by Nora Gold
“Judith?” inquires a voice.
It’s Suzy. “Hi!” Judith says, standing, again feeling dizzy. Guilty, too — she flushes like a schoolgirl caught playing hookey by the teacher. “What are you doing in Toronto?”
“My sister lives near here,” says Suzy, looking pretty, petite, and self-contained, as always. “Today’s my nephew’s birthday, so I’m picking up the birthday cake on my way there.”
Judith squints with concentration, but she is only half-listening to these words. She is anxiously searching Suzy’s eyes, trying to gauge how Suzy feels about her. But her eyes are opaque, “professional,” not giving anything away.
“What are you doing here?” Suzy asks. “I thought you were sick at home.”
“I was sick,” says Judith, “but now I’m better.” Then she hears how odd this must sound. She is talking to a teacher whose first three classes of the term she has missed, the last of them ending just an hour and a half ago. Feeling muddled, she adds, “I’m not completely better yet. I was sick in bed till an hour ago. I was planning to come to your class today, but I only woke up at two o’clock. But then an hour ago I felt better, so I decided to come out for a bit. Bobby’s birthday is on Wednesday and I need to get him a present.” She’s starting to feel nauseated again.
“You look terrific,” says Suzy. “You’ve got great colour in your cheeks.”
That’s just fever, thinks Judith, but doesn’t say anything.
“What’s wrong with you exactly?” Suzy asks. “Cindy said something about a flu, but the flu doesn’t usually last this long.”
She doesn’t believe I’m sick. Feeling on the defensive, Judith says, “My doctor says it’s one of those new viruses. You just have to wait them out. Sometimes they can last for even four weeks.”
“Four weeks — wow,” says Suzy. “I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
“Neither had I. But that’s what he said.”
“Does it have a name?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t tell me one.”
“Really,” Suzy says vaguely.
It’s clear she is unconvinced this virus is real.
“By the way,” says Suzy, “will you be coming to the SWAC meeting this Thursday? I don’t believe you RSVP’d.”
“I don’t know,” says Judith. “I hope so. I really want to come. But I’ll have to see. At this point I’m taking it one day at a time.”
Suzy openly studies her now, peering at her closely, as if weighing her words, and even her character. After a long moment, she says, “I hope this Thursday is one of your good days.”
“So do I,” Judith says earnestly.
Suzy nods. They both smile slightly and say goodbye.
Suzy continues on her way toward the bakery, and Judith watches her receding back until she can’t see it anymore. Then she drives home. In bed she falls quickly into a fever-drenched sleep. But one thing she knows as she is going under: she’d better show up at that meeting on Thursday. It’s her last chance.
— 3 —
On Tuesday and Wednesday she is no worse but no better, so on Wednesday night she and Bobby celebrate his birthday at her place, ordering in Chinese. Then on Thursday at 5:30 she drives to Dunhill. The drive starts out all right, but by the time she arrives she’s exhausted and sweating. She leans her seat back and lies down with her arm over her eyes. She shouldn’t have come today. But once she’s here, she’ll attend at least part of the SWAC meeting. She’ll warn Suzy beforehand that she may have to leave early. Suzy will understand.
Inside FRANK, Judith heads toward Suzy’s office. There is almost a half-hour now until the meeting starts. She’ll have time to explain to Suzy about leaving early because of her illness, but she’ll also offer to review the agenda with her like always. She’ll show her she’s trying to be a responsible co-chair.
But when she reaches Suzy’s office, Suzy is not alone. The office door is open and Judith hears laughter within. This possibility never occurred to her: that at 6:40, twenty minutes before a SWAC meeting, someone else could be sitting in Suzy’s office with her. This was always Judith’s time. She pauses in the hallway. She could leave now. But she wants Suzy to know that, despite how sick she’s been, she made this effort to come tonight. Approaching the doorway, she sees Suzy in her usual chair, and in the other one, Judith’s chair, sits Elizabeth.
Elizabeth and Suzy are laughing. Suzy, dark, cute and petite, reminding Judith of a charming Parisian brunette, a flirt with a glorious, tinkly laugh, and Elizabeth, taller and willowy with that long, straight blond hair. There is something intimate and united in their laugh, like when Suzy used to laugh with her. Now Suzy notices her and her laughter stops.
“Judith!” she says, looking guilty. “I thought you weren’t coming tonight. So Elizabeth and I were going over the agenda.”
The agenda? Judith thinks. You and I go over the agenda. I’m your co-chair, not her.
“We’re nearly finished,” Suzy says smoothly, quickly regaining her balance. “Did you want something?”
Yes, thinks Judith. I want things between us to be okay again. And I want this blond bimbo off my chair and out of your office.
“I’m still not 100 percent well,” she says. “So I probably won’t last the whole meeting.”
Suzy looks surprised. “How are you feeling now?”
Judith feels nauseous and so hot it feels like her skin is about to set fire to her clothes. But she replies, “Not bad.” Then she blushes. She’s not a good liar and senses Suzy knows she’s lying. Though Suzy seems to think she’s lying even when she’s not. She adds, to bring her answer closer to the truth, “Not great, either. It can turn on a dime.”
Suzy gazes at her silently with a sad, disappointed look. Then she says, “Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.”
There’s another pause. Judith vividly feels Suzy and Elizabeth waiting for her to leave. “I’ll let you finish,” she says.
“Right,” says Suzy. “See you there.”
Judith leaves, her face burning from both fever and humiliation. To have made such an effort to come here, perhaps jeopardizing her health, and then to be greeted so indifferently, to even be unwanted. Fighting back tears, she thumps down the long gloomy corridor. At the last bend in the labyrinth, she pauses in a shadowy corner. A grotesque stone figure on an upper ledge — an amphibian man with a tail — looks down at her with pity and mockery. She rests against the wall. Soon she’ll be in a well-lighted area, and visible. She collects herself. Vesti la giubba, she thinks. Put on the mask. And arranging her face into the best mask she can manage, she heads toward the meeting.
When Judith arrives, everyone is standing around in twos and threes like at a cocktail party. Binders or purses have been placed on the round table to reserve seats. Judith positions her purse next to Suzy’s and sits, feeling weepy. Suzy asks people to take their seats, and approaches her own, chatting with Elizabeth and Lola. But instead of sitting where her purse is, Suzy casually slides it one seat over and sits there, while Elizabeth squeezes in between Judith and Suzy. Never mind, Judith tells herself. It’s not important. But she’s short of breath, as though she’s received a physical blow.
The meeting begins with reports from SWAC’s two subcommittees. Brenda’s, having done nothing, is brief. Carl’s committee proposes establishing a satellite M.S.W. program on a reserve up north, with special admission criteria for Native people, in recognition of the oppression they experience. Instead of requiring the usual 80 percent average, marks won’t matter, and just having a B.A. or B.S.W. will suffice. Judith agrees that Native people have been oppressed, but believes that students with lower averages will have trouble meeting graduate school’s academic demands. There’s no point saying this, though. This proposal, despite its flaws, will pass, because no one can vote against it without looking right-wing, even racist. Indeed, it passes unanimously.
Judith feels very ill now: extremely nauseated and burning with fever. I’m cooking, she th
inks: I’m being roasted like a chicken in a pan. In an hour, when this meeting ends, I will be done, and they can serve me on a platter, garnished with parsley. She decides, though, not to leave yet. She can hold on awhile longer.
The rest of the meeting is devoted to Anti-oppression Day. Chris, reporting on PR, distributes copies of the Clarion, Dunhill’s student paper, which includes an article about Anti-oppression Day. Everyone seems impressed. But Judith stares numbly at the picture of Michael Brier. His arm is around Khaled Jaber, Head of Operations at the Martyrs of Vengeance, and the mastermind of what has now been nicknamed “The Baka Schoolchildren Attack.” In an article she read in Ha’aretz, Jaber told a Brussels journalist that the Baka attack expressed not only resistance to the Israeli occupation; it should be understood as “a warning to all Jews everywhere.” A week later the Globe and Mail quoted from an earlier interview with Jaber on Al Jazeera, where he said Jews were “the sons of dogs and monkeys.”
Looking now at Jaber’s photo, Judith sees other photos superimposed on it: pictures from the Internet, TV, and newspapers, of blown-apart little bodies, and of the empty blood-stained street, with pages of children’s schoolbooks flapping in the wind. Here in the Clarion, Michael Brier is gazing admiringly, even fawningly, at Jaber, while Jaber gazes straight ahead with the arrogance of a self-styled hero. Judith now reads the article. Brier says he and Khaled Jaber are not only “close friends,” but “soul brothers.” Soul brothers?! Judith glares at Brier’s face. You’re a “soul brother” to a murderer. Jaber is not merely sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and critical of the Israeli government, as she herself is. He believes it is morally okay to blow up Jewish six-year-olds on their way to school — in Israel, or anywhere else. This can’t be happening. A self-avowed terrorist giving the B.P. Dunhill Lecture on Human Rights.
Chris finishes his presentation, Suzy thanks him, and people smile at him. Then Janice covers lunch on Anti-oppression Day (of course — food being women’s domain!). Afterwards, the committee discusses some potential panellists for the afternoon session. Judith scans the table. Everything seems perfectly normal, as if this were any ordinary meeting, just a group of social workers planning a study day. When in fact they’ve just invited a terrorist into their midst, given him a platform for spreading poisonous hate, and presented him as a role model to their students. She looks from one face to another, feeling like an animal at the end of Animal Farm, who studies the faces but can’t tell the pigs from the humans. Someone here is crazy, she thinks. And I don’t think it’s me.
Suzy says, “This is good. We’re almost ready for Anti-oppression Day. Well done, group!” Everyone smiles except Hetty, who is typically morose. “Before moving on, does anyone have any comments or questions?” She looks brightly around the table. There’s silence. “Speak now or forever hold your peace.”
Speak now or forever hold your peace. It’s now or never. “Well,” says Judith, “I have something.”
Everyone looks at her.
She hesitates. Then says, “We can’t do what we’ve planned.”
Their faces are uncomprehending. She continues, addressing herself to Hetty, “This picture in the Clarion has Michael Brier with his arm around Khaled Jaber. Jaber, in case you don’t know, is from the Martyrs of Vengeance and is personally responsible for the recent suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed sixteen schoolchildren. In this article, Brier calls Jaber not just his ‘close friend,’ but his ‘soul brother.’ We cannot have the ‘soul brother’ of a terrorist giving the keynote address at Anti-oppression Day. Apart from it being morally egregious, we’ll look like idiots.”
She immediately realizes her blunder, but it’s too late. Chris is already saying primly, “Well, Judith, some of us aren’t concerned about appearances. We’re interested in doing what’s right.”
“Right?!” she cries. “Right! This is someone whose ‘soul brother’ is responsible for sixteen children’s deaths. Thirteen under the age of nine.”
Chris, his earring glinting in the light, says, “Any death is a tragedy. But don’t ask me to feel sorry for the Israelis; they’ve brought this on themselves. The Palestinians, living under the occupation, have no choice but to resist, and what other means do they have at their disposal? People have a right to fight for their liberation.”
“Yes,” says Judith, “but there are different ways to fight. There are words, there’s diplomacy. What Jaber opted for was blowing up a bunch of six-year-olds. That is terrorism.”
Chris regards her impassively. “Some might answer that the State of Israel practises terrorism on the Palestinian people every day of their lives. It terrorizes them economically, socially, and militarily. So, in a sense, terrorism is in the eye of the beholder. One person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter.” He draws himself up taller. “I’m not ashamed to say that I consider Khaled Jaber a freedom fighter and would be proud to have him at Dunhill.”
Judith stares at him. She knows there are arguments she can make about not equating terrorism with self-defence, and about Israel’s right to protect itself. But her body’s on fire and she’s dizzy, and she can’t rally the words.
Janice jumps in, in her little-girl voice: “In a way it’s all just a difference in point of view. Because from a postmodern perspective, there’s no right or wrong. It’s all just perceptions.”
“I’m not a postmodernist,” says Judith. “And I don’t believe everything is just perceptions. There’s truth and there are lies. It’s not true that there is no difference between a terrorist act aimed at civilians, and an action aimed at non-civilians and carried out by a democratic state trying to protect its citizens. The two are not the same. I feel compassion for the Palestinians. They’re not always well treated by the Israeli government, and they’ve been screwed over by their own leaders. But Khaled Jaber believes in murdering schoolchildren. And murdering schoolchildren is wrong. It’s as simple as that.”
“Actually, Judith,” says James, “it’s not. Because sometimes the end does justify the means. As you know from social work, you can never look at just the symptom of a problem. You have to ask: Why is this phenomenon occurring? What is its root cause?”
“Exactly,” pipes up Lola. “Exactly.”
Judith is now getting it from all sides. She’s been attacked by Chris and Janice across from her, by James on her right, and now by Lola on her left. She feels surrounded.
“We need to ask,” Lola says, “why a young Palestinian would even consider blowing himself up. And the reason is that he’s desperate and without hope because of the occupation. You can pretend otherwise, Judith. But that’s the truth, even if you can’t face it.”
Lola’s tone is openly contemptuous, her face is hostile, and her teeth are slightly bared, like a German shepherd. This palpable hostility, even hate, paralyzes Judith the way a wild animal’s snarling paralyzes its prey with fear. She’s paralyzed also by confusion. She is in a meeting in a university, ostensibly a place of Knowledge and Wisdom, engaged in a debate about whether or not her people has the right to defend itself against murderers. The right to not be blown to smithereens. In other words, the right to exist.
Suzy says in a bright, tinny voice, “There are obviously different views here.” Judith looks at her hopefully. “But just to give some context, when Judith lived in Israel, she did peace work, bringing together Jewish and Arab teenagers for dialogue. And her friends in Israel are active in the peace movement.”
She’s trying to help me, thinks Judith. Despite everything.
“That’s great!” says Carl. The faces around the table look at her now in a friendlier way than before. The pack of wolves has turned into dogs. First she’s relieved. Then she’s angry. I get it — now I’m a “good Jew.” Not an evil, “oppressor” Jew on the right or, God forbid, a settler — they, of course, all deserve to be killed. But since I’m a peacenik and a lefty, sharing their political views (they think), I’m a good Jew, so I deserve to be allowe
d to live. Well thanks, but no thanks. Go fuck yourselves.
James says, “Now I better understand, Judith, where you’re coming from. But still, on this topic, obviously the rest of us are more objective than you. Your perspective is biased.”
“Everyone’s ‘biased,’” says Judith. “No one is ‘objective.’”
“Yes,” says James, “but there’s more objectivity and less objectivity. Regarding Israel, you’re less objective than us.”
Judith shakes her head. If there is no such thing as objectivity, how can one person have more of it than another? But she doesn’t bother saying this. These people are crazy. She’s at a party at the Mad Hatter’s.
There’s silence. Then Hetty says ponderously, with her heavy European accent, “We must walk very cautiously here. It’s a fine line between criticizing Israel and sliding into antisemitism. We owe it not just to our Jewish students and faculty, but to ourselves, to approach this carefully, sensitively. Because,” she says, and now her voice gets louder with each word, “antisemitism is a scourge.” Scourge she says so loudly and emphatically it’s almost a shout. “A scourge, I tell you! Never will I forget being a little girl in Transylvania, and seeing what happened to our Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust.”
Judith stares at her. She didn’t know this about Hetty. She feels like jumping up, running over, and hugging her.
Chris says, “The Jewish holocaust, you mean. Other people besides the Jews have had holocausts.”
Fuck off, thinks Judith.
“Anyway,” Chris continues, “how come anytime someone criticizes Israel, they’re accused of antisemitism? I have no problem with Jews.” Well, thanks a lot, Judith snickers to herself. “But Zionism is a colonialist, imperialist movement whose occupation is brutally oppressing the indigenous population of Palestine. Anyone who cares about human rights has to oppose the Zionists.”