One day not long after we’d moved to Jerusalem—we lived there from 2006 to 2007, when I was the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University near Tel Aviv—my wife, Melanie, and I were just inside Jaffa Gate, the huge arched limestone entrance into the western side of the Old City.
Melanie was taking photos of the gate and the Tower of David near it, the limestone tower like a medieval castle you’d see in a movie. Something David himself never laid eyes on, the walls and tower having been built by the Ottomans only after the Crusaders had been cleared out.
I was standing, watching, and saw, just inside the gate, a kid beside a cart, a beat-up square green thing with bicycle tires for wheels.
What lay atop it was what got me: a couple rows of big, elongated bread rings, foot-long crosses between bagels and soft pretzels, sesame seeds baked into the tops. They looked sort of exotic, and maybe tasty, and pretty easy to tote. And I was hungry; we’d been walking the quarters all afternoon.
So I took a step toward the cart.
Before I could say a word, still four or five paces from contact, the kid—he couldn’t have been more than ten, his hair buzz-cut, shirt too big—zeroed in on me, said, “Five shekels,” and held up his hand, all five fingers extended.
I nodded at him, held up two fingers. “I’d like two, bevakasha,” I said, and he gave a smile, nodded hard. He picked out two, with the other hand reached somewhere inside the cart and brought out a small black plastic sack, loaded them in.
“Toda,” I said, and handed him a ten-shekel bill. He gave me the bag, nodded again, smiling, and started to stuff the bill in his pocket.
But then he stopped, quickly turned to look behind him, and I realized someone was talking to him.
There on the stoop of the shop behind him sat a man in jeans and a striped polo, who looked just like the kid. He was leaned back on his elbows, feet crossed in front of him, taking it easy. A dad, his son working the cart for a while.
Again he said something to the kid, who shrugged, looked into the cart, retrieved something, and held out his hand to me.
Two small triangle-shaped parcels, the same size as the paper footballs we flicked back and forth during
