The Month After October

Itamar left the house at 3:55 a.m., five minutes before the time he had scheduled the Uber to arrive. He hated being late, hated the way haste scattered a feeling of disorder around itself. He waited at the doorstep in the fresh cold of November, a trail of white feathers billowing from his exhales. Inside, the house was dark and warm, Camille and the children sound asleep.

Last night, he had promised Tula to wake her up before he left so they could hug goodbye. After she kept crying and begged him not to go, he had even promised to let her, and Ollie too, walk with him all the way to the front gate where they could wave as he drove away. But when the moment came to wake them, he decided it was more important to stick to their regular sleep schedule. He had only peered into their bedroom and listened to their breath—soft, peaceful, and that did not wish to be disturbed—before tiptoeing to kiss his wife and sneak out the main door like a burglar in his own home. He trusted Camille to appease the children when they woke to discover the sun already in the sky and their father long gone. Children had woken up to crueler realities. He couldn’t stop comparing. Since the war began, all he did was weigh and estimate, categorize and rank in order. Small pain, big pain, unbearable pain, and pain that was impossible to imagine until it was yours. In Hebrew, people spoke of an uncontainable pain. It was understood that this rank was reserved for all that most defied human capacity to hold, like using a bucket to absorb a storm. In the most extreme cases, he supposed, there came a tipping point when the pain was so great one could no longer feel it, or anything at all.

From Toronto Pearson, Itamar would fly to Newark Liberty. There, he would have one hour and five minutes to change terminals and board an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. Flying direct was no longer an option. Air Canada had ceased its service to Israel. Every major airline had done the same. It didn’t matter to him for convenience; only speed was of the essence. At 4:00 a.m., the street was still quiet, and there was no sign of the Uber. In an instant, Itamar’s pulse quickened as though readying him for action. But what was there to do? He had already built sufficient buffers into the day’s schedule, always calculating for possible delays. He stepped away from the doorstep into the drizzle and turned his gaze up to the bedroom window. Like a child, he hoped to find Camille there, watching over him. But the window was a dark square. No matter. He imagined what she’d say if she were there: Take three cleansing breaths. Yet he held his breath and waited.

Camille was blessed with the ability to balance the soul. Softly, she could summon hope from despair, kindness despite anger, and acceptance out of frustration—a magical alchemy that worked on the children, her massage patients, and yoga students. Only on Itamar had his wife’s alchemy stopped working. Not meditation and not pranayama. What worked lately was Wellbutrin and beta-blockers on occasion.

At 4:10, a silver sedan turned onto the street. Itamar stepped quietly down a path of soaked foliage, lifting his suitcase from its handle to prevent any noise on the bricks.

“For? Eh—” the driver stammered as Itamar slid into the back seat.

“Itamar,” he said. Few could pronounce his name on the first try.

From the foggy car window, Toronto zipped by, its city lights reflecting along the wet roads in multicolored incandescent ribbons. Occasionally, Itamar sensed the driver’s gaze trailing up the rearview mirror as though examining him. Probably he was only checking traffic. When the driver asked about drop-off, Itamar responded in monosyllables. After that, they were quiet, and Itamar was relieved. Normally, he would have appreciated a conversation. He was nothing like his father and brothers, who spoke in short, sparing phrases that concluded with periods, never commas or question marks. But at that moment, he suddenly resembled them. Unlike the Israeli dads he had known, Itamar was talkative and outwardly affectionate as a father. Yet his communication was no match with Camille’s, who therefore assumed the role of the educator, reflecting the world to the children with words that made it safe and approachable. And yet, it was Itamar who had the talk with six-year-old Tula about antisemitism.

At first, Itamar thought Tula was too young to understand. There was no use to needlessly traumatize her when the real dangers were far away. But one Saturday, Camille had driven past a protest and caught sight of swastikas on placards perturbing from a smoke-veiled crowd. Later, the news reported a heightened police presence patrolling community centers in Armour Heights and Jewish businesses downtown. Then there was the incident at the elementary school, and the diners harassed in Café Landwer, only a few blocks from their house, and the arson at the deli. They realized how, with every new development, they gradually acclimated to new levels of tolerance, just like the frog that grows accustomed to its water as it slowly boils. Sooner or later, Tula would see or hear something. The only choice was whether to react or to prepare.

They had planned to have the talk with Tula together. Camille’s intentions were many and could sometimes be at odds with each other. She wanted to cultivate resilience rather than fear, but do so without diminishing the situation. On top of it, she saw it as an opportunity to teach values of peace and coexistence while reminding her daughter that not all people were to be trusted. She researched online, spoke to other Jewish moms, and assembled all the right words. But just as they were about to enter Tula’s room, Camille pulled Itamar into the bathroom, locked the door behind them, pressed a towel against her mouth, and sobbed with the same intensity as she had every night the past couple of weeks after the kids had gone to sleep and she would catch up with the news. On those nights, Camille would watch video after video of the wives, the daughters, and the mothers, whose testimonies, eulogies, and speeches in rallies were as close and present as something uttered right there in bed with her. She knew fully well that her heartache for them—strangers she had made a part of her—no matter how devoted and unyielding, wouldn’t change a single one of their losses. She would promise herself to stop the next day, that she deserved to keep herself sane and protected and just a little bit ignorant, only to watch and read even more, and for a moment forget where and who she was and how come she deserved anything at all. Itamar couldn’t have known a capacity for such torment had existed in his wife, but had since grown accustomed to the sudden breaking down into tremors, the wet spots on his T-shirts, and had begun to buy tissue boxes in bulk.

“I can't go through with it,” Camille finally announced in a voice suffocated by the towel she held to her lips. She couldn’t face her daughter and—with words she kept for healing, words that had the magical power to transform—conjure up an explanation for what she had believed was sealed tightly between the covers of history books. Again, Itamar weighed, compared, and ranked his options, and determined that the pain that would be caused to his daughter by witnessing her mother in such distress would be greater than the one caused by the abstract understanding—delivered however clumsily by him—that there were those in her still safe and approachable world who sought to harm her because she was a Jew.

Itamar entered his daughter’s room alone. Sitting on the bed beside her, he leaned his head against the wall and, without realizing it, hugged a pillow to his chest. He wished he could say in Hebrew what he came to say. Expressing his thoughts in the language he’d spoken when he was Tula’s age seemed like a channel for a closer connection. But by now, even his deepest thoughts had long been translated. So were his dreams. Only the numbers when he counted how many chairs and plates to set around the dinner table, the inhales and exhales—achat, shtayim, shalosh—remained a single pure string of unprocessed energy. Tula jumped up and down on the bed, then climbed onto his lap and pretended to comb his short, curly hair into pigtails. He preferred to forget what he came in to say and surrender to play. But an unfamiliar earnestness awakened in him, and he said firmly, “Tula, sit down, please. Daddy needs to talk to you about something important.”

As his lips moved and delivered his lines according to the plan, Itamar felt like he was performing a scene in a play. He was some father in some period, telling some daughter about something he himself didn’t fully believe was real. He had pictured himself ending with something encouraging about how proud he was to be Jewish, what a gift it was. Then, without understanding why, he had felt embarrassed to say such things in front of his daughter and had kept them for later.

Along the curb outside the departure hall, the Uber came to a stop. Itamar stepped out of the car and checked his watch. It was 4:45 a.m. He needed to hurry. Walking briskly toward the entrance, it occurred to him that until now, he had believed that his next visit to the airport would be to greet his family from Israel in the arrivals hall below. For weeks he had tried to convince them to stay with him in Toronto, anxious that another war would erupt with Hezbollah, or worse, with Iran. A sense that the worst was yet to come loomed relentlessly. He hadn’t imagined that, in the end, it would be him making his way to them—Muhammad going to the mountain.

It was impossible for his family to conceive of abandoning the structures that held their lives in place. Even more impossible was fleeing, as if admitting defeat. Itamar understood that underneath these reasons lay a deep and ancient paradox. They feared that acting out of fear might turn it from perception to reality, from theory into practice, giving it control over everything. His family was well-educated and fully informed of the dangers, but their ability to deny them hinted at greater perils than missiles and wars. It was a rare clue to a mystery he had never been able to solve: Why did his grandmother’s parents and siblings stay in Poland despite the growing threat on the other side of the western border? Why didn’t they leave after the rise of the Nazi party, after Nurenberg, and even after Kristallnacht and the Anschluss? Why did the youngest of seven siblings, his sixteen-year-old grandmother, have to beg her parents to let her journey to Palestine in 1938—not to escape the impending world war, but to study agriculture with Hashomer Hatzair? The propensity to keep panic at bay had been passed down through generations in his family. It was as if the mental factory that manufactured feelings of safety was larger and more developed than the one ensuring physical safety. Neighboring threats, however imminent, were not enough to produce action. Only when the threat was at your doorstep—when it invaded your neighborhood, knocked down the door of your home, and shattered your bedroom window, only when it broke all the defenses that you’d built for yourself, only then would you act with urgency. Then you’d fight, run, and hide. But until then, one came to live as neighbors with fear, sometimes, out of habit, made peace with it instead of with the enemy. Itamar couldn’t make sense of it. Yet there he was, crossing the threshold into the departure hall, his fears imprisoned in a far corner of his mind, while his feet marched steadily toward the check-in counter.

“Good morning, sir. How are you today?” the airline agent greeted him cheerfully. Since October, he had grown to dread this question. At first he would stall on its essence, How am I? and the truth would slip through his teeth. He would say he didn’t know where to begin or how to contain everything in words, that he was speechless, hopeless, and powerless. Without realizing it, through those stale and insufficient phrases, he mourned those lesses. His coworkers, his frisbee buddies, and sometimes even his closest friends would gawk at him with stares blanked with confusion, not connecting the dots between the news and his reality. What is it, Itamar, what’s the matter? Why so down all of a sudden? Problems with the boss? The wife? Should we blow off some steam? Go skiing or something?

“Morning. Yourself?” Itamar handed his passport to the check-in agent, avoiding the question as he had come to learn.

“I’m sorry,” the agent said after typing for a while. “Unfortunately, only middle seats left. We’re fully booked today.” Having booked his flights only yesterday, Itamar had had no higher expectations.

His brother had called in the middle of the previous afternoon. Their call lasted less than three minutes. As soon as it ended, Itamar fetched his laptop and began searching for flights. He was aware of how futile this urgency could prove to be. It was possible, likely even, that by the time he crossed the ocean and made his way to the hospital, his father, his Abba, would no longer be alive. Even if he managed to arrive before his death, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Years had passed since his father had sunk into the depths of his consciousness, at first slowly and then quickly, all at once. Both his subtle, inching decline and his abrupt disappearance had transpired far out of Itamar’s sight. He had only received weekly updates from his brothers on the phone. Somewhere in the seam between those two phases, the slow and the quick, there was an elusive window to say goodbye. But missing out on these fleeting moments was the price those who left their homeland signed up to pay. Yet there were no guarantees to those who didn’t leave either. People could be abruptly severed from their loved ones frequently and without warning—a WhatsApp message, coordinates on a map, a mute glance briefly exchanged on the way out the door, and that was it, a final goodbye. Still, Itamar insisted on arriving as quickly as possible. Perhaps there might be a glimpse of awareness, a single lotus drifting in the murky swamp of his father’s consciousness, that could perceive his presence.

After the phone call, Itamar didn’t sit down with his face buried in his hands, didn’t pause to calm himself, didn’t go out for a walk in the rain, didn’t cry. He booked a rental car, packed pills, toiletries, and clothes, and arranged them neatly in a carry-on. He tied up loose ends at work, making sure nothing fell between the cracks. He took out the trash so Camille would have one less thing to worry about. In these moments, he could see himself from the outside, taking the necessary actions promptly and decisively—proof of his devotion—and it had seemed to him that this was how a good person would act.

Itamar crossed the wide departure hall with two boarding passes peeking out of his travel wallet. The airport was partly sleepy, partly waking into a seasonal merriness that was forced onto it by colorful decorations and flashing lights. In the background played that same Christmas music that only those who grew up on it could enjoy. His surroundings didn’t reflect even a trace of what was stirring inside of him. The departure board, perpetually updating and changing, towered overhead—a reminder that life kept moving ever forward. The world continued its orbit, waiting for no one to catch up. A familiar sense of loneliness settled in his sternum, whispering in a voice that skittered the hairs on his neck that he didn’t belong. This whisper wasn’t caused by the place but was tied to himself. It wasn’t a product of immigration nor a result of the carefree passengers about to embark on family vacations. It originated in his homeland with his people. Since he could remember, he had felt different from his brothers, cousins, classmates, and friends, and especially from the Mediterranean temperament that pervaded the hot and humid air. Others around him seemed seamlessly fused by kinship into something bigger, something he had no doorway into. Moving to Canada, he had hoped for a second chance. Quickly, he camouflaged his accent and practiced using proper prepositions. He learned to fish, compost, and not to ask others deeply personal questions too soon. He adapted himself to the invisible cues of those around him, always tuning himself to their inaudible notes. Like an expert chameleon, he blended in and disappeared.

Though it was early morning, the airport lines were longer than he had expected. They had to snake inward to compact as many as possible in a limited space. Spilling out of the snake’s outline, an overflow of people congregated to form an abstract yet orderly shape of their own. The passengers waited patiently as though in harmony with etiquette. No one pushed or cut in line. No one hollered orders to the staff, demanding that another counter be opened. No one barked at anyone to hurry up. The first time he landed in Canada as a young undergraduate student, he found himself comforted by this display of courtesy. He wondered if it was only because of this pleasant aesthetic—the clean air, the symmetry of lush greenery in the groomed cities, the miraculous orchestration of public transportation—that he’d stayed in Canada long after graduating. Whenever he visited Israel, chaos assaulted him from the moment his feet touched the ground. People shoved past him, walked straight into him—the cities’ din amplified by construction and honks fueled with rage. Returning, out of practice, he would always be on the verge of hyperventilating. He had never learned how to defend himself from the incessant competition in a zero-sum game: who was a sucker and who knew how to beat the system, who could think outside the box, who wouldn’t take no for an answer, who arrived first to get a portion of soup with a bite of potato, and who would patiently wait their turn, only to scrape the bottom.

As though born with the knowledge, Itamar couldn’t recall the exact moment when he first became aware of the Holocaust. One day, he would have to discuss it with Tula, and later with Ollie, and that would be their moment. But his parents hadn’t needed to. Every year, sirens would blare throughout the country in remembrance. For two minutes, the nation stood still with its gazes buried at the ground. Classes would stop mid-speech, and cars would pull over in the middle of jammed highways. It was the same drill, even the same system of sirens, used during rocket attacks and memorials—past and present coalescing into a single ritual. On that day, Holocaust survivors would visit his school to tell their stories. Once Itamar was immersed in enough details and the settings formed vivid imagery in his head, he would project himself into the landscape of their stories. Thoughts and dreams of his child self roaming a ghetto or a concentration camp, hiding, running, and hushing, became intrusive. Through this recurring practice, he contemplated who he really was inside, what sort of person he would have been if he had been unlucky enough to be born only fifty years sooner. Would he have had the necessary strength of character to survive? How much suffering would he have been able to withstand, and for how long? Never very strong or athletic, he questioned if wit and intelligence would have been enough. “Bemo’ach lo beko’ach,” brain not force, his father used to say. Itamar had wanted to believe there was enough goodness in him to be one of those brave people who would share their bread with a friend or help someone in need despite the risk. To prove it to himself, he began doing good deeds at any opportunity. Yet he worried that there was a cowardice in him, that this fear he had of death—one that hadn’t gone away nor diminished since childhood, but only changed its colors when he became a father—would bring out a selfish side of him. A text message from the airline vibrated the phone in his pocket, announcing that boarding had begun. It was almost his turn to remove his shoes and belt and go through the metal detector. He looked over his shoulder and saw a pregnant woman with an infant in her arms standing behind him. He paused and let her go ahead of him.

Lately, the same imaginings he had developed as a child returned to him, but they shifted from the Nazi camps to captivity by Hamas. While the former was rich with thoroughly documented evidence, personal accounts, and cultural renditions that had shaped Itamar’s imagination, the latter was a shadow. Only five women had emerged from there; so much was still unknown. Without warning, whenever he was alone and unoccupied, flashes of captivity crept into his thoughts. On his drive to work, or when he showered, Itamar would see himself in the place of the hostages. No longer a man in his forties, he was a child again, trapped in the cold underground as though in a coffin. How do you pass the days and the nights? What do you think about? And what must you not dare think? Where do you draw strength in the face of hunger and torture and the realization that the world has abandoned you? Once Itamar realized his thoughts had wandered to the maze of dark tunnels, he would force himself to stop and get out of there. But then something far worse would happen. Instead of seeing his child self there, he saw the hostages—their faces that he recognized from the posters he and Camille had hung around the neighborhood, dozens of names memorized. Their pain at once became so unbearable to him that he would close his eyes as though in silent prayer. He who never believed in God, who came from generations of atheists, found himself looking skyward and hoping that among the hostages there was someone like Camille who had unlimited access to light.

The sun began to rise above the horizon, its bright rays penetrating the plane’s elliptical windows. The window-seat passengers pulled down the shades, which caused the flight attendants to scurry down the aisle and insist the shades remained up until after take-off. If this were any other flight, Itamar might have wanted to understand the reasoning behind this seemingly arbitrary instruction, but he was too weary of questions without answers. He buckled his seatbelt, and with the sun blinding his pupils, his thoughts turned to his father, now lying in the ICU, unconscious and hooked up to a ventilator. Above his hospital bed, a television screen, constantly on, broadcasted the news. The hospital was packed well beyond its capacity with the wounded from the south, from Nova, and the battles in Gaza and the northern border with Lebanon. Which of them most needed the bed Itamar’s ninety-four-year-old father occupied for reasons that didn’t fit the collective narrative? No violence, terror, or war brought him there. He had simply slept in his own bed when his heart decided it was time to stop and go no further—a way of dying that Itamar considered ideal. His father’s caregiver had called an ambulance. On the way to the hospital, the paramedics went against the heart’s desire of his father and resuscitated him so he could die in a less ideal way, but later. Now his suffering was prolonged. No one knew for how long . Itamar wondered what he could say to his father when he sat by his side. So much had been left unsaid between them, for their bond was beholden to the vast expanse created by words they’d withheld.

The flight from Toronto to Newark was scheduled to depart at 6:30 a.m., but by 7:30, the plane still rested idle on the tarmac. Itamar broke down the time ahead into segments: the remaining wait, the duration of the flight, the time he’d need to change terminals and go through security again. He estimated roughly how long each of these unknowns would take. With every minute that passed and the plane remained motionless, his calculations were changed, and he had to start over. A flight attendant walked toward him, closing overhead compartments. Itamar wanted to explain to her how late he was for his connecting flight. He needed someone to know his layover was too short, not because of any optimism on his part, but because there were no alternatives. The El Al flight that left Newark later that day was fully booked. Tomorrow was Friday, and because of Shabbat, El Al didn’t fly. He wanted to shout that his father was hanging by a thread between life and death. There had to be something they could do to hurry up. Surely, with the right mindset, any problem could be solved.

The flight attendant passed him by and disappeared into the galley. Itamar remained seated, trapped between the elbows of two strangers. He was accustomed to feeling boxed in by a sense of helplessness. Like a pair of shrunken jeans, he had gotten used to wearing it in the morning and walking around in it all day. All he could do now was sit—sit and nothing more. Sometimes, that was all life asked of you. And yet, he continued his calculations in his head, defining plausible scenarios of what was to come. Some calculations presupposed trust in the system, assuming a logistical intelligence operating in the background to prevent risk, minimize damage, and maximize efficiency—a contingency process for every event. Other scenarios assumed a system of chance, where outcomes were random and illogical. There was no use in these predictions except for a momentary illusion of control against the utter lack of trust that, in recent weeks, threatened to shatter the very foundations on which his life was built. The same trust, for instance, allowed him to travel in a two hundred ton aircraft that flew like a fragile hummingbird across turbulent oceans without himself knowing the first thing about aerodynamics. It was a belief, he hated to admit, in a faceless, nameless entity forever busy behind the scenes taking care of him. It was ingrained in him, so fundamental he hadn’t noticed its existence. Until one day, the border was freely breached, with no intelligence or systems of defense to prevent it. The army that had never been defeated didn’t show up, while families burned and babies were shot in their cribs. No one came. Now he rejected conceptions and myths that promised anything other than the brittleness and randomness of life—its sanctity nothing but a bedtime story to help you close your eyes.

“Where are you headed?” the passenger to his left asked. In the pause between question and answer, Itamar asked himself how to reply. He could easily say New York or New Jersey without divulging Tel Aviv. But he hesitated.

We’re not there, not yet.

He thought of Tula, who was just waking up, and answered as he would if she were there with him.

By the time the plane finally landed in Newark, boarding for the flight to Israel had already begun. Itamar unbuckled his belt and asked the passenger in the aisle seat if he could go out first. The narrow aisles instantly filled with passengers waiting for the door to open. Itamar held his suitcase to his chest like a shield and squeezed through the crowd. He pushed and shoved and apologized.

“Excuse me, pardon me, I’m. . .connecting flight. Late. Yes, thanks, sorry.” Few noticed his plight; few raised their heads from their phones; no one cleared the way without being asked first. Somehow, Itamar reached the front of the plane. When the doors finally opened, he set down his suitcase, pulled up the handle, and bolted.

He sprinted through the stifling jet bridge and raced across the terminal, maneuvering around passengers who ambled in and out of duty-free shops, brushing shoulders with those who stood like mannequins on the escalators. Itamar ran and ran and ran until his lungs stung and his throat burned. But he kept running and didn’t give in to the overwhelming sensation because he thought not of himself but of those younger and much older than him, and weaker in that sense, who were enduring far greater difficulties at that exact moment. He ran and ran, accelerating his speed. Even when his knee, still recovering from last year’s surgery, began to give out, Itamar kept running. He thought of the fathers—men his age who knew they were outnumbered yet held back armed terrorists, even after bullets or shrapnel tore into their flesh, to give their families a slight chance. He kept running and thought of the festival-goers who had danced all night on young, vigorous feet before fleeing at dawn under a barrage of artillery, through open fields that offered no cover, only to arrive at a blocked road where Kalashnikov gunfire waited. He didn’t let himself think of how much he wanted to rest, catch his breath, and burst into tears. There would be no relief where he was headed, only more breathlessness and suffocation once he landed. Instead, he thought of the soldiers—teenage faces under helmets—deployed to kill and die to no end in the ruins of Shuja’iyya, Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and lose best friends to snipers, minefields, and RPGs. He thought of his brothers, who ran to the bomb shelter several times a day with his nieces, nephews, and sisters-in-law and nothing but statistics to pray for. And he thought of his father, a decorated officer who’d fought in three wars and at ninety-four was still fighting for every breath. Itamar kept running, even after he checked his watch and saw that time was running out. He ran faster, thinking of his grandmother who was no longer alive but visited his mind frequently, whose entire family perished in Auschwitz—who survived, yet was left all alone in the world until, with her own two hands, she built herself a world of her own. All those ran beside him, and there was no room for weakness alongside their strength. He carried them in his mind and on his back and ran toward an invisible finish line, without knowing how much farther he had to go, or whether there was any point in his efforts.