“I don’t get how this country stays alive” says Danya. He’s fulfilling his mandatory service by chauffeuring a female commander with a very strong personality. He’s facing his mother, Ira, at the dinner table and I’m sitting right between them, fresh off my flight from London. A little delirious. Eating dark bread with a light cheese spread and drinking raspberry marshmallow tea (which is delicious, by the way).
“Please don’t say it, please don’t say it” Danya pleads. “Well, prayers keep this country alive” Ira responds with a smirk. She’s a professional dietician, one who plans meals for soldiers in the IDF. I’m staying at her house in her guest room. She has a big gorgeous dog named Troy, an orange cat who bites, and a black cat who doesn’t.
“Prayers are the only thing that works.”
Danya tells me to download an app that’ll make a “horrifying sound” if there’s any danger. He tells me that if the alert is coming from Yemen, though, I shouldn’t worry about it. I remember when he was two feet tall and we went to a kangaroo petting zoo. Now he has a beard, wears army green, and has opinions about military personnel.
Today I visited my grandma in the hospital, she’d just gotten surgery and had just woken up. Turns out it’s the very same hospital where I was born. Some poems write themselves. I felt heavy and light and heavy and light all day. My dad and I went to the Russian supermarket to buy chocolates for the nurse, replicating a custom from Soviet times when there wasn’t enough food to go around. At the store, right next to a very impressive selection of cheeses, there was a sign pointing us to the nearest bomb shelter.
Before bed last night I imagined how frightened I would be if I was alone, on the beach let’s say, and an alarm went off…