Tajana merkazit

The central bus station of Tel Aviv, the world’s largest second building in its type, stands in a neighborhood conquered by refugees in a limbo, Sudanese and Eritrean Christians and Muslims, who arrived in recent decades.

The terminal is filthy, has poorly ventilated corridors filled with stores and stands offering robots that crawl on the ground; some sell huge round pizza in trays; some other synthetic skin coats and there are those who offer watered down cologne.

Here, in the lower floor, the crowd is crawling and yelling.

A fat Jew, woven kippa and grey bearded stands in the front of his shop to show customers the perfect working order of his portable air conditioners. Hanging in the back of every home appliance store, a picture of the Lubavitcher Rebbe consecrates the Israeli electronics.

There are three abandoned floors, of forbidden access, there are no letters, no toilets, no shelter, just a network of corridors leading to nowhere. And all over the floor, all over the walls, all over the ceiling, bulging belly cockroaches, restless legs cockroaches, dying cockroaches. The seven floors are all colonized by graffiti and blinking light tubes

In the upper floor, the cylinders of the emergency stairs seem to be hanging down the dark ceiling. Also up here, the racing electric cars intermingle with fast food counters guarded by an air force of blowflies.

The pizzas, lie on aluminum trays and offer themselves, submissive, to hypothetical clients; they remind the old tired, wrinkled whores of the vicinity that while puffing a cigarette wait for undecided customers.

Outside, a wide and long parking lot harbors the buses operated by sweat- shirted and grease fingers drivers.