Sarajevo, Bosnia (by Armin DoradO)
Your Yairi
Yair smiled, and the leathery skin on his face folded back into itself, sinking into the bones behind it. He had the kind of face that glows with life from within, from the two deep eye sockets, eyes inside viewing the world with glee, the hooked nose, looming long and sad over the upper lip, and the mouth itself, notched like a table edge.
Yair touched his fingers to his mouth, and ran them along his upper lip, feeling the notches and wrinkles along its outline. He thought that the lines on one’s mouth pointed to a life lived, to girls kissed under the heavy red August sunset, to a fine meal with fine wine, to terrible words misspoken—which, damn them, left his mouth puckered with a solvent taste even to this day. Yair’s finger slid from the cleft of his upper lip to the dimple in the right corner of his mouth and tapped it, remembering all of the occasions he had had to use it.
It wasn’t a shy dimple, but discerning and reticent, and it only appeared in circumstances where he laughed so violently that he must cry, or he wept so profusely that he must chuckle, or he giggled and sobbed in turn so greatly that his voice howled and groaned, and sighed, and then he wiped his face with his blue handkerchief, the dimple sparkling out from beyond its lower corners, and he looked at the world with a fresh damp gaze, and said: “Don’t mind, the Old Man Yair is a sentimental Jekyll, but Your Yairi still has the young man’s blood running from his brain to his schvantz and back up again.”
epigraph # 10,000
It is but fitting that one must to ascend to Jerusalem. Gabriel’s dad said that Tel Aviv is like a series of staggered entrances, so you never quite know when you’ve arrived, but Jerusalem is a door that you step through.
And it’s true.
You drive through the hills, around these godforsaken winding and twisting roads, and if you blink—you might miss it—the curve in the road that suddenly spits you out into the panorama of the old city, soft old yellow walls that stretch up to kiss the sky good-morning and good-night, and stretch down to shelter the juice stands that have been in the exact same place for seven generations, claiming every single patch of ground with hundreds of flats of produce, and all the free air with the ripe juicy smell of fruit, and their cries of ‘pomegranate-orange-mango-pineapple-carrot-juice-yalla-yalla!’
This was the point in the journey when we would turn off our music, and stretch, and yawn, and smile at each other those sheepish, silly smiles you always seem to have after a fitful, bus nap, eyes bleary with the dust of the road, and ears weary with the cries of Arab mothers, exasperated with the excitement of their babies, seeing the city again, but like it’s the first time…
It always feels like the first time, with Jerusalem.
