A Moveable Feast (4 page)

All communications were repeated in a clear voice, Oreste told us, just like in the movies.

‘Capitano!’
the radar operator barked.
‘La Superba
is arriving.’

Oreste peered through binoculars then put them down. ‘They will insist I have breakfast. All this eating makes me fat.’

It was an age-old tradition. Each time a harbour pilot boarded, he was not only in command, he was also an honoured guest. Oreste crossed into another room. ‘We sleep there on night duty,
and we eat together here, and that is why we get along, the great brotherhood of
piloti.’
He opened a cupboard. ‘Saffron, pickled fish, one curry, another curry, and another and another curry, from Pakistan, from India, from Indonesia, and herbs and chocolates and spices …’ He pointed at the jars and packages. ‘Always a gift of food.
La Superba
will feed me
sfogliatelle
pastries and cappuccino. With the Thais this afternoon, it will be steaming rice and spicy cuttlefish, and later, the Japanese, I foresee sushi with seaweed, and before I leave this evening, a Moroccan tagine, perhaps of lamb.’

‘It is very dangerous work,’ quipped the radar man as we returned to the control room.

Oreste chuckled, checking the roster. He counted aloud the twenty ships due that day. It was surreal poetry. ‘The Chinese are a challenge,’ he observed. ‘When a ship comes in, it must make voice contact, identify itself and get clearance. But the Chinese don’t speak Italian or much English. They shout, “Wait, wait,” and play a cassette we cannot understand. Then comes rice and shark fin or a century-old egg.’ Oreste patted his belly. ‘When I was young, I sailed the globe,’ he said, sounding Homeric. ‘But there’s no need now, the globe comes to me.’ He checked his watch. ‘Let’s go.’

Long and sleek, the harbour pilot’s craft bobbed at the dock. We slipped on life jackets as the boat tore away, skiing out along the breakwater. Ranged along our route, bright orange tugboats belched out black smoke, blowing their horns. In minutes we were alongside
La Superba.
‘The name,’ shouted Oreste over the engine noise, ‘is the name of the Republic. La Superba was Genoa before it became part of Italy. It means “the proud one”.’

A rope ladder fell between
La Superba
and us. With startling agility, Oreste leapt onto it, scurried up, and disappeared into a hatch on the hull. Before we could think, the speedboat was tearing off again, giving the mammoth ship room to manoeuvre.
Soon the tugs nudged in, and the ship was lashed to the wharf. Oreste reappeared, dangling a paper bag. ‘Pastries,’ he announced, ‘for all of us.’

At the gates awaited Maria-Antonietta. She wore a silk blouse and colourful skirt, and pecked our cheeks in greeting. Oreste walked us through the dry docks, where migrant workers were rebuilding cruise ships under the now merciless sun. ‘Italians won’t do the dirty work any more,’ he explained. From being an exporter of emigrants, Genoa had become an importer of immigrants. ‘We’re all educated, we disdain the soil, and the boars have taken over our villages.’

After the blinding light of the port, the tangled alleys of medieval Genoa seemed as dark as caves. So narrow were some that the slate roofs on both sides almost touched, eight or nine storeys above. Sails of laundry fluttered between pavement and sky. On a windowsill, weedy basil plants grew. Oreste and Maria-Antonietta pointed them out. We passed hole-in-the-wall shops selling nuts and bolts, candied fruit, shoelaces and buttons, or vegetables preserved in olive oil. Between them, other shops offered ethnic foods, reflecting the influx of African, Asian and South American immigrants. At a produce stand the basil vied for space with plantains.

The shopfront of Da Ugo dated to the 1970s, the kind of façade a visitor walks by without entering. ‘They keep it that way on purpose,’ Oreste said, holding open the door.

Inside were butcher-paper placemats on wooden tables, and copper pots on white walls. The decibel level flirted with danger. Ugo and his children clearly knew Oreste and Maria-Antonietta. They shook hands, shouting to be heard. The tables were packed. White- and blue-collar workers sat by men Oreste described as
‘captains of industry’. Everyone spoke rough-edged Genoese dialect. A few turned to glance as we settled in.

We let Oreste order; it was his territory. Out came plump
tortelli
stuffed with the kind of field greens Oreste grew, dressed with black pepper and herbs. The classic
trenette
pasta with pesto was excellent but not as good as our hosts’. Then came meltingly tender boiled octopus and potato salad, tiny squid in spicy tomato sauce, and golden fried, firm-fleshed anchovies stuffed with herbed parmigiano and breadcrumbs.

Oreste leaned over and cupped his hands. ‘Next week the
piloti
are meeting in the hills near Santa Margherita,’ he said. ‘Do you know what we will eat?’ He winked conspiratorially. ‘Wild boar. Would you care to join us?’

As we crossed the cool, dark alleys heading towards our train, Oreste and Maria-Antonietta asserted that roughshod Genoa could not and did not want to become like Venice, Florence or Rome. Genoa still belonged to the Genoese, they agreed, though hard-working immigrants and intrepid individual travellers like us were also welcome. ‘We no longer fear Barbarians,’ he quipped cryptically. ‘When the boars come into town, we’ll worry.’

‘Why?’ teased Maria-Antonietta. ‘We can raise them. Ugo will put boar on the menu.’

Elisabeth Eaves is the author of two nonfiction books,
Bare
and
Wanderlust
. Her travel writing has been anthologised in
The Best American Travel Writing 2009
and
The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010
. She has worked for the
Wall Street Journal
and
Forbes
magazine, and her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including
Harper’s,
the
New York Times, Slate
and
WorldHum
. Elisabeth was born in Vancouver, lives in New York City, and is still not entirely sure if she wants to settle down.

Khan al-Zeit, the street of the oil merchants, was where I stayed the first time I went to Jerusalem, in 1992. It was a souq, a covered passageway lined with small stores, open to the street. I could tell when the owners put out their wares in the morning because the fragrances rose up to my third-storey room. The vats of olives gave off a salty tang, and every bag of spice had its own scent. I smelled turmeric, cumin, cardamom, and more flavours I didn’t recognise. Among the food stores there were
shops selling cheap sneakers, bras and polyester Leonardo DiCaprio carpets.

Later that year, I went back to Jerusalem and got a job in a hostel on the same street. The building was of ancient stone and I shared a room with whatever guests came along. In exchange for room and board, and a few shekels a week, I cleaned the hostel and fetched guests from the bus station. I led them down the stone steps in front of Damascus Gate, through the long portal, around the donkey carts, and back into the Old City. Damascus Gate was the commercial heart of the Muslim quarter, and the plaza just inside the gate was thronged with vendors and shoppers. My charges were always from the most neutral places: Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand. I led them up Khan al-Zeit and inhaled as we passed the spices.

In 1998 I went to Jerusalem again, now with a summer job as an intern for a wire service. During my first two visits I had rarely ventured into Jewish West Jerusalem; now I would live there. The Muslim quarter of the Old City had always felt like a tidier extension of the Arab world, so this was my first real introduction to Israel. It was the first time I was surrounded by Hebrew and Jewish Israelis. In West Jerusalem the white stone buildings seemed to glow at night, and outside of the Orthodox neighbourhoods the girls wore tank tops.

On my first day at work my boss introduced me to another intern, Sarah, an ambitious photographer.

‘You from the States?’ she asked.

‘Yeah. No. I mean –’

‘Where’d ya go to college?’ she asked, cracking gum.

‘University of Washington,’ I said.

‘Jews-U?’

I stared.

‘Jews-U? Wash-U?’

I still couldn’t make out what she was talking about.

‘Washington University?’

‘University
of
Washington. In Seattle. U-dub.’

‘Ohhhhhh. I thought you meant Washington University in St Louis. Never mind. That’s what people call it. Are you Jewish?’

‘No.’

‘Right, see, I assumed you were Jewish. Anyway. I went to Penn. We should get a drink.’

I agreed.

Sarah and I rented a breezy ground-floor apartment in the neighbourhood of Rechavia. Together, we took the bus every day to the well-fortified JMC, the Jerusalem Media Centre, where nearly every foreign news organisation had its offices. Almost everyone else in my bureau was either Jewish or Arab. Some were from Jerusalem, while others had come from elsewhere to work – Jordan, Egypt, England, the United States. Underlying their nonpartisan professionalism, they all had a visceral reason for being here that I lacked. I felt a slight envy.

My first reporting assignment was on Jerusalem Day, which celebrated Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in the 1967 Six Day War. My editor asked me to do a man-in-the-street story, and I thought immediately of Damascus Gate. When I got there the steps were strangely deserted. So was the plaza just inside. On Khan al-Zeit, men were heaving their bags of spices and buckets of olives back into their stores, rolling up their polyester carpets and stowing them away. They were padlocking the metal grates across their storefronts and retreating into nearby doorways. Plastic bags skittered along in the dry breeze.

I approached an old man who was standing on the lopsided stone steps leading up to his door. ‘It’s a tragedy,’ he said;
il-nakba,
the disaster. He was locking up and lying low. ‘Go in peace,’ he said, before his grate clanged shut. When I made it back up to the western part of the city, an old man told me proudly how he had
fought in the war, how he had helped take Jerusalem. ‘The first thing we did was pray at the wall,’ he said.

In a way, every story was like that first one. A quote from one side and a quote from the other. There was nothing, it seemed, that could be covered without reference to the conflict – not a film festival, a crime story or the gay pride parade in Tel Aviv. The conflict sold the stories to the outside world. At first I thought my understanding would grow, and that by the end of the summer I would have gained some key insight. Like the many outsiders who had tried to broker peace, I thought that something other than a permanent state of war would eventually make sense. I thought it was just a question of missing knowledge, and now I was acquiring knowledge every day.

And yet things did not start to make sense. Every fact was countered by another fact. I drilled back through time, as though penetrating layers of sediment. There was yesterday, when an Israeli bulldozer demolished an Arab home; then last year, when the Arab family had squatted on the property; then 1967, when the Israelis had taken the property in a defensive war; and on back to 1948, when the Arabs had fled their Jerusalem homes. Then there were the British and the French, who everyone said had messed things up in the first place. And on and on it went, to the Bible, to millennia ago, when God had granted the land to the Israelites. If you had a stake in things, maybe one narrative or the other eventually started to make sense. If you came in with an equivocal view, things remained irresolute.

We travel in the hope of bonding with new places. To get that feeling of belonging, we side with the locals. We pay attention to their hopes and dreams. We try to imagine ourselves in their
place. We listen to their music, try on their clothes, eat their food. In return for our sympathy and respect, we ask them to love us back. This longing for connection is the traveller’s neediness. Connection, though, requires bias. I had come without one, and the way I spent my time made it difficult to get one. I pinged back and forth every day between enemy lines. They didn’t look like enemy lines; there were no check points, and I could walk between the two sides, but as I did, the language and dress changed, the things people thought and said changed, and suddenly I found myself in a new country.

The one thing that didn’t change was the food. Falafel sandwiches with hummus were served in both halves of the city. Oranges, eggplants and olive oil were consumed. Mint and tomatoes were chopped into salads, and meat was slaughtered as specified in the holy books.

I befriended Ben, a television producer who worked across the hall from my bureau. He was short and black-haired, the son of Moroccan Jews, Israeli-born and US-raised. He had grown up in the Northwest and, like me, had attended the University of Washington. We talked about professors we had in common, and I felt a connection to him through our shared background. He was an American who knew my grey-green home turf. He was an Arab. He was a Jew. The first time we went out he ordered me lemonade with mint.

Ben called at midday and said he wanted to show me the
shuk,
the Jewish market. He led me into the Mahane Yehuda, a sprawling web of tightly packed alleys and stalls. I had poked around its edges but had never been into its heart. Now he took my hand and guided me in, past hawkers shouting, ‘
B’shekel, b’shekel, b’shekel,
’ over mounds of vegetables.

Leading me from a wide alley into a maze of narrower lanes roofed with tarpaulins, we entered an unsigned restaurant, ducking under a low door into a cramped, white-tiled room that was packed with men. Some wore Orthodox black-and-whites; others were brown-skinned and rough like tradesmen, with stubble and dirty clothes. The heat, the close quarters and the absence of women made it feel Arab to me, recognisably Middle Eastern. We sat next to a wall, facing each other across a long table that quickly filled with diners. They trapped us into place. Ben ordered for both of us, and a man with a dish towel over his shoulder delivered bowls of hot savoury soup filled with vegetables and balls of dough. I asked what we were eating. ‘
Matzo kleis
,’ Ben said. I felt like I had penetrated an unknown place, and was grateful to him for taking me there.

A few weeks later Ben invited me to a dinner party at his home. It was a Friday, and I had seen Israelis buying and giving flowers on the evening before their Sabbath. On my way I stopped at the
shuk
and bought a bouquet, thinking I would emulate the custom. Ben’s apartment was in Nachlaot, an older part of the city where the white rock buildings had aged to shiny yellow. The homes there were divided by footpaths, stairs and the occasional bridge, like a drawing by MC Escher. When I handed Ben the flowers, he blushed. I suddenly felt insecure about my attempt at cultural assimilation, and wondered if I had committed a gaffe.

Ben had also invited an Australian who worked for the United Jewish Congress and an Irishwoman who was doing her PhD in Bible studies. Lily spent her days poring over fragile texts. She knew more about ancient history than any of us, more than anyone she was likely to meet. That was how she had made a place for herself here in Jerusalem. Journalists are voyeurs; Lily had a real reason for being here.

Ben served hearts of palm, eggplant and lamb with rice. After dinner his other guests left and I stayed. He poured glasses of
arak and we sat on his balcony. The strong liquorice liquid was overwhelming at first, then tasted smoother with every sip. A scratchy old tape of Oum Kalsoum, the beloved Egyptian singer, was playing.

Ben asked me if I was involved with someone, and I said I had a boyfriend in New York. I asked him the same question back.

Ben said he had had a girlfriend until recently, but that she had moved back to the States and they had broken up. ‘Long distance is tough,’ I said, but he said that wasn’t it.

‘What was?’

‘We had …’ he paused, ‘religious differences.’

‘She’s not Jewish?’

‘No, she is.’

I felt my comprehension beginning to drift.

‘Rebecca is studying music,’ he said. ‘She has a beautiful singing voice. In our religion there’s a person who sings liturgical passages in synagogue, called a cantor. Rebecca is in training to become a cantor.’

‘So?’

‘So in the Orthodox faith, which is mine, women can’t be cantors. Rebecca was raised in what is known as Reform Judaism.’ He bit off the last two words with distaste. ‘She would probably make a very good cantor.’

‘So – you broke up with her because she’s not Jewish enough?’

‘That’s not the right way to put it,’ he said kindly. ‘Orthodox is not more Jewish than Reform. But if you mean did I break up with her because she’s not Orthodox, that’s more or less true.’ He sighed. ‘I guess I decided that I couldn’t marry her. And if she changed her faith to mine, she wouldn’t be able to become a cantor. Men and women don’t even sit together in my synagogue.’

Ben no longer seemed comfortingly familiar to me. But I coveted his sureness about his place in the world.