Julie Rosenzweig

 

LIONS OF JUDAH

 

Ten to six, Shabbat morning. All quiet, as it should be. And dark, as one was used to at this time of year. Or should be.

A routine Shabbat morning, starting as most of Penina’s Shabbat mornings did, with a spin around the neighborhood. Together with Dalia, who would be waiting for her up at the intersection, their usual meeting-place. Two early-rising aging females, getting their me-time in. A little fresh air before shul (if they made it there); a little peace and quiet before the multigenerational din started up – the bustle over bottles and Bamba, the grandkids’ antics and scattered toys. Penina had practically tiptoed out of the house, as though afraid of offending the daughter-in-law who, she could hear, was up tending to the baby. Had the baby’s father been there, would she have felt less guilty?

It wasn’t so much me-time, these days, Penina thought, as processing-time. Processing together with Dalia; exchanging war stories, as it were. Everything needed to be unloaded and analyzed, for nothing was routine; nothing was as anyone had been used to. The early-morning darkness, once so comforting, felt like an oppressive presence now as Penina trudged up the street to meet her friend. She could easily have imagined herself alone in the world; the sole survivor of some unspeakable catastrophe.

Dalia, waiting under a streetlamp, was a reassuring sight. She seemed to have read Penina’s mind. “We turn the clocks back next week, you know,” she pointed out by way of greeting. “Next Shabbat at this hour, it’ll be light out.”

“Glad to hear it.”

As they headed out on their walk, Dalia called Penina’s attention to the flags that seemed to have sprouted overnight from lampposts all along the street. Penina nodded. Despite the opportunity to unload, neither spoke for a while. Two weeks into this war, maybe there was nothing left to say. Or too much. Maybe they should just let the flags speak for them.

Eventually, Dalia pointed out that it wasn’t only Israeli flags fluttering above them in the light breeze, but Jerusalem municipal flags as well.

“Right,” Penina answered as she discerned the emblem of Jerusalem, with its Lion of Judah, on some of the flags. Isolated under their streetlamp-spotlights, the lions looked more fragile than ferocious. If they spoke, Penina thought, it would probably be of loneliness.

The two women turned west up Yanovsky, the street that linked their neighborhood with the larger artery of Hebron Road. On one side of Yanovsky was Jerusalem’s famous Promenade, with its view of the Old City. The other side was a long, continuous construction site.

They stayed on the construction-site side; it felt safer.

“I’d have thought there’d be more security around the Promenade these days,” Penina remarked.

“It’s not like it was so safe there before,” Dalia answered.

The street was almost too still, even for this hour. Where were the dog walkers? A lone security vehicle finally did cruise past, only to leave the women enveloped in the same solitude as before. Forty minutes yet till sunrise, and they were headed away from its faint pinkish traces. The streetlamps cast a ghostly pallor on every object along the thoroughfare, which deepened rather than dispelled the sense of plunging ever farther into night.

Even from across the street, the Promenade vista was something to behold; even intermittently blocked by parked buses, overgrown shrubbery, and a portable restroom for the laborers who, before the war, had been carrying out endless renovations there. The lights of the city below twinkled with charming indifference; the golden dome gleamed in complacent aloofness – more complacent than usual, Penina thought.

On the south side of the street where the two women plodded along, half-a-dozen hotels were slated for construction. A lot of digging had been done, and ugly metal fencing put up, but in the way of such grandiose initiatives there had been delay after delay. Finally, the past few months had seen three skeletal stories of one building actually rise above ground.

In the semi-darkness, this proto-edifice, a jumble of scaffolding, seemed derelict, haunted. It had often struck Penina that a building under construction can look like its exact opposite – a building undergoing demolition. Like an ambiguous picture in need of a caption. The stretch of fencing in front of the building was plastered with images of the good times to be had in the future hotel: a rooftop pool, a balcony café with revelers overlooking an improbably close-up Old City, tall glasses filled with fancy cocktails. These marketing photos had been up for a while and were by now torn and splattered with mud. The last of them was followed by a stretch of empty fencing, and then a different kind of poster, one featuring the image of two Israeli politicians. “We won’t forgive and we won’t forget,” the poster proclaimed in angry red letters.

“Any idea what’s not being forgiven or forgotten? Or by whom?” Penina asked Dalia, who merely shook her head in response. They reached the end of Yanovsky and turned left onto Hebron Road, passing office buildings, restaurants, a gas station, and a wall with a rainbow mosaic.

“The mosaic!” Dalia cried. “We almost forgot. It’s Parashat Noach!”

The two women turned back to contemplate the mosaic, in honor of that week’s Torah portion, to which it was connected.

The mosaic had once beautified the façade of a telephone-exchange building that had stood on Hebron Road for many years. When the exchange building had been torn down, public outcry had saved the iconic artwork. It had been taken apart and stored away for reassembly once the new apartment complex that replaced the exchange building reached completion. The apartment complex lacked a blank wall large enough to accommodate the mosaic, so a standalone wall had been erected for it, situated awkwardly in front of the complex.

The mosaic’s popularity wasn’t surprising, as it was colorful and non-esoteric; you didn’t have to struggle to figure out that there was a rainbow there, set against a blue sky with pops of white cloud, above rolling green and orange hills. Penina and Dalia were glad the mural had been saved, though like many others they thought a better location could have been found for it.

“They still haven’t put the pasuk back,” Penina observed, referring to the verse from Parashat Noach that had originally been inscribed under the mosaic when it graced the exchange-building. For some reason, the verse had been omitted from the reconstruction, though there was plenty of room for it on the lower edge of the new wall.

“Without the pasuk, you could almost think it was just some random rainbow,” Dalia pointed out. “There’s no ark there, or animals, or any human figures you could identify as Noach and his family.”

“It needs the caption,” Penina murmured. Then, after a pause: “You don’t think … They couldn’t possibly … have left it vague on purpose? Open to … interpretation?”

Dalia’s eyes widened and she answered, “I doubt it. It was probably just an oversight.”

Disinclined to dwell on the matter, the two women moved on to the next intersection, Tzomet HaBankim. Here they stopped for a while, because the advertising board at the corner was plastered from top to bottom with posters of the recent Hamas abductees.

It was a municipal board, a large metal slab with Lions of Judah rearing upward at the two top corners. Under the lions, small posters had been arranged in regimented rows. Each poster displayed a single abductee’s photo with his or her name, age, and place of residence. The word “Kidnapped!” was printed in English at the top of each poster, and “Please help bring them home alive” on the bottom.

Penina knew it was nitpicking, but she didn’t care for the use of “them” in the bottom captions. It was true that the word could be understood collectively, as referring to all the abductees. But the posters were individualized, and so ought to have had “him” or “her” under each photo. Presumably there’d been a need for a poster template that would do for everyone, regardless of gender. Still, the forced androgyny, as well as the Warhol-like repetitiveness of the posters in their orderly rows, had a dehumanizing effect. So did the fact that abductees from the same families appeared in separate posters scattered randomly across the advertising board. But isn’t that just how war is? Penina reflected. Don’t we all become statistics, not people?

She didn’t want to but couldn’t help searching, amid all this repetitive randomness, for her darlings. Yes, that’s what she’d called them at first and still called them to herself whenever reminded of them, though she tried to banish the image from her mind – the video clip she’d seen the first day after the disaster. Her poor gingi darlings. As the mother of two redheads, she had an eagle eye for ginger-haired babies and toddlers, and felt a kind of kinship with them. The barbaric video of the mom being carted away with the baby and preschooler in arms, the little ones turned away from the camera so that what you saw wasn’t their faces but the sunny orange of their hair – this had done a number on Penina.

Ariel and Kfir were the boys’ names, one meaning “lion of G-d” and the other “young lion.” Had the parents had the Davidic ruddiness in mind when they’d named these boys – the Tribe of Judah lineage? Those were hard allusions to resist, Penina knew. Scanning the array of posters, she first located baby Kfir, middle-right, then four-year-old Ariel, bottom-left. The mom and dad didn’t seem to be anywhere on this board. Well of course not: you couldn’t fit all 200-some-odd captives on a single board; the parents must be alone, bereft of their children, on some other boards. Random statistics, after all.

Penina’s eyes were loaded; she closed them so that only a little wetness seeped out. With eyes shut it was easier to place the mom and the two little gingis together, on the sofa in the toy-strewn living room of the apartment where she, Penina, and her husband had started their own family. She put them there, and she didn’t forget to add some kiddie music in the background. A mug of cocoa on the coffee table for the mom. Puffy throw-cushions, a large stuffed animal, a hand-knit afghan. The dad enters the house, home from work; the four-year-old runs to greet him and is hefted giggling into the air.

Her own gingis, now full-grown lions – one married and a father himself – were both in uniform and had been stationed in different parts of the country. When they called, at irregular intervals, they were careful not to disclose their exact locations – a circumstance Penina was well aware she must put into perspective. She remembered suddenly what she’d once learned about the gur aryeh, the lion cub of Jacob’s blessing for Judah: that the term united the youthful fearlessness of the cub with the craftiness of the mature lion – the ability to wait until the right moment to strike.

She opened her eyes and glanced over at Dalia, whose own face was crumpled. The two women embraced briefly; then they stood looking west, down Rivka Street across the intersection, where the sky was still dark. If they hadn’t known morning was on its way – without that mental caption – they might have thought it was the picture of night. They turned and started walking home, eastward up Ein Gedi Street, where the sky was lightening. They felt disburdened of a great loneliness as they headed away from the darkness and into the day. 

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