Minus 2: A Wartime Vigil

I whisper in my father’s ear, even though he is asleep, even though he is very deaf. I don’t really want him to hear. “You’re not going to die in the parking lot, right?” He opens one eye and looks at me. His eyes are still startlingly blue. 

There is war. There are sirens and missiles. We are in the parking lot of Shaare Zedek Hospital in Jerusalem. Yesterday we spent the day in the ER on the ground floor and when the missiles fell I just sat there, listening to the siren, listening to the silence and the eventual thud, somewhere far off.  

But now we are on level minus two, in the parking lot.

My father’s bed was wheeled here in the middle of the night through back corridors, up and down elevators, through doors that click and close after you walk through them. He is parked in space number 89.  Above us are bare red pipes and metal rods. The floor is rough, painted with traffic stripes and arrows pointing up, and down. The lights are fluorescent strips, on all day and all night. 

Some of the time, my father doesn’t know where he is. He thinks the people clustered around the bed of a man who is about to be disconnected from life support are here for a Purim party. He thinks we’re in a traffic jam. We are, of sorts. He says it’s cozy in here and asks for another blanket. Later he tells me we just landed in America. 

My parents moved to Israel in the 70s. My cousin in Australia sent me a photo this morning of them waiting at an airport with a brown zip-up suitcase and a carpet cleaner in a large carton. They look very glamorous, she wrote me. I showed the photo to my father and he said it’s two people standing in front of a ship.  

My father was an expert upholsterer of furniture, very good with his hands, and he and my mother sewed beautiful toys for our children. I look at his hands now, pale and resting on the blue hospital blanket. Tapering fingers that knew how to thread needles with alacrity and to assess the weave of a fabric. Now I hold a tangerine segment for him to take because I don’t want to feed him like a baby and his fingers grasp the air.  

The staff, Arab and Jewish, are patient, polite and hassled. The patients in this geriatric ward are mostly asleep or unconscious. Their loved ones, scrunched in between beds and trash cans and hastily set up plastic curtains are similarly Arab and Jewish, and there are a number of foreign caregivers who talk frequently on the phone to their own loved ones far away—surely worried about the situation here.  

An architect friend of mine tells me that in Israel, hospital parking lots are designed to double up as civilian bomb shelters. He says this is the first thing in the design of a hospital: a bunker big enough to hold entire departments. I’m intrigued and look it up online. He’s right. The parking lot is built with reinforced concrete, advanced ventilation, electricity and communication systems. The Wi-Fi, in fact, is far superior to what we have at home.   

I think about the people in this region who have no minus two. No reinforced concrete, no advanced ventilation, no superior Wi-Fi. In Israel, in Gaza, in Lebanon, Iran, and in the West Bank, women like me are holding their sick and their old in places not designed for anything except ordinary life. A stairwell. A basement that is just a basement. A tent hardly sturdy enough to withstand winter.    

Someone has taped a printed sign to a concrete pillar that says GERIATRIC DEPT. with an arrow pointing right. Another arrow points to the exit. The painted arrows on the floor point up and down, up and down, as if they can’t decide.

When I walked into this makeshift department for the first time, I thought I’d stumbled into a sci-fi movie: a parking lot, deserted on one side except for a scattering of broken wheelchairs and carts, full of beds on the other, an armed guard at the door who told me these were not visiting hours (I told him I was too tired to listen to him and pushed past), bright wires in green and yellow spiraling around, hanging everywhere, a man who asked me if I was my father’s wife (do I look that bad today? I retorted) muffled booms from the floor above, intermittent drilling because they have not finished setting up this underground facility. 

At some point the drilling stops and the parking lot settles into its nighttime self. It’s easy to lose track of time down here.  

I eat my pita while watching a nurse gathering up discarded tubes and carefully wiping a suction machine. I have a good view of her in the cubicle opposite. I eat the vegetables first, picking them out piece by piece—cucumber, soggy lettuce. Then I pull out a thin slice of cheese and swallow almost without chewing. A janitor in Adidas sneakers sweeps the floor of stained gauze, crumpled tissues, tip caps from used syringes. I tuck what is left of the pita back into the cellophane and throw it into the garbage. The nurse throws the tubes into the garbage.   

Afterward they bring a big black trash can on wheels and throw whatever was left into it.  

My father’s eyes are closed. His hands are tucked snugly under the blanket. I don’t whisper anything this time. I just sit with him in space number 89, two floors below the war, in a place designed to keep people alive until the all-clear sounds.

Down here, we wait. 

—Joanna Chen is a writer and literary translator of contemporary poetry and prose from Hebrew to English.