two days later

The other day I heard a man blow himself up.
I didn't want that to be what I wrote about first thing in more than a month on this. I was planning on writing about how I voted in the Israeli election. Then I was planning on writing about Christopher and my trip to Sinai. But I just hadn't gotten around to it. Then there was the bombing at the Old Central Bus Station. Nine people killed, not including the 18-year old suicide bomber. His final pictures were set in front of a peaceful, autumnal New England landscape, the type of landscape I get more homesick for than I do for the streets of Jersey City. C and I watched "Paradise Now," the Palestinian-made movie about two suicide bombers, some weeks ago. We were thinking about it the other night when we walked up to the park at the top of our street, where Christopher likes to skateboard and we sometimes throw the frisbee around, to watch the sun set over Tel Aviv. We can see the whole city from there, glittering in its disco lights. It's quite a different view from what the two men see, their town of Nablus in the West Bank. The most affecting moment of the movie is when they get dropped off in Tel Aviv and look at the super-modern white-stone architecture, the women in bikinis rollerblading at the beach, the happy families with their dogs. This place is so small, it's hard to believe how many people can't and don't ever leave their hometowns, or home refugee camps, and never see this metropolis maybe 15 miles away.
Anyway, the bombing happened right as I ran out of the New Central Bus Station, where we've been having rehearsals, to meet Christopher for lunch. He was inside looking for me. I heard a loud, clumsy-sounding, as in, it had a couple parts to it, boom. Now, whenever I hear a boom here my first thought is, bomb. This time, after less than a minute, sirens filled the air and ambulances and all sorts of police vehicles filled the streets. C and I went to get sushi at a place in our neighborhood we'd never been before. My cell phone, which I'd had on silent for the rehearsal, was full of calls and messages from the girls in the quartet, who'd heard about the bombing while they were still in our rehearsal room. They knew that where it happened is on the way to my place, and that I was biking home as usual, and wanted to know I was safe. So that was when I heard what happened.
I miss baseball. I miss my cats, all the comforts of my parents' house. I miss the subway and the people I love to see in New York. I miss not having to worry about the people I love being hurt.
Nightmarish visions of the future make every city like this. Maybe this is an escalation, and maybe soon many more places will be. It's not all of Israel that you feel this immediacy of danger, that you feel yourself always at the middle of someone's bulls-eye. I'd say a majority of it, you still feel that magic of a just-discovered Eden. It's easy to forget here that it was settled through colonization. I'm not saying -AT ALL- that I agree or even sympathize with people who blow themselves up to hurt Israel, or with people who say this place shouldn't be here. Everybody needs a homeland, that should be the lesson of this place, and the history that led to its founding.
I'm probably not making any sense. It was an interesting experience leading up to voting. There are a lot more choices here than in the states. I wanted to vote for Hadash, the only party in Israel that is both Arab and Jewish. It's a communist party, at that. Ultimately, though, it was like choosing Gore over Nader. the coalition government means that smaller parties have almost no voice, even though their appeal is so great to us idealists. The pensioners' party, founded and peopled by all retirement-age people, ended up doing well among young, artsy people like me, and doing far better than expected. They benefited in a way from the low turnout. A lot of people who hadn't planned on voting, when they heard late in the day that Avoda, the Labor Party, had secured a strong place in the coalition, decided they could afford to vote idealistically, and threw their support behind this admirable cause: raising the average pension from Israel's current abysmally low 1,500 shekels a month- about $300. But I didn't think that far ahead, or wait that long, and decided to vote Avoda, both to support their frontman Amir Peretz, whom I like, and to make sure there was a strong left next to Sharon's Kadima, which was certain to win the most seats. The voting place, a school, was surrounded by banners and flags, with people for all the right-wing and religious parties like Shas, Likud, and the new ones, Israel Beiteinu ("Israel Our Home") and Zazim Yemina ("Moving Right"), many of them blasting dance music from boomboxes. It was a very funny scene for me and C, a circus to Americans used to the dignified silence that surrounds voting stations in the states. Inside, I gave my Tehudat Ze'ut, my national ID, to some people at the front desk, and they told me to which room I'd been assigned. They asked why Christopher wasn't voting, and I said, "Next year! He hasn't made Aliyah yet." He waited with his book as I went to my assigned room, where a row of four people sat at schooldesks, checked off my name, and held on to my Tehudat Ze'ut, I guess as collateral that I would vote correctly. I sat behind a desk with a large posterboard blocking me from their view. In front of me on the desk were about thirty stacks of pieces of paper, each emblazoned with a powerful, short word. On the posterboard was a key to what each word stood for: Power for Likud, Yes for Kadima, Truth for Avoda... That was easy, since Truth starts with an Aleph and they were arranged alphabetically. I put the paper in the blue envelope the folks at the desks had given me, sealed it, left my little hidden desk, and in front of the four of them, put the envelope into a big cardboard box. I felt like I was acting in a classroom play about the democratic process.
As Christopher and I rode our bikes away from the school, people still tried to give us fliers convincing us to vote for whatever. One religious man, a Dosi in the Israeli-Yiddish parlance, shouted at me, "Return to the Answer!" (the Hebrew naming of people who've become religious, like borne-again for Christians) "Stop wearing pants! Stop riding a bicycle! Observe the Shabbat!" I laughed as I pushed by him, thinking about how C and I had bought candlesticks at the Flea Market in Jaffo just the week before for our own Friday night observance. He probably wouldn't believe me.