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International controversy tends to imbue not just flowers but everything about Jerusalem with a nervous symbolism. Particularly state visitors. Thus French President Francois Mitterrand ceremonially carried a beribboned sheaf of flowers to the eternal flame at the Holocaust memorial of Yad Vashem last month, but he politely refused to go anywhere in the Arab districts of East Jerusalem. When Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak balked at extending his state visit to Jerusalem out of fear of appearing to condone Israeli control, there was talk for a time of his dashing through the Israeli capital without spending the night, a bizarre compromise that failed to satisfy anyone. Begin finally put off Mubarak's entire tour.
The strangest symbol of such controversy is Anwar Khatib, a suave attorney who maintains a dingy office behind the Herod's Gate post office and proclaims himself to be the Jordanian governor of Jerusalem. And although the last Jordanian forces were driven out of Jerusalem 15 years ago this June, a number of consuls come to pay him Official courtesy calls.
The paradoxical symbolism of Jerusalem flickers all through its commercial life. Just across the street from the Damascus Gate, near the East Jerusalem bus station, which still displays signs announcing the nonexistent express bus to the Jordanian capital of Amman, the British Bank of the Middle East stands apparently abandoned. Its front windows are covered by rusty metal shutters, the shutters covered with Arab handbills. "The Israelis wanted the bank to stay open," says an Arab wise in local charades, "but then it might be closed down in all Arab countries. So the manager remains here to do business, but you must call him at home, and then he comes down here, and there is a back way. Look here." The Arab points to an unmarked entrance on a side street, where an old woman is selling baskets of white and yellow daisies. Behind her is a little door that opens into the bank whenever someone comes to unlock it.
But this Friday is Good Friday—what Gogol called "the fearful day of the death on the Cross within the walls of Jerusalem"—and in Holy Week the city seems to become for a time the center of the world, as it was on the maps of the Middle Ages. As Holy Week starts on Palm Sunday, brown-robed Franciscan monks and white-robed Dominicans march in a long procession of the faithful, each with his own palm frond, along the route that Christ rode on his donkey from the village of Bethany up over the Mount of Olives, past the ancient olive trees in the Garden of Gethsemane and through St. Stephen's Gate into the Old City.
Good Friday is more somber. The zigzagging Via Dolorosa, so named only in the 16th century, is packed with pilgrims following in Christ's footsteps to Calvary. "We adore thee, O Christ ... Thou hast redeemed the world," the Franciscan monks chant in Lathi as they lead their flocks through the Arab market, through the 14 stations of the Cross. Past the small Polish chapel that marks the spot where Jesus staggered and fell under the burden of his Cross, past the Armenian church that commemorates his encounter with his mother, past the Greek chapel that honors St. Veronica for wiping his forehead with her kerchief, past the Coptic church where he