The Little Things

Out of the corner of my eye I see a sticker of Eden Yerushalmi by the entrance to the coffee shop. My head says: ‘They executed her. Why is she still here?’ I order a flat white with oat milk.

You have to sort of push it down, ignore it. Carry on with whatever. The war is everywhere, yet dispersed, competing with whatever illusion of normal life you’re propping up.

I go for dinner with a friend. She’s stressed, work is hard. Half the office is out on reserve duty.

‘So, who does the work?’ She looks at me like I’m from an alien planet. ‘It gets done, or it doesn’t.’ She admits to taking the morning off to buy a selection of pot plants.

‘What we’re going through, it counts. It matters. We’re going through this war too, not just the soldiers’ she insists as we chow our way through starter plates of masabacha and aubergine dip.

I gave back my rental car, so I don’t see all the BRING THEM HOME bumper stickers and yellow ribbons on wing mirrors, not any more. Or motorway bridges draped with flags of sad protest.

The city is a gift of distractions, bars, restaurants that require reservations, friends you can bump into, shop windows with sales for warm clothes. After all, it’s getting chilly at night.

Still, the war is spattered all over us like flecks of expressionist paint.

Sometimes I think it’s because I’m a foreigner, that I don’t really get it. I’m overreacting, out of the loop. Then I sit with a friend who lives in Jaffa, grew up in Nahariya. He’s flipping out.

He refuses to meet on Dizengoff – ‘can we go somewhere less bombable?’ We agree to hummus at a quiet street in the Yemenite Quarter.

They have a new baby, his wife wants them to move to Holland. She barely leaves the house with their one-year old son, mostly for forays down to a small communal garden. Months and months, almost a year, this tiny circle, life played out within three-dozen metres. They’d been excited to send the kid to bilingual Arabic-Hebrew play school. I doubt they’ll find that in Rotterdam.

‘It’s not the rockets. That’s easy – you just go downstairs and wait. No, it’s the terror attacks’. He looks at me while chewing through a plate of hummus with whole chickpeas on the side. He’s been telling me that during the big Iranian attack he tried and retried the door handle of their mamad, panicking that terrorists would break in. ‘Sometimes I think we live in the most amazing place on earth, it’s so cool. Sometimes I think we’re in hell.’

That’s reassuring, I suppose. I think more or less the same. The impossible calculus. As the sun sets, groups of women in lycra leggings do pilates on the grass. Tanned men in Ray-Bans cycle and scoot and skate and jog past. Bold, beautiful, battle hardened. Apparently unfazed by the proximity of death – giving or taking – supercharged by permanent hero status.

I return a windbreaker to the store – it was one size too big. The shop assistant recognizes me, gives me a hug. ‘Ata Gibor – You’re a Warrior!’, he exclaims. Am I? All I did was buy a jacket and return it.

Over a fruit tea on the couch, I hear about Inbar’s nephew. ‘He’s nineteen. Combat soldier in Lebanon – in Golani, ok? Lost five kilos in two weeks. They don’t feed them. It’s all happening in empty houses. The people left fast, still food in the fridge. They turned off the water so they have to – you know, go to the bathroom – in a nylon. Take it outside. They’re good kids, they don’t steal things.’

‘When he came home for Shabbat he had a scarf, like a football scarf, with Nasrallah’s face on it. His mother told him to take it away, she didn’t want to see that.’

Inbar sits up to quote her nephew, “But Mum, it’s rare. Worth something. They don’t make them anymore.”

November is still beach weather, if you head down in the middle of the day. Cold to swim but lovely to curl up on a towel and doze over a book. There’s a fixed price for french fries, thirty shekels a portion, though of course you should tip. The waiters live off tips.

By the sun beds there’s a wooden box packed full of placards with life-sized faces of the hostages. Around twenty different ones, mostly still alive.