Alon Z / Art / The water tower trilogy

There's a garden at the top of the highest hill in my home town where monkeys used to roam, giving the garden its name "The Monkeys Garden". At the bottom of the hill there was a basement that hosted a pediatric clinic. As a kid my mom would take me there for routine checkups, and they’ll measure my weight and height alongside other developmental tests. After the checkup, my mom would push me and the baby cart uphill toward the garden. It seems like a stiff climb back then, though now I realize that it was probably less than a hundred feet of elevation. Most of the houses in the area were only two or three stories high, which made the hill appear even more significant. On the other side of the garden there was a row of private houses, many which hosted families of ambassadors and had private pools and tall white gates. Sometimes we would see an expensive house cat walking on top of the gate, you could easily tell from its coat that it wasn’t a local cat, particularly around the British ambassador house, where you may even encounter a Scottish fold on a cool day.

In the center of the garden erect above the city a tall water tower was positioned, it was designed to provide water pressure to the surrounding neighborhood, following Pascal's law stating that a change in pressure in a closed environment of fluid will be transmitted equally to all parts and directions. Till this day I cannot recall a strong stream of water in any shower in my hometown, but I guess it was better than nothing.

As I grew up I recall often seeing a lot of cats while visiting the park, but never a monkey. At some point a theory was presented that the monkeys live in the water tower overseeing the park and only come out at night. As teenagers my friends and I tried to unsuccessfully verify this assumption, by spending many of our adolescence nights in the garden, drinking and wandering around while our physical, cognitive and psychosocial identities formed. I have a lot of beautiful memories from this time, though still no monkey at sight.