This Recording

Catch up with the first three parts of Molly Young’s journey to the Middle East, The American Colony, here.

The American Colony

Part Four

by Molly Young

While we wait for our plane in the tiny Eilat airport, I buy a Magnum ice cream bar. It is my first meal of the day and it turns into a sojourn of taste one doesn’t quickly forget. A column of pale ice cream, white chocolate shield cracking under my teeth like an ice pick on frozen water. Melting and coolness. I buy three more for the others and deliver them wordlessly. I could survive on these: one for lunch, one for dinner, one for snack, and the rest of the diet filled in with coffee and vodka.

My old history teacher, a booming fudge-colored man named Walter Turner, used to conclude every class with the same quote: It’s a cold world, he’d say, quoting Redman. Better pack your own heat.

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If it nearly seems that I am traveling alone from all I’ve written about my three companions, this is almost true. Wherever we are, I go off alone. If we wait in a lobby, I read on a separate couch. If we go to a restaurant, I often sit at my own table with a book. It is the only way I know of to maintain my patience and clarity when I am with others, at least physically, at all times. They pardon it. My dad writes it off as eccentricity, my stepmom writes it off as oddness, and I have no idea whether Ida passes judgment.

I read once that Sigmund Freud took all his meals alone as a child so that he could have more time to read, and this factoid makes me feel better about the urge to be alone. My reputation in my family has hardened into that of the studious and demanding member, but I always return from my solitary periods in a good mood, so nobody attempts to change me.

We are back in Tel Aviv for a few days. I spend time walking along the beach and streets observing Israeli women. They are bolt upright, beautiful, militant even when pouring a glass of Coca-Cola. Is it because they all served that they are so efficient and purposeful? The sense is that of a replicant from Blade Runner, only the women here are not subhuman but superhuman, seemingly weathered against everything and come out unruffled. Maybe that is why everyone pegs me at fifteen, sixteen years old. I’m transparently much, much less than my peers here.

“God Moving Over the Face of the Waters” – Moby (mp3)

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“Good morning,” says Ida when she hears me get up. Her voice is very quiet, determinedly quiet, and one must listen carefully in conversation to net all her words. “Good morning, Ida.” She is bundled in the hotel blankets, lying as straight and slim as a Moroccan cigar. Eighty-one years old. Ida rode the camel yesterday with fewer complaints than anyone else.

Mounting a camel is a treacherous process. You sit yourself in the saddle and hold on tight while the animal rouses itself up on its knees, then rears back and lurches to standing position. Ida got into the saddle and when the beast rose up, she careened forward, destined to fall but for the 11-year old boy guarding the camel, who stuck out his palm square against her chest and knocked her back into the saddle.

Ida’s expression did not change throughout (nor did the boy’s), and I watched with near horror at how the crisis had been averted by a little boy’s instinctive motion, unacknowledged by Ida even as she might have broken her neck in the middle of the Bedouin desert. It was this that made me begin to take the measure of her, to add to the known unknowns of her past a whole battery of unknown unknowns.

I dress and go downstairs. The morning is difficult. I have finished my book and feel as though I’ve been ditched by a close friend. It was Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, which title I kept misreading as The Hummus Stain. My stomach is knotted with cramps, my hair greasy and the day is to be filled with visits to infirm relatives whom I do not know. Despite all the draining – of energy, blood – I feel turgid.

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Today we’ll drive to Jerusalem after breakfast. I go to the dining room alone, as usual, but this time one of the hostesses is very nice and gives me a window seat, even though I am “table for one” and the peripheral spots are designated for groups. It is forty degrees outside, cold enough for me to wear a Russian hat to breakfast and for the paddle ball players on the beach to bundle up in coats.

One old man is actually entering the water. He wears black briefs with a saggy waistband, his mating materials weakly encased, arms dangling aside as he wades in and wades out. In an old guy this swimming seems less an act of fortitude than of stubbornness; or that is what I tell myself to redeem the fact that I would never, ever do it?

We motor to Jerusalem in a taxi that smells of tooth decay and head for the Museum of the Book, where the Dead Sea Scrolls are displayed. Dad doles out historical quizzes as we trot through the sculpture garden. Who burned the Second Temple in 70 AD? The Romans. And why? Because the Jews were disobedient.

The museum has bits of scroll and old sandals, even a bowl of ancient charred dates. There are photographs of the Bedouins who found the scrolls in 1947, and of the archaeologists who subsequently discovered more of them. Archaeologists with dark tans and expressions of scholarly appraisal.

“The Qumran sectarians believed that God had granted them knowledge of profound cosmological secrets,” reads a plaque. What confidence!

“New Dawn Fades” – Moby (mp3)

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According to a cookbook in the gift shop, Israelis eat small bowls of fruit jelly for dessert, as though toast were too much of an impediment to bother with. I walk back to the hotel through Me’a She’arim, the Orthodox Jewish section of town. It is an interesting place to visit but not a fun place to be. There are signs posted in the streets: “Please Do Not Pass Through Our Neighborhood in Immodest Clothes”, and signs posted on the doors: “Please Enter My Store in Modest Clothing.”

Religious solemnity feels a lot like hostility when it means that no one will look you in the eye except to glare. The men wear black hats, the women wear black stockings, and everyone is shaped like a matzoh ball, except for the skinny and hyperactive kids.

There must be a direct relationship between piety and sugar consumption, because I have never seen so much candy. Candy in the Jewish quarter of the old city, candy in the Muslim quarter, candy in the Christian quarter. Tourists are not allowed in the Armenian quarter but there is probably candy there too. Next to the yarmulkes are bins of liquid-filled grape suckers. Beside the keffiyehs are jelly blocks of Turkish Delight. Candy shops everywhere, selling long pipes of taffy and bulging sacks of complicated sugary wheels. There are bags of glace, apricots and blocks of halvah solid enough to built a temple out of.

One of the stranger sweets I taste is a pastry called knafeh. You can find knafeh in every bakery being pulled forth from the oven on hot round trays, doused in sugar syrup and sliced into squares. There is a layer of white cheese at the bottom; it is the texture of calamari and pistachios, syrup, and a mystery grain that feels like gravel. It is a specialty of the region, and it is very good.

In Me’a She’arim Orthodox Jews stand around in head-to-toe black filling plastic sacks with pizza-shaped gummies and chocolate stars. It appears as though these pious men have outsourced every speck of color from their lives into the candy stands only to buy it all back and fill themselves up with it. Perhaps the flame of religious conviction acts as an incinerator, burning thousands upon thousands of fudgy calories.

Molly Young is the senior contributor to This Recording. Her website is Magic Molly, and you can read her past work on TR here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

“Grace” – Moby (mp3)

The American Colony

Our senior contributor Molly Young’s groundbreaking journey to the Middle East continues. Relive those memorable Jews and Arabs in The American Colony.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

PREVIOUSLY ON THIS RECORDING

Inside the Pink Palace of Jayne Mansfield.

Hot chicks and Sharon Olds.

Tyler interview two hilarious ladies.