It was a hot August day. The summer was stretching Ruth and me thin, the unrelenting heat continuing day after day.
We don’t enjoy the summer; we fight it. Every weekend we brace ourselves to leave the apartment. Like many others, our lives are lived almost entirely in our apartment due to Corona. We sleep, eat, work and exercise in the same place.I like my apartment, but the walls are driving me crazy. I need to go outside, and not just to the soup, salad and juice place down the street to pick up lunch — regardless of how clever a pun Moshe found for his place: Mar Marak (Mr. Soup) on Marmorek St.
This particular day, we had a mission: Bialik square. As much as we had aimlessly wandered the streets of Tel-Aviv for the past few years, we never reached this square. Earlier, when we were looking at Tel-Aviv on Google Maps, wondering where would be a good place to walk to, this stood out. Looking at the pictures on the internet, Ruth asked me, “have we been here before? I don’t remember going but the pictures look familiar.”
We had been there before. When we visited Israel a year before we moved here, we explored Tel-Aviv and came across this square and the Ruben museum nearby. But we had never seen it since. so I’d started wondering if it was a figment of my imagination. While we haven’t walked every street, it seemed strange that we wouldn’t have stumbled on this memory since moving here.
Now armed with Google map proof, we set out to the square, down Ben-Zion boulevard, through Meir park, and into the neighbourhood of the square. I knew it was nearby, but was not sure in which direction. Is it possible for a place to not want to be found? Is it possible for it to exert a force keeping people away, a force that needs to be willfully overcome?
We wandered, took a few turns. We might have gone around in a circle. We suddenly found ourselves across the street from a coffee booth, standing in front of a wide staircase that stretched three stories up. We couldn’t see what was at the top, but it seemed fitting that we would need to climb these steps to reach the square: elevated, almost out of reach.
We climbed the stairs, and there was the square: the old city hall with its colonial architecture on one side, a fountain in the middle, and park benches that ringed the rest of the circular plaza, save for a section that bordered on a quiet street. We sat down on one of the benches under the shade of a tree, taking refuge from the midday sun.
I philosophized insufferably about how this was likely much closer to what the European founders of the state had envisioned, rightly or wrongly, than what Tel-Aviv had become. It was quiet, orderly, with a few palm trees. Palm trees are still to be found elsewhere in the city. Quiet and order, less so.
After about ten minutes, a car stopped on the side of the street that borders the square. Two shirtless guys in short shorts, the kind used for running, got out of the car. They started taking what looked like an entire home gym out of the trunk of the car: medicines balls, kettlebells, jump ropes. One of them started shlepping all the stuff towards one of the benches in the shade, while the other got back in the car, to go look for parking. I realized that what I had taken to be a foam roller from afar was actually a portable speaker. Typical Tel-Aviv Israelis, I thought, finding quiet, peaceful places and ruining them for everyone else.
A few minutes later, the other shirtless gentleman re-appeared: I don’t know how he found parking in this city so quickly. I overheard them speaking to each other. They were not native Israelis: they spoke English with a British accent.
They started doing some warmup squats and jumping jacks, music blasting and echoing across the square. We got up to leave, disappointed at these English people who had seemingly adapted too well to living in Israel. Or maybe I was just jealous that they will probably last here longer than me. Just then, the song they were playing reached its chorus: ‘This is England! This is England!’.