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Miriam MogilevskyIt had been a while since I'd last seen this place.When I walked through it now, I felt as if I were dawdling beside afountain, dragging my fingers through the water, penetrating only thetopmost layer. Beneath the water, on the blue tile bottom of thefountain - that's where the gold coins lay. If I stayed long enough,drank everything up and breathed it all in, maybe I could reach thatlayer sometime within the two weeks I'd be staying here.When the airplane had landed, people had applauded. I wonderedconstantly afterwards - what were they clapping for? I imagined thattheir applause was a tradition dating back from the days when flyingan airplane was no simple matter, and a safe landing with nocomplications was an impressive performance indeed. I imagined thepilot and copilot bowing during multiple curtain calls, as the audienceof passengers called for an encore.But a much more attractive hypothesis eventually occurred to me.Maybe they applauded because they were that happy, that pleased tobe in Israel. Maybe they saw the palm trees like I did, and the crystal-glass buildings of Tel Aviv, and thought they had just witnessed abeautiful ballet, or a perfectly sung opera, or an impeccably performedrendition of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and, like all sensible people,they wanted to applaud it.I understood them perfectly in that moment, and that sense of pureartistic pleasure captivated me again as I walked down the streets of Haifa, glancing into every nook and cranny of the urban landscape. Ineeded to sit on every piece of rusty playground equipment, and twirlaround each lamppost as if I were Gene Kelly himself.For the next two weeks, I tried to have it all. I went to the beach, eventhough it was much too cold for swimming, and poked at the sand andwaded in the sea. I ate falafel at a beachside restaurant. I visited mygrandfather's grave and marveled at the beauty of a lush, green Israelicemetery, versus a stark and cold American one. I fed Haifa'smultitudes of feral cats and wandered up and down the impossibly longstone stairways that lead from one street to another.Everything was soaked and tinted with my childhood memories. All thelittle parks and stores I used to go to, the benches where elderlycouples sat - all had a beautiful stain upon them, because I wasn't
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