Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(87)
In the remaining space, between the top of the brick wall and the edge of the page, Julia wrote, “I can see over the wall. Can you?” She folded it in half, and folded that in half, and had it passed the length of the delegation. Sam showed no emotion of any kind as he read it. He wrote something on the same page, folded and refolded it, and had it passed back to his mom. She opened it, and at first couldn’t see anything he’d written. Nothing in the space above the wall, where she’d written. She searched the bricks themselves—nothing. She looked to him. He put his open hand in front of him, fingers spread, then flipped it palm-up. She turned over the yellow paper, and Sam had written: “The other side of the wall is no wall.”
As the rest of the delegation was struggling to catch up with her radical departure from the agreed-upon script, Billie was smashing the rhetorical ceiling: “Micronesia shall, henceforth, have a seat on the UN Security Council; be granted NATO membership—yes, we realize we are in the Pacific—and preferential trading status with EU, NAFTA, UNASUR, AU, and EAEC partners; have an appointed member on the Federal Reserve Open Market Committee—”
A facilitator ran into the room.
“I’m sorry to interrupt the proceedings,” he said, “but I have an announcement. There was just a major earthquake in the Middle East.”
“This is real?” one of the chaperones asked.
“Real.”
“How major?”
“They’re calling it historic.”
“But real like the nuclear crisis? Or real real?”
Julia’s phone vibrated with a call; it was Deborah. She shuffled to the corner and answered, while the model crisis gave way to the real real one.
“Deborah?”
“Hi, Julia.”
“Is everything OK?”
“Benjy’s fine.”
“I got scared when I saw your name come up.”
“He’s fine. He’s watching a movie.”
“OK. I got scared.”
“Julia.” She took a long breath, to extend the period of not-knowing. “Something horrible has happened, Julia.”
“Benjy?”
“Benjy is absolutely fine.”
“You’re a mother. You would tell me.”
“Of course I would. He’s fine, Julia. He’s happy.”
“Let me speak with him.”
“This isn’t about Benjy.”
“Oh my God, did something happen to Jacob and Max?”
“No. They’re fine.”
“Do you promise me?”
“You need to go home.”
VEY IZ MIR
Little was known, which made what little was known terrifying. An earthquake of magnitude 7.6 had struck at 6:23 in the evening, its epicenter deep under the Dead Sea, just outside the Israeli settlement of Kalya. Electricity was out in virtually all of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. It seemed that the most badly damaged areas were Salt and Amman in Jordan, as well as the West Bank city of Jericho, whose walls crumbled thirty-four hundred years before, many archaeologists have argued, not from Joshua’s trumpeting but from a massive earthquake.
First accounts were coming in from the Old City of Jerusalem: the Crusader-era Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the traditional burial place of Jesus and the holiest site in Christianity, which was badly damaged in a 1927 earthquake, had partially collapsed with an unknown number of tourists and clergymen inside. Synagogues and yeshivas, monasteries, mosques and madrassas, were in ruins. There was no news about the Temple Mount, either because there was no news or because those bearing it withheld it.
A civil engineer was being interviewed on NPR. The host, a sultry-voiced, probably short-and-bald Jew named Robert Siegel, began:
SIEGEL: We apologize, in advance, for the audio quality of this interview. Normally, when phone lines are down, we use cell phones. But cell service has been disabled as well, so Mr. Horowitz is speaking to us by satellite phone. Mr. Horowitz, are you there?
HOROWITZ: Yes, hello. I am here.
SIEGEL: Can you give us your professional assessment of what’s going on right now?
HOROWITZ: My professional assessment, yes, but I can also tell you as a human being standing here that Israel has endured a cataclysmic earthquake. Everywhere you look there is destruction.
SIEGEL: You are safe, though?
HOROWITZ: Safe is a relative term. My family is alive, and as you can hear, so am I. Some are safer. Some are less safe.
Why the f*ck can’t Israelis just answer questions? Jacob wondered. Even then, in the midst of cataclysm—the word itself sounded like classic Israeli hyperbole—the Israeli couldn’t just give a straightforward, un-Israeli response.
SIEGEL: Mr. Horowitz, you are an engineer for Israeli civil services, is that correct?
HOROWITZ: An engineer, an adviser on government projects, an academic…
SIEGEL: As an engineer, what can you tell us about the potential effects of an earthquake of this magnitude?
HOROWITZ: It is not good.
SIEGEL: Could you elaborate?
HOROWITZ: Of the six hundred fifty thousand structures in Israel, fewer than half are equipped to deal with such an event.
SIEGEL: Are we going to see skyscrapers topple?
HOROWITZ: Of course not, Robert Siegel. They have been engineered to withstand even more than this. It’s the buildings between three and eight stories I’m most worried about. Many will survive, but few will be habitable. You have to realize that Israel didn’t have a building code until the late 1970s, and it’s never been enforced.