My teenage students at the three Tel Aviv high schools also said they would come. They saw me as an oddball who insisted upon teaching them the craft side of art, but was at the same time open to their own artistic quirks, as long as they came at the right time: my tenth graders knew I was a slave-driver when it came to copying pictures and I wouldn’t allow them to do anything abstract; first let them learn how to draw a horse that doesn’t look like a donkey and a dog that doesn’t look like a fox. To this end, they would choose a work to copy, draw a grid over it and another on their blank paper, and start copying, square after square, only bigger. When they had acquired sufficient skill at this, I would insist that they keep mixing their paints until the shade they obtained was identical to the original. Then I’d work with them on still-life sketches, taking pains with each line, with the perspective, the depth and the play of light and shadow, ensuring that the shades of the greys and blacks were in the correct places; especially so with those who had opted to specialize in drawing, and who could therefore create volume only by means of lines, light and shadow.
In eleventh grade, I allowed them to deviate from realism and precision, but I demanded explanations for what they did: each line had to have its reason. By the twelfth grade, when the students possessed the skills and an awareness of what they were doing, I gave them a lot of freedom, albeit guided freedom. I wanted to see some correspondence between the abstract idea and the execution: the results were excellent.
Our relationship at Shevah-Mofet school, went far beyond the teacher-student paradigm. The students mostly belonged to immigrant families from the former Soviet Union. Close to the end of the 2001 school year, there was a suicide-terrorist attack on a nightclub at the Tel Aviv Dolphinarium: twenty-one youngsters were killed and over a hundred injured. Seven of the dead were from that school, including one of my students, a drawing and graphics major, and one recent graduate, whom I considered to be a fine artist. As most of the students and teachers were not born in Israel, it very quickly became clear to me that I would have to take a central part in the talks with the students that were held in the aftermath of the atrocity. Not only to hug and console them, but also to describe the harsh reality they now found themselves part of, a reality that even I found difficult to grasp. Who could fathom the depth of the hatred and murderousness of a person who decides to give himself an afterlife in Paradise at the expense of kids waiting in line at a discotheque. Some of the youngsters had moved to Israel only a few years before in order to make a better life for themselves, and they now found themselves in the middle of a far worse tragedy than anything that was likely to have happened to them in Russia.
That whole summer I continued to visit the families and the students, consoling, explaining, trying to portray Israel’s situation in a manner that would enable them not to regret the step they had taken by coming to Israel, although I myself could not argue that the Zionist dream was worth the life of someone’s child. From the broad, national point of view, perhaps it was, certainly for a nation that had undergone humiliations, expulsions, pogroms, and ultimately the Holocaust. But not from the painful, personal point of view of a family that had lost a son or daughter, especially as in some cases these were single-parent families, and the dead boy or girl was an only child.
That summer drew to a close, a new school year began and halfway through, in March 2002, I was called up for reserve duty in Operation Defensive Shield against terrorist cells in Nablus and Jenin in the West Bank. The campaign followed a suicide bomber’s attack on a Passover celebration at the Park Hotel in Netanyah that resulted in many deaths and injuries, and I felt that I was fighting for my students. By the time of my exhibition, the operation had ended, and for some of my students I remained the dominant Israeli figure that they had a connection with, and now they were coming to see my show.
Some friends from my reserve unit also accepted my invitation, including some with whom I had also served during my regular army service, and who were like brothers to me and to each other, heart and soul. Like my art student friends, they also didn’t understand me, but from an entirely different angle: how could a practical man like me, a brave soldier, be an artist and an art teacher in civilian life, and not the manager of some company, or at least a lawyer.
I also expected to see those of my childhood and teenage friends that I still had, and others I had picked up on the way. I’d also invited exgirlfriends with whom I was still on good terms.
The Fitz Gallery shared the Arab house and courtyard with a restaurant on the right and an architectural firm on the left. On the evening of my opening, the restaurant put fewer tables for diners in the courtyard, to make room for two long tables, one laden with bottles of white and red wine and plastic glasses, and the other with different kinds of salty snacks. I waived my right to taste the wines and left it up to the owners to choose, because I knew little about wine: all dry red wines were equally unpalatable to me, and all white wines equally OK. Once I told Dolly that to me the whole wine thing, the sniff, the swirl and the sip, was nothing more than showing-off and she told me that I shouldn’t judge others on the basis of my own lack of good taste. Hummus, fresh brown bread and pickles are enough for you, she said, and she was right.
But unlike my palate, my eye was discriminating and I could see when Dolly, or any other woman, was well dressed, although my own taste in clothes was, like my taste in food and wines, simple: jeans and t-shirt in summer and corduroys and a flannel shirt in winter. Dolly forced me to freshen up my wardrobe before the exhibition and for the first time in years I went to the mall and came home with a pair of smart trousers and two smart shirts. Dolly wore a long, clinging, purple dress that she had bought for the opening. She looked wonderful and for a moment I could imagine her in a white dress, under the wedding canopy, and even with a little tummy a little while later. Over her objections (“You’re getting it creased”) I lay her down on the sofa in the living room, and we produced one of our more successful performances. But when she saw that the dress was soiled she was upset and I could only empathize.
We agreed that I should go to the gallery first, and she would try to remove the mark and come a little later. People would in any case be trickling in gradually in the first hour or so, she said.
Although I arrived half an hour before the set time, I wasn’t the first. My parents were already there with two couples of friends; they had all come together by train from Haifa. A dozen students from one of my classes had also arrived. In a trickle, as Dolly had foreseen, more and more people turned up. When the main room in the gallery was quite full, the back doors were opened and the guests went out into the courtyard where the refreshments were laid out.
You don’t touch the wine, I admonished my students, but as a dozen or so of my art school pals had also turned up, there was no fear the bottles would stay full. The kids tore into the snacks instead. There was a happy mood, lots of hugs and compliments, and as it grew darker, some journalists showed up. They asked me to say a few words, and I phoned Dolly to ask her where she was. She told me she was at the central bus station and was about to get on the bus to the gallery, but that I should go on without her. Mum told me that Tzippi, my big sister had been held up by her little daughters, but that Aliza, my younger sister would be there in a moment with her baby.
A TV crew, which had already shot my paintings and a short interview with me standing next to the Israman comics, told me they had another event to cover, so I took the mic to make a little speech, and they turned on their spotlights. The crowd gradually quietened down.
“I can see a lot of familiar and friendly faces,” I began, surveying my audience until I focused on my parents. “My beloved parents, who allowed me to follow the path laid out by my talents. [Sporadic applause.] My esteemed teachers, who taught me so much of what I know [More applause, mainly from the Bezalel graduates.] My friends from art school, the army, and my childhood. [One of the latter group gave one loud clap, and then stopped.] My dear
students, from whom I also learn new things every day. [They cheered when I mentioned the names of their schools.] My beloved sisters aren’t here yet, with their husbands and children, and neither is Dolly, the woman in my life. There are also some more dear friends who said they’d come and some students, who are probably on their way. I’ll make another speech for all of them later on.”
As I looked out at the crowd, I spotted an unfamiliar face, someone who had apparently just come in and was standing near the back – a burly man with a round head and some grey in his hair.
I breathed in, before beginning my actual address, in which I intended to expound on my views on art, beginning, perhaps surprisingly, with Israman, “in whose figure much of what has shaped me so far may be seen, and which may explain why I am here, in the broad sense of the word ‘here’.”
Before I had breathed out, the “boom” came.
There was no mistaking what it was. Not in the midst of a series of terrorist bombings, not with the strength of the blast. It could not have been far away, because in addition to the noise, we also felt the shock-waves. Windows rattled, the wine glasses on the tables and the pictures on the walls shifted. And a moment later, before I gathered my wits, beepers started buzzing, the journalists’ first, and then the police and ambulance sirens began rending the air, from all directions.
“I’ll stop now, until we know what’s going on,” I said in a totally steady voice.
“Speech, speech!” some of my friends called out, and some others also demanded that I continue. In spite of the bomb, some hecklers insisted, “We mustn’t let them ruin our celebrations.”
The ability of people to carry on living in a bubble when the liquid on which it is floating is contaminated and mixed with blood had always perplexed me. Perhaps it is normal, and my inability to do so and accept terror as part of life is my own personal problem. This inability of mine had also addicted me to the news. It was as if everything that happened was my concern, as if it happened to me, and as if a great deal depended on me. A kind of sense of responsibility in my bloodstream doesn’t let me cut myself off. But this time, the decision was mine.
“A quarter of an hour’s break,” I announced. “Then we’ll see.”
I had a very strong feeling that we wouldn’t be going on. The central bus station was nearby, Dolly had been there only minutes before, my sisters and their families were passing close by it, my students and friends may have been changing buses there on their way to the gallery. And that was the direction the blast had come from, I was quite sure.
“We can’t hang around,” the TV reporter told me.
“Off you go, and let’s meet again, on happy occasions,” I said, in the phrase that Jews use after funerals. Then he leaned towards me and whispered that there had been a suicide-bombing on a bus leaving the central station. That’s what he’d just been told on his beeper.
There wasn’t a TV or a radio in the gallery, but there was one in the restaurant. The owner was in a tizzy because his three Palestinian workers had run away and left him alone with only one waitress. I drew a chair up to the TV and switched it on. A Channel 1 reporter was describing the scene as he neared the site, huffing and puffing, and in a moment there was no more room for illusions. The charred wreckage of the bus came into view in the distance, in the middle of Allenby Street, near the Great Synagogue. Cars were in flames. Bleeding and burned people were being moved to safety by passersby, and the first estimates of the numbers of dead and wounded were being made.
Next to me, I suddenly noticed the big man with the greying hair.
“I came to see you about something entirely different,” he said in a deep voice, leaning over my chair. “And in any case I only meant to give you my business card.” I didn’t look at the card he gave me. “Call me when you can,” he said as he straightened up, squeezed my shoulder with a large, warm hand, and walked away from me with a heavy step and a slight stoop. He looked as if he was in his forties, but was carrying the whole world on his back.
Some of my teachers and friends came into the restaurant.
“Mickey,” one of them said, as they gazed at the horrors on the screen, “you’ve got to carry on. This is the biggest day of your life. Don’t let them screw it up for you.”
Once again I dialled Dolly’s number. If she answers, I thought, and if my sisters turn up, then perhaps I’ll be able to continue. But I couldn’t finish dialling. The mobile phone networks were down.
“Come on, the opening of your first exhibition is a never-to-be repeated event,” said the head of the Bezalel fine arts department. But everyone looked as if they were there to console me rather than celebrate with me; after all, a lot of people had been hurt, and whether they were my relatives and guests or not – they were my people.
I went back into the gallery. The mood was completely different. Many of the guests were trying to speak on their mobiles. All of a sudden I saw that my sisters were there, with their husbands and children, and tears of relief welled up in my eyes.
“I heard you were in the middle of something,” said Aliza, after wiping my cheek with a tissue. “You should always finish what you begin.”
“A thousand scenarios went through my head because you weren’t here,” I told her, and only then did I realize that I’d been thinking in great detail about how I’d behave with my parents if we learned that either of my sisters, or any of their daughters, had been killed in the explosion. Would I move them in with me, or would I move in with them? And if a sister and her husband were killed, and not the girls, what then? Would my other sister take them? Would I adopt them? Would Dolly agree? Amazing how many different thoughts run through one’s mind at times like these.
Under pressure from the crowd, I returned to the microphone. Without the TV floodlights it was easier, but my words were briefer and very different from what I had planned.
“We are people just like everyone else. People who want to get up in the morning, have their coffee, go to work and do something they enjoy, return home to people they love, and to sleep peacefully. Some of us like working in technology, or driving a cab, teaching, or painting. Each according to his own inclination and ability. We want to live in a country that will provide us with an environment of physical security. But we are not like other people everywhere, and this country isn’t like others.”
I began to notice perplexity, perhaps some resentment, in my audience, especially among my friends. But the spate of words continued.
“In no other country does an exhibition opening take place in the shadow of a terror attack. There’s no other country where an artist can be an artist for only eleven months a year, because in the twelfth month he has to do reserve duty on the borders. And if there weren’t enough people like him, nobody would be able to paint here, or do anything else, for those eleven other months.”
I managed to refrain from saying anything about those who do paint twelve months a year, oblivious to what I was talking about. Some of them were there in my audience.
“There aren’t many artists who began their careers by drawing comics of a national superhero, a hero who doesn’t busy himself with saving individuals from danger, but one who saves his nation. And this sprang directly from the biographies of his parents and grandparents.”
At this, there was some unexpected applause.
“At a moment like this, I don’t think it’s right for me to expound on my artistic ideas. I intended to talk about the pictures in this main room, but now it seems that the little room over there with the comics is much more relevant. During that period I never asked myself what the correct style was, or which the preferred style would be, what themes would be a success with curators or with buyers, or worst of all with the arty crowd. It was precisely then, at the age of thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, younger than my students today, that my hand, head and heart worked completely and honestly together.”
I signalled to one of the students to bring me a glass of wine.
; “Some say, the party must go on. Maybe. That life must go on? Yes, that sounds better,” I accepted the correction made by one of the guests. My wine came, and I raised the glass. “I want to drink a toast to that combination of hand, head, and heart, which is also the combination of our roots: personal – our parents; local – this country; social – all the dear people who came to celebrate with me. That is the head, and that is the heart, and it is only from them that the hand that draws should come.”
To lukewarm applause, I drank the wine. There was no more happiness. In the last row, the man with the big head stood out. He had apparently decided to stay, and he nodded to me in a sign of respect and agreement. I dialled Dolly’s number again, but there was no reply. Some of my pupils told me they’d heard that friends on the way here were on the bus that blew up. The head of the fine arts department asked to speak to me alone. He told me that there were some fourth year students who were coming to the show from Jerusalem and had not been heard from. He and everyone else were very anxious; only a month and a half before students had been killed in a terrorist bombing in the Frank Sinatra Cafeteria of the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, where Bezalel was also located.
From one moment to the next, the number of people who had been on their way here and with whom contact had been lost, was growing. When Dolly still didn’t reply, I said goodbye to my parents and sisters, quickly apologized to my friends and guests, and walked to the site of the bombing, where only the smoking wreck of the bus was standing, and then to the hospitals to which the casualties had been evacuated.
About three hours later, after a nightmare journey full of blood and fear and cries of anger and grief from people whose loved ones had been on the bus, I was sitting on a bench outside the trauma unit of Wolfson Hospital in Holon, south of Tel Aviv. Inside, I understood, doctors were fighting to save Dolly’s life. Next to me were groups of relatives of other injured people. All ages and ethnic groups, mothers and fathers, siblings, loved ones. There were also two sets of parents of students of mine who had been on the way to my show and had instead ended up in hospital.
Final Stop, Algiers: A Thriller Page 5