Say It in Hebrew

“Ar-khee-o-LOG-ya.”
“Archaeology.”
Saturday, Part I: Tsfat and Rosh Pina to Tel Hazor and Tiberias

Returning from dinner and the movie at the Rosh Pina Cinematheque, we relocated the house the Driver had rented for the night by the sheets that were clothespinned to the iron fence, snapping in the night breeze. The cottage-sized house had two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a living room attached to a kitchen. Only the living room had heat; foolishly, we had gone off Friday evening for dinner, and left the windows in the two bedrooms open, so when we returned, both rooms were freezing.

We split the stack of heavy blankets in the closet among the three groups, and piled about five blankets on our bed. The Italian took the other bedroom; the Driver took the couch in the (heated) living room.

The house was small, but comfortable; however, there was no soap to be found anywhere. Lack of soap and lack of heating did not fit in well with my expectations for our lodgings, which I had implicitly assumed would be some sort of tiny Israeli Hampton Inn. My husband found my reaction puzzling.

“There’s no soap,” I told him, from underneath the layers of blankets.

“But we brought soap,” he reminded me, opening his backpack. “Look, it’s right here.” He held up a tube of approximately three drops of bath gel.

“But they didn’t provide any soap. How can you rent out a place and not offer soap? Isn’t there some law against that?” I couldn’t understand why he didn’t see the principle involved, here.

My husband looked at me, and I could only imagine what he was thinking. “When I was at camp as a kid,” he finally said, “we went for weeks without bathing!”

“Well, that’s troubling, too,” I replied, and went to sleep.

Saturday morning, we packed up and left.

We pulled up outside J’ai Uni for breakfast, after careening down the mountain from Tsfat. As the Driver went to see if the restaurant was open, we vowed to prevent him from drinking anything but decaf, in the hopes that this would reduce his tendency to behave like Rocket Man behind the wheel.

Even at nine o’clock, it was warm enough to sit outside, under the trees. The waitress brought menus, and two puzzles, of the maddening cord-and-wooden-peg variety, which the mathematicians had solved the night before, at dinner. When they confessed this, she brought two more puzzles, which they had also promptly solved on Friday night, between dinner and dessert. In fact, they had solved the restaurant’s entire collection of puzzles by the time the check arrived. With waning patience, the breakfast waitress said, “Perhaps you would like to come look at the puzzles for yourself,” but the mathematicians declined, and focused on food.

There are two ubiquitous, standard Israeli breakfasts, and our group ordered one of each. One includes a small omelet, tomato-and-cucumber salad, and lots of bread, butter, and jam. The other, shakshouk, is a sautéed tomato and onion dish, with poached eggs on top (spicy sauce on the side). Done badly, it is a minor ode to heartburn. Done well, you finish breakfast convinced that you could conquer the world…or, at least, many neighboring counties.

Over breakfast, we somehow started to talk about dancing. The Italian and the Driver were partners in a tango class offered by the Institute’s Student Council (other classes include drawing and meditation), and the Italian said that she had been dancing all her life, taking classes in ballet, modern dance a la Martha Graham, and hip-hop.

“Hip-hop?” we asked.

“Yes,” she said, sipping her cappuccino. “I was the oldest one in the class,” she admitted. “The rest were teenagers.” She shook her head in mock sadness. “I was not, as you say, ‘down with it’. I had no ‘bling-bling.’” The hip-hop slang was lost on our Central European companions, who gazed at the grinning Italian as though she had begun to speak in tongues. I laughed myself silly.

Back on Highway 90, we headed for Tel Hazor National Park, an archaeological site with evidence of settlement beginning in the Early Bronze Age. That’s the third millennium B.C., if you’re keeping track.

Reading through the park’s brochure sparks the hair-raising realization that Biblical names are not abstract, foreign-sounding locations, but ancient cities whose foundations are beneath your feet, or, remarkably, still arching over empty rooms. In fact, the brochure cites Old Testament verses as historical evidence of the city’s activities, noting, for example, that King Jabin and allied Canaanite cities waged a campaign against the advancing Israelites, led by Joshua, who destroyed the city of Hazor by fire, as detailed in Joshua 11: 1-12.

Hazor was rebuilt during King Solomon’s reign (the 10th century B.C.), and destroyed and rebuilt continuously until the second century B.C. The map in the park’s brochure shows the overlapping outlines of Hazor’s series of major foundations with crisscrossing dotted lines.

As you walk around Tel Hazor, which stretches about five hundred meters long, you can see the remains of a citadel, palace walls, column bases, the city wall from the 9th century B.C., a small four-roomed house with a massive olive press, and the city’s water system (also from the 9th century B.C.). The water system, designed to provide fresh water for the city when it was under siege, is a great, humbling enterprise. It’s the kind of thing you see and wonder what on earth you have ever really had to complain about.

A square, vertical shaft (about fifteen feet by twenty feet wide) delves down forty meters through bedrock, into the aquifer. Wide stairs cut into the shaft walls offer easy access down to the water. A gutter next to the stairs funnels rainwater away from underfoot. Today, a metal spiral staircase leads down to the water system. You walk down it, and the stairs thrum and echo with a low clang. At the bottom, it’s completely dark, and the stairs end. There’s a drip, somewhere in front of you, but no water visible.

How did they do it? Who were they? What were they like?

Archaeologically exhausted, we collapsed on a picnic table and surveyed the countryside. Tel Hazor lies in the Hula Valley, and, on Saturday morning, green land fanned out as far as one could see into the white haze. Mount Hermon was a white blur, to the north.

Five thousand years before lunch was enough for me.

We drove on to Tiberias, passing the Church of the Beatitudes, on the way down to Kinneret Yam, or the Sea of Galilee. Because we were starving for lunch, we continued along the edge of the Sea, past the Church (which commemorates the Sermon on the Mount), past the town of Capernaum (birthplace of five disciples), and past the town of Ein Tabgha, where the miracle of the loaves and fishes is said to have occurred.

One can only hope that Saint Peter remembers what a growling stomach feels like.

The north end of Tiberias was startlingly run-down; floors of the “Holiday Hotel” dangled ribars and pocked concrete. Barbed wire and cement walls blocked access, on the other side of the road, to the shore. Finally, we saw a parking lot, bits of a promenade, and, most importantly, people. We parked, and walked down to the end of the promenade, where a gauntlet of seafood restaurants waited, each complete with its own slick, tourist-roping, maitre d’ with carefully-preserved Grecian-5 hair, wearing a spotless white button-down shirt with the cuffs rolled up to his elbows.

Alas, the tables right over the Sea, spread with tight white cloths, and spotless glasses, beckoned to us as insistently as did the maitre d’.

“Haverim! Haverot! Friends!” He slid over to us, and clapped his hands together, as soon as someone’s eyes spotted the menu. “Welcome. We have the best seafood in town. St. Peter’s Fish. Fried. Grilled. Complete meal: salad, meat, potatoes. Only forty-nine shekels. I offer you a special toast. Special bread! Olives. I promise you an excellent meal.” He folded his arms and waited for us to gratefully prostrate ourselves and our wallets at a table.

The prices seemed reasonable for lunch.

“Thanks,” my husband said cheerfully, not won over by the sales pitch. “We’ll walk around a bit and come back.” The maitre d’s eyes darkened and he looked like he wanted to sneer. Three out of the four of us were promptly intimidated, and we stongarmed my husband to a table.

“Luh-AN mo-VEEL kveesh zeh?”
“Where does that road go?”
Friday: Rehovot, Tsfat, Rosh Pina

Friday morning, we rolled out of bed, into a rental car, and hit the road, only to return to the Institute twenty minutes later, when our Hungarian friend the Driver found he had forgotten a crucial piece of paper with the telephone number of Friday night’s lodgings.

The paper retrieved, we spent another twenty minutes trying to navigate our way out of Rehovot, and finally emerged triumphantly onto a large highway, heading north, in the direction of Tel Aviv.

The Driver regarded speed limits as Mario Andretti might regard the Amish: as a subject of obscure and little interest, perhaps quaint, but of really no relevance to the modern emancipated motorist. Our car, no bigger than a peach pit, rocketed up the 402 highway, and later, the 65, in a truly thrilling manner. The Italian in the front passenger seat, gripped the handle over her door and no doubt prayed. In the back, we watched Israeli taxi drivers veer out of our way. We passed a truck, a few lanes to the right, that had a fenced-in flatbed, where a horse stood, tied, lips and ears flapping like a dog. He seemed to be enjoying his ride more than we were.

“I asked for a stick shift,” shouted the driver to us, “but I got an automatic.” He turned around to see if we were sympathetic.

“Pity!” we replied in a bald lie. “WATCH THE ROAD!”

“The engine!” he wailed, “It is so small!” The Driver red-lined, just for emphasis.

Fortunately, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, we were snarled in traffic lights that lasted forever. A man carrying stacks of bagels on a pegged wooden board wandered in and out of traffic, doing business.

On the way to Tsfat, our destination for Friday, the highway winds through a handful of Israeli Arabic towns, and a foreign skyscape of minarets stretches up through the dust. Names on the highway signs, while rendered in English and Hebrew, too, are distinctly Arabic. In this stretch of the country, the West Bank is closer than you think, and it is best to avoid looking at the scale on the road map.

Just north of this section is the Jezreel Valley, and the Ksulot Valley, to the northeast. We passed Mount Tabor, the Gospel site of the transfiguration of Christ.

“What’s transfiguration?” The Driver and my husband asked. The Italian and I looked at them, and then at each other, and we both started to explain.

“It’s when–”
“You know, when the substance of something–”
“In this case, Christ…”
“–changes. Undergoes a transformation…”

The men looked at us blankly. One of our guidbooks contains the passage from Mark, which I read, until the Driver interrupted me.

“Could you explain that in simpler terms?” he asked me, leaning forward to look in at me in the rearview mirror. “The vocabulary is too difficult.”

“I beg your pardon,” I said, as calmly as possible, “But are you asking me to simplify the text of the Gospel?!” As we went over a bump, I hiccuped in astonishment, and lost the page.

“No, never mind,” called the driver. I sighed in relief. Mount Tabor passed by on the left, with the 1921 Franciscan Basilica of the Transfiguration faintly visible at the top. The Greek Orthodox Church of Elias, as well as a Canaanite shrine, also occupy the summit of Mount Tabor.

Finally, around one o’clock in the afternoon (on Friday afternoon, a few hours before Shabbat), we arrived in Tsfat, mistakenly pulling into every modern “quarter”, or neighborhood, before finding parking near the Old Jewish quarter. Because it’s difficult to render the Hebrew spelling of Tsfat (with the letters tsadik, feh, and taf) into different languages, it appears in half a dozen different varieties on signs as Sefad, Safed, Zefat, Sfat, and Tsefat.

Tsfat lies past the Beit Kerem Valley, in the Meron Mountains, and is home to a number of significant synagogues, as well as a thriving kabbalah and Judaica art community (thriving, except, of course, on Friday afternoons and Shabbat/Saturday). Jerusalem Street, a high, narrow, cobblestoned street with shops and cafes on one side, and a mountain view and sharp dropoff on the other, leads to the Synagogue Quarter and the Artists’ Quarter. We had left the car back in a parking lot, at the edge of the old quarter, and walked in, starving. The Baghdad Cafe, the first place we saw for lunch, served spectacular food, despite the town’s main street bisecting the kitchen from the tables outside.

Given the name, I hid behind my menu until we determined that the owners of the cafe looked more Ashkenazi (Eastern European) than Iraqi.

Darting between taxis, and pedestrians in Orthodox dress, our waitress eventually delivered a towering salad and sandwiches on fresh, hot bread.

The air was cool, up in the mountains, but the view was obscured: the outline of the hills below was hard to make out in the dusty white air. After lunch, we headed to the Synagogue Quarter; the streets were thinning, and stores were beginning to close. Behind wooden doors, and through thin lace curtains, you could hear families settling in for Shabbat. Many of the synagogues were closed to visitors by the time we found them; likewise, all but a few of the artists’ galleries were shuttered and locked by three o’clock. With flagging enthusiasm, we went back to the more modern section of the old quarter, near the Visitors’ Center (also closed), and found a tiny courtyard with three galleries open. The Italian and I lingered in the galleries while the men sat on a bench.

By four o’clock, we decided to call the innkeeper, and ended up back on Jerusalem Street, at a cafe serving Turkish coffee, tea, and nut-covered truffles. The Driver phoned the innkeeper on the Italian’s cell phone and carried on a shouted conversation in German-accented English and Hebrew.

“Yes! Hello? Shalom? Ich bin Herr–” The Driver stopped and listened, then got up and wandered around in the street, trying to find a better signal. A homeless man stopped and stared at him with a mixture of awe and disgust. “Tonight. Yes! We have rented the house–. Oh.” The Driver looked up and down the street. “Ok, yofi, we are on Yerushalayim Street. Outside of a cafe. We wait for you.” The Driver came back to the table and helped himself to a truffle. “He will come collect us,” he reported.

We sat and watched the shadows go up the wall of the shops. A man in a Mercedes with curtained windows pulled up across the street, and got out. We looked at him hopefully, but he locked his car and continued up the street.

Finally, a man in a beat-up Subaru pulled up, got out, and examined our group. He was wearing a dirt-smudged sweatsuit. “You have rented the house?” he asked us. Those of us still eating truffles swallowed them whole.

Since we had to go get our car, he agreed to meet us at the bus station, and lead us to the house, convoy-style. Locating the car proved easier than locating the bus station, but we caught up with the driver as he was leaving the bus station parking lot and tailgated him out of the old quarter of Tsfat, and into a residential quarter about three miles down the road.

We followed him to the house, got out, and examined our lodgings for the night. The Driver, who had arranged the accomodations through the Institute’s Visiting Scientists Liason, asked the family who owned the house where a good place for dinner was in Tsfat.

They roared with laughter. “Tsfat! All closed now! Shabbat!” A woman smiled and shook her head at us. “Nothing is open there. You will have a better chance in Rosh Pina, down the road. It is full of life.”

Memo to self: plan trips around the country for during the week.

We drove back through Tsfat, shot down the mountainside, and blew into Rosh Pina. Settled by Romanian Jews in the nineteenth century, the town is partly preserved, partly still in ruins. The town’s name means “head stone” or “cornerstone,” and many of the buildings are hewn out of solid white stone, although the name refers to the fact that the town is the Galilee region’s first Jewish settlement since the Roman era. Rosh Pina was very quiet, as the sun was setting on Friday afternoon, but its synagogue was open to visitors. A few artist’s galleries, one or two craft shops, and a number of tucked-away elegant restaurants give it the aura of a smaller, yet-to-be-discovered Santa Fe.

We walked down a terraced garden, pulling the Italian away from the menu of a beautiful Italian restaurant, and found dinner at J’ai Uni, a place with tables under tall eucalyptus trees. Since it was cold, though, we ate inside, under lights with clusters of colored glass beads, and wall benches laid with maroon pillows. J’ai Uni’s menu of pastas, and grilled meats and vegetables made the desolate walk through dusty, Shabbat-silent Tsfat worth it, and the Cinematheque next door was showing a movie in English at 8:00pm that evening. Rosh Pina took on a positively rosy glow in my affections.

“Sayiver vamechonit.”
“Automobile travel.”

Yes! A road trip! To somewhere other than Ben-Gurion Airport!

Alas, although I’ve been practicing all week, I fear my travelling companions won’t appreciate my well-polished rendition of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” since it’s not part of their cultural heritage (via grade-school trips). Hopefully, they’ll teach me the Czech, Hungarian, and Italian equivalents.

One town on the itinerary, near Galilee, is Tsfat. (Too bad the “Artists’ Colony” link doesn’t work.)

“La-ha-vi-NAH ha-tsa-di-YIT.”
“Making Yourself Understood.”

Yet another exchange of the “Who’s On First” variety, Israeli-and-expatriate style:

There’s a vast supermarket attached to a shopping center about a half-hour’s walk west from the main gate of the Institute. Why trek to a giant supermarket when we’re surrounded by charming neighborhood groceries, you may ask? Well, I love our grocers, but I prefer to buy meat that was safely butchered in the A.D. time frame, rather than B.C. The historical complexities of FoodNetwork’s new show, “What Would Jesus Eat?” aisde, I’m fairly sure that, when it comes to corner-shop-meat, Even Jesus Wouldn’t Eat This Stuff.

On my way out of the gate, I stopped to ask one of the security guards if she knew the name of this shopping center. It was about sixty degrees here, today, and she was sitting outside on a stool, her face and sunglasses tilted upwards. I hated to interrupt her.

“This shopping center has a supermarket attached to it,” I said, trying to offer more detail.

She thought for a second. “Mega?”

“I guess…” I couldn’t remember what the name of the supermarket was. “But what’s the name of the whole shopping center?”

The girl looked at me, flipped open her phone, and began to talk, Bond-style, to another security guard who was standing about fifty feet away, in the little security hut.

“American City?” she asked me.

“Me? Um, I’m from Denver,” I said. “In Colorado. But why…?”

Her phone beeped angrily, and the voice of the other security guard broke in. She nodded, and then looked up and waved to him.

“American City,” she said.

What does it matter? I thought. Is this such a high-security question? Why do I need clearance from the Institute to go to the mall?

“Denver, but, no, really, it’s not a big deal,” I said, turning to look at the other guard across the street. “I just wanted to know the name of the mall. My husband is with the Institute.” Surely, showing them my i.d. would work. I dug around for my Institute i.d. and passport. “But I don’t live in Denver anymore.”

“It’s American City!” the girl practically shouted at me, forgetting her compatriot on the line. The phone crackled and went dead. Across the street, her colleague shouted at her in Hebrew and gestured with his machine gun.

“Which American city?!” I yelped. “What do you want to know? New York? Los Angeles? Oh, I did live near L.A….” Was such interrogation really necessary? I made a mental note to call the Visiting Scientists liason and–

“GVERET!” The girl snapped her phone antenna back in its holder, and rolled her eyes. “LADY! The name of the shopping center is ‘American City’!”

“Oh.” I said sheepishly. “Thank you.”

What a ridiculous name for a mall. Even “Cleveland” would have been better; at least, it wouldn’t be so abstract. The “American City” mall boasts a branch of the Mega supermarket chain, a McDonald’s, a handful of cut-rate clothing stores, a café, a florist, one excellent branch of Steimatzky’s (bookstore), and four floors of slowly-expiring retail space. It makes the empty corridors of the original Westland shopping center (on West Colfax) during the late ‘90s look like downtown Miami on a Friday night.

The café and the florist are both near the main entrance to the mall, and apparently thrive on the oxygen of passerby who are sucked in by the warring aromas of coffee and flowers. The other stores, buried in the belly of the lonely inner hallway, are not so lucky; McDonald’s, the exception, does a steady trickle of business in McShwarma and McKebab from its position in the guts of the dying shopping center.

“Beh-EM-tsa ha-ma-a-GAL.”
“In the middle of the circle.”

Stage Two of Operation Here Fishy, Fishy (aka “dinner”) met with limited success. Thursday night, I retrieved Moshe the Fish from his plastic bundle on the bottom shelf of the fridge, rinsed him off, and placed him on a big circle of sliced leeks on our cookie sheet. He was about twelve inches long (discounting his tail and head left eight edible inches), only slightly shorter than the width of our oven. I gave him the roast chicken treatment: a stuffing of butter, herbs, and lemon slices, and a little garlic-and-olive-oil massage a la Julia Child, whose philosophy behind this was, “well, the bird might as well be happy.” By the time I’d finished poking rosemary sprigs into him, however, Moshe was more puffy than the Michelin Man, and far less happy than him. The last touch (or the crowning blow, depending on your perspective) was a dousing with a squeezed whole orange, and then he went into the oven.

Twenty minutes later, Moshe’s top side looked great, but when I flipped him over, I yelped. The bottom side was still, to put it mildly, raw and slimy. Thus began the flipping process of trying to even out the roasting. Finally, after an hour (don’t laugh), I pulled him out of the oven for good, and he steamed up all of the kitchen windows with a pleasant herb-vapor cloud.

Holding a knife and a spatula, I stared at Moshe, and then at the two dinner plates, theorizing that I could just flip off the sides like little fish-waffles. How is it that I’ve never seen anyone serve a whole fish? I’ve seen plenty of turkeys and chicken carved, but this bore no resemblance to those. So what we ended up with was a pile of fish flesh on bones. It tasted fine, but neither Moshe nor I were really ready for prime-time, yet.

###

Last night, we attended a joint birthday party for a friend and his colleague, an Italian postdoc.

When we arrived, it was a relatively sophisticated, small affair. Appetizers were still obediently in their bowls, and about eight people stood around drinking red wine. Someone had peeled and painstakingly segmented about a dozen oranges, and they rested elegantly in two glass bowls. An iPod, hooked up to speakers, softly played tango music.

The Italian postdoc, Leia, a petite girl with curly dark hair up in a loose bun, laughed a lot and kept excusing herself to answer the phone. More people arrived. Of course, all the European girls wore tight black pants and pointy black shoes. They looked ready for a night of clubbing. In my gray jeans and black clogs, I looked ready for a grad-student reading of the complete works of John Donne.

The majority of the guests were Leia’s friends and colleagues, and, around ten o’clock, they presented her with a giant wrapped box that looked like it might contain a dish setting for twenty. Everyone formed a large circle around the birthday girl, who sat on a chair and initially plucked delicately at one taped end of the box as it sat on the floor.

“Hey, it’s not Christmas,” one of her friends teased her. “Go for it!”

Leia then ripped into the gift with great zeal, and shrieked ecstatically, when she saw what it was. “OH! A coffee machine!” Or, more specifically, an espresso maker. Raptly clutching her gift, the girl looked approximately like Dante in the Divine Comedy, must look when he glimpses the gates of Heaven. Such is the Italians’ love affair with the coffee bean. (Really, the coffee’s not that bad in town, I thought). On the verge of tears, Leia ran around the apartment, kissing each of her friends who had contributed the gift. Then she wrapped her thin arms around the precious box, hoisted it to hip level, and carefully toddled off to the kitchen with it.

The door buzzed, and a tall, thin girl with a piercing look and dark hair leaned in. “Oh, hello,” she said, in a British accent. She looked around the room, recognizing people. “Oh, hello, hello, HELLO! I’m not late, am I?” I inadvertently clutched my plastic glass of wine until it crackled, and heaved a deep, inward sigh. We previously met Jasmin at a dinner party in October. On a scale of one to ten, where one is the least extroverted and ten is the most, Jasmin is a forty-five. The Life of the Party. Upon meeting such people, introverts like me are usually driven to hide under the nearest piece of large furniture, such as a coaster.

The Italian postdoc flitted over to Jasmin and kissed her on both cheeks. “No, no, it’s fine. I just opened my first gift!” She beamed. “A coffee machine!”

“Wow, lovely, lovely,” Jasmin shouted. “Presents!” She threw off her pea-coat to reveal a skimpy, skin-colored tank top, which, at certain angles, was indistinguishable from actual skin. “You must open mine,” she told the Italian girl. “But I’ll wrap it first, shall I?” With that, she vanished into the hallway.

Meanwhile, our friend opened his gifts: a bottle of wine from us, and chocolate-covered coffee beans from another friend.

Jasmin blew out from the hallway and handed the Italian girl a black paper gift bag. “Here you are, happy birthday!” The Italian girl blushed and opened the bag. She pulled out a red beret and asked, “What do I do with this?”

“Now, it’s not that I want to change your look,” Jasmin began, tucking the girl’s head into the beret, “Really, I don’t! You have a great look!” She stood back and twisted out a few strands of hair. “But, you know, sweetie, you should just have fun with this!”

“You think I dress badly!” The Italian girl accused her, laughing.

“Oh, my God, no! But keep going,” Jasmin encouraged her, pointing to the bag. “There’s more!”

“I sort of thought there would be underwear in there,” the girl said, with relief. Then she pulled out a corduroy miniskirt with a four-inch flounced hem that was, more or less, underwear. The girl collapsed in giggles. “How am I supposed to wear this?” She held it up and stretched it across her hips. “I am not skinny enough!” She was probably a size four.

Leia’s friends loyally defended her tiny waist: “No, no, it’s fine! It will fit!” During a pause, someone had the misfortune to utter pragmatically, “Anyway, it will stretch,” and was rewarded with Darth-Vader looks from the crowd.

“You should go try it on,” Jasmin urged, fanning Leia excitedly with the gift bag.

“Nude! Nude!” one of the girl’s friends shouted, clapping his hands wildly. “Of course, I mean that only in the classical Italian sense,” he added.

At that point, someone cranked up the iPod until it quivered with alarm in its holder. Tango music boomed through the room, but was soon replaced by the entire works of ABBA, for which the crowd of Russians and Europeans went completely nuts, and began to dance as though fire ants had invaded their shoes. The apartment turned into a mini-disco, with about thirty postdocs dancing with wild abandon. This was all highly educational for me, since I’ve only ever seen Humanities people party with such gusto. I can now report that those not in the liberal arts dance just as badly as we liberal arts majors do. Perhaps only P.E. majors can really dance.

A few minutes later, as the party zoomed on, Leila and Jasmin careened out of the kitchen with a blue plastic bowl. Something orange sloshed around inside it.

“We made a drink!” Jasmin shouted over the music. “Everyone must come and try it!” She swung a plastic ladle around her head. “It’s just the teensiest bit of vodka, and lots of orange juice!” She reconsidered with a thoughtful look. “Or maybe it’s the other way ’round.”

We backed away from the bowl and its unstable contents, around the crowd of dancing scientists, and drank more wine. Suddenly someone switched the music from ABBA to Cher.

“Who did that?” Jasmin screeched from the dance floor. “DJ Crap?” She bounced over to the iPod, which was blinking red and clinging for dear life to its little stand, and switched the music back to ABBA. The iPod hiccuped and tipped out of its stand, but ABBA continued.

Soon, the lights dimmed and, from the kitchen, someone floated out with a candle-lighted cake. After Leia and our friend blew out the candles, the Russians insisted that we join hands and dance and sing a Russian song around the two birthday people. While they tried to decide what to sing, I dragged my husband around the circle with me.

“I’m not singing,” he told me. “It’s the language of the occupier!”

“Okay,” I replied, plodding around the circle. “But it may be the only way we get out of here.”

The crowd abandoned the notion of singing, once Leia and her friends began to pass around birthday cake. The scientists took to the two kinds of chocolate cake like little kids.