CHAPTERS 20-21

THE HOLYLAND HOTEL

20.

 

The bus had pulled into Jerusalem just as the sun was going down, and the stone walls of the old city had shone like red-hot coals. Shaya and Artie hadn’t spoken during the long ride. They had both been terrified of what was coming next – because Teddy had booked them into one hotel room with one king-size bed. Artie had told Teddy it wasn’t going to work. Shaya had wanted to kill him – Teddy, that is. But Teddy had said: “I’m not the Bank of America. If you want another room, pay for it. Which you can’t, because they only had one room. So what do you want from me?”

On a hill in west Jerusalem, they found the Holyland Hotel, on Nezer David Street in the Bayat Vagan neighborhood. The exteriors of its two buildings – one two stories high, one three – were very South Floridian, like mini-“Fountainblues.” But the setting was bucolic – long green lawns, a garden and, on three sides, a forest which gave the impression it had been pristine since God had created it. Anywhere else, the hotel would have been a golf resort – but there was little golf in Israel, and none in Jerusalem.

The lobby was piled with tropical plants and pink potted flowers. It was also piled with luggage; a tour group was wending its torturous way past the reception desk. The group – in their fifties and sixties – were American, but not Jews. Artie could tell that because, despite the inefficiency, no one was grousing about it. There was a high incidence of chintz in their ladies’ wear, and golf pants or well-pressed shorts – no T-shirts or jeans – on the men. Norma Jean had told Artie that he should judge people by their shoes. But sneakers were ubiquitous now, so he guessed that rule was as dead and gone as a decent meal on a plane.

It was because of this troupe that Teddy had chosen that hotel. In the morning, the group would board a bus and travel for twenty minutes until they passed through the Dung Gate, in the old city’s southeast wall, to listen to a lecture at the Bar Kochba Institute. Teddy had directed Artie to go to their tour director and say that they had been delayed and missed their bus – and would it be okay if they joined the group for the day.

Teddy had insisted that Shaya make the trip. If Artie went to the Institute alone, he had said, there was always the chance that someone there had seen him at Mitzia Golan and might recognize him, and that would not be good. If he and Shaya went as a couple, there’d be less chance of that. The men of the Institute would be staring at Shaya, not Artie – or, better yet, since an Orthodox Jew couldn’t even let himself look at Shaya, they would probably turn their eyes away, and never see Artie’s face.

Shaya didn’t hesitate to tell Teddy what she thought of it. But she’d said, for Artie, that she would come along. Of course, that was before Teddy mentioned about booking just one room. By then, though, it would have been cowardice if she’d backed out, and Shaya wouldn’t want to show anyone a hint of cowardice.

Artie and Shaya got on the end of the check-in line. The people just ahead of them grinned and said hello. They were from Ohio, they said, but the group was from everywhere – Iowa, Chicago, Texas, Arkansas. They were unremittingly pleasant, or “Christian,” as they would put it. Even jet lag hadn’t put an edge on them.

The longer Artie stood on that dawdling line, the more anxious he became. He couldn’t look at Shaya. She was giving him sidelong glances. There were still no words between them, and that was making it worse.

And lo and behold, when they got to the less than luxurious room, it was just as Teddy had said it would be. While the bellman brought their bags in, Shaya strolled down the bottom edge of the mattress, sliding her hand along it. Then she straightened up, and Artie saw her throw her shoulders back. “Oh, good – it’s two singles,” she smiled. “We can push them apart.”

She went into the bathroom to dress for dinner out of his sight. He put on the suit he’d brought, and the first tie he had worn since he’d left the legal profession. He swore he wouldn’t commit another dinner faux pas – but she came out in a short black sheath, and he knew this was going to be one of the most miserable nights of his life.

Ten people sat at each table in the hotel’s ornate dining room – colonial rococo, if there is such a thing. Most of the places were already filled when Artie and Shaya walked in. But as they circumnavigated the tables to find two empty seats, a hand shot out and grabbed Artie’s arm, stopping him in his tracks.

The hand belonged to an old girl with a well-scrubbed Midwestern face perched on a miraculously unwattled neck. With the other hand, she pointed to two unoccupied chairs and signaled them to join her with an imperious downcast finger. The chairs were as far from each other as it was possible for them to be, but it seemed Artie and Shaya were under orders, and they meekly sat in them.

The woman made introductions to a husband and wife from Oregon, a couple from Tennessee, a younger pair of Texans and her own spouse, a short rather robust man who owned fourteen GM dealerships in southern Idaho. Artie explained that Shaya and he came from Florida. Their hostess nodded: “We figured that. Or we thought maybe New York.”

At a signal which must have been passed around at dog-whistle frequency, they all took up their damask napkins, extracted them from their napkin rings and spread them on their laps. Shaya and Artie followed suit, to be neighborly. Artie had just lifted his dinner roll off its Wedgwood plate when Mr. GM’s rumbling basso announced: “Let us all praise Jesus.” The roll was wrenched from Artie’s grasp by the woman next to him, and they all linked hands and bowed their heads and listened to the car dealer preach.

Artie wasn’t paying attention. He was bemused by his lost dinner roll – until the man from Idaho came to his peroration. “And Lord we pray the Third Temple shall be built, and we shall rise in the Rapture!”

The “A-men!”’s and “Glory be!”’s that rose up in response were the most heartfelt sentiments Artie had ever heard. But this was what really startled him: for nearly two millennia, the prayers of Orthodox Jews had included a hopeful entreaty that the Temple might be rebuilt. But Artie hadn’t known there were Christians who had the same desire. And, for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why.

“Well, now,” said their hostess, “we really do love you Jews. I’m so glad that you could join us. Please let us pay for your meal.”

“How did you know we were Jewish?” Artie asked.

“Well, my goodness, it’s obvious. Well, it is in your case. Not so much in your daughter’s.”

Jesus Christ, Artie thought – she’s nailed me twice!

The name of their group, the woman said, was Goyish Friends of Israel. They had chosen to use the term “goyish” out of humility, under the assumption that a self-deprecating name would make them more acceptable to the paranoid Jewish race. Unlike some of the more aggressive sects, they accepted Jews as they were. “We would never try to convert you! God will take care of that. But if the urge comes over you, we’d be glad to help.”

The dinner – poached salmon, asparagus, potatoes au gratin – was as good as the steak had been the night before. A waiter poured from a bottle of Asher’s cabernet. The wine was as good as the dinner, and it came to Artie that grace was afoot in Israel. It had been yuppified.

Their hostess allowed as she felt purified, having eaten what she had been assured was a strictly kosher meal; and tomorrow she would feel glorified when she walked where Jesus had walked. As they all rose from the table en masse to go to bed, she patted Artie’s shoulder and said, in her egg-salad tones: “I do hope you come to your senses before the Tribulation.” With that, Artie was out of her life, as far as she knew at the time. She had done her duty by him. She could sleep peacefully. And he had no idea what she was talking about.

 

  

21.

 

In the room, Shaya was tentative, picking things up and putting them down, taking her nightclothes out of her bag, and her makeup kit. The beds were now a foot apart, and a world away from each other. She disappeared into the bathroom again. When she returned, she was wearing a pink cotton nightgown, and over it the terrycloth robe the hotel had put in the room. She assumed she had more or less locked herself up. But her nipples rose into the cotton gown, and Artie had to get away.

He came back an hour later. She had turned out the lights. He could hear her breathing softly. He found his way with his hands to her bed, and leaned over her. “Are you awake?”

Shaya threw her arms over her face. “I can’t do it! I just can’t!”

That would have about done it for me. I do not suffer neurotics. But Artie was in love with her – and a better man, anyway.

“Put on some clothes,” he told her. “There’s something you should see.”

They walked down the rolling lawn, then through the garden, their shoes wringing with dew. A hundred yards from the hotel was the strange place Artie had come across while trying to cool himself down. On the edge of a precipice which looked out over Jerusalem, someone had built a model, in 1/50^th scale, of the old city as it had looked in the days of the Second Temple. There was a sign in English which said that the builder had followed descriptions found in the holy books, and in the writings of Flavius Josephus, and had used authentic materials of the time.

He led Shaya to the model’s east, the site of the Temple Mount. They sat on the ground beside it. Artie stared over Herod’s two-foot-high walls, into the holy sanctuary. Shaya paid more attention to the real Jerusalem glittering below. In a while, she said: “It’s beautiful. But why did you bring me here?”

“Maybe I should have let you sleep.”

“I wasn’t sleeping.”

“I didn’t think so.” Artie put his hands behind him and leaned back until his wrists ached. “I wanted you to see this because this is why we’re here. But you probably already know everything about the Second Temple.”

“Maybe I did,” Shaya said. “But I don’t remember now.”

“But you’re Israeli. I thought all of you …”

“I was brought up on a kibbutz. They didn’t teach us those things.”

“You were never religious?”

“Me? God, no! The first time I saw a mezuzah I thought it was a doorbell. I couldn’t figure out why no one was coming to let me in!” Shaya brought her knees up and circled them with her arms. She seemed to let some of her tension go.

“They took us away from our parents when we were very young. I mean, we could see them, but we couldn’t stay with them. We lived in children’s houses – dormitories, really. The idea was to teach us a sense of community. And we kids became very close – still are, in a way. But there were many nights when I cried myself to sleep. I missed my papa.” Artie saw her go teary-eyed. “I never really knew him until just now. My mother died when I was young. I never knew her at all. They don’t take the children away any more. They don’t believe in that now.”

And then, to Artie’s amazement, she began to sob. “Oh, Arthur! I’m so sorry!” She hid her face in her hands.

From the little he knew of psychology – one course in college, a couple of hours of Doctor Laura and a lifetime of reading opponents across the tables of various boardrooms – Artie concluded Shaya had had a cathartic detonation. She was coming to terms with her losses. And he was right, in a way.

“We can push the beds together,” she said when she finally caught her breath.

A thrill of expectation sparked a synapse or two in his brain. He said: “Is that what you want, Shaya?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I do. But please don’t try ….”

He quickly promised he wouldn’t try … whatever it was. “But if you get close to me, what happens to my body, you know, that’s beyond my control …”

Shaya burst out laughing. “Just keep it in its pouch!”

And Artie said: “Well, I guess I can manage that.”

 

The two of them got into one single bed. Shaya nestled her head in the crook of his arm, and dropped her hand on his chest. There was a tingling rush of blood in every part of Artie that her skin had contact with. He had a hard-on everywhere except where it belonged. And that he was controlling as he always did …

 

“So, what did you use?” I asked him. “Myself, I use politics. I think about Poppy and Barbara Bush and the thing goes dead.”

“I thought about the temple.”

“Really! How weird is that!”

“I’d been thinking about it anyway. That’s what the whole thing with Teddy was about.”

There had been two temples in Jerusalem, he explained. The first had been destroyed by the Babylonians, when they had dragged the Jews out of Israel and into captivity. When the Jews returned to Jerusalem, the Second Temple was built.

It was the holiest place in Israel. Any Jew was permitted to enter the temple’s outer grounds, but only the priests – the Kohanim – could go into the Holy of Holies. No one – not even the Kohanim – had been allowed on the temple grounds who had had any contact with the dead. And it was assumed, at the time, that everybody had. Even if you hadn’t been near a corpse, there were bodies buried in the ground, you had been walking on the ground, and it was always possible that death had been under your feet. So before you entered the temple, you had to be purified.

The Bible spelled out that procedure in the Book of Numbers, Chapter Nineteen. The priests had to find a three-year-old red heifer, on which there was no blemish, and which had not carried the yoke. They had only managed nine times to come up with such a cow.

When they found one, they would have it brought to the Mount of Olives, just outside the city’s eastern wall. There the high priest would slaughter it in a ritual way, and burn it – in the sight of all – in a fire of hyssop and cedarwood and twice-dyed scarlet wool. Then the ashes would be gathered up, mixed into water and stored in a clean container outside the Temple Mount. The solution would last (hopefully) until the next red heifer was found. And any man could be sprinkled with this water of purification. If he was not, and he entered the temple, he would die at the hand of God….

 

While Artie had been distracting himself thinking about the temple, Shaya had reached out and tugged down his briefs. As Artie’s defenses crumbled, she took his erection in her hand. Holding him loosely, she drifted off to sleep, and Artie, astoundingly serene, soon followed her.

Artie awoke. It was still dark. Shaya was stroking him. He turned his head to look at her. Her nightgown had disappeared. He touched her breast. She shivered. He lowered his lips to her nipple and licked it tenderly. She took his hand and guided it between her legs. She was wet, but as he fondled her she overflowed, and her hips began to shudder and undulate. He stared at her hard legs flexing, and the bush of luxuriant blonde hair that covered his sliding finger as he pushed it into her. She was the most heartrendingly beautiful thing he had ever seen.

She lifted him up with both hands and drew him over her, then reached down and placed him inside her. She was deep, and hot, and she pleaded, as she thrust up at him: “Be good to me. Be gentle. That’s what I need.”

He would have done anything for her, Artie said. He was locking his soul inside her. He would have given her his life.

 

Holy Land Hotel
Bayit VaGan
Dung Gate
The Holyland Model
Mezuzah
Book of Numbers (see Ch. 19)

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