Oh Calcutta II

So I grabbed my suitcase, hastily packed from yet another short-term abode and dragged it up the remaining stairs to the terrace, banging against my calves. Within two minutes, my clothes were inside the single mirrored cupboard. My two books were on the shelf alongside Johnathan's two books of collected Tagore poems. My grandfather's dogtag from WWII hung off the handle of a decorative jug.

I look around.

A large room, a double bed in the corner, the doors and windows covered with soft bamboo blinds giving a shaded stillness. Fan whirring. I lay on the bed gazing at the ceiling, listening to the ever-present honking of car horns below, far enough away to lose the impact of the frustration and persistence they represent.

I lay back. Calcutta.

What am I doing here?

My mind goes - as it has done repeatedly and pointlessly for months now - to the last few years of my life, in a futile attempt to find the thread linking all the pieces together.

Israel, London, break up, India, ashram, breakdown, London again, France ...
Somewhere the thread snapped.

"Move on, move on. You have to move on," everyone but everyone was telling me. Yet I was frozen in a dark terror, riddled with fear, nerves shattered, mind stonewalled, seeing nothing but black.

Until ...

It was an odds against all odds. My CV posted on an Indian job website, a call to my parents' house one snowy morning after Christmas, a swift interview, a lengthy visa process and a few months later I am the new international editor for a newspaper start-up in Calcutta ...

And so a new thread begins ...

The street - everyone's bathroom

Shaving, washing, urinating ....

... and today's message from Mother Teresa

My walk to work - 22nd Jan

It starts, as always, at the chai stall.

While I hear temperatures are holding at well below zero in the UK, blankets of snow, frozen roads, closed schools, summer has started to come to Calcutta - or so I was thinking.

Having a camera in the vicinity does strange things to people.
Men started to amble ever so nonchalantly towards the place where the strange blonde girl was writing and taking pictures. Standing that little bit taller, that little bit prouder. Go on take my picture. Well you had to really.

This girl is always walking around the area, holding her baby to her hip, standing in front of people without needing to say what she is asking for. I don't even know if it's her baby - for all I know it's part of some city-wide use-a-baby-to-get-money scam. I have managed so far to ignore the requests, or actually sometimes the demands, for money, for children, from children but well, what can you do?
I fumbled in my pocket and drew out a flimsy excuse of a worn, ragged bill, which the mother/sister/baby borrower slipped professionally into her bag. One more sucker, I thought. But then a few minutes later I saw her walking back towards me with some food she had bought for the baby - even though it was some horrific sticky orange thing that I'm sure would offer no solution to the child's tiny thin bones she had pointed out to me earlier.

I set off on my 25-minute walk to work. Now those who know me me will know I have one of the worst senses of direction ever. I am phenomenally bad. I am impressively bad. 

Calcutta is not the place to have a bad sense of direction. The streets look the same; they have at least two names each, one ludicrously British - Hungerford Street, Devon Road, Shakespeare Avenue - the other unpronouncably long and neither of which help as no one seems to know where anything is, nor how to get there, anyway. One of the main arteries is bizarrely shaped like an infinity figure of eight that seems to turn itself inside out and be on every part of town all at once. A nightmarish trick of urban planning (or rather lack of) for someone as geographically-challenged as myself. 

My walk to work, however, is blissfully simple. Turn left out the house, turn right at the park, left at the Austin sign and straight. 

Yes Einstein, how right you are.

Now you see what I mean when I say that the pavements have been hijacked, forcing anyone so foolish as to walk to further extend the heights of foolishness by walking on the road. This is what the main stretch of my walk to work looks like.

And conveniently located so while you're picking up your new hubcaps and ratchet....

Today's message from Mother Teresa:

and into the office I go.

My walk to work - 21st Jan

I walk to work. Most people think I'm mad - the Indians don't seem big on physical exercise, but at least it keeps me somewhat active, even if I am breathing in heavily polluted air.

Every day starts here at my chai stall. They guy is pumping water from .... a water pump, I guess. 

The chai stall owner keeps a bucket of that water by the stall that people come and help themselves from. 

I have refrained.

Down the road and round the corner is what appears to be a massive makeshift urinal. 

Right next to the main road. I hold my breath for about 20 metres either side.

As you do

Being a nation of non-walkers has somewhat eradicated the need and use of pavements, meaning one lane of traffic is actually shared by pedestrians. It makes for some interesting road safety observations. 

Walkers swell out into the road, and the cars... well they don't actually care. Do not think for one minute that they will stop for a pedestrian ... But it also means that (or is a result from) the small cramped shops spread out onto what was a pavement. Anyone trying to walk down it is squeezed - on this particular road - between mountains of tyres and car parts and a metal railing, supposedly protecting you from the road. But what it actually does is simply encourage people to walk along the road.

Today there seemed to be some interest over a motorbike - or nothing at all ... hard to tell.

Two doors from my office is Mother House, the centre of the charity set up by Mother Teresa. I pop in every day. I sit by her shrine and take a few minutes of silence before heading out into the day. 

Every day there is a different message in flowers. 

This man lives on the street just outside my office. He sells something, I'm not quite sure what, odds and ends, bits and pieces, I've seen old hairbands, radio parts, eye glasses.

Everyday he smiles gently and welcomes me with his hands together in prayer, the traditional namaste. And the same each time I return home as he is neatly folding away his wares. 

Oh Calcutta

As I came out the lift on the top floor of the building that was to be my new home, I turned to the right and saw a mezzuzah on the door. My heart settled in recognition and I registered no little amazement. Could I have found the only such home in the whole of Calcutta?

Inviting me in for a cup of chai, my landlord shows me around the apartment he on-and-off occupies in the space beneath mine – the specially built room on the rooftop terrace, the likes of which are not to be found anywhere else in this sprawling city.

In his large airy apartment, artwork by an Israeli artist adorns the walls and a rusty stained mirror with Hebrew stencils advertising the somebody’s spice shop awaits hanging. “Oh something I picked up in Jaffa years ago,” he tells me. I finger the edges lovingly, delicately combing the fading lettering.

Jonathan.  My new landlord and friend. The half English, half Burmese, Hindi-speaking Jew born in Calcutta, now lives in LA and about six other cities around the world. He seems about as lost as I am. He once told me that during his early adulthood he used to travel the world with a white passport – nationless. Now that’s a man after my own heart.

His father worked for British intelligence in Calcutta (or Kolkata as they call it now, but without the same nostalgic strain, I feel), his mother a Burmese Jew. Grew up running the streets round Newmarket, taunting the rickshaw pullers and drinking pure sugarcane juice. He went to school in England, somewhere progressive and liberal and encouraging that he loved, before the whole family moved again to Israel, where he says the raw struggle of those early state years meant little food on the table and stress that eventually killed his father.

Then the U.S., more study and through a bizarre twist of fate and an open creative mind, he ends up “making jeans.”

“Jeans?” I asked.

“Yes, jeans,” he replies.

“To be honest it was quite funny as I really had no idea what I was doing – and was pretty sure one day I’d get found out, but that day never came.”

A fortune made from a random idea – taking scrap denim from warehouses, patching it all together and making a new pair of jeans. It took off. Big time. Who can predict fashion?

By his early 20s, major U.S. retailers were carrying the brand, factories were running, people were employed, things were moving. Then some personal stuff, a betrayal perhaps (his face goes sombre, so I don’t push) and it was time to move on. So he bought his first building.

At the age of 24.

“And that’s how I sort of fell into property,” he says.

I look at my own paltry collection of belongings at the door. One suitcase with pretty much everything I own in it. I have never owned a property in my life, and little else for that matter.

At the age of 38.

We walk up to the terrace where I will be living. It’s his pad really. His refuge when he comes to Calcutta that he never rents out. Only when I came and saw it and sat sharing a Kingfisher beer and breathing in a gradual feeling that everything was going to be ok, I asked him if he would rent it out to me.

“Well I never rent it out,” he reiterates, “but something tells me it will be good for you here.”

And so it was agreed and cheersed under a night sky lit up with the neon lights of a nearby hotel sign, a glowing advertisement for spine and brain MRIs and the odd star desperately pushing a feeble sparkle through the polluted air.

Oh Calcutta.

When I first arrived in Calcutta, my employers had arranged a two-bedroomed flat for me on the other side of town – near Maddox Square – the most happening square in Calcutta, they told me, especially at Durga Puja celebrations. Well Durga Puja came and went and if unbearably loud and bad renditions of Michael Jackson’s Black or White and a surge of young people letting off firecrackers, horns and any loud thing till 4am is happening, then I guess that’s just what it was.

Nothing wrong with my apartment, only I couldn’t stand it. The thin metal chairs scraped on the tile floor like fingers on a blackboard, the shower dribbled water down the wall rather than on me and the balcony from my room was a slither of space surrounded by bars, where I would sit knees hunched up most evenings like a bird in a cage.

And now in my room. A large terrace with plants around the edge, window sills and doorframes painted in a faded blue that whispered Mediterranean. Inside, bamboo blinds spread a shady coolness, fans whirr. And the biggest shower I have seen to date....

Not Jewish?! (part twelve)

SHALOM TO ALL THAT (PART IV)

I slouched over to the open window of the lounge that Grizzly and I shared. Our apartment was on the fourth floor and looked out over a square on a little side street where Israel’s national poet Bialik once lived. A sculpture of blue tiles honored this fact and the area had drawn musical academies and galleries to set up home there. On some nights, light piano music or the high vibratto of an operetta would drift through our window and mingle with the voices from the television. Today, it was serenely quiet; warm, sun-filled and serenely quiet.

When I was growing up in England, Sundays used to be like this – although not so much sun-filled. The shops were closed, public transport took the day off, parents eased into the Sunday papers or slept off large Sunday lunches and as children we were always told not to go knocking on our friends’ doors and disturbing the neighbours. Not now. Now England’s shops are open, cashing in on another day of business, and transport and people chug their way round the high street chains like it was any other day.

Even though in Tel Aviv on Shabbat, the cafes are open and filled with people and the streets and beaches are bursting with couples and pushchairs and children, there is still a sense that this is a day of rest. The buses don’t run and the shops are all closed, people sleep in late and take the day easy.

There’s many here who want to see the tradition stopped, to fight what they protest as another sign of the religious control over the country and there are some huge furniture and DIY stores that have opened on the outskirts of towns that draw in crowds of families – complete with screaming babies, bored toddlers, little patience and a whole pile of stress. Like I’ve said before, I’m not religious but here I think they’ve got a point – have a day of rest; who needs to buy shelves on Shabbat?

Anyway, I was looking out of the window, trying to imprint the smells and the emotions into my brain so that I would be able to conjure up the feelings of Tel Aviv on a Shabbat late into my life – and then I decided to get my camera and headed out into the streets, just in case my mental powers of recollection should fail me late in life and pictorial evidence should be required.

It was hot. I strolled down to the end of the road where the coffee shop that had been blown up was now up and running and full of people. It had been up and running and full of people about 3 days after the terror attack – the speed of recovery was astonishing. There’d had even been a piece about it in the local paper. “Café Oleh” was the title of the article (oleh means to go up in Hebrew – Nice headline, I remember thinking to myself, as the first worrying signs of the newsdesk cynic started to show – but again that’s material for a whole other chapter in itself…)

I wandered up Allenby Street, whose sleazy bars were all locked up and neon signs switched off; metal shutters covered the entrances to the stores where during the week cheap, bright clothes spilled out of the boxes at the front and deeply tanned and bleach blonde sales women stood around smoking cigarettes and shouting to each other over the happy pop music that blared from speakers all round the shop.
Grafitti scrawled on the wall next to the shop shutter promised purveyors that designer items could be found inside: Gap, Banana Republik and Calvin Kline, they assured.

Taking a right off Allenby and at the end of the street, the sea greets you, gently rippling, sparkling into the distant horizon.

I walked into a side street, into the old and crumbling Yemenite Quarter. On its flaking walls, faded posters from some local election were slowly, and over the windows of the jumbled apartments, swathes of material acted as makeshift curtains to hold off the October sun. Slight rips in the fabric offered a glimpse into the darkness, as the inhabitants – most of them foreign workers from China and the Philippines – shuffled sleepily about inside.

Outside, old women with wrinkles running like deep grooves through their face sat still and silent on the doorsteps, their hands folded in their laps, lifting them occasionally, as if in slow motion, to waft away a fly.

I sat down on a low wall, the heat of the stone seeping through to my skin. From one of small stone houses next to me, men started to sing, three or four voices – a simple harmony. I don’t know what it was, I don’t know if it was a religious psalm or an old folk song, but as the melody floated gently from the darkened room and the smell of black coffee with cardamum mingled with the warm silent air, a heaviness settled on my chest and my heart felt ready to break.

I started picturing the sights around me, but knew a photo would never capture this so I picked myself up and walked away from the singing back up towards home. I walked up through the deserted Carmel Market, where stray cats and pigeons were picking between the bare stalls at the fallen fruit that had been trampled underfoot in Friday’s hectic sales, and back to my street.

I had plans for that night to go out with friends. I only had about two weeks left in Israel and had planned to spend them saying good-bye to them and to Tel Aviv.

But as it turns out, Tel Aviv had different plans for me …..

Not Jewish?! (part eleven)

SHALOM TO ALL THAT (PART III)

Isn’t it amazing just how much stuff you can accumulate. I had come to Israel with one solitary backpack, stuffed unceremoniously with a few items of clothing that had done me for my year’s traveling round South America. And even though my one pair of sandals had sufficed for the “laid-back sand bowl” look of Be’er Sheva, I hadn’t quite realised before my arrival just how serious Tel Aviv women can be about getting dressed up for the night.

I’d thought Tel Aviv would be full of Israelis of the kind you meet in Koh Phi Phi or La Paz – all in floppy patterned trousers and Teva sandals, and was quite taken aback to meet a whole new breed of made up, sprayed up, nailed up tottering beauties squeezed into designer jeans and sparkling tops – not to be outdone of course by one of the largest and proudest gay communities in the world.

And so as always happens when you live out of your own country for any extended period of time, not only do you start picking up a few of the language habits (walla and yoffie had long ago become standard garnishing to my English sentences) but I had also submitted to a few Tel Aviv fashion trends, and had now amassed a wardrobe of spangly vests, figure-hugging trousers and a small but not insignificant collection of that original Israeli invention – the platform flip-flop.

I remember once when I was in England for a short break and was wandering around London shops wasting time before heading to Heathrow for my flight and one of the saleswomen had asked me where I was from after asking her, in perfect English (or so I thought) how much something was. “I’m English,” I’d told her, thinking maybe the fact that I had a slight tan had thrown her. “Oh,” she’d said, surprised. “You don’t look English at all. Something in the way you’re dressed.”
I’m not sure if it was a compliment or not.

And books. How had I managed to accumulate so many books? I hate throwing away books, so I knew I would have to lug them all the way back home with me. It’s the curse of the wandering bibliophile: nowhere can even start to be called home until there is a bookshelf stocked with the familiar faces and a steadily growing population of new ones.

I stared vacantly at the physical objects that were the result of my two years in Israel and tried to think of how I was going to summon up the energy to pack them.

I padded barefoot through to the lounge to call my best friend in London to tell her I was coming home. Her excitement was muffled through her scarf and was swallowed up in the churning of the trains as she stood on the platform at Clapham Junction, jokingly telling me I was crazy because it was “bloody freezing” there. It was late October. It was also Saturday. “I have to go into the office to do some work, nightmare,” she started telling me. “I’ve been there all week from 8 til 8, you wouldn’t believe …” and then the line went quiet as she had obviously boarded the train and rattled off into a tunnel. Oh yes, I remember working in London. And I remember now why I’d vowed never to do it again.

Not Jewish?! (part ten)

SHALOM TO ALL THAT (PART II)

Sitting opposite David Landau in his office, my announcement that I would soon be leaving was met with an almost knowing smile as if he were just waiting for this time to come. Like he’d seen it all before. Like he’d seen the lines of young Israelis’ “other halves” come in for jobs, try to make their lives and relationships work, until undoubtedly it would all unravel and the European partner would fly off home and forget all about that crazy and rude place where they lived for a while. Why did I feel like a failure?

It was almost like the time I called him up and asked for a few days’ break, the day after a suicide bomber had ripped through the large glass-fronted bar at the end of my street and the night had been broken by wails of sirens, red flashing lights and the screams of human panic.

“Can’t take the heat, huh?” David had said as I asked for the time off and apologised for the late notice. But maybe something in the sound of my “No” worked in my favor and the next day my friend Shahar and I took off for a few days in Turkey, to a resort where we found ourselves surrounded by English tourists of the sort that give everything English a bad name and Israelis constantly checking their cellphones to see what was going on in Israel.

My other colleagues also greeted the news of my departure as a kind of confirmation of what they always knew was going to happen. “I never really understood what you were doing here in the first place,” one of them said to me and, “Well we all thought you were a bit crazy to be here anyway,” said another.

It made me wonder what had driven me to stay. Who on earth was I trying to prove something to? I had felt it, this great sense of human duty to stay here, to take a stand against something, maybe against fear, maybe even against terror in a small way, or maybe it was just my own rebellious nature, stubbornly insisting on doing something that to others looked slightly insane and not to be done.

I guess at Haaretz English Edition, where there were either ambitious American Jewish interns who come for a short time or jaded Anglo veterans who had come here, as they tend to remind everyone on a regular basis, at a time when Israel was a paradise of socialist values, full of happy, song-singing pioneers, streets of sand and just the one television station, I was something of a misnomer.

One of my fellow sub-editors, however, said to me when I told him I was leaving, “Oh that’s a shame, you were quite an asset here.”
“Really?” I said, surprised. Positive employee feedback was an alien concept at Haaretz – the most one could hope for was an ego-crushing bellowing at from David (“The more he swears and the higher the decibels, the more he likes you,” I was comforted on many occasions of looking suitably ego-crushed), and training consisted of a “you can sit over there” from someone who had far more important things to do.

So mostly I just tried to catch up, keep up and read up, and of course had the frequent tendency to slip up….

Not Jewish?! (part nine)

SHALOM TO ALL THAT

I didn’t need the phone in my hand to hear my mother’s sigh of relief as I told her that I had decided to come home; but she did try – with not too much success – to hide it under sympathetic tones that my relationship with Boaz had come to an end once and for all.

Noa took the news slightly worse as we were sitting in the cluttered porch of her new moshav home where she lived – and frequently fought – with her boyfriend Ziv.

The tears that rolled down her cheeks spoke beyond words of the bond that had been formed in one summer in Tel Aviv when just taking the bus in the morning confronted you with an array of philosophical questions on life and death, overloaded your system with adrenaline and made you stare wide-eyed into the very essentials of your existence.

Grizzly, however, gave me a slow and deliberate nod with eyebrows slightly raised that bespoke his usual thinking of “I don’t believe anything until I actually see it.”

He was like that Grizzly, very solid, not given to fanciful dramatics or impulsive outbursts; rather his movements were weighted and thoughtful – but then again that might have been due to the copious amounts of dope he smoked.

Anyway, our leasing contract was about a month from the end and so it seemed a good closing point. I wouldn’t renew and instead Grizzly’s girlfriend would move in and my bedroom would be turned into a kind of office/spare room, with Grizzly already taking claim of the only decent piece of furniture I had – a large “walnut-look” desk I’d bought on sale from Home Center and he’d spent the afternoon sweating over and setting up for me. I sold my bed to a young German trainee journalist called Eva, who had just fallen in love with a young Israeli she’d met on a bus

Not Jewish?! (part eight)

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

After he talk on the beach with Boaz, it took only a few weeks for the relationship to completely unravel. There had been talk of him moving full-time up to Tel Aviv as his studies in Be’er Sheva only required him to be there a couple of days each week and of us finding an apartment together, but the whole marriage conversation had really nipped it all in the bud and it seemed pointless to be picking out paint for the living room walls when we knew things weren’t really going anywhere.

And so once again we parted ways and I wondered what I would do with myself. Things felt different this time – more final, like the book had been closed and sealed on this chapter of my life. I was feeling it was time to move on. Noa had moved out to a moshav with her boyfriend, Shahar was newlywed, Grizzly was ensconced with his new girlfriend and I felt I needed to be far away from Boaz, fearing that if I stayed we would constantly sway into each other’s lives, but always a little unsure and always a little reluctant. Maybe it’s time I left Israel, I thought.

I felt at a bit of a loss, tired and not a little stuck. Much like the entire country really as we drew into the final months of 2003, when the dark, black cloud of “the situation” pressed heavy on everyone’s lives and the fear, desperation, tit for tat stubbornness and stagnating hatred trudged on, exhausting, frustrating, and at the risk of sounding flippant, really annoying.

And so I decided to do what I usually decide to do when relationships end and life isn’t opening any obvious doors for me – I decided to go traveling. Yes, I thought, I’ll jump on a plane to India or Southeast Asia somewhere, backpack my way round for a few months and surely the answer would come to me. I started to get all drummed up about the idea, planning routes and treks, the best beaches and places to study ashtanga – yes I’ll get away from it all I thought.

Until, of course, it came to the most crucial part of my planning – money. I didn’t actually have any. Two years of working and I had amassed absolutely nothing.

In fact as I sat deep in reverie planning my solo trek around Rajasthan, I got a phone call from my bank manager, who just “wanted to make sure that I knew I was so overdrawn, because as a non-citizen, I’m paying really high interest so I should really cover it.”

And that was a nice call. The woman from my bank once called me and left a message on my answer phone that if I didn’t pay off my overdraft they would cancel my card. On my answer phone! By that time, however, I had learned the ways of the country enough to call her up and shout at her down the phone about some basic guidelines of customer service and manage not at all to address the very real problem of the state of my account.

You see, even though I am probably the last person on the planet that anyone should ever look to for money management or financial nous – to which my decision to take an arts degree, move into print journalism and then move to Israel at the height of an economic crisis attests – you can take it from anyone: it’s really hard to make any money here.

My friend Shahar puts it like this: “Take what you would earn in a Western country; halve it, then divide by three, trim off another 5 percent before halving it again and you get the ballpark figure of what you would earn in Israel.” Yeah, it’s hard to make money here.

Unless of course you belong to one of the four families here who seem to own the whole country and its entire wealth and whose stories of buying and selling, court battles and family fallouts fill the business pages like a particularly spicy script of The Bold and the Beautiful.

While the rest of us not so bold and not so beautiful are left juggling day jobs and night jobs, fending off the bank manager, drowning in overdraft and buying everything in installments.

Israelis love buying things in installments. You can buy your weekly shopping in Israel in installments.

I had no idea what the checkout girl wanted from me the first time she asked me if I wanted to buy my rather sorry collection of staple supplies in two or three payments – but soon tashlumim (installments) became a loyal and trusted friend among the words that populated my Hebrew vocabulary. Tashlumim the gas bill, tashlumim at the hairdresser’s tashlumim anything from the weekly necessities to a flight home.

My friends in England, peers with whom I had graduated high school and university, were already a few rungs up on the ladders of their individual careers and earning healthy salaries that allowed for the acquisition of the “nice” things in life – cars, clothes, holidays, houses. The very concept of buying a house in Israel didn’t even register on the radar of my comprehension. How the hell does anybody ever buy a house here?

My English friends were settling down, cozying into their nests, and I had less cash to my name than the day 10 years beforehand that I had skipped out of my parents’ house and rushed off excitedly to university. I kept having to turn down the steady stream of wedding invitations, explaining to them with heart-felt regret that I just couldn’t afford the flight, not mentioning that even the ticket for the Heathrow Express from the airport to central London was a strain on my budget.

Everyone I knew was struggling and every business was struggling. The newspaper twice cut our salaries, sending us all brief apologetic letters asking us for patience and thanking us for our hard work during such “difficult years.” And the Passover and Rosh Hashanah gifts that it is customary for Israeli firms to give out to employees, went from a NIS 200 voucher the first holiday to a bottle of wine the next to a small card, thanking us for our patience and hard work during such difficult years.

I was earning more money as a waitress in a bar – the only businesses that did seem to be flourishing.

One of my good friends from university was a VP at Merrill Lynch, with a flat overlooking Big Ben and a deposit down on a second home in the country. I was a part-time waitress, working for a broke newspaper who bought pasta on tashlumim. Something was very wrong.

So my relationship was at a definite end, not to mention my visa (which deserves a full chapter all to itself), my career was stalled and travel was off the cards. It seemed like I was going to have to do what all people approaching their 30s do when they find themselves back at square one: I called my Mum and told her I was coming home

Not Jewish?! (part seven)

THE 'C' WORD

And way before I had to send them to the army I would have to send them to kindergarten, where they would have a childhood experience that I couldn’t even begin to relate to.

I imagined them running out of their morning sessions clutching their finger paintings and babbling away about Purim or Hannukah in a language I could still only half speak. They would sing songs, watch programs and read books that were part of a tradition that I couldn’t help them love.

And what about Christmas? What about those magical years when you really believe that some cheery fat man in a red suit is going to squeeze down the chimney and spoil you rotten. There’s none of that in Israel. No high school Christmas parties, no carol singing, no exciting buildup, no countdown. Call it the cruel backlash of a capitalist consumer culture if you want, but hey it’s fun.

I spent Christmas Day in Tel Aviv once; I had to ask for the day off work and it was just like any other random Tuesday in December – grey, rainy and not a fairy light in sight. I spent the day yearning for the smell of turkey and the cosy presence of aunts and uncles gently dozing after eating far too much of it, their bright paper hats slipping down their foreheads and glints of sparkling wrapping paper at their feet.

“Well at least you’d never argue about which set of inlaws you’ll be spending Christmas with,” my sister once told me. But that wasn’t the point. I wanted my children to feel that same tingle about Christmas that I still did, even at the age of 31; I wanted to pass down the silly traditions and games and myths that my parents and grandparents had instilled in me. But I would never get to see my kids with a tea towel on their heads dressed up a shepherd for the nativity play, because my children would be Jewish.

Because if Boaz and I were to get married, then we had to deal with the big C word: conversion. It was very important to Boaz that I convert and that his children be Jewish.

Now, I would not consider myself a religious person – in fact as you can see, my approach to one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar – the birth of Jesus Christ – is all about food, family and overindulgence in every way and very little to do with the advent of the spiritual founder of my supposed beliefs.

Easter is hot cross buns and chocolate eggs, lent is giving it all up, Palm Sunday is somewhere in between and church in general is about gossipy old women and the weak strain of wobbling falsettos trying to find the right key for the day’s hymn.

But the minute someone asks you to give it all up, something strange happens on a molecular level. It’s like someone has asked me to rewrite my DNA coding, to unlearn everything that has been imprinted on my psyche from age 0. My religion meant nothing to me, I thought, but give it up? Now everything’s gone a little shaky.

And wasn’t it all a little hypocritical? Did a word really make all the difference? Wasn’t I just playing into the hands of institutionalized religion? I mean there are things I like about the Jewish religion and there are things I like about the Christian religion; Buddhism has a lot of appeal as do parts of Hinduism, but I, and all of us, have read enough about perverted priests, rampant rabbis and suspect spiritual leaders to want to shun the whole idea of an organized belief system. And I felt that by converting, by consciously choosing to be part of a religion, I was giving my backing to such managers in the huge business of God; that I was saying “yes” I agree to be a part of what you represent. And that kind of clashed with my principles.

It was a big decision. But it was one I was prepared to take had I felt the motivation were strong enough. If I were to convert, I wanted to convert because I truly felt it, that I truly wanted it with all my being, for me, for Boaz and for our life together. And it was then that I faced what I had really known somewhere deep down all along – that I didn’t want to convert for Boaz.

And so I turned back to him and in a small voice filled with heaviness said, “No, I don’t think we’ll ever get married.”

“Bassa,”* he said in a half-hearted attempt to lighten the moment, but as we started to gather up our things and brush the sand off our feet, a heaviness hung over us and it was clear to us both that things would never be the same again.

*Bummer

Not Jewish?! (part six)

WHAT A GAS

I still carried my gas mask with me – to work at the paper and at the bar where I still had a part-time job, even though I had serious doubts as to its actual effectiveness. I’m sure that if anything actually happened I would have had a heart attack from the panic, been paralysed with fear or too shaky to actually get the thing out of its box.

And that box. It was a cardboard box. It was so 1940s. To me gas masks were a thing from history; people had gas masks slung over their shoulders in black and white pictures of people running round Londonduring the Blitz, or in photos of queues of children in long shorts waiting at train stations to be evacuated from London. Gas masks were Carrie’s War, not Jill’s war.
The masks themselves looked like useless pieces of World War II rubber that you see in museums, not cutting edge military equipment from the 21st century. How were silly goggles with a plastic snout supposed to save me from this non-conventional, chemical, biological attack everyone was ranting about? It was laughable.

I tried not to even think about the possibility of actually having to use it and tried to approach the situation with a kind of detached humor, which is probably better known as idiotic denial, and lived in the blind and totally unsubstantiated belief that of course nothing would actually happen.

It was like when I get on the bus here, and as always – still to this day – the little warning light comes on in my head that there is the possibility that the guy who just stepped on, who looks pretty much like anyone else sitting on the bus, could suddenly explode. But then I think “nah, it won’t happen, not today.” Why? Because my gut feeling says so.

I seem to have convinced myself that I have some kind of supernatural powers of intuition, that I would “feel” it if I were about to die because surely you couldn’t die just like that. Surely you’d feel something weird inside, something “not quite right.” It couldn’t be that you could just die, just like that. Surely it didn’t happen like that.

And so I was convinced that of course Iraq didn’t have non-conventional weapon heads and of course Iraq wouldn’t fire at us and I approached the whole thing with a kind of hysterical wishful thinking and took pictures of myself sitting in my apartment with my gas mask on and two thumbs up – but decided I wouldn’t send them to my mum, who I’m sure wouldn’t have shared my sense of humour.

It was with that same sense of surreal disbelief that I parted from Boaz most mornings as he headed out all dressed up in his green uniform and his brown army boots. He had been called up on emergency reserve duty and had come up from Be’er Sheva to stay with Grizzly and me as it was nearer the base. Every day he would leave the apartment in his officer’s uniform and I would stand by the door seeing him off, feeling I should be proud or worried or something, like girlfriends are in the old movies when they send their men off to war.
(Even though I knew he was quite safe in an office somewhere, and even though he told me it was really boring and they sat around watching blips on a computer screen waiting for Iraq to launch, and eating).

And then it seemed that, for us, the war was over.

And it seemed that Boaz and I, once again, were over.

It didn’t end in tears and accusations, shouting and screaming. The relationship and all that it had been and could have been came to a head quite unexpectedly and innocuously while we were sitting on the beach one early evening as the sun weakened and the people were starting to walk away to their cars and their apartments, leaving behind them the dent of flattened sand and a few empty water bottles and crumpled Bisli* packets (which really drives me mad).

I don’t even remember how on earth we started talking about it, but at one point, Boaz turned to me and said, “Do you think we’ll ever get married?” And thus it seemed that the time had come to talk about all the thoughts, those heavy and serious thoughts that I had tried to push away and avoid dealing with. It seemed that the conversation had been forced upon me, without me being prepared, in completely the wrong setting, and it took me off guard.

All I could think – and you may find this ridiculous but I challenge you to find a woman whose brain doesn’t scramble wildly into the future – the first thing I thought about at the prospect of marrying Boaz was “Oh my God, I’ll have to send my kids to the army.”

I mean it was okay me being here, having my experiences, being part of the thrills, the fears, the passion, the craziness; I could sort of take responsibility for me. But kids, well that was another matter. I couldn’t have kids here. I’d panic, I’d worry, I’d be neurotic. Suddenly I understood Israeli mothers, who have their cell phones glued to their ears, know where their children are every second of the day, and are horrified when I tell them that I last spoke to my mother “about two weeks ago.”

And I’ll never forget the story a woman I work with told me: When she had given birth to her son in Israelduring the 1970s, the doctor had implied to her that it would probably be a good idea to have another child.

*A popular Israeli snack.

Not Jewish?! (part five)

inS

LOVE IS BLIND

“Jilly, I’ve got the perfect guy for you,” he would shout down the phone at me…

And God only knows why I ever listened to him. Because although Shahar has one of the biggest hearts I have ever known, he also has one of the biggest imaginations in the Middle East.

Ziv , the first such “perfect” guy , was a champion kick boxer – he must have informed me about 15 times – and a commander in some elite army unit. Before I’d even managed to shut the car door he had already started to tell me about his heroics in Lebanon, where he’d “seen things that would turn my hair white.”

He drove me to some awful concoction of a sushi-dance bar where he proceeded to scream in my ear about how many girls there wanted to date him while I tried to concentrate on dipping my salmon maki in the soy sauce rather than the ashtray.

After he had done what he felt was the groundwork on me, which involved telling me I was lucky he liked girls with some flesh on them, he threw his Gold card at the waitress, gave me the wink and the nod and headed back out for the car. He was stunned I didn’t want to go back to his place and with a huff and a tutt dropped me at home, I never saw him again.

Then there was Roi, whose dazzling green eyes and smooth olive skin were betrayed by the fact that his head barely reached my shoulders. Roi saw me as a dumb and innocent tourist, a bare canvas on which he could splatter his right-wing politics. He was determined to “educate” me, to “tell me how it is” and impress upon me his narrow-minded views as if I’d never opened a history book or a newspaper in my entire life and was quite incapable of forming my own opinions about anything because I am neither Israeli nor Jewish and therefore cannot possibly understand anything about anything.

And particularly because I’d never been in the army – even though from what I could gather he spent most of it slouching around eating biscuits.

Ho took me to a trendy bar at Tel Aviv’s north port, but the woman on the door wouldn’t let him in without ID. When I suggested we walk down the promenade to Jaffa, he looked at me gravely and warned me in all seriousness that “there were Arabs living there.”

And then there was Lior, who was, well, just boring.

And so Shahar’s interpretation of perfect led me down a rocky path of disastrous dates and pointless encounters, at the end of which the myth of the Israeli man lay shattered and broken before my very disappointed eyes.

No more the bronzed god, no more the virile Mediterranean lover, just the same meek mortals you get everywhere, but these ones don’t buy the drinks and certainly won’t hold any door open for you. Chivalry is long dead in Israel – if indeed it ever breathed.

I knew I should have listened to my first instinct that told me never ever to go on a blind date, but somehow I got swept up in the Israeli frenzy that never lets anyone ever just enjoy being single for a minute. They call setting you up with someone a mitzvah. People are constantly trying to set you up on dates or “find” someone for you or get you the phone number of a friend of a friend who might be good for you. There was even a surreal half hour one afternoon when I had my profile up on JDate and that was really enough for me to start questioning my sanity. I mean what the hell was I looking for? A nice Jewish boy to take home to mother? My mother was a few thousand miles away in England wondering where she went wrong with me and just when I would come to my senses and get on a plane and come home.

It was all becoming quite ridiculous, so when Boaz called me up one afternoon and told me he wanted us to get back together again I thought it was the sign I had been waiting for and that it would be a good idea.

It wasn’t, of course.

We tried again for another few months though and when we finally split up I decided I would leave Israel for good.

But we’ll get to that later

In the meantime, Noa had moved out to live with her boyfriend and I’d moved in with another friend I had met while travelling in South America. His name was Ilan, but he’d been dragging round the nickname Grizzly since the army, even though he was now much more toned – although just as large-framed – and that’s the only name I ever called him.

The bombings were less intense by then. And when there was one, it was as if no one wanted to deal with it anymore. Nobody wanted to dwell on bombings, or talk about them; everyone just wanted them to go away. They were pushed to the inner pages of the newspaper because now there was a new favourite in town: Gulf War II.

There was talk of the war everywhere. On the television and in the papers, on the street and at work. At the offices of Haaretz they cleared out the bomb shelters and were moving computers in there so that we could still get a paper out on time even if there was an attack. Other foreigners I knew who had Israeli boyfriends started leaving the country and everyone else was stocking up on goods for their sealed rooms.

And still I didn’t want to leave.

I thought I’d just hold out for this and then everything would be okay. Once this was over life would be good. Because Israel has a way of tricking you like that.

It terrifies you and maddens you and makes you insistent that you are going to leave right away; the people can drive you crazy, the situation can drive you crazy and more often than not it feels like comic tragedy being improvised all the way.

There are no rules and no standards and every time something happens it is even more ridiculous, outrageous and frightening than the time before. It seems there’s no one in control and in exasperation you swear you are going to leave because it’s just insupportable.

And then the sun comes out and the people spill onto the streets and everyone forgets the drama of the day before, the headlines move on and vitality and hope surges through the streets, promising a magic so attainable you can almost taste it – just for long enough to keep you addicted.

And like an addict, I live for it, from moment to moment and day to day, never really knowing what is going to happen next but falling into Israel’s seductive trap that somehow everything will be okay. And all the bad stuff is pushed aside, or explained away and the red lines stretch further and further away.

And it’s amazing what you get used to.

My sister came from England to visit me a couple of year ago. We were walking back from the supermarket as the spring day was turning into dusk and a car backfired on the street. She practically jumped out of her skin and dropped the shopping; my heart hardly skipped a beat. I laughed at her jumpiness, and calmed her “Oh they’d never bomb here; it’s too quiet round here. And anyway things are much better now, there hasn’t been a bombing for at least six weeks.”

Six weeks. Six weeks without a suicide bomb and I was talking like there’s peace in the Middle East.

“Do you think you’ll stay in Israel if there’s a war with Iraq?” Noa had asked me once.

“No way!” I’d said, “Absolutely not. Why would I do that? That’s just madness. I wouldn’t put my life at risk like that.”

And there I was a year or so later, walking to work, with my gas mask in its little cardboard box slung over my shoulder and the ridiculous duct tape across the windows of our apartment that was supposed to protect us against some kind of biological attack, and with Grizzly telling me where the nearest shelter was and that if I couldn’t get to it that I should crawl under the bed.

I didn’t have to, though. Nothing happened. Quite disappointing, really. All that did happen was that Israelis started reminiscing about the first Gulf War and about how it had been so much more frightening and exciting back then, and that I should have been here then.

Then there was real danger, then they’d had days off school and then they’d sat with their families in the sealed rooms, wide-eyed behind their masks, fingernails digging into the palms of their hands, listening to the wail of the SCUDs as they approached Tel Aviv. This was nothing, they scoffed, and casually shrugged off the government order to carry gas masks at all times. I felt like a bit of a square.