Pale of Settlement

Helicopter Days

The bomb went off downtown, near the entrance to the Haifa Carmelit subway, at 5:27 on a Friday morning in late June. It blew up a white Fiat and shattered the plate glass windows of the Bank Hapoalimbranchacrosstheintersection.Itexplodedastreetlight, two signposts, and part of the stone wall bordering the sidewalk on the subway side of the street. The lower branches of a eucalyptus tree were burned clear of leaves, and the trunk was singed with streaks of black, like a primitive drawing. The pavement was covered with bits of twisted metal and broken stone. Thedawninglightwasgrayasglass.Alongthebeaches,lessthan akilometeraway,wavesfoldedoveronthesand.HalfwayupMount Carmel, a muezzin called the faithful to prayer from a loudspeaker mounted on a minaret. In the cypresses that lined the steep slope of the Baha’i gardens, below the temple’s golden dome, jays woke and began to chatter, agitating the branches of the trees. Near the top of the Carmel, from the couch in her father’s old room where Love is a simultaneous firing of two spirits engaged in the autonomous act of growing up. And the sensation is of something having noiselessly exploded inside each of them. Lawrence Durrell, Justine Helicopter Days     ~ h e l i c o p t e r d a y s she slept behind green trissim folded down against the light, Susan didnotheartheexplosionontheHadar.Othersoundscametoher asifthroughwater:theclinkofcutlery,abarkingdog,themurmur ofaradio.TheVoiceofIsraelreportedinitsnineo’clockbroadcast thatnoonehadbeeninjuredintheblast.Otherthanadisruptionto traffic,everythingwasfunctioningasnormal.Onlyafewcommuters , stepping out of the Carmelit station into the daylight, noticed the smell of burned rubber, the toppled poles, the unswept bits of glass. During that summer of the 1982 war in Lebanon, nothing seemed dangerousthewaySusanhadimagineditwould.Thatsummer,the firsttimeSusanhadcometoIsraelonherown,shewalkedwithher grandmother as usual to the corner makolet to buy plastic sacks of milk and loaves of bread; on the merkaz, people sat outside in the cafés, drinking coffee and smoking, as they always did. There were soldiers about, kids her age, hitchhiking at bus stops or by the beach, the boys with m16s slung over their shoulders, the girls in khakiskirtsandcaps,butthat,too,wasnothingnew.WhenSusan’s parents telephoned from New York, she assured them everything was fine. Still, there was a tension in the air, like the faint buzz of high-voltage power lines: a sense of the borders just there, around that headland, over those hills. The narrowness of the land. From her grandparents’ terrace, Susan could see the army hel­ icopters landing on the roof of Rambam hospital. On some days, bad days, she counted ten or fifteen at a time, pulsing low along the horizon on their way in, arcing high out over the bay on their return to the north. Lebanon was barely twenty miles away, less than the distance from Susan’s parents’ apartment in Riverdale to h e l i c o p t e r d a y s ~  the bottom of Staten Island. Even though she couldn’t understand most of the newscaster’s words, Susan watched the news each evening on tv, footage of Israeli soldiers waving to their families back home, women in bikinis sunbathing on the beaches near Beirut, rows of Mercedes parked along the palm tree–lined boulevards. Look at that, Susan’s aunt said, they don’t care about the war at all! But hadn’t Susan gone to the beach herself that very day? A story ran in the Jerusalem Post claiming that a photograph of an armless LebaneseorphanwoundedbyIsraelishellingwas,infact,ahealthy Druze child with limbs and parents both intact. Susan studied the grainy photograph that showed a baby swaddled in a blanket in the arms of a Red Cross nurse. It was impossible to tell. HerfriendsbackinNewYorkdidn’tconsiderIsraelasafeplace. Don’t things blow up over there all the time? they said. Once, as a little girl, Susan had reached for an empty plastic jug lying on the ground, and her grandmother had slapped her, hard, on the hand. Never,evertouchanythingyoufindonthestreet!hergrandmother scolded. You never know what could be a bomb! But the truth was Susan had never encountered anything remotely dangerous there. Israel was the place her parents and all her relatives were from. It was almost home. Susan’s cousin Gavi was in the army, stationed near the Syrian borderintheGolanHeights.Mostweeks,hecamehomeonFriday night for Shabbat, just as if he had a regular job. He sprawled on the couch, his army boots unlaced and shirt unbuttoned, watching Dallas reruns on tv. Susan wanted to know what it was like along...