Nathan Englander - Man on the Moon

 

I was moving to Jerusalem to make peace. It was 1996, and I was living in Iowa City, Iowa, and peace was breaking out, there was going to be a new world order. Basically. I was sure everyone was going to be holding hands from Baghdad to Tel Aviv. And my friends were already there, and honestly-- Israel had peace with Egypt, they had peace with Jordan, the Palestinian Authority had the West Bank and a casino. The state was happening, it was going to be over, and I was desperately afraid that year that I was going to miss out. 

 

Now, I wasn't just moving. I'm radically secular now, but I was raised religious. I have this concept of Aliyah in my head. I'm making Aliyah. Literally, the route [unintelligible 00:37:24] is to go up in holiness, it's a forever thing when you move to Jerusalem, you don't come back from that. So, I am going there forever. 

 

I had a friend-- Jesus called me, got a job in Denver. He didn't say to me, "I'm moving to Denver and I will die in Denver and Denver will drink my blood." [audience chuckles] But this is the way I'm thinking for Jerusalem. School ends, two weeks later, I'm on a plane. I wake up in Tel Aviv, I walk into the airport and I look for the first official Jew I can find, and I say to him, "Where's the office for new immigrants?" And he looks at me and he says, "Did you come on the plane from Manhattan?" Not New York, not America, Manhattan. [audience laughter] And I tell him, “In fact, I have.” And he says to me, "It's not too late. Go back." [audience laughter] 

 

Two days later, I met this fancy-- I've been there a million times and I've lived there. I met this fancy lefty in the American neighborhood, this professor's house, the academics, all the brilliant lefties. Because it's not just I want to be part of peace. Peace needs me. It needs short story writers. I'm also convinced. One of the architects of the Oslo Accords is there. It's this fancy dinner, and I'm just excited, I can see it happening as she raises her glass and I'm going to get my toast and she says to me, "Welcome to the Titanic." [audience chuckles] 

 

But again, there have been setbacks. Buses are blowing up, the prime minister has been assassinated, but all I can tell you, and I so feel this, it felt so good on the street. We'd go to East Jerusalem on Saturday to the Arab party and eat lunch, and it was just a beautiful time. I didn't want to live with those Americans. I was becoming Israeli. There was this neighborhood in the center of town, all twisty alleyways and houses piled on top of each other. We're all living in a pile. There's the artists and the freaks and the stone messianists and, everything's happening. It is the birth then of Hebrew rap, which I recommend to all of you. [audience chuckles] So much good stuff is going on, and we're all so poor, and living in this crazy place.

 

Literally, my house is patched with tin and chicken wire. When it rains, my roommate and I would sit there and watch our one light bulb on a wire, just watch the water pour off and it would pour in under the doors, and like a horror movie, just water would run black down the walls. It was just downright dangerous to live that way. It's my buddy's story that sums it up best. He wakes up and he's peeing, it's on fire. His body's shaking, his toes are curling, his eyes are bugging out. It's horrible. And to give you all the gory details, there's a weird non-complication. When he poops and pees, he feels fine. When he pees again, the fire, the eyes, his body's shaking, he can't figure out what's happening. This is for my science friends. [audience laughter]

 

When he's sitting, he is peeing against porcelain. When he is standing up, his landlord has not grounded electricity. He is closing the circuit and being electrocuted through his wiener. [audience laughter] Honestly, this is the least of Jerusalem life. [audience laughter] Being in the heart of the city, we also have the open-air market, again Upper West Side, there are scientists in and Jews. I know Machane Yehuda. [audience chuckles] It's just this really simple life. You need a cucumber, you go get a cucumber. You need a tomato, you go get a tomato. That's such a nice way to live. I'm in the market with my Israeli girlfriend, and my buddy Mike's in from Haifa, and we're shopping, and it's a Friday, and it's always a beautiful day.

 

And we're thinking, should we do a real shopping? And we decide, as we always do, let's just be lazy and go home and eat. We walk the couple of blocks, and get to the balcony, and then there is a low boom and another low boom, and we absorb it, and the market has just blown up. I'm thinking, I want to freak out. I'm a kid from Strong Island. Like, “This is not for me.” I just want to freak. My girlfriend says-- She's going to make a man out of me. “This is it. When your number's up, your number’s up.” And I understand it. We don't do chaos theory there. You did not survive September 11th in Minnesota, you didn't survive it in the Bronx. Those are the rules of Jerusalem. If you're close enough to claim it, you're dead. And that's how we're going to do it. 

 

Now, I'm a coward. Why aren't I afraid? Because at this time, I'm an idealist and I honestly believe you have to be willing to die for something. We're making peace, and there is a cost, and there are enemies, and I was really ready to die for that. I would never say such a thing now. But then, I really believed. And not long after, I'm sitting in my cafe writing, downtown, and I'm thinking, I'm going to walk home, and I decide to just do another few more lines of writing, and I sit for a minute, and then it comes again the giant, giant boom.

 

And I tell you I wrote a short story about this, and I deny any link, and I feel like I am raping the memory to share it with you, but it's my memory, and I just don't like to talk about it, but I will, here. But this is not the first bombing. Now, this is the second. So, there's a second blast and a third, and it is the worst thing I have ever heard in my life. The second blast and the third, you are listening to people get dead. It is a horror. And just you turn into animal. You can't think. You just want to run into the fire, but there's nothing to do. I'm not a paramedic or a policeman. There's a paratrooper, there's my last pee, but there's just nothing to do.

 

So, I walk up to that corner, and I make my first non-Jerusalemite decision. I think, I don't need these memories. I don't need to see this. And I take another block and walk home. But the next day, I'm back. Because that's what we do. I'm a lefty. I want two states. I want East Jerusalem as Palestinian capital. This is not about Zionism, or colonialism, or territory. This is about my fucking neighborhood. Like, the next day, it's cleaned up. That's the way they do it. No blood, some broken windows, but they're gone. No glass, no nothing. I am back there in the middle of the bomb, just right where it happened, and I'm eating a slice. 

 

I'm going to have a slice of pizza, because it's my town and my block. And if I don't go back the next day, I'm not going to go the day after that or the day after that. And that's how we do it. But at this point, again, I'm still not afraid, but I'm thinking in a Chekhovian Ward 6 idea, like, maybe we should all be going crazy. Maybe this not going crazy is the crazy part. I think we should all be curled up in a corner, drooling. Honestly, it just can't be stopped, the peace. I just think this can't be stopped. Setbacks and setbacks, but this is how things happen. 

 

And the metaphor I used, the thing that kept me going all this time was I just would always think of the moon. Like, we've looked at the moon since the dawn of time, and people wanted to go there. And I thought, that's impossible. It's literally impossible to send a man to the moon, but we sent a man to the moon and we brought him back. And to me, that's how I feel. Peace is impossible, we'll still do it. It’s the time, it's the new millennium, close your eyes and think back. We still had Bill Clinton, there's a surplus, but we also had friends in the world. We are one signature away from peace. We need one more Sharm el-Sheikh, and it's over. It's really finally here after all these years. 

 

I remember it's New Year's in Jerusalem, Jewish New Year's, and I throw a big dinner party, and everything feels great. We have a super time. I wake up the next morning, and the country is on fire. We are having a war. Just mutually assured self-destruction, it is over. The hope is gone. And I call my friend Debbie, and she's a war photographer, she answers the phone. I can hear she's in the middle of a firefight. I hear the bullets flying and the shot grenades and the tear gas. She's really in the middle, and I ask her, really from the depths of myself, I want to know, "At dinner last night, do you think Shelly had a good time?" [audience chuckles] 

 

But this is it, because we're going to be normal. This is the point. Debbie still tortures me about this. She doesn't hang up the phone. She gets behind one of those big cement things that you see on the news, one of the blockade things, and she just squats down back there and we go over dinner, like, "Do you think it's okay that Kathy and Kobe drove from Tel Aviv? Like, how was dessert?" We go over that dinner, because that's it. We don't give up. 

 

And then, this is my life now. I don't complain about my neighbor's bad piano anymore. If tank fire's shaking the window, you put in your earplugs and you write your novel. I remember watching Die Hard one night, and I pause and open the balcony door to see that the machine gun fire is also coming from outside. That's my Jerusalem surround sound. It just becomes guns on the copters. It's just never-ending violence, but that's what I get used to. But this is also when I get afraid, because this is when I recognize. I just thought people were playing.

 

I see that Sharon sucks and Arafat sucks, and they're just-- Nobody is really trying, and that's when I see it's for nothing. That's when I start to see-- The tourists are gone, it's Jerusalem. There's no tourists, there's no buses, you're flying back from abroad on empty planes. It's just nobody wants to come to our country, and nobody in Israel wants to come to Jerusalem, and nobody in Jerusalem wants to come to my neighborhood. I'm sitting there in the shuk on Agrippa Street, eating my hummus, looking at the hummus guy and the other regular customers, because we have to be there. This is what we do. If we die from it, we die from hummus. 

 

I feel it's my obligation, and I just can't understand how I inherited this block, how did it become mine. And about that time, I get a call from a friend in New York, and she's weeping. She did not get invited to the Oscar party of her choice. [audience chuckles] And this hurts me. It does. I calm her down, and I hang up the phone, and I have an epiphany, because I want those fucking concerns. I want to worry about the Oscar parties, I want to weep deeply because I missed the Steve Allen sample sale. [audience chuckles] These are the things I want to worry about. 

 

I've got this Aliyah head. This is my head like, I think being an individual is weak or wanting to drink your coffee and not get blown up is weak. I just think any concerns that are basically what you would call a happy, normal life are somehow wrong. But I'm starting to think otherwise. I'm starting to think I missed that. 

 

So, I'm in New York giving a reading, and I'm walking around, and I'm thinking, you know what? I really like it here. It's such another betrayal. It's so hard to admit once you become a Jerusalemite. I'm thriving. I am thriving in New York. I like it. I like my New York friends. I like it here. And that's when I bump into an ex-expat, a New Yorker to Jerusalem and back. Everyone's already here. I see more people from Jerusalem here in this neighborhood than if I'd go back there. 

 

She's left a year before me. There's this halfway house that they have, this apartment-- You take a Jerusalemite, and it's like coming up so you don't get the bends. It's this place where they can acclimate before you re-release them into the wild. [audience chuckles] That's what we've got. There's a room empty. I know the girl who's left it, she left two years before, and she offers me the room. I look at it, and I think, it's-- I know this thing, because Aliyah, it is forever. I'm supposed to die there. I know how everyone does it. It's extended vacation. 

 

My parents came for two weeks from Israel to New York in 1964, and they're still headed back. That's how we all do it. So, I'm like, “I could just use a little more time here. It's peaceful. It's quiet. I'll do my writing. I deserve this life. It's okay.” Look at the room, I like it. I look at the lease and I sign it. I put down my name, Nathan Englander, and I put down the date, September 1st, 2001. Thanks.