So a bomb goes off in one of your common hang-outs. You’re not actually there but on the TV screen you see a street sign which you recognise all too well and suddenly you’re at the scene. You recognise the number on the bus which tells you it is a route which travels through your neighbourhood. Its windows are shattered and tyres are tattered. Isles run red with blood, an image too graphic, too reminiscent of Ezekiel 28:23.The corner stores on the edges of the black ash erratic circle, crudely drawn on the ground by the explosion are too familiar. You bought a bottle of water from that one last week. An apple from the one next door.
You watch as a volunteer on the street lowers a child’s blood soaked coat into a bin where a friend of yours butted out his cigarette the day before.
I’m not physically there, but my mind plays tricks by superimposing me sitting on the edge of the footpath behind the channel 2 news reporter. I see myself there because I was there. Not today, no in that hour, not in that split second where a woman took her last breath of city air, or when the driver punched a hole in that last ticket. The moment before fire and shards of the phone booth the bomb was attached to tore through the air, cutting and burning everything in its path. I wasn’t there then, but I am there now.
I’m sucked back into my sea in front of the TV, and in a whirl my mind flings me back to Sydney. I imagine seeing Bondi Junction in ruins like my bus station in Jerusalem. They are the same distance apart. My house in Vaucluse to the bus depot, my home in Jerusalem to the central bus station. I can see the 387 tilted on its side because it tires are shredded, glass on the seats from the shattered windows, identical to the seat I sat on my way to work.
I am not reminded of my mortality amidst all this. Yes I do feel slightly more alert and aware that any object on the street could be a death trap if someone is successful enough in hiding their home made bob. But I am more so reminded of why I came to this place, and I am glad that I don’t have that usual feeling in the pit of my stomach, feeling helpless as I sit behind the World section of the Saturday paper as I read about the attack, because I will get up tomorrow and ride the very bus which could have been blown up the day before, because I am Israeli, and we’re not going to stop our lives, in order to prolong them. For living in fear is worse than death.
