This was written in June 2019.
‘Ramal-lah’ he said. East Coast drawl. ‘I live in Ramal-lah’
‘Ram-all-ah’. Rolling the R at the back of my throat, dropping the last letters. Started French, then tumbled into Arabic. I learnt the meaning later.
It’s the weekend of the Eurovision Song Contest; cocooned in Tel Aviv, the turmoil doesn’t touch us here. So I find my own, shrugging off the worries that have followed me from Paris and devoting myself instead to the act of living, hedonistic and foolish and happy and fearless. I dance feverishly in clubs every night, as if trying to exorcise a demon, intoxicated by new friends and fresh infatuations and the smell of sunshine that radiates off my skin as my freckles bloom on Jaffa beach. This secular city is holy to me, a pilgrimage site I find myself returning to year after year, searching for a part of myself that went missing long ago or perhaps never existed but which I somehow, miraculously, can glimpse when I stand on the Wishing Bridge, before it shimmers away in the midday heat.
When we parted, the invitation hung in the air. I kissed him on the forehead. ‘See you there’. Days later, it was rescinded. He was too busy, working too much, articles and research and applications and iftar dinners. ‘Sorry dude. It’s not really anything about you’. Lying under the stars in the Jordanian desert, I let myself mourn the daydream now dissolving in front of me. Light filled mornings casting shadows in an old apartment. A red dress on the floor. The click of a camera shutter.
But the idea of the city had taken hold inside me, and I couldn’t shake it off. Before anything, before I even knew his last name or the curve of his collarbone, going had begun to feel inevitable. For months, I’d been waiting for my life to begin. I though being in constant motion might quieten the voice for a while, ‘get it out of my system’ as I quipped, offhand, to anyone querying why I was considering abandoning everything I’d spent the last decade building. In Amman I walked aimlessly through dusty streets, peering into alleys and doorways as if they might reveal a clue, as if finding my way was just a case of stumbling upon a map sprayed haphazardly onto a wall. Ofcourse, I’d had a life before, a fine one, with good people and honey-scented memories and work that felt fulfilling, for a while, but it was gone and buried now. I didn’t want fine anymore. I wanted to be eaten alive.
On Monday morning, I take endless buses north until I reach Nazareth. Weaving through the old town in the noon glare, dodging tour groups in matching caps chattering in European tongues. I’m sleeping in an old mansion in the heart of the market, turquoise shutters and plant-covered balconies and a cavernous dorm room that leaves my shoes damp in the morning.
I leave the tourists behind and walk to a further corner of the city, searching for somewhere I can bask in the afternoon sun. On a back street littered with pink flowers, I find the entrance to an old cemetery, crooked stones and swirling Arabic letters glinting in the light. Later, back at the house, I find petals embedded in the grooves of my shoes.
Ramadan breaks at sunset and I watch the yellow moon rise over the valley. My mouth tastes of sugar. I slip outside and walk through the dark market alone, lanterns swinging in the breeze and the smell of zaátar and cinnamon still in the stones, tinged with the metallic hint of blood. Salt air, even here, miles from the sea. In the church a group sit at the back, chanting, sound reverberating around the circular room before disappearing up through the hole in the ceiling. There’s a white statue of Mary outside and her hands have been touched so many times, searching for blessings, they’ve begun to blacken. A snake sits at her feet. They don’t touch the snake.
I think about the Crusaders, crossing these dusty roads for God, or power, or bloodthirst and lust. Maybe even a mix of all three, so closely entwined you can’t see where soul ends and spirit begins.
Plotting my way across Jordan, I relax into gentle chaos and an aloneness that is not quite lonely, but not entirely content either. One night in the vast emptiness of the desert I struggle to sleep, feeling enveloped in a darkness so black I’m afraid it might swallow me whole. A French couple give me a ride to Wadi Musa in the morning, and for three days I try to lose myself in the impossible wonder of the rose city, trekking to the furthest places in attempt to flee from the pseudo-influencers posing on shattered donkeys. It feels bleak, but I can’t quite articulate why. At night, red dust pours from my skin and swirls slowly around the drain of the shower, a mimicry of blood.
Sunrise starts, buses and taxis and and long lines at notorious borders await as I make my way into the promised land again. That night in Haifa, I dream of a room coated in paper-mache, painted pale yellow. The phones kept ringing but we couldn’t hear them, the mouthpieces blocked with pulp. Someone I used to love was there and when I tried to put my arms around him, the scratch of his sweatshirt left red welts all over my skin.
The next morning, on a boat to Acre, I tell this someone about the dream in a way that makes it sound funny rather than sad. You see, he’d begun calling again, catching me by surprise one afternoon in Nazareth when he sent me a photo of a card I’d given him on the day we met by chance in a cafe. It had been my first day in Paris. He’d crossed out my job title and written ‘PROFESSIONAL LIAR’ underneath; a joke that had only been mildly funny the first time, and four years later still stung in the way everything he said stung, in the way I had no skin around him. I ignored the jab and asked why he’d kept the card after all those other moves, flitting across Europe, and it was only now that he was discarding it for a new life on another continent.
It had been months since we’d last talked. His voice was always in my head, but now it was in my ears too, his low purr reaching through time and space. Even when we weren’t speaking the conversation never stopped, my desperate need to reach for his approval only ebbing and flowing rather than ending. So I carried him across the region with me the way I carried him everywhere with me; a tender bruise just out of sight.
I take the train back Tel Aviv, where old friends are waiting, to days of sunset beers and sandy labneh, to endless nights at Kuli, to feasting under the soft lights in the garden at Bicicletta. Then I leave half my belongings at the hostel and travel to Jerusalem, before boarding the Arabic bus at Damascus Gate and watching the golden dome in the distance fade through the window. Barbed wire and checkpoints puncture the journey, IDF soldiers in bulletproof vests. When we arrive in Ramallah, the late morning heat is already steaming off the stones. It smells of coffee and cherries. People look, but nobody speaks to me. I feel enchanted by the rapid energy, the sweet shops spilling into the street, the strangeness of it all after Tel Aviv’s comforting familiarity.
I walk without a map. I climb hills, wander into half-built housing estates, drink mint lemonade in a shady garden bar. The white noise of children laughing echoes from the pool, a hidden oasis that feels at once out of place and totally expected. The city takes me by surprise. Arafat’s tomb and Boiler Room sets. Goats trotting in the side streets, moments from trendy bars selling Palestinian beer to off-duty journalists.
On the first night, I’m the only guest in the hostel. The volunteers prepare an iftar dinner on the roof, while a long-haired Swede tells me he’s on a date-only diet. I laugh, thinking it’s a joke. It’s not. I gently rib him after he elaborates on the endless benefits of these little fruits, how they clean your teeth, detox your system, make you light as air. The other volunteers smile tightly, unwilling to disagree. Conversation moves to teaching, charity work, border trouble. They don’t ask about my work. I’m just a tourist here, drifting without a cause.
I go out after dark and wander aimlessly again, mosquitos nibbling at my skin. Loneliness seeps in. Brushing my teeth that night, I think about the man in Tel Aviv, now somewhere in this unknowable city. I think of the American volunteer with the tight smile. Her button nose. Her noble ideals. Perhaps that’s his sort of person. Flaxen hair and yoga mats and vegeterianism and a real, worthwhile cause that doesn’t involve glueing cereal together or helping sell vapes to the world. I don’t even know where to begin. I don’t even know how to be good enough.
In Bethlehem, there’s no God left now. Just currency, corrupt monks, concrete walls crossing through graveyards. Tourists clamber over each other in the Church of the Nativity, marveling at all the gold, scratching notes to the Saviour in the gaps between words on renovation billboards. In the Milk Grotto, a holy man takes money by the fistful from women babbling in Spanish, clutching packets of dust. He sees my expression and yells at me to cover my shoulders, as if I’m the one who should be ashamed. I retreat into the cool church. A model of baby Jesus lies in a Perspex box, surrounded by dollar bills. I stare at it for a long time. A man next to me plays Candy Crush on his phone, oblivious.
Another world lies a kilometer away, along the separation wall. Banksy’s turned occupation into an occupation, building a hotel with neon lights flashing above the door and carefully curated politics inside. There’s an art shop at the wall, and the man inside tells me he painted the famous ‘make hummus not walls’ slogan. We talk about Ramallah, how he came to be here, running this little shop under the looming wall.
Catching sight of the light, he offers to drive me to the bus stop before I’m stranded by the sunset; we climb into his car and he gives me a rapid tour of the city before we race to the bus station. ‘Do you like fast cars?’ he says, teeth glinting in a grin, weaving through the streets so fast my body presses into the soft leather of the passenger seat. He tells me to join him and his friends at Snowbar that night, before disappearing back into the afternoon traffic.
In the backseat of the bus from Bethlehem, speeding through checkpoints as the rocks change colour outside, iftar fast approaching, a flame-haired girl sits next to me and for two hours we talk about how it feels to plunge into a loneliness so barren you think you’ll never leave, never reach the other side again. The reality of new cities, the painful itch that begins to crawl over your skin once you feel settled at last, once you’ve built a life worth staying in. Set it all on fire, cut your losses, get out, start again. Repeat ad infinitum.
Back in Ramallah we go to Radio bar and continue to purge our souls over local beers, the way you only can with a stranger. In the morning, we walk through the streets to a small museum in the old city, drinking tea while the owner tells us the history of his family, of this ancient house, of how the city was before they began to raze the old bricks in favour of modern blocks. The story of his archeologist sister, the lengths they took to bring her library back to Ramallah from Paris when she died without having it seized by Israeli customs. Tomes in Arabic, French, English, mapping the world through hidden civilisations. He’s going to build a library here, he says. One day. In the chilly basement, paintings detailing the Palestinian occupation line the walls, colours so vivid I feel pinpricks across my shoulders. In the picture of Jaffa, oranges tumble out of the frame. My heart hurts. We go to a garden nearby and drink spiced juices in the shade and talk about lessons, rebellion, the impossible cruelty of intimacy. Then the future rushes in, and it’s time to leave.
The buses have stopped so I take a shuttle to the checkpoint and walk through the cattle grid into the hazy heat on the other side. I’m lucky, they tell me; it often takes hours. In Jerusalem, the man at the hostel desk asks me where I’ve travelled from.
‘I've been to Ramallah’ he says, hesitantly. There’s a pause. He looks at his desk. 'Under different circumstances, though’. Our eyes meet, but neither of us speak.
I stand at Jaffa and look at the sea and begin to cry. I don’t know where to go from here, I don’t know how to return. I though a month of hot nights and dusty days would put my heart to rest for a while but it’s only made it worse.
Long delays at the airport. An unexpected stop in Milan. Dreams of walls, seeing the lights of London unfold in the dark. The sun has begun to rise as we approach the village, church steeple peeking above the frosted fields. I wake up to the sound of my mother’s soft Scottish lilt, chattering in the kitchen next door.
Yesterday I was sitting on the roof in a red dress, eating watermelon. Someone told me I looked like summer. A day later, I’ve tumbled back into another life. Did I ever leave? Did I come back whole? Some stories will never be told. Some stories I etch onto my bones because there’s nowhere else to put them. Apologies made in hands not words. Notes written in code so deep I can’t interpret it them in the morning. ‘What’s this spell you’ve put on me?’ he murmured in the dark. If I knew, I’d never stop.