The Interior of the Hotel Petra, in the Old City section of Jerusalem, had the look of a deserted penny arcade. Above the door was an arch made of alternate red, green, and clear glass panels in the fan-like arrangement that used to decorate the fronts of old nickelodeons. The large colored picture of King Hussein in military uniform that hung on the wall at the end of the large main room could easily have been imagined as the prize to be won for knocking all the milk bottles down in a single pitch. Below it was an expanse of floor made of square white tiles that had been badly scuffed during the five years following the Israel-Arab war when the Hotel Petra was occupied by the Jordanian National Guard. The front desk where the manager sat and the tables at the rear that composed the “dining room” seemed to have been moved in for temporary storage, and failed to make the place look any less empty.
The guests who had come to the Petra for the Easter holidays were religious pilgrims of two varieties: those who had found no room at the hostels and decided to make an exception and “splurge” since it was, after all, a once-in-a-life-time visit; and those who had found no room at the first-class hotels and decided to make an exception and “rough it,” for the same reason. When I booked a room at the Petra for the Easter holidays I fell, at least financially, into the first category of pilgrims, for I went there only after learning that the previously recommended Anglican hospice was filled to capacity. Strictly speaking, though, I was really in neither category, for I was not a bona-fide “pilgrim” at all. I had come to Israel on several free-lance writing assignments, and I wanted to cross the border in order to “see the other side,” and one Arab village in particular about which I was doing a story. This village is half in Israel and half in Jordan, divided down the middle by the 1949 armistice line. To go as a reporter through the Mandelbaum Gate, which serves as the frontier crossing between the Israeli and Jordanian sections of Jerusalem, would have meant being prohibited from returning to Israel again, except by way of Cyprus. As a Christian “religious pilgrim,” however, I could go for four days during the Easter season and come back through the Mandelbaum Gate to the Israeli sector of Jerusalem. This procedure required a certain modification of the truth, but I eased my conscience with the thought that it would serve as some compensation for those long morning hours I had once sacrificed to the Baptist Sunday School in Indianapolis. My application was made and granted, and on the Thursday morning before Easter, after finding there was no more room at the Anglican hospice, I dropped my bag at the Petra.
A group of pilgrims who had arrived before me was huddled around a small coal stove at the front of the hotel, trying to get warm and waiting for the rain to stop. It had started the day before, spoiling the traditional sun-baked appearance of the Old City, and there was still no sign of a letup. I was soaked to the skin from having wandered about looking for the hotel without a guide, and since I was also anxious to look like one of the pilgrims, I joined the group around the stove. A thin, thirtyish man in wrinkled brown slacks and a gray checked double-breasted jacket, who introduced himself as “an interdenominational missionary” had taken the opportunity to say a few words. He was explaining that Judaism and Islam were at the heart of the misunderstanding between Israel and her Arab neighbors, and only a genuine Christian revival could save the Middle East.
The men in the impromptu audience inspected their fingernails, the women coughed daintily, but the speaker's pale, pinched face remained transfixed. He elaborated, gestured, quoted the Scriptures, repeated himself over and over while the pilgrims sat, unmoved and unmoving, trapped by the rain and the hesitant politeness of strangers who have just been introduced. It was only when the speaker seemed about to catch fire that the affair broke up. The tail of his sagging jacket, which had been partially draped across the top of the stove, began, suddenly, to smoke. A lady screamed, and the audience saw its chance. Chairs were scraped back, exclamations were made, tongues were clicked, and the pilgrims hastily retreated to their separate rooms.
By then, I imagined, I had established myself as an authentic pilgrim, and could risk going about my real business. I turned to the desk where the manager sat, and sized him up as a true native, but sufficiently “Westernized” for one to find some common ground with him. He had the rich, dark complexion of the Arabs, the slim, black mustache of the Arabs, and the tweed suit and short-sleeved sweater of the Imperialists. He looked about thirty years old, and the paunch at his waist was just large enough to make him seem comfortable—and safe. I smiled and asked him how long it took to get to Amman.
“Please, have a seat,” he said.
He pushed an extra chair from behind the desk and I sat down while he looked me over.
“There is no holy place in Amman,” he said. “Why you want to go to Amman?”
“Well, it's the capital of Jordan, after all. I can only be here a short time and I want to see your country, and—”
“How long are you here?”
“Just for four days.”
“Four days? Why not longer?”
“Well, that's all the time I'm allowed to stay. I came over from Israel this—”
The manager's face contorted as if I had jabbed him in the stomach. He no longer looked comfortable—or safe.
“From where have you come?” he asked.
I tried to make the answer sound nonchalant, but it wouldn't come out that way. “Israel,” I said, my voice cracking.
“Ah,” said the manager, “You've been over in Jewish-held territory.”
“I guess I have,” I said.
“Why do you go over there?”
I shrugged. “Just trying to see the world, that's all.”
“How long are you there?”
“Well, I've been there about a month now, I think.”
“A month!”
The manager looked at me as if I'd just confessed to being David Ben-Gurion's nephew.
“Maybe three weeks,” I said.
“You like it with the Jews, ah?”
“I'm just traveling, mostly.”
“American?”
“Yes.”
A sudden but not quite wholehearted smile opened up on the manager's face.
“I know the Americans well,” he said. “I used to work for Aramco in Saudi Arabia.”
“What do you know!”
My relief was so great I had to restrain myself from saying, “It's a small world.”
“I worked four years for Aramco,” the manager said, “and I made $250 a month. Americans who did the same work I did make $600 a month.”
“Really?”
“Yes. And if one of us Arabs who worked there looked at an American girl—” he stopped, grimaced, and flicked an imaginary fly from his sleeve. “Like that—we were fired.”
I laughed uneasily and suggested that American girls might not be worth the trouble.
“You married?” asked the manager.
“Not yet.”
“You have a girl—on the Jewish side?” he asked.
“Oh no. My girl's in New York.”
The chair bumped forward again and my inquisitor was staring me straight in the face.
“There are three million Jews in New York,” he said. “Maybe your girl is a Jew?”
“Roman Catholic,” I said, and in my eagerness I almost added, “she's a nun.”
“That's nice,” said the manager, and there was a moment of silent suspicion before he smiled again and said, “Maybe you like to buy her a cross. My friend has a nice souvenir shop here.”
“A cross?” I said.
“A cross,” said the manager. “All Christian girls like crosses.”
“Well, I don't have much money.”
“We have very cheap crosses.”
I looked at him and he looked at me and there was a moment when we both understood that I was about to be the purchaser of a cross.
The Canavati and Sons Oriental Souvenir Shop, “wholesale and retail, manufacturers of Stars, Crosses, Compacts, Earrings, Holy Bibles, Rosaries, Frames, Brooches, Medals, Cigarette Cases, Lighters, Camels, Crusader's Jackets, Oriental and Real Jewelry, Rings, Antiquities, Ikons, Silver Spoons, Old Daggers, etc . . .” was happy to receive a customer. A handsome young man came forward with eagerly clasped hands, and my manager friend said, “He'd like to see some crosses.”
“Crosses—of course!” and the counter was soon spangled with gold crosses inlaid with glass stones, mother-of-pearl crosses draped with silver figures of the agonized Christ, and china crosses clustered with pink-petalled flowers. I moved several of them here and there on the counter like chessmen and the sales clerk showed his teeth and asked, “English?”
“American,” the manager answered for me.
“A-mer-i-can,” the clerk said. “Sooo—. Perhaps a cloth of Damascus silk?” and a roll of gold and silver yard-goods was flung in my face.
“Just a cross, I think,” said the Petra manager.
“I'm afraid I don't have much money,” I said.
“Ahh,” said the clerk, rolling back the cloth, “I thought perhaps—Americans you know, they are not so much interested any more in religious objects.”
He leaned across the counter and whispered confidingly, “We are only a small shop, and we do not depend on Americans. They usually want something very expensive. We usually depend on religious pilgrims.”
“Americans, English, it's all the same,” said an Arab effendi in a red fez who stood at the entrance to the shop rolling a cigarette. “They made the trouble in this part of the world.”
The hotel manager nodded in agreement. “It is right, they made the state of the Jews, and that made the war and the killing we have.”
The effendi, still staring at the street, spat out a bit of tobacco and remarked, “The trouble here, it is all between English and Americans. This is their sport.”
I picked up the smallest of the crosses and asked the price.
“Only 15 piasters, sir,” said the waiter.
I paid and the hotel manager smiled and said, “I am sure she will like it.”
Bearing my cross of respectability (which is after all not so unreasonable at 15 piasters), I asked the hotel manager for directions to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, just for good measure, and set off into the maze of high-walled streets that run in dark and tangled profusion behind the gates of the Old City. Every street within the gates is dark, but some, like the one I had entered, are darker than the rest, arched with cement extensions of the walls, only letting in the sky at odd intervals where circular holes occur. It was almost noon and the street was thick with shadows, bearded beggars, Arab Legionnaires in their red and white checkered kafias, and Moslem women wearing black dresses and black shawls, their heads and faces covered by black veils, moving through the unmindful crowd like apparitions. After walking up and down and into and out of these streets that look so much like one another, lined with fruit markets and open shops selling silk goods, alive with the same sharp odors, loud with the same cries to tourists—“Hello—Hey you—one dollar!”—the eventual exit to a wider world at Damascus Gate was like coming to the last page of a Kafka novel.
_____________
En route to amman I shared a communal cab with two sleeping merchants, a doctor from Beirut, and the mukhtar of a village who was going to the capital to sue his cousin, who had added two extra zeros to an IOU for six pounds. I was seated between the doctor and one of the merchants, and since neither of them bothered to wipe off the rain-clouded windows for a glimpse of the Jordanian countryside, I could only sit and stare at the picture of Abdel Nasser that was stuck in the visor above the driver's part of the windshield. As we neared the outskirts of Jericho, however, the doctor began wiping off his window vigorously in order to point out to me the mud huts and rain-soaked tents of the refugee camps; the driver and the mukhtar joined him in explaining how these miserable folk had been driven from their land by the Jews, who were, in the words of the doctor, “like a thorn in the eye—every time the eye moves, the thorn pricks. Such a thorn has to be removed.”
“By peace or war,” the mukhtar added, “it makes no difference.”
When we had passed the camps, the windows were allowed to cloud up again, the merchants slept on, the mukhtar and doctor settled back to smoke, and I was left with only the smile of Colonel Nasser.
All day, and the next day, Friday, I traveled through the countryside, sometimes in taxis, sometimes in buses, sometimes in private cars, but always in rain. On the third day the sun came out, and I decided to make my trip to Beht Safafa, the Arab village that was split in half. To visit either part of the village you need permission from the military government—of Israel or of Jordan, depending on which side of the barbed wire you happen to be standing at the time. A boy from the Israeli side, which I had visited previously, had given me the name of a man on the Jordanian side, and I had decided to go there and ask permission to talk with him. To be unmasked as a working reporter during my four days as a religious pilgrim would, of course, lead to trouble, but my plan was to look very wide-eyed and ask questions “merely as an interested tourist.”
I asked an Arab Legionnaire at the Damascus Gate how to get permission to visit Beht Safafa, and he told me I would have to go to Bethlehem, which was only a mile or so from the village. A twenty-minute bus ride took me from Jerusalem to Bethlehem, where a second Legionnaire, wearing a “Tourist Police” armband, told me that as long as I was not carrying a camera, I could get permission to visit Beht Safafa by going there and telling the men at the Arab Legion post what I wanted. It sounded very simple.
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Beht safafa lies in a valley below the main road from Jerusalem to Bethlehem. A muddy promise of a road-to-be leads down from the highway through rocky, untended fields to the stone houses of the village. The farther I went down the muddy path, the slower I walked, for I knew I was being watched by the soldiers of two different armies, both of whom were hidden from view. Lying somewhere out there among the scattered stone houses was a line of barbed wire that could not be crossed without risking the fire of one, or both, of the armies, and although I was still far from the center of the village, I began searching the ground, fearing that at any moment I would find that the last step I had taken had put me in another country. A woman with a jug of water on her head and a barefoot child at her side passed by and stared right through me. An ancient, white-bearded man with a white kafia flowing down from his head to his shoulders leaned out of a doorway. I kept on walking, wondering where the Arab Legion post was to be found when two Arab Legion men with black ammunition belts strapped on their chests, and rifles on their shoulders appeared on the top of a small ridge on the road just ahead and came striding toward me. I stopped, smiled, and said, “Hello, I'd like to get permission to visit here.” The soldiers smiled back, exchanged glances with each other, and one motioned for me to follow. We walked back about ten yards to a plain stone house I had just passed. One of the soldiers beside me yelled “Ingleesi,” and I looked up to see three Arab Legionnaires staring down from a second-floor terrace.
“Come on up,” one of the men on the terrace said, and I walked up the stairs to the Arab Legion Post headquarters, the two soldiers following behind. A young, pale private with immense round eyes was seated at a table inside the main room. He offered me a chair, while four other soldiers stood by, smiling and staring. I explained that I wanted to see Hassan Aly, the mukhtar, and have him show me the Arab side of the village. The soldiers all looked at one another, took turns shrugging, and finally the pale private said he would have to ring up the sergeant. While we waited, I was offered peanuts and cigarettes, and asked about life on “the Jewish side”; several more soldiers came in and the group pressed closer around me to get a better look.
“How you like the Arab Legion?” one said. “Good?”
I looked up at the five faces surrounding me, each topped with the green, silver-spired helmet that alternates with the kafia as the official headdress of the Arab Legion, and though I opened my mouth to reply, not a sound emerged, whereupon all of us burst out laughing at once. Cigarettes were offered from several directions, and one of the men started to ask about the girls in America, but before I could answer, the sergeant came in, and the party was over.
A short, dark man with a disproportionately large black mustache, the sergeant shook hands with me quickly and firmly, with the air of a busy surgeon who has come to meet the patient before the operation, and sat down behind the desk. He flipped through the pages of my passport and asked for my permit to visit Beht Safafa. I explained that a soldier in Bethlehem had told me I could get permission right there in the village. The sergeant repeated the question, and when I gave the same answer he said, “It is not enough,” and proceeded to crank the handle of the phone on the wall beside him. The soldiers stopped smiling, moved back away from me, and the rest of the talk was carried on in Arabic. After his phone call the sergeant took paper and pen from his desk, copied down my passport statistics, and asked again who had sent me, whom I was to see, and why. Having duly noted all these in his report, he was plunged temporarily into confusion: what, precisely, was the nature of the military ordinance I had violated? There was evidently nothing on the books to cover the case of an American who had crossed from Israel and come to Beht Safafa to see Hassan Aly, mukhtar, on the recommendation of Said Elian, who lived on the Israeli side of the village and worked in the YMCA cafeteria in the new city section of Jerusalem. Some classification at last was settled on, a soldier was assigned to take me to the military governor at Bethlehem, and I left Beht Safafa wishing I had stuck to writing about only one half of the village.
Word of an American “infiltrator” at Beht Safafa had apparently preceded us to Bethlehem, for when my guard and I arrived there, we were greeted by about a dozen Arab Legionnaires, four taxi drivers, one priest, two souvenir postcard salesmen, and the mayor of Bethlehem, all waiting in front of the military government headquarters.
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A legion officer greeted me and asked to see my passport. While he studied it, I began explaining that I was “merely an interested tourist,” and that I had been told I could get permission to see Beht Safafa just by going there and asking. During this time, the mayor was peeking over the shoulder of the Legion officer in order to have a look at my passport. “Born in Indiana, eh?” he asked.
“Yes, sir!” I said. “Indianapolis. That's about 200 miles south of Chicago, in the Midwest, that is, the center part of the country, below the Great Lakes.”
“Yes,” said the mayor, “my son goes to school at West Lafayette.”
“Purdue!” I said.
“So one of the tourist policemen told you to go straight to Beht Safafa for permission?” asked the mayor.
“Yes sir, he said if I didn't have a camera it was all right to go there and ask at the Arab Legion Post for permission.”
“Well, it was probably a misunderstanding,” he replied. “It's a serious thing, but if you won't go down there again—.” The mayor smiled. “Since you're from Indiana we'll try to fix it up for you this time.”
I was ready to break into a chorus of “Hail, Hail to Old Purdue” when an Arab Legion officer standing on the steps pointed at me with his swagger stick and said something in Arabic. Everything changed to Arabic again, the smiles disappeared, and I was ushered inside by my guard, the Legion troops trailing behind. The civilians, including the mayor, were left standing on the sidewalk.
The military governor of Bethlehem was a tall, glowering man in a brown business suit and heavy black overcoat. He sat hunched over a small desk that was stacked with papers and wreathed in smoke from an ashtray full of mashed cigarette butts that hadn't quite been put out. After reading the report of the “incident” written up by the sergeant at Beht Safafa, he turned to me. “Where do you come from?” he asked.
“America,” I said.
“No!” he shouted. “Where do you come from to Jordan?”
“Israel.”
“No!” he shouted again, and I began to wonder if the Arabs had borrowed some brainwashing experts as well as technicians from their new Eastern friends. But it turned out to be only a question of semantics.
“You mean you come from Occupied Territory,” the governor said.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“You know Beht Safafa is half in Occupied Territory?”
“Yes, sir.”
The governor pounded the desk. “You think there is nothing between Jews and Arabs?” he shouted. “You think we are practically not in a war? What are you—you think you are going to make peace between Arabs and Jews, is that why you went to Beht Safafa?”
“Look, I'm not a crackpot,” I said. But upon hearing the words I realized that in my present position they would be pretty hard to support. I settled back in my seat without pursuing the point and said, “I was just curious.”
“The border is not a place for curiosity,” the governor answered.
He drummed his fingers on the desk, stared at the opposite wall, and asked, “How long have you been in Occupied Territory?”
“A month, sir.”
“A month!”
The governor took out a long sheet of paper, copied down some data from my passport and with pen poised and brow furrowed, said: “Now—you will tell me who sent you to Beht Safafa and why, and who you were to see, and what you were to say.”
Slowly I went through my story again, how I had been given the name of the mukhtar by a boy on the “Occupied” side, how all I wanted was to see the village because of its unusual division. There were more questions, more answers, and after about ten minutes the paper was covered with the scrawls and chicken-track marks and dots of written Arabic. The governor pushed it in front of me. “Sign this!” he ordered.
“But I can't read it!” I said.
“You don't have to read it, you only have to sign it,” the governor explained.
“Look, how do I know what's written here, it might be—”
“It's just what you told me!” the governor shouted. “If you told me the truth just now, you sign this.”
I looked at the dark, rigid face of the governor, straining toward me, and picked up the pen. Until that moment I don't think I had ever been conscious of how my name is spelled, but now, as the letters slowly materialized on the paper, they were being carved into my mind as well. The fact that I had a middle name became a source of sudden joy, for it meant I still had some time before the signature came to an end. When it was finally done I felt sickeningly sure that I had just turned over my life and property, gold cross and all, to the Arab League, and would probably end my days wiping goggles for King Hussein.
The governor put the document, along with my passport, into an envelope, sealed it up, and handed both it and me into the custody of two Arab Legion men.
“You will have to report to Jerusalem,” he said. “This is a serious matter.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you have a car?”
“No, sir.”
The governor looked out the window. The sun had gone down, and that meant there were no more buses.
“You will take a taxi,” he said. “These men will go with you. You will pay for the taxi.”
“Yes, sir.”
The crowd outside had disappeared by this time—including my fair-weather friend, the mayor—and one of the Legionnaires assigned to guard me hailed a taxi. Bethlehem was dark, there were no stars going by—silent or otherwise—and a last frantic glance before I got into the taxi left me with only one impression: the looming Church of the Nativity, sitting like some great factory in the center of the town, topped by a neon star and a neon cross, and on the opposite side of the street, the lighted window of the “Holy Manger Souvenirs, Ltd.” shop.
As I sat in the taxi between two Arab Legionnaires on the trip through the dark, silent hills to Jerusalem, I had only one thought in mind: an overpowering wish to be standing in the middle of Times Square, with the news of the Middle East running around the Times building in hurrying, lighted letters that would disappear on 42nd Street.
_____________
My interrogator in Jerusalem turned out to be a quiet officer who stood behind the pipe of a coal stove that sat in the middle of the room, and occasionally peeked around it to ask me a question. He looked at my passport for a long time and then asked me what sort of occupation a “researcher” was. Before leaving New York I had been making some extra money as a research assistant for a sociology professor at Columbia, and my passport was stamped accordingly. It was this designation, in fact, that had enabled me to cross over to Jordan without betraying my intentions as a reporter.
When I told the officer I did research work for a college professor, he brightened for a moment, as if he had stumbled on the answer to the whole confusing incident.
“Excavations, you mean, and that sort of thing?”
“No,” I said, “sociology.”
The officer's face disappeared again behind the stovepipe; after a minute or so of silence he spoke up: “What church do you belong to?”
“Baptist,” I replied hastily, clutching the gold cross in my pocket and wondering whether it might not be a good idea to let it drop to the floor in front of the officer.
“You've been in Occupied Territory a month,” he said, looking over the report from Bethlehem.
“Yes, sir.”
“I suppose you want to return there?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
The officer crossed the room, staring at the floor. When he reached the other side he told me he would “study the matter.” I was to report back to him the following day at eight. He kept my passport, the Arabic document I had signed, and any shred of well-being that might still be remaining to me. I was free to go my way for the next twelve hours, but I would have preferred it had the officer come right out in the open and told me what was in store for me no matter how horrendous, instead of leaving the future to my imagination.
Returning to the Hotel Petra, I noticed an Arab Legion soldier sitting with the pilgrims around the coal stove. The manager, stationed at his desk, was chewing on a toothpick and eyeing me carefully. I went straight to my room, locked the door behind me, and pulled down the shade. The first thing that entered my mind was my notebook. I had several pages of notes on Jordan—conversations with a few people, and statistics about the country that I'd jotted down before I came. If the Arab Legion had any doubts left about my being a spy for Israel, the notebook would certainly eliminate them. I stuffed it into my pocket and hurried outside.
It was about nine o'clock in the evening, and the streets of the Old City were like a backdrop for the sewer scenes in Phantom of the Opera. The vaulted roofs were still dripping from the rains of the day before; every step I took gave a hollow echo. I passed a few lighted cafés on my way from the hotel, after which the streets were empty of everything but cats and shadows. But there was no place to hide the notes. The streets and the walls were all made of cement; if I simply dropped the notebook and walked away I was sure it would be found by some soldier and presented—soaked, dirty, but still readable—as Exhibit A in my prosecution. I walked on faster into the interior passageways, and stopped short in front of an open sewer. I stood still, took the notebook out of my pocket, and listened. There was only the dripping of rain on cement. I bent down toward the sewer, and two steps sounded up the street. About fifty yards ahead was the dark outline of an Arab Legionnaire. I stuffed the notebook back into my pocket and hurried back to the Petra.
The next half hour was spent in the bathroom. First I ripped the three pages of Jordan notes from the rest of the notebook and, holding them above the toilet, lit a match; it did not, however, succeed in setting the notes on fire, but burnt my hand instead. In the ensuing confusion, I dropped the vital pages into the toilet. I retrieved them only to find that they were soaking wet and would not burn. The next step, of course, was to flush them down the toilet. There was a certain risk involved—the Arab Legion might conceivably rip up the pipes to get the evidence against me—but by then I was desperate. The only difficulty was that the plumbing wouldn't work. I returned to my room with the notes in a large and soggy wad in my pocket, still quite decipherable—and doubly dangerous now because I had obviously tried to destroy them. To attempt to hide them in my room was the purest folly, for the prying manager, who already suspected me of Jewish sympathies, would undoubtedly come upon them and turn them over to the authorities. There was only one thing left to do.
I undressed, turned off the lights, and got into bed with the notes. Through the long cold Easter Eve I lay there shivering and imagining the various possible fates that awaited me in the morning, all the while slowly, methodically chewing away at the soggy paper. By morning, the notes were gone.
_____________
I ate a hearty breakfast and while the pilgrims and the manager weren't looking, managed to slip outside and hurry off by myself. No one would know I was on my way that Easter morning not to the Sunrise Service of the Garden Tomb, but to the Jerusalem headquarters of the Arab Legion. On my way there I weighed the possible disasters once more, and made up my mind to break down and tell the whole story if I were taken into custody. It would mean all sorts of trouble with the consulates of Jordan, Israel, and the U.S., but I decided that of the two possibilities, it was better to be a conniving reporter than an international spy. My real hope, however, was to be dismissed as a crackpot and allowed through the gates the next morning with the rest of the returning pilgrims, my press credentials and machinations undiscovered.
The man who had questioned me the night before was busy with two disputing Arabs who were waving canes and cigarettes about when I entered the office. After ten minutes or so they left, and the officer, turning to me at last, excused himself, and went off to fetch my dossier. He came back in a while, holding my passport and several documents in Arabic, and settled down at his desk to study them. After a few minutes more of silence he pushed the passport across the desk. “You may go now,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
I was almost out of the office when he called me back: “One moment!”
“I presume you will spend the rest of your stay in Jerusalem,” he said.
“Yes, sir, I certainly shall.”
The outside world was beautiful and bright, in the way that it must be to all released prisoners. I walked for about ten minutes without knowing where I was going. Buses and taxis were leaving for Bethlehem, Nablus, and Jericho, Hebron and Amman, the Dead Sea and the Arabian border. I stood for a moment on the road, then, turning away from temptation, I bought a bag of bananas, and headed for the Mount of Olives.
The view took in all Jerusalem, spread across its hilltop site in a mass of pale yellow stone, bubbled with dome-shaped roofs and grown with towers and spires. The fortress-like wall of the Old City enclosed the buildings on the eastern edge that I was facing, and seemed, in fact, to enclose all Jerusalem, for it melted into the rest of the stone before you could see its western limits. No barbed wire or sandbags were visible, and there was no way to tell that Jerusalem was partly in “Occupied Territory.” There was no way to tell, in fact, that it was populated, for the narrow streets of the Old City closed off the sight of its people. Nothing moved.
Neither did I, and only once more in the day was my peaceful existence endangered. A patrol of barefoot Arab children spotted me from the hillside, yelled “Ingleesi! Ingleesi!” and stampeded into my camp with outstretched hands. I promptly emptied my pockets and handed over all my Hashemite coins, plus several Israeli prutot, an American penny, and a small gold cross to the delighted leader, and the band charged away toward the road. There was only the sunlight and scenery again until noon, when the sound of the muezzin came from the minaret, calling the Moslems to prayer. It drifted alone above Jerusalem until a few moments later when the heavy interruption of the church bells came, breaking on the world in a brassy chaos that left nothing else, and then, as if satisfied, died away one by one leaving the unmoving city in silence.
