Gelato in Jerusalem

“Ooh,” Zac says. “Now I need to make a decision. Waffle or gelato. Waffle or gelato?”

“No, you don’t,” I say. “This place does both!”

We’ve been randoming around downtown Jerusalem, a place, at least in the wealthy Jewish West, that’s not short on gelato parlours (apart from anything else, it allows the kosher restaurants to keep dairy desserts off their menu, vastly simplifying their washing up in a world where meat and milk must never mix).

“Ooh,” says Zac, again, pondering, with the ultra-focused attention only a child can devote to ice cream. “I think I’ll just have gelato.”

“You could have both,” I say, my spoilt brat greed surging to the fore.

Who wouldn’t want both?

“No,” he says. “Just gelato.”

There’s something up in the parlour when we enter and we, both of us, stand aside so as not to interrupt. A pretty young girl, tanned, hair neat in a pony tail over her army uniform, smiling and laughing, two mufti friends in tow, and a man in his 40s behind the counter, tense, grey-haired.

They see us. The girl leaves, still laughing, and the grey-haired chap behind the counter begins to shake.

Zac moves over to the refrigerator, starts poring over the Hebrew characters and pictures. “Wow, Mum!” he says. “It’s a good thing they’ve got pictures! Coconut. Pistachio. Rum and raisin…”

He’s spelling them out, working over them, 100% focused with the sort of concentration that I know will be gone within a year or two in search of things that feel more adult and more permanent.

And I start to smile. And I catch the gelato man’s eye. And he’s smiling too. At this still quite little boy, who won’t be little much longer, so painstakingly picking out an ice cream.

“Ooh,” says Zac. “Rum and RAISIN.”

“Would you like to buy?” I hear the man say.

“Oh, sorry,” I say. When it comes to food, Zac’s decision making powers would age Methuselah. We could, quite literally, be here all night. “He’ll buy. He’s just deciding. It takes a while.”

“No,” he says. “To try?”

He holds out a little plastic scoop of rum and raisin. Zac refuses at first, then accepts and pronounces it good.

The gelato man is still shaking. He’s smiling, but he’s shaking. His hand is juddering like an alcoholic’s at 9am.

Zac tries the scoop of icecream, pronounces it good, begins a leisurely inspection of the sauces and trimmings that line the other side.

“Do you have caramel?” he asks.

A blank look. “CARAMEL?”

A little pot comes out, and in goes the sauce for testing. Zac rolls it around his mouth, takes another scoop, and finds it good.

The gelato man is happy that Zac finds it good.

“Your daughter?” I ask, nodding in the direction of the vanished warrior, who must be all of nineteen at the most, but seems, to my untutored eye, to be dressed for combat.

“Yes,” he says, smiling and shaking. We’re in that weird communality of parenthood that hits at the most surprising moments, that sense of common humanity, that feeling that we understand each other, no matter what, we have that one thing in common.

“How many?” I ask. “Only one?”

“No,” he laughs. “Four.”

He mimes three, then one. His youngest.

“Oh,” I say. “Three safe now. This one to go.”

“Yes,” he says. He’s still shaking. Big, proud smile. Eyes that are about to cry.

“How many years?” I ask.

“Two,” he says, shaking more.

She’s only just begun. Two years to safety. Two years till she comes back home.

Or doesn’t.

“Cone or tub?” he asks Zac.

“A tub, please,” says Zac.

“How many scoops?”

“Just one.”

“Are you SURE?” I interject. “You can have as many as you want, as many flavours as you want.”

“No,” he says. “I just want one scoop, rum and raisin, with caramel sauce.”

The man scoops out one scoop, then fills the little tub with its strawberry print up to and beyond the brim. I count three scoops.

Zac’s eyes are almost popping out of his head. “Thank you!” he says.

We talk a little bit about London, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, how the city has changed since I was last here. I pay my twelve shekels, then we progress outside with the sacrificial ice cream to eat it on the pavement in the night breeze that’s just starting to shatter the heat of a day punctuated by the gunfire rattle of pre-Ramadan firecrackers.

As we head back towards the Old City, and the swelter of our cramped room in its Ottoman building, I say to Zac, “He was a nice man, wasn’t he? He was really nice to you.”

“Yeah,” says Zac. “Probably because of his daughter. He was thinking about his daughter the whole time he was offering me the ice cream. That’s why he was being so nice to me.”

No flies on you, son, I think.

“Yes,” I say. “I thought that too.”

“I think it’s good that they have women in the army here,” Zac says. “I know they only have to do two years, not three. But I think it’s very equal. Not as equal as it could be, but very equal.”

It’s Thursday night, the Friday night of the Middle East, and the streets are full of Haredim, the ultra-orthodox Jews whose children, boys and girls, alone among Jewish Israelis, are still (currently) excused the army.

So most vote as aggressively as they can in every single instance: more settlements, more war, push the dirty Arabs into the sea, no compromise, no second state in Eretz-Yisrael, no more polluting Zion with this filth…

“It is,” I say. “It’s very equal.”

For this is the first time, I think, I have witnessed a father waving off his daughter: normally it’s mothers waving off their sons.

Now, I’m not saying the fight she’s fighting is right. Lord knows I’m not.

We’ll visit Palestinian camps while we’re here, and there’ll be warriors and parents there too. Male warriors. Male martyrs. Grieving mothers. And perhaps some female martyrs too.

Ordinary mothers, fathers, children, routinely humiliated and turned over, by bold, brave, young fighters such as her, immortals who, in their own minds at least, death will never touch. Until it does.

Because, like everything in the Middle East, and especially in Jerusalem, this ancient city, this holy city, this city of crazed and bleeding mirrors, there is no right. There are only, ever, different shades of wrong.

The ice cream, Zac tells me, was great.