14 July 2013
“He called himself Hitler. So did everyone else. Mohammed Hitler. He was the worst one. Once, we played football with them, Eritreans against Bedouins. When an Eritrean scored a goal, this Mohammed Hitler pulled out a gun, shot the ball, and shot an Eritrean in the foot. Another time, he piled three prisoners on top of each other, lined up their heads, and killed all three with one bullet.” Tesfalem takes a long pause, his pupils flick to the right, his mind is back There. “Yeah, there were others, but he was the worst, I think.”
It’s not on the same level, and really, it’s not even the worst testimony I’ve heard from Sinai, not by far, but the day after having that conversation with Tesfalem, I walked down the street and everything I saw was awful. I walked past a small, run-down synagogue on Levinsky, saw an old religious man, not less than seventy, dressed up in a suit for Shabbat, leaning against the front door, hardly supporting himself, his flies open and peeing out onto the street. He was acutely aware of his situation but couldn’t control his aging body, and with a look of shame and hoping nobody was watching, he half-crouched half-leaned on the synagogue door and pissed all over it. I walked on, looking away.
And further down the street a shopowner branded a huge metal rod and threatened a group of children crowding outside his shop, and they laughed at him. I stood for a moment, afraid he would hurt them. (Would I have stopped him? I hope so, but.) Instead, the children moved back and threw stones at the shop window until it crashed down in a shower of glass. Everyone screamed: I walked away, quickly.
And it’s on a smaller scale, but still: my cat, Hanina, walked out of the house towards the shisha bar around the corner. A few minutes later, I came to take him in for the night, and one of the men sitting there hissed “Careful. He scratched me. Next time I see him I’ll kill him.”
I don’t like to fall into clichés, not in my writing and not in my thoughts. I don’t want to say “What has the world come to?” or any such thing. All I’ll say is that usually I manage to see things in a fairly wide perspective, to hold good thoughts and bad ones together in my mind, and respond to each case of human barbarity I come across with a story of altruism or kindness. Or even resort to cynicism: all these micro-stories are funny, in a way. Mohammed Hitler. Peeing on a synagogue. But lately I can’t do it, I can’t see the good side or the funny side or ignore the evil in the world. They say that these are the Wild Days, the months of Tamuz and Av, they say that they belong to the Other Side, the sitra achra. And I don’t believe in things like that, but. And I’m writing this at the end of a bad day [and I’m not writing why, that’s for another diary], and it’s super-late and I’m writing this half-drunk, but. Syria and Eritrea, Sinai and Tel Aviv, they’re weighing down on me like they never have before. I hope that I’ll break out of this and smile again soon; I know I will. But tonight, the eighth of Av, it’s too difficult, it’s too far away.
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