The Secret of the Storyteller by EM Richter

Author:EM Richter [Richter, EM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781452576251
Publisher: Balboa Press
Published: 2013-07-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Thursday morning, September 29th

Tel Aviv

The bus ride to the main terminal was longer than I’d expected. There was standing room only, and I missed my stop by a couple of miles. The map I held in front of me was a jumble of streets, crisscrossing and intersecting at impossible angles. The sun peaked through the buildings and the traffic on the roads was already heavy. Though it was early, the heat was already irrepressible. My backpack was heavy, and I could feel a large, wet sweat stain spreading under its weight.

The high-rise towers of the main street gave way to three and four storied stucco buildings. The sand-colored edifices were stained from years of rain and highway soot. Laundry, hung on wire lines outside of windows, told the story of the daily lives of the inhabitants. In one apartment lived a young family, their towels and colorful bathing suits drying in the sun after a day at the beach. Another apartment displayed the olive-green fatigues of a soldier, hanging beside a pair of blue jeans, washed by a mother, happy to have her child come home. Another window’s laundry line exhibited the large, white underpants of an old man, beside the large crème bra worn by an old woman. The hanging laundry was a parade of life.

The blue, cloudless sky was vast, providing no shelter from the bright, unrelenting sun. The stone walls, enclosing the perimeter of the buildings, acted as sentries against the explosion of bougainvillea in a deluge of vibrant color—purple, pink, crimson and all shades in between—that threatened to take over the sidewalks. An aroma of sweetness wafted in the air. Between the fence openings, the long stems of red hibiscus flowers would reach for my shoulder, dying my t-shirt with their bright orange powder. The tree branches bowed down, fatigued from clutching the excess weight of the oranges, discarding the over-ripe fruit to the floor. Walking along the sidewalk became an obstacle course, fruit from below, boughs from above, and hibiscus stems from the side.

By the time I reached the imposing white structure of the bus terminal, I was hot and bothered, damp from heat and ready to collapse. The lady behind the glass of the information desk was unhelpful and sardonic when I asked about the schedule for the Jerusalem-bound bus. She sneered before pointing to platform twelve with her pen without even looking up from her Sudoku.

The red dots of the electronic sign indicated that a bus to Jerusalem left on the hour. But at ten minutes past the hour, I ran onto platform twelve and watched the bus pull out of the station without me. Tentatively, I approached the information desk again and asked the lady when the next bus was. She peered up, shrugged her shoulders and returned to her Sudoku. The glass partition that separated us was thick so maybe she couldn’t hear me. I tried again, much louder this time. The info lady outright ignored me.

“Why do you not take a Sherut?” a soft, accented voice behind me asked.

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