Saul Elbein, Stray Cat Owner

Here's a story for you: I woke up yesterday morning to a large Russian woman standing in my apartment, yelling at me in Hebrew: "WHO'S CAT IS THIS?!"

I look over at my roommate, Dan, who has also just woken up. He looks like he's trying to wake up from a bad dream. I have two parallel thoughts. One: I never, ever want to wake up to this again. Russians are scary, especially in your apartment. Two: cat?

Israel in general and Jerusalem in particular are notorious for stray cats; the Middle East had a huge rat problem in the 30s and the British, who were then running the place, solved it with about as much foresight as they solved the rest of the region's problems. They released boatloads of cats. Now, there are no rats, and cats are everywhere. Including, apparently, the Beit Canada Absorbtion Center.



Russian woman kept yelling, so I got up. A small gray cat--probably like 6 months--was sitting on our dining room floor, meowing loudly. Galina--the Russian woman--pointed at the cat and told me to get it out. I scoop up cat and take it out of the apartment. Galina keeps yelling something about a new roommate coming, presumably not the cat. I smile and nod until she walks out.



Cat under bed


Dan walks over. We confer. We decide three things:

1. The cat is cute,
2. The cat clearly chose us, using apparently magical powers to get through a locked door,
3. Our keeping the cat will really, really piss off the Jewish Agency, as well as our obnoxious, anal-retentive religious roommate, DB, who flips if there is dirt on his soap. If he (cat or DB) stays, there will be trouble.
   

This decided, we retrieve the cat from the hallway. It meows pathetically. We look for food. The cat rejects corn, pita, non-dairy creamer, and, strangely, soy milk. We are annoyed at the cat's lack of gratitude, as it has shown up without supplies and acts entitled to ours. Cat is lucky that we didn't eat it.


Cat dissing our food


We find some tuna, probably belonging to DB. We give it to the cat. The cat eats it and stops meowing. We throw it in the bedroom, give it a bed. I walk out. Suddenly, I hear a cry of pain from Dan. I walk back in and the cat is flying around the room, attacking any vertical surface with its claws. We don't have string, so I play with it with a long piece of toilet paper until it passes out on a nest of toilet paper shreds. I decide I am a good cat owner. I leave.

Fast forward a few hours. I come back to DB ranting about how we did not consult him about bringing a cat in the room, and how it better stay in our room. I reply that I understand it bothers him, but on the other hand he can go tell the Jewish Agency that we already have four beings living in our room, and then maybe they won't send another roommate. This makes him slightly happier, until he realizes that it is ridiculous. He walk into our room, and picks up the cat, which scratches him fiercely. He announces that he is going to get rid of the cat. We laugh and say whatever. He tells us that it's a safety and health hazard, and that cats are like Israeli rats. We point out that the cat will eat Israeli rats. Unconvinced, DB picks up the cat and takes it outside. We are shocked by his lack of humanity. He feels completely justified. We feel better about feeding the cat his tuna.

So the cat is gone. But now that I think about it, it really resembled one some friends of mine in the building adopted before they left. I played with it before, and, surprise, it showed up at our apartment. So I have every belief that it will be back. And when it is, we may shave it against the heat. On DB's bed.

What Now?

So the winds are turning cold, birds are flying south, and Beit Canada is filling with new immigrants. It's about time for me to move on. Actually, I may not have a choice soon--I just got a notice from the absorption center that if I don't, they will kick me out. I'm quaking in my sandals.

I finish my JPost internship on Thursday, which means I'm essentially done now but am still hanging out in the office, waiting for the Jordanian Ministry of Antiquities to call me back, which really means looking busy while taking advantage of free internet. I've been spectacularly unmotivated this week; I've only gotten one mediocre story out, and even that should have gone out Friday, except that I was spectacularly hung-over (secondary consequence of a week spent dealing with the Israeli government). Oh, and it being the weekend, no one would return my calls.

If you're interested, the last few stories I've written that I'm at all proud of are here, here, here, and here, with that last being another Daily Texan editorial.

So I finish the internship Thursday, and then God knows what I'll do the next three weeks. I'm thinking a hiking trip in the Golan, maybe chilling in Tel Aviv, traveling across the West Bank by camel, whatever. Something like that. Basically, I have no idea what to do with myself, which, at the moment, feels very nice.

So I'm calling on the three people who read this blog--you know who you are--to tell me what to do with myself for the next three weeks, 'go fuck' being an acceptable but kind of juvenile answer. Come on, it'll be fun. Like a contest. With the added benefit of horrible guilt if I take your advice and it kills me.

Mount Sinai, Bedouin, and Russian Tour Groups

When Moses walked up Mount Sinai to talk to God, the first words he heard were not, I think, "I am the Lord Your God." They were not, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." No, if Moses' experience at the holy mountain was anything like mine, the first words he heard were something like "Mister, mister, you want buy keffiyeh?"

My travel buddy Roma and I arrived at the base of the mountain at two in the morning to find it crawling with tourists and local Bedouin trying to sell scarves.

"Buy keffiyeh," one of the Bedouin men said, pushing a head scarf at me. "Only twenty pounds."

"La, shukran," I said, exhausting my store of Arabic.

"No, buy," he said. "Is cold at the top of the mountain, and all your money will not keep you warm."

I felt it. Synthetic. "What's it made of?" I asked.

The Bedouin smiled through stained teeth. "Keffiyeh," he said. "Like Arafat. Yassir Arafat? You know?"

Now there's a good selling point. I laughed. "Oh, this is Arafat's keffiyeh?"

He nodded, not understanding. "Yes, Arafat."

I walked away. God only knows the bad karma involved in buying Arafat's old keffiyeh. And besides, I was dissapointed in the man. I would have thought he had too much class to wear polyester.

Roma and I had pulled an all-nighter to catch the minibus from our hotel in Dahab out to Jebel al-Mousa (Mount Moses), which the Bedouin say is the biblical Mount Sinai. The mountain lies about about fifty miles inland, on the other side of a wall of shield mountains that separate it from the coast. It is desert in the purest sense, which means that it is very, very hot very, very early in the day. So to climb it without dying of dehydration, you go at night, make the punishing hike to the summit, catch the sunrise, then speed down before it gets to hot. It would be a solitary, spiritual experience. This, at least, was the plan. We hadn't figured on the Bedouin, or the camels, or the Russian Orthodox tour group.



(Sidebar: The Bedouin having lived in the area for centuries, it seems like they would have the best claim as to the location of any mountain. On the other hand, though, it's not clear whether the Bedouin were in the area before the Arab Conquest fifteen hundred years ago, which most sources would put a while after the Revelation at Sinai. It may be that the Bedouin aren't quite the authorities on the subject they would have you believe--these are the same people who say Aaron is buried at Petra.)

Around two-thirty we started up the mountain. The moon was still almost full and the desert landscape glowed with a pearly light. The white sand path was easy to see, so we could hike fast without worrying about wandering off it. We passed Saint Catherine's, a Byzantine-era monastery about half a mile up the path, and ran directly into the camels.

The way up to the summit, we discovered, is very long--most people take about two-and-a-half to three hours to do it, although a decent hiker can do it in two. So the Bedouin sell camel rides up and down so that the lazy or out-of-shape can see the top without dying. There must be many of these, because in the course of the hike I counted easily a hundred camels, perhaps more. At first--near the bottom--the Bedouin would try to stop you and ask 'Mister, do you want ride gammel?' Later, they dropped even that formality and walked by saying 'Gammel," much in the small-time drug dealers say "Crack," or "X," walking off if you didn't respond quickly.

One saw me and Roma, gestured at her, and said, "Gammel for your wife?"

"Trade?" I asked. Roma shot me a dirty look. Whatever. She wasn't going to carry me and my bags up the mountain and donate hair for making carpets.

"No, no. Ride."

"Why not? I give you her, you give me camel. She cook, she clean, she bear strong Bedouin sons." I have no idea why I was talking like this. It was late.

"No, no good," he said. Then his eyes lit up. "Take camel. Is three hours walk to top. With gammel, only one." Mind, he was leading the camel. Walking. The Bedouin have an interesting way with numbers. Another promised it was two hours walk to the top. One trying to sell me a scarf said it was very cold at the 1250 meter summit, and another next to him swore I would freeze when I reached 2000.

We heard this, or variations of it, most of the way up the mountain. And it was a long way, especially since we spent most of it passing tour groups and camels. The path was narrow, and the camel is reluctant to let you pass. It is also smelly and ill-tempered, so you don't want to get too close. I was alomst run off cliffs several times by the beasts.

As for the mountain? Well, it's spectacular. Around an hour from the summit, you see it soaring above you, a great craggy peak that looks like the work of God Himself. Beneath, lit by moonlight, you see the valley, the path white against the stone, and behind it row on row of mountains. And from there it's a long climb, culminating in seven hundred and fifty--again, taking the Bedouin at their word--slick, rough hewn steps. Each is about a meter wide, though, so you can only go as fast as the slowest person anywhere on the path. And nothing against Russian endurance--I mean, WW2, come on--but there were definitely some slow people on that hike.

Eventually, we got to the top, dug into our halwa (A mixture of sesame oil and honey. All we had for food, since Egyptian grocery stores suck) and sat out to watch the sun rise. Five minutes later, freezing, we realized the sun wouldn't come up for another two hours. We unpacked the sleeping bag, wedged ourselves into a crack in a rock that blocked the wind, and covered ourselves with the bag. I closed my eyes for a second, and woke up two hours later to Japanese voices arguing and light streaming over the mountains.

We got up, opened our eyes. I wrapped myself in a blanket and went to go watch the sun rise. The view was incredible. The Sinai Mountains stretched to infinity like the waves of a stalled sea. And then, just as the sun crested the mountains, every Japanese tourist on the mountain ran to have his or her picture taken against it. And the Russians started singing Orthodox hymns in loud, deep, choral voices. It was time to go. We sped down the mountain.

This is the point where I should reflect on the experience, tell about what it did to my spirit, how I touched the face of God. But really, I'm not at the level where I can have a spiritual experience when surrounded by Japanese tourists, and I'm not even sure the Bedouin have the right mountain. So maybe I should bitch about how tourists ruined a good experience. But I was a tourist too. So I'll close with this: Sinai was an awesome hike. Do it. God is watching. And if you can't make it to the top, well, there's always gammels.