| s-301
| It all came to a panting standstill morning and evening without fail. |
| s-302
| To get away from the traffic snarl you could climb a nearby mountain and come down to a deserted beach, similar to the beach at Sdot Yam. |
| s-303
| John and his dog, Mississippi, went there every day. |
| s-304
| The German tourists had gone home, the bathing cabins were nailed shut. |
| s-305
| It was lovely, the small waves coming in steadily. |
| s-306
| In little pangs, said John. |
| s-307
| Part of the American Sixth Fleet was anchored nearby. |
| s-308
| The aircraft carrier John F Kennedy, with its helicopters, reminded John of the death of his son. |
| s-309
| On shore leave they wear civilian clothing now. |
| s-310
| This probably makes them less rowdy. |
| s-311
| One of the boys was from Oklahoma, near Tulsa. |
| s-312
| He had heard of Israel, but only just, and he was not especially interested. |
| s-313
| John was delighted by this. |
| s-314
| A clean young soul, he said. |
| s-315
| Such ignorance was refreshing. |
| s-316
| The young sailor knew nothing about holocausts or tanks in the desert or terrorist bombs. |
| s-317
| Back at sea, John had to stand double watches in the engine room because he was shorthanded. |
| s-318
| Off duty, he read in his cabin and chatted with his confidante, Mississippi. |
| s-319
| The crew said he was drinking himself silly in his quarters. |
| s-320
| When the ship passed Stromboli at night, there was a streak of crimson lava flowing from the volcano and the sailors wouldn't leave the television set to look at this natural phenomenon. |
| s-321
| But an owl from the island, disturbed by the sparks, flew out to the ship and was discovered next day on the mast. |
| s-322
| One of the young sailors carried it down. |
| s-323
| Then an engine man from the Balkans said, 'In our village we nailed owls to the church door when we caught them.' |
| s-324
| They shut the owl in the paint locker while they debated what to do with it, and in the night John set it free. |
| s-325
| The bird scratched his arm rather badly. |
| s-326
| 'Go back to Stromboli, you dumb bastard,' he said. |
| s-327
| So it flew off and the ship continued on its foul way. |
| s-328
| It's the water pumped into the tanks for ballast and then pumped out again that pollutes the seas, says John. |
| s-329
| Before I left Chicago, the art critic Harold Rosenberg said to me, 'Going to Jerusalem? |
| s-330
| And wondering whether people will talk freely? |
| s-331
| You've got to be kidding, they'll talk your head off.' |
| s-332
| He spoke as a Jew to a Jew about Jewish powers of speech. |
| s-333
| In flight, if the door of your plane comes open you are sucked into space. |
| s-334
| Here in Jerusalem, when you shut your apartment door behind you you fall into a gale of conversation exposition, argument, harangue, analysis, theory, expostulation, threat, and prophecy. |
| s-335
| From diplomats you hear cagey explanations; |
| s-336
| from responsible persons, cautious and grudging statements rephrasing and amending your own questions; |
| s-337
| from parents and children, deadly divisions; |
| s-338
| from friends who let themselves go, passionate speeches, raging denunciation of Western Europe, of Russia, of America. |
| s-339
| I listen carefully, closely, more closely than I've ever listened in my life, utterly attentive, but I often feel that I have dropped into a shoreless sea. |
| s-340
| The subject of all this talk is, ultimately, survival the survival of the decent society created in Israel within a few decades. |
| s-341
| At first this is hard to grasp because the setting is so civilized. |
| s-342
| You are in a city like many another well, not quite, for Jerusalem is the only ancient city I've ever seen whose antiquities are not on display as relics but are in daily use. |
| s-343
| Still, the city is a modern city with modern utilities. |
| s-344
| You shop in supermarkets, you say good morning to friends on the telephone, you hear symphony orchestras on the radio. |
| s-345
| But suddenly the music stops and a terrorist bomb is reported. |
| s-346
| A new explosion outside a coffee shop on the Jaffa Road: six young people killed and thirty-eight more wounded. |
| s-347
| Uneasy, you go out to your civilized dinner. |
| s-348
| Bombs are exploding everywhere. |
| s-349
| Dynamite has just been thrown in London; |
| s-350
| the difference is that when a bomb goes off in a West End restaurant the fundamental right of England to exist is not in dispute. |
| s-351
| Yet here you sit at dinner with charming people in a dining room like any other. |
| s-352
| You know that your hostess has lost a son; that her sister lost children in the 1973 war; |
| s-353
| That in this Jerusalem street, coolly sweet with night flowers and dark green under the lamps, many other families have lost children. |
| s-354
| And on the Jaffa Road, because of another bomb, six adolescents two on a break from night school stopping at a coffee shop to eat buns, have just died. |
| s-355
| But in the domestic ceremony of passed dishes and filled glasses thoughts of a destructive enemy are hard to grasp. |
| s-356
| What you do know is that there is one fact of Jewish life unchanged by the creation of a Jewish state: you can not take your right to live for granted. |
| s-357
| Others can; you can not. |
| s-358
| This is not to say that everyone else is living pleasantly and well under a decent regime. |
| s-359
| No, it means only that the Jews, because they are Jews, have never been able to take the right to live as a natural right. |
| s-360
| To be sure, many Israelis refuse to admit that this historic uneasiness has not been eliminated. |
| s-361
| They seem to think of themselves as a fixed power, immovable. |
| s-362
| Their point has been made. |