Hebrew spoken by children

“When I am big and someone dies, I am going to go to the funeral.”

“You can put a doll on the grave, just like in the story.’

Dear Lynne,

I patiently wait for the sand to sink, for the water to get clear.

Israel is a very small place and in a way very isolated. Being surrounded by

hostility is definitely getting to me. The hostility of war and terror and the hostility of people’s aggressiveness toward each other. So much hatred.

It is hard for me to become involved as an activist. For now catching up with the headlines over coffee in the morning is enough.

Every now and then I consider coming back to New York, being a student again, carrying a camera.

Hope you are well,

Nir

Dear Nir,

Do you ever have the feeling that the history you are experiencing has no shape?

Even as a teenager I was obsessed with history’s shifts and ruptures. Wars helped us order time. A war established beginnings and endings. There is “before”. There is “during”. There is “after”.

Lynne

PHONE CONVERSATION

LYNNE: Hey, Nir, did I wake you up?

NIR: No, I’m fine.

LYNNE: I just wanted to tell you about this article I read today in the Times that upset me so much. It was about a woman who reminded me of myself. Her name was Revital Ohayon. She was a filmmaker, a teacher, a mother. She was killed on a Kibbutz, Kibbutz Metzer. What do you know about it?

NIR: Oh, yes, it was horrible. Have you heard the details of the story, what happened, that terrorists got into her home when she was at home at night with her two kids and actually shot them. I will think about it and right you more things.

LYNNE: Alright, bye for now.

NIR: Bye, bye.

_________________________________

On my map, Metzer is not far from Jenin, only a thumb’s distance from the kibbutz. Isn’t Jenin a Palestinian refugee camp, the site of killings? All I know is its destruction.

November 15, 2002

How are you Lynne?

Living in Israel is closely related to Buddhist thinking. The encounter with death is so immediate in Israel. You have to be prepared for your own death. As grim as it sounds, it’s just statistics.

Thoughts about death cross people’s minds on a minute to minute basis. Imagine the terror and fear in people’s minds on the other side of the Green Line, on the other side of the Wall.

Yes, I know about Revital. Everyone is talking about it. Did you know her husband heard the gun shots over the phone?

Yours, Nir

Dear Nir,

I’ve made so many phone calls to Kibbutz Metzer. Today I finally reached an elderly secretary. “Yes”, she told me, “this is the Kibbutz where Revital Ohayon lived and was killed.” The woman didn’t seem to know more than that.

I wonder what they make at the Kibbutz factory – jars of pickles, buttons, machine parts?

PHONE CONVERSATION

NIR: Hello Lynne, did I tell you that I saw Revital’s husband, it was on the news, on the weekend broadcast, and they interviewed him about what he was going through, and since you were interested in her I was trying to think about what he’s actually going through….

I have the number for her former husband, Avi Ohayon, the man who heard it all from his phone, as the killing happened.

PHONE CONVERSATION cont

NIR: ….for me usually it’s very alienated, you read the news, you see what happened, but you’re not going to the families of the casualties and asking how they feel, or putting yourself in their situation….

Dear Lynne

Did you know that this week is the Jerusalem Film Festival?

Parallel to it is the Ramallah International Film Festival. Ramallah is a big city on the Palestinian side of the border. I wish I could visit to show my films and also to see film in a theater over there. I would have a drink in the local Palestinian café. See a life that is so close to me and yet so far away. Separated and strange.

It exists as the Palestinian town from the news. I can only imagine, of course, since I have never visited myself. It is quite impossible for me as an Israeli to experience Ramallah.

Ramallah Dreaming.

Soon,Nir

August 18, 2003

Dear Nir,

I need you to somehow get your hands on her movies, and also to photograph the land for me, as Revital would have experienced it – the kibbutz, Haifa where she grew up, the Northern coast, Tel Chai where she went to film school.

I am not asking you as a teacher, but as a friend. Did you know that I have never been to Israel? I missed those few moments of peace.

Lynne

August 20, 2003

Lynne,

It sounds so sad when I read your words, “I missed the few years of peace.” Like missing an old relative that passed away and will never return. I was drafting a message to you when your mail arrived. How can I describe my feelings? It’s all not so clear. I remember the opening sentence from Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, “I can feel the heat closing in.”

Nir

Write soon, tell me what you can do, And, no, this isn’t another assignment, just a request from a friend. Really.

Lynne

By now I think I must have called at least fifty times, only to hear a series of Hebrew numbers recited to me, like a wall of digits forbidding my entrance. If Avi is not reachable, I tell myself that he wants nothing to do with the me, that he has withered with sadness, or that his phone has merely been turned off.

August 25, 2003

Nir,

I called Avi in Tel Aviv again this morning. He is so kind, almost at ease, willing to talk. Yes, he told me, she was just about to finish a film about the “generation gap.” There are so many gaps between us, she was only trying to fill one, with her filmmaking.

I’ve been waiting for eight months to see her movies. Will you go to his home, ask him for the tapes, talk to him, and yes, take your camera? Tell me what happens,

Lynne

Lynne,

I was walking by myself in Metzer this morning.

For a minute, I thought about the terrorist coming towards me.

I protected myself by holding the Super 8 camera in its pistol grip. Transformed

it into an Uzi machinegun.

Then, I came back to my senses, saw an old woman hoeing her garden. Behind the double barbed-wire fence the open fields spread wide open.

More soon,

Nir

I mention Revital’s story to my friend Deborah. I had no idea that she had a personal connection to the kibbutz. Thirty years ago she’d been one of those idealistic American Jewish youths looking for a new way of living, communally, in Israel. Deborah lived on Kibbutz Metzer in 1972, the same place, a very different time.

CONVERSATION W/ WOMAN WHO LIVED ON KIBBUTZ METZER IN 1973

I don’t think there are very many places where the Arab village and the kibbutz are truly living side by side. And there always was a really good relationship between village and the kibbutz. And the very first at had coffee was in the village at Muhammad’s mother’s house. Of course, in Arab house you are always offered coffee and you can’t say no and I have never drunk a cup of coffee before.

The kibbutz was built literally on the dividing line of the West Bank. In fact the and the banana groves we used to work in the banana groves sometimes picking the bananas we were actually in the west bank. And the way that the… the road bet Haifa and Tel Aviv was here. If you went left, you went straight into the village of Metzner and if you went straight and kind of to the right you went to the Kibbutz Metzer.

If the Arabs from the village came to the kibbutz there needed to be a reason for them to come to the kibbutz. Where as if the villagers walked passed the village – if the kibbutzniks walked passed the village they were just walking towards the bus stop.

Going into the west back then was an incredible thing.

[How?]

It was like going to a different country. I mean this was 1973 there was barely – they weren’t even occupied. I mean they were occupied in that Israel controlled them militarily but there were no Israelis there. I mean look at all these villages. There are so many villages. There’s tons and tons. And I bet most of them are gone. This is all around Jerusalem.

I don’t think that they’re anymore, this is all Israeli now.

And when they build this fence between the West Bank and Israel it will probably run right through those banana plantations unless they do what they probably will do which is make a road around them so that the Israelis get the banana plantations and the Arab farmers wont be able to cultivate their crops

Listen to this: Israeli -Arab armistices in 1949 partition. Palestine. Since June 1967, Israeli forces have occupied Sinai, Gaza, all of Jordan and most of the Jordan River and a small area in southwest Syria. So of course it is all of Jordan and most of the Jordan River that we are talking about. And Metzer was just on that border.

PHONE CONVERSATION BTWN NIR AND LYNNE

Hello Lynne. HI NIR. I finally met Avi, Revital’s husband, at the Kibbutz. YOUR KIDDING. Yes, he brought her tapes, and I brought my camera. YOU ACTUALLY MET AVI, YOU ACTUALLY GOT THE FILMS. IT’S BEEN A YEAR SINCE… THAT I’VE BEEN WAITING. I saw the kibbutz, the house was living, where she was killed. I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS.

INTERVIEW WITH AVI OHAYON

She was the kind of person that had to find the exactly right path for her that the way of life that she believes is the only way of life that is right. That is the only way of life that is correct and right for her to live in. And so she struggled are her life to create that path to be able to have a career and to have the most amazing children and to make a path that nothing would come – would hurt the other goal.

Her movie was about three girls that didn’t know each other that met in a coincidence one day. And they went together on a trip and it was the first time that each one of them realized that she doesn’t like what she does in her life. All three of them are living a life that someone else dictated to them. One of them was a married woman with 3 children. The other one had a shop. The third one was a secretary. They had to help one another and by that they understood about themselves.

Her movies will not give an answer at the end of the movie but will make you put a question mark in the right places. To think ok I saw but who do I relate to, who do I think I behave like, who do I think make the right decision for me as a viewer. And even more I think that the goal, as I know Revital, that whatever choice you make it’s the right choice.

September 10, 2003

Dear Lynne

Now I’m testing my senses and trying to capture images of my living environment. Sending it oversees to you. Like caging wild animals.

Nir

Yossi: So where would you like me to begin?

Lynne: Maybe who she was.

Yossi: Who she was? I think I realized who she was only after the funeral. There were SO many people…. throughout sitting Shiva.

I keep thinking Yossi might have been a man I’ve walked past on the sidewalk, rubbed elbows with on the subway. If I could actually hear the tragedy of a violent death caused by hate, the gunshot, the explosion, months later in the minds of a family-member, would I be able to detect such an emotion as I sit next to a stranger? I ask him why Revital chose to live so close to the border of the West Bank. I’m contemplating the degrees by which we measure danger. She might have wondered why I stay in New York City with my 2 girls after September 11th. What does it mean to call a place home, like a squirrel burrowed in a tree she knows is just a leap from the hole of a fox.

DAY CARE CENTER AFTER FUNERAL, CREATING A MEMORIAL, CANDLES

TRANSLATION FROM HEBREW

TEACHER: Yesterday I was at the funeral for Matan and Noam. Do you know what a funeral is? The word funeral comes from Lelavot, to accompany. We accompany the dead to their grave. Then we bury them.

BOY: A grave is only in the ground.

TEACHER: What does a grave look like? When you bury someone what do you cover it with?

GIRL: A grave is only made of dirt. If someone dies, you don’t leave them at home. There is too much blood.

BOY: You need to dig a hole in the earth. You cover them with dirt just like you cover carrot seeds. Then you put a sign with their names on the grave.

BOY: I saw the terrorist who killed Noam and Matan on TV. Do you want to hear something about the terrorist? He has a brain of a chickadee and the common sense of a dog. LAUGHTER

I met a girl in summer camp in 1971. She was tall, lanky with blonde hair, very nice, quiet. One August afternoon, around my birthday, she confided to me that her father had been shot down in an air force plane in Vietnam. It was as if she’d told me that she had leprosy. I was so terrified I really couldn’t talk to her, or even stand near her, the rest of the summer.

TEACHER: We have things of Matam and Noam here. We have their dolls, their pacifiers, their drawings, tooth brushes.

CHILD: We have to take the stuff out so we can remember them, so that we don’t worry about them.

GIRL: If I take things out it will make me sad.

BOY: We are going to see the story again tonight on the news.

September 12, 2003

Lynne,

Now is the month of Elul, a time of repentance and reconciliation before Yom Kippur.

Such an intense period of prayer – -Selihot — a request for forgiveness.

There is this custom of lighting Ner Neshama (a soul candle) on Yom Kippur. A candle for the dead that lasts for 24 hours.

Yona Wallach wrote about it:

“My awareness is fading away, like a soul candle ….”

I like the way her poems sound in Hebrew.

(Yamim Noraim — DAYS OF AWE)

I wonder what this all means to you.

Soon,

Nir

Today I started to read Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish. Do you know it? I got the book a long time ago for 99 cents on St. Marks Place. Why did I start reading it today all of a sudden?

VOICE OF REVITAL COMFORTING HER SON IN HEBREW

AVI: She was lucky to go with them and maybe even luck was not the issue here because there’s no other way, there’s no other possibility that they would have gone without her or that she would have one without them. All three of them were one all the time.

February 24, 2004

Nir,

This morning I finally met Revital’s mother at Yossi’s apartment here in New York. She offered me a delicious cup of berry tea she brought from her home in Haifa. It’s divine, with such a powerful aroma like walking in a field.

Lynne

REVITAL’S MOTHER IN HEBREW: She believed that everything that is happening was not supposed to happen. That expressions from our nation could show the world that this is nonsense. This isn’t supposed to be happening. It’s very important that peace pervades. She took care of people at work, in the army. She wanted everything to be perfect.

YOSSI (R”S BROTHER): I asked her how she could possibly live in this country. I mean this constant stress is unbelievable. So she just created her own bubble and she used that bubble with her two little boys and she blocked herself to the environment and she moved to that little kibbutz where she has a little garden and they plant trees and flowers and she doesn’t read the news, she doesn’t watch the news,. I mean she doesn’t watch the news. And unless something close happenedd to them, the rest she is just oblivious to it.

That Passover was, was one of the bloodiest times of the Intifadah, the uprising. There was a terror attack almost on a daily basis, sometimes two times a day. How can you raise kids in this kind of atmosphere. They knew so much about what was going on.

She tried to keep herself separated from this whole craziness and yet she ended up being a casualty of war.

MOTHER: Well first of all the way it happened, he, the terrorist, managed to jump into her most intimate room where she was with her kids. She covered her kids with her body. They don’t want to give us the details. We didn’t see the pictures but what we heard was that she was screaming “Don’t kill them, just kill me!” That’s what the neighbors heard. They found her hugging her kids. I think that was the most tragic image, the one that moved the world. The Minister of Media sent that image around the world.

As a teenager, Revital used to go to the Judah Desert to learn about and photograph foxes and wolves. She was so interested in science. We thought that would be the direction she would go.

September 23, 2004

Lynne,

I keep growing here in Israel. Many things I would like to talk to you about. Did you know that the murderer of Revital was killed by the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force? I actually saw Avi Ohayon, Revital’s husband a few times on TV today.

The circle of grief hasn’t finished turning.

I learn and watch new aspects of reality every day. By living in my small environment I hope to generate a wave of sanity. I start inwards then I hope to get it out there one day.

Hope you are well,

Nir

Dear Nir,

I’ve been to Bosnia and Vietnam with my camera, made films there, looking for tell-tale signs of conflicts I’d never known. But those wars were over by the time I got there.

The difference between the peacefulness of the images you’re sending me and the hostility simmering outside the frame is so apparent to me. Are you trying to protect me, Nir? . The bombing of a tourist hotel in the Sinai a few months ago, the destruction of a home in the West Bank, the explosion yesterday in a Tel Aviv nightclub. Lynne

December 12, 2004

Lynne,

Today is Tu Bishvat, the birthday of the trees. An almond tree is blooming on Rotchild boulevard. It has white flowers and a really sweet smell.

I think that the olive tree grows very slowly. It has a long history here in Israel. Some are very old. Some have been here since before the country was even established. It has a very unique trunk, like sculpture, the color of bronze. The branch itself is mentioned in the Bible.

In the forest there are Cyprus and Pine and it seems as if they have been there forever, but in reality they were planted by a foundation. The making of a forest. A nation established. The concept of a nation to stay. Marking territory.

My bible teacher used to point to Jewish law: if a soldier needs to cut down an olive tree, he must have permission from a very highly ranked officer in the army.

In my head I compare the status of a person and a tree…. you don’t need special permission to shoot someone if there is a threat, but you need high authority to damage an olive tree. Olive is the color of the soldier’s uniform.

Nir

AVI: My children were four and five. They loved to hear the Muezzin from the village next to Metzer.

BROADCAST ABOUT WEST BANK WALL

Some go through the bottom others go over the top or squeeze through the middle of the wall Israel is building to stop suicide bombers from getting into Jerusalem.

So far, all the wall does, say the Palestinians of Abu Dis where the wall cuts their village in half, has ruined their lives. Israel’s plan is a combined wall and fence to run about 350 miles around most of the West Bank patrolled by police chiefs this part will run 38 miles near eastern Jerusalem with electronic sensors. Rada Audi who has breast cancer must sneak through the wall to get to her clinic and to get to work but it will get worse one day she won’t able to even do that.

RADA: They are forcing us to hate them and it is a very bad thing.

BYSTANDER (off camera): There has to be a better way than to split a village

Eventually the wall won’t only split Abu Dis and it won’t only cut Palestinians off from Israel. Through large parts of the West Bank it will cut off Palestinians from Palestinians.

This is the land that devours it own, I’ve read and read again in the Bible. The land of hyenas and jackals and doves, perpetually dry or consumed by water. It is a land I know now, but only anciently. At last, I can follow the green line with my finger, but I have yet to feel its actual bumps and crevices.

Hello Lynne

When I was 14 yrs old, I took a trip with a summer camp to Ein Gedi, a nature preserve in the desert, next to the Dead Sea. Our bus stopped at a slaughter house to pick up a brown cardboard box filled with little, weak, yellow chicks. As the sun was going down, we drove into the wilderness of the desert. In the darkness, we let the chicks loose and stepped away. Then we illuminated the area with light and waited with binoculars. The night animals started to show up. First the wolves, then the foxes, and when they were done the hyenas and the vultures came to eat the leftovers.

Nir

I’ve been reading the Bible incessantly, compulsively, looking for those few phrases that might give credence to a landscape that makes normal people go mad.

.

AVI OHAYON: Last summer they went to the seashore with Revital. There was a fight between Arabs and Israelis at the beach. One of the guys from the Arab group was hurt and he was bleeding. He ran to the parking where Revital and the children just arrived. She immediately started to call; she rushed him in the car and took him to the hospital. When I heard about it, when she told me what happened, I asked her, “Are you crazy?”

NEWS REPORT FROM CONFLICTS BTWN ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS

REVITAL’S MOTHER: She really didn’t have a childhood. She missed adolescence. She matured very quickly. At our house there was no middle ground, she had to do everything fully. No easy ways to do things. No compromises.

February 27, 2005

Nir,

I’m watching Haifa now, imagining Revital’s childhood in this city, the place where you’ve told me a Jewish girl and an Arab girl might have played together.

Bombs are exploding everywhere this afternoon. The sound is deafening but I can’t hear a thing. Israel. Istanbul. Iraq. Any shake-up on the surface of the earth dislodges my sense of equilibrium.

Newspapers drape us with the numbers of another person’s death. When scanning a page of horrors, I do not grope for mirrors. An open window onto the spectacle of killing. A gust of wind and I almost smell it.

Lynne

TEACHER: Nora can’t have Matan and Noam’s things under her bed. At a certain point, we have to separate from Matan and Noam. We have to collect their things. What can we do with them? What are they?

CHILDREN: Animals

TEACHER: We will have to ask their father what he wants to do with them. What are we going to do with their sheets, pillows, drawings? Do you have any ideas?

GIRL: Give them to their father so he has them in his house.

We can’t leave them outside.

AVI:The pain is so big but still you do not know where to put it ‘ cause you don’t know that kind of pain. You never felt if before. I never felt it before. I couldn’t relate to it in myself because I didn’t know where to put it. It is a different kind of pain you don’t know from before..

R’S MOTHER: During the whole month of sitting Shiva and also during the funeral, it always rained, but every time we arrived at the grave, it would stop raining.

YOSSI (R’S BROTHER) : It happened to us in the funeral. It happened to us in the seven days of the unveiling and it also happened in the 11 months. And the day of the anniversary, we went to the cemetery, the rain stopped. three pigeons actually that landed on the stone, the tombstones, while we were there, while we were saying the prayer for the anniversary… it was like a message from our sister, sending three doves onto the tombstone…

March 1, 2005

I‘ve stopped watching television all together, Nir. I have a rock to put on her grave. I arrive in Tel Aviv on Wednesday at 3:55 PM. Lynne

TITLE:AS I AM HEADING OUT THE DOOR TO THE AIRPORT, MAYA ASKS ME “IS THERE A WAR IN ISRAEL, MOM?”

“NO, NOT TODAY.” I TELL HER.

This is the land that devours it own, I’ve read and read again in the Bible. The land of hyenas and jackals and doves, perpetually dry or consumed by water. It is a land I know now, but only anciently. At last, I can follow the green line with my finger, but I have yet to feel its actual bumps and crevices.

Hello Lynne

When I was 14 yrs old, I took a trip with a summer camp to Ein Gedi, a nature preserve in the desert, next to the Dead Sea. Our bus stopped at a slaughter house to pick up a brown cardboard box filled with little, weak, yellow chicks. As the sun was going down, we drove into the wilderness of the desert. In the darkness, we let the chicks loose and stepped away. Then we illuminated the area with light and waited with binoculars. The night animals started to show up. First the wolves, then the foxes, and when they were done the hyenas and the vultures came to eat the leftovers.

Nir

I’ve been reading the Bible incessantly, compulsively, looking for those few phrases that might give credence to a landscape that makes normal people go mad.

.

AVI OHAYON: Last summer they went to the seashore with Revital. There was a fight between Arabs and Israelis at the beach. One of the guys from the Arab group was hurt and he was bleeding. He ran to the parking where Revital and the children just arrived. She immediately started to call; she rushed him in the car and took him to the hospital. When I heard about it, when she told me what happened, I asked her, “Are you crazy?”

NEWS REPORT FROM CONFLICTS BTWN ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS

REVITAL’S MOTHER: She really didn’t have a childhood. She missed adolescence. She matured very quickly. At our house there was no middle ground, she had to do everything fully. No easy ways to do things. No compromises.

February 27, 2005

Nir,

I’m watching Haifa now, imagining Revital’s childhood in this city, the place where you’ve told me a Jewish girl and an Arab girl might have played together.

Bombs are exploding everywhere this afternoon. The sound is deafening but I can’t hear a thing. Israel. Istanbul. Iraq. Any shake-up on the surface of the earth dislodges my sense of equilibrium.

Newspapers drape us with the numbers of another person’s death. When scanning a page of horrors, I do not grope for mirrors. An open window onto the spectacle of killing. A gust of wind and I almost smell it. Lynne

TEACHER: Nora can’t have Matan and Noam’s things under her bed. At a certain point, we have to separate from Matan and Noam. We have to collect their things. What can we do with them? What are they?

CHILDREN: Animals

TEACHER: We will have to ask their father what he wants to do with them. What are we going to do with their sheets, pillows, drawings? Do you have any ideas?

GIRL: Give them to their father so he has them in his house.

We can’t leave them outside.

AVI:The pain is so big but still you do not know where to put it ‘ cause you don’t know that kind of pain. You never felt if before. I never felt it before. I couldn’t relate to it in myself because I didn’t know where to put it. It is a different kind of pain you don’t know from before..

R’S MOTHER: During the whole month of sitting Shiva and also during the funeral, it always rained, but every time we arrived at the grave, it would stop raining.

YOSSI (R’S BROTHER) : It happened to us in the funeral. It happened to us in the seven days of the unveiling and it also happened in the 11 months. And the day of the anniversary, we went to the cemetery, the rain stopped. three pigeons actually that landed on the stone, the tombstones, while we were there, while we were saying the prayer for the anniversary… it was like a message from our sister, sending three doves onto the tombstone…

March 1, 2005

I‘ve stopped watching television all together, Nir. I have a rock to put on her grave. I arrive in Tel Aviv on Wednesday at 3:55 PM. Lynne

TITLE:AS I AM HEADING OUT THE DOOR TO THE AIRPORT, MAYA ASKS ME “IS THERE A WAR IN ISRAEL, MOM?”

“NO, NOT TODAY.” I TELL HER.

NIR & LYNNE TOGETHER

NIR:A group of a hundred or more religious men are marching down the street, chanting loudly. Can you hear it? The time is 6pm on a Friday evening, quite an unusual sound to hear at this time, something alarming about it, like a revolution.

Time is so poignant now. The right wing blocked a highway on Tuesday ,

Tomorrow the left wing is having a support demonstration at city hall.

LYNNE: It is warm, so peaceful in Tel Aviv, and yet as the sun comes down I hear that unusual chant of prayer from the street. What does it mean?

YOSSI

We just finished the 30 days mourning. It was raining, it was like a message from my sister, sending three doves into the tombstone. By the time we got back home, we received a phone call from the military spokeswoman who gave us the good… I don’t know if it’s good or bad, gave us the news that the murderer who killed my sister and two nephews was ambushed and killed.

AVI: I think Revital knew about life, knew what’s important in life, what I only learned after they went. I think I had to suffer the loss of all three of them to start understanding what she already knew. It’s like the place you’re coming from, trying to do something that is very personal. When you see those pictures coming from Israel each and every day, you stop looking at it as something that happens to people; and you start approaching it as a big thing that goes over in a small corner of the world, but there’s people involved.

If the geographic farness makes you numb and you can’t feel it, it will reach you too. It will happen in Iraq, in Iran, in Syria, in New York, in Madrid, in Ireland, and it will only stop when we start going back to our feelings, and try to relate to the fact that there is a person that could have been my friend, that could have been the brother or sister of someone who just rode with me on the subway. It could be me.

Dear Nir,

I cannot remember if the sun was shining or if I was wearing a sweater, or if I had a cup of tea in my hand when I picked up the newspaper on November 12, 2002. I only know that I saw anguish. My daughters heard the story of Abraham and his two sons this morning for Rosh Hashonah .

LYNNE’S DAUGHTER TELLS STORY OF ABRAHAM, SARAH, HAGAR, ISAAC AND ISHMAEL:

NOA: Abraham wanted a child so badly. He was 100 years old as was his wife Sarah, and there didn’t seem to be a chance. So Abraham decided to take matters into his own hands. He had a son with Hagar, the Arab maid. They named him Ishmael. Then, miraculously, Sarah too became pregnant and gave birth to Abraham’s second son, Isaac. Sarah was jealous of Hagar whose son would always be able to lay claim to being Abraham’s first born. So Abraham asked God to send Hagar and her baby boy to a far off land. God said to Abraham: “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned. I will make the son of the maidservant into a nation.”

NOA: Since his son had to go in the desert, he must have been really sort of mad.

LYNNE: Who was mad?

NOA: Abraham.

LYNNE: Abraham was mad…

NOA: …because his son had to go in the desert.

LYNNE: Yeah, and how do you think the brothers’ felt that they were separated?

NOA: How do you think?

LYNNE: I think they could have gotten along and lived in the same house together even though they both had different mothers.

NOA: Did, umm, did, did,…who sent them into the desert?

———-

All the best, Lynne

CREDITS



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Transcription

…If I should leave you, I do remember all the good times. Long days filled with sunshine, and just a little…

Tonight the cup of peril is full in Vietnam. Tonight as so many nights before young Americans struggle and young Americans die in a distant land. Tonight as so many nights before the American nation is asked to sacrifice the blood of its children and the fruits of its labor for the love of its freedom.

…and just a little bit of..

Our country says its independence rests in large measure, on confidence in America’s words and America’s protection. Undermine the independence of another; abandon much of Asia to the domination of communists.

And we do not intend to abandon Asia to conquest.

The ancient Israelites used to believe that in the stream of blood in a person’s body, the spirit reigned. And it’s a pretty accurate depiction of the reality, you know, and in Biblical lore too, blood is the sign of the covenant between God and us.

Not too many years ago Vietnam was a peaceful if troubled land.

I had a lot of anger, and I certainly didn’t like the idea of old generals sitting behind the lines, serving me up on a platter in Vietnam. And if the Vietnamese were being killed you could do a commensurate; you would do something strong, something risky.

The war was getting worse, and young draft resistors had actually started to burn their draft cards, which they were sent to Allenwood for two years. They really led the way. Those 18 year olds, 17 year olds, who went to prison.

And we said well let’s do something to these draft records. And that’s how we emerged with the idea of putting blood on those records. First of all to show what they are, they are blood. Blood is real, that’s not paper.

All of us active in the interfaith peace mission, walked in to the door of the main selective service headquarters in Baltimore with little containers of blood in our pockets, and we had looked at the place before because we wanted to be sure that you know that there’d be no, uh, if there were armed guards, we just wanted to be clear about what we were doing. And that whatever we would do that it would be a non-violent witness.

This covenant, this agreement between god and us, is sealed in Christ’s blood. This is the blood of the covenant as he said before he went to his execution. But anyway this was all misunderstood and our using of blood and it was denounced and ridiculed and misinterpreted and ridiculed and so since we were so strongly opposed to the war, we started thinking about other symbols.

And then we published something against the war, I think it’s the biggest ad that was published against the war in the whole county.

Oh, do you have a copy of that?

Yes.

I’d love to see that.

It was a 2-page spread in The Baltimore Sun. We knew that Johnson read that paper; it was one of the 3 or 4 papers he read, so we joked about it, and you know our little vision of Johnson taking a crap in the next morning and opening this, the The Baltimore Sun and seeing a 2 page spread with a promise that more was to come.

And we will stay until aggression has stopped.

Well this is the story of the infamous incident at Catonsville, Maryland, in May of ’68. My brother’s involvement of course went back to ’67, because he and 3 others had already burned their draft files in inner-city Baltimore, and they were out awaiting sentences and Phillip came up to Cornell and stayed overnight, I guess we stayed up most the night talking, and he said, some of us are going to do it again, and you’re invited. Where upon I started to quake in my boots. It had really never occurred to me that I would take part in something that serious as far as consequences went. But the idea of putting myself in to the furnace of the king, or being thrown there, was a pretty shocking and new. So I told Phillip, “Give me a few days to think this over and pray over it, and I’ll let you know.” So I did, I went through some very serious soul searching and talked to my family and couldn’t see, I’ll put it negatively, I couldn’t see any reason not to do it. I didn’t’ want to do it, but I couldn’t not do it.

By the time the Catonsville Nine happened, they switched from blood to fire.

The enemy, they’re no longer closer to victory. Time is no longer on his side. There is no cause to doubt the American commitment.

…and decency and unity, and love. Amen. And we unite…. And identify with their interests… And we stand witness…Unite in taking our matches, approaching the fire…

The idea of going into a selective service office, taking out files, and then taking them outside, where there would be no danger to the building or and people and burning them with napalm, that would be homemade napalm according to the handbook that the green berets had.

And he says it was just gasoline and soap suds – not soap suds, but Ivory flakes, the soap powder; and you stir it into the gas; you’re supposed to actually heat the gas and we figured the heck with that, but they just stirred it into the gas until it jellied a little bit which was our napalm. And the idea of it though, how it sticks to people you know you can’t pat out the fire, it just gonna stick to you and continue to burn. To me it was just overwhelming to think about that and using that.

Bureaucracy is fantastic. We walked in and nobody would look at us. Tom came up and started reading. “We are a group of clergyman and laymen concerned about the war.” And nobody would look up.

….based on the situation now, you can’t participate.

Alright.

…what we’re looking for now…

I was sitting at my desk doing my work, and these two ladies were in the office with me and those two gentleman came up in the hall outside there, and I said, “Yes sir, may I help you?” And so then right on top of him came another man.  And then he started to come in; he looked right; he looked in here and then he looked over there, and he said, as he walked into the office and I said, “ What can I do for you?”  And with that all of the rest of them came all of a sudden. Quickly. And the one man with the trash burner, he went around to my files and stood there and started dumping files into this trash burner, and this one man, I tried to prevent it, this one man attempted to stop me from doing it, and he did succeed.

I felt that we were doing the right thing by being there because I was sold on the idea that we were trying to fight communism in that part of the world. And that China and the other countries might be involved and I thought, I figured that we were a free country and had all the benefits of being in a free country and I was all for helping out any country that could fight communism. So I never even thought about being in a draft board except for helping my country and the boys that were going over and actually fighting for that war. I was trying to help them. Particularly ones that had gone for long years before and had to have some relief by sending them new recruits, and that’s what happened when you drafted new people you were able to send them, the people that were already over there fighting, some help.

Poor old Mrs. Murphy, they grabbed her, I think there was some sort of tussle, and there was a feeling she was defending her turf and in order to get to the records, they had to get her out of the way. I mean that’s an assault, that’s not the way we’re supposed to react to each other as citizens.

We’re gonna take you to the station…. Right in the back here.

Now you had to draft people, in order to replenish our forces and in Vietnam where we had half a million troops. So when you started messing with selective service, you were messing with the core of the whole war effort.

We’re all part of this. It is a symbolic message, bringing home to the American people that while American’s who are, while people throughout the whole world in especially in Vietnam now are suffering, and being napalmed, that these files are also being napalmed, so that these lives can find the same freedom. Amen. We think also those negotiating in terrorism, be asked through this action, that they take there work seriously, especially the Americans. And understand that Americans are able undergo some risk in the name of justice and the name of the dead.

It was like just trying to put a log in the path of the government, you know, to try to stop it from, to stop and reconsider what, what’s going on here, you know. And you know that it’s like a miniscule little log that you’re getting into, but what I wanted to do anyway, I said that is was similar to like children in a bus coming down a hill and the bus was a runaway bus and that what you really had to do was like something was gonna, you had to smash into it, into this other vehicle that was going to smash into the children in order to stop it so that you would prevent the kids from getting injured or hurt. And I still think that Catonsville was that, was just a little attempt at trying to stop the war.

Three, two, one, zero .We have commit. We have, we have lift off. Lift off at 7:51am….the clock is running…

We’re all at death’s throw now…

Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day, our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses and we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not to temptation, but deliver us from evil, amen.

You might say almost the residue of Pope John XXIII’s ideas, are spread throughout the Catholic world, you know, the American Catholic world and these guys all kind of came up to be Americans. So it’s kind of interesting that he kind of culled them out.

What does that mean, what does that mean Pope John XXIII culled them out?

Well, Pope John XXIII was the guy who, the first thing that he did when he went into the Vatican was opened up the curtains and said, “Let’s let some light into this church.” He more than any Pope, since or before, called for the resuscitation of the social gospel. That the church has to be about fighting poverty and fighting oppression and fighting war. So I think that, you can ask them themselves, but that all these folks are definitely children of John XXIII spiritually. And that’s when kind of liberation theology, which Pope John Paul has really quashed came to the fore. You know, the whole idea that the gospel has to be a living thing, even revolutionary.

Well this was a former priest and former nun, and they had met in Guatemala and had fallen in love and married. And came back and their whole focus as far as the trial was concerned and the action, was to shed light upon the betrayal of Guatemala by the US government.

She’s up their in the mountain and what am I gonna do? Stand around and baptize and say mass? No I can’t do that. So she got me more involved in Guatemala and I got her involved in Catonsville. It’s kind of reverse of it you know. And you know she said, well the only way that we can maintain our relationship is if we go through it together.

I was still full of the possibilities of a real revolution taking place, and a change where there would be a greater justice and then I just started thinking how does anyone dare go against the power of the United States. United States isn’t with you even though your cause is just. Forget it.

Not only are we killing people through violent physical war, but we are also killing them through the extension of our economical political empire. So let us all pray for those people who are dying from hunger and starvation throughout the world so that American’s can have a higher standard of living.

When people started calling me a communist, then I said now I understand, you’re a communist when you are looking for social justice. You’re a communist when you’re looking for the rights of the underdog. That’s the way they use the label. And so that for me became a huge change and I began to see US foreign policy in a whole different light.

Now were looking straight down over Australia, now we have the terminator out our right window, we have the whole further part of the world out one window. Fairly fantastic. The world is a different thing for each one of us, I think that each one us will carry his own impression of what we’ve seen today. You know my own impression is that it’s a vast, lonely, forbidding type.

But we were frankly worried about the state of euphoria that was beginning to set in, in the public mind about how easy this particular thing was. Light a match at the pad, the bird goes up, everything is great. Guys come back down again, you’ve got some heroes.

I remember our one friend who gave us a flag, and he, remember him Rita, and he, I thought he had three young children, and he was a helicopter pilot and he was very, he was a recruiter too, but then they called him back to active service, as a helicopter pilot and he died, he was killed in the war. And things like that happened all during our time of service. And we were strictly for the men who served for our country, so whether or the not government was right or wrong, I’m not in a position to know. I had to take what was told to me at that time. And what I understood at that time. So I don’t know whether it was right or wrong or why or who or what. We just tried to help, we just tried to help out to make our boys as safe as we could and send them people to help them when we could.

It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise. It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate. It is a crime against mankind. And so are the fires of war and death.

Napalm, which was made from information and from a formula in the United States Special Forces handbook, published by the school of special warfare, by the United States.

We all had a hand in making the napalm that was used here today.

These were folks who went to burn records that they thought had no right to exist. Well if everybody who feels that certain records don’t have a right to exist are entitled to do that, there is not only anarchy; there is a tearing of the social fabric that is intolerable. And I didn’t feel any sense of guilt or regret at prosecuting, what I regarded as excessive arrogant attempts to inflict their views on others. That’s not the way a democracy is supposed to work. You can’t burn what you hate.

We regret very much, I think all of us, the inconvenience and even the suffering that we brought to these clerks here; it was done so quickly and we hoped that they wouldn’t be so excitable over a few files, it’s very hard to bring home exactly what they are doing by being custodians of such files, but we certainly want to say publicly our apologies for hurting them.

And we tried to interpose ourselves between them and those who were gaining the drafts files here on the ground from the cabinets themselves. But I think that in a sense, we were a little unsuccessful, because we did have to struggle a bit with them, and I’d just like to repeat what Dan has said, we sincerely hope we didn’t injure anyone.

Um, I tended to be too damn angry all the time. I was ashamed of this country, and what we were doing in Vietnam and I was ashamed to be an American and I was angry as hell of over it, you know? And while I would never raise a hand against another human being, there was too much contempt in me and too much hatred of the system here. Forgetting of course, that the system is made up of people and according to our tradition and our religion and according to our scripture, we’re obligated to love the people. We’re obligated to love even our enemies. We’re obligated to love the people. And there wasn’t much of that in my make up in those days. Yet at the same time I was deeply convinced even then of the necessity for direct action. And now I know that it is the only resource that people have.

Well the Catonsville episode called to mind then, the life of a great Catholic lawyer the patron saint really of all lawyers, Thomas Moore, and the scene that makes this point best, is a scene in which Moore’s about to be betrayed by a disappointed office seeker and Moore’s family urges Moore to arrest him because he’s bad. And Moore, the lawyer, says, “There’s no law against that.” And he self righteous son in law, Roper says, “There is God’s law.” And Moore says, “Then let god arrest him.” And the impatient son in law says with sophistication upon sophistication. “Sheer simplicity,” says Moore, “The law, Roper, the law, I know what’s legal, not what’s right. And I’ll stick to what’s legal.” And Roper says, “Man’s law, above God’s?” “No, far below,” says Moore, but let me draw your attention to a fact, Roper, “I’m not God. The currents and eddies of right and wrong which you find such plain sailing, I can’t navigate; I’m no voyager, But in thickets of the law, there I’m a forester. I doubt there’s a man alive who could follow me there. Thank God” He said. And his wife then says, “While you talk, he’s gone, the bad guy’s getting away.” “And go he should,” says Moore, “if he was the devil himself, until he broke the law.” And Roper, now outraged, says “so now you give the devil the benefit of law?” Moore, “Yes, what would you do Roper? Cut a great road through the law? This country’s planted thick with the laws coast to coast, man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand up right in the winds that would blow then? Yes I’d give the devil the benefit of the law for my own safety’s sake.”

We’ll take you to the station. Right in the back of the paddy wagon. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.

These individuals were certainly at the very least, guilty of malicious destruction of property, and at the very worst, possibly even treason. The country was engaged at that time in a war, even thought it was an undeclared war, and certainly this action would give aid and comfort to the enemy.

In the race to the moon, in the race to the moon. Oh mister spaceman, you sure have started something, oh mister spaceman, don’t you know you got my heart a pumpin’, oh mister spaceman, I want to be spaceman too…

Oh mister spaceman don’t you know you got my heart a pumpin’, oh mister spaceman, I’m not really very far behind…

There wasn’t a single dinner conversation in Catholic families, that didn’t refer to that action, where people weren’t arguing passionately about it one way or the other.

And it split so many people, so many families, churches, clubs, what not, in Catonsville, because some of the people would say, it’s wonderful what they did, it needed to be done. Vietnam is not where we should be. Then part would say, they shouldn’t of done it, it’s a crime, they shouldn’t of done it. Everyone I knew, thought the government was doing the right thing. Then after that we began to have questions and we began to have concerns.

Ground action during the day was reported to light and scattered. The most significant engagement during the past few days took place near a US Special Forces camp in the central lowlands. It came after enemy troops…

As the trial progressed, I began to develop a lot of feelings for what they were doing, how much courage it took for them to do what they did. They surely knew it was going to change their whole life. I’m sorry.

It’s ok.

I could never be that courageous, never.

We strategized from the start. Our whole idea was to dispense with bullshit and with niceties of the courtroom to draw the thing tight like a spring. Each of you tell your story, where have you been with your life, and how did you come here.

And the whole process of the way that the judge handled the trial, really gave us a tremendous opportunity to speak. He asked me, “Well why didn’t you do this in Guatemala?” Well, I really, I relaxed then, and then I laughed out loud, I said, “Cause I’d be dead. You don’t demonstrate in a country that doesn’t let people speak out. I mean that’s one of the advantages of being an American. Why am I here. Why am I here, because you i have an opportunity to speak. Even if, I mean, this is civil disobedience. Taking part, and being willing to take the punishment for it, but allowing me to do it.”

They walked two miles, about 3,000 of them. The march was peaceful differing only from an ordinary parade by the chants, “end the war and the draft.”

Well, on a dolly, you know, they rolled in these boxes, these wooden boxes, that were the size of infant caskets. And I had seen infant caskets with the bodies of infants in Vietnam, burned infants. And so I just went like that and that’s were the booing started.

And what was, the people in the courtroom, did they know, who, how was it described, what was it, can you tell me what was in those boxes?

In the boxes in the courtroom?

In the courtroom.

Well there were nothing but burnt, have burned ashes papers and so on and so forth and they introduced those as evidence, as though they were important, you know and and they were nothing. We had burned papers instead children, that was our crime.

In Baltimore today, 9 Catholic war protesters were sentenced to federal prison for burning draft card records. The prison terms range from 2 to 2 and half years. Most of the active opposition to the Vietnam war in the United States…

Nixon was invading Cambodia and bombing Laos and Cambodia; the war was worse than we started. It had advanced into those other countries. There was huge turmoil on the campuses all over the country; strikes and occupations and so on. And a few of us decided when we were summoned, to give ourselves up, that that would be like giving ourselves up to military induction. They were worsening their criminal war and we were giving ourselves in, I said, “What is this?” So I went underground, a delaying tactic. It was to call more attention to the war. And in the process, give Mr. Hoover a headache. And a backache.

And that rationale, really caught fire, both within the Catholic left and throughout the country, and emboldened a lot of peolpe. If Catholic priests can go and make a statement like that about the war, surely in small way, I can do something, if only to speak up in some small gathering and express my opposition to the war.

I’ve been underground, if you can call it that, for only a short time. I was supposed to show up at the federal marshal’s offices in Baltimore on Thursday, April 9^th at 8:30 am, to begin serving my sentence, which is 2 years, I think. We’d gotten together, the remaining 8 of us, about a week or so before that and the decision that came out of the meeting, was that we would do our own thing. I hadn’t intended at all to show up, but then neither had I intended to, so to speak, go underground. I don’t think the feds are looking very hard for us, because we’re certainly not the 10 most wanted, and yet in one sense, I think we must very irritating to them and in this perhaps is our greatest impact.

The idea of jail doesn’t bother me that much. The idea of cooperating with the federal government in any way at all, irritates the hell out of me. My alternatives are, to go to jail, go above ground with an assumed identity, stay underground, or leave the country. Anyway I choose, the government is choosing for me. But what we’re questioning is their right, and they lost that right, because of the obscenity and the insanity of their actions, were are growing more and more obscene and insane.

Mr. McKinley, he didn’t do no wrong. He rode on down to Buffalo, and he didn’t stay too long, hard times, hard times, hard times….

I believe if we are really confronting the empire as Christians as that’s what we’re called to do, that’s a very clear Biblical message, and we have to be prepared for disruption. If we’re about, we need change through non-violence, then we should think seriously about being free enough to go to jail.

The train, well the train, running on down the line. Blowing out of a Henry station, McKinley is a die’n, hard times, hard times….

And so they took me to a restaurant to have a real meal for the first time and they hand me the menu and they said, “What would you like to order?” and I couldn’t believe it but I could not order, I could not think for myself, I could not figure out, “This is what I would like.” It’s not like, “Oh boy, I’m finally out, this is what I want.” I just couldn’t. And they looked over and they said, “Well just take your time, pick whatever you want,” and finally, tears came to my eyes and I just felt so helpless. It was like the first time that I was able to do anything for myself, ‘cause you can’t even get an aspirin, you know when you have a headache, you just go to the medicine cabinet and get and aspirin and you’re all set. Here you have to put in a request and beg and it’s a very dehumanizing kind of experience.

The rationale of those actions of going to jail, was that first, it’d fill up the jails, well you know it’s not gonna fill up the jails, two it would radicalize people, three, it would build communities, out of people coming out of jail, going into jail would build communities. I don’t, I think it’s failed on every score there.

I can’t achieve identity with the poor except when I’m in jail. I always tend when I feel, when I start feeling sorry for myself, I always tend to think, about what it would mean if I stopped. So that’s a terrible prospect, and I’ve never been able to acclimate to that, and I won’t I hope that I can keep going until I die.

I very definitely see myself as a criminal. I think if we’re serious about changing this society, that’s how we have to see ourselves. We’re all out on bail, and let’s all stay out.

And if you look back on their lives, they never really stopped. They never really stopped. And there are not many people around like that. They, they, they felt so strongly about what they were doing and about what the government was doing that they were willing to risk everything.

…now Roosevelt is in the White House, he’s doin’ his best, and McKinley, he’s in the graveyard, taking his rest, hard times, hard times, hard times….

The Vietnam war, produced the largest and most significant movement against war in American history, so I could see this myself and through the course of the war, as the acts of civil disobedience multiplied.

…yes, Roosevelt, he’s in the White House, drinking out of a silver cup, and McKinley, he’s in the graveyard, and he’ll never wake up, hard times, hard times, hard times….

Mr. McKinley, he didn’t do no wrong. Just rode on down to Buffalo, but he didn’t stay too long, hard times, hard times, hard times….

What Catonsville did was they became a kind of model for, you know, all those others, they were the Catonsville Nine, they were the Milwaukee Fourteen and they were the Camden Eight and they were the Boston Five.

One unit moves up the hill and drops a violet smoke bomb, to designate their point of contact with the enemy at the top. With the enemy positions marked, allied planes roar over the hill, and send napalm flaming along through the enemy bunkers.

Enemy troops moved into one little village only three hundred yards away, and started mortaring the camp. Most of the villagers were out of the way, when American air strikes were called in to silence the mortars. Now the villagers move their few remaining possessions to a hamlet even closer to the camp. Pigs and chickens and whatever is left where their houses used to be. The Special Forces know they will have to work hard later on to regain the confidence of these villagers. But even with the air attacks, it is still to Hattan, that these mountain people turn for security. Intelligence indicates, that this is to be the night of the attack on the base camp, so the Special Forces, want to take outpost four by nightfall. But the Special Forces unit still can’t dislodge the enemy after three tries, so a mobile strike force is sent up to assist in the assault.

I’m gonna throw a smoke right below me, and everything below this smoke is enemy, I say, and everything below the smoke is enemy, just have ‘em work the whole hillside below me, uh, copy..

Was that Frank?

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Feb. 17, 2001  I tell my next door neighbor that I’m going abroad for a couple of weeks and she wishes me a good vacation.  I tell my old boyfriend Sam, I’m going to Sarajevo on a student exchange program, and he asks me how it will feel to be part of target practice.  I feel a shiver surge through my body, pushing me to come up with some equally witty, sardonic retort.  I never was as clever as he, maybe that was our problem.  It’s as if I’d strolled into a restaurant to meet a guy I used to kiss but hadn’t seen in years.  I’m in a new dress that I think makes me look very chic, and he asks me if all the pressure of being in college has forced me to stop running.  I take a big gulp and start reminding this guy I hardly know or care about that the war in Bosnia has been over for five years.  I recite statistics and quote diplomats and still feel somehow wounded.  My muscles just aren’t what they used to be and I am actually wondering if I’m strong enough for this crazy journey.
You see, my step-father is Serb, at least that’s how he refereed to himself until I was about eleven years old.  That was about 1991 and things were getting really horrible in this country whose name most of my friends could hardly spell.
My mom traveled by herself through Yugoslavia.  She  collected a drawer full of Tito paraphernalia. One evening when I was about eight, she regaled all of us with her adventures.  Camping out in Lubjliana with two timid Dutch brothers, barricading herself into a rented room at the end of a dark hall in Zagrab, getting off the train at midnight in Belgrade with hundreds of soldiers there as if to meet her at the station.  This was my first real chance to invite a bunch of girls to a sleep over at my house, and my mother keeps us up all night talking about her European escapades.  All I can really see that came out of this is that she’s married to a man who now refers to himself as a Yugoslavian but who formerly was proud to say “I am a Serb.”  Sometimes I wonder if the reason she chose him is because he reminds her of those adventurous years in her twenties.
Anyway, it’s all kind of complicated because part of the reason I’m going to Bosnia is because I really need to understand that time in her life.  I need to know why she was so transformed by those few months she spent by herself in Yugoslavia and why she gravitated toward a man like him.  The more I learn about this part of the world, the more I find my head starting to spin.  By allowing their pasts to emerge through the landscape, I am able to pull apart a  wrought mess of conflicting information.

May 18, 2001   I’m flying into Sarajevo now realizing that I don’t actually have any one place etched in my mind’s eye.  For me, this ungrounded sense of the city’s physical qualities is something I will only be able to savor a few more minutes.  Unlike Paris or Rome, cities with a specific, timeless character, Sarajevo is a mismatch of horror and multi-ethnic notions of community.  I know there was a time when one could arrive in this city struck by the mingling of its people and its cultures.  That’s what a bird might have seen from a car before all of this lively color was quickly dimmed, squelched and killed.  So now I guess I should think about the mountains but all I really can wonder about it whether or not the kids will be smiling.

June 20, 2001  In the tub I am intoxicated by the warm, clear, clean water.  My mind travels; my body stays put, and the room is locked shut, set apart from the busy chatter in the living room of Dzenid, my uncle; Amra, my aunt: and Timur, their teenage son.  They talk of dinner plans, the closing of a Sarajevo bank, the last time they saw my stepfather Robert.  Or at least this is what I imagine they are saying.  Really, I understand nothing of Bosnian and so I invent not only the words but also the emotions.  Everyone in this house is a character in my radio play, and I am the naked director in the tub, the privileged thief of all the hot water left in this city.  For these fifteen minutes, this new family of mine becomes the actors in a story I’m free to improvise.  Soon the lovely hot water will become tepid.  There will be no more of the precious liquid until the morning.  I grab a towel, dry off and put on my clothes.  As the water flows down the drain, wickedly, as if to tease, I am quickly reminded of my own, unshakable awkwardness.  Whoever said that ignorance is bliss?
These new post-war days are like a fabulous blue sky that engulfs us with warmth and good spirit.  For my cousin Timur, however, each numinous cloud is a clever reminder of the rains that fell and fell and just wouldn’t stop.  “This bathtub,” he laughs, “the one you claim each night as your private luxuryship, was once dismantled, carried four flights down to the backyard and filled with dirt.  Of course no one had enough water upstairs to take a bath, so my mother claimed it for herself, filled it with dirt and watched her green beans and a transplanted rose bush grow there through four summers of shelling.  Now that it’s back upstairs, I can’t imagine you could ever really get clean in it.”

July 3, 2001  The B shelf of the tourist section in the used bookstore on 7th Avenue is lined with vibrant paperbacks full of details about scuba diving in Bermuda, tropical adventures in Bali and cheap eating in Beverly Hills.  There is nothing on Bosnia.  I’m hardly a seasoned traveler, yet, but I do know that a dog-eared guide book can serve as a real companion when traveling alone.  Yes, I have a few so-called family members who will meet me at the airport in Sarajevo, but how will I know what to do after that?  Somehow I feel that my whole sense of independence as a 20 year old woman in a foreign country depends on my ability to look through such a text. But there is nothing to be found and so I carefully, almost apprehensively, unfold the wrapping paper around a book my step-father must have hid in my suitcase just a few days before I left New York.  It’s a tattered, hard-back copy of some Balkan tome I’d never intended to peek into.  You see, I met this gift with the hard-scrabble resentment an ice skater feels when someone offers her a pair of knee pads.  I had no use and no interest in anything more Robert thought I would need.  He’s the kind of man who considers himself an expert on everything from inter-galactic phenomenon to fashion so I really wasn’t keen on giving him the thrill of guiding me through his own country if he wasn’t even brave enough to return himself.  He says he’s too old.  Is he too old for the nine hour plane trip?  Too old for foreign water?  Too old to go back to the place of his youth where time has not frozen, pristine, tree-lined, scar-free.  I didn’t even realize that I had actually lied to the airline functionaries when they asked me “Have you remained with your luggage the entire time?  Are you fully responsible for everything it contains?”  With the flippant brilliance of a girl on her own for what feels like the first time, I unpack my suitcase in my new Sarajevo home only to find to my complete surprise a well-worn copy of his book, Bosnia Chronicles.  Now as I begin to read, I realize this is not actually a dry historical treatise, but rather a highly compelling philosophical voyage through a land torn by the yearnings of east and west, cosmopolitan desires and the reveries of geographic isolation.  Despite myself, I am consumed.

August 5, 2001   I don’t know why a full eclipse sends shockwaves through my cornea.  I don’t know why I can’t get along with the man my mother loves.  I don’t know how my Uncle Dzenid holds a teacup with such elegance using only a thumb and an index finger.

Aug. 28, 2001   Timur and I are just about the same age, our birth dates hovering around the year 1980 like hungry flies on a peach.  We talk about listening to U2 as teenagers.  I in the comfort of my best friend’s refurbished Volkswagen bug and he in the basement of his four-story apartment building, pedaling a makeshift bicycle that generated just enough power to run a transistor radio.  We sit drinking Turkish coffee in the kitchen.  It’s Saturday morning, no work today, so he finally agrees to take a walk through Sarajevo with me.  Somehow I feel that there is an unspoken contract, a promise of sorts, between us.  We will talk about Madonna’s comeback at age 40 (the same age as our mothers so we giggle at this one), our interest in yoga, how much memory our computers can store, but we will not discuss the war.  At every turn in the road, with each bullet hole I see in a wall, I resist the temptation to ask. I want him to tell me if these skeletons of buildings that look as if they were bombed not more than a week ago are there to remind us of the war, if they are invisible to the people who walk past them everyday, or if they have been left to decay, allowing the winds to carry their dust , grain by grain away to the sea.  I never imagined that cement could be twisted into such horrid sculpture.
The bitter coffee burns holes in my gut.

Sept. 1, 2001  My mother called today, in the late afternoon, just as the prayers had begun at the mosque a few blocks away.  I was watching the shadows from a group of swallows swooping and swaying through the air, listening absent-mindedly to the Muslim chants, thinking about nothing and feeling a heightened sense of presence when the phone rang.   Aunt Amra, who speaks no English at all, picked up the receiver and immediately dropped it in my lab, as if to say she had no interest whatsoever in communicating with her brother-in-law’s family.  Ever since I arrived here I’ve come to realize that she, more than anyone else in this house, resents that my parents did virtually nothing to help her or her children except for making an occasional, expensive international call.  So now, when the phone rings, and she realizes it’s my mother, she uses a beautifully choreographed gesture of disdain to reveal her real feelings.
I’m no more happy than she to hear this familiar voice.

Sept. 4, 2001 My fingers follow a path through murky water, old, dry morsels of bread, broken toys.  I touch a wall, before I know it is there, startled not by the wall itself, but rather by the cracks and fissures in its surface.  At nine years old, I memorized the ridges and gullies of my grand-mother’s skin, observing an intricate web of surface texture that gave clues to the mystery of her life.  Each freckle, each shift of pigment, each mole, the number and the star etched on her shoulder.  I transcribed meticulously, as a way of unearthing an anatomy of time, when she slept, … as she did most of the daylight hours those months before her death.  At night she was startled by the slightest shift of our old, rumbling house.  Awake, awake, awake, she drove us mad with concern.  And now in the squid ink darkness of this Sarajevo night, I am again confronted by her skin, this time as a wall in an ally behind our apartment.  It’s as if she’s standing there before me, finally demanding an explanation for my invasion of her skin.

Sept. 5, 2001   My body is a suitcase full of souvenirs from the falls I have taken in my life.  The scar between my eyes came from a dive I took at age seven into a backyard pool near my mother’s home in Memphis.  My shoulder length red hair has just the slightest resemblance to a fried egg.  It’s what’s left from my botched attempt to transform myself a few hours before college graduation.  Too much peroxide landed on the back of my head that morning.  I whispered some insult to myself and went on to accept a diploma in the afternoon.  To this day, I am not sure if my grand-mother was weeping out of pride or sorrow.
I have a tattoo on my right hip that uses my own invented alphabet from childhood.
My voice is embarrassingly soft, so soft it draws far more attention than it deserves.  People always assume I am telling secrets.

Sept. 5, 2001  An unforgettably warm winter day.  I watch peer into the courtyard of the old mosque from my window three floors above.  The young mother with the turquoise veil pulled tight across her head scoops the water into her palms, then tenderly lets if fall into the mouth of her son below.  I watch his jaw, imagining the liquid as it passes into his throat, and down.  How did it feel five years, I wonder, when her mother merely wet the inner lining of her cheeks?  Was it enough for her daughter to forget her thirst?  A tall businessman in an Italian suit looks left, then right, perhaps ashamed I think, bends over, awkwardly you know, like he’s wincing with an old back injury, takes a gulp of water without wetting his hands, then quickly scoots along.  The white rabbit with a somewhere called nowhere to go. More water continues to form a liquid arch that soars up, then dives down onto the polished cobblestones below.

Sept. 7, 2001  Sarajevo airport.  A place is not a thing, but rather an uncontrollable sensation of memories that twitch at my nose, make me swell when I have nothing in my mouth, bring a stream of tears to my eyes when I am not sad.
This is a place I don’t just want to remember.  How do I keep the dirt under my nails?  How do I breath the air and keep it there, locked tight inside my lungs.  In a jar, I preserve a street I never had the chance to follow to the end.

Sept. 9, 2001   On a large treeless hill in a wooded area across from the house where I grew up, sit about a dozen stately homes half way through their construction.  It’s late spring now and they’ve been that way for about six months.  The first time I saw this new addition to the patchwork quilt of new housing communities, I decided I would use my imagination to inhabit each and every house. There were the Ringels with their just-a-little too rambunctious dog and their commitment to good cookware.  Then the Bradley’s with two boys and one on the way, a playroom large enough for a track and a husband with a long-awaited promotion at the firm.  In my mind, I couldn’t figure out why this impeccably dressed couple drove only one rundown car that needed a paint job.  Their muddy yard titled on a grate that exceeded the forty-five degree limit for a swing set.  Things just didn’t quite fit.  In fact, I believe, it is the Davis’ fragmented, no longer modular, life that was the first clue that the situation on the hill was not what it had first appeared to be.
You see I’d known this particular hill on an intimate basis ever since the summer between ninth and tenth grade when there were still at least a dozen Japanese Maples left.  It was there in that high summer glow of moonlight that I first let Phil, the gangly boy who walked with me silently to the bus stop, reach under my shirt.  I figured nothing too complicated would happen considering Phil’s taciturn ways and his inability to do anything with great panache.  He was so extraordinarily tall that I took great pleasure watching him wander absent-mindedly amongst the maples in the warm, midnight air.  It seemed right that his head soared amongst the delicate web of branches that sheltered our place below the sky.
It makes me sad to think that I have absolutely no mental image of Phil’s face.  He is even gone from my peripheral vision.  All I have left is the memory of his strange smell — like dirt from a garden rinsed with Ivory soap– and his height.  I remember something about his having had a twin brother who died at birth.  Could that boy possibly have been as tall and also fit inside his mother’s womb?
With all of the maples gone, it is becoming more and more difficult for me to remember either the touch of his hands or even the way his curly hair would get tangled in the branches.  I’d always thought I could come back to this spot, whenever I fancied, to claim those strands of hair.  I would giggle, thinking what it would be like to come home after years away, how I would steal a moment from a family dinner, run underneath a maple and delicately untangle a lock of his hair.  Then I would seal it in an envelope, look his name up in the phone book and send it to him.  Somehow the entire gesture seemed more like an archeological research project than a mean-spirited mockery.

Sept. 16, 2001   A tornado is a spinning cyclone of nature.  It stampedes like an angry bull through a tranquil pasture of blue violets and upright blades of grass.  A tornado kills with abandon but has no will.  Last Tuesday, September 11, I saw one of the two Twin Towers vomit dark clouds of venom into the air.  Before my eyes, what appeared to be an unimaginable accident of chance was transformed into something unworthy of a breath. Unable to comprehend the reality of death, my neighbor’s son mourns the death of the twins.  Like my friends in Sarajevo ten years ago, my house of drafts is pummeled by the danger that is now the wind.

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A 35 min film by Lynne Sachs

MUSIC: Pamela Z sings “Bone Music”

NARRATION: When God created Adam from the earth, he realized that it was not good for man to exist alone, so he created a woman out of dirt and impure sediment just as he had created Adam. He called this woman Lilith. Alphabet of Ben Sira, 800 C.E.

NARR: Like a beast, she sat when making water.

NARR:Unwilling to give up her equality, she disputed with Adam the manner of their intercourse, wishing to lay on top during the sexual act. But Adam would not agree.

Lilith Speaks to Adam (song and recitation by Cherie)

Just when I am on my way to becoming,

My eyes open and you are there.

Is Eden large enough for the two of us?

Wherever I turn,

There are branches pulling at my hair.

Earth between my toes and under my tongue.

I slither and sometimes I use my wings.

Let’s slither together.

Earth becomes dirt becomes dirty.

Bent knees turn into corners.

Am I not right for this world?

Before you, I did not know I was I.

Now this I is part of my unbecoming.

NARR: Lilith was not only disappointed — she was angry. She called out the unspeakable Name of God and flew from Eden to the Red Sea, a place full of evil demons. There, she howled her hatred of mankind through the night and vowed vengeance because of the shabby treatment she received at the hands of Adam.

No Kingdom There (from Isaiah 34)

Streams turn to pitch.

Soil into sulfur.

Land burns.

“No Kingdom Here.”

And all the goats called Evil cry out

“Bah, bah.”

LYNNE: From the Zohar, I read these words, it’s Lilith:

I flew up to touch the small faces

But he tore me away.

He made me crawl below

And then I saw I was nothing.

I had no beauty.

I flew up again to touch the small faces,

To melt inside their eyes.

But the guards barred my way,

And he slapped me

And cast me into the sea.

An owl perched on a tree above

Blinks, shivers and flys into a cloud.

NARR: There in the waves of the Red Sea, she engaged in unbridled promiscuity.

TEXT: A single drop of Lilith’s menstrual blood is enough to poison a whole town. Kabbalistic legend, 12th Century

NARR: She was unable to bear human children and had no milk in her breasts.

Cherie’s Interview: So you get your bookings weekly and you hit all your Podunk towns from New Jersey, you work from nine to two. Can you hear me? The pay is very good. 10 to 15 bucks an hour, and it’s kind of cool in New Jersey because all you do is dance. You keep your clothes on. There’s not a lot of pressure, but you feel the pressure because every other dancer is hustling. The men come in there because they are horny or lonely. The lonely ones always found me. I guess they’re all lonely. I got to hear their sad stories about their wives, their rotten jobs and their poor economic situation. They plied me with liquor. You had to B drink. That means for every drink you get a kickback. They put little straws in the drinks to keep track. I wasn’t good at that.

NARR: Eventually, God sent three angels, Sanvai, Sansanvai and Semongolof, after Lilith. They found her by the sea and threatened that if she did not return , 100 of her demon sons would die everyday. She refused. Lilith preferred her punishment to living with Adam.

NARR: Back in Eden, Adam was overcome by a feeling of isolation when the animals came to him in pairs to be named. So God took one of Adam’s ribs, made it into a woman and brought her to Adam. Adam said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman. Her name will be Eve.”

NARR: As we all know, Eve disobeyed the will of God by eating an apple from the tree of knowledge. Some say it was the serpent who encourged her, others claim it was Lilith. God punished Eve for her transgression: “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”

Cherie Interview: I’ve never had any true relationship with men. My criteria for being a mother is having the stability to play that role fully. I don’t think I could do that as a single mother. I am too ambitious and eccentric and creative to give up who I am and what I’ve done in my life. By doing that I gave up the role of mother because I could not have done it alone.

TEXT: It is forbidden for a man to sleep alone in a house, lest Lilith get hold of him to steal his seed. Babylonian Talmud, 6th Century

SYNC: Lilith with three Angels talking in car:

Angel #1: Why do you need all this stuff for children? You don’t have any children Lilith. Isn’t that right?

Lilith: All the world’s children are my children.

Angel #1: All the world’s children are Eve’s children. It’s time you got that through your head.

Angel #2: We’re concerned with what you’re eating in reference to our children.

Lilith: I don’t care who I am eating!

NARR:The angels Sanvai, Sansanvai and Semongolof came back once again and spoke to Lilith on behalf of God: “You must stop haunting expectant mothers and newborns, giving them the sleep of death, drinking their babies’ blood, sucking bone marrow, eating flesh. When you see a mother wearing an amulet with your image or hear her singing our names — Sanvai, Sansanvai and Semongolof — you must stop your violent acts. That is your contract with God.”

Mothers singing incantation using Angels’ names:

Swny Swswny Snygly Soon Sosoony Snygly

Sideros Smamit Swny Swsny Snygly Soony Sosoony Snygly

Swny Swsnny Sngrw Soony sosoony sangro

O Sergius, Sideros, Swny Swswny Sngrw

Soony Sosoony Sangro Sanvai, Sansanvai, Semongolof

TEXT: When Lilith finds no children born, she turns on her own.

Numbers Rabbah, 11th Century

POEM recited:

LYNNE:Mother Speaks to Baby

I’m learning to read all over again,

A face, this time, connected to a body.

At first, I feel your story from within–

Nose rubs against belly, elbow prods groin,

Your silent cough becomes

A confusing dip and bulge.

You speak and I struggle to translate.

I lie on my side, talk to myself,

Rub my fingers across my skin, from left to right.

I read out loud,

And I hope you can hear me.

I’m learning to read all over again

But this time I have a teacher.

TEXT: In ancient Babylonia, expectant mothers believed that Lilith could be trapped under a bowl inscribed with a formula against her. Alphabet of Ben Sira, 8th Century

LYNNE: Birth Poem

At last, nine full moons leave bare

The dust against the sky.

Air fills up with brightness.

A clumsy babies drops.

Dice on a betting table

Or rich, ripe fruit atop worn grass?

TEXT: A circle is drawn around a mother’s lying-in bed, and a magical inscription against Lilith is chalked upon the walls of the room.

Elijah Levita, 15th Century

Cherie’s Interview: At the time, keeping a child was just as absurd as everything else. I made an excellent choice because I’ve just been a person living on the fringes of society, battling to keep myself alive. To put a child through that would have been immoral. That’s how I felt then and that’s how I feel now.

TEXT:Lilith comes to earth to fornicate with men who experience nocturnal emissions or masturbate.

Demons and spirits born from this union are called “the plagues of mankind.”

The Zohar, 13th Century

Demon children born from a man’s adultrous encounters could make claims on their father’s property.

In Jerusalem, therefore, some burial societies forbid children from attending their father’s funeral. The evil spirits of their illigitimate brothers and sisters may be lurking about the open grave. Sephardic Burial Practice

Lilith Niggun Music

LYNNE: Mother Speaks to Baby

A smile comes over your face.

Lips flutter, flutter, quiver, turn up to touch cheek.

I know, am told, have heard — that

In the dark, under your cradle,

There in the empty space of dust between

Lies Lilith.

I catch the reflection of my face in her eyes.

I am a snake, a spider,

The flame of a burning sword,

A feather that tickles at the nape of your neck,

Broken glass and nakedness.

I touch your nose and her spell is broken.

Something lost and nothing gained.

For a moment your head swishes between ears.

To say no, to resist and then to sink into

Nothing more than a pillow.

TEXT: If a child laughs in his sleep, especially on the night of the full moon, this is a sign that Lilith is tickling him.

A mother will do well to tap her child on the nose and say “To her that flies in rooms of darkness, pass quickly, quickly, Lilith. You have no inheritance here.”

Emek ha-Melekh, 17th Century

Cherie Interview: I’ve always been a dance and I loved that. I spend a lot of money on costumes and carefully selected my music. Then I had inspiration when I was up there. The guys didn’t like me too much when I was up there dancing. I was in my own little world.

Durme Durme Music

Cherie Interview: If I could tell a different story and have a different history to tell you, playing another role, the mask, the social games, that was what I got paid for. A lot of places didn’t want me back because I wasn’t making money for the house. It was my life. That’s how I supported myself. I never thought of it. It kept me sane. If I zeroed in on what the job really was, it’s very degrading to women.

Durme Durme

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by Lynne Sachs

LYNNE: When I was six years old, I would lie on the living room couch, hang my head over the edge, let my hair swing against the floor and watch the evening news upside-down.

A frog that sits at the bottom of a well thinks that the whole sky is only as big as the lid of a pot. (in Vietnamese text, read by Viet woman in English)

Which Way is East

a film by Lynne Sachs

in collaboration with Dana Sachs

LYNNE: It rains all night. After five years of draught at home, I’m awake and listening, starring out the window at a darkened Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City. At 4:30, I hear a rooster crow from somewhere deep in this cluster of apartment buildings. Slowly sunlight spreads across the cement wall in my room, turning it gold.

I watch an elderly man in blue boxer shorts fold up his bedding and begin to do Tai Chi. A teenage girl turns on her radio. In my mind this gives the woman across the courtyard the cue to begin sweeping. I wonder then about my sister, Dana. After almost a year here, does she still notice all this?

DANA: My friend Thu and I take my sister Lynne to visit a pagoda in the Chinese neighborhood of Cho Lon. Thu takes Lynne’s hand and leads her through the sanctuary, making sure she puts three sticks of burning incense at every altar. Then Thu places oranges on the carved wooden tray in front of one of the Buddhas.

THU: “When the communist party took power they didn’t like Buddhists, and they didn’t like Catholics, so my family stopped coming here. We forgot about it for many years. Now the government says it’s okay. So we’re all starting to remember again.”

DANA: Thu closes her eyes, places the palms of her hands together, and raises them into the air. I look into the bronze eyes of the Buddha, and make wishes instead.

(Conversation in Vietnamese, English subtitles)

H: Your older sister is in Vietnam?

D: Yes, we’re going to travel together.

H: From Saigon to Hanoi?

D: Yes.

H: How old is she?

D: Thirty-one.

H: Is she married?

D: No.

H: Thirty-one and she’s still single! Why do American women get married so late?

D: As Ho Chi Minh said, “There’s nothing more precious than independence and freedom.”

LYNNE: May 15, my third day in Vietnam. Driving through the Mekong Delta, a name that carries so much weight. My mind is full of war, and my eyes are on a scavenger hunt for leftovers. Dana told me that those ponds full of bright green rice seedlings are actually craters, the inverted ghosts of bombed out fields.

LYNNE: At Cu Chi, we pay three U.S. dollars so that a tour guide will lead us through a section of this well-known 200-kilometer tunnel complex. This is the engineering masterpiece of the Viet Cong, a matrix of underground kitchens and living rooms and army headquarters. . As I slide through the narrow, dusty passageway, my head fills up with those old war movies Dad took us to in the ’70’s..

My body is way too big for these tunnels. I can hardly breathe. After five minutes, I come out gasping.

We decide not to spend the extra ten dollars it costs to shoot a rifle.

Sitting at a thatched-roof hut, sipping milk out of coconuts, I listen to Dana chat with the woman who runs this drink stand in the middle of the jungle. “Ask her,” I say.

CU CHI WOMAN: I’ve been in this area all my life. For twenty years, I stayed below ground, living in the tunnels. It was the only safe place during the war. I even gave birth to my daughter down there. My husband was a soldier. One day he crawled out of the tunnel, and he died right over my head. (In Vietnamese)

“Dont’t drop the bait to catch the shadow.” ( older Vietnamese woman reads English text in Vietnamese)

LYNNE:We’ve gotten lost somehow and are beginning to realize that we’ve walked past the same bush three times. In a nearby field, we spot a one-legged farmer with his two sons. They lead us in silence through dense brush to the ruins of My Son, once the intellectual center of Vietnam.

My Son survived centuries of monsoons and war before a US bomb scattered most of the ancient Cham stonework like gravel across the hillside.

We stand inside the tallest remaining tower listening to the birds. It’s very cool, almost damp. One of the boys offers us a hot soda pop.

DANA: I’ve been thinking about the way people talk about time here. All you have to do is mention a particular year and whoever’s listening already knows the whole story.

HA: “My parents came to the South in 1954.” (Vietnamese)

DANA: Behind that date lies the image of families leaving the land they’d farmed for generations, and turning their backs on the graves of their ancestors. Vietnam slit itself across the belly then. Hundreds of thousands fled north or south, depending on which ideology they trusted most.

DANA: Huong told me her father headed North in 1954 to fight with the revolutionary army. He thought Ho Chi Minh could reunite the country within two or three years.

HUONG: For two decades he couldn’t get a letter to his family in Saigon! (Vietnamese)

“When a water buffalo and a bull are fighting, the mosquitoes and the flies that follow them will die.” ( Bac teaches Dana as she reads parable in Vietnamese, has problems, english text)

LYNNE: In the old capitol of Hue one night, I take a meandering bicycle ride with Khoi, a university student friend of Dana’s.

During the 1968 Tet offensive, Hue became a battlefield, and the Viet Cong, thinking Khoi’s family was harboring South Vietnamese soldiers, burned down their house. Khoi’s father had been collecting books since he was a child, and when the house burned, his books burned with it.

Khoi says his father went crazy after that.

Past the hospital, we take a turn off the main road which winds along the Perfume River. We travel down a dark lane, where there are no people, no cafes, no open doors onto living rooms and t.v’s. This is the quietest, most peaceful street I’ve seen in Vietnam. Khoi tells me that this was the street where soldiers brought prisoners to shoot them. No one wants to mingle with their ghosts.

“When you love someone, you love everything about them, even their footsteps. When you hate someone, you hate everything about them, even their ancestors.”(Youngish man reads in English from Vietnamese text))

DANA: At a pagoda in the countryside, I meet another one legged man on crutches. He has on the most formal military attire, like a soldier on parade. He tells me he lost his leg in the American War, and asks where I come from. “I want to go to America,” he says. And, as if I would understand completely, he adds, “Everyone is rich, and business is good there.” We stand for a moment, face to face, surveying each other. I finally raise my hands together, as if in prayer. “Xin loi Bac, ” “Uncle, I’m sorry.” He looks at me uncomfortably, and shrugs. “Khong sao, Khong sao,” — It doesn’t matter, he says, waving his hand like we’re talking about a mistake I made years ago that he’s long since forgotten.

A few days later I tell Phong, who comes from a long line of revolutionaries, about my encounter with the veteran.

But Phong hardly listens.

He once told me that war is like a volcano. You can’t control it, so you do what you can to save yourself.

“Don’t feel too bad,” he tells me now. “That man probably killed some American soldiers too.”

LYNNE: Sick and dizzy for days, I see no more of Hue than what’s outside my window. Dana brings me a daily bowl of noodle soup and spends her time hanging out with the cooks downstairs. Without me around making her speak english, she’s come to know them quite well.

I feel trapped. Right now, I wish this sweltering hotel room were somewhere else. Home. Unable to film, I hand Dana my camera.

DANA: Lynne can stand for an hour finding the perfect frame for her shot. It’s as if she can understand Vietnam better when she looks at it through the lense of her camera. I hate the camera. The world feels too wide for the lense, and if I try to frame it, I only cut it up.

LYNNE: Lu strikes up a conversation with us as we walk one evening along a quiet, tree-lined street in Danang. He wants to practice his English.

We invite Lu to dinner. It’s his first time in a restaurant, so he’s bewildered by the menu and offended by the prices. He tells us about an American doctor who came to Danang to find the remains of a friend, a soldier lost in the war.

Lu’s older brother sold the doctor some human bones for $6.

LYNNE: I’m here such a short time, a bone collector who knows nothing about anatomy.

DANA: Back in Hanoi, we show my friend Hoa the photographs we just picked up from the one-hour developer . She sifts through all the famous sites of Vietnam, and then stops suddenly at a picture Lynne took.

HOA: “Where did your sister take this picture? That’s my grandmother! I’ve never introduced you to her. She’s not a very nice person. Always complaining.”

DANA: Once the photo lost its anonymity, it lost its meaning. it wasn’t the long suffering face of Vietname anymore, the trophy face a tourist loves to capture. It was just Hoa’s crabby grandmother.

DANA: When I first got here in winter, every proper coffee table had a bowl of mandarin oranges on it. I thought people must really like mandarin oranges in Vietnam. But no. That was mandarin orange season, so that’s what you do. Eat mandarin oranges.

Since then, we’ve been through sugar cane, apricots, mangoes and watermelon. During each period, I reach a point when I never want to see that food again. And then, miraculously, it disappears. The same woman who roamed my neighborhood with her two baskets of mangoes balanced on a bamboo pole across her shoulders reappears hawking pineapples.

It’s June now, the beginning of the rainy season, and the end, thank god, of lychee season. Lychee season is very short, as everyone I know has explained to me, and so lychees are a delicacy. Someone gives you a kilo of lychees and then you give them a kilo of lychees, and together you must eat 8 million of them. I’ve never particularly liked this fruit, but it’s impossible for me to tell someone I’ve had enough. You’ve got to go with the spirit of the thing, relish every juicy bite. I try to eat as slowly as possible, and make good use of one popular Vietnamese eating habit — preparing a morsel of food and then giving it to someone else. I peel the lychee, then hand it to a neighbor to eat, praying she won’t do the same for me.

DANA: Phong drove me home on his motorbike after the symphony. A storm had rolled into Hanoi while we were sitting in the opera house. I leaned into his back, bracing myself from the wind. The rain, illuminated by the light of our scooter, looked like a million shards of glass. Above us there was a loud blast in the sky.

PHONG: It’s raining so heavy. More and more thunder and lightning.

It reminds me of the war we fought against the American B52’s. Back then, American war planes kept flying over Hanoi everyday. They dropped so many bombs. The explosions sounded like this. (In Vietnamese, subtitled)

DANA: I wonder if he told me because he knows I want to know these things, or because everytime he hears thunder, he remembers the bombs.

DANA: Lynne and I are sitting in Hoa’s living room. We have the TV off, so none of her neighbors are standing out on the sidewalk, peeking in. In this unfamiliar quiet, we begin to talk about the United States.

HOA: “I think I understand homelessness, Dana, but I don’t understand why your government spends so much money trying to find the bodies of soldiers that they know are dead, when so many other soldiers are still alive and sleeping on the streets right there in America.”

DANA: I feel weary, maybe it’s almost time to go home.

I can’t. I’m not ready to leave the children I teach , the way they look at the ceiling when they are trying to remember an English word, or the way their eyes get bigger when they finally do remember.

I can’t leave Hoa’s son Viet, the wild child, the five-year-old with the gravelly voice of an older man.

I haven’t learned all the words for rain or the words for art, and I don’t know all the ways to talk about love. I still want to hear the firecrackers at Tet and taste the new rice, during those brief few weeks when it’s green and chewy.

“A leaf that is whole should protect a leaf that is torn.” (In English Dana translates)

LYNNE: OJ is a family friend and the only veteran I knew as a child. It seems strange to him that Dana has been living in Vietnam. Before I left, he told me he’d like to sit on the white sands of the China Sea again, to hear the strange chirping sounds of the birds in the jungle near Pleiku, to look for a south Vietnamese nurse he worked with pulling teeth. He doesn’t even know if his friend is alive. He imagines she’s a dentist by now.

But there is something that keeps OJ from coming back here. The same thing that keeps him from telling the owners of his favorite San Francisco noodle shop that he was stationed just miles away from their family farm. For him that old adage still holds, “You can’t get there from here.”

DANA: Lynne left for San Francisco this morning and Hoa can see it in my face. She hands me an ear of boiled corn she bought from a passing vendor, and we eat quietly, staring out at the traffic on the street. “Chia buon, do buon”, she says. “When you share someone’s sadness, you lessen it.”

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