The Judgement of Solomons

Chapter 15

'What a lovely settlement!' Jackie trilled.

Rebekah laughed, but she wasn't amused. ‘Tzion Sheli isn’t a 'settlement' - it's a town, where we live, where our ancestors lived until actual settlers, invading settlers, drove them out - the Romans, the Arabs. It's a hometown, with schools and a football team. And people who have come home.’

Looking out from Asher’s roof terrace Jackie tried to feel the enormity and solemnity of what she was experiencing now for the first time. (How come she’d visited Israel so much and never been near a settlement, no, a town in East Jerusalem - she’d been to the Mamilla Mall more times than she could remember.) There was a song, Jerusalem Of Gold, that her first husband, Nathan Solomons, had sung to Josh when he was a baby:

‘The mountain air is clear as wine

And the scent of pines

Is carried on the breeze of twilight

With the sound of bells.

And in the slumber of tree and stone

Captive in her dream

The city that sits solitary

And in its midst is a wall….’

But she was dismayed to find that the song playing in her unruly brain was Ennio Morricone’s sterling work on the theme from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. It was all so…frontier, here.

For some reason she thought of her favourite Tel Aviv restaurant, Toto, on Berkovitch Street, and wished she was there eating chestnut gnocchi and throwing back watermelon cocktails prior to a nice quiet evening of intimacy with strangers while ‘Dust In The Wind’ played, reminding her how transient life was and that she owed it to everyone to go out and have as much sex as humanly possible.

We’re not in Toto anymore, are we, Kansas!

She cursed herself for being so shallow.