Salman Masalha
The City of the Walking Flower
Here, on the watershed of the winds, between reality and imagination, between
the utopia of the celestial spheres and the doom of the underworld, stands
Jerusalem. The city is a pile of stones that separates sea from sea, tomorrow
from yesterday, the green from the desert, and, above all, the sacred from the
profane. It is like a broad cosmic-political terminal, the starting line for
the competitions in which participants race to other places, other times. Here
in Jerusalem, and in the four corners of the earth, the descendants of Moses,
Jesus, and Muhammad jostle one another on the track, taking part in an
Olympics of the evil spirit that knows no rest. They are all poised, crouching
to the ground in awe of the holy, waiting for the starting gun in order to
defeat gravity.
When I was a child, Jerusalem was inextricably linked in my imagination
to the apocalyptic day of the great dash forward, from which there is no
return. The scenario, including the instructions issued by the official
sitting on a raised platform in the dome of the sky, was determined in advance
and minutely detailed. In the play of the End of Days, mortal actors have no
freedom to improvise. They must play the roles determined for them, with
complete faith and no reservations or questions, such as what if, maybe,
nevertheless. According to the scenario, the Jews are destined to destroy the
Muslim mosques in Jerusalem. Because of the support the primarily Christian
West gives the Jews and the Jewish state, the Muslims will retaliate by rising
up and destroying the Christian churches. The West’s reaction will be swift:
it will gather its armies to conquer the K’aba. And thus, in an uncontrollable
chain reaction, a great world war will break out: the Apocalypse. Eventually,
the Messiah will come and bring a new world order, entirely different from the
one we have now. As a child, I never imagined fate would call me to rub
shoulders with the inhabitants of this city, nor did I conceive of the
possibility of living in what was destined to be the eye of the storm at the
End of Days.
In the year 1690 there also lived someone who thought the End of Days
was happening before his lightless eyes. No one knows his name, and chances
are no one ever will. A man from Aleppo, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, arrived
that year in Jerusalem. He prayed there, strolled through its markets, met its
people, and as is the habit of many pilgrims, put his impressions down in
writing. One day he went out to a hill west of the city walls. The hill served
as a Muslim cemetery, and the graveyard still exists in the center of
Jerusalem in the Mamilla quarter. His guides related that here, at the edge of
the cemetery, someone once dug a grave and, within the grave, found a Muslim
man sitting and reading the Quran. The man from the grave addressed him and
asked what had happened, whether the Hour, the End of Days, had come. The
digger, frightened by what he saw, fled for his life. However, after a while
he returned to the place, accompanied by other people, and found no trace of
digging or the man in the grave.
Nearly two centuries later, someone else thought the End of Days was
near. In 1874 a Dutch woman came to Jerusalem; the citizens called her the
Dutch Princess. She decided that it was not enough to dream. She wanted to
anticipate the practical needs of the Redemption and the End of Days.
Therefore, she embarked upon the construction of a building that was to serve
as a huge hostel meant to accommodate the 140,000 Children of Israel who would
remain alive at the End of Days. The place she selected was none other than
that same plot west of the Muslim cemetery in Mamilla. The man from the grave
in the previous story is of the Children of Ishmael, but had his luck been
with him, he might have been able to lodge in a five-star hotel as the
“Shabbes goy” (a Gentile who performs household tasks prohibited to Jews on
the Sabbath) for the surviving Children of Israel. The Dutch Princess ran out
of money and never completed her project, which shows that even in the
business of the End of Days, the earthly marketplace reigns.
Independence Park now stands on that site. Like many of the gardens in
the Holy Land, it represents the Garden of Eden and, by extension, the
expulsion. So, throughout the years, the people of Jerusalem, the living and
the dead, dwell there in expectation of the Day of Judgment. Jerusalem is
slowly borne above the earth’s surface, as if the stone of the city were not
the same stone, as if the wind were not the same wind, and as if the people
were not the same people.
Jerusalem is unlike other cities. It has laws of its own. For example,
the laws of physics do not apply here. The city of Jerusalem is borne above
the earth’s surface by supreme metaphysical forces, and any attempt to descend
with it to the firm ground of reality—to the street, the café, the noise of
the buses, the municipal garbage—leads to the crashing of dreams soaked in the
holiness of the End of Days and fantasies sprinkled by divinity. Therefore,
the city is famous for its syndrome, the Jerusalem Syndrome. Anyone who
strolls through the streets is likely to encounter people whose dreams have
all shattered on the ground of reality in this strange city. Where else in the
world is there a city with a syndrome all its own?
Jerusalem is best kept in the cellars of the imagination. It is
recommended, and perhaps desirable, to write about it, especially poetry. The
city does right by poets. It provides them with an abundance of color, images,
and metaphors. However, it is not a good idea, perhaps it’s even dangerous, to
break it down into small details. Reality could hit you in the face, and
dealing with this will be difficult. All of Jerusalem’s inhabitants are
strangers, yet she does not welcome strangers. Here, strangeness has a
hierarchy. I, too, am a stranger in Jerusalem, and it does not welcome me
either. But what am I, a mere mortal, compared to the many days through which
so many mortals have passed?
During the 1870s, about a hundred years before I came to Jerusalem, a
man from Damascus named Nu’man al-Qasatili came to the city gates seeking
progress and openness. The Damascus of those days looked to him like the
epitome of backwardness, so he set out for what he imagined to be the city of
lights. He did not find the city of lights, of course, but he immortalized his
impressions in a chronicle of his journeys through the provinces of Greater
Syria. He noted that there were about forty thousand inhabitants in the city
at the time. The natives were a minority in Jerusalem. The rest were a motley
of strangers: Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The majority of the city’s
inhabitants had arrived there from distant places, beyond the sea and desert.
Today the population of Jerusalem is more than four hundred thousand souls.
The inhabitants of today are new strangers, or the descendants of yesterday’s
strangers. The strangers of today are the fathers of the strangers who will be
born here. Gradually, it becomes clear that strangeness is an inseparable part
of the city. The strangers who have settled in the city enjoy when strangers
come to visit. They wait expectantly for the visitors because they provide a
significant part of their income, as al-Qasatili says. Those who have already
settled in Jerusalem do not love the other strangers who have already settled
here, but all of them want the strangers’ money, that is to say the tourists,
because that is how they earn their living.
Who builds whom? Does man build a city in his image, or is it the city
that builds the man? This question may seem simple, but with respect to
Jerusalem, it is not. Cities built along the coast take their character from
the sea. They face the sea and draw serenity from it. The cycle of the waves
beating endlessly on their shores pervades them with a sense of life without
end. In Jerusalem, too, there is a cycle, but it is the cycle of a volcano,
and you never know when it will explode. There is also a sea near Jerusalem.
But in this Jerusalem sea, you always lie on your back with your eyes looking
up toward heaven. You needn’t lift a finger in order to float because
Jerusalem’s sea always pushes you upward. You can sink only into
hallucinations of other places and other times. Any attempt to stand with your
feet on the ground, to be in reality, demands a supreme effort, and in many
cases it demands a lot of tears, and not always because of the salt of the
Dead Sea.
As I told you, I was not born in Jerusalem. I came there in the seventh
decade of the twentieth century to join the congregation of strangers that
inhabit it. Jerusalem is ultimately a city of eternal strangers. The
connection to the city is not a connection to place, but rather a connection
to time. The connection is not to stone, object, or anything earthly, but
rather to moments, feelings, experiences. And Jerusalem, as opposed to many
cities, has too much time, too many moments, and too much past. And with so
much past in Jerusalem, it is hard to see the future, because the future of
Jerusalem always pulls toward the past. The people of Jerusalem walk through
it with their eyes stuck in the backs of their heads and their faces eyeless.
This is perhaps another reason why the people of Jerusalem frequently fall
down in the street. Every movement in it, even the smallest, leads to a wound.
Every stone you turn over in this city could be hiding a scorpion because, as
the tradition has it, Jerusalem is a golden chalice full of scorpions. The
Jerusalem of yesterday, today, and presumably tomorrow sits on the watershed
of the winds, between the desert and the mountain. It is a mixture of Hebron
and Warsaw. Two seas battle for it, the Mediterranean Sea to the west, and the
Dead Sea to the east. A sea of life and a sea of death, exactly like its
history. Though it seems, more and more, that it is turning its back to the
West and not dwelling in the East. It pulls towards the past, to Creation. Too
much past has passed in Jerusalem, and in a place where the past is so dense,
it is hard to see the future.
And at that very place in Mamilla, al-Nabulsi writes, he saw something
wonderful. He noticed a plant the size of a finger, green in color and with a
flower. The plant had two arms, four legs, and a small red head with a white
tuft on top. It also had a reddish-pink tail with vertebrae, and this plant
was alive and walked on its legs. Hope hides in al-Nabulsi’s legend. The day
will come when not only the Torah will go forth, but the flowers of Jerusalem
will begin to walk freely on its earth. I have been living in Jerusalem for a
number of years now, and I pass by this place often. Every time, I examine the
ground, hoping to see that walking flower. However, in the meantime, I make do
with other walking flowers, which I have been seeing for years. They have arms
and legs, but not their own. These are the arms and legs of the girl who makes
the rounds at night, selling flowers in the bars of Jerusalem.