Every morning, when I wake up by quiet music of my alarm-clock, but not by a siren, I do not remember war. Fresh morning breeze, sun is not too hot, birds chirping, urban noise died down – that`s usual early morning of a usual day… That`s all – till the first cannonade crash. Yes, that is usual early morning of a war time, it even has become a usual thing. Four weeks of firing. The sound of air-craft alarm runs in our blood, it is under our skin, it dissolves in our tissues. It can be heard everywhere – in ambulance sirens and car alarms, in brake chatter, in growling of a starting motocycle, in children`s toys and jackals howling. I expect it every moment, and every time having heard that low, quickly increasing sound, I give a start, and everything goes dark before my eyes.
Currently we are at the middle of the war. We are neither under the everlasting missiles rain, like in Quiryat-Shemona, Naharia, Tsefat and Ma`alot and other frontier towns, it seems, there they have no single safe building, and people become moss-grown in their bomb-shelters; nor we are at south or at the central districts, where life has not changed in general. It seemed to be a 10 days` lull, most of sirens howled not for us, but the day before yesterday we had six rockets with direct hit into living houses, with terrible shrapnel, flying on 100 meters, with three men killed and more than 200 hurt. Haifa has not recovered from that shock still. War rushed, grew up and seized our back with its teeth. We turned our backside to the war, we kind of teased it.
One can soon get used to any, or even to the most terrible conditions of life. Everything can become routine, first or last. The war became routine, too, we do not feel so painfully, so hard, so frightful. Soldiers and civilians are killed. Yes, there are only two or three men per day killed on average, it is not very much. But there are our children, our boys. Every boy – he is someone`s child, every boy has his own name. There are less of us, and every death toll – it`s too much, too insufferable. We are not Russia, Russia can throw dozens of thousand of its boys to a forced-march, without a trace, and then show off it`s care of poor Lebanon civilians – typical, lousy hypocrisy. All this hurts me badly, it is the first time the dying soldiers of the country I live makes me feel that. This country – MY country.
All that`s like a scuffle in a village: two are fighting, dozen of others are sitting on a fence and dangling; they are talking, who had started, and if he should give a black eye for that one, who lashed his balls; anyone shouts ‘ That`s wrong way” and demands to stop the scandal, because to fight - that`s not nice. They all try not to get close to the fighting men, it`s dangerous. One part of the lookers-on knits their noses – “ they do not know, how to fight, beat him from the left! Looser!”, other people are shocked – “ it`s unallowed thing! Stick the rules!” The friends stand behind two fighters, they wait for a backfall of one of them, for a moment when they are supposed to join. One can hear different advices from the neighbouring houses – to catch hold of them, to let them have a game of dominoes, and winner will be winner, success is never blamed; another screams, he`ll call police; people next door talk over last fight and make their game of this one.
So let them talk. These two continue fighting. The main thing is– not to disturb them. Because one of them started, and one of them certainly will win.
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