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."