by Judith Frank
The other was typed on a manual typewriter, and the keys had unevenly pressed the letter imprints on the paper.
Dear Daniel Rosen,
I read the newspaper article in which you expressed your understanding of the terrorist who killed your brother and sister-in-law. Please do not talk about things you don’t understand. Compassion is a noble impulse but it must always be balanced with WISDOM. If it is not, the result is always foolish stupidity.
MATT LAID THEM CAREFULLY on the kitchen counter, smoothed them with his hand. “Christ,” Daniel was saying, and Matt said, “What are the odds that after not receiving any mail at all, you’d get two letters in one morning? And who even sends hate mail via snail mail these days?” Then he thought: These people know where we live, and they want us to know that. The thought came gulping up and swallowed him. His eyes scanned the windows. Would he and Daniel be like those abortion doctors, shot in their living rooms by deranged snipers? If one of the kids got hurt . . . At the very thought of that happening, his chest swelled and his blood seemed to roar through his heart.
The whistle of the kettle broke into his consciousness, and he went and turned off the burner. “I gotta go,” Daniel was saying. “Let’s talk about this when I get home.”
Matt opened the letters once more and reread them, and calmed himself with the observation that they didn’t seem threatening, just officious, condescending, obnoxious as hell.
CHAPTER 13
HE TRIED TO cultivate a sense of superiority—they didn’t deserve to be even considered—but the letters got to Daniel; a reflexive feeling that he’d done something terribly wrong nagged at him, and made it hard to fall asleep.
“That’s just what they want you to feel,” Matt said hotly. “They want you to think that you’re the crazy person.”
Daniel knew that. Still, sometimes, just sometimes, he had the heart-stopping thought that he’d missed something, or breached an important code of conduct, or failed at some response crucial to the common human enterprise. Wasn’t there, just possibly, something strange—even disturbed—about the fact that he couldn’t muster any anger at the man who had killed his brother?
Now he looked at Matt, who was sitting cross-legged on the playroom floor and taking apart the foam puzzle alphabet floor. He thought about how irritated Matt was that people who hadn’t given him the time of day before suddenly fell all over him in camaraderie once he had kids. Yes, he got why Matt was irritated, but it wasn’t entirely sinister, was it? Wasn’t having and raising children simply part of the common human enterprise?
“Sometimes,” he said, “I wonder, are we so perverse, so used to thinking against the grain that we can’t even recognize a normal human sentiment when we stumble upon it? Like, for example, that it’s bad to kill people?”
Matt tsked. “We know it’s bad to kill people, Daniel. We know that.”
“But understandable,” Daniel said, feeling the ugliness press at his eyes and face.
Matt looked at him and sighed, stood and put the stack of alphabet floor pieces in the corner. “Is that it?” he asked, looking around the playroom. “Kitchen clean?”
“Yes,” Daniel said.
In the living room Daniel threw himself on the couch, covering his face with his crooked arm, while Matt found the newspaper and sank into the armchair. Legs crossed at the knee, swinging a bare foot, he read. The news was all horrendous, the depredations of the Bush administration terrifying; but Matt felt it was his duty to witness it all. So he read and groaned, and his heart sank and swelled.
“What if,” Daniel said, sitting up. “What if you said—in print!—that you understood Matthew Shepard’s killers? And then the whole gay community turned on you? Would you call them lunatics?”
Don’t bite, don’t bite, Matt told himself, and then he said, “It’s so not the same thing! When did gay people ever do anything to straight people to warrant being killed?”
“So you think Israelis deserve to be killed!”
“Oh God,” Matt groaned.
THEY GOT MORE MAIL, some snail mail, most via email. Much of it—laced with the straining, acid language of political extremism, words like brutal, mockery, hypocrisy, bloodthirsty, fanatics, agenda—gave them a headache. Nothing worse than a Semite who is anti-Semitic. Do your homework before speaking. You’re the same type of so-called intelligentsia that propagated Hitler’s Holocaust. A few letters came in the form of long treatises so strenuously argued—one of them was even footnoted—they sounded like the ironclad cases the insane make about their persecution. Then Adam called to tell Daniel that his name was up on a website by a group called TheCancerWithin.com. Matt and Daniel logged on and scrolled down the luridly fonted home page. “Islam, a religion of peace? Or is it preparing to sodomize the world?”
“Lovely,” Matt muttered. He pointed to a link titled “His Ugliness Yasser AraFART: decades of stinking lies.” “AraFART. Clever!”
“Here,” Daniel said, clicking on a link called “Israel-hating Judenrats.”
“Oh,” Matt said, scanning. “It’s everybody who ever signed a petition.”
Daniel clicked on the Rs, and scrolled down to his name. There was a tiny picture of him, a cutout of his face from the Daily Hampshire Gazette article. “ ‘This Judenrat believes that the terrorist was right to kill his brother and sister-in-law. He’s a rabid homo—why are we not surprised that he likes to bend over for terrorist cock?’ ”
“Close it,” Matt said.
“Jesus,” Daniel said.
“Close it!”
But there were other kinds of letters, too. One was from someone who’d lost a son in 9/11, and wanted to direct Daniel to the group of bereaved family members who’d gone to Afghanistan on a peace mission before the war broke out. One was from a man who ran a workshop called Men Healing From Violence at the Kripalu yoga center; he sent his flyer, on the bottom of which he had written, I wish your spirit peace, friend. Daniel read it, feeling, as he always did in the face of the New Age, touched through layers of irony.
There was a letter from a gay man who’d lost his partner in Tower Two and had not received a penny of his estate, or a word of acknowledgment at his funeral, because they hadn’t made any legal arrangements, and his partner’s bio-family had elbowed him out. I’m trying not to hate them, he wrote, because I want to remember Robert without hatred attached to it. Can you tell me what your secret is for avoiding hatred?
I don’t really have a secret, Daniel wrote back. I think I’d hate your partner’s family, too.
THE READING ROOM OF the Smith College library was dim, lit by lamps with ornate shades; there was an antique fireplace, and the worn dark leather furniture was pushed against the walls to make room for two sections of folding chairs with an aisle in between them. A long table with water pitchers and cups was set at the head of the room, a small huddle of people talking at one end. In the audience were Smith students, some in tattered jeans and tight shirts and others in head scarves, white girls with dreadlocks, young women pierced in tendentious places, women with blunt features and buzz cuts who were transitioning to manhood. That was what they did these days, instead of living as butches, Daniel thought, regretting the loss of the gender deviance in both men and women that always stirred him. There were older people too, from the community—women in corduroys and wool sweaters with thick gray-streaked hair pulled back in ponytails, men with Abraham Lincoln beards.
Daniel sat next to Derrick in a chair near the door, leaving his coat on, picking out the speakers from the hosts. He’d known about this event for a few weeks, since Derrick had forwarded him the announcement posted on one of his social justice Listservs. It was a discussion by two members of The Families Project, a group of Israelis and Palestinians who had lost a family member to the conflict, who met together seeking peace and reconciliation. A Palestinian and an Israeli man, they were touring the States talking about their group and their friendship, and promoting a peace agenda. Daniel picked them out of the huddle of cha
tting organizers and faculty members, or was pretty sure he had. The Israeli was in his late thirties or early forties, with glasses and sandy-brown hair brushed evenly over his forehead, the kind of man who perhaps in high school, the army, or university was rejected by women because he wasn’t good-looking enough, but who goes on to happily marry in his thirties. The Palestinian was a young man in a worn gray leather bomber jacket, thick dark hair cut short. Chubby, heavy in the chin, with beautiful eyes and lips.
Next to him, Derrick sat with his hands folded, his shaved head stately and gleaming, emanating the scent of his aftershave. He had called Daniel a few hours after emailing him about the event, to ask if he planned on going. Daniel had said he’d try to go, that it depended on what was going on at work. “Don’t you think you should make this a priority?” Derrick had asked, and then added, after a chilly silence, “No pressure.”
“No pressure,” Daniel said.
“It’s just that these are your guys,” Derrick said in a burst. “And I’d like to see you get some support for your . . . your way of being. That’s all.”
“Support for my way of being, huh?” Daniel said. “You say it a lot nicer than Matt. He says I either come to this event or I stop complaining to him about the hate mail.” He continued to compulsively open the messages, instead of—as Matt wanted him to do—deleting them from his email without reading them. The loonies were bad; they called him a faggot, a traitor, a guilty liberal asshole. But it was the ones who debated Middle East policy with him who got to him the most, and his mind scuttled about in constant, heated rebuttal; his lips moved in argument as he went about his day.
Daniel was seized by a fit of yawning, tired from work and depressed as always by the early-winter dark, wanting and not wanting the presentation to be perfect. It was unpleasant sitting there, feeling a kind of scathing irony toward the audience, for he knew that if this peace-loving, gender-queering, intellectually high-flying audience wasn’t his ideal community, or very close to it, there was nowhere he belonged. A faculty member with a spray of steel-wool hair came to the front of the room to begin his introduction. He projected the aura of someone popular enough with his audience to extemporize, but he wasn’t actually good at it; he had to consult a piece of paper for the key facts, and labored over pronouncing the Israeli and Arab names. At the end, though, he grew grave. “They are the people who are supposed to most desire revenge,” he said, “and yet they turned in a different direction, a direction more difficult, more exacting, than retribution. They are here to tell us their stories.”
The applause was emphatic and encouraging, and the speakers nodded and said “Thank you” till it died down. The Palestinian man spoke first. His name was Ibrahim and he lived in Ramallah. He had lost his brother in the First Intifada, and spent seven years in an Israeli prison. Strangely, he said in very good English, his Arabic accent like water rolling over rocks, it was there that he developed compassion for Israelis, when he learned a little about Jewish history and about the Holocaust. “For six years I attended the Project’s meetings, and met Israelis who were grieving their own losses. I learned that our blood was the same color, that their tears were as bitter as mine, and had the same salty taste.”
Then his seven-year-old daughter was killed by a settler on her way home from school, and the IDF spokesman told the newspapers that she wouldn’t have been killed if she had been looked after properly. There was a collective intake of breath when he said that, and he paused for a minute. “My faith in peaceful coexistence faltered then,” he said, “and I left the Project. I thought that the Israelis I had met must be an aberration. I told myself that they were, after all, only a few. Most Israelis were the savages many Arabs thought they were. But I am not a violent man. I did not seek vengeance—instead, I grew weary, and spent most of my time in bed. I lost my job; I had been a photojournalist. I lost twenty kilos. You can see that I’ve put them all back.” He patted his stomach ruefully, to gentle, relieved laughter. “My wife grew desperate; she had lost her beloved daughter, and now her husband was disappearing, too.”
Then someone told him about the Israeli man, Eitan Goldberg, who had just joined the Project after his own young daughter died in his arms after a bus explosion. A Palestinian on the board of directors called him and asked him to reach out to this man. He knew, Ibrahim said, that this was a ruse to bring him back to the Project, and his first impulse was to refuse. But the board member was persuasive. He said, “So what if it’s a ruse? A bereaved man needs support, and Ibrahim, so do you.”
“We arranged to meet at Eitan’s house in Tel Aviv,” Ibrahim said. “It took me many weeks to get there. I was afraid, you see. Afraid that I might look in his eyes and see my own broken image. Afraid I would come to be friends with another Israeli, when I now knew for certain that Jews were evil. There is comfort in knowing that, in living without ambiguity. Much easier to live that way.” He paused, gazing at the audience with mild eyes, then picked up briskly. “And then, once I grew brave enough, I had to get a permit, which of course took a long time.” He paused and took a sip of water. “When the cab left me off at his address, I walked up and down his street. I was nauseated, I was so nervous.”
Eitan cut in. “Meanwhile, I was inside, also nauseated.”
The audience laughed.
“Remember,” Eitan said, “I was a new member of the Project. My sister had convinced me to try it. She is very important to me, and despite everything that occurred, does not have the least trace of hatred or spite in her heart. And I had not yet met any Palestinian members. My whole life, I had met exactly one Palestinian outside of the army, outside of people trying to pass through the checkpoint I was stationed at. What if I hated him, if he confirmed all the bad ideas I had about Palestinians? And there was part of me, a shameful part, that wondered, can a Palestinian love and grieve as I do?” He paused for effect, and Daniel felt Derrick nodding beside him.
“When he opened the door,” Ibrahim said, “we looked at each other, and we embraced without words. I went inside, his wife brought us tea, and we talked for over two hours. We found that we disagreed about many things,” Ibrahim said. “But to this we agreed: We must stop this vicious circle of violence. It is a never-ending cycle of murder and retaliation, revenge and punishment, with no winners. It is not a decree of fate. This is not our destiny!”
There was uncertain applause, and then it picked up and became full-fledged. Derrick reached over and took Daniel’s hand and squeezed it.
“So! Here are a few of the projects we have done.” There was a hotline on which bereaved Israelis could find a Palestinian to talk to, and vice versa. Since the two men became friends they’d gone together to Palestinian high schools and talked with classes of Israeli kids who were about to become soldiers. With two other Palestinian members of the Project, Ibrahim had gone to Magen David Adom, the Israeli Red Cross, to donate blood, while Eitan and several other Israelis made their way across the Green Line to a Palestinian hospital to do the same. “At first they had no idea what to do with us!” Eitan said. “We were trying to make blood flow for peace and healing, instead of from warfare. We were affirming that we all have the same blood.”
Tears prickled in Daniel’s eyes, and he bit his lip.
The moderator opened the floor to questions. There was a longish silence, then a man raised his hand and stood. “I’m sitting in my seat listening to your stunning stories, wondering how to respond, wondering what words could possibly be adequate to follow upon them. And I finally found a single word that does justice to you. ‘Bravo.’ ” He stood for a moment, flushed, until someone started to clap and a string of applause smattered around the room.
“Oh sweet Jesus,” Derrick muttered. “Give me a break.”
Daniel laughed, which felt like such a great release after his clenched and pent-up listening, he struggled to swallow down the giggles.
A young woman with short hair and a bull ring in her nose, wearing a T-shirt whose writing D
aniel tried to make out in her half turn toward him—he was pretty sure it said Bite me—stood agitatedly and said, “We learn in college about occupation, nationalism, globalization, migration, oppression . . .” She broke into a grin as a few people laughed. “All those intellectualized concepts! What you have said is simpler and truer than anything I’ve learned in the classroom.”
A bespectacled man in his sixties with disheveled hair stood and spoke. “I commend you for your commitment to peace. I too am agonized by the violence on both sides.” Daniel recognized him as one of those Jewish men who speak like a rabbi—heavy-consonanted, sorrowful, stooped from the weight of all his great thoughts. “I wish I could believe that yours was the right way. Let’s hope that it’s you who turn out to be right, and not me.” He shook his head woefully and sat back down.
A student with a round, light brown face and a head scarf stood. “My cousin was killed in Jenin last April,” she said. “How can my aunt and uncle get in touch with you?”
Eitan began to answer, but Daniel didn’t hear him. He stared at the back of the woman’s head, his mind buzzing, his heart making an unpleasant whir in his chest. Her cousin was probably killed in the name of his brother and sister-in-law. He wanted to stand and say: I didn’t want it that way. I was not comforted by it.
He wanted to say these things with a blaze of righteous fury. But he couldn’t; something seized his tongue. Derrick was directing a steady, gentle gaze at him—a gaze Daniel knew well and normally loved, but which felt unbearable to him now.
When the event ended, they sat with their hands pressed on their thighs, getting ready to stand. Derrick said, “You should go talk to them.”
Daniel looked at the men, who had already been approached by several audience members.
“I can’t. I can’t hang around here.”
“You’ll hate yourself if you miss this opportunity.”
