Ragil

The lift arrived from storage in Ashdod. Our new home was ready to receive it.

Three men came to deliver its contents. They drove up from Ashkelon. “Near the beach,” said Oleg, their leader. “I love it there.”

Oleg spoke to us in English. The three spoke to each other in Russian.

Ilya, a wiry young man with a shock of light brown hair, stayed downstairs with the truck.  He carried box after box from the cabin to the truck’s loading ramp. Oleg and Aleksei took them to the elevator, where thankfully the boxes fit. The elevator hoisted men and boxes up two flights.

My wife waited upstairs to direct each box and piece of furniture to the proper room.  My own job was to stand downstairs at the truck and point to the Passover dishes and other boxes that would stay in the machsan, the storage area at ground level.

Ilya knew what he was doing. He dragged or hoisted box after box to the edge of the loading ramp, or onto the ground next to it. His partners ferried them upstairs.

Aleksei and Ilya spoke no English, but they could read some, and thus identify which boxes were for the kitchen, and which had books.

“Books and more books,” Ilya said to me, in Hebrew. “Why so many books?”

I shrugged.  “Nice tattoo,” I said to him. On his right shin was densely colored tattoo that featured a fierce cartoon character.

Ilya’s face brightened. “I just put that on a month ago,” he said.

“Where’d you do it?” I asked. Back where I used to live, tattoo parlors were illegal for many years, and people had to go out of state.

“Ashkelon,” he said.

“And how did you pick the design?”

“The artist suggested it,” said Ilya. A surprisingly common reply to this question.

People have been adorning their bodies with tattoos for thousands of years. Tattoos can mean many things, but at bottom they are there to put the world on notice. “This is me,” they announce. “Have a look.”

“Are you from Russia?” I asked. “Or somewhere in the Soviet Union?”

“Ukraine,” he said, planting a large wardrobe carton down onto the pavement.

“Where in Ukraine?

“Donetsk.”

“Donetsk has been too much in the news,” I said. Ilya made no response. He grabbed another box from the truck bed and carried it out to the ramp.

“Do you still have family in Donetsk?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“And how is it for them?”

“Ragil,” he said. “Regular.”

“Regular?” I asked. “But there is a war.”

He focused on his work, leaning over the loading ramp. “There is a war,” he said, looking straight ahead. “Life goes on.

“Like it does here in Israel,” he added. “Ragil.”

I pointed out a box that was slated for ground-floor storage. He set it aside.

Ilya looked young, but I could not tell exactly how young. “Besides this work,” I asked him, “are you studying?”

“I finished the army,” he said. “I just spent six months in milu’im, reserve duty.”

“In Aza?”

“In Aza.”

And so, when he was finally released back home to Ashkelon, Ilya had a tattoo put on. To show the world, and himself, that life would go on.

**********

There is a famous prophecy about Jerusalem in the Book of Zechariah. It appears on a shelet, a sign, in the Old City.

עֹ֤ד יֵֽשְׁבוּ֙ זְקֵנִ֣ים וּזְקֵנ֔וֹת בִּרְחֹב֖וֹת יְרוּשָׁלִָ֑ם וְאִ֧ישׁ מִשְׁעַנְתּ֛וֹ בְּיָד֖וֹ מֵרֹ֥ב יָמִֽים׃ וּרְחֹב֤וֹת הָעִיר֙ יִמָּ֣לְא֔וּ יְלָדִ֖ים וִֽילָד֑וֹת מְשַׂחֲקִ֖ים בִּרְחֹֽבֹתֶֽיהָ׃

There will yet be elderly men and women in the squares of Jerusalem, each with staff in hand because of their great age. And the streets of the city shall be crowded with boys and girls playing in the streets.

On Tisha B’Av, just a few days earlier, Rabbi J. J. Schacter, in his magisterial parsing of the kinot, the lamentations recited that day, took up these verses.

“Is that really the best the Zechariah could do?” he asked, rhetorically. “Shouldn’t the vision for a rebuilt Jerusalem be grander, more transcendent?

“In these times,” he went on, “we can perhaps forgo transcendence. What we hope for is normalcy. Old men and women standing around. Children playing in the streets. In our present circumstances, that would be more than enough.”

Oleg, Aleksei, and Ilya finished their work in just over two hours. They waved good-bye and hopped into their truck, heading off to their next job somewhere in the merkaz, the center of the country.

I waved as I watched them leave. What I saw were not children at play but young men in the full flush and vigor of youth, heading into the streets of Jerusalem, presumably mulling youthful things: hatching plans, spinning dreams, sketching new forms of self-expression. They did this even though they knew that the life they were building is surrounded by unquenchable hate, and beset within by conflict, risk, and steady, dangerous demands for self-sacrifice. They would not express such thoughts in flowery, prophetic cadences, but in the blunt rhythms of fatalism: terse, curt, uninflected. This is ragil, regular. This is how it is. It is so elsewhere, and it is surely so here. Life, this life, this regilut. This life will proceed.

The poignancy ached. Not because Zechariah’s prophecy has not yet been fulfilled, but because it seemed hard, even for young men with their lives spread out before them, to imagine that it ever will be.

The truck pulled out, turned left, and was gone.