David Grossman - Death as a Way of Life

In Israel, if you lose your handbag, or if you leave your suitcase unattended for a minute to go buy a bus ticket, upon your return you’re likely to find it being detonated by a sapper robot. Many streets are closed off in Jerusalem each day because of suspicious objects. All Israelis know that they must allow double the normal time to get anywhere because of these security controls. Boarding an El Al plane is a complicated matter, involving interrogations and personal searches. (It’s almost like trying to get into a prestigious college.)

A large segment of the workforce hold security-related jobs. Huge amounts of energy, invention, and creativity that could have gone into science or technology and into improving the quality of life are channeled into security. Personal freedoms and rights are restricted and taken away in order to protect life. You can be sure that at this very moment every Western state is installing a dense web of surveillance over private telephone calls and e-mail traffic. Thousands of innocent civilians are being arrested, and will continue to be arrested, in an effort to prevent the next attack. An entire army of secret agents will now be allowed to invade every private, intimate area.

In the years to come we will see more people carrying firearms in the streets of the United States and Europe. This massive presence will affect every little run-in and confrontation, even over parking spaces. The violence and murder rates will rise. Fingers will be heavier on the trigger. “I thought he was a terrorist” is an acceptable justification for shooting people in terror-stricken areas.

It’s not only countries that will be trapped by the security networks they use to protect “normal life” (except that life long ago stopped being normal). This coarse, stiff veneer will also coat the individual soul, the soul of each human being. That is the immediate result of living in fear, in suspicion of every unfamiliar person. It is the way every normal person defends himself against the pain of what is liable to be taken from him at any moment. It is the inability to believe in normalcy even for a minute. Every habitual sequence of events is but an illusion, and he who is tempted to believe in it will not be prepared for the blow when it comes. Maybe that’s the worst thing of all — the person who lives for a time in the shadow of terror no longer knows how enslaved he has become to the struggle for survival, and how much he is, in fact, already a victim.

It is painful to admit, but in a certain sense terror always succeeds. The war against it, and the process of becoming accustomed to what it does with our lives, slowly perverts all that is precious and human, all that makes life worthwhile.

The frightened civilian very quickly composes his own internal mechanism that identifies and catalogues strangers by their racial/national/ethnic traits. Like it or not, he becomes more of a bigot, more suspectible to stereotypes and preconceptions. It is not hard to predict that, under such conditions, the political parties that feed off xenophobia and racism will flourish. Nor is it hard to predict how bitter the lives of minorities will be, especially those who, in outward appearance, match the profile of the suspect terrorists.

Just a few weeks of life in the shadow of the fear of terror will show every nation that believes itself enlightened just how rapidly and sharply it can turn needs into values, permit fear to determine its norms. Terror humiliates. It rapidly sends a human being back to a pre-cultural, violent, chaotic existence. It determines where society’s breaking point is. It entices certain groups, not small ones, to join it, and to actively seek to use force to destroy and crush everything they hate. Terror contains something that acts like a digestive enzyme — it decomposes the private human body and the body politic.

Terror also sharpens one’s awareness that a democratic, tranquil way of life requires a great deal of goodwill, the constant goodwill of a country’s citizens. That is the amazing secret of democratic rule, and also its Achilles’ heel. All of us are, when it comes down to it, each other’s hostages. Terrorists act on this potential, and so unstring the entire fabric of life.

I regret having to write so bluntly. This is unbearable for me, too, because as I write, I myself realize how great the price is that I, as an Israeli, pay each and every day and moment, in each and every dream at night, in each and every morning farewell to my children.

But it is now, when we are still overcome with shock, when every sane person is in despair over the evil and cruelty of which people are capable, that I want to reiterate something. We, all of us, have so much to lose. That which is most precious to us is so fragile. Countries that fight terror fight not only for the physical security of their citizens. They fight also for their humanity, and for everything that makes them civilized.

October 2001

This article was commissioned by the French newspaper Libération, as part of a series of personal diaries by authors.

Saturday, October 13, 2001

Saturday’s a great day to get your bomb shelter in order. As my wife and I do our best to clear out all the junk that’s piled up there since the last time we thought there’d be a war (it wasn’t that long ago, just a year back, when the Intifada broke out), my young daughter is busy making up the list of friends she wants to invite to her upcoming birthday party. A weighty question: Should she invite Tali, who didn’t invite her to her birthday party? We discuss the problem, trying to mobilize all the gravity it deserves, just so that we can at least keep up an appearance of routine. But the terrorist attacks in the United States have in fact robbed us of that illusion, of the possibility of depending on some sort of logical continuity. A thought is always hovering in the air: Who knows where we will be a month from now.

We already know that our lives will not be as they were before September 11. When the World Trade Center towers collapsed, a deep, long crack appeared in the old reality. The muffled roar of everything that might burst out can be heard through the crack — violence, cruelty, fanaticism, and madness. All is suddenly possible. The wish that we might keep what we have, keep up a daily routine, suddenly seems exposed and vulnerable. The effort to maintain some sort of routine now seems so touching, even heroic — to keep family, home, friends together.

We decide to invite Tali.

Sunday

I’m lucky that the suggestion to write this journal came as I was beginning to write a new story. If it weren’t for that, I’m afraid my diary would have been quite melancholy.

Several months have gone by since I finished my last book, and I felt that not writing was having a bad effect on me. When I’m not writing, I have a feeling that I don’t really understand anything. That everything that happens to me, all events and statements and encounters, exist only side by side, without any real contact between them. But the minute I begin writing a new story, everything suddenly becomes intertwined into a single cord; every event feeds into and imbues all other events with life. Every sight I see, every person I meet is a hint that’s been sent to me, waiting for me to decipher it.

I’m writing a story about a man and a woman. That is, it began as a short story about a man alone, but the woman he met, who was supposed to be just a chance passerby who listens to his story, suddenly interests me no less than he does. I wonder if it is correct, from a literary point of view, to get so involved with her. She changes the center of gravity I had planned for the story. She disrupts the delicate balance it requires. Last night I woke up thinking that I ought to take her out entirely and replace her with a different character, someone paler, who wouldn’t overshadow my protagonist. But in the morning, when I saw her in writing, I just couldn’t part with her. At least not before I got to know her a little better. I wrote her all day.