The bus to Jerusalem

A history of desecration, a present hope for pilgrims of different faiths and tombstones that bear witness to a faith in the future: Charles Anderson tours Jerusalem.

THE OLD man with a back brace and hobble and leaning on the helping arm of his wife had wandered back and forth in front of the windscreen of the minibus at least four times.

It had been an hour since the tour was due to leave and our travelling companions were nowhere to be seen.

Our Israeli guide, Avishalom, said more were to join but, except for my partner, Laura, and me, the bus to Jerusalem was empty.

With big sunglasses, highlighted hair, boosted lips, a Russian accent and a Prada handbag hooked over the forearm, Larissa and her husband, Leon, finally got on the bus at 9am.

There is a popular conception of the type of person who holds up tours – obstinate, stubborn, entitled and well off. Here, it seemed, was its personification.

‘‘When did you get here?’’ Leon asked Avishalom. ‘‘At 7.15am,’’ he replied. ‘‘How did you know this was the bus?’’ Leon said, turning to me.

‘‘We looked at the sign,’’ I said. ‘‘The name of the tour is the same.’’

They were angry and upset and it was not, they said, anything to do with them. They groaned and made their opinions known in the definitive awing vowels of immigrant New Yorkers.

The discussion about names on tour signs continued for some minutes. The same point was made again and again and again. I offered a solution.

‘‘Let’s forget about it and get moving.’’

At this rate the world would end and the Messiah would arrive before we even got to see the Old City. Larissa apologised. ‘‘I’m sorry. We are from New York. We get anxious about things.’’

Many things, we would learn. Larissa’s main anxiety was to see the Western Wall – the area on Mount Moriah where David had placed the Ark of the Covenant and where his son, Solomon, had built the first temple.

It was a remnant of a place of worship which had been razed and rebuilt many times over. It was said to be the very home of God himself. For non-believers, it was a tourist attraction. For some Muslims it was where the prophet Mohammed tethered his winged steed before ascending to heaven. For Jews, it was the most sacred bond to a heritage thousands of years old and a thoroughfare to the will of Yahweh – the god without a name.

‘‘We will see it, we will see it,’’ Avishalom reassured her. Finally, the old man with the back brace and his wife toddled on the bus. Bob and his wife, Linda, offered an apologetic wave.

‘‘In Jerusalem the truth is much less important than the myth,’’ wrote the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore. Its truths are never simple and always elusive.

Its walls have been sacked, its rulers murdered and overturned, its buildings countless times destroyed.

The city, it has been said, does not just represent a history of the world, but also a history of heaven and earth.

Founded some time between 1200BC and 850BC, Jerusalem’s yellow sandstone walls tell of ages gone by, of monuments misnamed and renamed and forgotten and appropriated as the place where the world would end – where Jesus was crucified, where Mohammed left this world to learn the signs of God and where

On the Mount of Olives, we surveyed the outer walls looking over the Jewish cemetery that houses tens of thousands of cadavers all awaiting their first chance at resurrection when Armageddon arrives. The hill will split in two, with one half moving north and the other south.

Some have been waiting for thousands of years. In 2012, it still is prime real estate.

Bob set about inspecting the tombstones.

‘‘We are probably the only people who go touring and inspect cemeteries,’’ he said.

Bob, we learned, was previously a mortician, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease eight years ago.

The couple had visited 48 countries in that time – a statistic that their children, both police officers in California, disapproved of. Why would they go if their father would not remember it?

‘‘He enjoys it at the time,’’ Linda said.

Bob took out his camera, squinted into the viewfinder and snapped another shot of a tomb.

At the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus prayed before being sentenced to death and where Judas betrayed him with a kiss, a group of Swedish tourists in tank tops and denim shorts posed and grinned. They smiled for photos and giggled.

Everything seemed disturbingly trivial in the holy city. There was a frustrated sadness about it all.

‘‘Are we going to see the Western Wall yet?’’ Larissa asked. ‘‘Are we going now?’’

Avishalom sighed. ‘‘Yes,’’ he said, ‘‘but it will be very busy, so we will have to walk. Stick together.’’

The walls of the Old City wrap around a patch of the not so neatly cleaved pieces delineating the Muslim, Christian, Armenian and Jewish quarters. The character, language, population and trinkets meld and shift within the space of a few steps.

Orthodox Jews wearing woollen trench coats in the height of summer morph into grey-bearded Muslim pomegranate juice sellers into Israeli Security Forces holding automatic weapons into baseball-capped American tourists intent on seeing God.

The history of Jerusalem is a history of people.

We assembled at the entrance to the Western Wall. At this point,