Day 3: Dogs.
The first rule of Israel, or any country where domestic animals often roam freely, is don’t pet the dogs. The reasons for this rule are as obvious as the signs of onset rabies. Of course, the first rule of writing, Austen’s actual truth universally acknowledged, is that any rule offered to the reader so freely, broadly and early must be broken, so let me tell you now: I tried! I didn’t want to pet him! I attempted to stay away. He came up to me. But he was beautiful, and more importantly medium-large and yellow, almost certainly a lab mix, and I was powerless to say no.
It was on a run, alone on a high hill overlooking the rest of the Nazareth valley, in what appeared to be one of the richest neighborhoods in the area. I had gone at night when the temperature dropped with the sun and the winds came in cool, long gusts, my first run of this trip. It’s a unique way to see any country, but particularly Israel, where there are few mountains but many hills and you can see the lights of the haphazardly placed low-rise apartments and religious spires — churches and mosques here, churches, mosques and synagogues most elsewhere — roll like waves across the landscape.
We don’t actually live in Nazareth, but Nazareth Iliit, a large hilltop suburb that overlooks the city and the tree-marked Jezreel Valley. From the right lookout point, you can see to your west the scattered orange roofs and can-shaped white water tanks of the city, and to the east the vast trees and what locals call, for geometric reasons, Boob Hill. Nazareth is almost 100 percent Arab, but Illit was founded as one of the many development towns a young Israeli government built in the 50s to accommodate the influx of Jews exiled from Arab countries (and in, this particular case, to cement Jewish presence in the area), and it has since largely retained that immigrant character. Olim from Russia and Ethiopia dot our apartment and the neighborhood’s sidestreets and playgrounds, many of the original Mizrachi Jews having long since moved on. Unlike many of the development towns, Nazareth Illit appears to have received a significant profusion of government funds over the years, and in addition to immigrants, is also home to some of the area’s wealthiest Israelis, Arab or Jew — who just might be liable to drive by in a jet black mustang or an ivory-and-ruby corvette.
Running up a hill high over the city, I found myself among these American luxuries. Atop lay the Plaza Hotel, a tour bus predictably parked out front. To the other side, down a dead-end street, lay some of the nicest homes I have ever seen in Israel. Well-polished Jerusalem stone ascended two stories. Ornate gates with lit frosted glass offered old-world privacy. Shouts and laughs rose from walled-off verandas. Pools weren’t uncommon, neither were the occasional Israeli smoking a cigarette or chatting on a cell phone while looking cooly down from a balcony. At the end of this hilltop Elysium, lay a single unfinished home. Two stories of cinderblocks and concrete rose over a high fence, sending off pungent fumes of must. As I passed it, approaching the end of the street, I noticed a gate of corrugated white metal: “No Entrance.” And then, in the knee-high gap beneath, came bounding an exuberant mass of golden hair.
I stopped. I must admit, as I imagined my time abroad, I had fancied befriending one of the neighborhood dogs common to small communities in Israel and numerous other countries, belonging to no one and everyone. A community dog. But this was the city of Nazareth (roughly), and this was a stray. Dogs, though are predators, especially strays, and predators dart at anything that moves, right? It’s in their wiring. It’d be absurd to keep running, dangerous even. He stood 4 or 5 feet away from me when I stopped. He plodded up and sat directly at my thigh in that way my old dog, Yukon used to whenever I got home. He looked a bit skinny but otherwise fairly healthy for an animal sleeping amid trash and cinderblocks: fur sleek except for a small mat above his left leg. Shark-white teeth that he flashed unthreateningly. The vertically spiraled tail I would later learn was a key sign of Canaan Dog lineage: He was as of this land as the Jews (or the first people, biblically, the Jews kicked out). When I hesitated, he jumped up, one paw on my chest, tongue reaching out for my chin. And how could I say no to that?
I ran my hands through the fur on his neck and back. It was thick but receptive. It reminded me, in other words, of Yukon, my yellow lab of 16 years, who died slightly over a year ago. The relationship one has with a dog is uniquely tactile; there are simply few other means of communication, and it’s in this precise absence, the rejection of all the messy mediums of human locution, that much of a dog’s appeal lies. I’m reminded of a cousin of mine, who told me of a night when her new dog hopped into bed while she was in the dreamy purgatory between wake and sleep, and for a few hours she believed, physically, that her since-departed german shepherd had joined her again, and how she savored those hours. I, too, have been dreaming often, and waking up to 75-pound absences.
A cat scurried by the dumpster, and he — let’s call him Yaakov — bolted, hind legs rising until he resembled a ball rolling down the street. The cat took to the woods. It’s the first and only time I’ve seen a dog chase a cat.
Yaakov returned and we walked for a bit back the way I came, still under the pretense that running would induce a chase. I was worried, as I often am here, of casting myself too much of an American, in this case by befriending a stray dog like an idiot. So as I heard voices rising from submerged living rooms and watched residents walk out to their cars, I took one side of the street and, by some vague assent, he took the other. I choose to believe we were walking together. Don’t bother telling me otherwise.
Yukon was an outdoors dog, and we walked in the woods often and there we were truly together. He wandered in long elliptical orbits, sniffing, drinking from puddles, scavenging for forgotten sandwiches, only to come back at a clap or a single “Yu!” I believed in those walks in I way I believed in few other things: In God or science or wherever it is other people find communion. Silence reigned there (what was one to say?), as it did in the beginning, before the Word and all this mess it yielded. We’d go home afterwards, and he’d curl in a ball on my bed and sleep there until dinner and then all the hours after that. His old metal bowl remains beside my bed. There are still a couple flecks in food.
I’m no believer in God, and I don’t think spirituality corresponds to anything outside the brain, but I’d like to believe that all dogs do not go to heaven. I’d like to believe that they come back, that strays find a home and the peace they never had, and that the beloved animals we keep in our humiliating yards roam with as much wildness as possible in this humanized world. Yes, I’d like to believe that the dog of an American Jew who wore a kippah above his snout some Friday night dinners came back as a Sabar.
We reached the roundabout between hills that was my signal to turn home. He followed me across a crosswalk and then marched on, having already forgotten about me or perhaps having found a more intriguing scent (I had no food to offer). I stopped and watched him cross the street a couple dozen yards up, one hand on my chest like a nervous owner.
