by Nora Gold
In the background, behind Yossi, there are ambulances and police cars, and men in charge rushing around frenetically gesticulating and shouting in Hebrew, “Move! Move! Out of the way!” There’s the sound of sirens, and people are running in every direction, and there’s screaming, wailing, and sobbing. A woman behind Yossi is rocking back and forth and screeching over and over, “My baby! Where’s my baby?!”
Yossi the falafel guy disappears, and Judith sees, in his place, a Canadian anchorman, wearing a neatly pressed white shirt and holding a mike that says: CBC News.
“The Martyrs of Vengeance have claimed responsibility for this attack,” he says calmly, in a voice that is matter-of-fact, professional, and free of regret or any other emotion. “They have also indicated that more attacks on Israeli children can be expected in the weeks ahead.”
There’s a brief pause, the length of three heartbeats. Now he is gone, replaced by a blonde woman in a royal blue suit and big white-and-gold paste earrings.
“Next in the news,” she says cheerfully, and announces the second disaster, the second great tragedy, of the day: someone high up in the Conservative Party has just defected to the Liberals. “A great betrayal,” this woman in blue says dramatically. Judith switches off the TV, but she does not go to bed.
Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? Are you okay? Twenty emails fly out from her to the twenty people she cares about the most over there. She knows these emails of hers, which she sends off every time there is an attack, won’t accomplish anything: they won’t save, prevent, help, alleviate, or change anything or anyone. Whoever is dead is dead. Whoever has lost the bottom half of their body has already lost the bottom half of their body. But she sends them anyway. It’s all she can do. It’s her way of saying, I am in the west, but my heart is in the east. Then she waits. It takes until 5:00 a.m. to hear back from her friends, because the Internet connections always get overloaded after an attack. Finally she receives an email from Bruria saying that Tamar, Benny, and their kids are fine. Luckily they’d all already left the house ten minutes before the bomb went off. Judith sighs with relief. Then she reads: Their house, however, has been reduced to rubble.
Shit. How ironic, too, that of all her friends, it’s Tamar and Benny this has happened to. Tamar and Benny, who twice monthly travel to Palestinian villages to help rebuild homes unfairly demolished by the army. The builders’ house has now been destroyed, she thinks, and a flash of anger runs through her. Let’s see how many Palestinians run now to Jerusalem to help rebuild Tamar and Benny’s house. Let’s see how many of them are willing to stand up against the injustice and violence on their side. This I want to see.
Bruria writes that all of their other mutual friends are also okay. No one they know has been killed or injured in this attack. A few minutes later Judith receives two more emails, and Yechiel and Rina separately confirm the same thing. Only now does Judith shut her computer and go to bed.
For a long time she lies there tensely, unable to relax. Then at 6:30 she shuts her eyes “just for a minute.” The next thing she knows, the sun is shining into them, hurting them, and the clock says it’s ten past nine. Oh my God — Weick’s class! She leaps out of bed.
— 7 —
Driving to Dunhill, her hands tremble on the wheel. She’s shaky from sleeplessness and hunger — she forgot to eat supper, and there wasn’t time this morning for breakfast. Though in a way this feels appropriate: a day of fasting, to mourn the dead and wounded. Marching in front of her eyes in a kind of parade are some of the children-under-nine she knows in Jerusalem, the kids of her friends and neighbours: Adi proudly showing off the purple backpack he got in honour of starting grade one, Leah squeaking away on her violin, Shimmy bouncing his basketball. “Fuck!” she cries. It’s now been more than two years since the second intifada started. She was still in Israel for the first year of it: bombs exploding in shoe stores, pizza parlours, bus stations. At bar mitzvahs and weddings. You never knew when or where it would happen. Now this: going after children. What next?
Though she knows very well what’s next — in the short term, anyway. Sharon will go in and pound the shit out of Gaza, or Ramallah, or Jenin. The Palestinians will retaliate with some more suicide bombings. Sharon will respond by pounding Gaza, Ramallah, or Jenin even more heavily, plus maybe reoccupying a town or two, or rerouting the fence to cut off more of their land. God. When is this going to end?
By now she is almost at the turnoff to Dunhill, but she’s stuck behind a big red truck going forty kilometres an hour. Impatiently she swerves onto the shoulder and bypasses the truck. Sharon is such an asshole, she thinks, taking the turnoff. But Arafat is no better; in fact he’s worse. Damn them both. Two stupid old men having a dick-waving contest, each one trying to prove his cock is bigger than the other guy’s. And in the meantime people — real people — are dying on both sides. Bruria always said, “Now if women ran the world, boy, would things be different!” and Judith usually agrees with that. But now she’s not so sure. Today’s suicide bomber was a woman. A shaheeda, instead of a shaheed. Yay. It’s good to know the Palestinians have made some progress: now they’re giving equal opportunity to women.
She pulls into Dunhill’s parking lot. On the news she heard — adding insult to injury — that this particular shaheeda was from Umm el Fahm: a village Judith visited three years ago for one of her dialogue meetings between Jewish and Palestinian women. Now she slams the car door shut and thumps up the stairs into FRANK. The lobby is eerily empty — well, of course: everyone else is already in class — and alone she rides the elevator to the fifth floor. Her mouth feels dry, mealy, and sour as she walks down the long hallway. My breath must be atrocious, she thinks. It’s from not eating breakfast. It’s the taste of the night.
But no, that’s not it at all. It’s the taste of horror that has filled my mouth. Lord, do not open my lips, because I will not be able to declare thy praise. If God opened her lips right now, death, despair, and fury would come pouring out, leaping off her tongue like little frog-plagues. Alone she walks down the long corridor. So long and so gloomy that she again recalls the valley of the shadow of death. Horror fills her, leaving little room for anything else. Except silence.
Fortunately, silence is fine in Weick’s class. There’s rarely any discussion — last week with Mary Martha was an exception — and today, as usual, everyone is just sitting there, bored, while he drones on and on. He gives Judith a scowl as she walks in at 10:25 a.m., almost an hour and a half late; she makes a grimace of apology and slinks into the chair next to Cindy.
She tries listening attentively, obediently, to Weick. For some reason he is lecturing about Systems Theory again. He’s telling them that the Dunhill School of Social Work is a living organism like any other, and therefore committed to its own survival. So everything that happens here is evaluated in terms of its relationship — its potential contribution, positive or negative — to that end. He looks right at Judith.
“Every part of a system,” he says to her, “affects every other part.”
Embarrassed, she looks down. Then he returns to his usual drone and she does what she always does to get through this class: she summons Moshe. This time the sexual fantasy she imagines involves a vibrator. She is rubbing it slowly up and down his penis, and he likes it. His eyes close and his face flushes. Even though initially he resisted trying it.
“What the hell is that?” he asked when she first introduced the lime-green phallus. “We don’t need that thing. There’s nothing wrong with my zayin.”
Judith likes the word zayin. Zayin in Hebrew is penis. But zayin is also a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, the one that makes the “z” sound. And zayin, in both its meanings, phonetically sounds exactly the same as Zion. Ah, she thinks — so maybe a Zayinist is one particular type of Zionist. If Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, and is based on ethical and religious ideals, then Zayinism could be a sick offshoot: the penis-oriented id
eology of macho militarism and misogyny. Zayinism, the dark brother of Zionism — the Cain to its Abel. Judith loves Zionism with all her heart, all her soul, and all her might. But just as much as that, she hates Zayinism, which pretends to be Zionism, but is just a perversion of it. She plays with words and with Moshe for the rest of Weick’s class. When it’s over, and everyone is getting up from their seats, she notices Aliza is missing.
“Where’s Aliza?” she asks Pam.
Pam’s eyes dart to the side. “She’s not feeling well today. But if she’s up to it, she may come in later.”
Judith, Pam, and Cindy proceed to Greg’s class. As they walk in, Greg stands at the front of the room, laughing and calling out like a newspaper vendor: “Papers! Papers! Give me all your papers!”
Judith hands him hers. But when he smiles at her with his usual radiant smile, she looks down. She wonders if he can tell how she feels about him now. She must talk to him sometime, she knows that, but she just doesn’t have it in her today. The room falls silent. Chris is at the front, about to make an announcement. He says he needs some volunteers on Monday, two weeks from now, to help set up the Students’ Union’s Social Justice Information Table. If anyone can come in a bit early that day, say around eight o’clock, and pitch in, that would be great. Even one hour, if there are enough pairs of hands, should be enough to get the job done.
“Come if you can,” Greg chimes in his support. “Walk the talk, as they say.”
Chris asks for a show of hands from people who might be able to help. A few hands shoot up: Kerry’s, Tyler’s, and some others. Judith isn’t sure what this information table is — this is the first she’s heard of it. But whatever it is, no, she isn’t leaving Toronto two Mondays from now at seven o’clock in the morning, for the pleasure of volunteering with Chris, Kerry, and Tyler, all haters of Israel.
Greg starts lecturing, and she half-listens, half-draws, or one-quarter listens and three-quarters draws, all the way through. As always, she draws creatures that are part animal and part human. A half-human-half-dog, a half-human-half-bear, and a half-human-half-lion. Then she does a series of birds, which end up looking like the bird-people in medieval Passover Haggadas, where all the illustrations are of birds, not humans, because of the injunction against drawing images. Human birds. Bird people. This is what she draws today in Greg’s class. As though art is an amulet, something that can protect her from harm.
Greg’s class passes without incident. Afterwards Judith, Cindy, and Pam walk to the new restaurant on campus, Libertad, that opened last week beside the cafeteria. They’ve been looking forward to this, since they’re all bored with the cafeteria menu. As they approach Libertad, standing in the doorway with a big grin and a red wool cap is Aliza. Judith runs over and throws her arms around her. “I loved your present!” she whispers into her ear.
Aliza laughs. “I knew you would.” Then, with a sly, intimate look, “It’s good, eh?”
Judith, blushing, smiles. “Yeah, but at first I was scared of it. Are you sure I can’t get electrocuted?”
Aliza, laughing, shakes her head.
“What are you two talking about?” asks Cindy. Judith leans over and whispers in her ear. Cindy chuckles and says to Aliza, “My birthday’s March 14.”
Aliza laughs. But now Judith notices how pale she is, even more than usual: there’s a translucence to her paper-white skin. “What was wrong with you this morning?” she asks.
Aliza looks away. “An upset stomach. But now I’m okay.”
“Good. I’d lend you my notes, but I didn’t take any. You didn’t miss a thing.”
“I figured.”
Libertad has a set-up similar to the cafeteria’s, but the menu here is different: half Canadian, half South American, and on the wall menu, between huncaina: cold cooked vegetables with cheese sauce and gallo pinto: rice and beans, a plaque reads: Viva el socialismo y la Libertad. The word Libertad is surrounded by little red dots. Everyone orders something except Aliza.
“My stomach,” she explains when Judith asks her why.
”But you need to eat.”
“I’ll be fine. Anyway, I should lose a few pounds.”
“You?! You’re so slim! You have the perfect body. A dancer’s body.”
“No, I don’t. I’m fat.”
Judith rolls her eyes and they find a table. Judith’s tuna sandwich isn’t bad, but Pam takes one sip of her coffee and spits it back into her cup. “It tastes like a cesspool,” she says.
“Life is a cesspool,” says Judith.
Cindy looks at her inquisitively.
“Did any of you hear the news this morning?” Judith asks.
“What exactly?” asks Pam.
“There was another terrorist attack in Israel today. Just six blocks from my house.”
“Your house?” Cindy asks.
“My apartment in Jerusalem. I still have my apartment there.”
“Was anyone hurt?” asks Aliza.
“Sixteen dead, twenty-eight injured.” To her embarrassment, tears spring to her eyes. “Most of them under the age of nine. This time they went after children.”
Pam’s usually rough voice is softer now. “Anyone you know, Judith?”
She shakes her head. “No. At least not that I’ve heard. But my friends’ house was destroyed.” She snaps her fingers. “Just like that.”
“Animals,” growls Aliza. “Fuckin’ animals.”
Judith looks at her, taken aback. No matter what she feels about this bombing — no matter how immense her pain or grief — she could never call a person an animal. Even a suicide bomber. She can call them lots of other things, but not animals. Though some Palestinians call Jews animals: pigs, monkeys … Also, there are right-wing Jews who refer to Palestinians as animals. Bobby’s brother did that several months ago, saying that an Arab and a dog have about the same level of moral intelligence. Judith got up and walked out of the room. Now she looks at Aliza and thinks: She feels what I feel, but not exactly. We’re not in the same place politically.
“Where precisely was the attack?” Aliza asks. “Not that I know Jerusalem well — my relatives are in Tel Aviv and on kibbutz.”
Judith names the intersection. Aliza shakes her head, not recognizing it. “They were on their way to school,” Judith says. “Little kids. This time the suicide bomber was a woman.”
“I heard that on the news,” says a voice, and Judith looks up. It’s Lola. Passing by with her tray, she’s stopped at their table. She’s a big woman under any circumstances, but now standing while they’re all seated, she towers over them, casting a shadow. “What terrible news,” she says.
Judith looks at her, surprised. “Really? I didn’t know you cared about Israelis.”
“Just because I care about the Palestinians doesn’t mean I can’t care about Israelis, too,” says Lola self-righteously. “I have enough caring inside me for everyone.” She sets her tray down on the edge of their table. “But let’s face it — terrible as it is, Sharon leaves the Palestinians no choice. They’re desperate, they feel they have nothing to lose. They have no way except violence to get their country back.”
“In other words,” says Judith, “these children deserved to be blown up?”
“I’m not saying that, obviously.” Lola looks slightly uncomfortable. “But in a way they’re just paying for the war crimes of Sharon. If Israelis don’t want any more of their children to get blown up, then they should give back what isn’t theirs. All of it. Not just the West Bank and Gaza, but Jaffa, Akko, Jerusalem.”
Judith stares at Lola. Jerusalem. She’s talking about my home. She’s talking about giving someone else my home.
“That’s ridiculous,” mutters Aliza under her breath.
Cindy, looking worriedly at Judith, says to Lola, “Would you excuse us, please? We’re trying to eat our lunch.”
“Well, sorreee,” Lola says. “I didn’t realize an alternative point of view would be off limits at this table.”
“Nothing’s off limits,” says Pam. “We’re just in the middle of a conversation.”
“Well, don’t let me interrupt you,” says Lola, picking up her tray.
When she’s gone, there is silence at the table.
“Asshole,” says Pam after a moment.
Judith is still staring straight in front of her. Cindy says her name. She turns and looks at her. Cindy’s eyes are china blue and honest. “You heard her,” Judith says wonderingly to Cindy. Then she looks around the table. “You all heard her. Am I hallucinating, or did she say that basically all these children deserved to die?”
“Basically,” says Pam. “But Judith, don’t pay any attention to her. She’s a nutcase. Anyone who thinks that Israel should give the Palestinians not only all the occupied territories, but also the whole rest of the country, is obviously out of their mind.”
“She’s crazy,” says Aliza.
But Judith’s eyes have a wild, trapped look. Cindy puts a hand on her arm and says, “Forget it, Judith.”
Judith, dazed, turns toward Cindy. “I can’t believe it,” she says. “I can’t believe she said that.”
“I know. It’s horrible. But don’t let her get to you. Like Pam said, she’s an idiot.”
“I didn’t say idiot,” says Pam. “I said nutcase.”
“Nutcase. Whatever.”
“Time for a joke,” Aliza loudly announces. To Judith’s astonishment and consternation, Aliza launches into a story about a gorgeous, sexy French poodle who goes for a walk one day in Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens. This poodle is so alluring that, within one hour, no less than three Parisian dogs have fallen in love with her. Judith, in spite of herself, listens. Each of the three dogs tries to impress the adorable poodle, and soon they are fighting over her. She doesn’t like this, and tells them that instead of watching them fight, she has a better way to decide between them. Whoever comes up with the most romantic and creative sentence will get to go on a date with her tonight. But there is one condition: the sentence must include the words liver and cheese.