The Metaphysics of the Shared Taxi

Late Monday morning, I'm waiting for the taxi from Jerusalem to Tel-Aviv to fill up at the stand on Rav Kook Street. There are three guys standing outside smoking cigarettes also waiting. The guy across from me is too big to fit into the seat, so he sits sideways in a pink shirt, charcoal grey suit jacket, talking on his cellphone. A comfortable burger, a businessman -- I imagine he owns an electronics store and is going to Tel-Aviv to meet with his suppliers. The Philippina lady in a baseball hat is cracking jokes in Hebrew to anyone who will listen. G. told me that when she first moved back to Israel, she had to get over her fear that the Arab man sitting beside her was a terrorist. Any of them could be. But I have no fear; I feel comfortable with the Arabic around me, the driver talking to his businessmen passengers. They are so involved in their gossip - how could they want to blow me up? There's even a kind of delicacy to the usual experience of being surrounded by four cellphone conversations, a more respectful distance, or maybe it's the faint Orientalism imprinted in my genetic makeup which lets me doze into a Middle Eastern fantasy.

Maybe the ease I feel though, is because the shared taxi is not regulated like the bus. You are not checked with the metal detector when you go into the station, your bag is not searched. Nobody examines the color of your ID card if you sound suspicious. You take your chances. And Arabic is spoken freely. "Ta'al, ta'al," the driver says to the guys smoking outside and off we go on our journey.

The shared taxi is the black market of intercity travel. There's an intimacy to this crossing of boundaries, to the way a taxi can slide into Jerusalem late on a Friday afternoon, no traffic, everyone in synagogue, parting the streets like butter. Usually one of the windows are broken, often the driver speeds, sometimes the driver listens to a Russian techno station.

And we're not surrounded by soldiers: their stripes, their clanking guns which I confess I used to think were sexy. Soldiers ride free on the bus. They're part of the apparatus: dormant, sleeping beauties like the rest of us, but ready to spring into action. Even the bus driver, I believe, is taught judo or at least is trained as a combat medic in case of need.

If you travel by bus, entering the station is unavoidable: the flashing lights, the mounds of borekas, cheap underwear, ten shekel discs. You're processed. You can't avoid the State: its guards and its split-second categorizations.

The shared taxi makes a stop a block away, where the old central bus station used to be. Now it's the neighborhood of the semi-legal foreign workers, prostitutes and "discrete houses," pork stores with signs in Hebrew, Russian, Yiddish and Chinese.

The three Arab businessmen, carrying no bags, jump off the shared taxi and disappear into the neighborhood as if they never existed.

Postscript

Tuesday, again on the taxi, I meet a sculpture teacher from Bezalel art school, who'd like me to write about the physics of the taxi, why the metaphysics? He says his sculptures are bigger than this van. He's straight out of Hemingway with a cane and a handlebar moustache, walks around his classroom with a glass of scotch. He says, put me on page three, not page one, if you write about me. Put me in the moleskin journal, not that little Chinese embossed one you're carrying around. He says, "One day a student came in and said, see that man in the paper? I shot him. He was a sniper, you see." I'm not sure I've put the sculptor in the right place in the story; there's a sense that we're caught in a story that's unsuited to us, no matter what moustache we grow.
"What did you say to him?"
"A killer, in my classroom. But he's a nice guy, a really nice guy."

The Passion of the Boy Soldier

I ran into a friend from college on the bus and when the news came on the radio, I shushed her, to hear if there was anything new with Gilaad Shalit. Then I realized it was okay: if they announced that he had been released everyone would be talking. You wouldn't even need to listen: you would see it on their faces. It would be like a Messianic redemption scene, everyone jumping up for joy, golden light coming out of the clouds, and everything we had lost three years ago when he disappeared restored back to us. No second war in Lebanon, no "Cast Lead Operation." We could wake up and say that had all been a a bad dream, and we brought our child-soldier home.

The talk about Gilaad Shalit surrounds us like a constant murmur, rising and falling, and we move inside of it. On Purim, the tabloids show his photograph as a boy dressed up. "Sad Clown," they scream. "Save me!" his silk screened picture implores at the entrance to Jerusalem, and hung from apartment buildings --"save me!" And we want to save him so badly. At the protest tent in from of the Prime Minister's house, there's a timeline for the days he's been gone with little markers for his first Rosh Hashana in captivity, his second Passover in captivity. My mother says, if it was you, don't you think I would do the same?

The man who is trying to sell me his mattress happens to head the campaign to free Gilaad. I'm lying on my back, checking out the springs, tell him I'm interested in the situation. He sitting on a chair -- a slightly cramped room, and him in his slippers -- he says, there is no "interested" in Israel anymore. There is only sad, happy, angry.

It reminds me of a terrible Hollywood movie I saw with S. before I left. Liam Neeson's spoiled daughter gets kidnapped in Europe and he uses all his most violent, former-CIA-FBI-macho-letter powers to get her back, destroying scores of buildings, cars, killing petty criminals and bystanders, letting her more slutty friends die in the process. The equation of lives just doesn't add up. Some days I think, our caring is no caring at all, if we didn't care when we turned off the electricity in Gaza and the food, and killed children going to school. But then some days I think that this recent bout of complete Gilaad Shalit obsession is some misguided attempt to regain our caring, to believe that we could be good parents after all if only we tried hard enough to get him back, like a magic spell, a resurrection.

First Thoughts

I used to think poets shouldn't blog, they should stay in their garret and preform their suffered acts of inspiration in silence -- perhaps on occasion letting out a sigh, groan or even barbaric yawp. I'm writing now because my mind is filled with parts of conversations I'm having with so many of you, my friends in Berkeley, about what it's like to come back to Israel after years of being gone, the mix of familiarity and strangeness. I'm hoping that all these snippets of conversations can also be woven into the bigger Conversation we are having with each other about places and homes, belonging and not belonging. I'm also writing to gnaw at this question that I bring to this particular visit -- the question of the past war, and how it is that these nice people who give me kube soup, and call me motek, who match-make me and send me to their favorite yoga teacher, who remember me from middle school, *my people*, supported this war. Or, in other words, how to put together the acts of brutality done by the state of Israel in my name (all Israelis? all Jews?) with the way you pay for a shared taxi cab in Tel Aviv: you tap on the shoulder of the person sitting in front of you, and give them your fifty shekel note, and then they pass the money back and forth to the driver, your change always coming back through the passengers perfectly accurate, coins poured from palm to palm, Israeli to Palestinian to foreign worker and back. I can't put it together.