Wednesday, January 09, 2019
Imagine having to teach your child that brightly colored balloons can kill. Imagine that hate that impels a people to try to murder and maim small children. https://t.co/tIF74KxW7C— (((Varda Epstein))) (@epavard) January 8, 2019
Etti always awoke at dawn, as
her parents and sister slumbered on for that one more delicious hour. Soon the
house would fill with the smell of coffee as the family began the hectic battle
of getting everyone showered, dressed, and out the door for the day to jobs and
daycare and school. Even Shaked, Etti’s sister, already a big girl in first
grade, slept on. It was warm under the covers. Why not?
Etti spied something moving on
balcony, something colorful, floating in and out of sight. “What could it be?”
she wondered. She pushed the sliding door ever so carefully, so as not to wake
the others. She knew she’d catch it if she risked even one precious moment of
their sleep.
It was a balloon! A red one.
Tied to a string, the bobbing orb had become entangled with the arms of a
chair. Etti clapped her hands, but without a sound, just the two hands meeting,
still reluctant to incur the wrath of her sleeping family.
The girl crept closer, reached
out for the balloon, and “Boom!” a big explosion.
Now it was like all the sound
had been sucked out of the air.
Etti was on the ground when her
parents ran to the source of the explosion and found her. And then there were
sirens, so many sirens. Too many sirens. Too many people running around. Some
of them in uniforms of various types, doctors, fire fighters, policemen,
soldiers. Residents in pajamas, too.
It was not even 7 AM.
***
This scenario might go in a
number of directions. In the worst case, Etti is dead by balloon, a gift from
the lovely people of Gaza, who want Jews dead, even children. That’s how much
they hate us. That’s the extent to which they dehumanize the Jews. If the Jews
are vermin, it’s a good deed to kill them, and certainly no reason to let a
small cockroach grow up to become a large one.
Fear would spread throughout
the neighborhood. Parents would warn their children not to touch balloons
unless a parent authorizes the contact. Etti’s little kindergarten friends
would ask for her, and wonder why their teachers looked away—couldn’t seem to
look the children in the eyes as they explained that Etti would not be coming
to kindergarten again.
When they asked their parents, “Aifo Etti?” (where is Etti), their mommas
hugged them and cried, while daddy went to check that the new lock on the
balcony door was secure.
Or maybe Etti lived, but the
explosion robbed her, at age 4, of her eyesight. There were many weeks in the
hospital, her face bandaged. Tests, pain. Tension. And worst of all, Etti
simply didn’t understand what had happened. She remembers the balloon,
tantalizing, red, weaving in and out of her sight, and being so careful not to
wake anyone, and then something big, a big noise, then no noise and now
hospitals, pain, and bandages over her eyes.
On the other hand, maybe it was
only a digit lost, or an appendage. A hand, her right one, of course, or a foot
or “just” her thumb. It wasn’t there anymore after the balloon, the red balloon
that beckoned to her on the balcony on that clear winter morning, so warm in
the South of Israel you could go out in your pajamas barefoot and not be the
least bit cold. Etti could still feel her foot/hand/thumb. And sometimes it
hurt bad. But when she looked, it wasn’t there. It never was anymore.
Etti had to learn everything
all over again. And she’d just learned to draw a house, with a sun in the sky,
and grass on the ground, and a happy family standing nearby. Two parents, and
two little girls. But now no one was happy.
Her mother would sit and rock with
Etti on her lap, neither of them making a sound. With her good hand, Etti would
sometimes reach up and touch the fat tears as they fell from her mother’s eyes
and then put her fingers to her mouth wondering at the salty sadness, so
different from the rain. Her father too, never smiled anymore in the way he used
to do when he looked at her, so his eyes would crinkle up with delight. Now his
mouth was a tight, straight line. He was angry. Maybe it was her fault for
touching the balloon! But it had been so red. She was sorry!
Perhaps, on the other hand,
Etti was the luckiest little girl in the world, and all that happened was a
loud noise, people running, and a stinging feeling where she’d received a small
powder burn on her hand. Lucky means never trusting ever again that a toy could
be just a toy. Being fearful and afraid to do anything without an adult
confirming that it’s okay, nothing will happen to her, she’s safe. Even though
never again does she really feel safe.
She wakes up in the night with
heart pounding from the bad dream, the scary one of red balloons with monster
faces exploding and hurting her, more and more of them each night, and again
she feels that the bed is wet. She imagines that dangerous things are all
around her and she is scared of the people she knows, too.
One fine morning, Etti woke up
a happy girl. But the next day she was not. Everything had changed. Her face,
once cute and pudgy became pinched and sullen. She acted out and had no
friends. Etti didn’t want friends. She couldn’t trust them.
They were stupid. They didn’t
know about the bad people who think up ways to hurt little girls with toys from far
away.
She’d learned to hate the color
red.
