But that would happen to everyone! said Michal with a laugh. It is a madness that would take down the whole world. But here … it would just be us, the little state that is the Jewish remnant: obliterated while the rest of the world goes on about its business.
You cannot imagine what happened to us, Michal went on after a long pause, the trauma when we nearly lost the Yom Kippur War. We are a country that lives by the sword. A desert warrior nation. Remember I told you: The people who founded this country were like the mad, unyielding men of Belsen. We believed in our army, the invincible Israeli Defense Forces. Then, for the first time, we understood that the IDF was not magic, was only an army. We understood that we could be beaten. Now we all sit and shudder and think, When will the time come? When will we not prevail? Someday our enemies will no longer be the pitiful armies of feuding sheiks. Someday they will come at us from all sides with modern armies and real arms and unified purpose. Then who will help us? Who will save us?
America? posited the patient.
Michal laughed until she coughed.
Do you not see what is happening? she asked. Young people all around the world have replaced the Vietcong with the Palestinians as the current cause célèbre of anti-imperialism. I see the young Americans come here. The nice, liberal American Jews who walk through the King David Hotel wearing Arafat’s keffiyeh as a scarf. And I think: Here come our American saviors!
And all this because we will not go back to the pre-’67 borders, she continued. But what were those precious pre-’67 borders? Some grand internationally negotiated settlement? Some U.N. resolution? Some solid black lines on ancient maps? No, simply where we stopped in 1949. At the end of the War of Independence. Then another war. And another. War after war after war.
She grew quiet. The clock-tick filled the silence, seeming to grow louder as the seconds passed.
And not a pretty war, that first one, Michal finally said. There were horrors on both sides, I will admit. There is cause for the Arabs’ bitterness. Many were driven from their homes.
Well, she said with a sigh. I cannot ask you if you remember that, because the story has not been written down yet. We are still living in the fantasy that we were all heroes. Someday—should we survive—we will be allowed to be a normal country, with good and bad, with skeletons in our closets, like everyone else.
This city, she went on after a pause. Jaffa. Two hundred thousand Arabs lived here before the War of Independence. Now they live in some wretched refugee camp in Gaza. We are ringed with their encampments, refugees sitting in their warrens, seething with hatred for us. Do you think we can hold them off forever?
Ah! she said with a sound that might have been her hand slapping the table. Somewhere down a maze of hovels in Gaza is a woman, a woman sitting there brimming with fury, holding the key to this house. My house.
I often think, Michal continued after a long pause, What am I doing living in this rough country, speaking a language that feels flat in my mouth? And with yet another name: Michal Gershon.
Again she seemed to slap the table.
Sometimes I detest it here, she said, her Ts like little knife stabs. Truly. Detest it. Which you may have supposed by now. So why would I want to bring any child here? Where we are ringed by enemies. Tell me, skinny girl who has come all the way from America to find me. Where exactly are we wanted?
108.
For many seconds, the patient said nothing in response to her mother. The sound of the ticking clock in Michal’s kitchen somehow managed to interweave itself with the clicks of the cassette, so that, for a moment, the time then—the patient with her mother, and Michal’s first arrival in Palestine—seemed to merge with the time now—the patient with her therapist (and with me). It was as if we all sat in some room together outside of normal duration, where we could not stop asking ourselves: Where exactly are Jews wanted?
So you are telling me, the patient said to her mother (time returning to its proper depth), that you didn’t come for me because your life was so dismal here?
Well. No. Not exactly dismal, said Michal. But. Yes. But