I LIT ANOTHER CIGARETTE. I looked at my watch. I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the sleeve of my T-shirt. The ticking of the hazard lights was starting to annoy me.
There was a homeless man on the sidewalk beside me. Old, bearded, filthy. Swathed in rags and blankets that looked like the colors of the Israeli flag. He was muttering to himself, kneeling on a piece of cardboard. I smoked awhile before realizing that the lump beside him — small, white, stock-still — was a cat. It seemed illogical to me that a cat could be so still with that many pedestrians around. Too stiff, I thought. Maybe it was a stuffed animal. Or maybe it was sleeping. Or dead. Was it dead? I opened the door and got out.
The homeless man, two or three steps away from me, mumbled something. I approached slowly without closing the car door. I stared at the cat, willing it to move, to yawn, to stretch the way cats stretch, to do something, anything, to show me that it wasn’t dead. But the more I contemplated it, lying there, inert, squalid, the more convinced I became that, in fact, it was dead. I stubbed my cigarette out on the sidewalk. I crouched down to see it better. The cat’s eyes were open. It seemed not to blink. Suddenly the homeless man yelled at me, perhaps in Hebrew, most likely begging. Then he began to laugh. Loud. Then louder. His laugh was solid and abrupt, like a series of waves crashing into the rocks. He was jeering at something behind me, farther back. I turned. Not two minutes had passed, but the brown Citroën was surrounded by a group of soldiers, maybe four or five soldiers, all young, all holding guns. They were nervous. They were looking inside the car. I walked toward them and they became even more nervous and began shouting at me in Hebrew and pointing their guns at me and instinctively I put my hands up, and suddenly I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t hear anything. A few pedestrians began to stop, to shout at me, but I just saw mouths moving and shouting without hearing what they were shouting. I saw the homeless man still laughing without hearing his laugh. I saw one of the soldiers, a blond girl, asking me something without hearing her question. I saw Tamara approaching from a distance, running in slow motion, a plastic bag in her hands, and I felt as if someone were removing cotton balls from my ears, and slowly I began to recognize Tamara’s voice, calming the soldiers in Hebrew. Saying something like this, I imagined: that she was very sorry, that the brown Citroën belonged to her, that the idiot standing there with his hands in the air was her Guatemalan friend, that he didn’t know that in Israel you can’t just leave an empty car in the middle of the street. I could hear the pedestrians murmuring again. I could hear the homeless man laughing again. The soldiers weren’t lowering their guns. Tamara told me in English to get in the car. Right now. I got in and sat down and closed the door. She handed me the plastic bag and immediately started the engine. I apologized, distressed, but she didn’t say a word. Just shook her head as we started to drive away. I wiped the sweat from my forehead, from the back of my neck. The white cat was still splayed in the same position.
IT HAS MANY NAMES, she told me as she drove, dropping pebbles of hash and strands of tobacco into a rolling paper on her leg. The Israelis call it security fence, or separation wall, or antiterrorist fence. She then licked the paper and rolled it long and tight. She was steering with her elbows. She hadn’t shifted out of fourth gear for some time. The Palestinians call it the wall of racial segregation, or the new wall of shame, or the apartheid wall. And she lit the joint, inhaled. The international media, according to their political slant, call it wall or fence or barrier, depends, she said, and exhaled a sweet bluish cloud. She passed me the joint. I don’t like hash. But I couldn’t say no. I took a couple of drags and handed it back to her, and we fell silent, simply staring at the immense wall or fence or barrier. I hadn’t pictured it so tall, so long, so thick, so imposing. It looked like it went on forever. I felt a profound desire to touch it. I was about to ask Tamara to stop, when suddenly I felt queasy. Maybe it was her driving. Maybe it was the combination of hash and the heat inside the Citroën and the adrenaline rush I’d gotten with the soldiers. Maybe it was something much darker and more fleeting. I rolled the window all the way down, stuck my head out and, breathing in the warm fresh air, thought of other walls. Chinese walls and German walls and American walls. Holy walls of temples and damp mossy walls of cells. The brick walls of a ghetto, the walls surrounding an entire people imprisoned in a ghetto, starving in a ghetto, dying slowly and silently. All of a sudden, I saw or imagined I saw on the wall (we were driving very fast and my eyes were almost closed and my pupils were dilated) the all-black figure of the girl in the Banksy painting: her black braid, black bangs, little black skirt, black shoes, black face looking up, her whole body facing up toward the sky as she floats up the wall with the help of a bunch of black balloons held in her tiny black hand. It occurred to me, my head halfway out the window and already experiencing a delicious lethargy from the hash, that a wall is the physical manifestation of man’s hatred of the other. A palpable, concrete manifestation that attempts to separate us from the other, isolate us from the other, eliminate the other from our sight and from our world. But it’s also a clearly useless manifestation: no matter how tall and thick the construction, no matter how long and imposing the structure, a wall is never insurmountable. A wall is never bigger than the spirit of those it confines. Because the other is still there. The other doesn’t disappear, never disappears. The other’s other is me. Me, and my spirit, and my imagination, and my black balloons.
Tamara gently roused me with an elbow. She offered me the joint and I took it with no hesitation, almost with relief. Regardless of its name, she said, accelerating sharply into a curve, it is what it is.
THEN EVERYTHING WAS SAND. The undulating landscape. The olive trees. The date palms. The Bedouins and camels on the side of the road. The sky and the clouds and maybe even the wind. As though we were making our way through a watercolor in which everything had been painted with the same sandy brush, on the same sandy canvas, in the same sandy color, but in endless tones and hues. Including us.