Samantha Shapiro – on getting them back.

Jerusalem
June 27, 2000

Dear Emily,

The bus was of course not where I left it, but I thought I could find it – I remembered that the driver had a giant yellow flag that said “Moshiach” (Messiah) by his seat. I ran up and down the aisles of buses peering in and asking in a panicked Hebrew, “Where is the bus with Moshiach?” They are used to this kind of tourist here; in fact he is usually wearing a purple robe and playing a harp. No one paid much attention to me – they were in a hurry to close for Shabbat – and I got sent home until Sunday.

There were many theories at the bus station about where my particular bus had gone after it stopped in Jerusalem, and I spent a lot of time calling various remote bus stations to see if the computer had turned up. I also paid repeated visits to the mystical “Department of Lost Objects” at the bus station, an improbably tranquil oasis in a country where the checkout counter at the supermarket is a bit like roller derby. I think I was the only person who visited the Department, and I usually found an old bearded man named Zion entertaining his friends with backgammon or stories when I arrived. Due to our language barrier he would show me all the empty computer bags he had, his dewy eyes beaming warmly at me. I eventually gave up hope and bought a new computer.

That was back in November. Then two weeks ago a man from a Christian television network in Michigan called my mom in New York City. Seemed he had been in a different lost and found and an Israeli police officer had told him to call my home phone number when he got back to the States. So yesterday I went to this other lost and found. Although it was in the center of the “shouk,” a chaotic market whose narrow cobblestone walkways are slick with mashed fruit and trash, it had the same surreal peaceful feeling as the Department of Lost Objects. Three old religious guys sat in an empty airy room. In desperately bad Hebrew I tried to engage them in my story. Unmoved by the surprise ending with the Christian TV producer, they replied repeatedly “everything here is property of medinat yisrael (the nation of Israel).” I thought this was brilliant – a lost and found which exists to tell people that they can’t have their lost things back, that the lost things have moved on! We went back and forth until I said “Texas Instruments,” the brand of my computer. Like magic, a middle-aged woman with an enormous blond coiffure and a fetchingly tight police uniform emerged and took me to a back room, where she removed my computer bag from a locker. She was incredibly proud of herself, although her entire effort to return the computer had been to tell a stranger to call me when he got to the United States nine months after she had first received it.

“Here,” she said proudly. “This is your disk, no? And this is your pens, no?” We went back and forth until she opened the computer bag. I screamed. Beneath the screen there were little holes with wires poking out from them. The computer didn’t sit straight, the keys were hanging off the plastic things that are apparently underneath keys. “Ohhh,” the officer said, “It must have been exploded.” Not to worry, she told me, the government of Israel reimburses people whose items get detonated. She filled out a form for me to take to a bureau in the Prime Minister’s office, where I was assigned to an English-speaking insurance agent.

His tiny office was lined with binders full of damage reports and a bottle of kosher wine. In the space between the bookshelves and the wall, he had crammed a series of prints of famous art works featuring serene women: Gauguin, Rembrandt, etc. My chair was back-to-back with his secretary’s. He apologized for keeping me waiting; he was busy because during the Israeli pullout from Lebanon, Hezbollah had lobbed a bunch of Ketuysha rockets over the border into Kiryat Shemona, a sort of battered desert Detroit that gets bombed every time the Middle East’s political Jenga shifts a bit. “See what happened to your computer?” the agent asked gently. “In Kiryat Shemona that happened to people’s houses and stores.”

He told me to estimate the damage, I told him I couldn’t, he asked me to bring him an estimate for the damage from anyone – even a friend who knew about computers – and said he would do the appropriate paperwork. He showed almost no interest in seeing the computer, although he repeatedly expressed great sympathy for my hardship. I asked him about Kiryat Shemona. He said after the recent bombs, the government sent thirty insurance agents down for a blitz weekend. They divided the town up and each surveyed a few blocks for damages.

“Was it hard?” I asked.

“To be honest,” he said, “it is not quite right. Often the people say more damage was done and we look and see it wasn’t done, but they say it’s bad and then on our reports we say it’s worse than it is. We go to the house and they already have three TV sets from the last set of ketuyshas.”

“You mean you say the damage is worse than it is so people can get new stuff?” He nodded. This seemed like a fairly inappropriate statement for an insurance agent to make to a client.

“Is that the right thing to do?” I asked.

He said, “The one night I stayed there I didn’t sleep at all. I couldn’t wait to leave. Rockets were going off over my head. They live with that.” He shrugged.

I took my computer to a repairman to get an estimate. When I told him it had been a hafetz hashuv, he cradled it sympathetically in his enormous hands. He sat with it, gently prodding the small plastic pieces into place with a tiny pocketknife. He put it back together again and when he was done there were just two keys that didn’t fit. Everything worked. He didn’t charge me but said for $400 he could send it somewhere to get the last two keys fixed. I said that wouldn’t be necessary, but he still wrote me an estimate for $400 and told me to give it to the insurance agent if I wanted to.

Israel isn’t really at war and hasn’t been since 1973. The Ketuyshas Lebanon sends over, the bombs that go off on busses don’t cause death counts that are anything like that of war. So why is there a bureau of the government to reimburse people for damages incurred at war? And what is it doing trying to pay me $400 for two broken keys?

The violence here – a thousand Israeli lives and tens of thousands of Arab lives during the eighteen-year occupation in Lebanon – is not exactly war, but unlike the violence in the United States, there is no distance from it, literal or imagined. In a tiny country where the enemies’ settlements are scattered throughout the land and on all sides, it is hard to feel safe. The enemies look a lot like the citizens and are close enough for their scars – missing eyes from rubber bullets, furious tempers – to remain in full view. Israel cannot, for all its military strength, provide the illusion of distance. There is no ocean, there is no West, no vast emptiness to choke memory and history with. The air is flush with memory and history; sometimes like the ecstatic honeysuckle fragrance of a spring balls-out blooming, sometimes like the inescapable stink of a paper mill that announces its presence in a town long before you see its hulking frame.

In America, the beginning of the story has a moment on the ground, like a dead leaf, a nostalgic moment touched with color, but then it is gone. In Israel, it just lies there in plain view. Nothing seeps into the ground, nothing disappears. Looking around it is obvious that the process of life, of creating new things, cannot happen without loss. To understand this too fully is crippling. We need the fiction that life and death are separate, that loss is accidental, in order to keep going on with it. When the fiction fails, when the threat of death comes too close to reminding everyone how they came to be in this particular place at this particular time; that the beginning of the story is, still, a part of the story – when the threat of death jostles everyone badly and in ways that cannot be fixed, what can be done? Someone can come around and suggest an imperfect remedy, announce in a report that all that was shaken was a window pane or a television set. That it may have been shaken in ways that are not visible, not apprehensible to insurance agents is a given.

In the Bible, the Hebrew word for redemption is the same as “to buy back,” to regain possession of something you once owned; it is often used in the Bible to describe the act of repurchasing land that had previously been in one’s family. These days, Webster’s says, to redeem is also to compensate, to pay the penalty for something; to make amends for it, to atone. It may be that whatever is lost or damaged in transit, whatever disappears into that violent airless vacuum at the moment of birthing, will be given back to us. Our precious wallets, sweaters, wristwatches will be rediscovered, nearly intact, like ghosts, changed only a bit by their silent adventures. And the pulse of stories thought to have dissolved into the earth will flicker and lurch again through the veins.

Love,

Samantha