15/1/99

Nightmare on Chelm Street

You wouldn't believe some of the neighbors I've had.

    Any time you want to prompt discourse with Israelis -- not that you have to work very hard at it -- just try one of my Seven Failproof Provocations to Torrid Conversation:
    "I'll never forget the last time I flew El Al."
    "I just had the most unbelievable experience with bureaucracy."
    "This government's the best thing that ever happened to the country."
    "This government's the worst thing that ever happened to the country."
    "Remember the war?"
    "You wouldn't believe what I saw a driver do today."
    "Bet you've had some interesting neighbors."
    My favorite is the last one. Boy, have I had some neighbors.
    I got a taste of what's to come with my first Israeli neighbors. It happened very early after I immigrated from Canada: it happened right there on the plane.
    Not 20 minutes after we took off, I managed to mention that I was making aliya. The fellow in front of me spelled out his opinion as authoritative fact that Israel is a wretched place. The fellow behind me shot back that Israel is a wonderful place, and for hours these two guys went at each other. (After 18 years here I still haven't decided who was right.)
    Moving to Jerusalem into my first Israeli apartment meant acquiring -- gulp! -- my first Israeli neighbors.
    Zvi and Aviva.
    They were not the quintessence of Israeli nextdoorness: Zvi was from Montreal, Aviva from Vancouver.
    They didn't play their stereo too loud, didn't leave their garbage in the hallway, didn't syphon off my electricity. The closest we ever came to raising a voice in discord was when we argued which was the greatest hockey team ever, the Canadiens of '56 or '77. (Of course, belying our origins, we always conceded that the other had a point.) Naturally, I thought all Israeli neighbors were like this.
    Eighteen months later, I moved...
    "Allo! Allo! Crazy manyak, start up with me I'll have my son beat you up. I'll make trouble for you, I swear it, ya manyak." My new neighbor did not wait to get acquainted before he started to hate my guts: he came out of his house like a rocket and attacked the moving van, for goodness sake, sputtering that the sidewalk it was parked on was his domain and he was gonna hammer on the truck's paintwork until it shoved off. You've never seen movers unload so fast.
    Clearly this gentleman was not from The True North Strong And Free.
    Adon Shmuel was a 68-year-old Turk. Adon Shmuel had been a taxi dispatcher until, I presume, he'd become too cantankerous even for the inimical brotherhood of taxi dispatchers. Adon Shmuel was a burly, sinewy and very vocal man. Adon Shmuel did not want anyone living above him, and that's precisely where I had moved in. For Adon Shmuel, my presence was a declaration of war. (I came to believe he would make a very good Syrian president.)
    I moved in early on a Friday afternoon. Just as daylight faded, so did my electricity. With all my possessions boxed up, and in a dark house I was not yet at home in, I could do nothing but hit the sack, which I could only find by dint of its bigness. Pillow, sheets and blanket I would have to do without until morning.
    My electricity mysteriously failed as regularly as my water supply dried up; when the water worked, the plumbing inexplicably didn't. OK, so perhaps it was just infernal bad luck that everything went wrong in suspicious cycles. Maybe. Maybe it was also bad luck that human excrement kept appearing on my doorstep. 
    Five times in my first three weeks there, Adon Shmuel called the police to complain I was disturbing the peace; three of those times the police had to wake me up to tell me so. It was absurd, really: I am the quietest of neighbors; I don't even hum without inquiring whether it's disturbing someone.
    But still I hadn't moved out, so Adon Shmuel tried something else: terrorism through bellicosity. He tramped out of his house, parked himself under my bedroom window and bellowed: "Nazi! German! You should be ashamed of yourself! Nazi! German! You should be ashamed of yourself!" And on and on and on, all night long. After perhaps 20 or 30 nights of this, I finally snapped. I flew out of bed, raced down the stairs in my underwear and in absolutely uncontrolable rage pummeled him into the pavement. The two of us flailed away at each other at 4 a.m. in the rain, screaming and swearing, drenched and bloodied.
    And then I went back to my apartment and called the police. "Better come quick," I said. "I just beat up an old man. Arrest me, for chrissakes, I can't take this anymore."
    The police came promptly -- they knew the address very well by now -- and immediately took my side. One of the policemen said to me: "What took you so long?"
    They dragged the fulminating Adon Shmuel and flung him into the car, and politely asked if I'd accompany them to the station, where, they said grinning, I could press charges against the man I'd just attacked.
    Well. You can imagine what effect that had on my esteemed neighbor.
    No you can't.
    A couple of days later he began a whole new strategy: suffocating, 24-hour-a-day love. He shlepped up the stairs and invited himself in for tea; shlepped me down the stairs to his place for tea; brought me plates of cookies, hot meals and his life story, time and time again; for months he knocked on my door almost daily to make sure everything was b'seder, that I wasn't too cold, too hot, overworked, lonely; he offered to help find me a wife and a good 100 times or so, always either before or after he embraced me, he said those words I've had nightmares from ever since: "I want you to be like a son to me."
    This was a winning strategy: after half a year of this, I had all I could take and moved the hell out.
    His last words to me as the moving van pulled out: "Tavo l'vaker -- come visit."

MY NEXT station on the railroad of life was the German Colony. It occurred to me that I shouldn't unpack until I'd done a door-to-door inspection for a block in every direction.
    I didn't have to.
    I wasn't living there for five minutes before the NDN (next-door neighbor) was pressing my doorbell.
    "Welcome to the neighborhood," he crooned with the warmest of smiles. He handed me a gift-wrapped bottle of wine and apologized for the interruption. "If there's any way we can help, please, just ask."
    I wanted to cry.
    Aubrey and Sylvia, a dapper, kindly, elderly English couple. They never called the cops on me, never called me a Nazi, and goodness, never left a brown doormat on my steps.
    I thought I'd never move away from Aubrey and Sylvia, but finally, my days of flatmates and rental contracts were over: I signed a marriage contract, and we decided to buy.
    "Honey," I said, when we started to scour the market, "trust me on this: it's not where you live; it's next to whom that's important."
    We found a place. The price was steep, but worth every grusch: the entire building was exemplary -- a single, middle-aged European Gentile cultural emissary we never heard nor saw; a genial Canadian-American couple; Judy downstairs, a real pal who we still call Judy Downstairs; two professor types who, when they made noise, we opened our windows to let it in (he was a concert pianist; she, a concert violinist); and a folksy family that, though thoroughly native, controlled their four children admirably.
    We had made a shrewd investment. The apartment itself was just a bonus.
    Nobody even said "there goes the neighborhood" when one day we brought home three squalling newborns.
    But suddenly, our tony abode was too small. When we bought it, we allowed for the not unlikely possibility that we and the cat might some day have to share it with a child. A child.
    Now, we were five and a feline plus live-in help.
    For the 10th time in 11 years, I put my socks in a box and went to live somewhere else.
    By now, our priorities were differently defined: we needed a place that was big, and cheap. Noisy neighbors? Frankly, we were now the neighbors we most dreaded.
    Next door: Shuli and Eitan, Moroccan-Persian, the kind of people you want to clone and populate the entire country with. The only irritation regarded their preteen daughter: she's become real popular, and there's always some kid outside bellowing "Sa-RAI!! Sa-RAI!!" When Sa-RAI!! couldn't be bothered to answer these clamoring Wherefore Art Thous, it was up to us to shoo the bellower away.
    Below us were have-a-nice-day folks. (If they resented having triplet toddlers on their heads, it's fortunate they never said so: the missus's sis soon produced a threesome of her own.) Next to them, starry-eyed young Christian volunteers who dedicated themselves to being nice to Jews, so they were no problem.
    And above us?
    They should make a TV series of that apartment.
    In my six years there we had five very, very different kinds of neighbors up there.    
    The current inhabitants are Russian immigrants, three generations of them, nothing unusual except that the children are polite. Preceding them was a picture-perfect Israeli family -- Sephardi-Ashkenazi, one son, one daughter, an adman's dream. (Couldn't say a bad word about them if I wanted to: Mama-neighbor and I have been close working colleagues for the past 15 years.) 
    The three sets of residents preceding them were weird, weirder, weirdest.
    The first, an etiolated Russian haredi and his bewildered brood.   
    The second: we began to worry a bit when we heard Arabic on walkie-talkies at 2 a.m., and watched a parade of young men entering and leaving. Turns out they all lived there together -- six of them, each with a gun: five Druse and a Beduin. "Security personnel," our all-knowing local grocer told us.
    They were friendly and considerate, though, and we were sorry to see them go.
    If you've never lived a ceiling apart from six armed Arabic-speaking men, you probably also haven't been neighborly with our next bunch:
    Collaborators.
    We didn't know at first, but there were peculiarities. The furtive anxiety. No name on the door, which was always bolted. They spent as much time outdoors as Boo Radley. And they never got mail.
    Mr. Collaborator had been in the business for 25 years, boastful of, as he put it, "how many Israeli lives I've saved." (He was also the first neighbor I've ever had who was tortured by Jibril Rajoub.)
    Mrs. Collaborator said to us, with such matter-of-factness you'd think she was exchanging recipes, that if ever we should hear her scream we should call the police.
    And then there was Collaborator Junior, a glowering teenage lad who worried me enormously. Cut off from his people, unwanted by ours, friendless, unemployable, unschoolable, in dire danger, his only ticket back to society was, I realized, to murder me. (He didn't.)
    Jibril, if you're reading this, don't get excited: they slipped away, leaving no forwarding address.
    I moved once again, only recently, to Ramot on the other side of town, far enough away that I can't hear the Call of the Sa-RAI!! in Gilo. No one attacked the moving truck, or welcomed me with a bottle of wine. There's a Filipino who sings, a baby that cries a lot, and an old codger who came over to me as I was getting in my car to mention that in this neighborhood people don't litter (as I was not in the act of strewing garbage, I think that was an insinuation of my car).  
    I'm now a lot closer to my first neighbors, Zvi and Aviva, who live in Mevasseret. I think if I get up on the roof in the dead of night, and give a good geshrei -- "ALLO, ZVI!" -- he just might hear me.