The son of my lawyer, Dina, is
getting married tonight and she has just about obligated me by contract to show
my face for the ceremony. The wedding is across the street from Jerusalem’s
large central market where a pigua, a terrorist attack, hit this
morning. In my evening bag I carry pepper spray which I do not know how to use
and which looks as menacing as a canister of breath freshener. I have two sharp
pencils. I have the dull pin of an old brooch. I have no chance if a pigua hits
tonight.
One route to this wedding is
through the town of Beitar. The bus winds past a stretch of trees which reminds
me of a parkway on Long Island. When we travel through concrete tunnels erected
to postpone bullets blowing off my skull, I remember I’m not headed towards my
brother’s Oyster Bay colonial. At a checkpoint, a civilian has another in a
bear hug; they’re both giggling. Our driver opens his window and says something
that sobers them. On a thin meridian, shoulder to shoulder, soldiers stand
guard.
We pass between razor wire fences
into Beitar. A life size diorama of ibex, sheep, and deer graze at a giant
welcome sign. One large billboard encourages – enjoy Shabbat, from the
minute it comes to the minute it leaves. Another warns – you’re bad
talking others? I don’t want to hear it! The only one to jump when
two figures in SWAT gear and masks board our bus at the front door and exit at
the back, is me.
I reverse the trip in the dark.
My bus is stuck behind a truck that says FedEx International. I imagine the
truck plowing the Atlantic, crossing Europe, and landing in front of us, all on
a single tank of gas. The driver is tuned in to a radio station he selected in
New Jersey. His radio reports that the Garden State Parkway is backed up for
miles, the new Miss America can drive a tractor, and nothing about pigua in
the soft Judaean Hills.
On the hill to my village we halt
at a road block. Two soldiers, one a woman with a French braid and a
sub-machine gun, examine the trunk of a car. A loud crack terrifies me. It’s
the limb of a tree, victim of a recent conflagration.
