A few weeks ago I helped my friend Steve and his wife Sue unpack boxes of books in their new home in Berkeley, with big airy rooms and a tree-framed view of the bay in the distance. I don’t know who said “A room with no books is like a house with no windows,” but Sue and Steve have many books, and many windows. And whenever I am with Steve, one of those windows is always open onto the memory of a big old house we shared for a year in Jerusalem, a big old Arab house in Beit Hakererm. Housemates came and went, and eventually we did too. Soon after we moved out the house was torn down and turned into a parking lot. But the memory remains, solid as its foot-thick walls.

On the street, two stone posts. A metal arch above them carried the address, 24 Hechalutz. Through that gateway, old stone stairs rose up one flight, to a flat area that had once been the dance floor of an outdoor cafe, according to neighbors who would grumble at us when we passed them on the street.

“That house has never changed," they would say, regarding the long-haired American hippies. Another flight of stairs led up to a second level, a patio once covered by outdoor tables. Off to the side, was a crumbling building that had once housed an outdoor kitchen. Another flight of those stone stairs led to the house itself, a six-room house with massive stones walls, a tiny inside bathroom, and four small bathrooms in a small annex, decayed beyond use.

Four, five, six of us shared that house, its narrow indoor kitchen and single indoor bathroom with a water heater so tiny that only three of us could take two minute showers in the morning. Then it took another two hours for the water to heat up again. We did homework, and didn’t; fell in and out of love and like; went to class, came back, studied Rashi together; tried to reinvent Shabbat and cook tolerably decent vegetarian meals for each other.

One day a housemate and I were sitting on the side porch doing our homework when an old man came staggering up the stairs, out of breath. We ran down to help him, got him a chair, some water, watched as he pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed away the beaded sweat on his wrinkled forehead. His hands were covered with liver spots. Of hair, only wild grey strands. His accent when he finally caught his breath was the Queen’s English. His story – he had been a British officer during the Mandate, serving in the Middle East. He was slowly dying of cancer and was making a tour of all the high points of his military years.

And the house, he told us, was where he spent some of his happiest hours.

“Down there,” he said pointing, “was an outdoor restaurant. Some of the best bands in the region played here. The house itself was the finest brothel in the Levant, run for high ranking British army officers.”

My housemate and I laughed, finally understanding what our Israeli neighbors meant by “This house has never changed.”

Our dying guest wanted to see the inside of the house. He remembered the tiled fireplace in the middle that was so constructed that a tiny flame could heat four rooms. And he informed us that the walls of our living room, which he called the salon, had once been painted with incredible murals. My housemate went into the kitchen and came back with a spoon. We pulled back the couch, an old single mattress set up as a daybed, and lightly scraping away the sky blue paint, then layers beneath it, we found ourselves looking at an interlocking pattern of arabesques. Our guest, struggling to kneel down beside us, was ecstatic – for what at first glance appeared to be garlands of flowers running across the wall – were actually decorative strings and spirals of human beings and animals of every variety, copulating together in every possible combination.

To the delight of our guest, and the dismay of a budding archaeologist (I was working to catalog a dig at the museum) those painted patterns, once revealed, began to crumble away. But we had made one old man very happy, and to this day, whenever I look at an old wall, I wonder what lingers beneath its surface.

To read Part I of Andrew Ramer's "Jerusalem Triptych," click here. To read Part III, click here.