The Wanting (3 page)

He stood at the foot of the bed with his hands behind his back, rocking on his heels, and assured me that, one, retribution would be enacted; two, I was a hero of the Jewish People; and, three, all my medical bills including rehabilitation, counseling by Ms. Katsir or the Russian speaker of my choice, and any necessary prosthetics would be taken care of courtesy of that same Jewish People for whom I had so recently become a hero. “And no copay!” he added. Finally he inched a little closer, patted the air above my hand, and asked me if there was anything else I needed. I could tell he was not much moved by my plight. I had only a torn-up face, busted eardrums, and a severed bicep. He was probably, and
rightly, thinking of Dasha Cohen, the girl in the coma, only sixteen years old; or rather he was probably thinking he did not want to face her parents. Her picture had been in
Haaretz
and
Yedioth Ahronoth
that morning. And even though the doctors forbade me to read the papers, Anyusha brought in several anyway, because I asked her to, including
Vesti
, which I never read because I don’t want my news in Russian, but, in this case, I did. This was on the second day of my internment, the first time I saw Dasha’s face, but of course at the time I only vaguely understood her importance to me. In fact, I was more interested in finding out what had happened to me. Natural enough. Where exactly did the bomb go off? When exactly? How strong was the explosion? Of what did the bomb consist? How much of my lovely street corner was in ruins?

In the meantime the Minister of Blown-Up People set a little Israeli flag in a tiny stand upon my night table, beside which he placed his card. And with that he said shalom and left the room.

Anyusha got up from her chair, made her way around my bed, and picked up the card.

“Cool,” she declared.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just think it’s nice.”

Suddenly I was frightened for her. Who was taking care of her?

“Where’s Babushka?” I said.

“Don’t worry about Babushka. I’m staying with Shana.”

“Shana?”

“Don’t you remember her mom came with me this morning? She already told you I was staying there.”

“So you’re okay?”

“Of course, I’m okay. I’m always okay. Or don’t you know that by now?”

“So you’re okay?” I repeated, or at least I think I did, but maybe I fell back asleep, because when I opened my eyes again, she was gone.

•    •    •

It had been Anyusha who first mentioned the name Amir Hamid. He had not yet made it into the papers, but his face was already on Channel 1, “At least once every five minutes,” Anyusha exclaimed.

“Then it will be in
Maariv
this evening, for sure,” I said. “Bring me a copy.”

“No problem, Papoola,” she smiled.

The newspaper photos Anyusha smuggled in were not very helpful, and the doctors wouldn’t let me watch TV. “For God’s sake, just rest,” they’d ordered. But I needed to see, not sleep. I needed to gauge exactly how close I’d come to dying, by what measure the thread of my life was frayed. I needed this in order to appreciate my woundedness, to feel the gravity of my suffering, to let the pleasant shudder of horror sweep over me, to be afraid. And so I craved to see with my own eyes the headless torsos, the severed limbs, the twisted metal, the broken glass, the blood-soaked benches shredded into splinters. Otherwise, I was just in the hospital with a few stitches on my forehead. I might as well have slipped in the tub or walked through the patio door on my way to the barbecue. So I studied the newspaper photos with great, even exquisite care. But all they were were shots of emergency workers lifting gurneys into ambulances.

“Have you been to see it?” I asked my daughter.

“I’m sure it’s already cleaned up. The only thing different is probably the bus shelter is gone.”

“Well,” I said, “don’t go over there. You understand?”

She shrugged and returned to her comic book. “By tomorrow the shelter will be back, too.”

Over time, I gleaned the facts. Young Amir Hamid from a town somewhere near Bethlehem in the Judean Hills, the son of Abdul-Latif Hamid, a shopkeeper specializing in auto repair, and Najya Hamid, the mother of four—Amir had three sisters—was given a vest into which were sewn eight small tubes of C-4, a high explosive popular in American action movies, which were activated by pressing the unlock button of a Mercedes-Benz ignition key. The
key had been wired to a simple detonator fitted into a small pocket in the suicide vest and was powered by two double-A batteries that had previously lived in the remote control of Amir Hamid’s father’s television set. This was the small detail that finally ripped the veil of lassitude from my eyes.

Did Hamas suicide vests come with a label that read
BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED
? There must have been a story, more than what I learned when Najya, the mother, appeared on Al Jazeera and Palestine TV triumphantly holding up the remote control with its empty battery compartment and crying, “These are the batteries of martyrdom! Victory is Allah’s, mighty and benevolent, and to his servant, Muhammad, may a prayer of peace be upon him!” No. They’d done a little test, his Hamas babysitter and Amir, and the original batteries were duds. “I have some at home,” Amir must have told him, probably thinking, Why spend money on new batteries that are only going to be used once? I imagined the frustration when Amir opened the back of his radio and found it used C batteries. The camera, Walkman, and nose-hair clipper—they all took triple-As. Finally, in desperation he popped open his dad’s beloved remote control. He must have known how pissed off Abdul-Latif would be when he came home and tried to turn on
Who Wants to Win a Million?
on Syria TV. But what could he do? Mr. Hamas was waiting at the safe house with a vest full of C-4 and a video camera, so he muttered a prayer of regret, stuffed his father’s CopperTops into his pocket, and placed the now-lifeless remote on his father’s pillow with a little note—“Sorry, but your batteries are needed to liberate Palestine. Love, Amir.” Maybe he thought he should have left a few shekels for new ones but decided he needed what little he had in his pockets for carfare. Perhaps then he took one last look around his father’s house, the house of his childhood, his youth, his young adulthood now come to an end, took in with a sigh the photos on the walls—the family portrait taken when little Salah was only two, or the one of himself on his twelfth birthday, or his parents’ wedding photo, or his three sisters in their school uniforms—perhaps he hesitated one moment more to inhale the scent of tobacco, the musty carpet, last night’s eggplant
fatteh, and the peculiar residue of motor oil that permeated any room his father long inhabited; I can only hope his mother was then taking her midmorning nap, so he could, at last, having refocused his mind on the Koran and the blessings of Allah, quietly slip through the door and run back to the moldy basement where Mr. Hamas was waiting impatiently, perhaps worrying that Amir had changed his mind.

Hamas must have been using some crappy batteries from India, I thought.

But crappy batteries or not, Najya Hamid was a proud mom. Even some weeks later, after the IDF bulldozed her house, and she, Abdul-Latif, and the girls had to move in with Abdul-Latif’s brother a few blocks away on Armenia Street, she said she wished Amir would come back to life so that he could blow himself up all over again. This was in a little film called
Mothers of Martyrs
that was broadcast repeatedly on PBC.

I was struck by this incident of the batteries. I wondered what Mr. Abdul-Latif Hamid felt when he learned that it was his own batteries that set off the explosion that blew his son to pieces and massacred eight other people, including Suliman bin-Sula and Mukhtar Raif, two Arab construction workers on the first leg of their long commute back to Ramalah. I remember thinking this weeks later, and in great agitation rising from my chair and walking across the living room to Anyusha who was doing homework at the kitchen table, and running my fingers through her thick, dark hair, which she had recently cut short and spiky to look like her Japanese comic book heroes, and thinking: What of mine will you steal to kill yourself with?

The bomb went off at exactly 4:23 p.m. on that Wednesday afternoon in 1996, in a bus shelter on the corner of the street my office is on. Even though the explosion was timed with the onset of rush hour, the authorities speculated that it ignited prematurely, perhaps even accidentally, as the C-4 would have caused significantly more damage had Amir actually stepped onto the bus before pressing
the unlock button on the Mercedes key. As it was, the pressure wave shattered windows in a fifty-meter radius and sent debris flying in a more or less perfect circle at a velocity approaching the speed of sound. This short (less than one second) but quite lethal (nine dead, forty-two wounded) shock wave exceeded one thousand tons per square millimeter at the epicenter of the blast; by the time it reached my office, approximately twenty-four meters away, the pressure had decreased to a mere three hundred and twenty kilograms per square millimeter, enough to break glass and pop eardrums and throw a seventy-five-kilo man off his chair but not enough to rip apart my innards or soften the masonry in my three-hundred-year-old building significantly enough to bring the walls down around my head. However, the Egged bus that had, some seconds earlier, come to a halt in front of Amir was thrown three meters into the air and landed across the street, on its side, like a dead horse. The bus shelter was vaporized. There remained only a few stems of twisted aluminum poking up from the ground. On one of these, a life-size poster of Rita on the cover of her new album doggedly hung on, flapping in the wind, her face dripping with blood.

This particular detail I know because it was described to me by several bystanders, mostly people who were in the coffee shop across the square, a coffee shop I myself frequented most days of the week. Everyone knows me there, and everyone found it necessary to tell me the same story. I wondered if they had all seen it or if they had merely heard it from one another. It didn’t really matter. I asked my friend Lonya—who now calls himself Ari—who happened to be coming to see me that day and had just turned the corner onto my street when the bomb exploded. He could not remember the poster.

“I just hit the ground,” he said. “When I looked up there was blood everywhere.” Which is also what everyone says.

Lonya, too, had the ringing in his ears. “It sounds like fleas,” he complained. “Like a million fucking fleas, all day, all night. Sometimes I want to blow my own head off.”

All this I found sad, fascinating, disturbing, and meaningless.

•    •    •

But back to the hospital. They finally let me go, and I arrived home at about two o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Shabbat. Shana’s mother, Daphne, picked me up. Shana was Anyusha’s best friend. They all came up to the room, the girls carrying balloons in the shape of hearts and Daphne with a basket of food cradled in her arms. We ate a little lunch, and then the two girls ran around tossing all my things in a bag. They found this highly amusing. I pulled the curtains around the bed so I could change into the clothes Daphne had picked out for me, and I emerged feeling much more myself—a man with a pair of pants. Then I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and foolishly took a moment to actually examine myself in the mirror. What I saw was something more like the invisible man, a creature of science fiction, its face entombed in bandages. The question was, What lay beneath these bandages?

Daphne and her daughter lived only a few doors down from me. Our town was situated just north of Tel Aviv—not Herzliya, not Ra’anana, but nice. The apartments in our small complex surrounded a garden, so it was almost like we all lived in one great big house, although, come to think of it, I had no idea who most of my neighbors were. I might recognize their faces when I passed them, might say good morning or good evening, but I didn’t know their names, their stories. I knew Daphne mostly because of Anyusha, and her story was this in a nutshell: Daphne was divorced. Her husband had remained in the army and over time had changed, at least according to her. “He became hard,” she once told me. She repeated the word “hard” with a distant, almost mystical, look, as if she could see the heart inside him calcifying before her eyes. “He spent a lot of time in Gaza,” she explained.

Daphne was an artist, but she made her living doing computer graphics. At night, though, she toiled over her watercolors. To describe her, I would say: average height, average build, just an average girl. Her bland, ocher hair was neat and short. Her lips were the color of mouse, always in need of lipstick. But the main
trouble was her eyes. A very deep, almost tarry brown, that always, and quite improbably given her circumstances, radiated hope.

“Here,” she said, as we gathered my things and made our way down the hospital corridor, “hold on to me. You probably can’t even see with all that stuff on your face.”

She led me to the car, guided me into the seat on the passenger side. I was actually surprised that I needed the help. More shaky than I’d thought. She reached over and fastened my seat belt.

When we were on the road, I couldn’t help myself. “Can we pass by?” I asked.

“There’s nothing to see,” she said.

“Still.”

“There’s nothing there.”

“Nothing for you, perhaps.”

“It will upset the girls.”

“Don’t worry. It’s already cleaned up,” I insisted.

“Then why go?”

A muffled, disconsolate voice came from the backseat. “He won’t stop until you do what he wants. Just do it.”

She had to change directions altogether and head toward the center of town. As an architect, I had thought location important. A beautiful building, one of the oldest in town, white stone, low, exotic doors, unquestionably Ottoman; but I gutted the inside of our suite, installed brazilwood floors, stainless credenzas, a glass conference table surrounded by six Herman Miller chairs. I had a small Snaidero kitchenette with brightly enameled three-legged stools, a sitting area with Barcelona chairs and a genuine Børge Morgensen coffee table. And, of course, the floor-to-ceiling window that later came crashing down on top of me and was the reason my face was wrapped in gauze and a searing pain was shooting down my right arm and up across my shoulder.