Thick Thin Line

by Julia Bohr (Poland)

I didn't expect to find Israel

It is difficult not to have expectations. We are surrounded by concepts, images, ideas. We know the capital city of Uganda, number of volumes of "In Search of Lost Time" by Marcel Proust, a way from school to home inside out. It may seem, that in the face of accumulation of so many facts, we are fated to live a life devoid of any surprises. However it turns out that our expectations, facing the bottomless diversity of the world may lose every single time. So we travel. To open eyes widely, knit brows, shed a tear or two, but never to shrug with a dead "that's what I expected" laid softly on the lips. I have always been interested in transitions. As a child I would observe borderlines between countries, standing in the middle and shifting weight of my body from left foot to the right over and over again. "Where does the desert start?" - those doubts, fossilized in the margins of my school notebooks still attack me without any prediction. Last summer I had a chance to experience a transition. Despite all the expectations, I found myself at the junction of two worlds separeted by a thick line. Israel is a splice, birthplace of three big religions, blend of the extreme antagonisms. From the bus station vehicles were leaving every several minutes to the directions unknown from my perspective. I got into one of them. The bus was full of people, which I considered a positive omen. My purpose was to reach the final, anonymous station. Passengers were getting out. Not even a one person got into. At the end I was the only one standing on the bus stop in Hebron, the cross-border city between the State of Palestine and Israel. The first thing I could see was nothing. "Nothing" refers to the people, animals, every display of life. I got to realise that our well-known world is a big harp. Its strings tremble, but we are so accustomed to these sounds that we become deaf. The strings of the jewish area of Hebron weren't moving, as if they had nothing to say. Behind the corner there were two of them, wearing military green, clearly visible on the sandy background. Big rifles in their hands. It was probably my first close encounter with the synonim of fear, war, death. Nevertheless, it was not the weapon that caught my attention. It was the age. The soldiers looked like my peers passing by in the university hall. They started to ask about the purpose of my visit immediately. "Go back to Tel Aviv, you'll find more attractions there", I heard. By pretending strong-minded, I found out that they were overseeing the borderline between jewish and palestinian area, located just behind the wall. I asked them how it is on the other side. No idea, they have never been there. Accidentally I was standing in the middle of the invisible, although thick line, deciding ultimately to cross it. After the passport control and several steps, I saw a world taken out from the surrealistic movie. Narrow alleys were multipling, spliting into hundreds of directions as if only to contain more stalls, goods, screams. The strings of that harp were trembling tenaciously. On the Muslim markets of Hebron, it's not the passer-by who shows an interest in products. This is the alteration of hierarchy of importance. When you get noticed, you become a purchaser and your preferences don't matter. I was eavesdropping, looking around, wishing to absorb as much as possible of this picture, save it permanently. At once I started to realise that I wasn't just a passive witness of others' dailiness. I was being observed. I felt glances, I saw meaningful jabs, I heard indiscreet whispers. Lack of the hijab puts in the spotlight, giving the female tourists status of an attraction of the city, in which number of soldiers exceeds the number of visitors notably. Going through the passport control on my way back felt like starting over, having new blank space to fulfill. It became perfectly clear that seemingly conventional borders, distances of only two metres represent sometimes cultural walls impossible to knock down.