'ROAD MAP' SOMETIMES IRRELEVANT.

Byline: Erik N. Nelson

JERUSALEM - THE mechanism that opens a window in our VW Golf broke itself into a mangled wreck this week, a few days after Israeli and Palestinian leaders were pressured into accepting a U.S. ``road map'' to Middle East peace.

That's how I found myself face-to-face with a Palestinian tour bus operator, talking religion a few miles from where 16 Israelis were blown up the previous evening.

``Everybody thinks he is right,'' said Malbek from the Jenin area as he puffed apple-flavored tobacco smoke from a water pipe in the middle of Alef Alef Glas, an automotive glass works in southern Jerusalem's Talpiot neighborhood. ``But listen up: They all are the same nine months in their mothers.''

Three religions, all revering the same God and the same ``holy place,'' or ``Al-Quds'' in Arabic, but none of them seems to be getting the same message, said the 30-something driver as his western-dressed wife smiled uncomfortably by his side.

``She does not like politics,'' he said, grinning and tilting his head toward her. We agreed that a disinterest in politics may pass for wisdom in a place like this.

It was time to find out the damages on my window. The peripatetic manager, sporting a characteristically Israeli tanned bald head, said it would be 350 shekels, mostly for the 90 minutes it would take the mechanic to wrestle the linkage back into place. Labor is cheap here, parts exorbitant because everything is transported here by boat past unfriendly neighbors Lebanon and Syria.

I popped into the waiting room for a cup of cardamom-laced Arabic coffee, which retains the traditional sludge in the bottom of the Styrofoam cup despite being instant. Before I got through the door, I was stopped by a cheery man in his late 20s wearing a starched white shirt and a black yarmulke so large it obscured most of his hair.

``Did you get stoned?'' he asked in barely accented English. He thought I was British, and was surprised that I was from Southern California. ``I saw 'TV' on your car.''

After a brief flashback to high school in the late 1970s, I answered: ``Oh, no. I tried to lower the window, and ...'' I made a crunching noise.

I supposed he meant that because there was ``TV'' in red and black duct tape all over the car, I must be a journalist who frequents the West Bank.

It's true that the car has been to Tulkarm, Nablus and Hebron, but always with my wife behind the wheel. I get to drive our son to school and pick up groceries. I do get past the armed guards at the mall parking garage easily, because they always recognize the duct-taped monstrosity. Never have I had my window put out by Palestinian rock-throwers.

I said that had never happened to me, although I had heard the car had been hit a few times under different ownership. Fortunately, its windows were Plexiglas, in anticipation of such attacks.

I rejoined Malbek and his wife, and asked him why the glaziers had to replace the windshield on his bus, which nearly blocked the cavernous garage's entrance.

Someone had thrown a rock at the bus on the West Bank, presumably because it is emblazoned with large Hebrew letters and the rock-thrower didn't know or care that the driver was Palestinian.

He didn't know which, but told me of once getting his bus stuck between Palestinian demonstrators and Israeli soldiers in Bethlehem, prompting him to don a kaffiyeh and put up his photograph of the Dome of the Rock - Jerusalem's most striking landmark and a symbol of Palestinian sovereignty over Jerusalem.

The garage's Palestinian and Israeli customers didn't seem to care who waited on them, as long as someone did, or who ended up sweeping the broken glass from their floor mats.

This while on the outskirts of town crypts were being prepared for many of the bus bombing victims, nurses tended to the wounded on life support and investigators dealt with their own glass shard puzzles.

On nearby newsstands, a day-old newspaper carried the headline in Hebrew, ``Lama achshav?'' or ``Why now?'' referring to the assassination attempt against the most prominent leader of the Palestinian militant group, Hamas.

Today's papers were dominated by the number of Israeli victims - 804 - that had been killed since the Palestinian uprising began nearly three years ago.

But at the Alef Alef Glas garage, people needed their cars fixed, and for that they didn't need a road map. If it meant they could get on with their lives, it didn't matter from which book, if any, the mechanics and the cashiers took their cues from.