excerpt

While I'm teaching this summer and working on bigger projects, I'll do my best to keep you posted on little things. In the meantime, here's a bit of what I've been working on:

I’ve come to stay here more and more; the hostel (like Jaffa) is a refuge from the raucous backpackers and the chintzy stops that line the tiyelet beachfront in Tel Aviv proper. Like Jaffa, the hostel is full of old charm and ardor.

There is a rooftop where the thrifty sleep for cheaper and from all angles of the roof a person can see something that holds them. Rows of workshops fill with handymen and merchants during the day, fabrics in the market stalls float in a soupy drift of air and mix in styles instead of nationalities. Beneath doorways from the Ottoman era, old silver and brass wares reflect the sunlight. Tourists and their children stroll slowly in a wonder. At night, the workshops are bundled silent, garages lock up with metal doors, and tiny cars park two wheels up onto the sidewalk. To the west, there is the sea and the ancient port and the minarets above the mosques with twisting iron ladders and the landmark Jaffa clock tower with its arching stained-glass windows, gabled green copper roof, sandstone walls and a dominating spire.

Inside the hostel, next to the rattling fridge, there is a small span of wall space with histories of the couples that met randomly at the hostel, pictures from their weddings, postcards from their honeymoons, polaroids of their children, and scribbled notes of thanks.

The private rooms are mainly vacant and couples no longer rove through the hostel in awe, cherishing their own singularity, observing the quirky tenants who almost bow and curtsy in their gushing affability. On the rooftop, the couples no longer look out onto Old Jaffa hands clasped, filing away small notations of the curious images: a woman in a window pinning bed sheets to a clothesline, a carpenter clapping a dust cloud off of his jeans.

It's true that the view so encapsulates the richness of this small place that in more normal times even the most cynical Israeli would pause on the roof of The Old Jaffa Hostel. She would let her hand come down from its rest on the railing to brush against another's palm and giving nothing more away than that she would say metukah, that it's sweet, without looking at anyone directly. In the hot wind, strands of her black hair would carry across her shoulders and she would allow it to be corrected by a brush of the foreign palm.

Today, the couple would no longer leave the roof and sail off the island into Jaffa, listening to the swearing and bargaining of the merchants and tourists. A tourist would talk a merchant down ten shekels and be pleased and then the merchant would say "but that's only two dollars’ difference" and then the merchant would win. The couple would walk past the craftsmen grunting in the act of lifting and unloading, fish caught near the harbor would stare out jealously at the couple from the ice and the sight and smell of the fish would infuse the couple’s gait with the also sense of being caught.

The whirring sound of an electric knife would turn the two heads from the street to a falafel shop and they would see a lamb's great leg spinning and roasting on the shawarma spigot. On the counter they’d see bottles of white tahini and red-hot harif and then their favorite topping, amber-colored amba, and their mouths would pucker at the imagining of the Chilbeh and pickled mango taste.

The couple would make its way down a windy stone path, its terminus at the rusty port where, in the bible, the prophet Jonah fled only to be caught. They’d see the boats christened in names of different languages and see Arab boys sliding on the moss of the pier and diving into the water in sight of the tourists’ cameras. The sun might be starting to go and an Arab fisherman would sit on the wall with his pole and string waiting to catch his dinner and past him the couple would walk, watching a child throw bits of pita bread at a pack of fighting gulls. The sea would crash into the wall and lift up a spray that would catch in the wind and speckle their faces with water. And this would be the cause of laughter.

The couple would climb down the rocks to the beach. They would see the human circus and all the tanning flesh and remain slightly away. And then they would sit together and watch and when he found he had to go, she would watch him walk away and stand with his back to her in the lessening sun and he could feel her looking while he pissed onto the rocks by the sand, the noise of which was drowned out by the tide. This would feel like something private that they had shared.

After they sat, they would walk back as it got dark and then the clock would strike eight and they knew to go home. This was how it could normally be.