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IF I WAS going to take up Pascal’s wager I might was well go all-in, the way I would in a Monte Carlo casino.* I wasn’t about to do things by halves. I was prepared to go for the triple. So we set off through streets filled with paste jewellery and Arab songs and headed towards the mosque. At the far end of a souk selling dates, olive oil, and sesame cakes, a bearded officer at the door of the Al-Aqsa Mosque turned us away, like a bouncer outside Les Caves du Roy (except that I’ve never been turned away at Les Caves du Roy).

* (Author’s note) Monaco is the country with the longest average life expectancy in the world: 87 years.

“Are you Muslim?”

“No …”

“You can’t enter here. Please turn around.”

I didn’t insist; he looked like a difficult customer.

Later, I found out that certain days were reserved for Muslims. My ecumenism would forever be an unattainable ideal, like that of the Hierosolymitan people.

“Pity,” Romy said, reading something on her iPhone. “It was from this mosque that the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven one night on his horse, Buraq.”

“Oh yeah! A lot of strange stuff has happened in this city.”

I consoled Romy with a bag of pistachios from an elderly Palestinian playing at being a pistachio seller, like the waiter in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was playing at being a waiter. In general, the whole of the Old City in Jerusalem was playing at being Jerusalem. I decided to do what everyone else was doing: overplay my faith.