418
PARTISAN REVIEW
IT's THE FIRST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER, and 1 drop by to visit Ella, who
is still in her apartment on the street of hope. The country has moved
on,
to
other threats, other bombs. One block away from my apartment
in Jerusalem, a car bomb is detonated. No one is hurt. Bombs are found
in a watermelon on a bus seat, in a beer can in a supermarket.
1 decide
to
fly to New York for a few weeks,
to
take a break,
to
relax
from the tension here. On the way
to
the travel agency to buy my ticket,
1 hear a song on the radio, "I Don't Have Another Land, Even
If
My
Land is Burning." Rock-and-roll nationalism
to
soothe the grieving
teenagers . In a news brief, a reporter interviews Russian high-schoolers
from Yelena and Yulia's school,
to
see how they fee l about starting
school without several dozen of their classmates. Somewhere else, I
imagine, somewhere far away, a mother is listening to the broadcast and
thinking, "Thank God my child is alive."
SEPTEMBER
1 I
WAS AGOLDEN AND GORGEOUS MORNING in Jerusalem. At
7 a .m. Jerusalem time, a
sherut
cab-a group taxi, basically--comes to
take me
to
the airport. The passengers are an American researcher on his
way
to
start a fellowship in medieval charity, a human-rights activist
going home
to
Vienna and her musician husband after visiting a son in
Jerusalem, and a friendly retiree flying
to
see his girlfriend. We make our
way through Me'a She'arim and other ultra-religious Jerusalem neigh–
borhoods, where the faithful are a lready on their way
to
pray.
The researcher, the retiree, and I all get on the same flight to London,
on our way
to
Newark, New Jersey.
At Heathrow Airport 1 make my way
to
the airline counter
to
check
in for the London-Newark leg. There, I'm stopped. "No flights
to
New
York," the airline worker says. I'm thinking weather, maybe a strike.
"How about New Jersey?" I ask . "Let me check," she says, all standard–
issue airline helpfulness.
She calls, and then her face drops. Her head, her hair, it's all suddenly
cradled by her hands. After a long minute, she raises her head and says
to me, "There are no flights to anywhere in the United States . Don't
move." Moments later, an employee with a German accent comes out
to
say that two planes have hit the World Trade Center, another has hit
the Pentagon, and eight hijacked planes are in flight and no one knows
where they are.
At first we laugh. We think it's a joke, British humor gone wild. "This
is no joke," the employee says. "We will give you no hotel vouchers, no
food vouchers, no phone cards . We have no furt her information."
