284
CAIRO TO DAMASCUS
I broke it in half and hid the pieces inside my shirt. Finding a secluded place in the lovely gardens, I devoured part of
the first half. Munching, I arrived at the Pantiles.
"What are you eating?" one of the boys asked.
"Stale chewing-gum I found in my pocket."
I wrapped the remaining bread in paper and placed it on
my closet shelf. But when I returned to it for supper, half
was gone. I didn't know whom to suspect and said nothing
about it, for morally, I should have shared the loot with the
boys.1
The few restaurants in Jerusalem still open a few hours a
day served watery soup, tiny slivers of meat, dehydrated potatoes and other dehydrated vegetables, a glutenous substance
called jam, a colorless tepid water called coffee, and half a
slice of bread—for $2.25! The waitress was in uniform, off
duty from the army. The bread, usually blackish and musty,
was down to five ounces a day. When word got around that
meat was being served at a restaurant, the place immediately
became jammed. Few ate more than eight hundred calories a
day. In one instance a grocer told a customer that some of his
food was wormy. "Never mind," came the retort. "It's better
for me to be eating the worms than for the worms to be eating me."
With water precious and laundering practically impossible,
men wore their darkest shirts to hide the dirt. The women
began to look shabby, their clothing wrinkled, spotted, grayish. Both men and women frequently had to sleep in their
clothes to be ready to rush to shelters, so that rumpled clothing was quite the vogue. Toilets remained unflushed, adding
to the odors from unwashed bodies. Garbage remained uncollected, adding to the filth accumulating in gutters and streets.
The hot winds from the desert circulated the stench they
helped create.
But people who looked dried up, washed out, and worn
1
A year later, when I met Jim Fitzsimmons in New York, he said, "Remember that bread you hid in your closet? Well, I swiped some of it."