Jerusalem; Galilee; Negev

CHURCH

The fragrance is thick. Audrey imagines a thin, blue cloud swirling into her lungs. This is contested ground. At each corner of the sanctuary, separated by wooden screens of one sort or another, guards smile. The Coptic guard there; the Catholic guard next door. Here the Orthodox, there the Protestant. Audrey imagines God prepared for an operation by these theological surgeons, each ready to cut along his own dotted line. She remembers Solomon and the baby, She bites a cuticle and shifts her backpack.

GARDEN

They say that some of the olive trees are two thousand years old, and for the religious Christian tourists, that information itself is almost holy. They breathe out quietly: "Here, maybe," one says, touching the arthritic trunk of one of the oldest -- or at any rate ugliest -- of the trees. Maybe here Jesus prayed. Audrey has no idea who the "they" that "say" are, but she avoids this place except when the tour buses have gone. How do you live in a city that everyone else imagines?

MARKET

Her favorite vendor sells cucumbers: "Meh-la-fa-fo-neem!" he growls, waving his hand in the air. "Meh-la-fa-fo-neem!" This is the richest place in the city, ripe with the tang and sweetness beneath the skins of a thousand lemons, a thousand berries. At the edge of a poor neighborhood, in back of the narrow alleys of the ultra-orthodox, here there is only plenty, exuberance of color, and ripe, naked fruit. It has been the favorite place to bomb, not for the produce but for the people, bursting their skins, letting their juices cover the ground.

POOL

Which stones would she cast here? Anger. Bitterness. Envy. She watches from above as men and boys approach the water for tashlich. But even if she were to hurl the stones in her heart out of a boat in the middle of Galilee or miles out from Jaffa? Surely they would only drop to the bottom and shift, grinding against others' grief and hatred.

MOUNTAIN

A mountain, really no more than a hillside, but the orange trees have come into flower and the air is sweet with a perfume that is heady only because it is real. Until she came to this country, she had smelled that honeyed fragrance only from the necks of dime store bottles. This hillside is where Christ preached, they say, and this is where Mussolini built his ghastly church, the black excrescence high above the lake. Blessed are the orange blossoms, for they do not last, but neither do they intentionally betray.

DESERT

Near Bethlehem, Herod's palace emerges out of the dust at a great distance. A giant anthill. High up, they say. So high that he could see his enemies on the horizon like so many sand flies. Could prepare for them with his multitude of weaponry. What if I had seen it coming, Audrey wonders. Does a man's heart look like an army of insets if it marches forward to harm you? Herod was paranoid, they say. As if trusting were wisdom.