I ate a breaded salmon fillet on a bed of zucchini with my bare hands, breaking it apart piece by piece. Aviva, Michal and Diana sat in a pitch black restaurant with me for my "goodbye" dinner. Two of us ordered the chef's surprise so we wouldn't have any idea what we were eating. Desert felt like a bunch of tiny ladders covered with whipped cream. The waitress jangled with bells like a belly dancer so we could hear her, and when she sat us, she lifted and placed our hands on the table, and tapped our glasses with a fork so we could hear where they were.
After an hour or so, my eyes began to grasp at the impenetrable black and started creating multicolored chimneys above the table. We got shooshed a few times since the folks I was with didn't seem to have "indoor voices" - and though we heard the other people in the restaurant, we couldn't see them, so resumed our former volume soon after. After three hours, we finally ask our waitress to thrust us past the blackout curtains back into the dazzling light of Na Laga'at, on time to see the chef - the MC of our olfactory, gustatory and tactile experience - departing after a long day of work.
As we walked out of Old Jaffa along the water, I said goodbye to the sea. The water swelled and buckled as it had for thousands of years, tugging loose emotions I haven't known what to do with, and wondered if I was inventing as I said goodbye to some of the friends I made in Tel Aviv. A few days prior, I had goodbye beers with a few of my cohort in Jerusalem. Though I chose not to live in there for many reasons, seeing black silouhettes walking on the illuminated serpentine bridge for the high speed rail as I departed in the sheirut for the last time made me feel a certain tenderness for the place.
No comments:
Post a Comment