November 6, 1989
Would you marry a penguin holding an egg, with porcupine legs?
I walk over it a hundred times every day. The dirty, grey sidewalks of New York. Flecks of dirt ground into the pavement under my feet, my eyes cast down, passing through life in a numb, determined mission. Expressionless, feelingless. I never will be able to free myself from this prison called life. I can't have it and I can't get out either. I'm just left gazing at it from afar, watching others go through the motions, wondering at what I am missing, what I will never have.
August 30, 1990
I know we are close to Jerusalem when the bus slows down and I feel the gears shift as it begins its uphill climb.
As students enter the university, an elderly security guard pats the bottom of our bags and mumbles "Boker Tov."
In class when I take out my books I have to turn them around a few times until I find the right side up.
September 20, 1990
Sunlight falls into my room, turning the white walls golden. On the bus hehind me a Swiss listens to a German exclaim that his father spoke an excellent Yiddish, even though he was a Nazi. An American oleh explains the Israeli military to his visiting friend. Women are not called up for reserve duty because usually a whole combat unit is called up together and women do not perform combat. Although parachuting is not performed in war anymore, it is continued as a training exercise to prove to the men that they have balls.
The paper reports on how American women soldiers in Saudi Arabia learn to practice discretion when they are off the bases.
I fumigate the apartment against biting insects that attack me while I sleep. All night long there is music and dancing in the park to celebrate the new year. I think of folklore descriptions of biblical scenes of annual dances where young people can meet, and where Ruth chose to lay down next to Boaz.
The newspaper reported that it was foggy at 1:45 p.m. when the crash occurred after a winter storm moved through the area. The ground was wet from a morning snow and sleet storm that delayed flights at the airport.
I sipped my morning coffee and wondered when I would find a husband. Friends back home were on my mind and Carol Ann had left the night before for England with a bag full of olive oil. After Michael's girlfriend left him he came over and we walked through the park together at night.
The newspapers report that when Kahane got shot the man with the yarmulke stood beside him. He was lying on the ground and someone placed a silver gun at his side. Defense lawyers are expected to argue that he was heavily sedated.
April 3, 1991
The war has come and gone. I preferred to keep notes in longhand. The news has dimmed into the distance, yet remains poignant. My pussycat has a puffy layer of winter fur.
The day we heard the Americans started bombing we were relieved. I sat with my neighbors, sipping tea with mint in lawn chairs we had set up in the little alley we lived on. That night at 2 in the morning the sirens went off. Madeline in New York tried to call me to wake me up. She never did get through. I was up anyhow, watching the news which was on 24 hours a day. I ran across the street to Esther's house and crowded into her tiny bedroom with her four children. For three hours they played music on the radio while we listened to planes overhead. We had a bucket in the corner to pee in. We had been told that we'd have several hours to prepare for an attack. In fact, we had about 4 minutes.
After about a week I created my own sealed room and stayed home during the sirens. I watched the news and used it as an opportunity to practice Hebrew. Pad and pencil in hand, I wrote down every word I thought I understood. An exercise I had learned in Ulpan (Hebrew classes). I wanted so desperately to understand that my mind cracked open and I finally began to comprehend the sounds that I was hearing.
I still get a start when I hear a siren that wails. In the midwest, they use them to announce tornadoes.
July 15, 1991
The door stood ajar as echoes from an airraid siren wailed through the empty city and the radio announced that cats now chase rats through the littered lobbies of five-star hotels. I had sent out letters and dropped them in a red mailbox labeled "Everywhere Except Jerusalem." I read the papers and touched by the images of civilian victimization: a dump truck clattered down the road on three tires and one rim, a man, woman and two children in the open trunk and two perched amid mattresses and bags on the roof. They stopped alongside a highway that pointed south and spoke of being lost and unwanted. All they had with them were a teapot, a few onions, a stove, and six tins of cooking oil. Tense togetherness is an indication of war.
Sometimes I confuse the war it is we're in with another time and place. Heavy deserts shifted their weight in sand and a missile hurtled into an unpopulated area in the center of the country. All systems working faultlessly, all switchboards being manned day and night, missions plowed ahead. Another missile slammed to earth and skidded down a commercial strip into the window of a jewelry shop. Body parts came crashing down and spilled forth in an echo of twisted limbs, torsos of siblings, fingers and aunts, wedding rings, biting teeth, hair with knots in it, dirty feet, wrinkled photographs. A blanket fell into deep folds around me. I clung to the wall of a sealed room and in one hour approximately 750,000 calls were made.
According to scientists, an active core theoretically continues to burn its way through the earth, coming out the other side. This, of course, does not happen. But it's hard to tell with those waves of spherical aberration. The visions at night particularly seemed somewhat dark and foggy. A full moon hung like a globe just above the horizon where the sky meets the sea and I called out to my friends - it's the world! But all they could see was my face, buried in a tattered rose, splinters of sand and glass in my teeth, auroral backscatter, enhancement predictions, and propogation in sunlit paths. When standing on the bow of a ship, floating offshore, context is everything. Behind me it was the middle of the afternoon.
When I came home from my year in Jerusalem, my sister gave me a t-shirt that said: "I stayed".