by Jemma Wayne
***
Dad is bringing boxes. We’ve never been one of those families where the mother pops round to her grown children’s places to pot plants or decorate cushions, and Dad isn’t handy so he’s never offered to put up a bookcase or drill holes for picture hooks. Their support comes in the form of forthright candour – elicited or otherwise. And the impetus is on us, the children, to remember to make visits home. ‘If they don’t,’ so says my mother, ‘Well then they never loved you anyway.’ Today however, Dad has insisted on bringing the boxes. He has taken a day off for it and driven himself to the storage company to collect them before meeting me at the dealership where I am selling my car. Dad waves as he pulls up and I slip into the seat beside him before doing a double take and stifling a laugh.
“Uh, hello Reb Dad.”
“Daniel.” Dad nods as though nothing is unusual.
“Do I actually have to ask the question?”
“What question is that?”
“You’re wearing a yamaka.”
“Yes.”
“Why are you wearing a yamaka?”
“Ties in nicely with my jacket, don’t you think? Blue.”
In my lifetime I have seen Dad don a yamaka only at synagogue, at simchas, when we do the prayers at home on festivals, or sometimes if we have guests for Shabbat dinner and Mum nudges him towards one. Never, ever, to a car dealership. Dad turns off the Edgware Road towards Golders Green. I’ve attempted to fill the final three weeks before I go with at least one thing a day that I’ll miss. Today it’s my favourite deli’s bagels. And Nana. Mum has collected her and is meeting us for a bite before we get packing.
“It feels like a time to not hide,” Dad says, turning to me with sudden concentration so that I have to wave my hand to direct his attention back towards the road.
“You’ve never hidden, Dad.”
Dad keeps his eyes ahead and nods to himself. “I’m glad you think that. I hope that’s what you do think. I haven’t meant to hide. Integrate, assimilate, contribute, yes, reach out to others, but not hide, that’s the thing.”
“You haven’t.”
“Maybe I should’ve kept kosher after all, done some things that marked me out but- I don’t know. Anyway, I just want people to see Jews right now. To really see us here, working, living, along with everyone else. So what’s a little hat?”
“You’re an atheist.”
“I’m a Jewish atheist,” Dad corrects.
I smile as he tilts his blue yamaka slightly, pleased with his linguistic agility, and I can’t help but think of the time he burst into the school staff room to confront Mr Pike. I have that same 12-year-old feeling of awe, that strange sensation of seeing my father just for a second as an outsider would. His rainbow grey hair sticks up around the blue yamaka like decorative tissue paper in a shop display.
“Did you hear about France?” I ask him.
“Disgusting,” he nods.
“It’s like it’s been there the whole time, just bubbling below the surface, and now that it’s cool to slam Israel, the antisemitism is just exploding.”
“Not so much here,” Dad clarifies. “It’s not as acute. I think people are still making the distinction, still-”
“Apparently loads of French Jews are moving to Israel.”
“I don’t think we need an exodus from London quite yet,” Dad says as he manoeuvres into a parking space.“ Don’t make that an excuse, Dan,” he adds. “You go because you want to go.”
“I know. I do want to.”
He nods again.
“Did you hear about the sign in Belgium?” I say. “In the café? Dogs are allowed but no Jews.”
“It’s important to remember these are isolated, crazy incidents,” Dad says.
“Do you think that’s what Anne Frank’s Dad told her?”
“Dan…” Dad shakes his head and pats his blue yamaka as he gets out of the car. I grin. There is a horror movie element to our discussion and I’m being a little facetious. I am scared, but not really. There is some amount of revelling in the dreadfulness of it all. A detachment. As though the horror really is only on a screen somewhere, a director’s lens between us. Disbelief not quite suspended. Still, I see Dad glancing around with uncharacteristic apprehension as we make our way towards the deli. We are in one of the most Jewish neighbourhoods in the UK, where Jews are most numerous, most safe. Most visible.
Nana and Mum have ordered. Nana gets low blood sugar and Mum gets impatient, and we are admittedly 20 minutes late. Nana is talking to Sadie, one half of the old Polish couple who run the deli, argue non-stop and are the only people I know other than my Nana who are fluent in Yiddish. I love listening to them: the guttural clatter that sounds like an exaggerated stage whisper, or a list of ingredients for some kind of stew. Nana is two years younger than Sadie and Sadie calls her bubula, meaning baby. Nana’s face is alight, enhanced I suppose by this position of relative youth. I kiss her on the cheek as I sit down next to her and lean across the table to kiss my mother. I smile at Sadie too who pats my hand absentmindedly before grasping on to it as though she means to tell me something in just a moment. For now she is busy telling Nana that it is her wedding anniversary today – she and Moshe have been married 64 years and tonight they are going dancing. I sit with my arm above my head as she clings onto my palm but eventually Sadie releases me and as her arm lifts away I notice, as I have noticed many times before, the dark stain of imprinted numbers. No matter how many times I see this I cannot help but feel startled, and uncomfortable, as though I have mistakenly picked up her diary. Nana always wears long sleeves so it isn’t something I otherwise see. I look away. On the wall behind the counter there is a photo of Sadie and Moshe winning a ballroom dancing competition back when they were mere whippets of 70. Next to it is a faded black and white picture of the two of them in 1945, fresh off a refugee boat to England. They met on that boat. It was called The Atlantis. So is the deli. Sadie signals to a young Israeli waitress to take Dad’s and my order. I go for the classic, a smoked salmon and cream cheese poppyseed bagel with lemon and pepper, and an Israeli salad. Mum is already tucking into the same, though she has removed the top half of her bagel so as to lessen her bread intake. “Sold the car okay?” she asks between mouthfuls, but I can tell that she too is listening to the glorious back-throated, life-coated exchange between Sadie and her mother. We all are. We are so consumed by it that none of us notice the two men wearing hoods who enter through the open door behind us.
None of us notice that one is carrying a spray can and a knife, the other a bat.
None of us see until glass is shattering down into bagels and challah bread.
And Moshe is standing statue behind the counter.
And a red swastika is bleeding across the wall next to the words ‘Free Gaza’ and ruining the photo of Sadie and Moshe’s arrival to their English safe haven, and their ballroom win.
And it is exactly like a horror movie. The lens shaking to give that naturalistic edge.
Rewind. Go back.
That’s the thing about movies, or books, or events that happen in your head. Paranoid imaginings. You can replay them, spot new tangents, catch glances and objects and clues you hadn’t noticed before, in real time, in reality.
Like the volume of the crash. A shattering, not dissimilar from the glass underfoot at a wedding, but louder, far far louder, echoing in the ears. A shard of it struck my jacket. No blood, no wound, but an unexpected impact that took my breath.
Like the feeling of paralysis. Did I hunch? Did I cower? I know I did not stand up.
Like the way a falling blue yamaka looks like a puddle in the air.
Like the feeling of terror. A bit like suffocating.
Like my father’s uncovered head, fragile and grey. His lined hands raising to protect it.
Like my mother’s voice hurtling through the instant.
Like my Nana sitting still and tall and dignified, her lunch on her lap.
And then
the sudden sound of an alarm.
And the look of disgust and hatred from the man who turned first towards Moshe and then to my shrieking mother.
And Sadie staying standing.
And me still not standing up.
It is only after the men have raced out of the store and are half way down the street that a few customers belatedly chase after them. It is as though it has taken a minute for our collective brains to understand that what we have just seen is real, here, now. Not a movie. You can almost see the cogs turning, forks still hovering mid-air near mouths. But all at once we are up and chasing. I follow because Dad has gone and because I am a man and cannot remain sitting, but even before we have stepped out of the door I know we aren’t going to catch them. Even if we did, we aren’t going to restrain them because what are we going to do really? Beat them up? Clearly not. We jog down the road for a bit to make a good showing then sigh dramatically when they jump into a waiting car. One of them extends a fist out of the window, and we throw our own arms around and do a lot of pointing while we call out the number of the car’s license plate to each other. By now my adrenalin is pumping. I am standing, moving. We all are. There are five of us by the side of the road, strangers except that everybody looks a bit familiar and actually I think one of the men is related to Robert. We’re not quite sure what to say to each other but we seem to have got stuck on the word ‘unbelievable’. I’ve noticed this before, you hear it on the news all the time: an event is reported and one word starts to stick to it –‘tragic’, ‘shocking’, ‘unprecedented’. Everybody starts referring to the event the same way, as though none of the other adjectives quite encapsulate the proper emotion, or as though the chosen descriptive is part of what happened, a noun not an adjective: Tragic Crash; Shocking Scenes; Unprecedented Flooding. Disproportionate Force. Disproportionate Force. And it becomes not a description or an opinion or a feeling but a fact. Israel’s force? Disproportionate. The five of us are still stuck on ‘unbelievable’, and we say it over and over in different ways all the way back to The Atlantis.
There, a police officer is already talking to Sadie and Moshe and a handful of customers. I hurry over to our table, kissing Mum’s head and squeezing Nana’s hand as I sit down. I want to reassure them, to be their protector. But when Nana keeps hold of my palm and holds it against her cheek, and Mum reaches for my other hand, I realise that my face must have betrayed fear or shock or panic, or they must have noticed how I didn’t stand, couldn’t stand, because the women are fine, it is my own heart that is racing.
Of course nothing happened. Not really. Nothing devastating, nothing to anybody’s person. It’s all just stuff and symbols. And it’s not like I’ve never been around violence before. Throughout my early twenties there were the usual bar fights and argy bargies with bouncers, as a teen there were muggings (I had my phone stolen three times between the ages of 15 and 17), just last year at Costco I almost got pummelled by a huge tattooed guy who decided I’d pinched his parking space, and don’t forget the time I got bottled. But all of those things felt random, accidental. And, ‘It began with words,’ said Nana.
Dad stoops to reclaim his yamaka from the floor.
Now I stand up. Now. And sidestep like a warming up boxer. And can’t breathe.
Perhaps Gaby is right, what am I going to do, talk Hamas to death? Imagine astronaut suits? Throw a punch an hour late?
But at least in the army I’ll be trained, and have a gun, and know how to use it.
Not that I want to use it, except if my family is threatened. If astronaut suits turn out not to work. If people hate us that much…
“Come on, Dan,” Dad says eventually. “Boxes to fill.”
He is at my flat until late, long after the packing is finished. We order pizza for dinner. I ask him if he remembers Mr Pike. I demonstrate to him that I have recently realised I can still recite my entire barmitzvah portion. We pause for a moment as we carefully roll into a tube the painting of me created by Orli. He hugs me for no reason. We find we are again stuck on the word ‘unbelievable’. Before leaving the flat, he dons his yamaka. He looks older in it, vulnerable. I call out to him as he is about to round the corner and he stops to wave. He moves a few feet down the road then turns to wave again. I keep my hand raised until he is out of sight.
***
Now
17
So I went to Hobbycraft. After the incident at the deli I spent four days writing ‘letters to the editor’ that I never sent, five nights constructing ever more indestructible astronaut suits, including one for Orli, and then I came up with this. It’s ironic really – there’s finally something in London that I want to get up and shout about but that something only confirms to me that I want to leave. I’m an outsider anyway, it seems, London won’t miss me. The discomfort this triggers in me sticks in my throat. A nervousness creeps into my muscles. Even so, there is something enlivening about caring, about identifying a problem, a wrong to right, a chance to make a difference. I remember being a kid and stumbling for the first time upon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, being overcome by the unnerving, thrilling sensation that under my radar there had been a whole world out there, with superheroes and villains and all the glorious trappings of boyhood obsession, and now I was privy to it, clued in. I feel a bit like that. Though in this case there are villains on both sides, and real victims, and superheroes that are few and far between. On Facebook there is an article going around that lists every one of the Palestinian children who have been killed. It makes me think of the American nurse in Jaffa who told me to take a trip. Of his Palestinian girl, bright as anything. She’d be there now. In Gaza. What was her name? The article gives each child’s age and their cause of death: Ziad Kamel Hamad, age nine, immediate on air-strike; Adam Abu Mustafa, age 16, immediate on air-strike; Farah Hasan al-Breem, age 12, died later of asphyxiation. The list fills four pages. I cannot bear to read the names, but I also cannot bear the article’s blatant manipulation of emotion. Of course the deaths are tragic. Of course. But why are they happening? Surely that’s the point? I bought blue markers and have turned my placard into an Israeli flag with a small British one in the corner, and the words: Free Gaza… From Hamas.
I thought maybe Gaby would come with me after she heard about the deli. She had that look when we told her the story, the same one as when our cousin Simon unceremoniously dumped her best friend, or when she overheard two teenage girls on a bus making digs at a fat woman, or when she noticed the guy in Fenwick slipping electronics into his bag. It’s a look of indignation. It’s a look that ushers forward consequences. It’s a look she’s inherited from Dad. But she wouldn’t come. “It’s not the same thing,” she said. “It’s a different argument.” And she forwarded me a bunch of articles by some leftie Israeli journo. So I am standing only with Robert at the Pro-Israel rally.
Carrying the cardboard flag, I have a new appreciation for the black hats. Underneath my shirt sits my Magen David, as always. A platinum star, the ancient symbol hammered to look industrial and edgy, Jewishness made appropriate for fashion. I’ve had this particular necklace since I was 21, I take it off only if I swim and I barely notice the weight of it just below my collar. But there have been times when I have been aware, and have patted my shirt to make sure it is safely covered in cotton. Now there is no ambiguity. The placard is twice the size of my head. We are loud and proud.
Orli says there have been demonstrations in Israel too. She hasn’t joined them and she says she feels selfish to have stayed home, to have looked inwards to her art. But I assure her that her work has greater reach, that it says far more than even the loudest of our rallying voices. Still, our voices are loud. Robert and I join the back of a blue and white crowd. There is a sense of being on tour, or at a football match. Our numbers bolster my nerves. We sing first the Hatikvah and then the British national anthem. Then somebody with a guitar and a microphone begins ‘Oseh Shalom’. The words are in Hebrew but everybody knows them – we hear this song
time and again at weddings and other simchas. I don’t know the full translation but shalom means peace. Peace. That word reverberates again and again down the Kensington street, the melody soul stirring, hopeful. Peace. It is so moving to be here. I feel that for once, for once, I have connected to something real, something important, something that is a part of me. I want to stand up for Israel and defend it, with deeds as well as my raised voice in song.
I take a picture, add a moody filter and send it to Orli before in a moment of awareness realising that when we spoke about the protests in Israel, I never asked what they were about, which side she would have stood on. “There is no one truth,” she said to me again today. “It is as vulnerable as land. As partial as history books.” I make a mental note to ask her later, which side she has selected.
On the other side here are those that hate us. Not the other side of the street – blue and white floods both flanks of the Kensington path. But down the road, a little away from where I am standing the police have cornered off an area where there is a counter protest. There are maybe 40 or 50 people, it is not frightening and nothing like the swell of 15,000 who protested against Israel yesterday. The opposing group here is small, much smaller than ours, and the police seem ready for attempts to cross the barrier. Still, there is the same venom, the same aggression, the same violence that I watched with horror on TV. I was at Nana’s for some of it. I could feel her sadness, see her remembering. For me it is novel to be so directly, so publicly hated. Novel and uncomfortable. But for her… She went to a march once, she told me. Or rather, she was made to march. I hear a chant: ‘From the river to the sea, we will fight until we’re free’. To the sea. Not to the green line. Not to the 1967 borders. See, that’s the whole problem in a nutshell. They don’t want their own state, they never have, they want to destroy ours. Ours. I know I am not yet a citizen but I feel proprietorial. Of course many of the counter-protestors won’t realise what they’re chanting. They are focussing on dead children and freedom, not geography. But their bleeding hearts are being exploited. To bleed mine.
