In the morning, after he’s done writing about how he got the apartment and what he found there, he drives to Rehovot again, to see Ya’akov. He delights in the relatively empty streets of central Tel Aviv, listening to the radio. The stiffness that comes from staying indoors begins to loosen. There’s a sort of optimism that comes with the light of day. “Out there, someone is thinking of you,” he sings along, when suddenly a dramatic sound cuts into the broadcast, and a mechanical voice says: ‘Alert, south Ashkelon area, seek shelter.’

Ashkelon, a southern city, has endured relatively constant bombings since the war began. The music comes back on, but Aaron hesitates to sing along—wisely, because two chords later the next alert comes. The same dramatic intro, and then: ‘Alert, north Ashkelon area, seek shelter.’ Which is good, because it’s still not Tel Aviv, even though it’s a little closer. 

People are driving as usual, and young mothers in tight yoga clothes walk strollers across the sidewalk, without any hint of tension. 

‘Alert, South Rishon L’Tzion area…’ Rhison is further north than Ashkelon, right? He’s been in both of those cities, but the Tel Avivian stereotype is true: he really doesn’t have a clue what the country looks like. Is Tel Aviv next in line, or are there more cities in between? Where the hell is Holon, anyway?

‘Alert, North Rishon L’Tzion. Alert, Tel Aviv south.’

The alerts are climbing up the map, into familiar territory. Their next stop is Tel Aviv Center, where he currently is.

He stops at a red light, as if there are still rules; as if he’s not waiting to be notified if he should run and hide because someone is trying to kill him. That’s the real problem. Statistically you know you’re unlikely to die, but there’s still that intent. Someone wants to kill you. 

Imagine that you’re standing in front of a killer with a knife, a pane of thick tempered glass between you. Looking at that face, at the shine of the knife, is enough to scare away any notion of peace, even if you’re a hundred percent sure the glass will hold. And you’re never a hundred percent sure. 

The music comes back on, and the mechanical voice says nothing more. The attack wasn’t directed at him—this time. One of the young mothers bends forward over her stroller. Aaron sneaks a peek at her cleavage, but finds no joy in the sight.

He’s glad to leave the city boundaries for the so-called “fast roads”, as highways are called in Hebrew, more wishfully than descriptively. He fills up at a gas station surrounded by wilderness, the pump shaking with each of his presses. When he selects the paper receipt option, there isn’t even an error message: the receipt just doesn’t come out. Because there’s no paper; because the twenty-two-year-old veteran who works at the station couldn’t be bothered. Why would he? If it’s not on fire, why fix it? 

Only when Aaron considers kicking the pump does he realize how agitated he is.

When he arrives at Ya’akov’s door, Ya’akov asks, “Is it a terrorist?” 

“Haven’t decided yet. Odds are good, though.”

Aaron enters, gets the fake smile covering the real one, plus the hug, and knows Ya’akov is going to be silent today. Hillel and Leibnitz are staying over. Hillel is tall, with a wide and confident face. He gives the immediate impression of a serious guy who isn’t looking for trouble but knows how to solve it. He has thick palms and the confidence of a person that works with things, not people. His partner, Leibnitz, is tiny, blue-eyed and deeply tanned, with a broad smile and something sad in her eyes, as a poet once said. She was given her nickname years before, after defeating Aaron in an argument about who made the greater philosophical contribution, her namesake or Isaac Newton.

Hillel shakes his hand with just at the right amount of force, and hugs him brotherly. Leibnitz hugs him with the gentleness of a sparrow landing on an open palm. 

“Last time I met you,” he says, proving how well he remembers them, which is the most sincere compliment he knows, “you were just about to take a vacation in India, right? How was it?”

Said vacation happened after Hillel was simultaneously fired from his job and received a large sum of money. He found himself at the head of a workers’ union at a factory that will remain nameless. Management offered to pay him off to cut ties with the union, an action that would kill the union’s chances of improving working conditions. Hillel considered his moral obligation to his fellow workers against his obligation to himself and his beloved, and decided to take the money and fly to India for a couple of months. The part that most surprised both him and Aaron was that the bribe wasn’t given under the table. The company added a bonus to his last paycheck. Paid taxes on it and everything. 

“Listen, I think that was five years ago,” Hillel answers. “Leibnitz, how was India?”

She smiles, as if remembering a pleasant dream. “It was amazing—how else could India be? What about you? Are you in Canada now?”

“Not anymore. I lived there with my girlfriend, and then I lived there with my ex.” They smile bitter-sweetly, instantly getting it. Aaron remembers a German physicist he told the same joke to, who had to stop him and make sure that he was indeed talking about the same woman. “And then I got here.”

“Ah,” Leibnitz says. “And how are you holding up?”

“I can’t with this country anymore.” Aaron rubs his face with hand. “There’s too much going on.”

“Meaning?”

“Every time something interesting happens here I write it down—like a diary, but with dialogue. And interesting things are constantly happening.”

Leibnitz arches an eyebrow. “Like what?”

“Knowing you two, this conversation will also end up in it. But for instance, yesterday I got stuck in an alarm in one of Tel Aviv’s smaller streets. I get out of the car and head for the nearest building and I’m all stressed out, knocking on the door, which nobody opens. Then I see a line of cooking-gas tanks beside me.”

They crack up, and Aaron laughs with them. “Like, what was all the effort worth?” Hillel says.

“And on the other side of the street, construction workers carry on as usual.”

“Probably nobody explained the situation to them,” Leibniz hypothesizes. 

“Half of them must have heard about it on channel 9.”

“Oh, so they were Russian?”

“Half of them were Russian, I think, the rest were Arabs. That was one of the hardest things to get across to Canadians when they asked about the situation here. They think the problem is Arabs versus Jews, so then you have to explain that there are two million Arabs who live in the country and make their living in professions like medicine and pharmacy and accounting, and not only do they die in terror attacks just like Jews, but the last thing they want is for Hamas to win and all of Israel to become like Gaza. So you try and explain that the problem is liberalism against theocracy, and then they ask, hey, does that mean you’re on bad terms with your religious brother-in-law? And you explain that no, he’s ‘knit yarmulka’, it’s a whole other thing, and that’s before you get into Druzi and Christian Arabs and Karaite Jews. And these sahi¹s  are trying to figure out what’s the least offensive opinion to hold.”

“Walla? They’re sahi over there?” Hillel says as he rolls a truly colossal joint. “I thought they smoked by the pound.”

“Smoke, and still sahi.”

Ya’akov, who’s been listening quietly, plugs the electric guitar into the amplifier. He plays Megadeth (‘Holy Wars’, this time) loud enough that the song is recognizable but not so loud that it interrupts. Aaron allows himself to feel good about Ya’akov playing again. There were times he thought he would change the world, that he would be a great scientist and children would read his biographies like he read Newton’s and Einstein’s as a child. The older he gets, though, the more he understands that little acts like encouraging a person to do one thing he likes are where his greatness lies. 

They take a break to decide on a plan regarding food, and after Hillel orders burgers for everyone, Aaron asks, “What about you? How are you doing?”

“We’re alright,” Hillel says. “We have a cute one-story house near Afula. Nice big yard; quiet. Not anything huge, not the highest quality, but the things that bothered us I fixed myself and the quiet, the quiet is worth all the rest. This country is insane, and you get used to the madness. More accurately, you think you get used to the madness, and it’s only when you get two minutes of quiet that you realize how much you need to rest. The only problem is that we’re far away from our friends down south, and we don’t always have the energy to spend three hours on the road.”

Leibniz shrugs one shoulder. “Sometimes that’s a good thing. Like when they invited us to Nova and we didn’t feel like making the drive.”

“Walla?” Aaron asks, and stops himself from asking the obvious followup.

Hillel answers it anyway. “Yes, people we knew died there. Not close friends, but people we knew by their face, people we danced with, people we carpooled with, who gave us water or food or acid. People who shared the joy and freedom that only exist at raves. And the most fucked-up part is that they went there to celebrate the purest love. Those parties, even before you take the MD, are a place where everyone comes to celebrate that love. It’s not like some club where people go to get lucky or fight: it’s just dancing, but dancing like meditating. A vehicle for ecstasy. And in that place of all places that those people, consumed by the ugliest hate, the most evil, came to kill.”

The hamburgers arrive, and with them a reprieve. They open the boxes, and empty the ketchup packets onto a piece of cardboard in the middle, so that everyone has enough for their fries. They eat without speaking. 

It seems to Aaron that they’re all thinking the same thing: they’re not managing their mental health properly, and should stick to lighter subjects. He says, “It’s kind of nice, being in ba’asa² together. I was in ba’asa alone before. This is an improvement.”

They laugh bitter but cathartic laughter. They talk about the memes of war—a Hamas propagandist who was caught acting in too many different roles; an Israeli drone operator who became so famous for the cute way he gave the launch command that people use the same lethal command (Fa-yer, the syllables clearly separated to make it clear to launch on the second syllable) to order pizza. 

While Hillel and Ya’akov throw out the garbage, Leibnitz goes to the other room. She returns in full army uniform. 

“Walla, you’re going to serve right now?” Aaron asks.

“Yeah. I’m not some hero, yeah? It’s just the Civilian Front Command.”

“As far as I’m concerned, anyone who leaves the house is a hero.” He doesn’t look at Ya’akov, but remembers that he told Aaron that he can barely manage that. “Anyone who gets out of bed is a hero.”

“It’s much better than staying home. It’s not easy, but it’s better. Listen, civilian outreach is a hard thing to do. On the one hand we have to brief the public about a scenario before it happens, if we want them to be prepared. On the other hand, we don’t trust the public. Every time we tell them things, they go into panic mode.”

“Walla? So were you there when they told people to save enough water for seventy-two hours?”

She sighs, rolls her blue eyes. “Oof, what a mess that was.”

Aaron tells them his own experience of the mess. The evening the order came down, he was invited to a villa his friends rented just to have a house with a shelter. They commanded him to bring a bathing suit and three six packs of beer. He drove there with high expectations, looking forward to epic, pre-apocalyptic drinking—expectations that shattered as soon as he arrived and found his friends sitting poolside, fully clothed, looking at their phones while the television played in the background. On the screen, Aaron’s childhood crush, Yonit Levi, was explaining that citizens should get ready to spend seventy-two hours in their safe space, in case of a land invasion. Aaron managed to get them to look away from their phones, but then they started arguing about whether their safe room was large enough to house the five of them and their five dogs, whether they had enough water, and if they did buy bottled water, whether there would be room for it in the shelter. 

When Aaron eventually took his stuff and left, after two hours of listening to them argue, the friends were separated into two groups. Four of them thought they should all calm down; one was worried about the electricity going out, which would mean there’d be no way to keep her diabetic dog’s insulin refrigerated. Two days later, that same friend becomes the first casualty Aaron personally knows in this war: running to the shelter, she slips and breaks her arm.

Leibnitz bursts into loud laughter, covering her mouth. “I’m sorry. It’s not nice to laugh about.”

“I get it,” Aaron says. “It’s funny. I love that girl, but the irony is too much not to laugh at.”

“That’s exactly the kind of thing we’re worried about, though,” Leibnitz says, the last remnants of laughter still on her lips. “People should know that if they’re in Tel Aviv they’re going to hear about it before terrorists start going from house to house with automatic rifles, knocking on doors.”

“But is that likely?” Aaron asks, slightly more alert. “How many terrorists were left on our side of the fence after the kidnappings, waiting for a chance to play GTA?”

“Who knows. Three? A hundred? When they show up, we’ll take care of them.”

“And there’s the issue of identifying who you find,” Hillel adds. “If you find tracks showing someone’s living in some meadow, there’s no way of knowing if it’s a Thai farm worker trying not to get deported or a Palestinian waiting for things to calm down to score a terror attack in Dizengoff.”

Aaron frowns. “Ok, so seriously: how worried should I be?”

“Up north,” Leibnitz says, “if the Lebanese decide to get in on the action, we’re not prepared to defend against it. I mean, we’ll fuck them up.” She makes a small, explicit motion with her fist. “We’ll blow their life away. But the Iron Dome wasn’t designed to intercept that many rockets, that quickly. Each rocket of theirs is a pipe full of explosives; each of ours is a supercomputer. That shit is expensive.”

“It’s going to be like in the Gulf War,” Hillel says, and pummels the back of his neck with his fist³. “The Civilian Front is going to take a beating.”

Ya’akov leads his melody to a rousing finish and turns off the amplifier. “Do you remember the Gulf War?” he asks Aaron, who’s a couple of years younger than the rest.

“Nope. My mom says that I cried every time she put on the gas mask, that I felt like I was choking, but I don’t remember any of it.”

Ya’akov picks a half-burnt joint from the ashtray, puts it in his mouth, lights, inhales slowly. “Walla, I don’t think it’s something you forget.”

NEXT: Rest?

1. From Arabic, meaning clear, of good health. In Hebrew its usage evolved from meaning “not high right now” to “doesn’t smoke weed” to “conformist.” Dear Canadian reader, obviously I mean the rest of the Canadians, not you. You are a free thinker, unbound by the shackles of society. ↩︎
2. Arabic. Originally meaning “miserable”, used in Hebrew to describe a general sad mood. ↩︎
3. In Hebrew, the term used for Civilian Front translates literally to “The Back of the Neck”: the vulnerable part of the country. ↩︎