195. Breakfast and Dead Sea

Breakfast and Dead Sea

Early morning.


Turn left into the first alley inside the Damascus Gate and you will find a little bakery. 

A dried-up baker stands in a pit shoveling dough pancakes into a glowing oven. The pancakes puff up into lovely brown rolls. Little girls in stripped pinafores come and go buying bread for their families’ breakfast for a coin. A patriarch in soiled robes discusses something with a tiny black-haired girl.


Sunny and I buy breakfast in the bakery: three eggs broken into a pastry shell, salted, peppered and baked. While I am eating, a little boy, perhaps four years old, wearing a natty tweed jacket, walks up, puts his chin on my knee and gazes into my eyes with the bright fluid eyes of the very young. I wonder why I so fascinate him.


We catch a bus to the Dead Sea.


Another disappointment.


This celebrated “sea” is a small, narrow lake easily crossed by a weak swimmer. 

We try swimming too but, surprise, the water is so super saturated with salt that we just bounce off. It's like trying to dive into rubber—and the salty brine really stings the eyes!

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194. The White Nile

The White Nile

Sunday. 

Church bells. 

It is the Christian’s Sabbath in the Holy City of Peace. 

We hike to King David’s Tomb. I pay the twenty-five cent fee, borrow a paper cap and am allowed inside to watch the other American tourists watching me.


Next door to David’s Tomb is “The Upper Room” where the Holy Ghost inspired some of Jesus’ students after His untimely departure. The Ghost is still at it up there; a circle of Christians are moaning and swaying with one finger pointing in the air. They chant: “Save me, sweet Jesus!” in English.


On the ground floor of the same building, some men, apparently Jews, are arguing (also in English) and pounding their fists on a big table.


Around the corner is a church built “on the spot where Mary went to sleep”, as they say, and down a nicely landscaped hillside is the “House of Quality” where contemporary craftsmen display their wares. We go down, of course, and I see a gold-and-crystal ring I covet and a small patient fellow blowing glass goblets.


Sunny loans me a book that I read all night in my room: “The White Nile”; it puts my own little adventure into proper perspective.

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193. Sightseeing Jerusalem

Sightseeing Jerusalem

In the evening, Sunny fixes dinner for two in her room—cream cheese, raw eggs, apples and bananas sweetened with some sugar. Good, simple home cooking!


Saturday. This is the Jewish Sabbath. Sunny and I walk through Mea Shearim, a subdivision of the New City, where the residents wear Orthodox garb: the men in black robes, white shawls and large fur doughnut hats. No automobiles are allowed in Mea Shearim during the hours of the Sabbath. An old gentleman standing at the barricade that keeps cars out shouts: “Sabbath!” at the passing infidel motorists.


We stroll through other neighborhoods in the New City. This part of Jerusalem looks a lot like a Midwestern American town. We continue through the old city and out into the desert—a long, hot walk to the Garden of Gethsemane.


I am expecting an Agony to strike in the Garden and sure enough, a sparrow is dying in front of the Russian Orthodox Church that is built on the traditional spot where Jesus prayed for the cup to pass without being drained to the last drop


We want to enter the church and a female attendant hands Sunny a shapeless smock to wear, which will cover her exposed knees. (She is wearing practical and not sexy shorts in this horrible heat.) Sunny conforms to the rule though it makes her fume: “Typical male chauvinist sexist tradition!”

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192. Collection

192.

Back out in the darkened church I collect myself.

Sunny has wandered off, talking to a handsome tourist. More monks sweep by in single file, their leader swinging a smoking censor of incense. Their chanting, sliding up and down the scale, is as good as Maha Vishnu. 

"Aum…Aum…Aum…"

I follow them up some stairs to the place of crucifixion with my mind completely out of gear. I let the music carry me along. 

Old monks. This singing is their Zen thing.

In another part of this huge church an organ is playing and other voices are singing.

Soon the old monks leave and a boy’s choir marches in. Their leader, a big monk in black beard and pointy hat is a character straight from the movie about the Spanish Inquisition, “The Devils”. Bringing up the rear of the boy’s act is a six-foot six, two hundred fifty pound monk. None of the kids gets out of line and everybody sings loud!

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191. Stations of the Cross

191.

Stations of the Cross

At a very old church, we join the daily guided tour of the “real” Stations of the Cross”.

It is a fantasy parade: men wearing the black monk’s robes of the middle ages mingle with perhaps two hundred tourists. A medieval monk, wearing up-to-date eye glasses, reads what I suppose are the approved words in Latin through a bull-horn loud speaker while a sound engineer captures the rite with his complicated equipment.

You can’t believe the range of cameras being snapped!

Now some of the black robes are chanting as through the narrow streets we pour. Shopkeepers leer from their open doorways at the liberated young tourist girls wearing skimpy tops and skin-tight jeans. We pause at plaques set into walls marking each of the twelve certified locations where the God-man did His thing.

It’s a Fellini film! Not very many of the faces in the mob are wholesome to look at; old people visiting Spiritual Las Vegas, kids along for the ride—and me? Well, I’m here too aren’t I?

The last four “stations” are in the same building—a big Crusader’s church. The “sepulcher” is thirty feet from ground zero, “Golgotha”, where they did Him in. This preposterous layout for a medieval Disneyland is the final assault on credibility.

But the black robe’s chanting is beautiful and in the soft gloom, the glitter of silver, marble and camera lenses reaches for a psychedelic high.

Here’s the marble box representing “the tomb”. Taking my turn, I crawl through a short tunnel and emerge into a sudden blaze of precious metal by candlelight. Here it is! In the center of the tiny room guarded by a holy bouncer in black: The Money Box! What did I think it would be? What sort of revelation did I expect? Money. That’s what it’s all about. So I drop in a handful of coins. 

Wouldn’t you?

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190. The Real Thing

190.

The Real Thing

In an ancient vaulted room in the old city we eat a meal of homos and bread.

This “real” room reminds me of the fake “historic” dining rooms so popular in California. 

Both set the proper mood and I suspect that both are real enough in their own way. In other words, I suspect that this “ancient” room has been remodeled to provide the proper antique mood for dining in Jerusalem. 

Clever merchandising, not historic veracity is the key to obtaining the touristic dollar!

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189. Sunny and Chagall

189.

Sunny and Chagall

When I return to my room in the afternoon I find a note from Sunny slipped under the door. She has also “crossed over the Jordan” and taken a room down the hall. We soon get together and swap traveler’s yarns. She has crossed the Atlantic in a thirty-foot sailboat and bicycled all over Europe. I have done what I have done.


Next day we visit the Hadasa Hospital together to see Chagall’s famous stained glass windows.


Before viewing the windows, all of us tourists (and there are about a hundred of us) sit for a slide show depicting the history of the hospital. This entertainment is pure propaganda, of course, and we are expected to choose the right side in mortal combat. After the slide show, we all know who we are and who our enemy is. But I can only remember the cartoon character, Pogo, who stated the case even more succinctly, I think, when he said: “We have met the enemy and they are us!”


Chagall’s “painting with light” is inspiring.

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188. Arrested as Terrorist

188.

Arrested as Terrorist.

 

Another mosque is nearby, but I don’t pass the entrance examination.

I cracked the crystal of my wristwatch and have wrapped it with tape to keep dust out. It is in my handbag.

When the suspicious guard finds it and points it out to me I see that it does look peculiar. He marches me over to a police station where the officer in charge orders me to unwrap it. When I do and expose the damaged wristwatch he apologizes for the inconvenience but it did look suspicious as I now see and they have been blasted enough around here to make the coolest head edgy.

Before I leave the police station I ask the young officer if I look like an Arab terrorist and he says that of course I do. I am youngish with the light brown hair, blue eyes and very pale skin typical of Northern European ancestry. Me, an Arab terrorist?

I walk through the olive trees to the Israel Museum. Here for the first time in my life I see original paintings by Paul Klee. Even though I have only seen his work in reproduction before, his whimsical and gentle trip has made him one of my all time favorite artists when I was back in school.

There are other curious things exhibited in the museum: a collection of masterfully done photographs, some ancient Chinese paintings and some fragments of the famous “Dead Sea Scrolls”—the old fathers trying to communicate with their great, great, ever-so-great grandselves.

(And, dear Folk of the Future, when you discover this writing stuffed into a pickle-jar in a cave in California, I hope it will bring you a smile and not more argument and dissension. I would prefer to leave you with a cheerful legacy than another complicated philosophy or a “sacred” rock to fight over!)

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187. Dome of the Rock

 Dome of the Rock

I am walking down the “real” Via Dolorosa thinking things over when a shabbily dressed man stops me and begs me to visit a blood bank around the corner and donate blood for his sick wife. I usually donate blood once or twice a year anyway so I agree and walk around the corner with him. I am a little surprised to find a blood bank there! The nurse in the office drains some of my blood and then insists on paying me eight dollars.


During my stay in “The City of Peace” I pass by this way several times and notice the same shabby man making his "sick wife" plea to all passing tourists. I guess that he probably gets a percentage on all the blood they donate and the Israeli medical establishment gets a continual supply of fresh tourist blood for emergencies.


I go to the Dome of the Rock, pay my admission fee, have my bag searched for bombs and spend a couple of hours soaking up the vibes. In the middle of this temple, behind a see-through and reachy-feel-through wall, is the big rock, which is sacred to Jews, Christians and Moslems, so there is plenty to quarrel about!


While I am there, several American tour groups are escorted through the building. These American tourists, with their world-famous arrogance and noise push right up against the wall and reach through for a grope. After giving the rock a feel, one plump tourist exclaims: “Why it’s JUST a ROCK!”


Right O, my heavy-set friend, and there are plenty of THEM back home, aren’t there?

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186. Uncle Mustache's

Uncle Mustache's

And here it is—Uncle Mustache's .


Uncle Mustache is a short man with a belly that is said to be the 8th Wonder of the World. 

When we meet he gives me a free cup of coffee then, while I eat a fine cheese omelet, he brings me three notebooks he keeps on hand for his customers to look at and to write in. 

These “slam books” are filled with several years worth of poems, stupid remarks, traveler’s wisdom and even some cartoons and sketches. Next he shows me a traveler’s “guide to Israel” book where his restaurant is listed under “Starvation Budget”. The book calls him a saint for his kindness to hippies and backpackers.


When he has time to talk a bit I ask him about his customers and he says that his youthful customers have changed over the years. “Before, some of the young people were curious about the spiritual life in this city, but the young people now are interested only in sex and drugs.” 

He calls himself not religious but “a realist”.


I like him and think just about anyone would.

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