A Street Divided Read Online Free Page A

throwing poisoned meat into the dog’s yard. But it didn’t work. Timmy the Sixth lived to bark another day. I gave up. The yapping dog appeared unbeatable. The day I moved out of the apartment at the end of 2009, the irritable little Chihuahua was still barking at shrieks and shadows.
    When I returned to Abu Tor in 2014 to talk with the family, the woman’s son, Yaacov, a guy known in the neighborhood as Yanki, recognized me almost immediately. Like his mom, Yanki had put down his roots in Abu Tor. He’d brought his wife there, proudly took their twins on afternoon walks, and watched the three of them move away when the feuding couple decided some distance was best. Like the kid he must have been, Yanki still roamed around his mom’s house in flip-flops, baggy shorts and sleeveless T-shirts that showed off his dark, hairy arms. The house smelled of wet dog and chicken soup. Timmy the Sixth was still alive—and still barking at anyone who knocked on the gate.
    Yanki’s mother, Malka Joudan, the one who’d blamed the Arab kids for making her dog bark, still lived on Assael in the abandoned Palestinian home she’d moved into in 1951. Malka’s mind had been hobbled by a stroke that made it difficult to talk to her. It was hard to follow all the tangents in her meandering stories and harder to know which tales were true. Yanki’s wife and their twins were long gone. Yanki and his mother had stopped talking to each other. They moved around the cold, damp house in their own orbits. Malka’s brown curls popped out of the edges of the scarf tied around her head as she asked her guests, again and again, why they were there, whether they had seen her daughter, what her son was doing in the kitchen . . .
    Malka sat near a small electric space heater under several puffy comforters while she shouted at the television news. Yanki paced around the darkened rooms as he talked on the phone. His flip-flops slapped against the cold tile floors while he rummaged about in the shadows for something. When he was nearly done with the call, he came into the living room where his mom was watching TV with the volume blasting.
    â€œI remember you,” he said to me as he sat down near his mother and hung up the phone. “You wanted to be in control.”
    I waved my hand and laughed it off. The sound of Timmy the Sixth’s barking felt like nails on the chalkboard in my brain. I wanted to chase the memories from my mind as soon as I could.
    â€œIt’s in the past,” I told him.
    Yanki chuckled and looked me over.
    â€œIt’s OK,” he said before getting up again to get tea and water for his guests. “Forget it.”
    Yanki, who was born and raised on the street, took a long view of the fight. He’d seen plenty of foreigners pass through the neighborhood. He could tell who was going to be around for the long haul.
    â€œI knew you were a visitor here,” he told me as he slipped away into the darkness once again. “I knew you were going to go.”
    * * *
    Living in Jerusalem sometimes felt like being in Dr. Seuss’s illustrated children’s story “The Zax,” about a North-Going Zax who runs straight into a South-Going Zax in the middle of the wide-open Prairie of Prax. Whether North-Going or South-Going, the Zaxes are loud, hairy, stubborn, argumentative creatures. Although the open prairie stretches out on either side of them, neither the North-Going Zax nor the South-Going Zax is willing to step aside so the other can pass.
    The North-Going Zax threatens to stand firm for 59 days. The South-Going Zax vows to stay put for 59 years. If there is to be a showdown, the South-Going Zax says, he will come out on top. As a boy, the South-Going Zax tells his North-Going rival, all young Zaxes learned a simple rule: “Never budge in the least! Not an inch to the west! Not an inch to the east!” The patronizing lecture only seems to make the