On a late afternoon, a chilly spring-day, I rushed down Gihon Street of Jerusalem’s Abu-Tur neighborhood. I had to get to the main street’s bus station, to catch number 74 downtown. A few months earlier we had married, and moved from Nahla’ot to Abu-Tur, into an apartment of a house, that people referred to as “the last house of Gihon Street.” It was not that this street ended with our house – our house gained its appellation simply because it was the last house of Gihon Street’s Jewish part. Right next to it, the remains of a wall from the 67’-war marked the “border,” the border between “Jewish Jerusalem,” and the other, unknown, “Arab Jerusalem”: that part, which is – from the perspective of the city’s Jewish inhabitants – some kind of a white spot or a black hole, where the names of neighborhoods and streets become indistinguishable gibberish, where I would not get along, be lost, a total stranger.
Yet, a stranger I was also in “Jewish Jerusalem”: Women who looked like me were sitting in the bus next to me, reading Psalms, or calling their families on their mobile phones to organize the Shabbat’s set up – yet I had no family in Israel, and instead of Psalms, I had just discovered Talal Asad’s “Formations of the Secular.” Jerusalem’s German expats didn’t offer any refuge, too: as a convert, who deliberately chose to belong to the not-yet-enlightened Psalm-readers, I was referred to as a more or less pitiful person, whose academic brain melts away like a snow-man in the sun. I was, in short, an assemblage of unrelated parts, with myself (and my apartment, coincidentally) being located at an unidentifiable in-between place, where no other people were dwelling, where there was no recognizable community, no solidarity, no natural buffer-zone.
On that chilly afternoon, on my way to the bus-stop, I met Mandolina. Mandolina – who did not have her name back then – was a cat, maybe one month old, not bigger than a fist. She was dwindled up in a bush next to the street, crying, because her belly was ripped open. There were branches, thorns, dust and dirt, and a bundle of blood, bowels entangled around legs, with a faint breathing body. Frantically, I searched for the phone-number of the city’s veterinary emergency. Someone picked up: Yes, they would come, but it may take a while.
I waited next to the bush. The hours passed by. The sun slowly vanished, the sky turned red, and the air became cold and serene. I am not sure, cat, what we are doing here, I told her. She kept on breathing; I kept on waiting.
It was dark already when the veterinary service arrived. With a pair of tongs, similar to those that are used to pick up rubbish from the street, they grabbed her, placed her in a metal cage, took my phone number, and drove away. She will not make it, they told me.
Mandolina, however, made it. Three days later, I got a phone call from the veterinary service: The cat had survived surgery, but it couldn’t remain any longer at the veterinary station. Outside, the chilly weather and the rain would turn the wound inflammatory, so if I could take the cat into my home? Yes, I said, sure, the cat can stay with me!
Again, she was locked up in a metal cage. When the veterinary service worker opened it, she ran out in total panic, crushed a few times against the walls, and eventually hid behind the fridge. Ok, he said, goodbye then.
For two weeks, she left her hideaway only during the nights, in order to eat some of the food, which I had placed next to the fridge. In the night, I heard her wandering around, yet as soon as she heard the rustling of my blanket, she ran back to the fridge, her refuge. We advanced in small steps: First, she stared at me when I was sitting at my computer, a few meters away from the fridge. Weeks later, she stared at me also when I was walking around in the apartment, hiding only when I came too close to her fridge. It took a few months, until she dared to touch my hand with her little nose. In the meantime, we had built her a little shack in the garden right next to our apartment’s window, from where she could jump in- and out. She never became fully domesticated.
When we left Jerusalem for Berlin, Mandolina stayed behind. I placed a full plate of food next to her shack – she immediately came to fetch it – and I closed the windows of our apartment, the garden’s backdoor, the apartment’s door, and left the “last house” of Gihon Street. I passed the place where I had found her, walked down the street to the bus stop, to the central bus station, to the airport. Our neighbors agreed to give her food, yet we lost contact with them. I have no idea what happened to Mandolina: for a few weeks, she probably waited for food to be placed next to her shack. I hope that she made it, and am tentatively optimistic: Even though she had always remained small, she had a strong survival instinct, and luck, too.
When setting up my blog, one of the stages of registration entailed the naming of the site’s domain. I didn’t know that, unlike the blog’s title, I could of course not change the domain-name later on. And that’s how a blog called “Mandolina” came into being: It was simply the first name that came to my mind. She remained in my heart, if you wish to phrase it like that.
This name fits, however, because much of my writing here is a continuation of something, that started many years earlier in “Gihon Street’s last house,” during the time Mandolina was living in our garden (which was not officially “our garden” at all). The feeling of insecurity and melancholy of this time have vanished, yet still, the blog’s vantage point is that moment when turning from a self-evident, naturally belonging agent into an object, or a “problem,” of contemporary notions of “the good,” the reasonable, the right, the important. Of course, this means that this blog is not about pleasing the majority of readers: it is about re-thinking that, which pleases the majority of readers. It is, at the end of the day, about finding words for a vantage point, that is situated at the margin of a place, where street-names sound familiar, and glides into another place, that is the dominion of another law, quite literally. A place, where me and Mandolina gradually lost our panic, reassembled our selves, and tried to make sense of this fragile, particular beginning of a new life.
Mandolina 