Aaron gets on the bus, and the driver asks him, with a heavy Arabic accent, where he needs to go. “Be’er Sheva Centeral,” Aaron answers.
“Then get on the next one. This one’s for Mitzpe Ramon.”
Aaron gets off, confused, looks at the sign again, and realizes that the bus that comes from Be’er Sheva and the line that goes to Be’er sheva goes through the same side of the road. A couple of minutes later, the Bus to Be’er Sheva arrives. The same driver, the same bus, just a little emptier. The driver smiles, to show that he recognizes Aaron, and Aaron smiles back and gets on.
Even though he downloaded a chess app to practice for the next game against his nephews, even though he should record the events that just took place as soon as possible to write them here, he ends up looking out into the desert and looking for rams in the setting-sunlight. He finds none.
The only way out of Be’er Sheva’s central station is through a little shopping center and in order to get into the shopping center the commuter must pass through a metal detector, and get inspected by a security guard1. The security guard, which is the title of the young soldier that only recently got released and settled for this job, gives Aaron one long look, and gestures with his head for him to go on. Aaron has already opened his bag for inspection, but it doesn’t matter. The guard doesn’t check anybody’s bag, just looks at them. The metal detector beeps as Aaron passes.
On the street Ya’akov and Hillel are waiting for him, each one next to his car. They hug him and ask who he’d rather ride with. It’s a psychological step up for him that he just says that he’d rather ride with Ya’akov instead of stumbling on his own guilt. After a short discussion they decide Ya’akov’s car will be the head of the caravan.
“But Hillel, I’m not doing a hundred and thirty.” It’s worth noting that the legal limit on these roads is a hundred kilometers per hour.
“As slow as you want, habibi2. You wanna do a hundred and twenty nine? Also good.”
They get into their cars laughing, and hit the road. Aaron is full of energy, talking about his admiration to Uncle Yoni, even though he’s aware that he always does that to Ya’akov that he doesn’t leave room for him to speak and then regrets it, but he lets the words flow. About the desert, the season of ‘Northern Exposure’ that waits for him to be the protagonist of. After he relaxes a little, he sweetens his Yang with some Yin. “Wait a minute, man, how was the first day of work?”
“Shitty. Effectively, I barely did three hours of work.”
“Shhh,” Aaron comforts. “Three hours is great. Like when you get back to the gym, and in the first week you can’t pick up half of the weight you’ve tossed around before. Give yourself some time to adjust and I’m sure that in two weeks you’ll be busting full days like you’re used to.”
“Walla, you’re right,” Ya’akov says, and Aaron isn’t convinced that he’s answering earnestly, but it doesn’t matter. That’s the depth of their friendship—if Ya’akov is trying to get him to let it go, that’s enough for him to let go.
“You know,” Ya’akov changes the subject back to Aaron. “I read the first story, from the shorts you sent me.”
“For real? That’s great!”
“Listen, I have notes if you wanna hear them.”
“Of course I wanna hear them, but it’s not the thing I wanna hear the most. I built a little world and you got into it, I’m more interested what was it like for you inside of it, did you see what I saw or-”
“Kus emek, aars!3” Ya’akov curses, and barely avoids colliding with a car that just stopped, God knows why, in the middle of the road. If his response would have been one or two seconds slower, they would have been in the aftermath of a car accident right now.
“You see,” Ya’akov says after a deep breath. “That’s the problem with this country. You constantly need to react, always ready. Even your relaxation isn’t really relaxed. All the time you were in Canada, have you ever seen anything like this?”
Aaron admits that he didn’t.
“I bet there you don’t have to fight with other people just to get home. Here it’s like we’re in a constant battle royal.”
As if to punctuate his words, a jet of blue flame ignites at the side of the road, about half a kilometer from them or less, larger than their car, pointing downwards and soaring quickly. Aaron never saw a jet plane take off so quickly, and from so close. The plane makes a sharp turn, painting a vertical U with the pink color it leaves on their retinas, and flies south. For a moment they both stay silent.
“I can’t handle this place anymore,” Aaron says. He knows how easy his situation is. He knows that he didn’t fear for his life at any point, that he didn’t lose anybody in this war. But everything around him is moving so quickly. “I’m tired of feeling like I’m in a dystopian novel.”
“And not just one! A couple of dystopian scenarios at the same time—the corruption; the war; viruses; warming; everything, daddio, all at the same time. I wish there would have been something supernatural too, like in Akira.”
Aaron laughs at that. “Yeah, but if someone would have awakened as Akira now it probably would have been one Ben-Gvir’s Hilltop boys4, or a Palestinian kid, and honestly I don’t know what would be worse.”
They get off the highway, and the traffic becomes suspiciously slow. Two police cars block two out of the three lanes, forming a funnel that forces their car to pass slowly and close to a pair of police officers that inspect the drivers closely.
“I’m sorry,” Aaron says. “I couldn’t find my haircut machine. If my beard causes us to be detained, I apologize in advance.”
“Don’t worry,” Ya’akov, the one with actual arabic heritage, says. “I look Ashkenazi enough for the both of us.”
They pass the blockade without any trouble. In the small streets of Rehovot a cab driver pulls over without signaling, causing a four-cars long traffic jam that could have easily been avoided. The cars clumsily navigate around the cab that only half-blocks the street, and when Ya’akov finally gets his car to the funnel the cab driver starts driving again, trying to cut them off. “Did you see that son of a whore?” Ya’akov almost raises his voice. “It’s not enough that you got us all to this mess, now you try to get out before everyone else?”
“You know,” Aaron says. “A friend once told me that she has friends that their whole deal is to work three months in tech, bust their asses with long hours, and then fly abroad and travel three months in beautiful views. And I didn’t understand why anyone would do that. Now I understand.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t really live abroad. You got used to this pace, to these encounters. But it ruins your health, and you gotta get a break, and you can’t get a break here. I also understand why they’d stay late at work—because it’s easier to be inside of the offices of a tech company than in Israel itself.” He gestures backwards with his hand, to the cab driver. “Than in this shit.”
They park and climb the five floors to Ya’akov’s apartment, complaining cheerfully about the confusing apartment numbers. A very tall woman with glasses and a summer dress opens the door to them. Hillel get in first hugs her, then Ya’akov who kisses her, before turning to Aaron, blocking his entrance. “Are you a terrorist?”
“For sure. Allahu Ackbar. I’m here to smoke weed and kill Jews, and I’m all out of weed.”
“If that’s what it takes to instill peace…” Ya’akov shrugs. “We’ll get you some weed. But first, have you met my girlfriend, Mika?”
Aaron greets the tall woman, puts out his hand to shake which she slaps away and hugs him. “I’ve heard so much about you!” She tells Aaron.
“Don’t believe all of it,” he jokes shyly.
“I don’t believe any of it. Do you want to eat?”
“I’m ok with delivery,” Aaron says, preemptively guilty for eating all of their food.
“No need to get delivery,” Mika insists. “There’s so much food. Are potatoes with tahini ok?”
“That sounds great, thank you.”
Ya’akov sits down with the guitar and plays, to Aaron’s delight, the national anthem, “The Hope”. Mika serves him the warmed up potatoes. Hillel sits by the window and rolls himself a joint.
“Well, how is it?” Mika asks before Aaron even finishes the first bite.
“Really really good,” he testifies as soon as he’s done swallowing.
“Not too sour?”
“No, just right. The lemon really adds.”
“You hear that, Ya’akov? He says there wasn’t enough lemon. Next time we’ll put in more lemon.”
Ya’akov raises his eyes from the guitar, and perhaps for the first time in their thirteen years of friendship Aaron sees him smile with no pretense. Aaron has never seen him as happy as he is now, happy for this helpmate5, for the little war they are having together.
Mika turns back to Aaron. “Did you notice that he’s playing ‘The Hope’? Not what you’d expect from Ya’akov, would you?”
“Look,” Aaron is the one speaking, but he says what Ya’akov is thinking. “It’s a great melody.”
“You see?” Ya’akov uses the momentum. “It’s just a melody. The fact that some people attach some words to it isn’t my problem.” He is, of course, correct. Before the melody was drafted to serve as the national anthem, it was a Romanian folk song.
“Yeah yeah,” Mika waves her hand, disregarding him. “That’s the excuse he makes, but at this pace I’ll have him singing Hanuka songs. Aaron, you sing on Hanuka, don’t you?”
“In Vancouver we didn’t have a hanukkiah6, so I didn’t really make the effort. But when we were invited over, I sang and enjoyed it.”
Ya’akov raises an eyebrow. “Walla? You bless the candles and everythings?”
“Sure.”
Ya’akov stops playing. “You say ‘blessed are you the lord my god king of the world that commanded us in his commandments to light a candle?”
Aaron shrugs. “When I taught Hebrew in Vancouver, I even put on the yarmulka and taught kids how to sing the prayers. If you look at God as the amalgamation of all existing process, physics and evolution and sociology and all of it, and feel grateful for being created and brought here, with the weird traditions like lighting a candle when the moon is in a specific location in the sky, most of the prayers still make a lot of sense.”
“That’s the Shpinozian interpretation,” Mika says, surprising Aron.
“Nice.” He gives her a little bow, and she bows back before continuing.
“But the absolute majority of people who pray don’t think that way.”
“The absolute majority of people are wrong, I think that everyone in this room agrees on that.” They all nod, and Aaron doesn’t say that in every room that the sentence is said, everyone agrees.
The conversation flows, eventually flowing into the same paths it did yesterday, with the nomads and Carmel—the signs claiming “we’re all in this together”, where Mika takes the same stance as the nomadess (“Warms your heart, doesn’t it?”) and hillel puts aaron’s opinion into words so accurately (“What do you mean we’re all in this together? Where was this solidarity when you called us traitors, you fucking asshole? Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”) that Aaron doesn’t even bother adding anything, and finishes his meal peacefully.
“Thank you, Mika, it was excellent.”
“Sure thing. You want some more?”
“No no, I’m good, thank you so much.”
“In that case,” Ya’akov stops playing the guitar again to say. “Maybe you should sit by the window.”
The sitting spot by the window, the one that functions as a smoking station, was evacuated in the meantime by Hillel, who now lounges on the couch, sighing deeply and letting go of the stress of the day. Aaron doesn’t really understand, but being a pleasant dude he abides, sits down on the couch, and finds a little joint, rolled by a masterful hand. “What’s this?” He asks Ya’akov.
“That’s a joint with no tobacco, just like you like it. Yours if you want.”
Aaron takes the little cigarette in his hand, looks at the spiral of paper on paper, the accurate angle of the cone, the little w shape of the cardboard filter, and thinks about how while he was sitting there and eating Ya’akov’s food, Ya’akov created this little masterpiece without Aaron even asking him, just because he said, as a part of a joke, that he’d like to smoke more.
The year in which Aaron learned how to cry is also the year Aaron learned how not to cry, and that’s a good opportunity to put that new ability to use. It’s just gonna make everybody sad, bring down the vibe. He takes a deep breath. “Thanks, Adam’s son.”
“For sure.”
Aaron lights up the joint, and it feels like he’s taking it all in one inhale.
He opens his eyes on one of the couches, and realizes he must have forgotten the last sentences he’s heard, because he has no idea what Hillel is talking about.
“I hate when people say that to me. A deathly hatred. What are you a prophet, my brother? How the hell would you know?”
“So what do you want them to say?” Mika defends the last of the good in the world. “‘It’s not going to be alright’?”
“No, you don’t know that either. Say— it’s going to be.”
Mika laughs. “It’s going to be!”
“Yeah, just like that. Well, it’s been fun, but I gotta wake up at six and it’s getting real late.”
“Okay,” Mika says. “I won’t tell you to have a safe drive home, so you won’t get pissy with me. Have a drive, sababa?”
He laughs too. “Sababa.”
“Want some coffee?”
“Yeah, strong and black.”
Mika makes him a glass of coffee, as he goes around and hugs everybody, Aaron last.
“Take care of yourself,” Aaron says, and Hillel returns the demand. That sentence has much more weight than it did a couple of months ago. It used to be just something that people say.
Hillel takes the glass, not a disposable one, with him, and Aaron is awed at that little show of trust that comes with sharing possessions.
After he leaves they sit back down with a grunt, Ya’akov and Aaron on one couch and Mika on the other. Mika gives Aaron a curious look, as if recognizing something. “What’s up Aaron? You okay?” They know each other for less than three hours.
Ya’akov notices also, turns to him, grabs him between the neck and trapezoid, messaging the little tight muscles. “Is the world heavy on your shoulders?”
Aaron falls back against the couch, lets go, covers his eyes with a hand. Not so much out of desperation as much as to block away all of the distractions. He remembers that at some point during that night Ya’akov showed him videos of Dagestan, a muslim region in Russia, where an angry mob was going through the airport looking for Israelis while chanting the war cry Allahu Ackbar. The thirst for blood in their faces, even through the phone’s tiny screen, struck at him. Dissolved the illusion he was trying to hold, the one Hillel was angry at anyone saying out loud—that it will be alright. In the darkness, Aaron can focus his mind on finding the right story to express what he’s feeling. “Do you know the game Sekiro? Came out a couple of years for Playstation?”
“No,” Mika admits.
“Passingly familiar,” Ya’akov answers.
“It’s a game about samurai, but unlike the other samurai games where all it takes to cut up your opponent is pressing a button once, in Sekiro it feels like the enemy is trying to survive. If you strike without thinking, they just block. The only way to hit is to make a perry, instead of defending, you wait for your enemy to strike, then parry their sword sideways, opening up their defenses, and then slash their throat open with one strike. Enemies that would take you two minutes to kill just by bashing them with the sword you can kill in two seconds the moment you realize it. It’s a great game—you feel like a samurai because you think and fight like a samurai.”
“Okay,” Mika says. “I think I’m following so far.”
Aaron finds solace in the blue shapes behind his eyelids. “But then, after you’ve gained enough experience to start feeling comfortable, suddenly a huge samurai arrives, with a sword and armor like you’ve never seen before. Most of his strikes can be blocked or parried, but then he takes his sword back, winds up, and then over your head appears the Kanji for death-”
“Shin,” Ya’akov says in an authentic Japanese accent, passively trained in the language after decades of watching Japanese animation.
“And when that symbol appears, it means that a strike is coming, one that can’t be blocked or parried. The only way to survive it is to be somewhere else. That’s how I feel now—like I’ve gotten way better at reacting to the world, but now the symbol of death is over my head. And I need to get on a plane and not be here when the strike, whatever it is, lands.”
“Aaron, come here a second,” Ya’akov says, and Aaron obeys, opening his eyes and straightening up. “Look at me. You might be right. Maybe we’re all going to die. Nobody knows. But maybe, just maybe, you’re very, very high.”
Aaron laughs. They all laugh.
“Right now you’re too high to make decisions. Why don’t you leave that for now, eat some more, relax, sleep well, and if tomorrow morning you still feel that way, order a plane ticket to whereve-”
“Thailand,” Aaron blurts out. “India could have been alright, too, but I heard they always try to scam you there, and I really don’t wanna deal with that.”
“Okay. In the morning you’ll buy a ticket for Thailand. Sababa?”
“Sababa,” Aaron agrees.
“Cool, then I’m gonna have a shower. Mika, you gonna stay here with Aaron or are you going to sleep already?”
“I’ll stay with Aaron a little. I think that if I leave him alone he might trip on his own.”
Aaron nods. He wouldn’t have asked her to stay, but she’s not wrong.
Ya’akov heads towards the shower, and Mika, God bless her heart, starts administering psychological first aid. “Come on, Aaron, it’s not all bad. Of course there’s a lot of bad stuff, but there’s positives too, and it’s important to notice them.”
“Not to sound too negative, but what are the positives, exactly?”
She tells him a story that in the meantime became a piece of modern mythology, straight out of the oven. In the story, a Filipino caretaker from the Otef saved the old woman she was entrusted with. When they came to kidnap the old woman, the caretaker offered the terrorists money, begged for both of the old lady’s life. “Afterwards they interviewed the caretaker for the news, and she said they’re kindred spirits, that the elderly woman is her best friend.”
Aaron makes the same expression that Carmel did the night before. “Come on.”
“What?’
“You know what. Come on.”
“What do you mean come on? What?” She says that with a smile and warmth, and you can almost mistake it for having no anger.
“Mika, how do you feel around foreign workers? Hand on your heart, no political correctness. How does it feel when the cleaner comes over?”
“Listen, I’m very nice to them.”
“I had no doubt.”
“Every time the cleaner arrives I offer her food and coffee and everything.”
“That’s very nice. Why do I feel like there’s a ‘but’ coming up.”
“But…” she says, and they both laugh, and there’s tension in the air.
“But she’s a slave,” Aaron leads the witness.
“She’s a slave,” she admits, and shrugs. “What can you do? Nobody wants such a shitty job. And no, it’s not a person making her do this job, but a complicated geo-economical circumstances. But!”
“But…”
“But I believe they really are good friends.That’s what happens when you spend your entire day with someone. If they’re good to you, even just some of the time, you get attached to them. You learn to love them until you can’t imagine your life without them.”
“Even if you’re a slave?” Aaron asks, and the question has a weight the origin of which he doesn’t know.
She shrugs again. “Even if you’re a slave.”
Her phone makes a loud ‘ping’, demanding her attention, and she leans forward to the table and gets it, looking at the screen for a long moment.
Aaron is glad to be with his friends’ girlfriends. There’s something about communication with women that heals the soul, particularly after such a breakup, and their relative categories neutralize the duel anxiety that comes when he talks to single women—one from the potential to hit on them, another from the potential that they might think he’s hitting on them. At that moment, Aaron’s actually relaxed. Mika puts down the phone and sighs.
“What’s up? The news?”
“Not this time. I’ll have you know that I really toned it down the last couple of days. It’s just that my mom really drives me insane.”
“Like how?”
“Listen, she’s super anxious, even on more normal days. And she’s always complaining, and like walla, I can understand. Everyone’s having a hard time, and I try to be patient with her. But there’s some stuff she says I just can’t stand.”
Oh. how comforted Aaron is by hearing other people complain about their parents. Makes him feel less ungrateful. Aaron hopes the effects of weed on him lessened enough for him to remember this in the morning.
“So, my mother has a friend, Rutti. And Rutti’s daughter was in Kfar Aza7 on the seventh. And she didn’t die. She was just in the safe room alone, for seventeen hours until they came to rescue her. Physically. She’s fine.”
“God keep us safe,” Aaron says, not noticing the Irony.
“I have no idea what insane levels of trauma the daughter had to experience, but for the mother it’s the accumulation of seeing her daughter like she is now, plus those seventeen hours of not knowing if her daughter is alive, or, forgive me for saying this, getting raped to death while her mom is sitting by the phone and waiting for updates. So sababa, now the daughter and the mother are together, and everybody’s fine, but they’re both still in a crazy shock. And this Rutti comes to my mother for support, tells her again and again how afraid she was, and she never wants that to happen to her child again. And I get my mom too, that she’s tired of hearing it again and again, but she says things you shouldn’t say.”
“Like?”
“She says—‘what is she still in shock for? It’s not like they killed her daughter, some people actually lost their children.’.
“Wow.”
“Yep. And it’s clear that if we weren’t in a war now, and she only had one friend this happened to, then everyone would surround her with support. But nobody has the energy for that.”
They’re silent for a moment. Aaron doesn’t notice that he’s forgotten to drink for the entire evening, and he picks up a bottle, drinks, puts it down. “Do you know what it looks like to me? When one person is in a traumatic event, like a car accident or something, there’s a couple of hours when they’re in shock, and in ordinary circumstances people who aren’t in shock sit them down, tell them everything’s fine, make him something to eat.”
In front of Aaron flashes a image of himself in his parents’ kitchen, with two missing teeth and a barely stitched together eyebrow, his face purple and so swollen he looks like a character from The Simpsons, and his parents don’t say anything, can’t, aside from the superficial jokes they’re so well practiced in, use the food processor to blend chicken and potatoes because his jaw hurts too much to chew. He recalls the wonder he felt that something can be so tasty in its solid form and so disgusting as mush, even as the substances are exactly the same.
He’s so well practiced in pushing that memory aside the memory of his twentieth birthday he hadn’t thought about it once since Ya’akov told him about his father, even though sees the scars every time he looks in the mirror. That one time that a complete stranger decided to pick up a brick from the floor and break his face with it, for no reason aside from his life teaching him to hate. No, he wasn’t Arabic, if that’s what you’re thinking.
Aaron’s speech doesn’t even slow down, and nobody watching from the side would have even noticed that it happened. “But now it’s like we’re all in this car crash. We’re all shocked with our hands shaking, and no one has the resources to tend to anyone else. And when we try, that’s what we get. What about your dad?”
“Look, my dad’s a real sweety, I love him. But he’s an engineer in the full sense of the word, you know what I mean? He doesn’t really have the bandwidth for that kind of stuff.”
“I get what you mean. I worked as an engineer for a while. What’s his field?”
“He works for the army. Do you know The Sunflower?”
“No, what’s that?”
“It’s like a mine, only instead of exploding it jumps like this, and then rains down shrapnel.” She gestures with her hands, one hand representing the device rising up in the air, the other one the rain of death it shoots. “The shtick is that it doesn’t kill, it just sprays them with enough phosphorus they can’t move. It’s so cruel I’d rather die than get hit by that, but I don’t care about them, they deserve it.”
Aaron treads lightly. As far as he understands, the statement ‘they deserve it’ means that the person saying the words believes that ‘their’ suffering is a good thing. Aaron, who thinks that suffering is bad in all circumstances except for when it decreases overall suffering, knows only to open up that discussion with people he loves and has fun arguing with. The thing is, the people he loves already agree. “Don’t they die anyway?” he asks.
“They might, if left alone. But we get them to the hospital before that happens.”
“But why? Why get them to the hospital at all?”
“That’s exactly the difference between us and them.” She looks him in the eye. “We’re not animals.”
When Aaron’s patience breaks it’s not an eruption of rage, more like a surrender. “Come on. You know that’s bullshit, right?”
Her expression becomes stern. She’s also applying effort to build this bridge, even though she thinks what Aaron is saying really isn’t ok. “No. I think these things are important.”
“What does it matter? We kill them. We’re ok with their suffering. What’s the difference?”
“The difference is that we never kill for enjoyment.”
“But we kill them, and we kill more.”
“That’s not the same thing. Did you see the picture from Kfar Gaza? They enjoy killing babies and women. We just want to kill Hamas.”
“But we kill babies and women too, and much more of them.”
“If they don’t want to be killed, they should give back the hostages.”
“Do you think children being killed over there can bring back the hostage?”
“No, of course not. But what are we supposed to do? Leave them there?”
“I have no idea what we’re supposed to do. I’m just scared of how easy it’s gotten for us to kill children.”
“It’s never easy. Don’t say that. It’s never easy. We do it because they made us.”
“How did they make us? They were here first.”
“True, we arrived when they were already here. But we offered for them to be together, to develop this land and they chose revenge, and still they talk about claiming all of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”
“Those are their values. We came here with our own, and when they act according to theirs we tell them that it’s wrong according to our values?”
“Yes. Definitely yes. They lived there in sababa until the first intifada, and their own actions caused things to get worse. It’s proven that Iranian agents are actively causing unrest.”
“It’s easy to cause unrest when people live in a cage.”
“Sababa, but they didn’t have to start the war that put them in a cage. You can’t say it’s a cultural difference when Israeli Arabs decided to be a part of Israel, and now the only ones calling for the liberation of Palestine are dumbass university students. Any Arab student here, with all the racism they probably endure, is way better off than any student in Egypt or Lebanon, or whatever country would have been here if it wasn’t for us. That’s the thing the Americans don’t get—our values, absolutely, scientifically, are better than the Arabs’. We don’t murder our gays, we don’t beat our wives, we don’t send out children to die-”
“Don’t we?”
“Yeah, we send them to protect, we even send them to risk their lives. But the real heroism is to protect your country and come back, not just give up and die. And the Americans and the Europeans seeing us from afar, think the Arabs are just like them. That’s their most patronizing mistake—thinking that everyone shares their values. That’s why they accepted all of those refugees, they think the victim is automatically the good guy, and the ones with power are the bad guys. They don’t understand that someone can see their family die in a bombing, and still think a woman who was raped should be stoned. Germany and Sweden took in a whole bunch of Afghani refugees because they imagined they’re just like them, but Egypt and Jordan and Saudi Arabia didn’t take in a single one. They didn’t feel any moral obligation to save someone else’s refugees.”
“What does that have to do with anything? We need to manage this conflict humanely. That’s our responsibility. We can’t just say that they kill children, so we’re allowed also.”
“That’s not the point, though. The Arabs are waging war under Arab conventions, and Europe is expecting us to fight under European conventions. So Hamas doesn’t get judged for having fun raping our women, and when our only way to get back our babies taken hostage is to flatten Gaza, then the world arrives to say that’s not right. Do you think anyone from Denmark or the Netherlands remembers what it’s like to fear an enemy bombing? All of their diplomacy is talk and money, and they expect us to act the same way. But we can’t. It’s like they’ll send you into a dangerous prison and tell you to resolve conflicts using words. It’s just not possible. Don’t you agree?”
Aaron doesn’t remark that there are probably quite a few Danes that remember WW2. Her point still stands. “I don’t know. I get your point about western diplomacy. But I see how easier it’s gotten for us to talk about killing their children and I’m scared that was the point. That’s what they wanted to happen to us.”
Ya’akov gets out of the shower, a towel around his waist. “There’s a lot of hot water left. Aaron, you getting in?”
“Yeah, I think I will. Unless you are, Mika?”
“Nah, I’m off to bed, thanks.”
“Yalla,” Ya’akov says, and explains to Aaron where the towel is, where the soap is, and apologizes for the weak water pressure.
Aaron starts walking to the shower, stops, turns around. “Mika?”
“Yeah, good soul?”
“Thanks for having this discussion with me. It’s not easy to talk to people you disagree with without getting pissed.”
“What, of course,” she says, but you can tell that she’s still a little angry. It doesn’t make him appreciate what she says any less. On the contrary.
Aaron showers, and when he heads out to the hall he hears Ya’akov on the couch, watching nonsense on his phone, and comes to sit with him. Ya’akov, in a noble gesture that’s become more and more rare in the modern world, puts down his phone and looks the person sitting across from him in the eyes, gives him a long and thoughtful look.
“What’s up?” Aaron asks.
“I realized two things.” Ya’akov pulls at his beard as he does when he’s not sure how to put something into words. “The easier of the two is that I have to stop smoking weed.”
“Because of me?”
“No, because of me. I don’t trip as hard as you do ,but in the morning I don’t like applying any effort, instead I’m just going with flow of things as they come. In the lab, that’s a shitty thing to do.”
“Cool, I agree. What’s the second one?”
“I realized we’re refugees. I don’t think things will be as bad as you think, but we have to leave. We haven’t left yet, haven’t even realized where we’re going to go, but we’re already refugees.”
They go to sleep and sleep very little.
When I’m done writing the dialogue with Mika, when I read it again, I think this was the hardest part to write down of this entire text. With most of the people I talked to I wrote for myself the stories they told, the key sentences, and used my familiarity with them to bind these bits with stuff they might have said, things they said at other times. With Mika, there are two crucial differences to the rest of my characters: The one is that I don’t know her as well as the others, so it’s harder to generate sentences she might have said. The other is that I didn’t agree with her, unlike most of the conversations here, where we can follow an agreement as it’s building. When I tried writing her arguments, I felt like a part of me was trying to distort them—to write her as if she’s stupid, which she definitely isn’t, or like she agrees with me, which is also wrong.
I was tempted to delete this entire bit, with its lesser accuracy, but it seems more interesting to leave it here, a monument not just to hard it is to understand people we disagree with, but that there’s a part in us that wants to remember their arguments differently.
NEXT: Passengers
- Since the wave of suicide bombings and remotely detonated attacks on civilians in the early 90’s, every mall, theater, even outside fair in Israel, has at least one security guard at the entrance checking for explosives in backpacks and purses, with varying degrees of strictness. ↩︎
- Arabic. Literally – “my loved one”, meaning “my friend”. ↩︎
- Arabic. Literally – “The pussy of your mother, you pimp.” ↩︎
- Hilltop Youth are hardline, extremist religious-nationalist youth who establish outposts in the West Bank. The ideology of the Hilltop Youth, a derivation of Kahanism, includes the claim that the Palestinians are “raping the Holy Land”, and must be expelled. They apply terror tactics against civilians in the West Bank, but according to the Israeli government they are not considered a terrorist organization. ↩︎
- Genesis 2:18. עזר כנגדו can literally be translated as “a help against him.” ↩︎
- A specific stand for candles used in Hanuka. ↩︎
- One of the villages of Otef Aza. ↩︎
Aaron Benelli 
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