Eleanor Marsh arrived in Jerusalem on a Tuesday in October 1969 with a press credential from The Observer, a medium-weight notebook, and the quiet confidence of a twenty-three year old who has just talked her editor into sending her somewhere he did not particularly want to send anyone.
The editor had said: Jerusalem. Fine. Write something about the city. Something accessible. Perhaps a sidebar about where to eat.
Eleanor had said: absolutely.
She had not mentioned that she intended to write something considerably more than a sidebar about where to eat. This seemed like a conversation better had after she had filed.
She cleared immigration at Lod Airport in forty-five minutes, which her taxi driver informed her was extremely fast. She had been asked, during those forty-five minutes, where she was born, why she was visiting, how long she was staying, whether she had been to Israel before, whether she knew anyone in Israel, what her father did for work, whether she was married, and whether she had any citrus fruit in her luggage.
She had no citrus fruit in her luggage.
The immigration officer had seemed mildly disappointed by this.
The taxi driver's name was Yossi and he had opinions. Strong ones. He delivered them in the specific tone of a man who has been waiting for someone to ask and has decided that Eleanor, by virtue of existing in his taxi, had asked.
Eleanor wrote none of it down.
Her editor had said specifically: Eleanor. Not politics.
She looked out the window at the Judean Hills moving past and thought about what she was going to write instead.
The Jaffa Gate.
She had read about it. She had seen photographs. She understood intellectually that it was a gate in the walls of the Old City built by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1538 and that it was the main western entrance to one of the most historically significant square kilometres on the surface of the earth.
None of this had prepared her for the actual experience of standing in front of it at seven in the morning while the city woke up around her in approximately six languages simultaneously.
The call to prayer was happening. The church bells were happening. Someone nearby was having an argument that appeared to require both parties to use their hands as well as their voices. The smell of fresh bread was coming from somewhere to her left. A cat of extraordinary confidence was sitting in the middle of the road and declining to move for a delivery truck whose driver was making his feelings known on the horn.
Eleanor stood at the Jaffa Gate with her notebook open and wrote: louder than expected.
Then she walked in.
The thing about Jerusalem that nobody tells you, or rather that everybody tells you but that you cannot understand until you are standing inside it, is that the city is not one city.
It is approximately seventeen cities occupying the same space simultaneously and conducting an ongoing negotiation about which of them is the real one.
The Old City is divided into four quarters. The Jewish Quarter, the Muslim Quarter, the Christian Quarter, and the Armenian Quarter, which Eleanor had not known existed until she arrived and which turned out to be the most interesting quarter in the city, populated by the descendants of survivors of the Armenian genocide who have been making extraordinarily beautiful ceramic tiles in this specific corner of Jerusalem since 1919 and appear to have no intention of stopping.
Four quarters. One square kilometre. Walls built in the sixteenth century around streets that were old when the walls were young.
Eleanor walked all of it.
She walked the Via Dolorosa, which is the route along which Jesus carried the cross to his crucifixion, a route marked by fourteen stations of devotion, currently also marked by approximately forty shops selling plastic crucifixes, a very good falafel stand, three establishments offering what they described as genuine biblical olive oil, and a child of about eight who followed Eleanor for two blocks trying to sell her a postcard of the Dome of the Rock before concluding she was not going to buy it and going back to whatever he had been doing before.
She walked through the souk, the covered market in the Muslim quarter, which smelled of spices and leather and something sweet she never identified and where the light came through the vaulted stone ceiling in columns that turned the dust in the air gold. She went in for a bottle of water. She came out forty minutes later having drunk three cups of coffee she had not asked for, discussed Manchester United in considerable depth with a merchant named Khalil who had very strong opinions about George Best, acquired a small ceramic tile with a blue geometric pattern that she would keep on her desk at The Observer for the next thirty years, and developed views about hummus that she had not previously held.
She walked to the Western Wall.
She stood before it for a long time without writing anything.
The wall is what remains of the retaining wall of the Second Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE. It is the holiest site accessible to Jewish worshippers. People press notes into the cracks between the stones. Prayers. Wishes. The names of the sick. The names of people who are no longer alive. The notes accumulate and are periodically collected and buried in the cemetery on the Mount of Olives.
Eleanor asked a man nearby what happened to the notes.
He said they were buried.
She asked where.
He said among the dead on the Mount of Olives.
She stood with this for a moment.
The prayers of the living buried among the dead. She found this either the most beautiful thing she had heard or the saddest and concluded it was probably both and that Jerusalem appeared to specialise in both simultaneously which was already becoming a pattern she would need to address in her piece.
She wrote: prayers buried among the dead. Both things at once. Come back to this.
She walked to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built on the site where Jesus was crucified and buried and is therefore the holiest site in Christianity. It is administered jointly by six Christian denominations: the Greek Orthodox, the Roman Catholic, the Armenian Apostolic, the Coptic, the Ethiopian, and the Syriac. Each denomination controls specific sections of the church. Arrangements for the management of common areas have been the subject of negotiation since the seventh century and remain, at the time of Eleanor's visit, ongoing.
The key to the church is held by the Joudeh family. The right to open the door belongs to the Nuseibeh family. Both families are Muslim. This arrangement was made by Saladin in the twelfth century and has continued uninterrupted since because the six Christian denominations trust a Muslim family with the key to their holiest church more than they trust each other.
Eleanor stood outside the church and read this in her guidebook.
She read it again.
She wrote in her notebook: the key to the holiest site in Christianity is held by a Muslim family because the Christians cannot agree. This is either a masterpiece of practical diplomacy or a theological situation of almost sublime absurdity. Possibly both. Definitely Jerusalem.
Then she went inside.
Above the entrance to the church, on a ledge above the doorway, there is a ladder.
It is a small wooden ladder, approximately two and a half metres tall, leaning against the wall. It has been there since at least 1728. There is a drawing from that year showing the ladder in exactly the same position. It has not moved since.
It has not moved since because moving it would require the agreement of the six denominations and the six denominations have not been able to agree on this specific point for approximately two hundred and forty years.
It is a ladder.
On a ledge.
Above the entrance to the holiest site in Christianity.
Eleanor looked at it for a long time.
She wrote in her notebook: the immovable ladder. Three hundred years. Cannot be moved because nobody can agree who has the authority to move it. The holiest site in Christianity has a ladder problem that makes the average British planning dispute look like a model of efficient governance.
She underlined ladder problem.
She went inside and found the church to be dark and incense-heavy and full of the specific quality of accumulated prayer, which is a real quality, a kind of weight in the air that has nothing to do with theology and everything to do with the sheer number of people who have stood in this space and meant something very deeply.
She stood in it for a while.
She did not write anything.
Some things, she was discovering, Jerusalem did not allow you to be witty about.
The ladder was one of the things Jerusalem allowed you to be witty about.
The interior of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was not.
She made a note of the distinction.
On the second day she went to the Temple Mount.
The Temple Mount is called Haram al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, by Muslims. It is the holiest site in Judaism. It is the third holiest site in Islam. It is the place where, depending on which tradition you are consulting, Abraham brought his son, the Temple of Solomon stood, the Second Temple stood and was destroyed, Muhammad ascended to heaven, and the world will one day end.
It is covering a lot of ground, theologically speaking, for one hill.
Eleanor walked across the wide stone plaza in the morning light. The Dome of the Rock rose ahead of her, its gold surface catching the October sun, and she understood for the first time why people throughout history had been willing to do extremely ill-advised things to control this specific piece of real estate. It was simply the most beautiful thing she had seen. Not beautiful in the way of art galleries or countryside or the view from certain hills in the Lake District. Beautiful in the way of things that are exactly what they are supposed to be.
She went in.
The rock is inside.
It is a large outcropping of natural stone, roughly eighteen metres by thirteen, irregular at the edges, ancient in a way that makes the dome above it seem recent. This is the rock, according to Jewish tradition, where Abraham bound his son for sacrifice. According to Islamic tradition this is where Muhammad stood before his ascent.
Eleanor stood beside it.
She looked at it for a long time.
She thought: everything starts somewhere.
She thought: this is the place where several very large things started.
She thought about what she had read in preparation for the trip. The history of the hill. The specific series of events that had produced this specific complicated present. She had read about Abraham, the man from Ur who had heard something he could not ignore and followed it out of the city and into the desert, who had two sons by two women and could not hold both stories together and left a silence between them that had been growing ever since.
She had read about Isaac, who sat down after his father's death and wrote the covenant and stopped at a name he could not write.
She had read about Jacob, who wrestled someone in the dark at a river crossing and refused to let go until he received a blessing and received instead a name, Israel, which became a people, which became a nation, which built the first Temple on this hill.
She had read about the destruction of the Temple. About the people who ran into the burning building to save what could be saved. About the exile and the return and the second Temple and the second destruction.
She had read about Jesus, who walked through this city and taught in its streets and was killed outside its walls and whose followers built a church over the place where he died that is currently managed by a committee of six that cannot agree on a ladder.
She had read about Muhammad, the orphan from Mecca who had stood on this rock and understood something about the shape of the world that nobody before him had been positioned to understand.
She stood on the Temple Mount and looked at the city spread below her. The Dome of the Rock. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Western Wall. The minarets. The bell towers. The ancient streets connecting them all.
She thought: every enormous thing begins with something small.
She thought: the storm does not know the butterfly.
She wrote this in her notebook.
She underlined it.
Then she went to find somewhere to have lunch.
The cafe was in a narrow street near the souk, the kind of place that has no sign because everyone who needs to know about it already knows about it. Eleanor found it by following a man who looked like he knew where he was going.
She ordered coffee. It arrived immediately and was extraordinary.
The man at the next table was perhaps seventy years old, small, with the expression of someone who has thought carefully about a great many things and arrived at a kind of equanimity that from the outside was indistinguishable from amusement. His name, she learned later, was Professor Elias Khoury. He had been born in this city. He had lived in it through the British Mandate and the partition and the wars and the occupation and the reunification under Israeli authority two years earlier. He had watched armies come and go. He had watched walls built and torn down and rebuilt.
He taught history at the Hebrew University.
He found Eleanor's notebook immediately interesting.
She found his coffee immediately interesting.
They began to talk.
She asked him: how did this city become this city.
He said: which time.
She said: any time. All times.
He said: that is the correct answer to the wrong question.
She said: what is the correct question.
He said: the correct question is not how did this become this. The correct question is how does a hill become a hill. And the answer is not armies. Armies come later. The answer is always something small. Someone says a word. Someone does not say a word. Someone writes something down. Someone does not write something down. Someone stays when they could have left. Someone leaves when they could have stayed. Very small things. And then the rings spread outward and by the time the rings are large enough to see nobody can remember the stone.
Eleanor wrote this down.
He watched her write it.
He said: you are going to put that in a newspaper.
She said: I am going to try.
He said: the British always try to put Jerusalem in a newspaper. It does not fit.
She said: I am aware of that.
He said: it is like trying to put the sea in a bottle.
She said: we have a long tradition of attempting things that do not fit.
He almost smiled.
She said: tell me about the small things.
He said: which ones.
She said: the ones that started this.
He was quiet for a moment.
Then he said: there was a man who did not say something to his sons. A long time ago. A very long time ago. He had two sons by two different women and he loved both of them and he could not find the words that would keep them together and so the words were not said and the gap opened. Everything that happened after happened through that gap.
She wrote: a man who did not say something.
He said: there was a woman who said yes to sharing her husband with another woman. A gesture of generosity that split a family into two branches that have been growing apart ever since.
She wrote: a woman who said yes.
He said: there was a woman who ran between two hills with no water visible. She had nothing. She had been sent away. She ran between the hills looking for water and found it and built a city around it. The city is called Mecca. When his son asked, she didnt tell him that his father chose another son. She said "Yes" his father loved him. Everything the tradition that became Islam built passes through that woman running between two hills.
She wrote: a woman who told his son that his father loved him.
He said: there was a boy who was told a story. He beleived the story that his mother wlaked alone in a desert with just one skin of water for an impossibly long distance. He chose the impossible story over the probable one. Everything his branch of the family built, the city, the tradition, the two thousand years of carrying the story in their mouths, began with a boy deciding to believe something that could not be verified.
She wrote: a boy who chose to believe.
He said: there was a man who sat down after his father's death and wrote everything he could write and stopped at his brother's name because he could not find the category for his brother. He left a gap in the record. That gap has been growing for three thousand years.
She wrote: a gap in the record.
He said: there was a woman who told a story ten thousand times to a child who was six years old and then died on a road between two cities. The child carried the story forward because it was the only inheritance he had.
She wrote: a story told ten thousand times.
He said: there was a man at a river crossing who had been beaten in a fight and his opponent asked to be released and he said not until you bless me. Three words. He could have said nothing. He held on. He received a name. The name became a people.
She wrote: three words at a river.
He said: there was a man in a burning city who ran into a burning building and carried out three jars when he could have carried more or fewer and what he carried survived and what he left behind did not.
She wrote: three jars in a fire.
He said: there was a carpenter who could have left a city when someone told him to leave and did not leave. He stayed. What he believed traveled further because of the shape of the person who believed it.
She wrote: a carpenter who stayed.
He said: there was an orphan who decided that the wound of being an orphan was not something to recover from but something to understand. He spent his life trying to make sure nobody had to stand at the edge of a room without someone crossing the floor to take their hand.
She wrote: an orphan who understood.
He stopped.
She looked up from her notebook.
She said: and all of that produced this.
He said: all of that produced the argument that produced the armies that produced the walls that produced the situation that produced the ladder that cannot be moved.
She said: the ladder.
He said: the ladder is my favourite thing in this city. It is the most honest thing here. Every other thing pretends to be about God. The ladder is honestly about a committee that cannot agree.
Eleanor laughed.
She had not expected to laugh in this particular conversation.
He said: you think I am joking.
She said: I think you are not entirely joking.
He said: I am a historian. I am never entirely joking. And I am never entirely not joking.
She said: that seems like a very Jerusalem answer.
He said: it is a very Jerusalem answer. We have been here a long time. We have learned that the only sensible response to this city is to hold two things at once. The enormous and the specific. The sacred and the ridiculous. The ladder and what the ladder is leaning against.
She wrote this down.
He watched her write it.
He said: you understand that what I have told you is not history.
She said: it sounded like history.
He said: it is smaller than history. History is what happens after. What I am telling you is the things before the history. The things so small that nobody thought to record why they happened. The man who did not say the words. The woman who ran between the hills. The gap in the record. The three words at the river. By the time anyone thought to write these things down they had already become enormous. The butterfly had already caused the storm. The stone had already caused the ripple. You cannot see the origin from inside the consequence.
Eleanor put her pen down.
She looked at her notebook.
She said: every enormous thing begins with something small that nobody recorded at the time.
He said: yes.
She said: and we are inside one now.
He said: we are always inside one. The question is which small thing happening today will look enormous in three thousand years. The answer is we cannot know. We can only try to be the kind of small thing that produces the right kind of large thing.
She said: that is a lot to ask of a small thing.
He said: Jerusalem has always asked a lot.
He refilled her coffee.
She sat with it for a while.
Outside the narrow street was doing what it always did. Loud and specific and indifferent to the conversation happening inside the cafe. A child ran past. Two men argued about something with the passionate efficiency of people who have been arguing about the same thing for years and have refined the argument to its essential elements. A cat sat in a patch of light and declined to be disturbed.
She said: does it not exhaust you. Living here. In the middle of all of it.
He said: I was born here. This is simply Tuesday.
She wrote: simply Tuesday.
She underlined it twice.
On her last evening Eleanor climbed to the roof of the Austrian Hospice, a building near the Via Dolorosa that was built in 1863 and serves the best apple strudel in the Middle East, which is an unexpected thing for Jerusalem to contain but then Jerusalem contains many unexpected things and has stopped apologising for them.
From the roof you can see the whole Old City.
The Dome of the Rock catching the last of the light.
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the middle distance.
The minarets.
The bell towers.
The Western Wall.
All of it visible from one place. All of it in the same field of vision. The entire argument laid out below her like a map of itself.
She stood there for a long time.
She thought about what Professor Khoury had said. The butterfly. The storm. The stone. The ripple. The small things that produce the large things that produce the arguments that produce the walls that produce the ladders that produce the committees that cannot agree.
She thought: the city knows all of this. The city has been watching it happen since before anyone was keeping records. The city was here when the man from Ur arrived following something he could not ignore. The city was here when the Temple was built and when it burned and when it was built again and when it burned again. The city was here when the carpenter walked its streets. The city was here when the armies came, all the armies, Babylonians and Romans and Crusaders and Ottomans and British and everyone before and after and in between.
The city outlasted all of them.
It will outlast the current argument too.
Not because the argument is unimportant. It is important. The people inside it are real and their suffering is real and the stakes are real.
But the city is older than the argument. The city was here before the split that produced the argument. The city remembers, in the way that stones remember, the time before the gap in the record. The time when the story was not yet divided.
She thought: I came here to write a travel piece.
She thought: I am going to write something my editor will read and call me about.
She thought: he will say Eleanor this is not what we asked for.
She thought: I will say I know.
She thought: he will say it is rather good though.
She thought: I will say I know.
The Dome of the Rock was gold in the last light.
The church bells were beginning.
Somewhere below her in the souk Khalil was closing his shop and thinking about George Best and the upcoming season.
Somewhere in the Jewish quarter a family was beginning the preparations for Shabbat.
Somewhere in the Armenian quarter a ceramicist was finishing a tile with a blue geometric pattern that would end up on a desk in London for thirty years.
The city was doing what the city does.
Eleanor looked at it for a long time.
Then she went downstairs and ate the apple strudel, which was as good as advertised, and wrote for four hours without stopping.
On the last morning she walked out through the Jaffa Gate.
She stopped on the other side and looked back at the walls. Five hundred years old. Built on the foundations of walls older than that. Built on the memory of walls older than that.
She thought about all the people who had walked through this gate. Every tradition. Every army. Every pilgrim. Every merchant. Every journalist with a press credential from a Sunday newspaper and an editor who wanted a sidebar about where to eat.
She thought: the gate does not distinguish.
She thought: the city does not distinguish.
She thought: it simply accumulates.
Her taxi was waiting.
The driver had opinions. Strong ones. He began delivering them before she had fully closed the door. He had opinions about the British Mandate, the partition, the current government, the previous government, the one before that, America, Russia, the United Nations, and what he described as the general situation, which appeared to encompass everything that had happened in the Middle East since approximately 1200 BCE.
Eleanor listened politely.
This was, she reflected, the most information she had received from a single human being since her uncle Gerald at Christmas 1967, and Gerald had the advantage of knowing when to stop for lunch.
She did not write any of it down.
She opened her notebook to a fresh page.
A soldier is on a rooftop.
Somewhere in this region. The city below him may be Jerusalem. It may be somewhere else. It does not matter which. What matters is the sky he is scanning and the weight he is carrying and the fact that he does not know the butterfly.
His radio crackles.
Orders.
He is to stand down. Return to base.
He goes.
The city does not notice. It has seen armies come and go for three thousand years. It will see more.
Oh Jerusalem.
You have been here since before the argument.
You will be here after.
The storm does not know the butterfly.
The ripple does not know the stone.
The wall does not know the silence that started everything.
You know. You have always known.
You hold the ladder
and the key
and the notes pressed into the wall
and the prayers buried among the dead
and the argument and the coffee
and the cat in the road that will not move for anyone.
it's simply Tuesday.
You were here before the butterfly.
You will be here after the storm.
Go.
Look it up on a map.
Then go.
