Israel from my window
Moments after the call to say that my grandfather had collapsed and was taken to hospital with complete liver failure eleven thousand miles across the world, my aunt put on a load of washing. She and my mother would make the journey back to South Africa the following day to bury him. She never understood why in that moment, amidst discussion of tickets and flights, prognosis and logistics, grief and heartbreak, she decided to do the washing. Today I understand.
When asked where she lives in Israel, my friend replies, halfway between Hamas and Hezbala, which is where I live too. Rockets probably wont reach us from Gaza, but longer range missiles from Lebanon might. It’s quiet here at night apart from a few planes overhead that pull me out of sleep. I follow their trail into the night with gratitude as I drift back to sleep. Unless there’s a hint of light breaking through my window, and then I just surrender and get up and make tea. Why fight it, it wont help.
We recieved a message from Home Command recommending we prepare our bomb shelters with baterry operated radios — does anyone happen to have one of those lying around ? phone chargers, cash, water and enough dry food to last for three days. At seven in the morning, after dropping my youngest at the train, to spend the day and night guarding her base, I stood in the middle of the supermarket I know like the back of my hand, and froze.
Elderly sephardi men were roaming around with hands open up to the heavens saying ‘ayn mayim’ — there is no water, as most of the bottle water has been sent up north to the soldiers, (but there was plenty of coca-cola). I didnt know where to start. What do you buy to be stuck in a bomb shelter for three days, Bamba ? So I spent my mortgage on fresh fruit and vegetables, some chicken for the freezer, pre cooked fresh noodles, toilet paper, protein bars, apple sauce and canned tuna. I figure at this point, the bank can wait. If we’re going down, at least we can go down with kiwi and fuji fruit.
And I bought some liquid iodine too in case anyone hurts themselves or a wall falls on one of us, or a Hamas operative hiding out in Jenin makes his way to Barta and walks across the village, (which is half Palestinian territories, half Israel proper, with a pet shop selling snakes to demarcate the crossing), and into the fields by Lisa’s house and down the road and into our front door. And when I came home, I added it to my medical kit, much like my aunt added washing powder to her washing machine that day, in the hope that occupying my mind with such ridiculous mundanities might calm the existential storm brewing in my mamallian brain.
Maybe I’ll bake a banana cake, we have so many bananas, I think. Maybe that will help. And so I do. When she comes home, my little soldier will be momentarily comforted by the smell of cooked butter and sugar with chocolate chips lingering in the air until she opens her tick-tock or her instagram or her friend group and hears another and another and another story of devestating horror and loss. She was meant to go to a festival in the desert tomorrow. She had organised a day off from the army, bought her ticket and planned to borrow her dad’s car and she and three friends would drive all the way to Gaza to celebrate freedom and life and music and youth. She missed the slaughter by less than a week, so I’m not sure banana cake is going to do it, but it’s all I can offer her at this point, because it’s all I can do myself.
On the way home from visiting my friend yesterday, the one who said she lives between Hamas and Hezbala, I got caught in traffic. It was unusal as the roads have been pretty quiet since they took all the young men off to war. Up ahead I saw police cars and police officers and men in uniform manning the streets and managing the traffic. People lined the street. As I approached I turned down the radio, rolled down my window and asked a young couple standing on the footpath what was going on.
“It’s the burial procession of the soldier,” they said.
There are no words to describe the surreal nature of day to day reality as we move from these sobering, tragic moments to our screens to our kitchens, completing small tasks that distract us momentarily - an online payment, the washing. The visuals come in waves, because the human heart can only bear so much.
For eighteen years we’ve been treating Syphilis with a single dose of antibiotics.
