“Olfactory triggers,” Ricki says, “are very common.”
It’s all visceral. Some of it stays visceral and needs help escaping. Disguising details to protect the privacy of the person involved, Ricki tells a story about a client of hers: The patient was a young man experiencing emotional problems, for no apparent reason. Ricki first interviewed the patient’s mother and asked for a routine mental health history. Were there any particular traumas in the boy’s life? The mother ticked off the usual list: hospitalizations, divorces in the family, death of pets, that sort of thing. Nope, nothing special.
Meanwhile, the patient was delayed in arriving. The mother apologized, saying that he couldn’t take the bus. “I almost didn’t ask why,” Ricki says. It turned out he wouldn’t ride a bus because he had been personally affected not by one bus bombing but by four—hearing one happen, losing a relative in another, and so forth.
“You raise your kids to think people are good, because the alternative is too terrible to bear,” Ricki says. “You don’t want to live in a world like that, where there is evil lurking behind every smile. You don’t want to believe in that. And then your children find out on their own.”
One ordinary Israeli family. Seven people. Levi, Jessica, and Shai have each been at the scene of a bombing. Ricki counsels victims. And Bernie? “Two students of mine were killed at the bombing of the cafeteria at the Hebrew University in 2002. A third one was sitting between them, and bent down to get something from a knapsack, and because of that, though she was wounded, she lived.” Only Tani, the quiet, handsome boy with the soft eyes, seems not to have a story to tell.
I ask Bernie and Ricki: Why do you still live in this place?
“There has to be a Jewish homeland,” Ricki says. “This is not a guaranteed thing. Someone has to do it, and we didn’t want to be people who just send money to plant trees.”
And so they live, partly in defiance, but mostly, they do what they must to keep their own tree flowering. Bernie, one of the gentlest men I’ve ever known, owns a pistol. He carries it when he is traveling with his students somewhere. The Israeli Ministry of Education requires armed escorts on class trips.
In the intractability of the current situation, the history teacher hears echoes of the past. “The history of war,” Bernie says, “shows us that there is always a demonization of the enemy. You don’t know what to believe. In World War I, we were told that the Kaiser was murdering children. That was not true. In World War II, when the Allies said the Germans were killing civilians, it also sounded like propaganda. Now the Palestinians are being told outrageous things. They are being told by their leaders that the Jews are poisoning their wells. They don’t know what to believe. They are deprived of a decent life, and they are whipped into a frenzy. I don’t think most Palestinians are evil.”
It is at this point that Tani speaks out. It turns out he does have a story to tell, after all. “When I was in eighth grade, I had a friend who lived in a settlement. He and another friend skipped school and took a hike down the valley near their home. A Palestinian shepherd killed them with bricks and stones, and dipped his hands in their blood, and wrote things in blood on the wall of a cave. They were beaten so badly they couldn’t be identified by dental records. They needed DNA.”
An ordinary Israeli family, preparing for Sabbath dinner.
MY TRIP HOME was uneventful. As it happens, there was nothing at all to worry about with the fated, fearful Flight 223. Security was surprisingly light, and we were checked aboard by a Sikh in a turban and a Muslim woman with a head scarf.
There are no more bad rumors about Flight 223, no more delays or cancellations. There used to be a problem, but British Airways has taken care of it. Flight 223 no longer exists. The same plane still flies along the same route at the same time, but it is now called Flight 293.
International air corridors are not Jerusalem. Things are simple, still.
On the way to my house, I asked the cabdriver, as I always do, if anything interesting had happened while I was gone.
Plenty, he said. The government had issued an alert to be on the lookout for seven people suspected of belonging to al Qaeda, possibly planning something bad, though it wasn’t clear what, or when, or if they were in this country at all. The government was urging people to go on with their holiday plans, though. The driver said he felt things were getting pretty scary, here.
Then he asked me why I was laughing.
NO ONE KNOWS what terrorism, fueled by new technologies, will unleash on our country in the coming months, or years. In our climate of strategically restrained anxiety, it is considered almost a crime to make predictions. When, shortly after 9/11, the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking dared to speculate once again that advances in genetic manipulation of biological toxins will make it almost inevitable that mankind will extinguish itself on this planet in the not too distant future, scientific colleagues rose one by one to distance themselves from these terrible, irresponsible thoughts. You probably don’t even remember this episode. Good, good.
Will America of the next decade resemble more closely the Jerusalem of today than it will the America of today? Maybe. How scary is that? Plenty. But I’m a little less scared of it than I was before I met my old friend Bernie and his family, surviving with love and dignity and a sense of purpose.
In Israel, I think, the constant grind of terrorism has not only penetrated people’s sense of denial, it has sanded it almost completely away. But what it has exposed is not the blind, paralyzing fear that Ernest Becker envisioned in The Denial of Death. It is something else altogether.
The Israelis live defiantly, indomitably, with a heightened intensity, as though each day might be their last. After a bomb killed two dozen young people at a Tel Aviv disco a few years ago, Israeli youth refused to be cowed. They resumed a robust nightlife. Today, outside the scene of the bombing, beneath a stone memorial listing the names of the dead, is a single inscription: LO NAFSEEK LIRKOD. It means “We won’t stop dancing.”
I think Becker got it only partly right. Yes, death is a certainty, and we get by through denial. But would immortality, in a world such as ours, really be better? Becker, in his own bleak way, was too insistent on defining the human as just another animal dumbly fulfilling his Darwinian destiny. With the right frame of mind, denial can be a magnificent ignorance; the possibilities within it are limitless. In the end, those possibilities—not self-delusion—are what make us human and keep us sane.
Just before I left on this trip, my friend Laura gave me a $5 bill. Laura is a journalist, an expert in affairs of the Middle East, and the daughter of a rabbi. The bill, she told me, was “mitzvah money.” When someone is heading off on a possibly dangerous journey, it is a Jewish custom to give him money to give to a beggar at his destination. That turns the journey into a good deed. With luck, God will protect you.
The bill is still in my wallet; I’d completely forgotten about it. At first, I felt ashamed. But sometimes, when you focus too intently on your own situation, you miss the big picture. I’m going outside, right now, to give the five bucks to the first homeless person I see. It’s all the same world, you know.
Yankee Doodle Danny
Affection is hard to express in writing without seeming like a sap. A good way to do it is through indirection; write of facts, not feelings. But choose the right facts.
July 1, 2001
MY SON WAS named on an airplane over the Gulf of Mexico during the summer of 1978. This was six years before he was born, but his mother and I were already planning a future together, inasmuch as we had just survived simultaneous dysentery in a small Mexican hotel room and still tolerated each other’s company, which had to mean something. All that remained were the petty details of getting married and choosing a city to live in and careers to pursue.
These things were still up for grabs in the summer of 1978, but what we knew for sure was that our son would be Danny, and that he would be a Yankees fan. First things first.
/> So here we were on a Tuesday night six years later, in a hospital delivery room in Miami. Danny was on the way, but I was not happy. I can explain, but not justify, what happened next.
These were the 1980s, the heyday of “natural childbirth,” a medical philosophy that rejected the distasteful use of analgesics in favor of a woman’s right to writhe in agony for hours on end. It was during this process that I asked my wife, politely, if she could “hold off just a little bit longer.”
Silence.
A couple of hours would do the trick, I said.
Silence.
It was important, I said. To me.
My wife shot me a glance that was pregnant with meaning. If I translated the precise meaning here, it would cost me my job.
Danny had announced his impending arrival earlier that evening as my wife was driving home from work. I telephoned my in-laws to ask them to take care of our three-year-old daughter for the night. They weren’t home but had left the number of the restaurant at which they’d be.
My father-in-law envied my college education, which I took for granted. I envied his combat experience, which he took for granted. John Reidy had served valiantly as a seaman in the Pacific during World War II, but his only medal was a serpentine scar from an appendectomy performed hastily in the darkness belowdecks during a kamikaze attack. To me, this far outclassed my A-minus in behavioral psych.
I’d missed my war, the one in Southeast Asia. Had I been called to serve, I would have declined at whatever penalty, and I would have told myself it was an act of conscience, not cowardice. In those years, ambiguity clouded many things, particularly the definition of patriotism.
At the end of his war, John turned in his Navy whites for drab green pants and a work shirt, the uniform of a municipal employee. Now he was retired.
I phoned the restaurant and, on impulse, had him paged as “Admiral Reidy.” For years afterward, he laughed about how the retired Bridgeport, Connecticut, electrician had strode importantly to the phone past the curious and admiring stares of all those retired West Palm Beach lawyers and doctors.
In the delivery room, the writhing was proceeding pretty much according to schedule when a nurse started looking real hard at a monitor beside the bed. The line that recorded the baby’s heartbeat was flattening out. Fetal distress. She suggested a change in position. If this didn’t correct itself immediately, she explained, they’d have to do a Caesarean.
My eyes moved from the monitor to the clock. Still too soon!
I moved my wife onto her side and prayed for luck.
John believed in luck. He always played the lottery, just a few bucks a week, and kept elaborate charts of winning numbers, convinced there had to be a pattern. Painstakingly, I exploded the illogic of this, using probability and number theory. John listened patiently, and kept drawing his charts. I had facts, he had faith. We disagreed on religion, too.
We disagreed on newspapers. John loved them but felt they were at their least patriotic when they were finding fault with the American government. That, I argued, was when they were at their most patriotic.
John always drank Busch beer and drove American cars, because they were American. I always drank Heineken and drove Japanese cars, because they were better. We had some debates about this, too. In my mind, John always won. He had the scar.
My wife would have no scar. The baby’s heartbeat strengthened, the Caesarean was averted, and after dawdling for another hour or two—just long enough—my son finally made his appearance a little after midnight.
As he nursed as an infant, Danny liked to grab a fistful of my wife’s hair. It comforted him. John had no hair to offer, so to bottle-feed his grandson in the style to which he was accustomed, he bought a floor mop and wore it on his head.
Gotta love the guy. I did.
John died suddenly of a stroke a few years ago, with none of our little disagreements resolved.
Danny is Dan now. He doesn’t give a damn about the Yankees, but has otherwise grown up splendidly. He turns seventeen on Wednesday, the Fourth.
It’s a good birthday. The best, in fact. On that, John and I actually agreed.
Pardon My French…
People sometimes ask me if I am comfortable doing the sorts of things journalists occasionally must do: embarrass people, invade their privacy, write things that will provoke, disturb, or injure. I answer honestly that I am not comfortable with it at all, but that the Machine is.
The Machine is what I become when working on a story. It is rational, but soulless. It thinks but does not feel. It observes basic rules of fairness but is impervious to emotion; it is a stranger to guilt; it cannot be humiliated. The Machine operates always under a single rule: Within the limits of human decency, it always does what is necessary to get the best possible story.
This story was assigned at a time when the French government was—zut alors!—daring to insinuate that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was unjustified. The mood in America was hostile. Diplomatically, both countries were walking on eggshells. My job was to head over there in hobnail boots.
To carry this off, I had to behave like a complete jackass. And, yes, I had a problem with that. Fortunately, the Machine did not.
September 7, 2003
THE FRENCH MINISTER of agriculture politely awaited my question. We were seated in the study of his ministry in the heart of Paris, overlooking a garden with ancient statuary. At forty-three, Hervé Gaymard is already a member of the national cabinet, custodian of nothing less formidable than the French wine industry. Sandy-haired, lithe, urbanely handsome like Paul Henreid in Casablanca, the minister was in shirtsleeves, slacks, and—as became apparent when he crossed his legs—loafers sans socks. He looked effortlessly fabulous, of course. He is French.
This interview almost didn’t happen. I had requested an audience with the highest French official available, on the subject of the strained relations between our two nations over the war in Iraq. The French Embassy initially seemed reluctant, at which point I observed that it would be a pity if, to secure an official audience with a French dignitary, I had to seek out Jean-Marie Le Pen. That would be the race-baiting cryptofascist whose stunning showing in the last presidential elections threatened to create an international embarrassment for the French of a magnitude unseen since a swastika flapped beneath the Arc de Triomphe.
Soon afterward, Monsieur Gaymard was made available.
This was a delicate situation. If I was not representing all of America, I was surely representing the American media, blamed by many for taking an awkward situation and, in search of spicy headlines, gleefully making it worse.
I began by assuring M. Gaymard that confrontation and controversy were the last things on my mind; that my role was conciliatory; that my questions were designed to elicit an open and frank exchange of views, so vital to the healing process. The minister inclined his head graciously, and I began.
“I think we can both agree that the diplomatic situation between our two nations is both regrettable and unnecessary… Perhaps the worst part is that it has resurrected in the United States some ugly, unfair, inaccurate, and totally unsupportable stereotypes about the French. You know: that you are elitist, that you are rude, that you are cowards, that you have an insufferable air of superiority, that your fashion shows are nothing more than elaborate parades of clown costumes…”
The minister waited for translation.
“. . . that your movies are long and boring and unbearably pretentious, that you lack personal hygiene and let your dogs poop all over the streets, and indeed, that your national pet, the poodle, is a ridiculous life form better never to have survived the evolutionary process.”
The minister shifted slightly in his chair.
“I will not insult you, or dignify these preposterous, obviously untrue stereotypes by asking you to respond to them. But I was just wondering if the French have any equally preposterous and obviously untrue stereotypes about Americans that you might enumerate here for the
purpose of my not dignifying them with a response.”
As I awaited his answer, it occurred to me that, yes, diplomacy is a difficult and subtle art. But one must try to do one’s part.
IN FRANCE, THE president of the United States is widely perceived to be a squinty-eyed bully, a cowboy given to shooting first and asking questions later. Worse, he is seen by the sophisticated French as something of a yokel—uncultured, unschooled, inarticulate, anti-intellectual, dangerously shallow—elected and supported by a populace too fearful of terrorist attacks, an electorate that values too much the blunt, common touch and too little the more complex virtues of the Renaissance man. For his part, the prez isn’t so crazy about the French, either. Small wonder, then, that a relatively minor dispute would lead to intemperate words and a serious crisis in diplomacy.
We are talking, of course, about… 1834. The man in the White House was Andrew Jackson, hero of the Indian campaigns, our first cowboy president. Sorry, you have been hoodwinked by the oldest journalistic trick in the book, the ironic time-frame switcheroo. You stupid, gullible, non-European, linear-thinking, literal-minded American.
Yes, that is a stereotype. But this is all about stereotypes, and journalism, and the rhythms of history.
It is often said that the French republic is our oldest continuous ally, and this is inarguable. The American Revolution might never have succeeded without the support of the French; it is immaterial that their real goal was sticking it to their superpower rival, England. It is likewise immaterial if that initial alliance was a hypocritical marriage of convenience between our fledgling democracy and a country that was at the time a despotic state more suffocating than the one against which we’d just rebelled. The fact is, the French were there for us when we needed them the most.
The Fiddler in the Subway Page 20