by Nora Gold
Reluctantly she gets out of bed. The floor is freezing against the bare soles of her feet. In the bathroom, shivering, she does her “morning ablutions,” as her father used to call them. Fear flutters in her stomach. Butterflies. She’s ashamed of being afraid like this. But brushing her teeth, she remembers Bubba once telling her that fear is nothing to be ashamed of, because without fear there is no opportunity for bravery. Plus, she remembers, even Rabin was afraid. He admitted publicly after signing the Oslo Accords that he’d had butterflies in his stomach when he walked out onto the White House lawn. Not that that worked out very well. The Oslo Accords did not bring peace. Still, it was brave of Rabin. Just because it didn’t work out doesn’t mean the act itself didn’t take courage. Courage isn’t about the outcome; it’s about finding the strength to do the right thing.
Or is it? Judith ponders this as she steps into her jeans. Maybe outcome does matter. Is it brave, after all, to do something that’s foolish (foolish meaning pointless, ineffective, Quixote-ish)? Or is that just foolish? Can something be simultaneously both brave and foolish? Anyway, she thinks, pulling on a sweatshirt, just because Rabin didn’t succeed doesn’t mean that what he did was foolish. It didn’t necessarily fail because of him. What he did may have been his best option at the time. At least he tried.
Downstairs she distractedly eats some cereal, still wondering about courage and foolishness. She agrees with Burke’s famous statement that all that’s required for evil to triumph in the world is for good people to do nothing. But what is fighting the evil in the world, as every good person must, and what is tilting at windmills or self-aggrandizing? Bobby thinks fighting evil is foolish, and maybe even a form of narcissism or martyrdom, unless you use the same strategies as that legal committee he’s on, like high-level lobbying and politics. But she can’t do that at Dunhill. She doesn’t know how, and she doesn’t have the power. Yet someone has to take these people on. You can’t just let them take over the whole world: her classes, then the School of Social Work, then Dunhill University, then all the universities in Canada, then the whole country. Because once you own the mind of a nation, its intellectual life, you own the nation itself. Someone has to say to these people: “Stop. Stop right here. Not one inch more.”
She feels herself getting worked up, her stomach is churning again, and she knows this is not good. She still has the one-hour drive to Dunhill ahead of her, a whole day of classes to get through, and then the long drive back home. Besides, whoever this brave person is who is going to fight these assholes and be the leader of the hour, standing up for “Truth, Justice, and the American (or Canadian) way,” it is not her. She’s no Superman — or Superwoman. She knows herself: in the courage department she is nothing special. She’s sensitive and timid — definitely not hero material. I’ll be satisfied if I just survive this year, she thinks. Not get smashed and mashed into hummus, but remain who I am: a single chickpea, whole.
Driving to Dunhill, she muses about Babs and Miss Piggy, and tries applying this technique to Kerry, Chris, and Lola. She plays around with funny cartoon characters, and people and animals from books and movies. But it’s much harder to do than Suzy’s book made it sound. She can’t find just the right image for each person — something that will declaw them and render them harmless, maybe even humorous. The closest she comes is picturing Chris as a puppy dog, a tiny chihuahua yelping and running in circles around Michael Brier the famous celebrity, hoping to impress him by snapping at the heels of his detractors. Seen this way, Chris shrinks down, small and comical. But still he has teeth. Sharp little teeth that can bite. So this isn’t working.
Exhausted by all this thinking, she pulls into the Dunhill parking lot at twenty to nine. Good. She won’t be late for Weick’s class again. Striding through the parking lot, the students around her look not just pale and tense, but also strangely absent, vacant-eyed like zombies, some without hats or scarves even though it’s twenty below. It’s the mid-November blues plus the end-of-term crunch, she thinks gloomily. But then one of the zombies waves from the far side of the parking lot. It’s Roberta. She waves back to her, feeling reassured and warmed. See? she tells herself, walking along the path toward FRANK. Just because Roberta ate lunch with Lola last week doesn’t mean she agrees with her on everything and is my enemy. Maybe Roberta’s okay.
— 3 —
Much to Judith’s relief, today’s classes are all uneventful, and she leaves Dunhill immediately after the last one so as to miss the anti-Israel rally. Driving home, she is glad it’s behind her, and figures this was it for the year: the annual anti-Israel rally at Dunhill that she read about in the papers last spring. Anyway, she thinks, put it out of your mind. Use Cognitive Therapy techniques if necessary. Just focus on your schoolwork. So for the rest of that week, she studies from the moment she awakens in the morning till collapsing into bed at night, and almost never leaves the house. But in a way she doesn’t mind. She likes the simplicity of this life: the clarity of purpose, the purity of focusing on just one thing to the exclusion of all else. Like a hermit focusing only on God. The week passes quickly, and on Sunday night she’s still so deeply and pleasantly immersed in her papers that she almost decides to skip her classes the next day. But she concludes it’s not worth it. It’s easier just to go. So she does.
That Monday, she spends the whole drive to Dunhill worrying about her final assignments. She has a lot left to do and really can’t afford to waste this whole day attending classes. She parks impatiently in the lot nearest FRANK and trudges up the stairs.
But once in the building, she stands just inside the doorway, disoriented. The whole atrium has been converted into a kind of fair. There are two long tables reaching out toward her like arms, and a shorter table joining them on the far side, forming a horseshoe shape. On top of the three tables are a dozen brightly-coloured poster boards, each with two little wings, like the winged poster boards that ensure privacy in voting stations. What are they voting on here? she asks herself, looking around, dazed. She’s too far away to see the small pictures or read the text on any of these poster boards, but she is dazzled by their colours, as cheerful as those at a fairground or circus: orange, lime-green, purple, shocking pink. A dozen students are milling around, some looking at the exhibits, others chatting and laughing, a few in earnest, animated conversation. Judith advances toward the long right arm of the horseshoe, close enough to see the first booth on the right, and then stops cold. In front of her is a black-and-white picture of a beautiful, serious-looking boy with black hair, big black eyes, and sensual lips. The caption underneath says:
MOHAMMED RAJOUB
AGE 10
SHOT DEAD BY ISRAELI SOLDIERS
APRIL 19, 2002
She freezes. Stares at it, stunned. Then moves on to the next picture. This one is of a Palestinian woman holding a dead baby in her open, upturned hands. It hangs there lifeless, looking like an upside-down banana, its two ends — head and feet — limply dangling. In the background, an Israeli soldier watches this woman with narrowed eyes. This mother reminds Judith of another mother, the Israeli one sobbing after the terrorist attack in Jerusalem one week ago: “My baby, my baby …” The Arab woman in the picture looks vaguely familiar — maybe they met at that mothers’ group Miri’s sister took her to: Israeli and Palestinian mothers who have bonded together — who are bound together, Miri said, like the Binding of Isaac, or of Isaac-and-Ishmael — through their dead sons. “No more violence, no more war,” they chanted in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, demonstrating with trilingual signs in front of the Knesset, to the contempt of passersby.
“Lefties! Idealists! Haters of Israel!” people shouted at them. But that didn’t upset Miri’s sister. Judith asked her why and she just shrugged: “People who haven’t lost a son — what do they know about anything?”
Now Judith has had enough. She does not want to look at any more pictures at this “fair.” This unfair fair. But she has to walk past more of them, between two long rows o
f them, like running the gauntlet, to get to the elevator. She decides she’ll just glance at them cursorily, scan them superficially, as she walks quickly past, so they won’t go inside her, inside her mind, body, or soul. But even one glance is enough. She sees them and they enter her — how could they not? — pictures of dead Palestinian children, their blood spattered across the photos like spilled ink. She stops walking and turns aside, afraid she’ll throw up. To steady herself she gazes down, breathing heavily, at a patch of green tablecloth. A small, neutral circle. She knows these photographs are true. She has seen others like them — there’s nothing here she hasn’t seen before, or that she and her friends haven’t been outraged over, and demonstrated against, dozens of times. Yet these photographs are not true. They are not true because they tell just half of the story and provide no context. There is nothing here, not one single picture, about what the Palestinians do to Israelis: about the incessant suicide bombings, the rockets fired from Gaza on young families, the Israeli children stabbed to death in their beds at night. Someone ignorant visiting this exhibit would get the impression that the Israeli army, sheerly out of naked aggression, completely unprovoked, goes around killing Palestinians. Which isn’t true.
She’s still gazing down at the green tablecloth, wracked with anger and pain. Then she looks around her. What is this exhibit, anyway? she wonders. Against the far wall, there’s a printed banner:
PHOTO ALBUM OF OUR PEOPLE:
PALESTINIAN LIFE AND DEATH UNDER ZIONIST APARTHEID
“Apartheid” again. And again her stomach drops. I have to get to class, she thinks. I have to reach those elevators up ahead. So she keeps moving toward this banner. Finally she is close enough to be able to read the small print:
SPONSORED BY THE SOCIAL JUSTICE COMMITTEE OF THE DUNHILL STUDENTS’ UNION (DSU)
Now she understands. This is the Students’ Union’s Social Justice Information Table. The table Chris was asking for volunteers for in Greg’s class two Mondays ago. She looks around the lobby. New students are constantly streaming in, initially looking surprised, but then browsing through the exhibit. Every single student, she thinks, from social work, labour studies, anthropology, or sociology who enters this building today is going to be exposed to these pictures. To this lie. And a certain percentage of them, being ignorant and gullible, will believe it.
She feels someone looking at her. It’s Chris, watching her with a smug little smirk, a look of “Let’s see what you have to say about this.” A look daring her to say or do something. She lowers her eyes. “Just get through this year,” Bobby said. “Keep your mouth shut. In six months you’ll never have to see these people again.” Avoiding looking at Chris, she squeezes through a crack between the tables and slinks to the elevator. Slinking like a snake. Slinking like a worm. Full of angst and shame, she rides up to class.
Walking in, she sees Cindy smiling and waving at her. She waves back, unable to smile. As usual, Cindy has saved her the seat on her left. But on Cindy’s right sits Pam alone. Aliza is away again.
“She came in this morning,” Pam explains, “but then her stomach went crazy, so she went back home.”
Judith nods. Aliza’s stomach virus must be more serious than she realized. Or else Aliza took one look at those pictures downstairs and felt so nauseated she couldn’t walk past them to get to class. Now Pam leans closer, her body arching over Cindy’s like a bridge, and she asks Judith in a low voice, “What did you think of those pictures?”
Judith searches her eyes — eager, grey, and catlike — meanwhile sensing Cindy watching and listening in. “Unbelievable,” Judith answers softly. Then: “Well, actually, they’re not. That’s the problem — they’re quite believable. I’ll bet lots of people who saw them believed everything they saw.”
“So they aren’t true?” Cindy asks earnestly.
“They’re true but they’re not,” Judith begins, but stops because Weick is pounding on the desk at the front of the room. What a Neanderthal, she thinks. Pounding like a caveman to get our attention. She listens to him for a minute, but she’s not in the mood right now to hear about how values-driven, ethical, and morally sensitive her social work colleagues are. She’s feeling too hurt and cynical. She summons Moshe. He comes immediately, and like her, he’s disgusted by this exhibit.
“Disgusting,” he says to her first in English, then in Hebrew: “go’al nefesh” — literally “revulsion of the soul.” His soul is revulsed, she can see, but so is his body: his face is twisted into a scowl as if he’s smelled something bad and is trying not to vomit. This comforts her. Here is someone — someone from her own people — who understands things, who feels things, just the way she does. It doesn’t matter that their politics are different. They are part of the same drop of water.
Moshe’s eyes, brown, warm, deep, draw her in. Then a brightness that she recognizes enters them: it’s that “Wanna do it?” look. But she doesn’t feel like sex now. She just wants him to hold her. So he does. He wraps his big arms around her and holds her. And in this position she rests, feeling safe, till Weick’s class ends.
— 4 —
In the next class, Greg hands back everyone’s papers. There are yelps of joy, groans, and silences as people see their marks. Judith’s gotten an A and is pleased. But Cindy is silent and looks disappointed. Judith tactfully glances away. Cindy taps her shoulder, though, and asks how she did. She just shrugs.
“Come on,” says Cindy. “Tell me.”
She shows Cindy the last page. There’s a big A circled at the top and underneath it a paragraph of glowing comments.
“That’s great!” says Cindy. “Another A!”
Judith checks out Cindy’s nonverbals: not a single cloud in those clear sky-blue eyes. Not the slightest trace of envy or resentment. Judith knows in the reverse situation she’d have felt a twinge, but not Cindy. She’s a better person than me, thinks Judith. Then she asks, to be polite, “What about you?”
Cindy shrugs. “The usual. C+. Like the fruit drink.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Cindy says gamely. “As long as I pass.”
Greg starts his lecture. Since that incident with Kerry, Judith doesn’t smile at Greg, and she hardly ever speaks in his class. But she lets herself be distracted by Greg and his antics, and does her best to ignore Kerry and her gang — all huddled today, as usual, off to the left — and Lola and her gang, at the front on the right. The class passes quickly. When it’s over, Phoebe, the school’s administrative coordinator, comes in. Looking dumpy and depressed as always, she distributes pink forms and says she needs their second-term course selections by the end of the day. As everybody rises to leave, Judith proposes to Cindy and Pam that they go for lunch to Le Petit Café, so they won’t have to walk through that exhibit again. They can bypass it by taking the elevator all the way down to the basement. Cindy and Pam agree. Over lunch they work, as planned, on their final project for Greg’s course, updating each other on what’s happening in each region of Canada regarding anti-oppression initiatives in schools of social work. Then they fill out their pink course forms for Phoebe. Judith is astonished to discover she is the only one signing up for “Advanced Social Work Practice,” the continuation of Suzy’s course. Cindy says Suzy is okay but she’s had enough of her. Judith looks at her sharply. Something in Cindy’s tone confirms what she has suspected for a while: Cindy is jealous of her relationship with Suzy.
Pam, too, is giving Suzy’s course a miss, but for an entirely different reason. She’s lost her interest, she says, in clinical work. Lately she’s been eyeing the courses in labour studies, and plans to take at least one elective there, maybe more.
Instead of Suzy’s course, Cindy says she’ll take Terry Montana’s on feminism and social work. “I need to get to know her at least a little if she’s going to be my thesis advisor.”
“True,” says Judith, and scribbles herself a note to ask Suzy to be hers.
Then they each pick tw
o more courses. Judith is glad that Cindy, like her, is signing up for Corinne Marajian’s class, “Sexism, Racism, and Women of Colour.” Judith likes Corinne’s look: almost queenly, yet kind and warm. Plus Judith is parched for feminist content, some watering from the feminist spring, after a first term that’s been a desert in this respect. For their required research course, it’s either Hetty Caplar or Penny Harloffery, whom Judith remembers from Orientation as shiny, hard, and cold, like a brass bugle. She tells Pam and Cindy that Hetty is awkward socially, even slightly odd, but a good egg. So they all choose Hetty.
Pam has taken an extra pink form for Aliza that she can hand in next week. “Assuming she wants to continue with the program,” Pam adds.
“What do you mean?!” cries Judith. It never occurred to her that maybe all four of them wouldn’t continue together all the way through. They’re a unit. A quartet. They’re her gang for this year.