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Tel Aviv Nursery Children Cope With Rockets

A teacher’s story

by
Matthew Schultz
July 30, 2014
(Shutterstock)
(Shutterstock)

“Giraffe!” I shout. “Giraffe! Giraffe! Giraffe!”

It’s a code word the kids and I came up with at our morning meeting. They know now that when the teacher starts calling out “Giraffe” they must run, as quickly and calmly as possible, back to our ground level school’s kitchen, which is underground and thus the safest place for us when the sirens go off.

At three years old, it’s hard for them to balance the jumble of vocabulary and narratives that have accompanied the recent arrival of regular rocket fire over Tel Aviv. One girl says that the siren (she calls it the “woo woo woo”) is the noise made when an airplane leaves its doors open. This could be something her mother told her, or just something she decided for herself.

Another child, the son of foreign correspondents, seems to have been given more information. In the morning he sat down at the crayon table and asked me to write on his drawing an accompanying story, dictating: “And mommy said there’s missiles in Gaza, and said there used to be missiles in Gaza but now they’re melted. Daddy said they land and make fires and when the missiles melted the sirens went away. The siren is warning the bad people, trying to scare them. Missiles are things that snip and when they snip on the ground they hurt people.”

In the kitchen we play Simon Says. We read a story. We speak loudly to cover the noise of the rockets being intercepted but still it’s loud and shakes the building. The children startle as they try to focus on the story, “Go, Dog. Go!” Then we head back out to play.

I sit on the low stone wall and watch them. For many at our English nursery school, this will all just be a story their parents tell them. They will move out of Israel still in their early childhoods, back to New York or London, and someday their mothers will ask them if they remember the sirens, the woo woo woo, the running for cover, the loud booms. Others will stay and the experience will be reinforced every few years as Gaza Operation piles on top of Gaza Operation over the years.

Suddenly one of them, a little boy named Joshua, approaches me. He’s holding something in his hand. “Did it fall?” He asks. I take the piece from him curiously. It’s a little piece of scorched metal with twisted screws stuck in it. It’s warped from combustion. Shrapnel. I sniff it. It has the smell of explosion and fire. I can’t hide my astonishment, calling over the other teachers to gasp and look.

Soon the children return to playing. I know that you’re not supposed to touch the shrapnel but I can’t let it out of my hands, rubbing it with my thumb and placing it flat in my palm to feel its weight. For me it has the quality of a moon rock, the same otherness and also the mysterious silence of something inert that has traveled from far away, from an unimaginable place.

The children run up to me saying “Look what I found!” They hold beads or pieces of trash or sticks they picked up from the ground. They want to have, like Joshua, found something that truly impresses the teacher. “Thank you,” I say, stuffing beads in my pocket.

When we head back inside, my boss tells me that she’s called the police to collect the shrapnel. I grow irrationally angry, cursing her in my mind, for taking away my new treasure. It’s morbid, perhaps, but recalls for me the stones I collected as a child, each one a piece in the puzzle of a world I desperately wanted to understand. In my childhood rock collection there were no bad stones. Some were crystals, but some were hunks of asphalt or even the occasional piece of a brick or cinderblock.

During story time, after my shrapnel had been confiscated from me, I saw that Joshua wore a distracted, far away expression. I pulled him aside and asked him if he was OK. “I think the piece made the noise,” he said. “When it fell it made the loud noise.”

“Is that what Mom says?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I just think so.”

Matthew Schultz is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College in New York, where he studied creative writing and literature. He is currently living and writing in Tel Aviv. His work has appeared in Ecotone Journal and Zeek Magazine.