Pumpkinflowers (16 page)

49

I
WAS SITTING
not long ago along one of the boulevards in Tel Aviv. The Middle East had succumbed to chaos and butchery dwarfing our own conflict in one tiny corner of the region. But our country was calm again, at least for a time, thanks not to anyone's goodwill but to the force of our arms.

The promenade was full of teenagers in tank tops, tattooed riders of old-fashioned bikes, men with women and men with men and women with women, speaking the language of the Bible and of Jewish prayer. There were old people sipping coffee outside a restaurant, and some music. The country was going about its improbably cheerful business on a weekday evening.

Beyond the city were the neighborhoods of middle-class apartments with parking lots of company Mazdas, the kinds of places where I found many of the men from the Pumpkin when I went looking for them to write this book, most having first passed through Goa or the Andes for decompression before coming back to their families, finding work as programmers and accountants and settling down to watch their kids on the swings. All of this is more than our grandparents, the perpetual outsiders of the ghettoes of Minsk and Fez, had any right to expect. But it seemed for a moment—and this can happen to me in a cafe in my corner of Jerusalem, or picking up my children at school, anytime—that the buildings on either side of the boulevard were embankments, and the sky a concrete roof.

The Israel that arrived in Lebanon in 1982 was still imaginative and light on its feet, however unwise its ideas and however wretched their execution. The point is that we thought we could make things happen. The invasion was supposed to effect a dramatic change in our surroundings, just as in the nineties, the years of this narrative, many of us believed that such a change would be engineered not by force but by compromise. Underlying these very different enterprises was the same sentiment—our fate was malleable, and it was ours to shape. But most of us came to understand in the year of the Pumpkin's destruction that we were wrong. We might make good choices, or bad choices, but the results are unpredictable and the possibilities limited. The Middle East doesn't bend to our dictates or our hopes. It won't change for us.

When these things began to be clear something interesting occurred. People in Israel didn't despair, as our enemies hoped. Instead they stopped paying attention. What would we gain from looking to our neighbors? Only heartbreak, and a slow descent after them into the pit. No, we would turn our back on them and look elsewhere, to the film festivals of Berlin and Copenhagen or the tech parks of California. Our happiness would no longer depend on the moods of people who wish us ill, and their happiness wouldn't concern us more than ours concerns them. Something important in the mind of the country—an old utopian optimism—was laid to rest. At the same time we were liberated, most of us, from the curse of existing as characters in a mythic drama, from the hallucination that our lives are enactments of the great moral problems of humanity, that people in Israel are anything other than people, hauling their biology from home to work and trying to eke out the usual human pleasures in an unfortunate region and an abnormal history.

It seems to me now that the Lebanon outposts were incubators for the Israelis of the age that followed the outposts' destruction: allergic to ideology, thinkers of small practical thoughts, livers of life between bombardments, expert in extracting the enjoyment possible from a constricted and endangered existence. The former soldiers are people used to political currents of immense complexity and capable of ignoring them. They didn't come back from Lebanon and devote themselves to politics, defense, or settling the frontiers but rather to the vigorous and stubborn building of private lives, and these combined energies have become the fuel driving the country. Israel isn't a place of slogans anymore, certainly not the Zionist classics “If you will it, it is no dream,” or “We have come to the Land to build and be rebuilt.” But if one were needed now, why not recall Harel's laconic explanation of how he went back to the army after the funerals of every single member of his platoon but him? I don't think we could do better than “On the bus.”

When Hezbollah attacked a border patrol inside Israel in the summer of 2006, triggering a month of fighting, my parents' town was hit by several hundred rockets and was nearly deserted. I reported the war and remember the sinister sight of traffic lights blinking yellow along a main street devoid of pedestrians or traffic. The day after the shooting stopped the town filled with people as if nothing had happened. Less than a year later I counted eight new cafes and restaurants on the same street.

Making do in this way is perhaps a fundamental national ability, something Jews have done throughout the centuries no matter how inhospitable the soil. It reminds me of the impromptu rave that erupted in one of our bunkers one night in 1999, with shirts off, military light sticks glowing green and orange, and “The Rockafeller Skank” on repeat. Laughter inside the perimeter; outside, the quiet of the trench and young men in guard posts.

This is all, in other words, very familiar. Sometimes the Pumpkin seems more present to me now than it did when it existed.

50

A
CANADIAN FRIEND
of mine arrived in Israel one day after backpacking through Lebanon. She was unmindful of our borders and couldn't understand why I was struck by the ease of her transit. If you were Israeli the border was like a high steel wall, and beyond it were people who wanted you dead. But if you were Canadian the border hardly existed, and Lebanon was just a place. This hadn't truly occurred to me until then.

The plan had its roots in the jokes we used to tell as soldiers about coming back to the security zone one day as tourists. But now it began to take shape in earnest in my mind. The Middle East was closing in on me. But what if I ignored the borders it wanted to impose and went to Lebanon again, protected not by armor or sandbags but by the accident of my birth in a country far away? I would see the hill without fear and privately mark the end of that time. I would meet the people I had glimpsed through binoculars and tread their sidewalks with them. I would share something of their lives. I'm sure that at the time I thought this might give me reason for hope.

I understood that I would be detained upon landing at the airport if my identity became apparent. I knew too that I would have to cross into territory controlled by Hezbollah. It was a little more than two years since the withdrawal. The guerrillas were holding a live Israeli hostage, a crooked businessman they had abducted some time before in the Persian Gulf, and three Israeli soldiers whose fate was unknown. But I had a clean Canadian passport. I had what I thought of as my Canadian face, a look of benign vacancy that seemed to induce in Middle Easterners not suspicion but a desire to give me directions without being asked. I was twenty-five. I could pull it off.

I flew to Toronto and spent a few weeks there, becoming accustomed to drooling my vowels again instead of spitting them. I cut the Hebrew labels out of my clothes. I flew to London, changed airlines, and left all incriminating documents and spare Israeli change at the apartment of a friend. The story would be that I was from Canada, a university student of Islam and the Middle East. This was true, strictly speaking, though it left much out.

51

A
N HOUR BEFORE
dawn: the red blink of wing lights through the mist outside, stale air, the drone of engines—a routine flight from Heathrow. When the stewardess looked at my stub as I boarded a few hours before I thought she might laugh and send me back. But she said 23C was right this way, sir, and enjoy the flight, and before she finished speaking her smile had shifted to the next passenger.

Beside me was a woman named Collette, who seemed pleased that I was traveling to her country just to visit, not for business or to see family. The country was so beautiful and not enough people knew. I was Canadian? She had relatives in Ottawa, did I know them? She took my guidebook and, in a mix of French and English, pointed out places I must see. She produced a pen and marked most of the entries in the table of contents.

The seat-belt light came on, and we emerged from the clouds. Below us a coastline glittered with tiny lights. I had been warned not to do this, but of course it was too late now to turn back. When she asked if I had been to Lebanon before I shook my head.

The customs clerk at the Beirut airport eyed my passport and glanced up at me with disinterest. One hand thumped down with its stamp and the other waved me through.

A taxi took me into the city and left me at an inexpensive hotel, the Mace. Surprised that getting here had been so easy and unsure what to do now, I sat on the bed and turned on the television. A woman in clothes that left only her face and hands exposed smiled as she held a box up to the camera. English letters on the box read always. After that commercial came the news, and there was the city I had left a few weeks before, Jerusalem, orange lights flashing on sheets draped over figures lying still in the street. At the bottom of the screen were Arabic words that I could now read: “Martyrdom operation in occupied Palestine.” It was September 2002, two years and five months after the last night at the Pumpkin.

52

I
WALKED AROUND
downtown Beirut and found that it was possible at times to sense, like a barely detectible odor of cumin, the old cosmopolitan Middle East—the one where Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Europeans, Muslims of various types, and many others, mingled and did business with each other in an atmosphere of congenial corruption.

I sat one evening at the Temple of Jupiter in Baalbek as bats flapped around the Roman columns. I was ripped off in the soap markets of Tripoli. I took a cable car up to a giant white statue of Mary that looked over the Mediterranean, her hands away from her sides, palms facing forward. She was made by craftsmen from France more than a century ago, and her pose suggested she might be wondering where the French had gone and when they would be back to pick her up. I stood at her feet with the Maronite pilgrims, men with golden crosses in the Vs of their unbuttoned shirts and women observing the Levantine tradition of putting on your tightest miniskirt and scantiest blouse before heading off to touch the Virgin. We have our own equivalents. These experiences will not be unique to anyone who has visited Lebanon, something I urge you to do if you can—it's a country that deserves a better history than it has had and a better future than the one that seems in store.

One Sunday morning I joined a hiking group that left Beirut in a van for the hills to the east. When we arrived I inhaled the familiar black licorice scent of fennel, the smell of Galilee in the summer. We began picking our way along a high ridge. There were a dozen of us, all Lebanese except for two Frenchwomen and me. The guide warned us not to stray from the path because of Israeli cluster bomblets left over from the 1982 war and not to take pictures of the nearby military emplacement maintained by the Syrian army. On one of the slopes between us and the sea I saw an enormous cross that I took for a stark emblem of Christian faith before realizing it was the pillar of an off-season ski lift. After we had been walking for a while I realized that I had assumed the natural position of the sergeant at the back of the line.

I offered my bottle to a man and woman walking ahead of me, a third-grade teacher and a university student. They had come without water, and accepted it. The woman began to give me her list of places I must see, each of them the
most
beautiful. When I asked carefully about the south, she said, “No one goes down there. The Israelis could strike at any time.” She had never been herself.

Upon discovering I was alone she pulled out a piece of paper and wrote down her email address. “I have friends all over the country,” she said, “and you can stay with any of them.” A girl with a bandanna tied over her hair was listening, and she wrote down her number on the same slip. On our way back to the city another of the hikers hosted us all at his villa for drinks. They were lovely, and I was very conscious of lying to them. When I made it to the hotel that evening I tore the paper into tiny pieces and threw them in the garbage.

53

O
N A FRIDAY
in one of the Shiite neighborhoods of Beirut I heard the mosques broadcast sermons over loudspeakers and found men sitting on curbs listening to sermons on car radios. I passed a damaged building that had no front wall, a remnant of the civil war, and saw ten poor men squatting there in the second-floor apartment, living their lives in view of the street. A few of them sat at the edge of what appeared to be a living room, their feet dangling over my head as I passed. There were no other Westerners in evidence.

The women wore black here, and the buildings were decorated with pictures of clerics. One of the most common posters showed the turbaned Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, grinning as he brandished aloft a captured Israeli rifle with a green strap. I recognized the photograph—it was taken after the battle made famous by Ofer, the machine gunner who didn't get up. The rifle belonged to a guy who was shot several times that night but recovered and who I still meet sometimes around Jerusalem.

I came upon a huddle of men listening to a preacher's voice coming from a loudspeaker mounted on the roof of a taxi. Two adolescents in yellow Hezbollah jerseys stood nearby with a donation box shaped like the Dome of the Rock. My Arabic was good enough to understand that the sermon was about me; every few sentences I heard “Jews.” There was a shopkeeper standing in his doorway nearby, and I was surprised when he gave me a friendly glance. Walking over and assuming my most Canadian demeanor I asked him what this was about. Nothing, he said, and he put his hand on my shoulder and actually pushed me away down the sidewalk. He stopped pushing only when he was sure I would keep going by myself. Don't worry, he said, it is nothing. He was still smiling.

I sat at a plastic table on the street downtown one evening and was joined by two guys in their twenties who grasped my hand, bought me a carrot juice, and welcomed me to Lebanon. Did I like it here?

“Lebanon is the best place on earth—paradise,” the first one said, placing his hand on my arm for emphasis. He said both of them were trying to get visas for Europe. He waved by way of explanation at the driver of a moped parked at the curb. The driver, a deliveryman, waved back. He starts every day at 7 a.m. and finishes after 8 p.m., the first one said, and makes nothing.

A loudspeaker in a nearby mosque issued the call to evening prayers. “I love to hear that in the morning, when the streets are empty,” the first one told me. They were both Shiites. I asked if he prayed, and he appeared surprised by the question. “Of course not,” he said. “But I trust God, and I'm a good person.” The second one nodded.

What did I think about the Middle East? Did I agree that America was bad? Canada, however, was good, very good. “And do you like Jews?” asked the first one, and I sipped my carrot juice, and said no I did not, not particularly.

“Jews are very bad,” he said. “They kill little babies.” He extended his forearms with his palms facing each other to show me how little. After we parted ways with friendly handshakes I went back to the dingy pension to which I had relocated to save money, two floors up from the Wash Me car wash. Near the reception desk sat a man with a faded T-shirt reading, in Arabic,
THE LIBERATION OF THE SOUTH: A CELEBRATION FOR THE NATION
.