peter wild : “the ninth of av”

Apropos of nothing, he gets up out of his seat and starts tugging at his tie. With one hand, he’s yanking at his tie – yanking so hard, all he’s doing is tightening that bad boy, throttling himself. He’s yanking at his tie as he jerks his shoulder, shucking off his jacket or trying to, one foot lifted onto the seat where he sat mere moments ago, looking for all the world like a man who has just discovered his clothing is in fact aflame.

 

Opposite, there’s a family, a young mother, two children, a little girl of about five and a little boy who couldn’t really be much more than two. About five seconds ago, the little boy had been crying as a result of something his sister had said or done, something to do with the fact that they were fasting, it being the day it was, the Ninth of Av, the saddest day in the whole Jewish calendar, if you believe that kind of thing – but now they’re frozen, the little girl, the little boy and the mother, the pretty mother, they’re frozen, watching this crazy birdman hop and pitch and turn.

 

Outside, through the plate glass on the strip out front of Terminal 1, there are maybe a dozen aeroplanes sat uselessly glinting in the sun: Sun D’Or, El Al Israel Airlines, Israir Airlines, Arkia Israel Airlines. The sky is all bleached out, white and hot like sand.

 

The lazy aeroplanes and the bleached out sky and the heat; that’s the backdrop, the backdrop to all of the stuff that comes next.

 

Aside from the man, nothing is moving. It’s like the world is holding its breath. There are people milling around, or there were, but now: nothing. There is just the man, with his jacket turned inside out but hanging offof the cuff of his right arm, uselessly flapping like a bird with a broken wing. The tie is loose, a noose which he tugs up over his head, twisting the collar of his shirt out, spavined and awkward.

 

Not that he notices.

 

Suddenly there is movement, far off, the clatter of feet coming hard in this direction like rain on tin. The man is gulping for air, one minute flapping his hands at his sides and the next struggling with the top button of his short-sleeved shirt, all the while ducking and weaving and whirling about, a panic-eyed dervish in half a suit spinning like a fanatic.

 

There are men, coming. Plain-clothed men, security guards, police and IDF running with their arms wide at their sides, running like a gang of kids fleeing the law – only they are the law and they’re running, bringing the law with them, as if the law was some kind of holy rain. They’re running and they’re yelling at people to get out of the way. They’re running and yelling but they have radios on their lapels and they’re talking into their radio lapels as they run and yell. They don’t say this is serious but they don’t need to.

 

This is serious.

 

The sight of them jerks the pretty young mother back to life. What has she been doing this last five seconds? Sitting here, her and her two children, watching some man – some man she can’t even describe even though he’s stood in front of her. Her mind is a blank. She’s terrified, suddenly. All she can do is stretch her arms, one to the left about her boy and one to the right about her girl. Here she is. Terminal 1 of the Ben Gurion International Airport, waiting for her mother’s flight, waiting to make sure her mother gets in safely, wanting her mother’s first sight to be her grandchildren. Here she is. Caught. Trapped. Like the proverbial fly in the proverbial spider’s web. She knows that she should do something. But she doesn’t know what. She could stand. That’s one thing she could do. She could scream. She could grab her children and flee, hoping there was still enough time to make it far enough away.

 

The man is standing on his jacket, pulling with all of his might, his hand caught up in his sleeve. He’s grunting, desperate. His face is purple and his eyes are bulging. How old is he? Not even twenty-five. He’s young at any rate. There is a sound, a fearful adolescent howl searing out through his clenched teeth. Is he Arabic?

 

Is he forming words and are those words of Arabic extract?

 

The men are close and the men have drawn guns. Some of the men have drawn guns. Some of the men have produced telephones and they are talking. Some of the men are talking to other men who are stationed further away. Some of the men are being told what to do and what to say. Some of the men are issuing orders. Yelling. Directing. Pointing. The men are fanning out about the man. The men are fanning out about the man and about the woman and about her two children, the little boy and the little girl.

 

The woman hardly moves at all. She doesn’t think she can. It takes all of her energy to place her left hand on her boy’s left arm, her right hand on her girl’s right arm. She pulls them to her, resisting the temptation, finally, to look again at the man in front of her, reluctant to see whether there is anything that can be glimpsed beneath his short-sleeved shirt, her now silent children gawping at the spectacle, the two of them no idea at all that their lives might be on the verge of ending, might at any moment in the next fifteen seconds end with all of the abruptness of –

{ issue zero