Hello friends
Another item that was written earlier this week appeared in Friday's Morning Call-a daily from Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania that serves the Allentown, Bethlehem, Easton area
August 4, 2006
Life goes on during war — and then a rocket kills Dave
''Workers have come from Sheikh Danun to help Yossi pick the pitaya fruit.''
We were momentarily alarmed with the new barrage. In bed, that barrage increased, quickened its pace, so often more than two guns were firing in unison. I went outside, like a tenant in a sleeveless T-shirt on a sultry August evening in an east side tenement. Out on the fire-escape, the tenant found the traffic and the loiterers at the nearby bodega abundantly more interesting than the driveling of the TV commercial in the cooped up kitchen of his tenement flat.
I wandered into the yard, and surveyed the neighborhood, scanning for the faintest orange glimmer venting itself upon the clouds. I saw nothing from the ''footbal''" field, where rumor wildly circulated of a spreading army encampment. Sometimes from a distance, military life appears to revolve around the gleam of a dull Coleman lantern.
Satisfied with my own answers in the dark, accompanied by a multiplicity of guns straining to fire in tandem, I returned to bed. The sound of these blasts traversed the width of our home, echoing eastward, beneath the bend of Irbin, disintegrating into tiny memories.
In the ''Dromiot'' orchard, the recoil of western guns vibrate shrilly. The blast caroms off caverns and outcrops on the thorny hillside. The thrumming skips across the shrubby green crest of Jauran and evaporates in the adjacent ravine; another memory.
The recent division-plus reserve call-up can be felt. A few of the locals have been in khaki for days. One was summoned from his bed at 2 this morning. A truck is parked near the gym and some two dozen reservists are bedding down beneath the building's facade.
There was a discernible lull in the fighting after the Kfar Qana calamity, but the nearby artillery batteries had gotten busy, evidently fixated on the fighting in and around Ait al-Sha'ab in south Lebanon. We were able to hear the outgoing fire and simultaneously observe the plumes and dry summer dust choke the air on its ancient village slopes.
Hezbollah refrained from firing its daily dosage of rockets, and clearly the momentum and the sympathy shifted dramatically into Lebanon. Hezbollah may have hoped that its valiant effort to stave off Israeli incursions into the southern villages could be regarded admirably, at least by its Middle Eastern audience.
None of this has deterred me from my evening carousal with Zed, and I am hauled off to the nearest dumpster. Zed waits poised, like a sprinter at the starting block, on the off chance that a cat might leap from the vessel into his eager jaws. After Zed is finally convinced that no cat lurks within, we resume our walk into the well-lit street at Van Gogh. As a jogger, absorbed in his paces passes by, something wheezes overhead, and seconds later explodes somewhere across the road. The explosion sounds subdued, either smothered in a distant vale, or drowned in the reservoir. Years from now will we recruit the services of a marine archaeologist to explore for sunken rockets camouflaged by plankton in the muck of its wasted briny depths.
For the time being, we continue our nightly walk, wobbling under its plantain moon. Moshe, our security chief, having been alerted, swerves his jeep into the suburban neighborhood, exhorting its residents to remain indoors in their security rooms. Moshe tells me that another rocket had also fallen in the vicinity of Ya'ara. The fire department was already there, containing the blaze.
In the morning, business is usual. There are a number of fields to be attended to. Artillery fire is fast paced, its blasts ruffling the air, filling the field's corners and curling outward. An unmanned plane drones on, invisible to all. Workers have come from Sheikh Danun to help Yossi pick the pitaya fruit. Yossi has to check with the army for permission to work the pitaya grove. The grove is not far from the artillery pits.
The air eddies and buckles with each blast. The 48-hour hiatus is over. We anticipate a flurry of rockets, which are not late in coming. One of them kills Dave outside of his home in Sa'ar. Dave caught for the Shomrat-Adamit softball team for a decade or so.
The thick turbulent smoky air that burns near Hanita shatters our souls.
Barry Steinberg is a New York native whose family moved to the Lehigh Valley. He has lived on a kibbutz in Eilon in northern Galilee since the 1970s.
Copyright © 2006, The Morning Call