No. 44371 rises from the bench and walks across the train station, leaving behind the young girl and the object he had been holding in his hands.
“But love is justice,” I say to Gautama.
“It is not so, my daughter,” Gautama replies. “Cain murdered Abel for justice. God flooded the earth for justice. The people crucified Jesus of Nazareth for justice. Terror and murder are the way of justice, not the way of love. Every war waged, and every harm inflicted, has been for the sake of justice. Soldiers kill because they believe their cause is just; assailants attack because they believe they have just cause. Justice drives the abusive spouse, the angry parent, the screaming child, the feuding neighbor, the outraged nation. He who seeks justice is harmed, not healed, because to obtain justice one must do that which is unjust. God experienced perfect justice when he flooded the earth and destroyed the possibility of evil, but the price of achieving perfect justice was unbearable; all creation was destroyed and God was separated from all that God loved and all that could love God in return. This is why the story is told, my daughter; it is a warning, not an invitation. Rainbows contain God’s covenant never to seek justice again.”
“But not to seek justice is to allow others to harm us, to become victims.”
“No, my daughter. Not to seek justice is to love those who harm us and become victors. Love is not passive or submissive; it is the determined application of opposite force to hatred and fear, demanding the highest effort and skill. The warrior who fights back with weapons is honored and celebrated, but what bravery is there in meeting gun with gun? True bravery is displayed in meeting gun with arms wide open, refusing to submit to hatred and fear, even under pain of death. Those who mistake such bravery for cowardice do not see clearly and are forever doomed to the cycle of suffering and violence. At times, an assailant will be conquered by such love and stop attacking, but at other times he will ignore such love and continue to cause pain. Is this not also true of justice? At times, an assailant will fear retribution and stop attacking, but, at other times, he will ignore the threat of retribution and continue the onslaught. Has justice prevented the crime? People cannot be controlled; they are all born with the freedom to choose. The wise man who chooses love over justice controls himself. Experiencing unconditional love, he ends his suffering and reenters the Garden from which he came. Reuniting with his Creator, he knows, at last, what it means to be God.”
I reach down and pick up the object Ott Bowles left on the bench. It is the small figurine of the one-armed Christ that fell from the menorah on Cudi Dagh. The young girl stirs and reaches out timidly with her left hand. I allow her to have it. She takes it and walks across train shed to Luas, who has just entered and is seating himself on a bench next to a new presenter who has just arrived at the station and is sitting all alone, looking perplexed. I had not seen him there earlier. The girl offers Luas the figurine, but he waves her away and she wanders off. Luas smiles at the new presenter the way he smiled at me when I first arrived, as if to say: Yes, my son, I see. I see what you are afraid to see, but I will pretend not to have noticed.
43
The man on the bench tries to deny and conceal his wounds, as I had done when I first arrived, but I am a presenter now, and I can see them, and with them I see the last moments of his life.
The man’s name is Elon Kaluzhsky. His abdomen is torn open, and pieces of his face and forehead are missing, along with both arms and legs. Twenty minutes before he arrived at Shemaya Station, when his body was still whole, he kissed his beautiful wife and three beautiful children goodbye for the day and walked the two blocks from their apartment on a quiet street in Haifa to the bus stop. Rosh Hashanah would begin at sundown that evening, and Elon Kaluzhsky was thinking about the festive meal they would share. He loved dates, and as he walked down the street he contemplated the Rosh Hashanah prayer that must be said before eating them: “May it be your will, G-d, that our enemies be finished.”
With this thought fresh in his mind, Elon took the last available seat on the Number 35 express bus, which would bring him to the downtown offices of the profitable Israeli export business where he maintained the accounts. He was full of goodwill this morning and offered a pleasant hello to the oddly overdressed man seated next to him, wearing a long overcoat on an eighty-five degree day. The greeting was not returned, but even this did not spoil Elon’s happy mood. He smiled kindly at the elderly couple sitting across the aisle from him, and next to them a pretty, young secretary. Further down the aisle sat several businessmen reading newspapers, a group of high school students, and a young mother cradling her infant son.
The express bus gathered speed and the buildings of Haifa flashed by. In the middle of the journey, in the middle of a street, the overdressed man stood calmly, braced himself against a support pole for standing passengers, and from beneath his long coat pulled an automatic assault rifle. Without uttering a word, he opened fire on the passengers, sweeping the bus in an arc. Brass shell casings rained down, and a fine spray of blood filled the air as bodies collapsed onto the floor, including the elderly couple, the secretary, the businessmen, the high school students, and the young mother cradling her infant son. Elon Kaluzhsky, who had been thinking about dates and their meaning, was an athletic man and reacted bravely. He tackled the man with the gun and pinned him to the floor.
“You Arab bastard!” he screamed at him in Hebrew. “You son of a bitch!”
The man spit in Elon’s face and said, “La ilaha illa ‘llah.”
Then he detonated the suicide bomb strapped to his waist.
Luas embraces Elon, who has just recognized that his own blood is flowing through the gaping wound in his abdomen and is sobbing uncontrollably on the bench. Luas leads him away, to what Elon believes is the house outside Moscow where he was raised, to be cared for there by a tender spirit he believes is the soul of his mother, who died ten years earlier of cancer. Elon does not notice on the way out that seated on the next bench over is the Arab man who blew himself and Elon down the tracks into Shemaya Station. I can see the last moments of this man’s life too, and I recognize his face and his thoughts. Samar Mansour was not thinking about passengers or dates when he boarded the Number 35 express bus in Haifa. He did not even see the faces of those around him. He saw only Israeli soldiers firing bullets into the bodies of Palestinian children.
It had been hot the day before in Ramallah, and the customers in the café had been irritable from the heat, the humiliating Israeli checkpoints, and being penned into their neighborhoods like animals. When Samar Mansour heard the shots, he raced up the blockaded alley and into the line of fire to see if he could help. Children who had been throwing stones at the Israeli soldiers were running back down the alley toward him, but when he arrived he saw three boys lying in pools of blood on the ground. The soldiers aimed their guns into the crowd from the walls and rooftops. Samar lifted one of the boys and carried him to an arriving ambulance. The boy had a leg wound and was not hurt badly. Sam tried to comfort him.
Other men arrived at the same ambulance, carrying the other two injured boys. Samar heard a woman wailing behind them, “Hanni! Hanni!” as she tried to reach one of the boys. Samar could tell instantly the little boy was dead. Military ammunition does unspeakable violence to a child’s small body.
Something changed in Samar Mansour at that moment. He thought of his father, orphaned by the Israelis and forced to carry the bags of an American archaeologist to survive. He thought of his Holocaust documentary, which had changed nothing at all, and of his theories, which had liberated no one. He thought of the little boy, Hanni, whose life in Ramallah had been full of misery, and of Hanni’s mother, who would never forget the horrifying image of her son that day. He thought of the ranchers on the great plains of America who find the mauled carcasses of their livestock and go hunting gray wolves. And so, on the Number 35 express bus in Haifa that morning, Samar Mansour saw only Israeli soldiers and gray wolves, not human beings living their lives.