“Shit. How are you already contracting like this?”
“I – don’t – know,” she said, teeth clenched. I finally eased her into the car and took off, running red lights and skirting the wrong way down one-way streets, Jamie grabbing the handle above the passenger-side window, flexing her body toward the door, attempting to push herself through the glass and onto the asphalt, seeking relief. As we neared the birth center, I was forced to stop at a major intersection, where I cracked the windows for fresh air, trying to relieve her convulsions by doing something, anything. The baby was close.
Jamie groaned, “Hurry.” Then, closing her eyes, focused completely internally, she let out a primordial scream. I looked past her and into the eyes of a teenage boy in the car waiting next to ours, his face stricken. There was no doubt in my mind: She’s going to have this right now. The light turned green and I skidded the car into the birth center’s parking lot. It was dark, and the doors were locked.
“Press the button.”
I pressed the buzzer. Nothing. Pressed it again. Then a voice came over: “Can I help you?”
“I’m having a baby!” Jamie yelled, the word baby trailing up, forming a sarcastic question where no question existed. The door buzzed open as a nurse greeted us from the top of a steep flight of stairs. “Just have her come on up and we’ll – ” she said as Jamie bent over and wailed. “Oh my, she’s having it right now. Do you think you can get her up here?”
“I hope so.”
“Then do it now.” She disappeared. I grabbed Jamie’s arm and guided her up the stairs to a room with a bed. Jamie got on it and immediately started pushing as the nurse reported that the midwife wasn’t going to make it, that there was no time, that we were going to have to do it on our own. I wasn’t pre pared. Noa’s delivery had been an exercise in procrastination. But Tamar was suckling on Jamie’s belly before I’d processed what was transpiring. We were a family of four, just like that. And just like that my thoughts of confronting the terrorist attack within the cozy confines of graduate school dissipated entirely from my mind.
Jamie and I began adjusting to life as a family of four, our house transformed into a wrestling ring with three others always on the mat with me, all of us stomping and ricocheting off the ropes, a flurry of activity that was blinding and exhilarating. It was in the midst of this brawl that the UNCW professor called, inviting us to live along the coast, speaking warmly, calmly, saying, “The Department of Creative Writing really wants you,” saying, “The writers here are really excited about your work,” saying, “You’ll love the ocean, how time stretches flat and long and open along the coast from Wrightsville Beach to Fort Fisher,” saying, “You can roam here, be free, like the terns and sandpipers.”
We talked for weeks about the impossibility of such a move, looking at our finances, the numbers never adding up. Noa and Tamar bounced off the ropes, reminding us that they needed to be included in our calculations. My students at JDS bounced off the walls, reminding me that I’d be abandoning them as their FBI chief. The city hummed, reminding us of the bustling community we’d be leaving behind. Then one day, Jamie said, “Let’s just do it. The ocean sounds nice. And we’ll make the numbers work. We’ll find a way, somehow.”
In truth, we were both ready to escape the traffic and the sirens and the political chatter, which seemed to push time, a bit quicker than it should. We delighted in the words small town, beach town, southern town. By mid-July, nearly four years after the attack, we were ready to abandon Washington for Wilmington.
We woke up at 4:30 on a summer’s morning, our apartment emptied of everything save an inflatable mattress from our last night’s sleep. We had decided to rise bombastically early to avoid rush-hour traffic, to escape under the cover of perpetual movement and our children’s slumbers, giddy to reach North Carolina. But seven hours later, as we approached Wilmington on I-40, driving through the drab, flat landscape punctuated by clumps of browning pines, the decision to move south no longer seemed sound.
“I wonder what this is going to be like,” Jamie said. She looked concerned.
“Maybe we should have visited first?”
“I’m sure it will get better.”
“It has to,” I said, wondering how many Jews per square mile lived in the towns we passed – Watha, Burgaw, Rocky Point – suddenly feeling foreign and vulnerable. Finally, our exit arrived. We were funneled off the interstate and onto Third Street, toward downtown Wilmington, where we were greeted by austere colonial homes and moss-draped oaks whose branches formed a canopy over the road. We sighed at the beauty, at the tranquility, at the coffee shop we found with pastel rocking chairs planted on the sidewalk. We stopped, got out, sat down and exhaled.
“We’re here,” I said to Noa.
She looked around, taking in the storefronts. “This is our house?”
“No,” I chuckled. “This is Wilmington. The place we’re going to live.”
“Oh. Where’s our house?”
“We have to find one,” Jamie explained.
Noa’s brow crinkled quizzically until her eyes focused on the cinnamon roll I was holding. Reaching for it, she said, “I know what. Let’s go find a home.”
We found a rental in one of the town’s oldest neighborhoods, where the houses hugged each other closely and the front stoops pressed against the curb, providing a cozy, residential main-street feel that harkened back to the turn of the twentieth century. Our house was from the 1930s, painted light green and buttressed by a spacious porch. When we opened the door to get our first look, Noa was immediately enamored, skipping into the living room and yelling, “We live in a castle,” bouncing around each of the three bedrooms in turn, echoing off the hardwood floors, while Jamie, smiling, cradled Tamar on the threshold of our new life.
Still, it wasn’t until I was sitting on Wrightsville Beach, watching Noa build sand castles and Tamar waddle unsteadily with a diaper weighed down by sea water, that I understood the seismic shift. Barefoot, I walked down to the water’s edge, and what once seemed foreign, vulnerable – writing about Israel in a sleepy southern town – suddenly felt natural. I dipped a toe in the ocean, envisioning a line leading directly from it across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and Tel Aviv, then overland via Highway 1 inland to Jerusalem, thinking of these two coastlines and these two states as my topographic bookends.
On my first visit to the writing department, I thought of bookends, of UNCW and Hebrew University as intellectual peaks, the valley of my narrative running between them. In contrast to Hebrew University’s limestone structures, UNCW’s campus appeared modern – bricks and angles and manicured swaths of grass occasionally interrupted by a sandy pocket, a miniature dune rejecting the landscaped sod. But it wasn’t the sand that most stood out as a sign, a signifier, that I was standing on coastal land. It was the laxity. The unfettered freedom of movement. The leisure. No gates. No security stations. No metal detectors or wand-wielding guards. No soldiers carrying M-16s or professors sporting gun holsters instead of pocket protectors.
Finding a café tucked inside the university’s library, I watched groups of students mingle and felt at ease. It seemed an appropriate place in which to begin the process of committing everything that had happened to us to the page, and once classes began, I allowed myself to inhale, deeply, as though I was a long-distance runner at the starters’ block, pressing the balls of my feet into the floor and my fingertips into a keyboard, thinking, It’s time to start digging.
I did not know then that my digging would take me back to Israel, back to Jerusalem, where I would desperately seek a meeting with the terrorist who tried to kill Jamie.
13
Research. It began with research on a campus computer. It began by sifting through archived newspaper articles, this time seeking information rather than an emotional conversion, as I had with Kathy. It began by zeroing in on the man I had been avoiding, whose existence I had been unable to face, afraid of what such an encounter might bring.<
br />
I learned his name – Mohammad Odeh. Learned he was the one who placed the explosives-filled backpack in the cafeteria where Jamie sat, eating.
The one who worked for Hebrew University as a painter.
The one disguised as a student, waiting in line with perfumed hands.
The one who ignited a cell phone, calling the bag next to Marla and Ben, a folded paper balancing on top of it, a paper Jamie ducked beneath when his thumb opposed “send.”
The one who murdered.
The one who tried to murder.
The one who shoved hammers under my pillow and xylophones against our door.
The one who fashioned bereaved parents and siblings and lovers from nails and bolts and scrap metal.
The one with a young son, an infant girl.
The one nobody would understand. Ever.
The one I would eventually decide to confront.
I learned his name. And it became personal, this ability to point and say “Mohammad,” the primordial act of naming, of identifying with syllables, with established grunts and pauses, feeling as powerful as creation itself. He was named. He existed. But further details provided by the Jerusalem Post and The Times of London encouraged me to remain dispassionate: he was part of a Hamas terror cell, just one of many who had perpetrated, with the push of a button, numerous mass killings in restaurants and on buses across Israel. He was presented as another generic representation of evil, a representation that was comforting, that coaxed me into believing there were no fingers to point, no what-ifs to consider – it had just happened, because evil happens, and that was all.
Newspapers:
Forget Mohammad. He is just an archetype.
Me:
Sure thing.7
At first, I was prepared to accept this – to accept things the way I had for years. I focused on piecing together the logistics of how the bombing had happened, keeping a healthy dose of emotional restraint on hand, moving from A to B to C with the cold clarity of a statistician. But then I found something strange, something wrong. A misquote. Or a typo. It was embedded within an Associated Press article covering Mohammad’s 2002 capture:
After his arrest, Odeh told investigators he was sorry for what he had done since so many people died in the university attack, [Israeli] officials said.
Odeh told investigators he was sorry. It had to be a mistake – ideologically crazed terrorists don’t apologize. They don’t express remorse. They praise the struggle, hold up the jihadist’s banner and pro claim, in the name of Allah, for continued acts against the infidels. They are programmed, robotic, repeating the same predictable refrains while marching, faces disguised, guns raised toward the sky. Death to all Jews. Praised be the martyrs. Allahu Akbar. God is great.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Mohammad was not human. He did not reflect any recognizable sliver of the world I recognized as sane, rational, acceptable. He was not sorry. He could not possibly be sorry.
Me:
I thought you said he was an archetype.
Newspapers:
Oops.
I was on unstable ground, unable to discern where to step given this unanticipated, unmapped terrain. Not only was Mohammad named, not only did he exist, but his existence was abruptly made impossible. How could a person capable of orchestrating and executing the mass murder of innocent college students have the capacity for genuine contrition? How could a member of Hamas let slip such a statement? Odeh told investigators he was sorry. It was incomprehensible. I wanted to pass it off as editorial malpractice, or at the very least an inauthentic response to days of interrogation, and possibly torture, hoping the word sorry had been squeezed out of him as Israeli police poured water into Mohammad’s mouth. But two items from the article forced me to think otherwise. First, he was the only one of fifteen terrorists captured to have made such an expression. Second, Odeh’s family in East Jerusalem responded with disbelief:
“My brother just goes from home to work … and has nothing to do with any other thing,” Samr Odeh told the Associated Press outside his East Jerusalem home as Mohammad’s six-year-old son Hamza stood crying nearby at the mention of his father. “I deny the charges that the Israelis are trying to put on him.”8
It was clear that Mohammad’s family did not consider it possible that he could have bombed a cafeteria, did not want to consider it possible. This was not an ideologically extreme clan, a clan eager to embrace a son’s and brother’s martyrdom and proclaim his glory. Instead, they denied the veracity of the accusation. Samr’s words indicated a family horrified by Israel’s claim.
Mohammad had come from what appeared on the surface to be a moderate family, a family unwilling to accept his involvement with Hamas, with terrorism. But Mohammad had done it. He had admitted to doing it. And according to anonymous officials quoted in this reputable media outlet, he had expressed remorse. I couldn’t digest any of it, couldn’t stomach the digestive process. The experience felt akin to when, after years of vegetarianism, I broke down and ate two hotdogs laced with sauerkraut during a University of Georgia football game. The lining of my stomach had not been prepared to process a pound of hormone-filled beef then, and today it wasn’t prepared to process the incongruity of learning that the terrorist who had tried to kill Jamie might be sorry for what he’d done.
I had spent years giving little thought to the fact that an actual person had been responsible for the bombing. Now, I was consumed by thoughts of the perpetrator as a fellow human, a remorseful criminal, a man with a crying son and a traumatized family. It was all I could consider, and such considering induced digestive distress. I was ill.
One evening soon afterward, Jamie and I went out to eat at Indochine, a Thai establishment whose interior glittered with emerald green and polished gold, its self-contained fountains trickling steadily, soothing streams in the background. In the foreground, a costumed waiter took our order. For Jamie, vegetable drunken delight, a rich serving of bamboo shoots, lotus roots, and broccoli drenched in a mild wine sauce. For me, green curry aubergines, a dish full of coconut and eggplant, a dish I couldn’t pronounce. After we made our choices, the waiter gave us further options. Mild. Medium. Spicy. Jamie chose mild.
“How spicy is spicy?” I asked.
“It’s spicy. Do you like spicy food?”
“Sure, I can handle spicy food,” I said, needing to make up for mangling “aubergines,” for not knowing what the word meant by pretending to be a veteran of all things curried.
“Then you should be fine.”
“Wait, David, he’s not asking if you can handle it. He’s asking if you want it,” Jamie interrupted.
“I know.” I looked at the waiter confidently. “Spicy.”
“Very well,” he said, taking the menus and departing with our order.
Jamie looked at me. “I didn’t know you like really spicy stuff.”
“Of course I do.”
“Really?”
“I’m sure it will be good.”
As we nibbled on a salad with peanuts and caramelized shallots, I wanted to tell Jamie, “This guy who tried to kill you might have expressed remorse,” wanted to say, “This fuck might have said he’s sorry,” wanted to say, “Can you believe such bullshit?” But I couldn’t. I couldn’t mention it. This was my process. This was my game, a game to be played solo, because Jamie had already moved beyond the attack, had shaken it off in ways I couldn’t seem to replicate. So I kept quiet as our meals were delivered to us.
Lifting a piece of tofu between pinched chopsticks, I slid it into my mouth and began choking, the curry burning the back of my throat.
“Are you okay?”
I nodded, fist pressed to my mouth, head bent over the plate. The food was too hot. It was more than I could bear.
But I ate anyway, choking through dinner with my eyes tearing and my lips burning, sporadically giving myself over to convulsive fits between bites. I was determined to finish. Jamie glanced up sympathetically as she ate.
All I could think was, Just finish the meal. Just finish it.
14
It mattered. Mohammad’s sincerity, the veracity of his statement, mattered. Why, I could not articulate.
Me:
Why does it matter?
Me:
I don’t know.
Me:
So he might have expressed remorse? So what?
Me:
It’s important.
Me:
But it changes nothing.
Me:
I know.
Me:
He’s still a monster.
Me:
I know.
Me:
What, then?
Me:
I don’t know how to answer.
Me:
You’re pathetic.
Me:
Thanks.
Unsure from where this impulse had arisen, but sure that the impulse existed, I tried to dig up the truth.
My first thought was to contact the Associated Press journalist who had recorded Mohammad’s “words” from four years earlier. He was sorry – was it true? Maybe she still had her notes, maybe she would remember her source. I wanted her source. After finding her email on a site for professional newspaper reporters, I requested the information. But no reply came.
The only way you’ll know is to ask him, I thought. A nod came from deep within me, without any rational understanding of the mechanics involved. A decision had been made: I would try to secure a meeting with Mohammad, the idea feeling shaky. Seeking a confrontation with the perpetrator of the bombing had never been placed upon the buffet of potential treatments by those attempting to assist in my healing and recovery. Nobody had set this in a metal bin and identified it as an option. Here, psychotherapy au gratin. And next to it, sautéed compartmentalization. And just in this morning, a freshly caught terrorist who talks, answers questions, and is reportedly remorseful.
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Page 13