Sheikh Badr

Sheikh Badr is an abandoned Arab village whose ruins lie beyond the empty fields outside Jerusalem. A huge, unfinished Palace of Festivals looms over the remains: its exposed concrete and rusting iron make the site a stark meeting point of displacement, stalled ambition, and remembered death.

Ruins and the Unfinished Palace

The village is presented as a place already reduced to ruins when the construction of the Palace of Festivals began. Work on the immense building continued intermittently for about ten years: it was left half-built, resumed, and then stopped again for a long period. Its gray skeleton consists of unfinished walls, broad staircases exposed to the rain, and dark concrete beams bristling with rusty reinforcing bars. The structure’s scale does not overcome the ruin beneath it; instead, the abandoned village and the incomplete modern project remain visibly joined.

The image recurs in the landscape at the end of winter. Beyond a shallow ravine and fields and hills, the remains of the village stand in the distance beneath the Palace of Festivals. From afar, the building resembles a primitive dragon, while its twisted, exposed iron suggests bony fingers. The flowers spreading across the dark-green fields—hyacinths, cyclamens, anemones, and poppies—make the ruined settlement and unfinished construction more conspicuous by contrast with the season’s renewal.

The Ruins in the Surrounding Landscape

Sheikh Badr belongs to a wider terrain of empty fields, abandoned hillsides, and isolated olive trees. Seen from a distance, the olives seem almost to have passed out of the vegetal world into the mineral one. The landscape is neither wholly barren nor wholly restored: winter rain has left standing water in parts of the ravine, and spring growth covers the hills, while the village remains abandoned and the great building remains incomplete.

This contrast sharpens the setting’s sense of arrested time. Jerusalem’s winter rains have ceased, and the surrounding countryside is newly green, yet the Palace of Festivals still bears the marks of work begun and repeatedly suspended. Its unfinished walls and exposed iron preserve interruption in the middle of a landscape moving into spring.

A Landmark on Shmuel’s Departure

When Shmuel Ash leaves the house in Rabbi Elbaz Alley, he waits beside its gate for a call that does not come. Instead, he hears dogs barking in the distance, from the ruins of Sheikh Badr. He turns away, crosses the stone-paved courtyard, and leaves through the gate without trying to close it; the rusted gate has stood sunken for years and is habitually left ajar. Its long neglect gives him a fleeting sense of confirmation, though he cannot say what, exactly, it confirms.

Later, on the bus out of Jerusalem, the road winds through the wooded hills around Sha'ar HaGai. Shmuel recalls that twelve years earlier, in spring, Mija Wald lay bleeding and alone among the rocks there through the night, then lost consciousness and died at dawn. Sheikh Badr’s nearby ruins thus belong to a landscape Shmuel experiences not only as open country beyond the city but as ground entangled with Mija’s death and with the winter Shmuel spent in Mija’s family home. The ruined village is not identified as the place where Mija died; its narrative significance comes from its position within the same surrounding landscape and from its recurring presence as Shmuel leaves Jerusalem.