Eshkol Nevo - Homesick

Thirty-four injured, Sima says, repeating the number the Deputy Director has just said as if it were a mantra for self-relaxation. Thirty-four.

As I dial the first number on the page, I recall those stories from Memorial Day programmes about mothers who feel in their bodies, even before the army officers knock on their doors, that their son has been killed. Did Yotam’s mother feel it too?

I check to see what I’m feeling inside my body, and find turmoil.

*

On days when there’s a suicide bombing, Jews don’t answer you. Even if you ask, ‘How much does this juice cost?’ they don’t answer. And if they do, you can tell from their voice how scared they are. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, wherever you go, the radio is screaming words like ‘savages’ or ‘murderers’. And you want to scream back at the radio. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I feel shame in my heart, and pride too, and I don’t understand how I can feel both those things at the same time. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I calculate how to save more money than Nehila and I are already saving. Maybe we should rent out a room in the house. Maybe we should sell some of her gold jewellery. Maybe our oldest boy should leave school and start working. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, even I am afraid of buses. Every time our van is behind a bus, I think there’s going to be an explosion and I picture the back of the bus flying through the window and the glass slicing into our throat. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I say to myself: calm down, Saddiq. There’s already been one bombing. It’s not logical for there to be two on the same day. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I think about my cousin Munir, who went to study medicine in Italy and met an Italian girl from a rich family and married her. He sends us pictures of his big house that has a beautiful garden and a pool, and he’s standing there with a completely shaven face, and even though it’s only a picture, you can smell his expensive cologne. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I think about my mother and what she always calls Munir: a traitor. She says: a person should die in the place where he was born. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I want to go back to bed and get under the winter blanket and be a child again, not a father who has to go to work, put food on the table and think every day about what tomorrow will bring. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I love my wife again. Even though she’s fat from all the babies she’s had, even though she has wrinkles around her eyes. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I stroke her hair before we fall asleep and kiss her forehead. On days when there’s a bombing, I want to smoke, even though I gave up, and drink a bottle of whiskey, even though it’s not allowed. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I don’t listen to music, but I eat a lot. I eat everything my wife puts on my plate and go to the pots to see if there’s anything left. On days when there’s a suicide bombing, I remember the chief prison guard, Eli Barzilai, and hope that asshole was on the bus that exploded. But I also remember one girl soldier who heard me crying in my cell and gave me a Marlboro Light from her pack, and I hope she decided to take her car today.

*

At first, I ran around taking pictures of everything like a madwoman. Small groups of people, large groups, bloodstains on glass. The area looked like the palm of someone who squashed a mosquito that had food in its mouth. I finished three rolls of film one after the other without stopping, without thinking. Without even feeling. It’s a good thing Schwartz Photos was open and he still had Fuji 200. Schwartz’s son gave me a you-must-be-crazy-to-be-taking-pictures-today look, but I didn’t care. The main thing was to get back to the scene and start looking for mistakes. I saw a sign on a shoe shop right above the skeleton of the bus that said EXPLOSIVE SALE. I noticed other photographers, like me, who were looking for the right angle, hiding behind their cameras. I tried to document the first signs of life going back to its regular routine. The first violinist to take his violin out of its case and play a heart-rending melody to the cold stones, and to me. The first falafel stand to reopen. The first man to buy and eat half an order, tahini dripping down his chin. The first European traveller to stop and look at the frame of the bus for a few minutes and then continue walking down the pedestrian area. And I wasn’t the least bit scared. Not that I’m brave or anything. Just the opposite. Every little noise in the house at night scares me. Once I even convinced Amir that there was a burglar in the living room, and he went to see, armed with a tennis racket, and found that it was a small plastic bag making all the noise. But during all the time I spent on Jaffa Street, I wasn’t worried for even a minute. I was completely engrossed in my work. It wasn’t until the end of the day, on the bus going home, that I suddenly got scared.

And that was when I took the best picture, the one I’m looking at now.

At that hour, the number one-five-four bus is usually full, and I have to stand for half the trip, holding on to a post or the back of a seat and regretting that I’m not wearing more comfortable shoes. But when I got on this time, most of the seats were empty. The few passengers looked suspiciously at me and tried to figure out how dangerous I was and what was in that bulging bag I was carrying (a camera, folks, calm down). I sat down in the seat behind the driver, the one reserved for old or handicapped people, and hoped that more people would get on at the next stop. No one did. The driver, wearing a blue sweater over a white button-down shirt, passed the empty bus stop without pulling in to it. I remembered A.B. Yehoshua’s story, ‘Galia’s Stop’. The hero is on a bus, going to see his childhood sweetheart, and at some point the ride becomes a total hallucination, and it turns out that the bus is moving through the streets without a driver.

Suddenly, I had an idea. I went to a seat at the back of the bus, attached my flash, switched to Fuji 800 film and started snapping. I explained to the astonished passengers that it was for a project I was doing at photography college and I promised not to photograph their faces. They were too exhausted to argue with me. Two or three raised an eyebrow, but the rest just ignored me and sank back into their coats.

The pictures turned out to be grainy. Slightly blurry. From the people sitting and standing, you might guess they’re on a bus, but it’s only a guess. The backs of two necks fill the centre of the frame, one thick like a man’s, the other thin and wrinkled, like an old woman’s. The windows reflect each other, and my image with my camera in front of my face is caught in one of them. The driver isn’t in this shot. The angle I took it from makes it seem as if the bus is moving along without a driver. The ‘Break in Case of Emergency’ hammer is in the upper corner of the frame. An ad for the Kupat Holim Sick Fund is on the left. And the blurriness anaesthetises everything. It’s hard to explain. When I developed the picture, I felt that I’d succeeded in doing what’s so hard to do when you deal only with the external, only with what you can see: catching the inner sense. A week later, I named the picture ‘After a Terrorist Attack’ and hung it proudly on the wall of our classroom.

My fellow students actually complimented me on it before the lesson, but the lecturer stared at it for a while, sniffed twice and said: aesthetic, very aesthetic, in a tone that was leading up to a ‘but’, so I beat him to it and said, but what? He didn’t smile. He just said, I’m asking myself, Noa, where are you in all this? And I, a perfect idiot, pointed to my reflection in one of the bus windows, and he, his bottom lip drooping in disappointment, said, yes, very nice, but that’s not what I meant. What’s missing here is the emotion, Noa, what do you feel about all this?