From Jester To King CXI

When I went back to Israel, I’d be shepherded over the border in a private hire car and the car would go inside the cable car and there’d be a man there to meet me known simply as Gidi. Gidi had dark skin and strong arms and splayed his right arm out the window with  Mediterranean abandon. Gidi knew my emotions and he looked after me; I suppose you’d call Gidi a friend, but more importantly with Gidi there was an absence of fear, with Gidi everything I felt was ok (I didn’t have to hide anything) all behaviour was acceptable and he tended to laugh avuncularly as if dismissing my angst as child’s play.

At the top of the crossing was a fairground/a funfair, a sparkling pleasure-dome; a kaleidoscope of stars suspended in sky, an ungrounded Ferris wheel, and the scene seemed to be imprinted on top of Monaco; the way the bay might appear if you looked out from a perch in the cliff, or from one of the many billionaire balconies, how it might have felt if you’d jumped out from one of them, but rather than plummeting you managed to hover as if tied to a parachute, floating amongst the gulls and the birds, just gliding and soaring, and once you were at the zenith you knew you had made it, you knew you’d come down on the other side into the country of Israel, but the lights and the fireworks always mystified me, even though I took it as read when I saw them.

What was this top of crossing really? It was p-zazz, a natural explosion of energy; it was the core of an inferno, it was all things popping and fizzing an electricity of colours violets and pinks, it was where the car and the cable car simply melted away and you were held up without effort. It was the realisation you didn’t need to struggle. It was something so powerful it could have been scary, but I wasn’t scared, I was uplifted.

We had to pick something up on the way there and the cab pulled up in a side road, one of those cul de sacs, just an alley at the back of some grand hotel which extended about 25 metres and I understood Gidi had made his way into an office to get papers, though it was never a serious endeavour -- he was always casual -- and then when you were on the ground in the taxi, when you were actually grounded on those roads, you really noticed the tarmac, that dark black bitumen inside it, and you saw how smoothly the mixture had been laid upon the under-surface, and you saw the tires rested on it and there was you from the inside looking out, seeing these roads and the hedges and the oblongs of grass, which was all in marked contrast to how you felt at the top of the crossing.

And that’s about it. We crossed, and when it struck me that we were back in Israel I burst into tears. How could I have been so overcome with sadness? Were these tears of joy? How come so moved? It was like someone pulling across at my insides and I felt this yelping inside --I get why they say ‘tug on your heart strings’--but it was more in the abdomen than in the heart area, and I think I was just so grateful to Gidi and to everyone for bringing me across. There was nothing to stop me coming back home, never would be, and all was just as I’d left it. There was no danger of losing what I was and what I had had, to see it all in its fullness was moving, to see something as unblemished as I’d pictured it to be, well there was a certain amount of relief in that, yes, it was like the bubble had burst.