Mornings feel like Yom Kippur. Schools and businesses are closed, streets are mostly empty. A stillness permeates Jerusalem’s crisp mountain air. But unlike the serene stillness of Yom Kippur, the air has an edge—as if it retains a trace of the previous night’s air raid sirens and anticipates those to come later in the day.
Afternoons feel like the first days of Covid. Without a routine to match the new reality, I busy myself with work, laundry-hanging, dishwashing. I chat with my older son, who has come home to ride out this unexpected war-within-a-war with my husband and me. (Our building has a bomb shelter, his Tel Aviv building does not.) I check in with my daughter, who has fled Haifa for her boyfriend’s family home in the Galilee; our younger son in Bangkok checks in with us. When energy lags, anxiety creeps in. A mindfulness meditation brings calm for a half-hour, tops.
Worry gathers with evening. We eat dinner knowing that at any moment our phones may blare with an advance warning that Iran’s missiles are headed our way, and we should stay within close range of a shelter. (The missiles come more often in the evening and night.) Should they close in on southern Jerusalem, where we live, they will trigger a local siren—an oddly gentle whistle that rises and falls, rises and falls, before a final decrescendo.
This is our cue to slap on our sandals, leash the dog, and scramble down the stairs. Though I cannot make out a word of our neighbors’ native French, Russian, or Japanese, I recognize their nervous chatter as they emerge from their apartments. I introduce myself to a newcomer, a Sri Lankan woman who has just begun working as an aide to an elderly neighbor, though I have no idea what language she speaks.
Not all my neighbors come to the shelter. Amara, from Ethiopia, assures me there is no need. “God will protect me… my fate is already written,” she says. Aliza, a secular, native Jerusalemite, isn’t worried either. “I’ve lived through every war since the War of Independence,” she says with a rascally smile. The Chinese construction workers who live next door stay behind too. The AI-generated translation I showed them apparently did not convey an adequate sense of urgency.
When we enter the shelter—a dusty cement basement fitted with reinforced steel doors and shutters and scattered with shabby sofas and mattresses—we joke about who was the first one down tonight and who will be the evening’s “designated updater” to periodically pop out and refresh their phone screen, so we will know when the Home Front Command announces the skies are clear. Unflappable retirees Dani and Chani play cards. Tunisian-French immigrant Eliyahu studies a Bible with a magnifying glass. Tamar, a Jew-for-Jesus who rents the rooftop apartment and spends most nights on the shelter floor to avoid climbing the stairs, reads from the Book of Isaiah. Our little dog, Coco, trots from neighbor to neighbor, whimpering whenever he picks up the scent of stress (ie: often).
When I hear the boom of an intercepted missile overhead, I decide it’s time to search a stack of my children’s old board games for something that will interest 10- and 12-year-old brothers, Ilan and Yoram. I pass over Risk and Battleship for non-belligerent Domino Rally. Those in need of serious distraction huddle around a 1,000-piece puzzle piled on a folding table. The puzzle is an image of Reptiles, a lithograph created by Dutch artist M.C. Escher during World War II, in which lizard-like creatures emerge from one end of a drawing into a three-dimensional world, crawl over a series of objects, and re-enter the drawing at its opposite end—rising and falling in a never-ending loop.
After receiving the “all clear,” we drag our bodies upstairs. I check the news to find out how many missiles penetrated our air defense systems this time and how many people were injured. My adrenaline plummets. I collapse into bed hoping for a decent stretch of sleep before the sirens, and we, rise and fall again.
