Say It in Hebrew

“Kham me-OD.”
“Very hot.”

The Dead Sea, Part 2

After Charlie and the Spanish-speakers went off to Masada, I stared into my locker at the Spa and tried to formulate an approach.

What first? Sea or mud? I had never considered this kind of dilemma before.

I changed, crammed everything into the locker, and flip-flopped out from the women’s side of the lockers. The first floor of the spa is one giant, brown-tiled room, partitioned off into women’s and men’s locker sections, with separate baths behind the lockers, and one mixed bath at the end of both sections. The other half of the first floor was spread with lounge chairs, and the wall of windows looked out over the outdoor pool, with a wider view of the Dead Sea, facing the northeast. The din from the first floor was incredible: there was hardly any splashing from the baths, but the pensioners who were forcibly occupying the lounge section–that is, those who weren’t splayed out, snoring–were chattering in high-pitched voices to each other.

There appeared to be no one under the age of seventy in the lounge section. But, darn, they looked good.

I headed around the pool, past a grassy area below the pool with palm trees (where I staked out a spot for later), past the shaded areas near the giant mud box and a six-sided turning mirror right next to it, past the mineral-water showers next to the mud station, to the tractor stop.

Tractor stop, you say?

The level of the Dead Sea receded at a shocking rate during the twentieth century, when the flow from the Jordan River ceased, in the 1960s, leaving a good kilometer between the Ein Gedi Spa and the actual waterline of the Sea. (Originally, the Spa was built on the shore, but the shore is much farther out, now.) So that tourists or pensioners from Be’er Sheva don’t have to do the embarrassing “Ooh! Owee! Ouch! Hot!” walk down to the beach, the Spa offers a tractor-pulled cart with benches.

My theory is that the massage industry at the Spa is generated in large part by the spine-crushing effect of being jerked down the road by a sputtering tractor engine.

To get into the Sea, you have to walk down a gangplank, into the water. Fellow tourists may point and say something in Russian to you, which turns out to be “Step!”, too late, at the bottom. Thanks, anyway.

The Sea feels like silky water; when I lifted my hand out of the water, it didn’t feel wet, or wet as you normally think of it. When I rubbed my fingers together, it was as though there was hardly any water on them at all. The Sea is an opaque teal color, and there’s absolutely nothing growing or living in it; its salinity is about 300 parts per thousand, which is about nine times as much as the salt concentration of ocean water.

I walked out past the raft, which was tethered to the gangplank with a long cord. Most of the pensioners went hand-over-hand to the raft and clung to it, even though the water there was waist-deep. I kept walking out, and then hopped a bit, to see how buoyant I was.

Very. I popped up onto the water and sat there; I felt like I was on top of the water, and constantly rolling off it. Your center of gravity is much higher, because of the buoyancy caused by the water’s high density.

The few people who were scattered out beyond the raft, like me, were all wearing silly grins.

As I lay back and looked at the reddish mountains on the western side of the Sea, right behind Ein Gedi and the road, I was so relaxed that all I could think was, “Gee, it looks a lot like Arizona.”

On the eastern side of the Sea, the hills of Jordan loomed behind the dust, but that was all I could see.

I floated around for a while, and then headed back for the mud, gingerly sitting on the tractor for the jolting ride back. For about half an hour, I had lazed in the Dead Sea, but the reduced ultraviolet levels meant that I didn’t get (too) sunburned…

Next to the mud box were the same hard-core mud folk I had seen on my way down to the Sea; these people were draped in the patio chairs provided by the Spa, sitting in the sun and shade, baking. They were covered, every inch, in the dark slate-green goop, and no one sitting there spoke to each other, as though to move or speak would break the spell.

I would venture that, for most people over the age of four, the experience of digging into a giant wooden box of clay-like mud and gleefully slapping it on oneself, is not an everyday thing. All health benefits aside, there’s something exhilarating about slathering yourself in mud–for a moment, you’re a kid again.

The mud hardened and caked on about a minute after I covered myself in it. It was hot. And itchy. I was no competition for the mud folk, and I’m convinced that some of them snickered at me as I ran for the open showers, a few minutes after walking around like a giant ball of dried goo.

Very relaxing, though! And everyone standing at the open showers, tugging on the cords for fresh water, exclaimed in his or her language, “My skin feels GREAT!”

I ambled back to the building, and headed for the thermal mineral-water baths, which smelled slightly sulfurous and powerfully healthy, even though the water was an odd greenish-tan color. I’m not sure what explains the smell, since the sulfur content is pretty low; the mineral composition of the Dead Sea (which feeds the baths, I think) consists principally of magnesium chloride, potassium chloride and sodium chloride.

Whatever it was, it was stinky. I bobbed around in the warm bath for a while, on the women’s side, until two German-speaking women came in, stripped, and got in, next to me.

Americans don’t do nudity so well. Or maybe we don’t do clothing so well, when others are nude. Either way, I felt silly (but thin) and clambered out.

In fact, going to the Dead Sea is a marvelous way to improve your body image. After five hours of watching pensioners amble to and from the sea, the baths, lockers, showers, etc., I thought, “Good God, why don’t I have a bikini on, then?!” They looked like they had not only eaten Heidi Klum for lunch, but stolen and put on her swimsuit-issue outfit.

I decamped to the grass-and-palm-tree area with my books, lugged over a lounge chair (in a sarong, so bonus points for difficulty), and spent a blissful few hours under a palm tree, reading and napping. Napping is a difficult activity for paranoid tourists like me, who, even in a remote spot within a remote spot, feel like they must have all their stuff within sight and reach at all times. I draped my limbs over my gear and slept.

When I woke up and staggered to the “snake bar” an hour or two later with my gear, it was swarmed with people, including a small group of tourists from Japan who were clothed from head to toe. The Israeli contingent looked at them with interest and some degree of pity.

I took lunch back to my beach chair, read some more, watched a lot of nothing going on in the Sea itself, relaxed, and drove the man under the next tree generally crazy by munching on coated peanuts.

Did I mention it was hot? During the last hour before the appointed group-meeting time Back at the Bus, I began to wonder if things were really all that healthy. Something–the high atmospheric pressure at the Dead Sea?–was giving me a powerful headache, and I was running out of water. I sadly left my idyllic spot and went inside to change; true, it was cooler inside, but the “lounge area” was still filled with pensioners, all of whom were cackling like Macbeth’s witches about God knows what. They sat in little groups and tried to wage verbal war on the other groups; whatever it was, it was loud. Well, if they were waiting loudly for Godot, they were just going to have to shove over and make room for me. Their crankiness was infectious.

Charlie appeared at 4:30. I wanted to ask him if my pores looked smaller, but I thought he might take it the wrong way.

“Kham.”
“Hot.”

The Dead Sea, Part 1

I left the apartment at 5:45 am, yesterday morning, and by 11:30 am, I was bobbing in the Dead Sea at the Ein Gedi Spa.

“Don’t you want to go to Masada, too?” asked the tour-guide reservations guy, when I called mid-week to book a place on Thursday’s tour. “We stop at Ein Gedi on the way back, for a couple of hours.”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Are you sure?” he pressed. “Masada is a very important site!” (The fortress at Masada, high on a mountain, was the site of Jewish resistance to the Romans in 73 A.D.; the Zealot tribe committed suicide, rather than fall to the Romans. Every year, Israeli soldiers vow that Masada will not fall again.)

“Yes, I know, but I only want the spa–for the whole day,” I said peevishly, like some third-rate celebrity. I had a vision of one entire day filled with mineral water, salts, baths, fluffy towels, and palm trees, and no amount of history or religion was going to interfere with it.

Finally, the reservationist relented and grudgingly booked me as “SPA ONLY”. I worried that they would make me wear a nametag with “HEDONIST HEATHEN” on it.

At 6:45 am, I walked out of the Tel Aviv-Merkaz train station. To say that it took me almost two years to discover that “Merkaz,” “Arlozoroff,” and “Savidor” are synonyms referring to the Merkaz station, doesn’t bode well for any sort of future career as a tour guide… (In my defense, the last two are hardly ever used, although “Savidor” does pop up on destination boards in a maddening, mysterious way.)

It was cool and foggy, Thursday morning, and I didn’t mind waiting by the bus “terminal” (two designated parking spaces) for the bus to show up. After about ten minutes, a short woman with curly brown hair, who was wearing fascinating plaid golf pants, sidled up to me. I stepped away. She followed me. As I was about to glare at her, she said, “You are here for the tour?”

“Yes,” I replied.

“Dead Sea tour?”

I nodded, and she beamed, relaxing and hoisting her bag up onto the trunk of a car parked nearby.

“Geveret, GEVERET!” the guard near the entrance to the bus parking lot shouted, like Jerry Lewis. “HEY, LADY!” The guard dashed over, and she yanked her bag off the car. The guard dusted the back of the car with his shirtsleeve. “It’s new,” he said in a hurt voice. The woman looked away airily.

A few minutes later, the tour guide showed up. Charlie, whose nametag listed Hebrew, English, French, Spanish, Romanian, and Polish as his languages, was a tall man who looked like a little like Qaddafi, if Qaddafi had a pleasant smile and expressive eyebrows.

“Colorado means red,” he told me, after he found out where I was from. “In Israel, we have adom.”

“Oh, like Magen David Adom,” I said. (This is the name of the Israeli Red Cross / Red Star of David.)

I think he was searching for the word, “Duh”, in any language, but he continued.

“America is full of fascinating place names, like Philadelphia,” he said.

“The city of brotherly love,” I added, determined to get one right.

Charlie nodded, satisfied, and excused himself to make a bunch of phone calls, which produced a giant bus for the drive to the Dead Sea via Jerusalem.

A handful of people got on the bus in Tel Aviv, and, except for me and two German girls, they all spoke Spanish. So Charlie announced everything in English and Spanish, with some Hebrew thrown in, for good measure.

“Señoras y señores, hoy es Yom Yerushalayim, y tenemos mucha gente en los calles, oy!” Charlie recounted in two languages how difficult it would be to get around Jerusalem, since the city would be crowded with people and parades. He then discussed it in Hebrew with the driver…who also spoke French.

In Jerusalem, Charlie’s “jolly good morning” attitude cracked, a little. The tour was scheduled to pick up fifty guests from Jerusalem hotels, and the driver, Sammy, incurred Charlie’s wrath by continually choosing the wrong streets. It was difficult to tell exactly where we were in Jerusalem: girls wearing school tunics, jeans, and headscarves walked past the bus, up the hill; Orthodox couples pushing strollers walked down, a few minutes later. The old city has this kind of quiet coexistence, but I don’t know how far outside the old city walls it extends.

We left Jerusalem via a tunnel under Mt. Scopus, passing by the Ma’ale Adumim settlement; here’s a map. Charlie pointed out that the landscape on the western side of the tunnel is covered in evergreen forests, while the eastern side is arid, rocky desert.

“On your right, you will see a camel,” boomed Charlie, from the microphone. Sure enough, a camel whizzed by, and, a few meters later, what looked like yurts slid into view; these were the tents of Bedouin tribes, nestled in among the rock valleys, far from the road. Not all of the tents were round, and from a distance, they looked as though they were covered in big squares of chamois cloth. Occasionally, as we passed, wind would catch a tent flap and reveal brighter cloth, inside.

At some point, the road winds up just at the northern edge of the Dead Sea, and a road sign says, between the Hebrew and Arabic characters, “JERICHO” (to the left) and “DEAD SEA” (to the right). We went right; to the left, the skyline of Jericho, the oldest inhabited spot on earth, shimmered through the morning dust, eight to ten miles to the north.

On the way to the Dead Sea, horizontal lines of blue tile mark sea level, and then below sea level, on mountainsides abutting the road.

“Slow down! Slow down!” Charlie yelled to Sammy in Hebrew. “It’s here!”

“This is a bus, a bus, not a donkey cart!” I imagined Sammy replying, as he shouted back to Charlie, and didn’t slow down. “I’m on a public road, here; what am I supposed to do?”

“This is my job!” Charlie shot back, and slumped in his seat, with the hand holding the microphone dangling off the seat railing in front of him. The sound system emitted alarmed screeches. He picked it up, and glared at Sammy. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, I was trying to show you a very important line, a water mark that shows how much the Dead Sea fell between 1913 and 1917.” Charlie sighed. “We will attempt it again on the return.”

Sadly, there was not enough Dramamine in the world to make me budge from the second row of seats. The road to the Dead Sea may go mainly down, but once you get to the shore of the sea, the trip south is surprisingly curvy.

Charlie recovered enough to announce our arrival at the Ahava factory. I pressed my nose to the glass suspiciously. This wasn’t in any description of the tour, on the website. I had a moment of flashback, to when my aunt and I walked into Hilo Hattie’s, with what seemed like hundreds of other Tourists, who had all arrived by bus.

I smelled a kickback.

Charlie shepherded us in, and turned the group over to an Ahava rep, who crammed us into a room at the back of the showroom, where she began to ask what language the group spoke.

“Español! ES-PAÑOL!” cheered a good chunk of the tour group. “La mayoria!” one member noted proudly.

“English,” replied two pale people feebly.

“Ok, English,” said the guide, and popped a video cassette into a vcr beneath a giant tv. I got up and left.

My problem with this aspect of the tour was not necessarily that it was an unnanounced stop, and obviously one motivated by the kickback, but that Charlie had, only moments before we arrived, just finished describing how companies like Ahava contribute to the erosion of the Dead Sea, by harvesting it for cosmetic products. To suddenly be wheedled into purchasing 160-shekel mud didn’t sit well, for anyone who has vaguely socially-conscious tendencies.

(And it’s cheaper at the duty-free place, at Ben-Gurion, anyway. So much for my liberal leanings.)

After waiting out the Ahava trip outside–the “factory tour” is a view of the production line’s boxing-and-shipping station–we lumbered off to Ein Gedi.

The bus slowed at the Ein Gedi public beach, surrounded by palm trees and a restaurant. “Ahhhh,” went the tour group.

“We are not stopping here,” Charlie intoned over the PA system, and Sammy hit the gas, evilly. “Awww!” went the group.

We went past Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. We were not stopping there, either, which dismayed my seatmate, a French-speaking woman from Algeria with red hair, clad in pink linen. She fingered a turquoise pendant on a red thread around her neck in a nervous way.

“But the man who sold me the tour told me we would go to Qumran,” she told Charlie in French.

I felt compelled to mention to her that the Dead Sea Scrolls were in Jerusalem, at the Israel Museum, at the Shrine of the Book. Actually, I think I said “temple du livre”, but I figured it was close. She rewarded me with a cold stare.

Finally, the Ein Gedi Spa rose up on the shore of the Dead Sea, and Charlie called to those of us who were getting off, “Get ready!”, as though Sammy were going to open the door, swing the bus by, and hurl us off.

He stopped, and three of us got off. We looked at each other sheepishly, for a second. Then Charlie got out and led us through the check-in counter, where we were rewarded with a locker key, but none of the cool and impossibly-fluffy teal-blue towels that everyone else at the Spa got. I blinked past the smell of sulfur at the check-in desk (but by the end of the day, didn’t notice it).

“Here are the lockers, baths, the mud is outside, and downstairs there is a snake bar,” Charlie rattled off.

Pardon?

“Snake bar!” He mimed eating.

Oh…

Never mind. I had come prepared, including basic spa essentials such as a towel, two kinds of nuts, a biography of Shakespeare, and Great Expectations.

“A-NEE ha-ver-AH shel…”
“I am a friend of…”

Beginning sometime in February, K. and I started talking about how to find the other spouses of postdocs and visiting scientists, in order to establish some sense of community.

It’s strange to live somewhere where you have never met your neighbors. To me, it’s unnatural. Most of last year felt like a Samuel Beckett version of “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood”:

“Won’t you be mine? Won’t you be mine? Won’t you be my neighbor?”

NO, came the resounding silence.

Is the desire to go knocking on nearby doors with coffee cake in hand solely an American trait?

Perhaps the need to meet neighbors is explained more by living patterns: people in apartment buildings are physically closer to their neighbors, to begin with, than are those in suburbia. In an apartment block, you hear your neighbors sing, argue, and do dishes–along with a host of other activities. When I lived in London, my host family’s house shared a wall with the man living next door–a very thin wall. I heard the man sneeze, clink silverware, and sigh, on the other side of my bedroom wall.

I most certainly did not want to meet him. In fact, I wanted him to leave me alone and to sigh more quietly, please. I would have preferred it greatly if I lived on a farm and he lived on the next farm, because then I wouldn’t have to hear him incessantly.

But there’s something about apartment living, Bauhaus-style, that made me want to force people out of their concrete stupor, here, on our block, and get to know each other. With people from all over the world, it had the potential to be a really vibrant community. I used the word “community” so often, this winter, that I should have been shipped off to a kibbutz.

I naively forgot that at least half of these people were working feverishly, every day, to come up with Results. Scientists seem to speak about Results in the same way people used to talk about opium in the nineteenth century.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t really with these people that K. and I were concerned; they were already taken care of by the Institute. It was the others–the ones whose visas are stamped “NO WORK PERMIT” and “ACCOMPANYING”, in a vaguely offensive way–with whom we wanted to meet, talk art, literature, and philosophy, and, occasionally, go shopping. (The revolution would come later.)

So after months of talking about it, and after gentle prodding from the Visiting Scientist liason, K. showed up at the apartment, last Wednesday morning, about half an hour before the meet-’n-greet affair was to begin.

She added a bag of pretzels and a package of cookies to the table, and plopped in a chair in a Cleopatra-esque way that expectant mothers seem to do well. I surveyed our living room, and tried to determine how kid-proof it was. With a bamboo stalk in a tiny glass, and my prized Riverside Shakespeare perilously close to a bowl of cookies, I determined that it wasn’t. And probably I wasn’t. I hoped anyone with kids would keep them on a short leash. Literally. But I was feeling a little bitter.

“You realize this could be you, me, and Liza sitting around, don’t you?” I asked K. Last year, Liza asked me to host the same kind of thing, and two other spouses of postdocs showed up…and then turned out to be postdocs, themselves. Cheaters.

K. sighed. “Everyone’s moving in June, anyway,” she said woefully.

“Sorry,” I said. “Have a cookie.”

Our buzzer rang, and K. paused with a cookie halfway in her mouth, her eyebrows raised. “Someone’s early,” she said, through crumbs.

“An American,” I guessed correctly.

First to arrive was a woman from Michigan (originally from South America), who was leaving next week to do volunteer work in Jerusalem, as a dentist. She had a bright smile and black hair that swung just beneath her ears. When she offered to drive K. to the hospital, K’s eyes welled up. When she realized that she would be in Jerusalem and couldn’t do it, K’s eyes welled up for a second time.

Neighbors from across the street arrived, next, before we could recover from the shock of anyone actually turning up, at all: a woman from Hungary, with a long braid and her quiet, three-year-old son, who was at wide-eyed level with the fruit and cookies arrayed on the kitchen table. As his mother and I talked, he sat on the edge of the sofa and calmly emptied a bowl of dried pineapple slices, politely piling them on a napkin on his knees. His mother, after restoring the pineapple to the bowl, steered her son over to the bookshelves, where he appraised our collection of Kinder-Egg toys with a practiced eye, and glanced up with a shy smile after I took down three for him to play with.

A woman from Germany arrived with a year-old baby; a woman from New York arrived and took to the babies instantly, as a practiced grandmother; two women from South Korea arrived, bearing homemade cookies and cherries, and a tiny, chirpy toddler–a girl who followed the Hungarian boy around in an adoring way, slapping the floor in glee when he did something particularly enchanting. Mae, visiting with her husband from Ann Arbor, arrived and we started talking about A.B. Yehoshua and his How-Not-to-Give-a-Thank-You-Speech controversy.

Liza stepped inside the apartment, registered shock at how many people were there, and instantly left, saying, “I’ll go get the nametags.” (She came back, a few minutes later, but I was darned if anyone was going to wear nametags. Too AA.)

K. and I were shocked. We really hadn’t expected so many people to show up. “Where have you all BEEN?” I wanted to shout. But it’s best not to terrify your guests in this fashion, so I just poured them more lemonade.

The apartment buzzed with voices and kids chirping for two hours; then, people exchanged email addresses and phone numbers with all the excitement of a highschool-yearbook-signing session.

And that’s how we kicked Beckett out of the neighborhood, for a day.

“Neh-heh-NAY-tee muh-OD.”
“I have enjoyed myself very much.”

The best thing to come out of this blog has been meeting Ben H. and his family, who have a far greater claim to the name “Rehovot” than I do; Ben, brave soul, took an interest in the blog and went so far as to go through the archives, where God knows what sort of writing lurks… The blog reveals how few Israelis I’ve actually met; Ben kindly proposed to remedy that, on a recent trip down from Haifa to his hometown.

So last Friday afternoon, we set out for the Alkalai Cafe, at the corner of Herzl and Weizmann streets, where I suggested the three of us meet for coffee.

Initially, on the Alkalai patio, there were four of us: me, J., Ben, and an Orthodox man, who was trying to persuade Ben to wear tefillin–the box containing portions of the Torah. As Ben politely waved away the black tefillin strands, the last guest packed up and disappeared.

Ben demystified military life and mandatory service, and shed light on other aspects of society, his family’s history in Rehovot, and where to get great falafel outside of Tel Aviv.

It was a little strange to meet someone who knows exactly how much I’ve complained, over the last two years. In my defense, I would like to say that I haven’t felt the need to track down tortillas in six months. Really! That’s quite an improvement!

Midway through coffee, Ben took a phone call, and then turned to us. “Would you like to come for dinner?”

This is the first such invitation in two years.

We were delighted to be asked, and happily made our way to Ben’s family’s home, a couple of hours later. (That is, after we got lost on the way.)

Ben’s mother, Michal, welcomed us in warmly, and we met Tamar and Tal, and sat down to a marvelous dinner. (If I made meatballs only half as well as Tamar does, I’d open a meatball shop and retire happily!) With great conversation, compelling stories, and laughter, we felt right at home.

At one point, Michal began, “You know, when Ben was younger…”

“Mom, don’t!” Ben protested. Tamar, Ben’s sister, laughed.

Michal continued with a smile. “In Rehovot, for a long time, the freight trains used to run, long before the passenger trains started to. After seeing these freight trains go by, day after day, Ben finally wrote a letter to the stationmaster, and asked to ride one of them. The letter reached the freight train company, and they agreed.”

Michal cited this as evidence of Ben’s curiosity and his willingness to find a means of connecting with people; it’s a great story, about someone with imagination, who would grow up to travel way beyond Rehovot.

All in all, we had a marvelous evening with a remarkable and generous family.

“Sah luh-AT.”
“Slow down.”

Last night, J.’s advisor and his wife invited us to see the fireworks for the Lag B’omer holiday, which is traditionally celebrated with bonfires.

Some people decided to have a bonfire of sound outside our apartment, on the street, and cranked their car stereo sub-woofers up until 6 am. When I called Security at 3 am, the guard responded sweetly, “Well, we can’t really do anything; it’s a holiday!”

“Can’t you move them further down the street?” I growled. “We’re trying to sleep, here!” I really did feel thirty.

At six o’clock, unable to compete with the birds, who had been warming up for two hours, the partiers gave up and went home.

By six in the evening, we were yawning, but we headed off to the advisor’s house, where everyone elected to depart for Tel Aviv ASAP. We piled in the car, along with a Lithuanian scientist visiting from Canada, and rolled merrily off…into a two-and-a-half-hour long traffic jam.

Normally, by train, you can get from Rehovot to Tel Aviv in about thirty minutes; by car, in about twenty minutes.

Creeping toward Tel Aviv, I remembered why my first impression of Israel was that it looked a lot like Los Angeles.

The sun set, trains passed unimpeded, the moon rose, and we were still not even in Tel Aviv. All of us stared glumly at the taillights and prayed for a parting of the traffic, Red-Sea style.

When we reached Tel Aviv, we circled the city like dust around a comet; which is to say, incredibly slowly. We could hear the fireworks begin and end. Someone in the car claimed to see them in a reflection from an office building, but this was met by the group with great skepticism. J’s advisor, a man of infinite patience behind the steering wheel, tried to find parking at two restaurants, before getting back on the highway and heading north to the port.

Even in the northern part of Tel Aviv, streets were packed, and at a standstill, but the sidewalks were full of people coming back from the fireworks. “How were they? Nice, I hope?” J’s advisor called wistfully to a mother and her daughter, out the car window.

The mother and daughter looked surprised, but stopped to talk, since we were clearly not going anywhere.

“Lovely! They were great!”

“We’ve been in the car for two and a half hours!” J’s advisor’s wife called to them in a tone of desperation. They shook their heads in commiseration.

A block later, the advisor put the car in park and motioned for all of us to get out, while he joined a very long line for a parking lot.

We were just south of the Reading power station, at the old Tel Aviv harbor. A bike path runs from the power station south to the old harbor (and continues all the way down to Jafo), past a cluster of cafes and restaurants, some of which overlook the beach from a wide boardwalk. We walked to the cafe at Comme il Faut, and sat outside, to soak up the wind and the sea salt. Frankly, it felt more like being in Normandy than in Israel; people sitting at tables closer to the beach were swaddled in fleece throws, and were trying to spear bits of their salads from between pieces of fringe.

But we were comfortable, and dined very happily at ten o’clock, with the waves breaking a few yards away. J’s advisor’s wife told us stories of the first Gulf War, when a postdoc and his wife called and asked to come stay with them, when the first sirens went off (signalling incoming missiles from Iraq).

“Actually,” Dr. E. said, “the sirens went off, and A. and his wife dove into their closet and sat there for four hours. Then they crawled out, called us, and came to stay for two weeks.” (“They were in your apartment,” she added, to us.)

“Every morning,” she went on, “A. and I would go out and do the grocery shopping. We would buy two loaves of bread every day, and go home and cook up a storm.” She laughed. “We all gained a lot, during those first two weeks of the war.”

“Some took it well,” she said. “But the postdoc’s wife, who was from Bogotá, stayed in the house for twelve days, shaking.” She shook her head, remembering. “Bogotá! Where the crime rate is through the roof! And she was worried that we’d get hit…”

“But how close did the missiles land?” I asked.

“Oh, Americans always think they landed very close,” she teased me. “But the closest one to land was about five kilometers from us, at Kibbutz Netzer Sireni. Do you know where that is?”

“Yes,” I exclaimed, “it’s really close!” The advisor’s wife just laughed.

When you’ve had to put on a gas mask for real, then everything else must seem trivial and liveable, in comparison…