As Michael worked and I watched, the landlord walked in, an elderly woman, slightly hunched. She caught a glimpse of some purple flowers still resting in the window and said, “Look at these flowers. She was such an angel.” The woman began rambling in Hebrew. She wouldn’t shut up, this poor, elderly woman clutching at a corner of the grieving that belonged to Michael. She wanted to hold it, to own it too.
I looked directly at her and said, “Maspeek” – Enough. I asked her to leave, to give us time, to give Michael time. And then it was time for me to return to the hospital, to Jamie. When I approached her bed, it was late morning.
“Where were you?”
“I needed to do something.”
“You didn’t tell me you wouldn’t be here.”
“I did.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I’m sorry. I told the nurses not to let anybody in to see you.”
“Where were you?”
“Just had to help Michael with something.”
“Can you not do anything else?”
“I won’t.”
And I didn’t, staying by Jamie’s side as she struggled through an excruciating recovery, being treated for second- and third-degree burns over 30 percent of her body. I stayed by Jamie’s side when, after being moved from the ICU to a private room, the medical staff began torturing her. Twice a day the nurses would take Jamie into the shower, unwind her bandages, and scrub the burns to remove the layers of dead skin. Then, they doused those areas with an alcohol-based antiseptic solution to help prevent any infection from setting in. While the nurses scrubbed, I would stand guard outside Jamie’s room and listen to her wail, waiting for the nod from a nurse that signaled it was over, that it was time to enter the room and comfort my wife. Each time, I would open the door to find Jamie on the bed, her body convulsing as an automatic response to the shock of prolonged pain. Leaning down, I’d place my hands upon her chest – as I had been taught by the lead nurse – and apply pressure to help Jamie breathe deeply, to help her calm down.
I never saw the burns. But I saw the effects of the burns. On the eve of her transfer to Hadassah Ein Kerem, the hospital that housed Israel’s preeminent burn center, I saw her plead with the lead doctor, who had popped in for a visit with his thick Russian accent and his flushed cheeks. I saw her beg, “Please, please don’t do this anymore. Do you have to? Please don’t have to. It’s enough.”
He agreed and said, “Okay. We can stop.” And they did.
The next morning, Jamie was placed on a stretcher and wheeled toward an ambulance waiting to transport her and several other patients to Hadassah Ein Kerem. She was nervous. It was a winding, forty-minute drive through the Judean Hills. A long ride. A bumpy ride. As we exited the hospital’s front doors, Jamie gazed up at the open sky – a sky she had not seen since lying outside the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria thinking, I’m lightly injured. She left the hospital in exactly the same way as she had entered it, on a stretcher pulled from the hull of an ambulance. Workers flanked each side and pushed her into the vehicle, the collapsible legs automatically buckling and folding underneath. She reached for my hand as I said, “It will be fine.”
Jamie looked at the driver smoking outside on a bench as I crawled in. “Tell him to drive slow,” she said.
“I’m sure he’ll drive slow,” I replied, knowing he would not.
“Will you tell him if he doesn’t?”
I nodded, grabbing a seat on one of the benches running along each side of the ambulance. A Palestinian woman and her daughter sat opposite me. The engine started. Jamie braced for movement.
“I need help.”
“What?”
“I can’t calm down.”
The ambulance began rattling over the city’s streets, the driver braking hard and honking through the traffic.
“Efshar L’ha’ayt, b’vakashah?” – Would it be possible to slow down, please? The driver glanced in the rearview mirror and nodded as I looked down at Jamie, her eyes clenched. Fishing through my backpack, I pulled out a portable CD player and popped in an acoustic mix of Neil Young recordings.
“Would this help?” I asked, holding up the player.
She shrugged as I fitted the speakers over her ears. “What is it?”
“Neil Young.”
“Is it relaxing?”
“I think so – do you want something else?”
“No, it’s okay. Just not too loud.”
Her left eardrum had shattered in the blast. The internal damage was permanent, and she was particularly sensitive to noise despite the lost hearing. I turned the volume down and “A Heart of Gold” softly pulsed in Jamie’s ears as she meditated on the music, on Young’s gravelly voice, on the harmonica humming discordantly as the van descended into the hills, the words “I want to live” echoing within her.
After arriving at Ein Kerem and admitting Jamie to the burn unit, I tried to stay the night with her that first night. I tried to stay with my wife now afraid to be alone, afraid of the dark, of the monsters lurking. I tried. But it did not go well. For a week, while she recovered in the ICU at Hebrew University, I had held up miraculously, had been the hero, revealing unimaginable strength under the stress of everything. My emotionally deadened existence was my superpower. The swallowed anger, sadness, and grief – I had buried all of it. But that night, after the transfer, after the long, bumpy ambulance ride, I started cracking. I couldn’t handle her wakefulness, her pain, her dependence. Sitting next to the bed, placing my head on arms draped over the metal rails, I dozed for minutes at a time, sighing heavily whenever something was needed – a pillow shift, a sheet positioning, a call to the nurse for more painkillers. “You want OxyContin? Oh, morphine? Yes, I can do it. I’m fine. I’m going.”
When morning came, Jamie said, “I don’t want you staying the night again.” It was the first time I hadn’t been able to cut it. The adrenaline was gone, and exhaustion had set in. Everyone noticed. Everyone saw the lines on my face, including one of the Anglo directors of the hospital, who worked some bureaucratic magic and gave me a room at the bunker across from the hospital – a makeshift town full of temporary housing for medical students. It was a collection of ill-conceived concrete squares built along a winding, dirt road that hugged a severe precipice from which one could look out for miles. It was a place to take naps, to recharge during those afternoons when I couldn’t remain standing, when I needed to shut down.
My room was a cricket-infested, eight-by-eight square of peeling linoleum with a bed in the middle and a rusty sink near the door.
It was perfect.
In the evening, I would relinquish my watch to one of many friends and acquaintances who came to spend the night with Jamie during her month-long recovery at the burn center. Back at our apartment, I would often lie awake, unable to sleep, waiting for visiting hours to begin again. But at the bunker, I slept. At the bunker, I walked in, set an alarm, fell upon the moldy mattress, and slept as a soldier should.
After a week of this – sharing bathrooms with Hebrew-speaking medical students, cat-napping in the bunker after a shift spent supervising Jamie’s care – I began imagining myself as a resident, a medical professional. I was on call. It was a game played coyly, the hospital becoming an academic hoop through which I had to jump. You’re a damn good intern, I thought, learning the medical lingo in Hebrew and grilling the nurses about dressings, doses, side effects, and alternative courses of treatment. I shadowed doctors, stamping out their discarded cigarettes, and read their charts. I fell asleep against walls in between drug-runs. Fraternized with technicians taking blood. Twirled my bunker key while scanning the halls, watching the movement, becoming a part of the movement, a part of the machine responsible for aiding those unable to move freely.
My patient was making progress. Jamie was starting, a week after the attack, to leave the bed for brief stretches, sitting propped up in a high-backed chair, her blood slowly circulating. And then she began walking, leaning on my ar
m for a minute on the way to the water fountain here, two minutes on a walk down the hall there. Re-configuring her muscles, the skin around her muscles. When she slept, I’d stroll to the Chagall windows in the medical campus’s synagogue, allowing the tinted light streaming through each of Jacob’s twelve sons to rest on my face – the yellow of Joseph, the blue of Dan, the red of Judah. I walked the grounds and considered the buildings carved into the hills, with wildflowers and rocks clinging to the slopes. And I thought, This is a beautiful place; thought, This is a good place; thought, You’re lucky to be working here.
Soon after arriving at Ein Kerem, a nurse walked in and said to Jamie, “We’re placing you on a high-calorie diet – you’re going to need three thousand a day.” She nodded silently as I looked to her, curious how the words “high-calorie diet” could be reconciled with the fact that Jamie’s small intestine had recently been spliced and re-attached to itself. But then I learned the menu: cans of a nutritional drink called Ensure, a sludgy, milkshake-like concoction packed with potent levels of nutrients, calories, and protein.
The nurse, after imparting the news, beckoned me with a curled index finger and walked away. I followed her to a miniature fridge that resembled the one I rented as a freshman in college. Only, instead of finding a few beers and peanut butter within, row after row of Ensure stared back. Like a secret drug cache. Chocolate. Vanilla. Strawberry. Medical grade. Take your pick.
I was instructed to coax Jamie into pounding a case daily, to turn her into a nutritional-drink lush, a binge drinker. Her body was working furiously, was under construction, replacing skin layer by layer, and she required large amounts of raw material.
Six a day, that was our goal – approximately five hundred calories and twenty grams of protein a piece. Things started out benign enough, with me wearing out a familiar path to the fridge, retrieving cans, and gently coaxing Jamie to chug. “Come on, finish it already.” But after a dare – “taste it yourself, jerk” – I began to lean on them, first as an occasional snack, then for breakfast, and finally for my entire diet. I double-dipped when nobody was looking, grabbing a chocolate for myself and a strawberry for the patient. I started gaining back the weight I’d lost since “the accident,” and guarded the fridge jealously, worrying whenever the stash began to thin. I wondered if I should stop as patients everywhere sat up stiffly, drinking at all hours.
At times I imagined being Mick, Rocky’s hardened trainer, holding a can to Jamie’s lips and saying things like “Just one more sip” and “There you go, champ,” while Jamie breathed heavily. This is how we spent much of each day, with me serving up a non-stop regimen of geriatric shakes and her loving me unconditionally, feeling grateful. “If you put that to my lips one more time, I swear I’m going to puke all over you.”
So I’d finish the can. And then I finished my own, calorie highs that became an obsession, or at least a distraction, one in a series that occupied my existence as I searched for things to digest, to keep the blood flowing to my stomach and away from my brain. Don’t think, act. It’s how I survived. These addictions saved me.
There were others.
For example, the flower watering. At our apartment each morning, before heading to the hospital, I watered the flowers on our back porch, each species requiring a delicate balance of liquid and fertilizer for survival. I had never cared for them before with any diligence, never approached the task with any sense of duty. But now, I worked tirelessly to avoid wilting petals or browning leaves. I pruned. Groomed. Watered with measuring cups. Monitored the soil. Talked to them. “What’s this we have here, hmm? Do you need me to remove that yellow leaf? Do you? Let me get it. There you go.”
Fifteen minutes a morning, minimum, I coddled them. Trying to keep them alive. They had to live. I wouldn’t let them die, so fragile, so needy, many of them out of their element – chrysanthemums and impatiens – not meant for this place, this desert full of dust and heat. Each morning, before leaving to visit Jamie, I’d think, Thrive. Thinking I meant the flowers. Thinking I was actually worried about the flowers, about a few opening blossoms, which were actually quite ugly, in my opinion.
But I had to save something.
One morning, while walking toward the hospital, I encountered a Palestinian man lying on the sidewalk, face up. He was clearly in distress, and had either passed out or succumbed to some thing greater than he could bear. His eyes were closed, his breathing slow. A small crowd of Israelis had gathered around him, encircling the fallen at a comfortable distance. I stopped. Looked at him. Then looked at the towering hospital structure one hundred yards away. Curiously, nobody moved to help – we just watched, mute, as if stumbling upon a wild animal in the wilderness.
I scanned the body, looking for wires, for something bulging from underneath the shirt, for a sign of danger. I was not alone in this. Fear had paralyzed us, a group of onlookers afraid to recognize this poor man’s humanity as we clutched at our own.
Moments before, I had been caring for flowers with unnecessary diligence. But standing there, I felt nothing. At some point, just as I was preparing to leave without doing a thing, inexplicably thinking, Tough shit, you fuck, medics from the hospital arrived, squatted next to the body, and prodded cautiously as the silent audience backed away.
I turned and continued on toward the hospital, refusing to watch the care being given, to see the scene become intimate, personal, just as I had refused to face the reality of what had occurred at the cafeteria. An attack had taken place, this I knew. But in my mind it remained passive and impersonal, as though the bombing had materialized on its own, was simply the inevitable consequence of living in Israel. It was just the result of some larger political struggle, mechanical, faceless. It was safer that way. Nobody tried to kill her. It just happened.
It just happened – this is what I clung to, a month into Jamie’s recovery, when news spread that a Hamas cell had been captured by Israeli police. It was a cell responsible for multiple attacks across Israel, responsible for bombing cafes, petrol stations, pool halls, and a university cafeteria. The front pages of Israeli newspapers projected four faces, Mohammad’s among them, of the men who choreographed their bloody shows of resistance. I looked away. Friends brought me copies, pointed to the pictures, and said, “At least they caught them. At least there will be justice.” I looked away, frightened to recognize in the faces of those who wanted us dead an image of myself, of humanity hopelessly flawed. In the image of God He created them.
8
Three years. For three years I woke in Jerusalem, inhaling sand and the scent of baking barrekas, and walked to the industrial section of Talpiot. I would pass flocks of Israeli children skipping to school, Chasidim rushing to minyan, and Palestinian workers grouped on street corners, waiting for rides to various job sites. My destination was Pardes, where I regularly prayed the morning service at sunrise with a small group of egalitarian Jews forcing gender-equality into the traditional script, the act revolutionary, evolutionary. The routine was steady, and the praying for me was more an exercise in discipline than the fulfillment of any spiritual need. I could just as easily have been running or working out with free weights. It was practice, a daily rhythm. Though admittedly there were moments when I would breathe deeply, close my eyes, and try speaking with the Divine, pretending She existed.
There is a section in the Hebrew weekday prayers, recited three times daily, called the Amidah – literally the Standing – in which the community rises and silently cycles through nineteen prayers that move from praising God to humble requests. Among these requests is a catch-all entreaty:
Hear our voice, Lord our God – have compassion and take pity on us, and compassionately and favorably accept our prayer, because You are a God who hears our prayers and supplications. From before you, our King, please don’t turn us away empty, because you compassionately hear the prayer of your people Israel. Blessed are You, Lord, who hears prayer.
Most mornings, upon reaching You are a God who h
ears our prayers and supplications, I would insert a personal appeal, asking God to protect Jamie from harm, from the dangers of this place. During the hour-long session, it was perhaps the only moment each morning I consistently dropped my cynicism and blathered from the heart, hoping that Something on the other end was cupping a palm and receiving the words. Hoping there was a receptacle.
I come from a long line of God-haters. My maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors, the grandfather I never met having lost his first wife and family to the ovens while himself escaping, then finding a new wife, my grandmother, who had also escaped. Together they fled Europe to Jacksonville, Florida, where the Holocaust and the camps were never mentioned around my mother. The one exception being at the Passover Seder, when my grandfather, full of wine, would sometimes begin to talk.
My mother hates God, has always been existentially angry, her parents dead long before their time, the stress of life having stolen decades from them. Her uncles, aunts, and cousins all murdered a lifetime ago. She’s never exactly said, “I hate God,” and the word “hate” may be too harsh, but the silent anger she’s carried all these years is unmistakable. It’s an anger I’d always understood and sympathized with, but hadn’t necessarily felt.
Growing up – forced to attend Hebrew school by parents who didn’t seem enthusiastic to embrace the religious observances being taught by ruler-wielding Israelis in suburban Atlanta – I had to blame someone for the hours of boredom and dogma. God seemed appropriate enough. And so after my bar-mitzvah, I walked out of Congregation Etz Chaim on Roswell Road and washed my hands of the Divine. I had escaped, and turned to roaming the city’s basketball courts during my free afternoons. Hardwood floors and vaulted ceilings became my sacred spaces where, for hours a day, I would practice jump shots and crossover dribbles, honing physical skills that filled the void. I was focused on making Pope High School’s basketball team, focused on joining a new congregation full of kids who spat, swore, and slapped each other on the ass. Standing five-foot-three, full of hustle and grit, I made the team, and traded the pew for the bench.
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Page 7