There's so much I can hear from the merpesset of my building. Over the past few weeks, someone in the electric guitar shop next door played the same five notes over and over again, with a vibrato here and a staccato there. Then over the last week, I could begin to feel his fingers reaching out through the shape of the sounds articulated by their contact with each string. The other day I think I saw him, in his 50s with a ponytail...pretty much what you'd expect: he was playing around again, weaving those five notes into song. But on Shabbat, his song was replaced by a woman's voice, quivering loudly and full of tears. In trying to ground myself against the cascade of fury next door, I used my small vocabulary to enter the language of her cries and could only understood enough to know she felt alone.
To have a social life on Shabbat in Tel Aviv, I often need to go out for meals. Last Saturday, yet another unseasonably warm winter day, I met Rafi at a beach-front cafe on for lunch. We ate sandwiches, and agreed we couldn't resist the gigantic desert that passed by us on the way to another table, with its pile of whipped cream, scoop of vanilla and warm chocolate cake. After our meal, we walked on a dock that reached out into the Mediterranean Sea, and gazed at an island we
couldn't figure out how to reach. As we continued to stroll, we arrived at the gay beach, and stood transfixed as a man walked back and forth, balancing on one foot and then the other, moving from standing to laying down - on a wire suspended between two posts. We approached, and a small crowd gathered. A girl kept falling down, perhaps practicing finding her center of gravity, as she landed in the sand again and again. Then she took a turn as the wire-walker's hand held her up.
On Wednesday, I went to a small vegan restaurant with Dafna and Galit and charged my body with beet juice, seitan cholent and a rainbow of raw vegetables. After I reached the point of satisfaction, the vegan desserts on the house were both irresistible, and too much. Dafna and I parted ways with Galit, and then headed toward the main mall in town - but not before drinking deeply from the sacred well of silence in the musty labyrinth of a used bookstore, and swinging through the chambers of hipsters, DVDs and comics at The Third Ear. By the time we arrived at Dizengoff Center, my lower back - which I haven't rested enough since the Contact Improv Festival, and strained again after sitting in a bad chair to finish my final paper the previous day - was demanding my complete attention. When I couldn't lift my feet high enough to get them into the tube slide that emerged from an elephant's butt in the kids mall playground, I should have listened to my body and not decided to go down headfirst instead, but how could I resist?
After that, my limbs moved like those of a marionette, my feet descending to the ground with immense effort against the strain of invisible strings of pain. I bent over carefully to peer through the kaleidoscopes fastened to the railing of the mall as a passerby exclaimed, kaleidoscopim! and our legs rippled and shrunk past the nearby fun-house mirrors. When we got to our main destination, Dafna and I gazed longingly into the store decorated like an enchanted forest and full of the most exquisite frolicking fairies and toadstool gnomes - which was unexpectedly closed for a lecture on astrology and palm-reading. So we instead went to the mall's bookstore with its green lamps and tables. And then, passing by women in fur coats walking their tiny dogs (dogs are apparently allowed into malls here), we entered the Imaginarium, a kids toy store. By this point, the wordless "Babies Go! Michael Jackson" music ("The best pop songs from your favourite groups in special instrumental versions for your baby") was the only stimulus keeping my attention from spiraling into the pain at my center.
Yesterday I firmly committed to spending the entire day off my feet and with a pillow under my legs. As I lay in bed, with all my desires to move in the world coursing through me, I recalled the remnants of last Saturday, after I walked with Rafi and my bike down Allenby and parted ways. I remembered returning to the apartment that day, and hearing a voice breaking with laughter. A familiar voice with a landscape of edges and valleys that I recognized, as if I had once traveled them. Its song was beautiful. The voice that had splintered into sobs earlier that day opened into at least as colorful a set of overtones as, that afternoon, it pulsed with laughter.
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