– wakes up to the sound of a rocket siren. It takes him a moment to reorient himself. When he remembers, he rolls to one side and puts the pillow on his head to partially block the howl. “Israel’s at it again,” he mumbles and tries to go back to sleep, but the explosion that follows is closer, louder than usual. Fifteen minutes later he accepts that he won’t get back to sleep, and looks at his phone. 

“Are you ok?” Menashe texts him. Almost every friend—group goes through the same protocol, touching base. Aaron didn’t miss this—the entire world asking, every time there’s a single explosion, if you died. If he died, he’d tell you himself. 

“As okay as possible,” Aaron responds to Menashe. “What’s up? The usual?”

“No, my brother. Not the usual.”

Then comes the careful catching up. A person needs to know where they live, that’s true, and what’s happening around them. But catching up too quickly, consuming too much information too quickly, rips up the person from the inside. It reminds Aaron of the stories he heard on Holocaust Day¹ in elementary school, about Jews who ate until their intestines burst on the day they were rescued from the concentration camps.

Aaron never experienced an event like this, so where does the instinct to protect himself from the news come from? WhatsApp groups he’s stayed in for years in order not to offend anyone by leaving, he leaves now, so he won’t hear how many got killed, how many got kidnapped, how much acid they took before they got shot or taken, and what a deep trauma it had to have been. 

The second time the siren wails, he goes down to the shelter. There’s no rational reason – the Iron Dome is as strong as ever—but something urges him to act.

In the shelter he meets Shammai’s neighbors for the first time. A pair of forty-something-year-old lesbians sit on plastic chairs, shivering and hugging. A bald man with stubble, in green uniform pants and a T-shirt for some internet provider, stands with his back to the wall, looking at his phone. One of the lesbians asks him if he’s been recruited as reserve, and he answers yes, to artillery, but he doesn’t know when, yet.

“Oh,” she says. “Keep us safe, over there.”

“Let them call me first,” he says, still looking at his phone, and apparently decides that now everyone around him gets to know exactly what happened. “They slaughtered them. They just slaughtered them.”

Another man, in pajamas, also bald but with a long and ridiculous beard, asks, “How many is that, already? A thousand, from what I heard.”

“No way,” the first man answers. “Much more than a thousand. Sixteen hundred, at least.”

“Oh,” says the same lesbian from before, and at that exact moment there’s an explosion. She starts crying. 

Aaron doesn’t want to hear this himself, and also doesn’t want the lesbians to scare even further, so he tries to come between them. But he’s socially inept, so what comes out sounds something like: “Do you know what this week’s Torah Portion² is?”

The artillerist’s only response is a look, not outright hostile but far from cooperative. 

 “It’s on the death of Aaron, compared with the death of Moses. When Aaron died the entirety of Israel cried, and when Moses died only the men cried. Do you know why?” Aaron knows there’s no point in waiting for the answer. “Because Moses was a man of truth. He told the truth—all of it. And Aaron was a man of peace. He told the parts of the truth that helped, in the right place and time. Do you get what I’m saying?”

The artillerist nods, but that nod is better translated as ‘leave me alone’ than anything else. He gets back to his phone, sighs a deep sigh. “How they slaughtered them, wow. They just got in there and murdered everybody.” 

I know. I find it hard to believe, too.

Aaron feels a strong desire to serve in the military. Guilt for not doing so. It’s not a matter of not being recruited as a reserve. He was disqualified from service more than a decade ago, for mental health reasons. He begged to be disqualified. He was terrified, just like his parents, terrified by the new mental state that being a part of the army flung him into, and its potentially deadly outcome. One suicide in their home was enough for them—Aaron’s older brother—taking place under the army’s blind eye. An event that knocked Aaron’s life off its ‘original’ track in many ways, army service being one of them. And still he feels guilt.

He spends the afternoon at Shammai’s apartment, though the choir of voices in his phone encourages him not to be alone. 

He sees the reason in that, and looks for a place to go, but there aren’t any friends who are close enough to be worth the nerve-wracking walk while looking for a place to hide with every single step. Aside from his parents, that he’s been hoping to avoid a little longer. 

When he arrives, they’re both seated in front of the TV showing the news. His father leans forward on the couch, towards the screen, and his mother leans back, reading Ha’Aretz’s literature section. When he turns, his mother doesn’t turn to him, having turned off her hearing aids—a deliberate decision to block out parts of reality.

They agree to turn off the news, a request that will soon become routine, and they even have a little chat before he goes into their saferoom³ to make his bed, a simple mattress on the floor. He arranges it so it doesn’t block the door, knowing at some point at night the siren is going to go off and his parents will rush to his room, having been through enough wars to know Hamas’s fondness for late-night bombings, an attrition strategy. He lies down on the mattress and turns on his Kindle, tries to read, but none of the books he’s downloaded catches his interest. He closes it, stares at the ceiling, and feels nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not when he thinks of the boundaries of his country being breached, not when he thinks about the people who died, not when he thinks about the people taken. He opens the Kindle again and forces himself to sink into a book he finds no interest in

When he finally admits he isn’t falling asleep, he takes his dad’s weights to the balcony—the same steel dumbbells (painted with white wall paint) that accompanied his father from Aaron’s childhood home. Among the potted plants, looking down at his shiny home city, Aaron swings the weights around in familiar patterns. He doesn’t count reps, and uses the same two dumbbells for exercises that require double the load, but it doesn’t matter. The important part is to have something to do, something to push against. 

He discovers a slug close to his foot, a gross creature, slow and unstoppable, impossible to get rid of, no matter how many you kill. He thinks about how ugliness and malice always find their way into places we thought were safe. 

In the morning he wakes up and realizes, to his surprise, that he slept through the rest of the night. He opens the saferoom’s iron door to find his mother standing in the hallway with her back to him. 

“Speak quieter,” she tells someone he can’t see. “I don’t want you to wake him up.”

Aaron smiles. Last time that he slept at their place, driven by similar necessity, she woke him up by yelling on the phone. He asked her to speak quieter, but as these things sometimes go, it only drove her to yell louder. He accepts this as an apology.

She turns to him, alarm in her eyes. “Did your father wake you?”

“Don’t worry.” He waves a dismissive hand and takes out the earplugs he shoved into his ear canals last night. “I couldn’t hear you at all.”

He hugs her and goes to the kitchen, where his dad is boiling water. Aaron pats him on the shoulders, and once again finds himself impressed by the wiry musculature of the pensioner’s shoulders. 

“Some coffee, my dear son?”

“Yes, please,” Aaron mumbles, and wonders how long the fear of their distant cousin over the border will keep them from finding something to fight about. He doesn’t wait to find out, and calls Ya’akov, an old friend from university. 

“Don’t tell me you’re back?” is the first thing Ya’akov says.

“Back and regretting it. Didn’t I tell you?”

“Nah, I thought you were still in Berlin. Hoped.”

“I wish. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you; there was a lot of stuff to figure out and I wasn’t in the best–”

Ya’akov laughs. “Adam’s Son, I’m glad you’re here. We’re all good.”

“Should I pop over?”

“Pop, my man, pop away.”

There’s a certain atmosphere outside, like on Yum Kippur⁴, but without the kids on their bicycles. The streets are nearly empty, and confusingly quiet. A woman, walking quickly, somehow foreign looking, notices the bakery bag Aaron is holding—the pastries his mother insisted he take to Ya’akov’s. The woman turns to him. 

“Is anything open?” she asks him in English.

English is still fresh in his mouth, faster than his Hebrew. “There should be a kiosk open around the corner. It’s a little far, maybe five minutes.”

Expression stern, like a soldier preparing for a mission, she nods at him and throws a quick, “Thanks.” He nods back.

There’s a feeling that Tel Aviv doesn’t usually have. A feeling that we’re all in this together. 

NEXT: Scientists

1. A national mourning day in Israel. The ordinary lesson plans in school are put aside in favor of more relevant, and explicit, content. ↩︎
2. A section of the Torah used in Jewish liturgy during a particular week. There are 54 portions, and the full cycle is read over the course of one Jewish year. ↩︎
3. A room made with fortified concrete. Not a full-blown bomb shelter, but enough for Hamas’s rockets. Most the new apartments have one. ↩︎
4. Literally Day of Atonement, a day traditionally reserved for fasting and seeking forgiveness from both God and people. In modern, secular society, it’s a day where nobody drives their car except for emergencies, and the streets are filled with (mostly) kids on bicycles. ↩︎