When Terror Calls, the Urge to Stay Put Remains Strongest

JERUSALEM —  Two weekends ago, I was in Tel Aviv visiting a friend. We awoke Sunday morning to the news of the No. 18 bus blowing up at 6:45 a.m. in Jerusalem, only a few blocks from my apartment there. I rarely take the 18, and I’m never awake before 8 a.m., so it didn’t occur to me that anyone would be worried.

I returned home that afternoon to a hysterical roommate. Because I had been away, she had convinced herself I was a casualty. She called a number of my friends, reporting me missing. They had called the hospitals and police, looking for a tall blond American woman wearing hiking boots or running shoes.

“Stupid Americans!” my roommate scolded as she hugged me. “Don’t you know that the first thing you must do when something like this happens is to call and let people know you’re all right?”

I didn’t know. Now I do.

That night I walked to the corner where the bus had blown up. Hundreds of people milled around, along with soldiers and police. The bus had been removed, but shards of glass covered the street and sidewalk.

I picked up a thin piece of wood, about 6 inches long, a long nail jutting through its center. Probably a part of the bus window. I put it in my pocket. Morbid, I thought. But I wanted this to be real. I felt numb.

*

I went through the week feeling moody, but my life went on as always. Newspaper pictures of the dead hung outside newsstands. But I avoided thinking about the terrorist attacks, or the chances of another happening again soon.

“When you ride the buses, stand only in the very front or the very back,” my friend David from Hebron cautioned me.

“Never get on a crowded bus, and if you notice anyone who looks at all strange, get off,” David continued.

I listened to his advice, but I didn’t absorb it. I often take up to six buses a day. Often they are crowded. Everyone looks suspicious to me. I can’t change my life because of this. I can’t think about it; I’d turn into a nervous wreck. I rode the buses, and I didn’t think about it.

A week later, I awoke to an insistent knock on my bedroom door.

Removing an earplug, I yelled “What?” groggily, annoyed at the disturbance. My roommate opened the door. “There’s been another bomb on the 18. Twenty people are dead.” She began crying and closed my door.

My head pounded. I tried to go back to sleep. Twenty people dead. The phone rang. I heaved myself out of bed and rushed to answer it.

“Andrea, did you hear? Are you OK?” David.

“I don’t want you riding the buses. Where do you have to go today? I’ll drive you.”

I planned to catch a bus to an aerobics class that afternoon. For the first time, I didn’t want to. Maybe I’d let David drive me. Maybe I’d walk the four miles.

The low voice of an Israeli announcer blared from the radio in the next room. My Hebrew is weak. I just understood the word “dead,” and the sobs and cries. My roommate told me that people from the burial society were climbing buildings to scrape pieces of bodies off the walls.

The next afternoon, I was visiting a friend. The phone rang. “Oh, my God,” she said into the receiver. “How many were killed?” A bomb in Tel Aviv. At Dizengoff Center, exactly where I had spent the weekend two weeks before.

*

I don’t want to live like this. It’s not right. I am a Jew in the land of Israel, and I don’t want to be afraid. I don’t want to see the pictures of the dead in the newspapers. I don’t want this to be real.

“It’s just going to get worse,” David said. “Pretty soon only crazy ideologues like myself are going to want to live here. Why would any normal person live in a country like this?”

I wondered myself. I thought of my parents, how they must feel when they hear this kind of news. I thought of getting a ticket home, at least for a visit.

Tuesday, on Purim, Jews celebrated the victory over those who wanted to destroy them in Persia 2,400 years ago. Jews across the world ate, drank, exchanged gifts with friends and donated money to charity. At the same time, we mourned. We waited for the next tragedy.

*

Ours is a stiff-necked people, the Bible tells us. I see it in myself. What am I, a nice American girl from an ordinary family in Tucson, Ariz., doing in Jerusalem, at the expense of all the niceties of life as I once knew it? Before I moved here a year and a half ago, I worked in Los Angeles. I had a beautiful apartment with wood floors and antique furniture, a spiffy car and a good job, an office with a view, manicures every week, designer clothes.

Here, I wear hiking boots to get me through the rain without slipping. I haven’t bought new clothes since I’ve been here. I work from a desk made of two crooked dining room chairs in a cluttered apartment with pink walls, black speckled linoleum and horrific ‘70s-style orange couches.

Life here is real. It’s concrete--life, death, person-to-person contact. From politics to religion to the weather, everything is extreme. They say God’s presence rests heaviest in Israel, and I feel it.

When I go back to America, it’s as though I’m walking into a plastic bubble. There is a thin film between myself and reality. My senses are bombarded with sex, music, billboards, beautiful people, beautiful things. I reel about, from car to cafe to mall. Everything is sleek, superficial. I am lulled into oblivion.

Here it’s impossible to forget what really matters.

I pray to God the violence stops. But I’m not leaving. I’ll continue to take the buses. I’ll continue to live. I’m not a crazy ideologue or a fatalist, nor did I ever think of myself as much of a Zionist. But I am a Jew in Israel, and though I don’t want to leave my apartment today, though I feel sad, tired and disoriented, still, I will not be scared out of my home.