A Street Divided Read Online Free

A Street Divided
Book: A Street Divided Read Online Free
Author: Dion Nissenbaum
Pages:
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can knock heavy iron window shutters from their hinges. When the rolling thunder stops echoing through the valleys and the skies clear, you can turn east to see the shimmering waters of the Dead Sea and the dull glow of Amman’s city lights 50 miles away in Jordan’s rolling desert hills.
    * * *
    It was easy to settle into the city’s rhythms. I moved into my new home in 2006 and sat for hours drinking coffee on the rooftop, soaking in the sounds and scents of Jerusalem. There was a small dog yapping in the garden right below my living room window, but what neighborhood doesn’t have barking dogs? I didn’t think too much of it at first. But because I often worked from home, the yappy Chihuahua soon became the bane of my existence. The dog barked day and night. There never seemed to be an hour when he wasn’t yapping at something.
    I didn’t want to be the new foreigner who started complaining about things the minute I arrived. But as the days of relentless barking dragged into weeks, I walked down the concrete stairs next to my building and knocked on a rusting metal gate leading to the garden home right below mine. A small, elderly woman with tangles of dark hair and a thin, flowered dress came out and stood on the porch, giving me the eye. She spoke in a loud, gravelly voice, as if she could hardly hear herself. She didn’t know much English. I didn’t understand much Hebrew. Her suspicious daughter-in-law finally came out to translate. I had a feeling it wasn’t going to end well.
    â€œCan you please keep your dog inside when you’re gone?” I asked the two women in my best friendly-new-neighbor voice. “He barks all the time.”
    â€œYes, yes,” the daughter-in-law said in a way that made it clear they weren’t going to think much about it after they closed the door.
    The yappy dog, Timmy the Sixth, became my Telltale Heart, the incessant soundtrack to my life, driving me a little battier every day. I left my neighbors printouts of brochures for gizmos they could buy to train Timmy the Sixth not to bark. One afternoon, when the yapping seemed unbearable, I stormed back down to the house and asked the old woman to do something about her dog—this time with a bit more Jerusalem anger in my voice.
    â€œIt’s the Arabs,” her irritated Filipina daughter-in-law told me as she translated for a mother-in-law she seemed to dislike. “She says it’s the Arab kids that make her dog bark. She says the Arab kids run up and down the street all day and bang on our fence to make the dog bark and upset her.”
    It felt like an argument I wasn’t going to win, so I turned to the long arm of the law. The long, legal process of having the woman fined for violating city noise ordinances became a torturous, time-consuming affair that led nowhere. When all hope appeared lost, one longtime Abu Tor resident offered a grim solution: She offered to kill Timmy the Sixth for me.
    â€œI’ll just put poison in some meat and throw it over the fence,” she told me matter-of-factly one night after listening, again, to my complaints about the barking. “It’s no problem. We’ve had problems with them for years. ”
    I didn’t think she was serious until she mentioned it again. Like it was a done deal.
    â€œIt’s OK,” I told her. “It’s not so bad that you have to do that.”
    â€œOh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.”
    I wasn’t giving her a wink-and-a-nod to go ahead with it. I really didn’t want her to poison the dog. But she seemed to think I was giving her an implicit green light.
    â€œReally though,” I said before we hung up. “Please don’t poison the dog.”
    â€œDon’t worry about it,” she reassured me in a way that wasn’t reassuring at all. “I understand.”
    Sure enough, she tried to kill Timmy the Sixth by
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