others once a month and presenting their work to each other. She always had things in common with other future academics: similar priorities and values, a shared frame of reference, even a knowledge of the quirks and flamboyancies of the most prominent senior people in each field. It was easier, Wendy generally found, to be friends with someone who shared something in common with you—someone who knew someone you knew, had been to the same school or camp, knew a place you did. She remembered one of her friends telling her as she left Princeton, “Maybe you will find the best friend you’ve ever had there.”
She was again jostled by someone at her side. She knew that, somewhere in the airport, there was a shared cab to Jerusalem, but wasn’t sure how to find it. Wendy was dazed, blinking in the bright summer sun, trying to find her way; but there were tears in her eyes. From the intensity of the sun? From exhaustion at not having slept well on the plane? Or from a larger anxiety about what she was doing here at all?
“Do you know where you’re going?” a familiar voice asked.
“No,” Wendy responded, turning to see Professor Lamdan, now pushing an airport luggage cart filled with suitcases and boxes of Little Tykes and Fisher Price toys, gifts for his grandchildren. She noted his six blue numbers on the forearm that carefully gripped the cart, and asked why she was feeling sorry for herself. How, she wondered, had Lamdan figured out where he was going?
She looked at him gratefully and said, “I’m looking for a shared cab to Jerusalem.”
“Come, it’s over here,” he said gesturing. “It must be a bit overwhelming to be here for the first time. For me, every time, it’s a miracle. The Gemara says the air of Eretz Yisrael makes one wise.” He stopped and paused for breath, his intake of the molecules of the Holy Land’s air slow and careful.
She followed after him, pushing her own off-kilter cart—the heaviness of the duffel bags making her progress forward an exercise in awkwardness—and marveling at the dignity in his gait. He looked weak, because he was so physically skinny, yet strong, striding in front of her, pushing his luggage cart. What did it cost him, that single-mindedness of putting one foot in front of the other? Maybe it was indeed heroic to keep going, no matter what.
Having followed Lamdan, putting his one foot in front of the other, she and he were at the end of the path from the airport to the parking area, where cars were everywhere, horns honking. He maneuvered his cart in front of the van they would share, spoke to the driver in Hebrew, and gestured at Wendy, indicating she was coming also. She stood next to him, catching only the words “yofee,” “fine,” and “Yerushalayim,” Jerusalem. The driver yanked their bags off the luggage carts and heaved them to the storage area in the rear of the van. Lamdan gestured to Wendy to get in. There were three rows of seats—the back one had a mother and two young children in it; her older two were in the middle row. Lamdan got in and filled out that row, so Wendy sat by the window in the front row of seats. She rested her head against the window of the van and closed her eyes.
Jerusalem was a place where history is not a one-way street; here the resurrection of old glories still seemed possible.
—SAMUEL HEILMAN, A Walker in Jerusalem
Friday morning, Wendy was walking around her apartment, getting ready for her day’s task, to go to the shuk, open-air market, and buy things she’d need this year for her place. Wendy picked up the metal grogger on a shelf in the living room. It was a small, cheap thing with its caricatured pictures of the dense Persian king, his heinously evil advisor and rapturously beautiful Jewish queen portrayed in clashing tones of turquoise blue, hot pink, and neon orange. Was it a sacrilege to throw it away? She had misgivings about whether it was worth saving; yet it made a slight mewl of protest as it was being tossed to the garbage pile, the plastic cogs grinding angrily in complaint. Would its made-in-Taiwan apparatus be strong enough to hold up to repeated ritual protests against the evil Haman? It seemed to personify uncertainty, which was what led to her desire to keep it, unnecessary and ugly though it was.
The prohibitive cost of overseas shipping meant that each item from her Princeton apartment took on a larger significance. When she was packing that place up, she felt like, with each piece of her apartment she took apart or discarded, a bit of her identity was being obliterated, rubbed away—a bit of finger gone here, a brown eye there, now some locks of her black shoulder-length curly hair. If her stuff defined her, with less of it, she was lesser too. She remembered seeing a billboard for a real estate agency: “Nothing defines you more than the home in which you live.” Despite her graduate student status and lack of both cash and the ability to reside in this place longer than an academic year, she wanted the things in her apartment to be part of her self-definition. She hoped it was a scintillating agglomeration of things. She wanted a visitor to her apartment to pick up any random item—book, poster, vase—and know there would be a captivating story behind it. It all added up, she hoped, to a picture of herself that was appealing—as a friend, or as a love interest.
She replaced the grogger on the shelf and tried to list what she needed. Extra kitchen items. She would use the pots for whatever she wanted so she wouldn’t have to worry about using the kosher pots in the apartment the wrong way. In her apartment in Princeton, Wendy didn’t cook much beyond spaghetti, eggs, and soy hot dogs. Cooking was a skill graduate students at Princeton did not hone. Friendships and parties were not focused on food—if people wanted to be in a group they went out to a bar or restaurant. If the department had a potluck gathering, people brought things from a takeout store. Cooking was not part of the life of the mind, and it brought no one closer to tenure, the scale by which all was rated in the world of graduate student priorities. As they frequently reminded themselves, mantra-like, the work is all that matters.
Wendy wandered around, getting ready to leave her apartment, looking for her sunglasses, keys, and wallet. She hoped, looking at the sunny space where her still-unpurchased desk would go, this would be where she’d begin her dissertation. There was something magical about the thought—this is where it would begin. How do I really know where I came from? Hadn’t Freud written that the mystery of origin is one of the greatest to humans? Enmeshed within this city, woven tightly into this place that is the omphalos mundi, the absolute center of the religious world, source and foundation of three religions, would be the beginnings of the lifetime opus of Wendy Dora Goldberg, sure to be of field-changing, paradigm-shifting, earth-shattering proportions. She laughed aloud at her own grandiosity.
Before leaving, she put a small notebook in her purse, remembering the admonition of Violet Dohrmann, the anthropologist on her dissertation committee: “An anthropologist doesn’t know what she thinks of a situation until she goes home and writes about it.”
After going over her list of needed items, she left her apartment and walked down Mishael Street to Yehoshua ben Nun, a quiet residential street with bougainvillea framing the stone gates of the apartment houses. She admired the trees. Eucalyptus? Hopefully, she’d learn the names of the Middle Eastern flora. She noticed the cats trawling the green garbage containers for sustenance; they were beginning to have a certain charm, scrawny and disorderly though they were. The quality of the sunlight attracted her notice. Did the light somehow pierce things that normally didn’t respond to its rays? But not knowing the names of the things that surrounded her, or even why she noticed the light, made her feel alien, appreciative as she was growing of Jerusalem’s beauty.
There was a meow from a feral cat somewhere in the alley, and a scurrying
