C’est un peu, dans chacun de ces hommes, Mozart assassiné.
I enter the hotel where Ricky has been staying since a few days after October 18 when she was forced to leave her house in Metula. In that home next to the northern border of Israel she had been dealing with her Parkinsons’ with walks in the garden in the morning and the afternoon, grab bars in strategic places, meals provided by a local organization, and visits and deliveries from shops she has known for 50-odd years. Now she is in a small room far from the elevator and can’t make it to the dining room because there are some stairs she cannot manage.
She has pretty much given up leaving her room, so as I pass the lobby filled with empty-eyed residents I get a porter to help me carry up the bags of books that may help her to get through part of the long days, and toys that she can distribute to the temporary kindergarten set up in one of the ballrooms.
When I tell her about the silent lobby she tells me all the hotels are crowded with people who were forced to flee their cities, kibbutzim and towns in the north on October 18, and now their only concern is to find out whether their home was bombed today. Whole families have been living in rooms smaller than hers, and for most of them there is no chance to make a living.
In January there were about 150,000 displaced people in Israel, but some of them have found new homes in other parts of the country, some have moved in with relatives, and others returned to their homes despite the rockets.
There are still about 40,000 who are in limbo, and all of them are longing to go home.
You will say there are many more homeless in Gaza. Yes, but I don’t get to look them in the eye anymore. Up to October 6, there were a bunch of guys from Gaza working on a building next door for months and I met them all the time at the grocers. We even smiled and sometimes said hello. There was one kid, about 16, Ali. We managed a discussion over which candy bar is least messy in our hot weather. These men and boys may well have participated in the mass murder and rapes the day after, but I saw in Ali’s eyes that beautiful hunger for development that always thrills me. That hunger has become focused on surviving, I’m sure.
All of them are to very different degrees displaced, the murderers, the victims, the homeless, the prisoners, the displaced.
When Gertrude Stein told Hemingway and his friends that they were all a lost generation, she wasn’t referring to all the soldiers killed in the First World War. She meant the generation of the emotionally wounded, those whose futures have been destroyed. They are the ones that terrify me.
I know, like Saint-Exupery, walking through a train of deportees in his book Terre des Hommes, that in every one of the homeless a Mozart has been assassinated