Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph by Ted Simon Read Free Book Online Page A

constantly colliding in the doorways was a matter for wonder. There was never a harsh word, no hint of impatience or frustration, the children kept to their own little world, seemingly content, looking up from a modest mud pie with big eyes full of liquid love.
    They designed their lives around each other with the intricate harmony of an oriental carpet. Obviously it required much submission, mostly on the part of the women. Was it submission or repression? Or a different view of space? I could not tell.
    Just how uncrowded they felt became clear when I asked about their third room. They said that since their eldest children had moved out, they had so much space that they had offered their spare room to a couple of elderly poor relations who were still sleeping. So now we were eight.
    There was one other door through which I passed after breakfast. Behind it was a square metre of cement with a hole in the middle, and a jug with a slender spout. I went to get some paper, and then returned and squatted down, rather puzzled, because it was obvious that nobody else used paper. I had been told many times of course, that you should never greet an Arab with your left hand. It was serious insult, because that was the hand they used to wipe their behinds, and I had grinned and said, Yes, I know, and somehow I had never really thought what it meant because everyone has paper. Don't they?
    No, they don't. They have a jug of water and a left hand, and the thought of having to touch my shit with my own hand disgusted me. God, it was bad enough having to stick your fingers in your food. So I ignored the whole problem and choked up their lavatory with paper.
    There was no running water in the house and no electricity. The houses were as small as they could be, and built of the cheapest materials. The roads between them were dirt. Kabaria was a slum: a new, still uncompleted slum. Or it would have been but for the people who lived in it. A slum, I came to realize, is the people and not the place.
    I only came to realize how mean a place it was when Mohamad's brother-in-law took me to visit his father in the country. We rode off down the highway and up into some low hills, softly curved like the breasts of mother earth, nourishing big shade trees and peaceful olive groves. I saw a brown cow suckling its calf, and a compound of thorn and cactus, and we turned in there to a couple of huts set at right angles. They were made of mud plastered over wattle and you could see where the hands had shaped them at the corners. The door frames revealed how thick and satisfying the walls were, like gingerbread maybe, topped with thatch, and at their base sat two colour-matched orange marmalade cats.
    Inside, the spaces were about the same size as the rooms at Kabaria, but this was real space, under the rafters, with room for the imagination to grow. The old man sat down opposite me across a rough coffee table while his wife busied herself behind me with a charcoal stove, always behind me so that I never really saw her. Behind her and filling the width of the hut was a wicker-work bed stretched on a wooden frame.
    The old man talked crazy nonsense to me about the world beyond his cactus fence, and he had a perfect right because it was a crazy world. I ate his bread and honey - his own wheat, his own hives - and heard about the Jews.
    'These Jews,' he said, 'they have a strong smell. I can smell one a mile away.' We were face to face, and half of me is Jewish. Maybe it's the rear half.
    T have heard of a Jewish tribe,' he went on, 'which was conquered, and the invaders slew all the men, but the women allowed themselves to have children by their conquerors. "Beshwaya, beshzvaya", they murmured; "in time, in time". Secretly they taught the children to hate, and when they grew up they murdered their fathers.
    'As long as there is one left alive they will never give up.'
    He was a fine old man and his nonsense did not disturb me. Any Jew could come into his house