The Arabs
invented ice cream, this is said the world over. Even in places where it approaches
platonic perfection; in Sicily that is what they say. The Sicilians say the Arabs
brought us ice cream, pasta, ceci, and lemons. The Arabs terraced our hills,
tolerated all of the faiths, made us rich and a center of the world.Then we
killed them. Thank God for the ice cream.
This
is
how they make ice cream at Rukab in Ramallah, and it is joy. They add
gum Arabic, and beat the milk into submission and emerges a thick cold
delight.
Flip and Flop want rum raisin, but they aren’t going to get it. Of
course
there is no rum, and they have no idea of why they can’t get it.
Tempesta,
still in her work suit straight out of Wall Street, pulls the money out
and
gets them chocolate. They sit beneath the green florescent lights at a
white
linoleum table, gnawing at the rubbery ice cream, as it bites them back.
Rukab is
on two floors, Flip has curly black hair, she is in a black quilted jacket,
Flop has straight dark brown hair with a Moe cut, and a denim jacket. Very punk
for a three year old. Total Dee Dee Ramone.
Rukab’s
solid steel shutters are bullet proof. They are on rails and could quickly slide
shut over the wide windows in case of exigency. Now the windows open to the
street outside, the street they call Rukab Street in Ramallah. The sign is in
the old Mandate style, a sign with ‘40s flavor, Rukab’s Ice Cream, Ice Cream,
Slushes & Hot Drinks. Next to it there is a much more modern and manicured Arabic sign, but it
doesn’t have the same charm.
Travel up
the postage stamp sidewalk, the streets are full, unlicensed cabbies, and condemned
cars. The Hajji’s black robes are taken by the wind and rise as they hold their
children’s hands, walking up the street under the sky divided between grey
clouds, crescent moon and velvet night.
Ahead in
the Manara Square stand the money changers, lined up one after another, as car
spin round the traffic circle before flinging out into the radial streets.
Ah
Capitalism! The currency is passed from hand to hand, large rolls of bills
emerge for a moment just to disappear beneath winter coats. Ah Magic! A green
bill becomes a red bill, a blue bill becomes red. One money Mage reaches behind
Flop’s ear and pulls out a Swiss franc. A white bearded financial Wizard on the
corner raises his arms and out fly a dozen rock doves, with Euro bills tied to
their legs. The birds take flight to Gaza.
Beyond is
the souq, shops open the way as spilling out for a procession, offerings,
soaps, brooms, floor squeegees, baked spice breads, hot rolls with meat, bins
overfilled with exaggeratedly long dried pasta, lasagna, bins of dried beans,
spiced nuts, and piles and piles of ground spices.
Beyond
still are stands with their wind rustled cloth tent tops, filled with Technicolor
toned vegetables and fruits, that spill out from the official market.
Here there
are no hard lines, just curves and details, so that there is no boundary
between the covered market and the streets that surround it. Less civil
planning and more the muscular amorphous beauty of a jelly fish at swim.
The voices
of merchants, yelling screaming above the din of cars, and the footsteps of
people who take advantage of the break in the rain to sit outside and smoke the
n’argilia. Families, wife in Hajab and husband who is even more covered up. Children digging into sweet drinks and pastries
layered with honey. Groups of young men sit somehow without their ridiculously
tight jeans cutting off the flow of blood to their brains. Groups of girls,
modestly dressed sit and laugh, the conjoining of eyes from a distance sweeter
than the stroke of a hand.
An
eye
cast over the crowds, looks for uniforms, but there are none. The entire
Palestinian
police force has been arrested by the IDF until further notice. Sorry
for the inconvenient. The rule of law is a privilege not a right in the
middle east.
In its
place two things have arisen; speed bumps to slow the horrendous Palestinian
driving, and the other; tribal rule.
People complain about the speed bumps, no one has said that they miss
cops. They miss specific cops, wives miss their husbands, mothers miss their
sons, children cry at night waiting for their father; tonight there’s lots of
people who miss someone who has been disappeared into a jail cell without a
trial. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.But no one misses cops.
Above it
all is the mosque, its minaret towering over downtown. The wave of chaos of the
souq breaks upon this Lighthouse shore, leaving a place of calm, short steps that slowly
lead up to it’s modern place of worship.
Around its
minarets is an bright blue light of neon, illuminating it to the city beneath. An
electric mosque, how cool is that.
Pulling
change from his pocket Ali, Tempesta’s husband, buys a hot paper cup and hands
it to my wife. Saleb, thick
white drink made from hot milk and ground orchids, sweetened with orange and rose
water. Her red lips part with a slight white mustache she licks off her lips.
Ali
is not
from Ramallah, very few people are. Ali is from Nablus which seems to be
evident to everyone. Place here has meaning, as does family and name.
These are extended parts of identity, which everyone on the street seems
to be aware of as
we pass the lingere and perfume shops filled with covered women.
We,
who's family names mean nothing, what are we to these Arabs? Are we
mysteries, our identities concealed or are we ghosts, with no identity
at all?
Before our
tour Ali showed us the families apartment, a new building, seeming hewn out of
stone, with a glass pyramid over it’s central lobby, with had an enormous
puddle in the center of the marble floor, from a leak in
the glass above.
Inside the
elegant flat; with it’s Bedouin Nouveau design sense; Ali in his cream polo
shirt, khakis and brown loafers opened the Sauna and touched the slats of wood.
-We bought
this from a settler, great guy. He did a great job, no?
Ali why
are you buying Saunas from settlers?
-It’s not
like you can just get a Sauna anywhere, especially here among us Arabs. What
ever you could get from an Arab, would be of a much lower quality. We can’t
import anything directly, everything has to go through an Israeli intermediary in
any case, and it always adds a lot to the price. It is also no better to go
through an Arab Israeli rather than a European one, business is business.
Either way they are profiting off you, in a massive exercise in income transfer
from the West Bank to the Israeli economy. So it is best to go for the best
deal at the best quality.
Ali smiles
and closes the door and leads me to the living room saying:
-Any of
the settlers are quite good business men, once they get over their hatred,
disgust, mistrust and outright racism against you. Once they get beyond the raw
paranoia that this isn’t some kind of plot, that my sauna would not be used in
some massive plot against the Jewish people, they become quite friendly. It
takes a little time, but money and business can break through hatred and fear.
Like the man who sold us the sauna, he started out as a real shit, but after
the shit phase became really a nice guy.
Tempesta’s
cake sat on the table lit with candles for my birthday. It was shaped like a
cat and covered in black chocolate icing. Flip and Flop stared at it, circled
it and kept trying to pull adults toward it. Tempesta took out a flame thrower
and commenced the inferno atop it, blazing white phosphorous light, burning
through the cake until the white bones of a hand were revealed. Flip and Flop
blew furiously trying to extinguish the flame. Then it is a chocolate cake again.
The
stone
walls, the American appliances, the marble floors, this is not what
comes to
mind when you heard West Bank. But there you are, in a luxury condo,
with an American kitchen, American washer and a giant transformer to
equalize it. The
age of empire.
Looking
out at their terrace, covered in flowers, vines, vases, into the interior, with
pillows thrown on the floor, pillows made of fine Damascus silk, the TV set in
the corner, and across the way, the formal living room, with it’s chairs arranged in a rigid square.
The whole thing with the IRA was digging around in
my brain. My presence here seems to be a tremendously bad idea.
My
wife
has work here, and we need the money. If she does well, she could turn
this
into a career in development work. What's in it for me? Death at a
checkpoint, gunned down by a settlers machine gun ? Death from an IRA
bullet in the back of my
brain? Thank god for the ice cream.
Tempesta,
the shit you were talking about earlier today, you know with the IRA and the
sniper, does that mean the intifada is going into a new stage? You know, get a
lot worse?
Tempesta
laughed, and pulled the hair from out her face:
-Jack the
intifada is over. And the Palestinians lost.
dream 2
There
seems
no end to this pharmacy, there is no way to tell at least. The floors,
the
walls and the ceiling are all bright white, and the florescent lights
are on so powerful that all detail is burnt out of them. There are no
supporting columns,
there is only a cafeteria, windows and lines. Take a number and wait but
as
they come up to your number, the suddenly tell everyone to form lines in
front
of the windows instead, as it comes to your turn at a window, they close
your
line, you run to another window, shoving a nun out of the way, and as
you get
close to the window they close it again. You rush though the pharmacy
becoming
more violent and irrational, trying to cut in, jump the line, or
demonstrate
that your number was almost called and you were the next in line. An old
woman's
hand touches your arm, with her brown wrinkled hand. She has full lips,
lines
that radiate from her eyes like stars, and her white hair is covered
with a
light black veil. Her nails are immaculate, her hands strong, and she
takes
your arm, she calms you. She reminds you that there is no rush, because
there are no exits.
Click here to enter The Electric Mosque
Click here to enter The Electric Mosque
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