My first trip to the Holy Land was in the late 1980s. I don’t remember the exact date, but I remember the season – early spring – and the light. As the plane landed in the early morning, I woke up suddenly, and looked out of the window. In London, where I had fallen asleep as the flight took off, it was rainy and gloomy, but the light in Israel was translucent, fierce.
At the taxi stand, there was a tree bursting with fragrant pink flowers. The smell followed me as I piled my luggage in the back. I felt, already, like I was on a great adventure. I had no hotel booked and no plans. I had a few addresses and a few telephone numbers, but this was my first real journey, my Grand Tour. The taxi took an hour to reach Jerusalem, climbing the hill up and up to the city that I had read about since I was small. The temperature grew colder as we climbed higher, and we passed Palestinian villages, some deserted since 1948. I kept my nose pressed against the glass like a child, watching the rocky hills, which seemed biblical. I saw shepherds herding sheep, their white robes nearly fluorescent against the light. The scene was a total contrast to my grey student life in Bloomsbury – a life of books and libraries and coffee shops that served weak tea.
When we reached the outskirts of the Holy City, I remember thinking again that the light was extraordinary: now, against the faintly white buildings, it had changed from white to a pale, shell-like pink. I was completely and utterly transfixed: I knew at that moment this city would remain important to me for the rest of my life. I was right.
I stayed in Jerusalem and the West Bank for a month. The heat rose as April turned to May, and I moved from the YMCA in West Jerusalem to the journalists’ HQ, the American Colony Hotel, on the east side (more affordable is the Jerusalem Hotel, or even more affordable still, the St George Pilgrim Guest House, just down the road). I took a taxi to get there, and the manager gave me the smallest and cheapest room – flush up against the mosque. But my room was perfect for my pile of books, my dusty boots and my headscarves. It had an iron bed, a tiled bathroom and a Turkish rug. I rose at dawn to the wail of the muezzin and began to write. Then I went to breakfast in the lemon-scented courtyard, and sat at tables inlaid with Armenian tiles, and ate white cheese and olives, and drank freshly squeezed juice. The strong coffee had the smell of the market: cardamom.
Everything about Jerusalem seemed magical to me. Although it was the beginning of the first intifada, or uprising of the Palestinians, I wandered every day through the old city alone and was not at all afraid. In the Christian section, I went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In the Armenian section, I climbed up to the rooftops and marvelled at the panorama of the old city. I made friends with a tile maker called Hagop whom I commissioned to make me a wall tile of the Tree of Life. I still see him, 20 years later, when I go back to Jerusalem, and he still tells me the stories of the Armenian diaspora. (He works in a tile shop in the Armenian Quarter. When you arrive, ask anyone to lead you to his store. There is a good coffee shop nearby and you should ask him to take you into the Armenian church, which is usually closed to foreigners.)
I went to the Wailing Wall and wrote my prayers on a piece of paper and inserted them into the holes, next to fervently praying Jews. I stood as close as I could to the Dome of the Rock mosque. I drank mint tea in an outdoor café near the Jaffa Gate, and smelt the fresh herbs and spices in vendors’ buckets.
Sometimes I drove to Bethlehem, because, as a Catholic, it was a town whose importance was imprinted in my mind from earliest childhood. I visited nuns in a convent. I met blue-eyed Palestinian Christians who told me stories of their ancestors. I went to refugee camps, which offered a massive contrast to life inside the clean white walls of the city. And I went to the spot where Jesus was apparently born. Ten years later, a few weeks after my father died, and a few days after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, I would return there and bring one of my father’s holy medals and lay it on the spot. It was nearly Christmas and there were pilgrims from all over the world praying near the place where the baby Jesus had lain, thousands of years before. I could hear their prayers, smell the incense.
Since that first trip nearly 20 years ago, I return to Jerusalem at least once a year. There are places in the world that touch me, but Jerusalem moves me profoundly. It is a place, I believe, that has the essence of history, the smell of time. And above all, to me, it is a Holy Place. I still wander alone there and marvel at the smells and the impenetrable light. And, although I must have made that journey from Jerusalem to Bethlehem a hundred times, I am still astounded, still shocked by how ancient, how peaceful, how perfect it is.
Janine di Giovanni is author of The Place at the End of the World: Stories from the Frontline and Madness Visible: A Memoir of War (both £8.99, Bloomsbury).
British Airways flies from London Heathrow to Tel Aviv. Book a flight on ba.com now.
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