each other, with cell phones held between ear and shoulder. There was a beautiful policewoman directing traffic. She had a thick waist and black eye makeup. There was a mole on one of her cheeks, and her hair was French-braided into a low bun. She held a silver whistle in her mouth. Without letting it fall from her lips, she yelled at offending pedestrians, who were trying to cross over to find the emergency area. The whistle sounded full, bubbling, like a ringing screech. There was sweat under her armpits, and her arms never stopped moving. She was crying, but simply sniffed and kept people away as long as she was able. I didn't want to see. I ran down the hill, to the bookstore.

He was there. "I have to go," he said. "There has been a bomb. Don't cry. My mother was selling at the market, I think. She is not answering her cell. I go now." He pushed my arm down, away from his shoulder.

"No, you don't!" I screamed in his diction. "You don't go! What about me? I'm scared!"

"I'm not yours," he replied. "I don't even belong to my mother now. I belong only to my father, and he is not here now." We were outside then, and he was waving at a taxi, a white car with a Palestinian driver who was shaking his head, afraid to go anywhere but away. "I will get in trouble! I have nothing to do with this!" the taxi driver yelled.

"Where was the bomb," my boyfriend asked him. "Did you see it?" Somewhere near, the driver replied, perhaps ten blocks away, near the marketplace. Away from me and my skinny boyfriend and the bookstore that was dirty, but still white, underneath. In the dim light, I could see the reddish veins that broadened the corners of his eyes. I was afraid because I had fallen in love with a 32-year-old alcoholic. I was frightened of what my parents might think and scared that he and I would be separated for a lot longer than a day's worth of tragedy.

"Don't let your mind worry," he finished. "I go for a while. But I come back." The light went on, suddenly, in the street lamp behind him. His hair seemed to glow at its ends, and his skin looked golden and pure.

After everything was done, he came back. We went with his friends on a trip to the desert, due south of the city. The site looked back at the Arab settlements just over the rise in the Judean hills. The sun was setting, and the soft hills had darkened around the edges where the light had grazed as it lowered.

I felt strange, a nineteen-year-old with three older men. His friends were all Armenian brothers with strange, lively eyes. At first they stared at me, and then reached out with their long arms. Play-acting with their softly-held fists, they did not stop until my boyfriend waved his hands at them and then pulled me away. He hugged me to his waist, steadying me with his arm so that I would not trip and fall as we walked over to where he had decided to lay a bonfire.

I reached up behind his neck to feel the stubble of his grown out haircut. He turned his neck as if he did not understand what I was doing. Then there were times when he looked at me and shook his head as if I were something else, something he was strangely unsure of.

He wanted to show me how to make a fire, but I was too giggly to take in anything but the slow movements of his arms and the gentle line of his neck as he squatted in the dust and softly blew on the newspaper that he had wadded up between the sticks. He paused to look up and held out his hand. "Do you see that? Over there!" He was gazing at something across the distance of the rocky, windy plain. It was getting colder as the summer neared its end. I shivered, pretending to look. I saw nothing.

"Ah, well," he grew quiet. "I suppose it was not much."

The next morning he woke early and crawled out of the tent. I was only half-awake. I figured he went to the bathroom, and soon I fell back asleep without having heard him return. But when I woke up, the others asked where he had gone.

We did not find his body. There was a corpse found three days later on the side of the desert highway to Eilat, but by the time we made it out to that remote station, the soldiers said that the body was gone and that they had no idea who had come to pick it up. So we were never quite sure.

Soon after, I decided that I had lost my faith in that land. I went to the airport and did not cry until after my plane flight was over, and the plane had touched down.

Not until the pilot's voice scratched out over the intercom, letting out a relieved "Whew!" He welcomed the passengers to the United States, saying: "It's good to be home, folks." I stood up, leaning my bare elbows on the seat behind, and watched the little Israeli children who were probably visiting this country for the first time. They held tightly to their toys, as all children do, perhaps afraid that when they are separated from them they will lose their souls.