My Safe Child
I am thirty-three years old, and I am so happy that I am not a mother. I do not hear a biological clock ticking, only the nerve wrecking ticks of bombs yet to explode. My friends are leaping whenever their cell phones ring. “Where are you? No, you can’t go out. No, I don’t care if all the other children are going”. How na?ve children are when they tell lies. What mother in Israel now would believe that “all the children are going” anywhere?
And where are the children going? Where will their fears take them? In many places in the world children are afraid of the unknown, of the unreal. You know that you live in a war zone when you realize that the greatest fears of the children are of what they know only too well.
Two years ago, when my younger brother was ten, he came home from school, and as he opened the door he heard the familiar sound of explosion rising from the street he just left behind him. Sitting in front of the television five minutes later, he could see his friend wandering blindly in the street, which was covered with body parts and injured people. The friend’s father, who picked him up from school and took him for a pizza, was killed in front of his eyes. My brother refused to talk about it. “This kid wasn’t really a friend of mine,” is all he would say, “I don’t really know him that well”. That evening he told my father that he is afraid of Freddy Kruger, a monstrous murderer from a common horror film. My father didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I suspect he felt some relief. How good it is to caress your child’s hair and to tell him that Kruger doesn’t really exist.
But the man who exploded himself in the centre of a busy street did exist. And the man who will explode himself in another one of our busy streets in a few years is now my brother’s age. His mother doesn’t have to worry about the dangers which lurk on the way to school. There are no schools anymore. We have demolished them all, when we crushed the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority. His younger brother was killed when our soldiers exploded their home. Our soldiers exploded their home because his older brother was a “wanted person”. Exploding his family’s home was our way to insure that he will soon turn from a wanted person into an unwanted body, torn to a thousand pieces, surrounded by his victims.
The young terrorist to be sleeps now in a tent provided by UNRWA. What is he afraid of? Not much to fear anymore. The worst already took place. But the bulldozers are still around, demolishing the neighbours’ homes. Every day a few new tents join the raw. His mother tells him how they were deported from their home in Latrun in 1967. His grandmother tells him it was nothing compared to what she had to go through when she was driven away from Jaffa in 1948, carrying his screaming mother, then a newborn, in her arms.
My grandmother doesn’t understand her plight. It had never occurred to her to go back to her home in Poland, which she had to flee as a refugee, haunted by the rise of Nazism in Europe. The fact that the Palestinians still talk about Jaffa, she says, just proves that they want to exterminate us. Whenever a suicide bombing strikes our cities, my grandmother calls me and tells me of her secret plan. “I am an old woman, and I have nothing to loose,” she says in a conspiratorial tone. “I will wear rags like their women, and go and explode myself in the centre of Nablus. This will teach them a lesson. I will show them what it’s like.” I am trying to tell her that they already know what it is like, that the number of their dead is three times bigger than ours, that the fear and terror we spread in their lives is much bigger than ours. But my grandmother doesn’t hear me, because she is crying. “They are not human beings,” she says. “What people can do such things, kill children like this?” De-humanised people, I want to answer, but I keep my mouth shut, and think about the child that I don’t want to have.
The child I won’t have will never feel the guilt of being an occupier, or the fear of becoming a victim. I will never tell him not to be scared, when fear is the only rational thing to feel. I will not have to teach him that the Palestinian child is a human being just like him, while everybody else will tell him that it is not so. The child I won’t have will keep sleeping, curled in a secret corner of my mind. The child I will never have is going to be the only safe child in the Middle East.
我那安全的孩子
我今年三十三岁，很高兴没有成为一名母亲。我听不见生物钟的滴答作响，只听到即将爆炸的炸弹那令人神经崩溃的走秒声。我的朋友们一听到自己的手机铃响就会惊跳起来。“你在哪里？不行，你不能出去。不行，我才不管是不是别的孩子都去呢。”孩子们撒谎时是多么的天真啊。如今在以色列会有什么母亲相信“所有孩子都去”哪个地方呢？
那么，孩子们要去哪儿呢？他们的恐惧会将他们带往哪儿呢？在世界上许多地方，孩子们害怕的是那些未知的、不真实的东西。而当你意识到孩子们最恐惧的恰恰是那些他们最为熟知的事物时，你知道你是生活在战区。
两年前我的弟弟十岁，他放学回家，刚打开门，就听见熟悉的爆炸声从他身后刚刚离开的街上响起。五分钟后坐在电视机前，他看到了他的朋友在满是伤者和残肢断臂的街上茫然地徘徊。朋友的父亲刚把他从学校接出来还带他去吃了比萨饼，现在就眼睁睁地被杀死了。我弟弟拒绝谈论这件事。“这个小孩并不真是我的朋友，”他老那么说，“我跟他真的不是很熟。”那天晚上，他跟我父亲说他害怕弗莱迪?克鲁格，这个人物是一部大家都熟悉的恐怖片里的杀人恶魔。我父亲不知道是该笑还是该哭，但我猜想他感到了某种宽慰。抚摸着孩子的头发告诉他克鲁格并非真的存在，这种感觉有多棒。
然而，那个在繁忙的街道中央将自身引爆的人确实存在。而那个几年后将要在我们另一条繁忙街道上引爆自己的人现在正是我弟弟的年纪。他的母亲无需担心潜伏在上学路上的危险，因为根本就不再有学校，在我们破坏巴勒斯坦基础设施时已经将学校全部摧毁了。他的弟弟在我们的战士炸毁他们家时死去了。我们的战士炸毁他们家是因为他的哥哥是个被通缉的要犯。我们用炸毁他家屋子这个办法来确保他那位哥哥能很快从一个被通缉的要犯变为没人要的尸体，被炸成了千百片，旁边都是因他而受害的人。
这个未来的小恐怖分子现在就睡在联合国难民救济及工程局提供的帐篷里。他害怕什么呢？再也没多少令他害怕的了，最糟糕的事情已经发生。然而，推土机仍然在周围拆除邻居家的屋子。每天都有几顶新的帐篷加入到这种未开化的生活中来。他的母亲告诉他，1967年他们是如何被驱逐出在拉特伦的家的。他的姥姥告诉他，1948年她被从雅法赶出来，怀抱着他那当时刚出生不久哇哇直哭的母亲，现在的情况比起那时经历的一切算不了什么。
我的祖母不了解自己所处的境况。她在兴起的纳粹主义肆虐欧洲时以难民的身份逃离了波兰，之后她从未想过要重返那里的家。她说，巴勒斯坦人仍在谈论雅法只是说明了他们想消灭我们。每当我们城市发生一起自杀性爆炸，我祖母就会打电话跟我讲她的秘密计划。“我是个老太婆，没有什么放不下的。”她以阴谋策划的语气说道，“我穿上他们女人那样的破衣服，到纳布卢斯市中心去引爆自己，给他们个教训，让他们看看这象什么样子。”我试图告诉她他们已经知道这象什么样子，告诉她他们的死亡人数比我们多三倍，告诉她我们在他们生活中播撒的害怕和恐怖要比我们自己生活中的多得多。但祖母听不见我的话，因为她在哭。“他们不是人，”她说，“什么人会做这样的事，象这样杀孩子？”没有人性的人，我想回答，但我没有张嘴，心里想着我那不想生养的孩子。
我不想生养的这个孩子将永远不会为自己成为占领者而感到有罪，也不会为自己可能成为受害者而感到害怕。我将永远不用告诉他不要怕，尽管害怕是现在唯一合乎理性的感受。我将不必教导他巴勒斯坦孩子也是象他一样的人，而其他所有人都会告诉他并非如此。这个我不想生养的孩子将蜷缩在我的大脑内一个秘密角落里一直睡大觉。这个我不想生养的孩子将是中东地区唯一安全的孩子。
