The Illusion of Security
Our security code, apparently, was as familiar to Jerusalem as the scent of vanilla is to a baker.
That morning, I decided to wear a dress. Blue. Light fabric. The kind that wrinkles immediately under a seatbelt.
Jerusalem is hard on dresses. Too much stone. Too many hills. Car doors that swing shut halfway down an incline like they’ve made a decision without you.
Still, the weather had changed while we were away. And the lightness of Cyprus had followed us back somehow.
Before we left, I sat at the kitchen table clearing emails off my phone while Matt prepared for his Sunday morning teaching.
Delete.
Archive.
Unsubscribe.
One subject line caught my eye.
“Congratulations. Your credit score...”
I opened it.
Apparently, a three-digit number had achieved more trust than most human relationships ever do.
I archived it and moved on.
We left early enough for traffic as Highway 1 climbed toward Jerusalem beneath rows of flags. Israeli flags. American flags. I wasn’t exactly sure what we were commemorating. War. Independence Day. Diplomats. Memorials. Alliances. Jerusalem rarely limits itself to one explanation at a time.
A truck passed us hard enough to shake the car.
Then something underneath the hood made a short sound. Matt lowered the music immediately.
The smell reached us a few seconds later.
“Do you smell that?”
“Yeah.”
Another sound came from the engine. Sharper this time.
Matt pulled onto the shoulder of the highway.
The dress moved again the second I stepped out of the car as wind from passing trucks kept catching the fabric against my legs.
Matt opened the hood. Heat lifted out in slow waves. Cars flew past us toward Jerusalem without slowing. The shoulder vibrated every few seconds from the weight of them. Matt leaned over the engine with both hands braced against the frame.
As if proximity might help.
A motorcycle passed close enough behind us to lift the hem of my dress sideways.
I held it down with both hands.
“Can you call someone?” he asked.
“Who?”
He looked up at me for a second.
I searched online and made a call. That was the easy part.
”…our location?…eh…before the Jerusalem tunnels”
He hung up.
While I searched for another tow company, a car pulled onto the shoulder behind us.
A man stepped out and walked straight toward me.
He said a woman’s name.
I shook my head. “No.”
He studied my face another second. “You look exactly like someone I know.”
Without thinking, I touched the side of the dress again, flattening the fabric against my hip.
“Well, I hope she’s pretty,” I said in Hebrew before my brain had time to locate a more intelligent response.
He laughed immediately.
Not polite laughter. Genuine laughter. Loud enough that Matt looked up from the engine.
The man held up his hand for a high five. I met it instinctively. In ten years of living in Israel, that had never happened to me once.
Then he turned toward the car like this was all proceeding normally. He leaned over the engine compartment. Looked down intently, then unscrewed the coolant cap and studied something neither of us could see.
The man pressed his mouth against the coolant cap like this was a perfectly ordinary thing to do. My only frame of reference was poisoned Mountain Dew.
Then the man started blowing air into the engine. Not gently either. More like someone inflating a raft.
Matt and I looked at each other immediately.
The engine hissed softly back at him.
Neither of us said anything. Mostly because neither of us possessed enough mechanical knowledge to confidently identify what qualified as alarming anymore.
The man straightened up. “I’m a mechanic,” he said.
There was coolant on his chin. He wiped it away with the back of his wrist.
Then he looked at Matt.
“This is bad.”
“How bad?”
The mechanic tilted his hand side to side.
“Bad enough.”
He made a phone call in Arabic.
Spoke quickly. Listened. Hung up.
“I’ll take it,” he said. “I know someone with a tow truck. I can drive you to the bus station.”
“Okay,” I said.
The word came out before I had fully decided to trust him. The mechanic asked for the security code.
Cars stolen in Jerusalem do not always stay in Jerusalem. Years earlier, after a string of thefts, all cars had to have installed a keypad system that disabled the engine unless you entered a four-digit code before driving.
At least that was the theory.
Matt leaned into the car.
“Two-”
“Five, eight zero,” the mechanic finished automatically.
Matt looked up immediately.
The mechanic was still staring into the engine compartment.
Another truck blasted past us. The dress snapped hard against my legs in the wind.
Matt handed him the keys anyway.
A second later, I heard the soft camera click from Matt’s phone behind me. The mechanic opened the passenger door for us like none of this was strange. Inside, a vanilla air freshener swung gently beneath the mirror.
Every few minutes he asked us a question in Hebrew.
Where were we from originally.
How long had we lived here.
Did we like Jerusalem.
The conversation kept dissolving into silence before fully becoming conversation.
At the bus station he unloaded our bags beside the curb
“I’ll call you,” he said.
Then he drove away with our keys.
Somehow the morning continued.
People gathered for church. Coffee appeared. Music started.
Our car kept moving west on the Find My app.
The little blue dot moved steadily west.
Past Jerusalem. Toward the West Bank. I zoomed out once. Then farther.
At a certain distance the roads stopped looking real and started looking political. I stared at the screen for another few seconds before silencing it and putting it down.
Matt had to teach.
After the service ended, Matt checked his phone. Three missed calls.
We found Omar near the entrance talking to someone and asked him to check on the car for us. Arabic moved rapidly between them while we stood there trying unsuccessfully to look like people not listening carefully to Arabic.
Arabic moved back and forth across the phone while we stood there recognizing only fragments.
Abu. Bethany. Yalla.
Omar nodded once. Then looked up at us.
“It’s okay.”
“What’s okay?”
He waved his hand slightly.
Another burst of Arabic came through the phone. Omar listened, nodded once, then covered the speaker with his hand.
“He said he tried calling you,” Omar said. “But you didn’t answer. He couldn’t find your engine, so he took two different ones and put them together.”
Then Omar laughed quietly through his nose.
“Our fathers know each other,” he said.
Jerusalem is enormous right up until the exact moment you need something from it.
Then suddenly everybody’s uncle repaired somebody else’s plumbing in 1997.
Late that afternoon, Matt stopped midsentence.
“Oh no.”
“What?”
He stared at the wall for a second.
“That’s how he knew the code.”
All day the question had apparently been circling quietly inside his head looking for somewhere to land. Years earlier, when the security system was installed, the technician asked what code he wanted.
Matt looked at the keypad and saw the number scribbled on a sticky note.
“That seems good,” he said.
The technician nodded and apparently sent us back into Jerusalem protected by the automotive equivalent of leaving the password as “password.”
Then we both laughed at our “security” code.
Like people discovering the guard dog had been greeting intruders politely for years.
Omar picked Matt up on his motorcycle after the evening service, and together they went to the Mount of Olives where the mechanic had kindly left the car. By the time Matt brought it home, the engine sounded different.
Not fixed.
Just functioning.
The next day we drove back up toward Jerusalem.
This time I wore jeans.
The car rattled on the incline outside the city. Something underneath us groaned every time Matt pressed the accelerator.
“Why do I smell vanilla?” I asked.
Matt pointed toward the rearview mirror. The mechanic, apparently, had decided the car needed vanilla.
Outside, the hills began climbing again toward Jerusalem.
The engine struggled again.
Then caught itself.
And kept climbing.