Here I Am (27 page)
Authors: Jonathan Safran Foer
Little was known, which made what little was known terrifying. An earthquake of magnitude 7.6 had struck at 6:23 in the evening, its epicenter deep under the Dead Sea, just outside the Israeli settlement of Kalya. Electricity was out in virtually all of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. It seemed that the most badly damaged areas were Salt and Amman in Jordan, as well as the West Bank city of Jericho, whose walls crumbled thirty-four hundred years before, many archaeologists have argued, not from Joshua's trumpeting but from a massive earthquake.
First accounts were coming in from the Old City of Jerusalem: the Crusader-era Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional burial place of Jesus and the holiest site in Christianity, which was badly damaged in a 1927 earthquake, had partially collapsed with an unknown number of tourists and clergymen inside. Synagogues and yeshivas, monasteries, mosques and madrassas, were in ruins. There was no news about the Temple Mount, either because there was no news or because those bearing it withheld it.
A civil engineer was being interviewed on NPR. The host, a sultry-voiced, probably short-and-bald Jew named Robert Siegel, began:
SIEGEL
: We apologize, in advance, for the audio quality of this interview. Normally, when phone lines are down, we use cell phones. But cell service has been disabled as well, so Mr. Horowitz is speaking to us by satellite phone. Mr. Horowitz, are you there?
HOROWITZ:
Yes, hello. I am here.
SIEGEL
: Can you give us your professional assessment of what's going on right now?
HOROWITZ:
My professional assessment, yes, but I can also tell you as a human being standing here that Israel has endured a cataclysmic earthquake. Everywhere you look there is destruction.
SIEGEL:
You are safe, though?
HOROWITZ:
Safe
is a relative term. My family is alive, and as you can hear, so am I. Some are safer. Some are less safe.
Why the fuck can't Israelis just answer questions?
Jacob wondered. Even then, in the midst of cataclysmâthe word itself sounded like classic Israeli hyperboleâthe Israeli couldn't just give a straightforward, un-Israeli response.
SIEGEL
: Mr. Horowitz, you are an engineer for Israeli civil services, is that correct?
HOROWITZ:
An engineer, an adviser on government projects, an academicâ¦
SIEGEL:
As an engineer, what can you tell us about the potential effects of an earthquake of this magnitude?
HOROWITZ:
It is not good.
SIEGEL:
Could you elaborate?
HOROWITZ:
Of the six hundred fifty thousand structures in Israel, fewer than half are equipped to deal with such an event.
SIEGEL
: Are we going to see skyscrapers topple?
HOROWITZ:
Of course not, Robert Siegel. They have been engineered to withstand even more than this. It's the buildings between three and eight stories I'm most worried about. Many will survive, but few will be habitable. You have to realize that Israel didn't have a building code until the late 1970s, and it's never been enforced.
SIEGEL:
Why is that?
HOROWITZ:
We've had other things on our minds.
SIEGEL:
The conflict.
HOROWITZ:
Conflict? We should have been so lucky to have only one conflict. Most buildings are made of concreteâvery rigid, unforgiving engineering. Buildings like Israelis, you might say. It's served a booming population well, but couldn't be worse-suited to the current situation.
SIEGEL:
What about the West Bank?
HOROWITZ:
What about it?
SIEGEL:
How will its structures respond to such an earthquake?
HOROWITZ:
You'd have to ask a Palestinian civil engineer.
SIEGEL:
Well, we'll certainly try toâ
HOROWITZ:
But since you're asking me, I have to imagine it has been completely destroyed.
SIEGEL:
I'm sorry,
what
has?
HOROWITZ:
The West Bank.
SIEGEL:
Destroyed?
HOROWITZ:
All of the structures. Everything. There's going to be a lot of fatality.
SIEGEL
: In the thousands?
HOROWITZ:
I'm afraid that as I speak these words, tens of thousands are already dead.
SIEGEL
: And I am sure you want to get to your family, but before letting you go, could you offer some possibilities for how this will play out?
HOROWITZ:
What time frame are you asking about? Hours? Weeks? A generation?
SIEGEL:
Let's start with hours.
HOROWITZ:
The next few hours will be pivotal for Israel. It's all about prioritizing now. Electricity is out countrywide, and will likely remain out, even in the major cities, for several days. As you can imagine, military needs will be the first priority.
SIEGEL
: I'm surprised to hear you say that.
HOROWITZ:
You are Jewish?
SIEGEL
: I'm not sure why that's relevant, but yes, I am.
HOROWITZ:
I'm surprised that a fellow Jew would be surprised. But then, only an American Jew would question why being Jewish is relevant.
SIEGEL
: You're concerned for Israel's safety?
HOROWITZ:
You aren't?
SIEGEL
: Mr. Horowitzâ
HOROWITZ:
Israel's tactical superiority is technological, and that has been greatly diminished by the quake. The destruction will cause desperation and unrest. And this will developâeither organically or deliberatelyâinto violence. If it hasn't already happened, we're soon to see masses of people flooding the borders into Israelâfrom the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria. I don't have to tell you that Syria already has a refugee problem.
SIEGEL:
Why would they come to Israel, a country most in the Arab world view as a mortal enemy?
HOROWITZ:
Because their mortal enemy has first-rate medical care. Their mortal enemy has food and water. And Israel is going to be presented with a choice: let them in, or don't. Letting them in will require sharing limited and precious resourses. For others to live, Israelis will have to die. But not letting them in will involve bullets. And of course Israel's neighbors will have a choice, too: take care of their citizens, or take advantage of Israel's sudden vulnerability.
SIEGEL
: Let's hope the shared tragedy brings the region together.
HOROWITZ:
Yes, but let's not be naïve while we hope.
SIEGEL:
And what about the long term? You mentioned the generational view?
HOROWITZ:
Of course, no one can know what will happen, but what Israel is facing here is something far more threatening than '67, or '73, or even Iran's nuclear threat. There is the immediate crisis of needing to secure the country, rescue citizens, get food and medical care to those who need it, repair the electricity, gas, water, and other utilities quickly and safely. Then there is also the work of rebuilding the country. This will be a generational challenge. And finally, and perhaps most daunting, will be the work of keeping Jews here.
SIEGEL:
Meaning?
HOROWITZ:
A young, ambitious, idealistic Israeli has many reasons to leave Israel. You have an expression, “The straw that broke the camel's back.”
SIEGEL:
Yes.
HOROWITZ:
Thousands of buildings have fallen on the back.
JACOB:
Vey iz mir
.
Jacob hadn't meant to say anything, and he certainly hadn't meant to say
vey iz mir
. But then, no one ever means to say
vey iz mir
.
“This is bad,” Irv said, shaking his head. “Really, really bad in about a million ways.”
Jacob's mind teleported to apocalyptic tableaux: the ceiling collapsed onto the trundle in Tamir's old bedroom; women in wigs trapped under slabs of Jerusalem stone, the ruins of the ruins of Masada. He imagined the marble bench in Blumenberg Park, now shattered stone. It must be a catastrophe, he thought, but he meant it in two entirely different ways: that it certainly had to be, and that he wanted it to be. He couldn't acknowledge the second meaning, but he couldn't deny it.
Tamir said, “It's not good. But it's not so bad.”
“Do you want to call home?”
“You heard him. The lines are knocked out. And my voice won't help anyone.”
“Are you sure?”
“They're fine. Absolutely. We live in a new construction. Like he said, it's engineered for this kind of thingâbetter than any of your skyscrapers, believe me. The building has a backup generatorâtwo, I thinkâand in the bomb shelter there's enough food for months. The shelter is nicer than that apartment you had in Foggy Bottom. Remember that?”
Jacob remembered the apartment; he had lived there for five years. But even more clearly he remembered the bomb shelter in Tamir's childhood home, despite having been inside it for less than five minutes. It was the last day of that first trip to Israel. Deborah and Tamir's mother, Adina, were on a walk to the market, hoping to find some delicacies to
bring back for Isaac. Over coffee, with what almost looked like a grin, Irv asked Shlomo if the house had a shelter.
“Of course,” Shlomo said, “it's the law.”
“Underneath the house?”
“Of course.”
The second
of course
made clear what should have been clear to Irv with
it's the law:
Shlomo wanted his shelter underground when there was bombing, and underground when there wasn't. But Irv pushed: “Would you show it to us? I'd like Jacob to see.” The
I'd like Jacob to see
made clear what should have been clear to Shlomo with
Underneath the house?:
Irv wasn't going to let it go.
Save for the twelve-inch-thick door, the room was slow to reveal its oddness. It was moist, the concrete floor sweating. The light was chalky, in color and texture. Sound seemed to gather in clouds above them. There were four gas masks hanging on the wall, even though there were only three people in Tamir's family. Some sort of four-for-three promotion? Was one for the cleaning lady, or a future child? For Elijah? What would be the protocol if chemical war broke out while Jacob's family was there? Was it like on a planeâadults instructed to care for themselves before attending to their kids? Would Jacob watch himself suffocate in the reflection of his father's mask? His mother would never allow it. But then, she might be suffocating, too. Surely his dad would give it to her, right? Unless she was wearing Tamir's mask, in which case that wouldn't be an issue. Were adults instructed to care for themselves before attending to
their own
children, or
all
children? If the cleaning lady were there, would she really claim one of the masks from Jacob's parents? Tamir was older than Jacob by a few months. Did that make him, relatively speaking, the adult of the two? There was no scenario in which Jacob wouldn't be a victim of chemical warfare.
“Let's get out of this dump,” Tamir said to Jacob.
Jacob didn't want to go. He wanted to spend his remaining time in Israel exploring every inch of the room, learning it, learning himself in it, simply being there. He wanted to eat lunch down there, bring down his clothes and suitcase and pack, forgo the last drips of sightseeing in order to spend another couple of hours behind those impenetrable walls. And more: he wanted to hear the air-raid sirenânot the false alarm for Yom HaShoah, but a siren signaling a complete destruction from which he would be safe.
“Come on,” Tamir said, pulling on Jacob's arm with awkward force.
On the flight back to America, thirty-three thousand feet above the Atlantic, Jacob dreamed of a shelter beneath the shelter, reached by another set of stairs. But this second shelter was enormous, large enough to be confused for the world, large enough to hold enough people to make war inevitable. And when the bombs started to fall in the world on that side of the thick door, the world on the other side became the shelter.
Nearly ten years later, Tamir and Jacob split a six-pack at a kitchen table that couldn't be walked around, in an apartment carved out of an apartment, carved out of a house in Foggy Bottom. “I met someone,” Jacob said, saying it aloud for the first time.
And nearly twenty years after that, in a Japanese car bisecting the nation's capital, the Israeli cousinâJacob's Israeli cousinâsaid, “Anyway, it's not going to come to that.”
“To what?”
“To bomb shelters. To war.”
“Who said war?”
“We'll figure it out,” Tamir said, as if to himself. “
Israel
is Hebrew for âcontingency plan.'â”
They drove the next few minutes without speaking. NPR did its best with unreliable news, and Tamir buried himself in his phone, which might have been a tablet, or even a TV. Despite checking his own with manic constancy, Jacob hated all phonesâfound them to be even worse than the brain tumors they gave their users. Why? Because he hated that his was ruining his life? Or because he knew that it wasn't ruining his life, but gave him the easy and socially acceptable means to ruin it himself? Or because he suspected that other people were getting more, and more interesting, messages? Or maybe he knew all along that his phone would be his undoingâeven if he didn't know how.
Tamir's phone was singularly annoying. Barak's, too. They were phone SUVs. Jacob didn't care how vivid their screens were, or how good the reception, or how easy to link with their other miserable devices. Barak had never even been to America, which, if it wasn't the greatest country in the history of the world, at the very least had a few things to offer eyes that cared to look up. Maybe they were searching for news, although what kind of news site emits
“Boom shakalaka!”
every few seconds?
