As You Like It: Bus Number 16

Editor’s note: The following column originally appeared in a 2001 issue of the Canton Citizen.

For the people in the world who live 9/11 every day of their lives.

I used to live in a suburb of Haifa, a picture postcard, hillside city in northern Israel. My apartment sat on the crest of a hill on a brand-new street in a brand-new neighborhood. It was so new that, unlike every other established neighborhood in the area, it had no stores, no day care center, no post office, and worst of all, no bus stop. You had to walk to the bottom of the hill to do your shopping or buy a stamp or catch a bus. Walking down the hill on a cool spring day was delightful, despite the dust that constantly hovered from the ever-present construction. However, climbing that mountain on the way home, with two bags of groceries, in the summer’s heat or the winter’s rain, was not what I’d call a pleasure. Whenever my parents came to visit, my mom would collapse on the couch, trying to catch her breath, gasping, “That hill! When will the buses start coming up here?” But the view from my window was worth it. Haifa Bay stretched out blue and sunny gold from my living room terrace. I lost my tensions in that bay. It was my daily meditation.

When I lived there in the early seventies, low rise buildings were the rule. Very few houses had elevators. According to code, if you had to walk up over four stories to your apartment, the building had to have an elevator. In order to avoid installing them, with all their inherent maintenance costs and headaches, the builders used the Haifa topography to their advantage. Buildings were situated on the hillsides with bridges running from the roads to their entrances, which were placed in the center, with half of the apartments located above the bridge and the other half below. When you entered the building, you either walked up or down four flights to your apartment, so no one climbed more than four sets of steps to get home. Ingenious as this arrangement was, if your apartment was one of the lower ones facing the side of the hill, you paid less but you suffered everyday with the same gloomy, monotonous view. But if your apartment faced out, your daily reward was a small slice of heaven outside your window.

Though I lived only a few miles from Haifa University, getting there was a challenge. Only one bus ran near my house a few times a day, so I was a slave to its schedule. Getting to work was easier. I caught Bus No. 16 down to the city and back home everyday. Bus 16 was my home away from home. I juggled homework, or wrote out my shopping list, struck up a conversation with my seat neighbor or listened to the news, which every bus driver turned up every hour on the hour every day in every corner of Israel. Sometimes I fell asleep on the way home on my favorite seat in the back, but a friendly soul would always shake me awake so that I didn’t miss my stop.

I worked part time at the post office. My understanding boss let me work around my school schedule on the condition that he could send me off to sell stamps wherever I was needed. I replaced sick or vacationing workers, or those called up for reserve duty. As much as I enjoyed the extended family I acquired as a result of my travels, my favorite branch was the main post office in the port area. I loved the noisy, crowded surrounding neighborhood because it was one of the oldest in the city. Dating back to the early1900s, its streets, like much of Haifa, were filled with an informal mix of Jews and Arabs living normal lives together in one comfortable community. During my lunch break I would walk through the narrow, stone streets exploring new stores and food stalls, discussing news and life in general with the shopkeepers or acquaintances, stopping to sip Turkish coffee when invited.

On Friday afternoons, when my husband was off on reserve duty, I stood at the Bus 16 stop with my dog, waiting to catch a ride to my parents’ apartment for the weekend. The drivers would either laugh or scowl when they saw me standing there with a blonde dog in one arm and a suitcase in the other. Sometimes they would charge me for an extra seat and warn me to keep him on my lap away from the other passengers. We would head for my favorite seat in the back, trying to pass unnoticed. But he was such a friendly dog that we usually walked off the bus with new friends, including the bus driver.

Bus 16 was especially crowded on Friday afternoons when everyone hurried home for the Sabbath. Eighteen-year-old soldiers crowded the aisles of Bus 16 anxious to see their families. Kids with backpacks were on their way home from school on Bus 16. Men and women with shopping bags filled the seats, as everyone chattered on Bus 16, glad the week was over and they could relax.

Bus 16 exploded last week, killing or wounding everyone on board, and as I looked at the front page picture, the paper fell from my hands and the room darkened for a breath as I sat once more in my favorite seat in the back of Bus 16 on my way home from a long day at work.

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Posted by Joan Florek Schottenfeld on Sep 21 2011. Filed under As You Like It, Featured Content, Opinion. Both comments and pings are currently closed.