The Enemy Within

Our apartment in Jerusalem, which overlooked the garden and eucalyptus trees of a romantic Ottoman building, had high ceilings and lots of light, and we fell in love with it almost as soon as we stepped inside. On our first inspection, while we were standing in the living room, we heard a loud explosion. A booby-trapped refrigerator had been unloaded at Zion Square, a few blocks away, killing 15 people and wounding 77. It was the first of many such explosions that we would hear from inside that apartment.

To maximize casualties, suicide bombers would blow themselves up in the central market or in city-center cafes and restaurants or in busses when the vehicle had reached the center of town. Since we lived downtown, we heard a lot of explosions, followed by the sirens of police cars, ambulances, and fire engines. Often the explosions occurred only an hour or two after my own passage through the fatal site.

At first I tried to act normally, reminding myself that I was more likely to be killed in a traffic accident than in a terrorist attack, but after a while I lost my cool. I abandoned busses in favor of taxis and avoided the most crowded downtown streets, walking on parallel streets less likely to serve as targets. My wife and I bought cell phones so that we could notify each other that we were safe when one of us was outside during a bombing. And when one of us left the apartment, the other would watch him or her depart. Would this be the last time we saw the other alive?

New York, of course, is not immune from terrorist attacks as we learned on that crystalline autumn morning in 2001. Nonetheless, now that we live in New York, we figure that the chances are exceedingly small that either of us will die as a victim of terrorism. Still, each of us watches from our apartment's open door as the other stands at the elevator, waiting to descend to the lobby and the outside world. Will this be the last time we see the other in good health, before he or she is killed or incapacitated, not by a bomb but by a heart attack, stroke, or burst aneurysm?

We know we are being ridiculous. We know that the chances of a medical catastrophe occurring outside the apartment on the very day that we watch the other waiting for the elevator are pretty slim. Even so, we look at each other and see mortality. So ridiculous or not, we worry, because the enemy is now within.