1.
I've come back to this city where names are given to distances
as if to human beings and the numbers are not of bus-routes
but 70 after, 1917, 500 B.C., Forty-Eight. These are the
lines you really travel on.
And already the demons of the past are meeting with the
demons of the future and negotiating about me above me,
their give-and-take neither giving nor taking, in the high
arches of shell-orbits above my head.
A man who comes back to Jerusalem is aware that the places
that used to hurt don't hurt any more. But a light warning
remains in everything, like the movement of a light veil:
warning.
2.
In vain you will look for the fences of barbed wire. You
know that such things don't disappear. A different city
perhaps is now being cut in two; two lovers separated; a
different flesh is tormenting itself now with these thorns,
refusing to be stone.
In vain you will look. You lift up your eyes unto the hills,
perhaps there? Not these hills, accidents of geology, but
The Hills. You ask questions without a rise in your voice,
without a question-mark, only because you're supposed to
ask them; and they don't exist. But a great weariness wants
you with all your might and gets you. Like death.
Jerusalem, the only city in the world where the right to
vote is granted even to the dead.
3.
Jerusalem is short and crouched among its hills, unlike
New York, for example. Two thousand years ago she crouched
in the starting-line position. All the other cities went
out, for long laps in the arena of time, they won or lost,
and died. Jerusalem remained in the starting-crouch: all
the victories are clenched inside her hidden inside her.
All the defeats. Her strength grows and her breathing is
calm for a race even beyond the arena.
4. Tourists
Once I was sitting on the steps near the gate at David's
Citadel and I put down my two heavy baskets beside me. A
group of tourists stood there around their guide, and I
became their point of reference. "You see the man over there
with the baskets? A little to the right of his head there's
an arch from the Roman period. A little to the right of
his head." "But he's moving, he's moving!" I said to myself:
Redemption will come only when they are told, "Do you see
that arch over there from the Roman period? It doesn't matter,
but near it, a little to the left and then down a bit, there's
a man who has just bought fruit and vegetables for his family."
