Home > Olives & Thorns > Archives > 2008 > October > 09 > Entry
Yom Kippur
I started my walk on the East side. The Christian grocery on Nablus Road was open for business and the bread stalls on the corner of Suleiman Street were well-stocked still.
On Saladdin, the main street of Palestinian East Jerusalem, I chatted with the money changer, Nabil, and then waited in line at Shauleh for a shwarma sandwich.
A few blocks more, I stopped into the bookshop at the American Colony Hotel. The clerk was smoking a cigarette and reading a book himself.
Then, I crossed the street and fell down the rabbit hole.
Traffic lights flashed yellow onto empty pavement. A bearded man in white coat and white skullcap walked next to a woman also covered in white and girls in skirts and white stockings playing jump rope. I crossed paths with a group of three men, also bearded, draped in prayer shawls. More children played in the street. I was invisible.
Turning onto Prophets Street, a man pushed his son in a tricycle along the yellow double line. I realized there was no need to stay on the sidewalks.
I climbed the hill, past the 19th century neo-Gothic stone tributes to European colonialism. A Muslim couple and their young daughter were strolling there, too.
An old man with a long white beard shuffled in the road and asked the time. “Shteim.” Two.
Walking through the commercial center of the West side of the city, the street became quiet and I was alone. The sun was hot, as it can be in the autumn afternoon, and the breezes cool. A tree branch beat against the metal sheeting of a parking lot fence. The lot was vacant.
At moments, I could hear myself breath. The chirping of the birds was oddly reassuring.
I turned down Ben Yehuda and then Jaffa streets. They were empty, too, save a group of Filipino women, domestic help given the day off. A border police jeep passed. The borders aren’t marked, but the police know where they are. In truth, everyone does, no more so than on this day.
Reaching the King David Hotel, I turned past the Art Deco French Consulate, toward the crenellated Ottoman walls of the original city, golden by this time of day.
Walking through Jaffa Gate, known in Arabic as Hebron Gate, all was as I had left it. Shop doors flung open, merchants hawking as they do, and I stopped to say hello to Ahmed, the carpet seller, drank tea, negotiated, then hurtled past the Russian pilgrims spilling out of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and onward through the medieval stone canyons, navigating past the three-wheeled carts and the kabob sellers and the throng at the gates and home.
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