You go to your parents’ place for a couple days to relax. Your parents live in Beersheba, the most Jewish city in the world if you ask me: a university, plus a hospital, plus 4,000 municipal workers. You lie around in your pajamas in the middle of the living room, your mother’s cooking beautifully arrayed around you: a rich palette, thick brushstrokes—three kilos of jellied fish, a small bucket of borscht, a platter of fried zucchini, and a moderately fluffy homemade cake. There are two TV remotes so that peanut doesn’t have to bend over if she drops one. Suddenly, sirens: another rocket attack. A soft wail sweeps through the apartment. Nobody wants to go into the safe room2—you’d have to tear yourself away from the computer, a book—in some cases a cheesecake, of which at least a kilo and a half is still uneaten. But everyone makes a point of demonstrating that they’re responsible people or whatever—so they get up and go. The sirens wail. It’s cool in the safe room; everyone sits on stools.
“Want a little water, peanut?”
A little! There’s enough water here to last for three years. Also chocolate, crackers, canned goods, gas masks, and a bucket for—well, you know. What a time for a bombing, the assholes—they just had to interrupt peanut’s lunch. At this point we’re used to running to the safe room—we ran under Shamir, we ran under Rabin, we ran under Barak. We also ran under Olmert. We’re really sick of running, but being responsible people we dragged ourselves in here and sat down on these stools. Now we’re sitting here like docile gophers. The siren subsided—or did it? Dad, turn on the radio! For some reason the radio isn’t tuned to the news, but to a wavelength with stories and songs for babies. Everyone looks at Dad with interest. They offer to bring in a mattress and a bottle for him—he can fall asleep in here every night, we don’t care, except if they start bombing again we might accidentally trample him. Dad makes it look like the radio changed channels on its own and hastily turns the knobs. Suddenly, bang-bang—the music from The Terminator comes on. Everyone is amused.
But most importantly, a special notice is pasted to the wall: whom to call after the alarm subsides so they don’t worry. Twenty-one names in six countries. You have to tell each person something different; everyone’s heart is pained, everyone loves us. The full list takes about two hours to phone. At least we have plenty of canned goods! I wonder if we have a can opener in here? Turns out there’s no can opener. In the ensuing chorus of laughter, the radio falls to the floor and switches to the news. They still haven’t called off the alarm.
“Guys, who wants to pee in the bucket? We’ve been running to the safe room for twenty years and we’ve never peed in the bucket…”
Unfortunately, they call off the alarm—bad luck for the bucket again.
“Want some ice cream, peanut?”
“Naw.”
“Borya, it’s all this stupid emergency chocolate of yours! Peanut ate too much chocolate in the safe room, and now she doesn’t want ice cream!”
Before the Flood, morals on earth were so bad that even animals of different species were copulating with each other. If it weren’t for the terrible consequences, you’d have to admit it was a great party.
The next day you go back to Tel Aviv. On the way, you listen to the news. Among other things: the doctors’ strike is winding down, the zoo’s newborn sand kitten is feeling great, Jerusalem’s got trams now, and they’re bombing Beersheba. Or really, they’re bombing the whole South—but for me of course that means they’re bombing Beersheba. To put it mildly, you’re worried. You call up your parents.
“Mom, Dad, be reasonable—come stay with me for a few days!”
“What are you talking about, peanut! And anyway, it’s all nonsense! There’s nothing like that going on here, you know! We’ve got bomb shelters everywhere!”
“Well, at least don’t leave the house!”
“We’re not going anywhere! I just sat down at the hair salon—I’m not going anywhere!”
“Mom!!!!”
“What? They have a safe room just like ours! They even have a bucket like ours…”
You call up Hayut and go: “Look, Hayut, if the bombing keeps up I’m heading back to be with my parents.”
“Sure, do it,” Hayut says. “Don’t forget to tell them. They’ll have a heart attack, bomb shelter or no.”
“Hayut,” I go, “I can’t take it, I’m worried for them.”
“Well, put on a gas mask, lock yourself in the closet, sit on a bucket and worry,” he suggests. “Show a little empathy!”
Hayut is callous. He used to play “Iron Dome” with the neighbors’ baby: “Fly, fly, fly—oops, we missed the enemy rocket! Fly, fly, fly—oops, we missed the enemy rocket!”3 He’s rough, Hayut.
“Dad, seriously—come stay!”
“Peanut, come on, we’re such responsible gophers. You know, if anything happens, we’ll…”
You do something or other, go somewhere or other, blah blah blah. You scan the news. Among other things: a young Israeli designer is conquering the American runway, the World of Taste culinary festival is kicking off in Rishon, the actress Hiam Abbass is making her directorial debut. Beersheba is getting bombed. “The village of Bumblefuck was wiped out.” You call your parents.
“Mom! Come on!!”
“Peanut, stop it, it’s all nonsense, everything’s fine here. I was just at Mira’s work, this one lady brought a cherry pie like you wouldn’t believe. We ate it in the shelter, I’ll make you one just like it—five minutes. Every day someone brings in a pie and takes it down to the bomb shelter first thing in the morning so they can eat it to the tune of the siren.”
“Mom, how about no work for a couple days?”
“Well, we’re at home right now, peanut. We’re ready to go here, it’s all nonsense anyway. I took all of Pushkin into the shelter and your dad put on underwear. Last alarm, I ran all around like an idiot looking for the right book to take with me, I kept grabbing the wrong thing. No, Dad didn’t need to look for underwear, he keeps his underwear close at hand. We even gathered all of our money and papers, I said to him: ‘Borya, grab the money and documents!’ and he laughs at me, and I go, ‘What are you laughing at?’”
(Dad’s voice in the background: “And Dad will shove it all up his ass so they can identify us and pay for the funeral!”)
“Mom, can you pop him in the eye for me?” The rapid footfalls of my fleeing father.
“Why don’t you tell me how you’re doing, peanut. Want us to bring you the chocolate on Friday, the one you ate in the shelter? Did you like it?”
“Mom, why don’t you stay with me on Friday?”
“Stop worrying, peanut! We’re responsible gophers, you know—if it were necessary we would stay with you.”
“Honestly, I think you’re being asses, not gophers.”
“So that’s how you talk to your parents, huh? What does that make you, if your parents are asses?” At the end of the conversation, Mom complains about how shitty it is to bomb people when Friends is on. The whole night’s ruined.
You wake up in the morning and scan the news—what’s up? Well, same old blah blah blah. The Israeli basketball team did well in Europe, the Maghreb Orchestra will be playing in Club Barbie, and there’s a new Eshkol Nevo novel out. Beersheba’s doing a repeat performance from yesterday. You call your parents.
“You must be sick of running, right?” They are, but they’re still not coming to stay with me. Insinuatingly: “Well, if you can’t stop worrying, we’ll drop everything and move in with you in Moscow, peanut. Is that what you want?”
“Ah, so we’ve moved on to blackmail and threats?!”
“You started it!” A long discussion on the relative merits of puff pastry with cherry filling versus apple sponge—something tells me that I’ll be getting both on Friday.
“Mom, did you get a little sleep at least?”
“Of course! I put my bra and gas mask next to me and I was really comfortable—good to go. And our boys even knocked two rockets out of the air, it was beauti
ful! Uncle Marik was so pleased, he’ll find a video for you online.”
“Wait, Mom, you went outside to watch?!”
“You’re crazy, peanut, we’re responsible goph…”
(My father’s sarcastic voice: “Responsible, sure! And who forgot the cottage cheese in the bathroom?”)
“Oy, peanut, we made you some homemade cottage cheese but forgot to take it off the rack for the night because of the bombing, so it turned out twice as good as last time. See how good things are here? Everything is twice as good as it was before the bombing!”
They’ll come on Friday, with borscht, cottage cheese, pies, the online video of the rockets, and God only knows what else. They’ll definitely check (secretly, of course) whether or not my gas mask is in order, stuffed under the bucket in the bathroom along with some rags. They’ll listen to the news, and in the evening they’ll go back to Beersheba. All you can do is sit on a bucket in the closet, shove a piece of chocolate in your mouth, hang out in the dark and think: who are these remarkable people? Responsible gophers—yeah, right. You said it.
It’s like they don’t understand that you worry about them. Crazy! And would you look at that, their daughter is a reasonable and cautious woman, neither willful nor stubborn. How did that happen? Who does she take after?
BIBLICAL ZOO
Judah is a lion’s whelp; from the prey, my son, you have gone up. He crouches down, he stretches out like a lion, like a lioness—who dares rouse him up?
▶ Jacob’s blessing for his sons, Genesis 49:9, NRSV
They don’t kick you out of here very energetically. That is, the zoo officially closes at six, but at six-thirty, you’ll still see cheerful caretakers zipping around on tiny golf carts, gently asking you to take your leave. You get the impression that if you hid in the bushes, you could stay overnight. For three years in a row now, I’ve been doing the same thing: finding myself in the Jerusalem zoo, I lay down on the pavement near the main entrance, take a picture of the sky, and make that picture my desktop background. Sometimes it’s very unpleasant, e.g., rain. Sometimes it’s unbearably blue, sometimes unbearably gray. One time the legs of some kind of flying heron ended up in the frame. Another time it was the very surprised face of a boy with ice cream, his kippah pushed off to one side and dangling like a puppy’s ear. If you take a picture before closing time, there’s a greater chance that you’ll get blue. If you do it after, you’re more likely to get gray.
It’s called the Biblical Zoo because back in the day it was conceived in biblical terms: a zoo inhabited by animals mentioned in the Old Testament.4 Nowadays you walk in, go a short distance, sit down on the ground in front of the bird enclosure—and see a penguin swimming directly toward you. Just a standard African penguin that comes across more like a seal. They swim around speedily and smell powerfully of fish, but not in a gross way—kind of like vorschmack.5 They’re small and fat. A couple of huge, gray, fuzzy babies are fighting on the rocks, biting each other with their beaks. Instead of breaking up the fight, the mother tosses a piece of something edible up into the air. One of the chicks catches the tidbit and gets engrossed, the second, offended, goes for a swim. On the highest rock, the patriarch cleans his bottom with his beak—and then, suddenly, plunges under the water like a heavy black bullet. One of the most complicated feelings you get on any zoo visit is the sense that they don’t need anything from you, but you need something from them. You want to be friends, you want them to pay attention to you: look over here, sweetie, penguin, red panda, look over here, I exist, my life runs in parallel to yours, I want to convince myself that you’re real. Here we are in the same territory, in the same space, and it’s very hard to believe, so come over here, you strange creature in your black frock coat, take a piece of bagel, let me know that this, this shared reality, is possible. Swim up to the glass wall, show me your round tongue, rough as a brush. Instead of your forbidden bagel, the penguin snaps its legitimate fish up with its beak, turns its back to you—and then, suddenly, glances back over its shoulder. You didn’t even think that he, muffled up in black, could turn his head in such a way. Behind you, you hear the beep-beep of the kicker-outer—it’s six-fifteen, and you ought to have left the zoo already. There are no penguins in the Old Testament, but there are here.
You energetically indicate to the kicker-outer that you’re going directly to the exit—like, right now. Instead, hugging the bushes, keeping your distance from the beep-beeping, you make your way over to the meerkats. The meerkat enclosure has tunnels so kids can climb inside, stick their heads out, and look through a little glass porthole at those nimble little guys who see everything, are interested in everything, and are forever chattering amongst themselves about something or other, gossiping in their jittery way. You, naturally, crawl through one of these tunnels and stick your head out. The meerkats immediately gather round and look at you silently. A wary intelligentsia with intertwining family ties, really well-bred—they don’t spit, they don’t harass, they don’t poop, they just wait to see what you turn out to be, what kind of offering you’ll present them with. What can you offer? You show them your miserable bagel, but there’s no way around the glass porthole. You can only exit the tunnel ass-first, like after an audience with some royal majesties. It’s six-twenty-five, the sound of beep-beep makes you jump—but it’s far away from you for now, it’s on the neighboring path. Instead, standing next to you there’s a Shmulik (according to some zoo workers; according to others, his name is Itzik): a life-sized cardboard dude, very realistic. There’s a lot of Shmulik at the zoo—he shows visitors how to get to the zebras or inquires with interest whether there are black cockatoos in the wild, or cheerfully invites you to inquire, in your turn, as to the meaning of the word “compost.”
Elephants aren’t mentioned in the Old Testament, though references to ivory abound. Elephants don’t like to talk about it.
The meerkats are all standing like they’ve got a glass of white wine in one paw and a ballet program in the other, like they’ve never heard the word “compost” in their entire lives. Compost is foreign to them. There are no meerkats in the Old Testament, but there are here.
All in all, you think to yourself, staying in the zoo doesn’t really take all that much effort. Hide out under a Palestinian azalea, or grab that Israeli worker’s jacket over there, the one left on a bench by the man performing tricks with parrots for the kids. Pretend to be a local, walk back and forth looking as if you’re, you know. It’s unclear what’s stopping you. Look at Charlie, Charlie is a hundred and four. Charlie doesn’t waste time thinking about bullshit, Charlie gets it. Charlie is a blue macaw that supposedly once belonged to Churchill, and probably picked up both good and bad habits from him. They say he’s got a particularly difficult personality: he doesn’t recognize authority and firmly believes that everything used to be better, that the younger generations are destroying the zoo’s very ambience, that they value nothing, understand nothing, want nothing, everything comes easily to them, they belong in the dumpster, not on this blessed land. He accepts a piece of bagel with an air of haughty contempt, because of course it’s not a proper bagel, in the old days it would have been a proper bagel, nowadays everything is off—they’ve ruined the cafeteria. From time to time Charlie explodes with terrible curses addressed at the Nazis in the stern English of the British Mandate.6 There are no parrots in the Old Testament, but there are here.
It’s six-thirty, cardboard Shmulik emphatically reminds you that the exit is located to the left, but you turn right. It’s the world of lemurs—during the tourist season a stern young woman the size of a zucchini stands here and stays: “Don’t touch, they’re delicate—don’t touch, they’re delicate.” They’re delicate, all right—sleeping in, tanning for hours, smoothing down their fur, licking themselves clean, never hurrying, caressing one another slowly. They walk up to you, take your finger in their silky paw, look in your eyes, sigh over the children, mark their territory in an amazingly contorted pose—standing upsi
de-down in a liana hammock—it’s very evolved, very original. It’s a good thing that Charlie is nowhere near them, he’d get apoplectic over these delicate, gentle, spoiled-rotten creatures sniffing a bagel with polite interest, then brushing it away with one paw. “Too calorie dense for them,” the stern zucchini says to you reproachfully. But when the zoo closes and the zucchini heads out to take care of its human business, the lemurs take your calorie-dense bagel, rolling their eyes and sighing the whole time, evidently vowing to themselves that as of tomorrow, all they’ll eat is salad, salad, and more salad. They have tiny round bellies and surprisingly strong legs. There aren’t any lemurs in the Old Testament, but there are here.
The beep-beepers beep-beep and a megaphone informs you, with some irritation, that it’s now past seven, time’s up—go home! It’s time for you to go home, stranger, your flight’s in two hours, stranger. But you can’t hear the loudspeakers because a more interesting and nuanced sound rolls through the zoo—a roar, a roar so stereotypical you used to think it could only be heard during the credits of movies by MGM Studios. Indeed not! Lions, as it turns out, really do roar like that. You only get to hear it if you violate the tourist schedule, since lions only wake at dusk. Gone are the Arab moms with their strollers; gone are the chubby young people from Brooklyn who decided to go back to their roots and are now all sweaty from their various experiences; gone are the love-weary teens seeking seclusion in the terrarium, with their indifference to the marble tortoises and blue-tongued skinks. You can stand really close to the glass, and then the lions are running past, literally just a few inches from you, stretching their sleep-stiff legs, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and suddenly you realize that they’re not just going there and back again: each time, he makes a slight turn or a slight change in angle—and suddenly you’re face to face with him and your heart falls into your stomach, you who have had your fill of sweet daytime critters. His eyes are heavy and yellow and his body is strangely small. It suddenly occurs to you that, although he’s a strong little guy, he’s still maybe a little smaller than a young bull, maybe even a little smaller than a particularly large dog—and that’s when he growls. He’s there in the Old Testament, he’s there on Jerusalem’s coat of arms and there you are, standing watching him look up from his prey, and you begin to understand a lot about this zoo, and this country, and a few other things as well. And there’s a guy standing behind you and he’s not beep-beeping, just standing there with you also looking at the lion, who’s all yellow, tranquil, and heavy-eyed. You ride the beep-beeper to the zoo exit. On the way, you ask the driver about the cardboard guy—is it Shmulik or Itzik, after all? The driver says that he thinks it’s Yonik. It’s seven-thirty, blue turned to gray a while ago, soon gray will go iridescent and smooth—like onyx, like the plumage of the black cockatoo—but the pavement is still hot. The cell phone camera can’t capture the color, but it turns out all right anyway—ashy, with six power lines running in parallel, and it’s not until you’re at the check-in counter that some friendly Itzik or Yonik from ground service plucks someone’s bright-blue feather from your back—it looks crazy in the cosmopolitan airport setting.
Found Life Page 20