Aaron returns to the apartment, and finds it flooded with people. He only then recalls that his roommates notified him that they were going to host a party with their friends from the Otef. They all turn to him when he opens the door, and a chubby guy with a pointed goatee says, “Sorry we made your home into a refugee camp.”

Aaron laughs, but still packs his things as quickly as possible and leaves to work out. He does it in a confused way, like a cat who doesn’t want anyone to see how uncomfortable he is. He’s disorganized—goes to the kitchen to fill his water bottle, goes back to his room, realizes it’s too hot in the room and he needs to get the AC remote from the living room, asks the refugees for it (and a part of him softens to see them all attentive to him and reaching for the remote together), goes back to his room, turns on the AC, returns to the kitchen, places the remote where everyone can find it, goes back to his room and realizes the AC didn’t turn on but now he’s too embarrassed to go back and get it again. 

Eventually he dresses and packs his boxing gloves into a bag and gets himself to the workout area about a minute’s walk from the apartment. Unlike the beach where he usually works out, this one has a shelter, which makes it safer but also more crowded. Children and old people play table tennis, young parents guide toddlers to climbing structures, youths play basketball. In the area Aaron’s in, between the punching bags and the pull-up bars, a group of shirtless, muscular men are doing handstands and bridges. Aaron leaps up to the bar, not wasting any time warming up. 

In Canada, he promised himself that every time he went to work out he’d say hi to at least one person. And every single time, literally a hundred percent of the times, it started a conversation that was either nice or very nice. He talked to white Canadians who thought homeless people should be euthanized (surprising, isn’t it?), Brazilians who spoke in favor of socialist policies, Muslims from Kazakhstan (a whole lot of them) who liked the same cartoons as him, Asian and Black youths from conservative towns that told him what it was like to be flanked on one side by conservatives who hated them because of what they looked like and on the other by liberals who were angry with them because they’d forget they/their gender. The conversations were always pleasant, lovely even. But here, something makes him withdraw from these men. 

A siren howls suddenly, and everyone in the park—toddlers and parents, youth and grandparents—all run together to the underground shelter. Aaron considers joining, but he sees the line that’s forming at the entrance, and decides to just carry on with his workout. He doesn’t get to see the interception itself, but he does see, right above him, a white cloud of smoke appear. very small compared to the entire sky, where there used to be a rocket on its way to him. An instant later, he hears an echoing boom. About a minute later everybody starts leaving the shelter. The musclemen go back to contorting, the old and young go back to playing ping-pong, the toddlers go back to climbing, and no one says anything to Aaron about staying there. He finishes the workout and returns home. 

The refugee camp has cleared by now, aside from a single guest Aaron hears even before opening the door. His voice isn’t very loud, but penetrating and low. 

When Aaron enters, the guest and two nomads are sitting in the living room around the coffee table, eating vegan food. The guest is very tall and thin, dressed in soft clothes like a backpacker in the Far East, and even in the way he sits there’s the limberness of a yoga teacher. And still, something about him gives the impression that he used to be a combatant. Aaron doesn’t remember seeing him before. “Anyway, the start of the year was postponed-” The guest sees Aaron sitting down across from him and stops in the middle of the sentence. Do you remember how angry it made us in Canada, when people would just continue the conversation, as if it was none of their business whether the new person felt welcome? It’s nice that in Israel they don’t do that. “Sup? Carmel.”

“Sababa, you know. Aaron.”

“Pleased. Anyway,” he says, turning back to the nomads. “At first they said it was postponed until November, then mid-November, then the end of November, then the beginning of December.  Do you know how far away the beginning of December is? They’re sure to postpone it again until then.”

“What school is that?” Aaron asks. 

“Wingate.”

“Walla, what are you studying?”

“Osteopathy. You know what that is?”

“Not in depth, but I know how to say ‘bone’ in greek.”

“Boss.” Carmel smiles, and continues, “So I thought to myself, what am I going to do until then? And then Yulia crashed the car. The same left turn out of the kibbutz she’s made a million times, only this time she missed it. I’m not angry with her. She can’t sleep, she’s distracted, and she’s angry enough at herself for the both of us. So I can fix it, and it’ll cost seven thousand, or I can buy a used car for six point five thousand. But I can take it apart and put it back together again. So what’s the difference between seven and six fifty? Both of sums I have no chance of coughing up now. But what am I complaining about? I have a friend who ran away from there with his baby girl in his arms, his wife running behind him. And they all survived, and they’re all safe now and they have food and water and a place to sleep, but he can’t understand what he’s supposed to do with his life now. Go back to work? He had a story, and this wasn’t a part of it, and now he doesn’t understand what story he’s supposed to live. Nothing makes sense.”

The nomad makes a sound. “I’m with you, my brother. Did you hear that Dorin from our year is one of the captives?”

“I heard. Leave it, I can’t… To think that we’re sitting here and rolling joints and where is she now? I can’t even think about that. I can hardly think about my military commander, literally the best person I ever met, who died there. Do you understand what kind of person it takes, that when our platoon was screwed over with a surprise Saturday¹, he went home on Friday and came back on Saturday morning with food that his wife and him cooked all day, just so the platoon would have one day to eat food that’s actually decent? And they killed him. That’s before we even start talking about the people who were lit up on acid, and ran back and forth without knowing who they were… leave it. Leave it. I was never one of those who said ‘death to the Arabs’. Maybe a little phase at eighteen, but it passed when I got into the army and saw what was actually going on. But now? I just don’t care anymore. Enough. We can’t live like this anymore. If people need to die in order for us to have peace, they’ll die. It’s not like there was any sort of life ahead of them.” 

Aaron is charmed by how open this person is with a stranger he just met, so allows himself to speak unfiltered. “The more afraid we are, the more OK we are with killing people.”

“Yeah, I heard a Holocaust survivor say the exact same thing. His wife just died in this breach. And he says, all this time we said we’d never let it happen again. And there, it happened again. You can’t repress it, no matter what your coping mechanisms are.”

Something about the Holocaust survivor story knocks Aaron off balance, plus he notices he’s smelly, so he goes and takes a shower. When he returns, the nomadess is sitting alone, reading a book. 

“Where are the boys?” he asks.

They got a call from the police, she says, telling them Carmel is blocking someone’s parking spot. 

Aaron gets an SMS and brings up his phone to read –

We’re going on a land invasion! [Muscular arm emoji].

What’s your contribution to the soldiers?

1. Keeping the Shabbat
2. Putting on teffilin

When the nomad and Carmel return, Carmel goes straight to the bathroom, passing Aaron quickly and very close, but doesn’t make eye contact or say anything. 

“What happened?” the nomadess asks her partner. “I heard yelling.”

The nomad speaks slowly, stunned. “Somebody came out of the house and chased us with a hammer.”

“What?” The nomadess and Aaron ask in unison. 

Carmel returns from the bathroom and his arms are wet, like he washed them off. “Yeah, I had to jump over the bushes and grab the hammer from her. She completely lost it.”

“Wait a minute.” Aaron tries to make sense of things. “She assaulted you with a hammer?”

“Yeah, she yelled at me that she’s paying eight hundred shekels per month for her parking spot, and who the hell am I to block it, and I said listen, I’m sorry, I didn’t know, please stop yelling, I just came from the Otef. And she didn’t stop, so I got into the car and started driving, and she just slammed the hammer against the roof and ran away. So I chased her and took the hammer. Where’s the joint? I feel like this thing sobered me up completely. Roll me another one. Aaron, do you smoke?”

Aaron counts how many days it’s been since the last time, and nods. “Tonight I do.”

The nomad rolls another joint, and Aaron thanks him and takes it. He really, really wants to light it up. He wants to light it up that very second, but he realizes he needs to decide if he’s going to Mitzpe Ramon first. 

He doesn’t want to go. He wants to stay in Tel Aviv with his friends, smoke weed, watch anime till late at night, wake up in the morning and write this weird diary that’s becoming one of the most interesting projects he’s ever taken on. But he also knows that Uncle Yoni is very old, and Aaron won’t get many more chances to learn the secret of his art, so he sends Yoni a text. Yoni says he wants to be on the road at seven, and Aaron agrees and, with grief, sets his alarm clock for six. The app notifies him that the alarm will ring in a number of hours larger by one than what Aaron expected, and he realizes that daylights savings time starts tonight. He’s glad for the extra hour of sleep, and lights the joint with glee. 

The marijuana the nomad uses is very strong, so I can describe very little of what happened that night. Most of what remains is the feeling of a strong connection, of a very honest conversation. 

“I wanna tell you something,” the nomadess says. “I was driving today to shop for groceries, and I saw Dizingoff’s bridge is totally covered with billboards saying ‘together we will win’ and ‘there’s no more left and right’. And it made me feel really good, you know?” Hopeful innocence shines in her green eyes.

Aaron tries to hold himself back from telling her that it’s naive nonsense. He feels a particular expression crawling across his face: half doubt, half compassion. He looks at Carmel, and sees that he’s wearing the exact same expression. 

“What?” the nomadess asks. “Why are you making that face?”

There’s a brief moment of negotiation between Carmel and Aaron over which of them will tell her. Aaron, still with some Canadian-ness left in him, gestures for Carmel to have the right of way. 

Carmel takes it. “What ‘together in this’? Who’s ‘together in this’? I understand what you mean: there are places where it really does feel like we’re all in it together. But they fucked us over. They fucked us over as hard as physicaly possible. They left us to die, and now when they tell me something like ‘strong together’ the first thing I think about is where was this ‘together’ when they took the soldiers to protect the settlers, soldiers who were supposed to protect us? Aren’t they ashamed to say that there’s no more left and right? It’s true, though. They need to get their heads cut off. That’s not right or left.”

The nomadess insists that she finds it more positive than negative, and Aaron says something that agrees with both of them. 

“Balance,” Carmel says. “It’s always about balance. I wanted to get it tattooed, or maybe the Yin Yang symbol, but I never got around to it.” He grabs the nomad between the shoulder and neck, massages him. “Nomadush, I now realize I never said thank you. So thank you for coming with me. It’s a really good thing you were there.”

The nomad laughs, somewhat shyly, and Aaron realizes that what he saw before wasn’t snobbishness at all. “It is good that I was there! There was that part where you took the hammer from her hands and I shouted at you. ‘Carmel!’” he cries, recreating the moment. “‘Carmel!’”

“I remember. It really got me out of that mindset. The moment I had the hammer in my hand… What a time, God guard us. It’s like time is stretching and everything that’s happening now is more meaningful, more important. It will take us years to process everything going on in this one month.”

Aaron thinks of that scene they just described, and how it manifests Yin and Yang. First Carmel apologized, explained to the woman with the hammer that he didn’t know, tried speaking to her compassion by letting her know he came from the Otef, that he’d so recently been traumatized. That was Yin — the receptive, soft, feminine, cold. But when she crossed the line he did push back, took the hammer away by force. That was Yang, the hot, the masculine, the violent, manifesting power over reality. But when he had the hammer, he stopped himself from using it. Yin inside Yang, Yang inside Yin. 

Apparently Aaron said this out loud, because Carmel responds, saying he never heard that kind of reference to Yin and Yang, and asks where Aaron learned it. Aaron tells him about the True Book of the Southern Blossom, and from there flows on to the rest of his spiritual journey to Vipassana workshops. He tells him how doing nothing but meditating for a week drives you mad, but you come back, and when you come back the world is less scary than it ever was. Not ever, though. Not less scary than it was before the trauma.

“If that’s your journey, then you should go to India. I’ve always said that — India takes broken people and gives them what they need. It won’t necessarily be fun, but it will be good.”

Aaron knows he wants to, but he’s afraid. He hesitates. 

“You don’t know if you have the power to deal with it. But you already have inside of you everything you need, that’s what you don’t know. You just need to open the door, and the rest will happen by itself.”

Soon it’s late, and Aaron’s worried about how little he’ll sleep before he needs to get up and catch a ride with Yoni. He tells them that he’s leaving, and doesn’t know whether to hug Carmel. Carmel spoke to Aaron’s heart, but to him, Aaron must be just another stranger. So he turns to leave.

“Wait, my brother,” Carmel says. He gets up, hugs Aaron fiercely. “Good luck on the path. You got it, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Aaron says, embarrassed. He goes to sleep glad, after all, that he came back to Israel.

NEXT: Teachers 1

1.  On IDF bases, most soldiers are released on Saturdays, leaving a skeleton crew for guard duty and maintenance. The Halacha forbids cooking on Saturday, so the soldiers have to eat premade food. ‘Staying a Saturday’ is often given as a penalty by commanders to their soldiers. ↩︎