Suddenly a cry flew out of nowhere, like the lash of a whip, piercing and sharp, waking us from a troubled sleep — furious — “Tell me, have you all gone mad? Giving up on all this? Just like that, despairing already, Without a real fight?” “Leave us alone,” we said. “Let us withdraw into our heads to mourn our dead until this thing passes away that no words can portray. We are like mutes beneath the weight of its pain, before the horrors of our hostages. So let us be, just be, without understanding, without thinking, until our looted land, our trampled land, our raped land stops hurting.” For a moment the lights flailed. For a moment the tunnels wailed. The world was black and white. The world was coal and ice. In the middle of the night we got up to flee, my wife, my son, and me I bore the cry on one shoulder and the hope on the other, numbed and put under. “How much more can we go on like this” my wife whispered, so that the boy wouldn’t hear and be struck by fear. “Our high-tech filled the world with awe we were the start-up nation — but it turns out we had a flaw, we were just the warm-up band for the guy in the crowd with a gun in his hand who said his bullets were blanks.” “Look,” whispered my wife. “This is how it happens. This is what it looks like when it actually happens.” We saw – We saw long, silent convoys streaming from the mountains into the valleys and swallowed by ships that were swallowed by seas. “It’s as if in a single day of atrocities this land became too demanding, too much for us to handle,” my wife said in astonishment. “No, no,” scoffed a young man passing by on a scooter, with a gun in his holster, a shooter. “No, no, it’s that it took only a single day of fear to extinguish — to rob you of — maybe you never had it — the desire for a land of your own.” “It’s not that we’re running away,” I said to my wife. “We’re just changing the arrangement of our elements, We’re just relocating, inward — ” Suddenly the boy spoke: “Yallah, rise from the ashes, from your school of fear and despair!” So said our son, as he grew stronger before our eyes. He showed us pictures from an album we did not recognize of a bloodied childhood, a war childhood, a ruined cradle, images of a confiscated childhood. “Because if we do not rise from the ashes now,” the boy said, “we will never rise again.” “Or we will rise so different,” my wife said, “so strange and terrible, so hard and bitter — Foes — until finally we will no longer be those they would be foolish to tangle with.” “This is the last minute,” the boy roared, “And even if it sounds trite, for right now it is right, because right now rules are being written. Those who were left behind are leaving, those who were deserted are deserting. Speak to me, father, give me breath. I’m nearly done for, father, I’m nearing death. My soul is weary of the call-ups, weary, give me a hope, give me a reason — You are silent, father, so I will speak for you: Men, women, now is the time to fight, to go out into the streets at night. There is whom to fight for and there is what to fight for, because a gift like this, a gift from life, we will never be given again. No other state will sprout from this strife. It all now depends on you. This is the time to rise, to live, To be a nation or not to be — To be a human or not to be — There is for whom and there is for what — And everything is suspended over nothingness.” Translated by Leon Wieseltier
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