The Old City of Jerusalem stands over the novel’s divided landscape as both a visible landmark and a boundary that governs movement. On a nighttime walk, Shmuel Ash and Atalia pass the barbed-wire frontier between Israeli and Jordanian Jerusalem and climb toward Mount Zion, where the Old City’s walls cast a long shadow over their route. The surrounding defenses make political separation part of the characters’ ordinary physical experience.

Setting and Division

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the boundary near the Old City is marked by rusty barbed wire, a mine-strewn no-man’s-land, and positions exposed to enemy fire. Mount Zion is described as a projection of Israeli territory bordered on three sides by Jordanian territory. These details locate the Old City within a city divided not just by lines on a map but by obstacles that make passage perilous and constrain where people can go.

The Nighttime Approach

During their walk, Shmuel and Atalia travel through Yemin Moshe and descend toward the road around the Valley of Hinnom before passing the barbed-wire fence at the foot of the Old City’s walls. They then take the steep path up Mount Zion. Shmuel struggles to keep pace with Atalia and worries about losing her in the darkness, in an area near no-man’s-land and exposed to enemy machine-gun positions. The city’s political geography directly shapes the intimacy and uncertainty of the walk.

Walls, Visibility, and Confinement

Elsewhere, Shmuel’s winter wanderings take him close to the concrete wall dividing Israeli Jerusalem from Jordanian Jerusalem. Warning signs on coils of rusted wire alert him to the frontier, mines, no-man’s-land, and exposed ground. He pauses to read them, caught between the warnings as if choosing from a menu. The image makes the border at once a concrete danger and a strange object of distracted attention.

The city’s walls also structure Shmuel’s sense of confinement. On another walk he passes high walls topped with broken glass and sometimes barbed wire, enclosing places whose contents he cannot see, such as monasteries, orphanages, or military installations. Near a wall around the leper colony in Talbiya, he wonders about life on the other side and compares it with his own secluded attic room at the edge of Jerusalem. Physical enclosure becomes a measure for private isolation, without making the two conditions identical.

Historical and Narrative Significance

The Old City’s walls and the divided territory around them place personal movement within a larger political reality. The novel repeatedly sets ordinary acts—walking, following someone, wandering, trying to get home—against barriers, warnings, and restricted sightlines. The landmark therefore functions not merely as scenery but as part of the lived geography through which separation, uncertainty, and isolation become tangible.