I guess its like any war story when the vets come home and can't quite describe the horrors and the scenes that never leave, the sights that return right before you wake up, the ghosts you didnt know until that day, the ghosts that follow you everywhere.
Coming on ten years in a few days. There are a few forks in the road of my life where I can say at this point, there is a clear demarcation line of before and after. 9/11 is one of those lines.
I left for work expecially early because my body was just beginning to show signs of internal breaking down, doing the subway crawl everyday, I had to have a seat and for many years you just hung on to the nearest person or steel pole if you could reach one, and went with the flow. The first year I left Crown Heights and felt the pressure of men pushing against me for 45minutes as the train jolted back and forth had me crying.
The office was dark at 7::45am, I never turned on the overhead lights because no one came in until 9 or 9:30. But that morning was especially blue and clear, cloudless...not quite fall and no longer hot. Around 8:45 my ext rang and although it was my time to get work done before the crowds came in, the questions started and the calls began, I picked it up thinking it might be a boss calling. It was my mother frantically trying to explain what she was seeing on TV an asked if I could see a news report. I told her I'd check and call her back, she was crying and saying the buildings were burning...what buildings?
CNN was trying to decide if we had just been attacked, people were coming in and yelling the that one of the World Trade Center towers had a plane crash right into it, and what a horrible accident. Some of us ran up to the roof to watch, because we could see the towers only a few blocks south, smoke billowing from the mid section, then papers fluttering all around like lost birds and the young Bosnian woman next to me ,grabbed me crying saying that people were falling out of the windows...I looked and bodies were rolling off the sills and disappearing. I never figured that out. Does a body melt or disintegrate at a certain height before it hits the ground? We could see people who looked propelled, not jumpers, as if something behind them, exploded to thrust them out into free fall.
What struck me deepest then was how we watched all of this happening, a second plane came silently and went right into the 2nd tower and then we knew, this was no accident. Horror for those who at first had died from a terrible mistake became horror for everyone still alive watching and not knowing where the next strike was going to be...or why? As the 2nd tower began to smoke and slowly burn, the first tower began to implode, withdraw, slide and melt down, it crumbled in total silence before our eyes and all we could do was stand there clutching at one another. Bosnian girl said to me she had already lived through this, she couldnt take anymore war.I just held her close, my arm around her shoulder as she sobbed. She seemed to understand better than the group of us, what might be going on, what the start was of what we were seeing.
When the 2nd tower fell it was after 9:30 probably closer to 9:45am.
We had to go back inside, and did but unsure of what our next function was to be. What work would be done on such a day? What message would we hear from the President? Would we hear anything close to the truth? Did even they WH know what had happened?
In the next few days there seemed to be a flurry, chaotic dance of side taking once it became clear this was done by al queada, although at the time the name meant little or nothing to anyone, except the government officials who chose to ignore earlier warnings and thought the '93 attempt was a blip on the radar and nothing to be concerned about. Or that Meir Kahane was murdered and that had no connection to anything...nothing in the minds of America is connected to anything else, every freakin event is a discreet moment in time occuring with cause, and once the cause is known and rid of, the issue is resolved.
As we learned ten years out, the issue is not resolved...it festers.
It festered then as well.
I worked in a university, not NYU but in that area. And so the admins decided they would apply for the funding being offered to area businesses 'affected' by the trauma and destruction. They announced an application was being made, but what we received and what was done with the funds, who knows. We had a big staff meeting of many departments and were asked if anyone wanted to get anything off their chest. That was our big trauma counseling session...a room of silent disbelieving people who supposedly were so intelligent they would never cast aspertions on a culture or group of people. So while the 3 conference tables were encircled by numb and dumb I told everyone to get ready, this was only the beginning and get a gas mask if nothing else.
I traveled to Cairo before the end of the year, spent 5 weeks working and met someone. I need to rephrase that sentence, I met someone, therefore I traveled to Egypt and found myself very busy...because Egyptians had the impression that the appearance of an american in this period was dangerous and possible helpful for each of their personal crisis. Every Egyptian had a story of a son, father or husband in jail for unknown reasons, missing or the reasons were teaching a brand of Islam not sanctioned by the Mubarak government. Ignoring common sense, intelligence and female instinct I returned the following fall, weeks before Iraq was invaded by the US looking for WMDs.
I've never traveled where tourists go in either Israel or Cairo. Somehow I always landed in a world of alley ways, whispered conversations, lies and cash under the table. Believing in the better natures of the poor, the misunderstood (muslims) and the illiterate, my only calling was to make the life of a stranger easier-that is the mind of the simpleton writing here that somehow made it back alive after writing to Suzanne Mubarak pleading for the life of a religious man whose wife was left to sell fruit in a stall in shubra al kama with 6 toddlers milling around her feet. Or the bank trips to send money to Israel because oldest daughter was there and needed money. America at war with Iraq and money being sent to Israel....the gentleman I was with tended to wait outside or around corners or barely containing himself, would sit on his hands and left the talking to me. I should have known that was a bad sign, a man who cannot be one, is always a bad sign.
But, thought I, look at the country and its people, its men struggle to be men by creating the chaos of many wives who joust bitterly for position, a better apartment, whose son will inherit and who will be pushed away, a world of destroyed blood lines further confused by women nursing the infants of mother's who were unable to feed their own children. In Islam if you nurse by a woman 3x, she is the same to you as your mother.
With the airports closed to incoming and outgoing flights, there was little to do except receive belated messages from looney colleagues offering to call the State Department to 'rescue' me from the madness of war. But the war was in Iraq and Egypt watched it all on state television. I made meatballs and spaghetti for my future father in law who also wanted pancakes he had eaten decades ago when he came to the states.
When all the people around me were speaking against Islam, running from muslims, I ran toward them like a mother hen protecting her clutch. I dont know if my early development that was a crash course in emotional trauma raising two alcoholics ruined my sense of equinimity, but when everyone was running left, I ran right and kept running until all the papers were in place and we were married in the Ministry of Justice building.
Says of obtianing stamps on documents. A game somewhat like Russians waiting for half a day on a line for leaves of cabbage or a roll of toilet papers...you miss the line or lose your place, come back another day. If the office worker needed lunch or had to go home to make her family dinner, she might be shelling peas while the files of supplicants sat waiting for her to stamp them and pass them to the next official to play with.
I hope with the Arab Spring that the reality of what work IS, is gently broken to the millions of Egyptians who, when I was there, worked an average of 2 -3 hours a day and thought those were long hours. Maybe the intense heat throughout the day is why work was divided up in morning and late afternoon sessions with mid day hours to sleep or shop...or drink tea...or smoke a bong.
Although I warned him life here is very different, it was ridiculous on my part thinking that in any way he could imagine a world he could not control or conquer, because that was how he thought an lived. That was what drew me to him, that and his sense of fascination with a Jew so interested in Islam. What drew me as well to him was his poverty. He had fathered child with the maid from his father's house. The late nobel prize writer Naguib Mahfouz could have written the story and did, many times in different ways. The tragedy of Egyptian life where men cannot find legal work to build a future, who remain engaged for years, sometimes decades saving for an apartment, and girls who grow into women and must retain themselves intact for their husbands to be or be discarded as trash, whores.
So my experience of 9/11 was to do what I always do, run to rescue to misunderstood and rejected waifs of the world. A young man whose mother had died only 18 months earlier, with no future position available after studying English literature for 4 years and thinking the world was his oyster...not there and not here either. He didnt have the temperment to teach, he had rage-not anger-rage issues and lack of control. But somehow he kept most all of himself in check for the months I was in Cairo until flights resumed and I had run out of extensions on my ticket.
I rescued him and as soon as he got here and saw how little I had, asked me to buy a house. He seemed to be speaking with people here that he knew but told me he knew no one. By Chrsitmas he had purchased a ticket to visit 'friends' in Michigan and returned only to take me to a mortgage company run by Indians in Queens who said both of us together did not make enough to warrant a mortgage. I began to lose any worth fairly quickly, as i had no car and couldnt supply a house. He wanted to bring his brother and son over, and he thought his father and his father's family. I was supposed to sponsor everyone. He couldnt do it, he didnt even have his green card yet.
For most of my life the holes I've dug myself into, I've dug myself out of, after praying and weeping on G-ds shoulder for help. But the immensity of being responsible for someone elses life as well as my own was overwhelming and not an iota of financial or emotional support was available from him. I was told many times "It is your job to support me until I become a citizen." His out of town trips continued. I saw a lawyer, then withdrew the separation papers. I was scared, not in love. I realized when he traveled on his first holiday trip and his phone was off and he was unreachable for days, that love had nothing to do with the arramgement.
Was it politics? No, I married a narcissist, a hungry young man who thought of himself as the King of Egypt and that sooner or later no matter where he went, that fact would become clear to one and all. Politics was the furthest thing from his mind. He wasnt even up to snuff on what was going on in his country while he lived there...and found Seinfeld and WWE Smack Down the most amazing entertainment.
When he began using some of the techniques of the WWE on me I realized it was time to say goodbye, green card or not. He cried, pleaded, threatened, but between the dawning sanity and one daughter yelling at me to wake up, I woke up. By the third time separation papers were drawn up and he was told to sign them, he did so with the understanding that his card, both green and Mastercard would not be in jeopardy.
I'm writing this as an exercise to understand myself because its a painful thing to face or speak to anyone about. Not only consorting with the enemy, but questioning my own religion, then rejecting my own religion afer feeling abandoned by the religion I turned to after my father's death. But among Jews a convert is always just a tad off...always a bridesmaid, never the bride. Its the same with Islam, you remain 'the Jew' even when its said with affection or pride, you are a Jew, an outsider.
I was a double outsider who came from a home of 2 drunks. Only these past two weeks as the dynamics between myself and my children are shifting, have I understood myself a litle better. I've gone from pillar to post looking all my life for a parent to parent me, a husband to care for me and all the while, my children are no different than all the waifs of the world...I can care for them and all the others too, someone has to...right?
My daughter, the one who yelled me out of the abusive Egyptian marriage, asked me, 'is that how you see yourself? as not good enough between Jews?' That is how I see myself because I've been treated that way. Even though it is not acceptable to remove yourself from a Jewish community, to isolate, I was
never genuinely part of The Jewish Community.
In my intensse, blissfull isolation I wake to wash neggel vasser, care for the cats, wash again and daven shachris and tehillim. I make a simple shabbos and give what I can to chabad. I'm learning by force that you must rely on yourself and G-d, all else is empty promises to call and the calls never come or the messages go unanswered.
I survived my parents home and returned to college after 9 years of chassidic marriage and 5 children. Penniless except for a check that arrived unexpectedly from the Rebbe, I left one life to begin a new one without knowing what or where. It is something like an internal line gets crossed, before and after and a traumatic event precipitates my departure. An astrologer onnce told me I am the lightening rod in any group of people-while people may look to me for answers, the truth is usually divisive and I am the one left picking up the pieces.Faith said these cycles come in 12 year periods....my 12 year sentence seems in perpetuity.
G-d bless and have mercy on those who died on 9/11. those who were truly innocent, those who believed the lies they were taught and blew themselves up thinking a better life awaited them in death.
I want to segue here into something that's connected but its 3am and I cant see straight...
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