Four Apartments (January 09/09)

"They're trying to kill me," Yossarian told him calmly.
"No one's trying to kill you," Clevinger cried.
"Then why are they shooting at me?" Yossarian asked.
"They're shooting at everyone," Clevinger answered. "They're trying to kill everyone."
"What difference does that make?"
Joseph Heller - Catch 22

There are four apartments in the house. My landlord lives in the apartment underneath mine. He and his wife are in their late fifties. She told me yesterday: "When I was a girl, I was much afraid of the siren and the bombs, but I hoped that when I grow up there would be peace."

I read the BBC headline: "Bombs hit Gaza as UN urges truce." I read it after I was woken up by the siren and had to run downstairs. Probably it would have been too late, if a rocket indeed hit our house, but it seems to have been a false alarm.

A headline "Rockets hit Beer Sheva as UN urges truce" would be true as well. This is confirmed by a siren a half an hour later. This time I meet my neighbor, and we count "boom-boom-boom-boom" - four times. Four rockets are confirmed by the news: often my count and the count in the news are not the same. If the two attacks come close in time, Haaretz reports only one of them. My neighbor has several children, but it seems that she has sent them away to a safer place - I haven't seen them for a few days. She is usually with her husband, but for some reason he did not come out this time.

The house doesn't have a proper bomb shelter or at least the one within easy reach for me, therefore my neighbors on the floor and I simply walk into the staircase and go one floor down, which is the ground floor of the two-story house. This way we are supposed to be better shielded from shrapnel.

My landlord and the other family living in the ground floor probably have hiding places under their apartments. However, when I go down two hours later, after hearing another siren, I meet my landlord's neighbor looking for her husband, who went out for a "walk". You can't really call this a "walk" - he is old, and barely walks, being supported by a nurse or a relative of his. He just wondered a few meters from the house and now "runs" back. There is "boom-boom-boom" - I don't count, but Haaretz says that there were three.

There is another siren twenty minutes later, and I think that I heard more "boom"s, but this time Haaretz says nothing.

A hot morning indeed! But the UN Security Council has voted for a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, and Hamas desperately needs to kill somebody before any actual ceasefire comes in effect.