On my way to return books to the Hebrew University Library and close my account there, I get off the #18 bus at the base of Ammunition Hill.  Usually I would either walk from there or take an Israeli bus that goes a long way around, winding through some uniformly Orthodox neighborhoods, then past the spiffy Israeli French Hill area–where, I’m told, some upscale Palestinian families are now seeking housing–then past Hadassah Hospital and over to the University.  This time, with a heavy load of books, I hail a cab.  The driver is a powerful guy about 65 who turns out to be Mizrachi, a third-generation Moroccan Jew.  I get in and he starts up, then notices a young woman dragging a carry-on suitcase and signalling to him pleadingly–her hands pressed together in “prayer”–to stop for her.  Which he does, and learns that she’s in a hurry to get to the Central Bus Station.  It’s in the opposite direction from the University and way across town, but she’s cute with her henna’ed hair and her off-the-shoulder blouse and the driver, as I will learn, is a susceptible fellow. He asks me if it’s OK to drop her off first–“a matter of five minutes,” he assures me.  I agree and we start off.

Five minutes turns into forty-five, as we weave through the city traffic.  But I had the time and, as you’ll see, it was worth it.  The young woman, sitting in the front, has only a little English, the driver considerably more, so he and I converse, he directing his remarks over his shoulder to me, but aware of being listened to, perhaps even understood, by his other passenger.  I offer him a huge green fig, one of a bagful I’d picked up at Al Manara on my way to the #18 bus.  “Wow!” he says, “Look at this fig!”  I tell him it’s from Ramallah.  That doesn’t faze him: “They know how to grow things over there,” he says, “and they don’t use–what d’you call ’em?” “Pesticides?” “Yeah, that stuff.”  He takes his hands off the wheel to split the fig in two and hand me half.  I tell him to watch out for the juice; he’s not worried, “This kind of juice I don’t mind.”

With no particular prompting from me, as the drive goes on, he tells me that he’s about to get married again–he’d been divorced years ago, and, in fact, his daughter by that marriage is about to have a baby.  He himself has a third-year-old by the woman he’s hoping–that’s not, as you’ll see, quite the right word–to marry.  Who is she?  “A Nepali filipina” and almost 40 years younger than he.  American readers may wonder how one can be both Nepali and Filipina, but, as I learned recently, “filipina” (small f when transliterated) is not just a proper noun for a woman from the Philippines, but a common noun for a hired caretaker of the elderly (as in, “My mother has this Russian filipina”).  So his mother had this Nepali filipina who, sometime either before or after his mother died, he had impregnated.  So they started living together, with their little girl, until the filipina got tired of waiting for him to marry her–which would have brought her Israeli citizenship, not a bad thing to set your eye on!–and took the child back to Nepal.  “It’s a beautiful country, ” he noted, “but poor, dirt poor, you can’t believe!”  Now she was back, with the child, and they were talking of marriage again, probably in Cyprus where they could get legally wed; they could not do so in Israel, given the control the Orthodox rabbinate has over who may marry whom, and how.  There was a hitch, though, he went on.  His spoken English was OK, he said–and indeed it was–but he was “practically analphabetic” when it came to writing.  And there were all these documents from Cyprus, how was he going to deal with them? He needed a translator, someone to help him fill these forms out. I saw where this conversation was heading.

By this time we were close to the Central Bus Station and the young woman, worried about missing her bus to Kiryat Shmona in the North, had said nothing along the way.  I would never learn her thoughts, if any, on the Nepali filipina.  When she got out, I watched the driver’s glance follow her fanny into the crowd:  “A woman like that, ” he pronounced, “A woman like that could get anything she wants.”

As to what the filipina wanted and might be about to get, he was concerned, not to say troubled.  They were getting along all right for now, and there was the child, but Israel has this community property law–if they were to marry, she would be part owner of his house, and then suppose she decided to throw him out?  “I’m too old to start this stuff all over again!” he reflected sadly.  So, to the difficulties he was facing with his Cypriot documentation there was this added difficulty: did he really want to get married at all?  He was wavering, but, for the moment, he would be grateful for my help with the paperwork.  I agreed to look at the documents.  By now we were in the tunnel under the University where buses and cabs drop their passengers.  “Are you going to charge me for this WHOLE DRIVE?” I asked, in what I took to be a tone of comic Israeli exaggeration:  “THIS WHOLE DRIVE???”  “Of course not,” he said, “I charge you nothing!,” as he wrote down how to get in touch with him, so he could send me the documents, “I can’t believe this!  God must have sent you to me!”  I couldn’t tell how seriously to take this: was his relation to God as deep as his relation to women’s bodies?  He wore no skullcap and had nothing but scorn for the ultra-Orthodox we had passed by on our long ride around town.  I heard from him again this morning: he plans to e-mail me the documents later in the day.