Reading Virginia Woolf in the Middle East

My usual swimming pool is indoors. It has red lines painted on the bottom and a row of triangular flags strung above the pool just before each wall, warning backstrokers that the end of the lap is nigh. My summertime pool has dispensed with such frippery. Or, more likely, never entertained it.

Instead of gazing peacefully at the sky while enjoying the weightlessness of the water and feeling my shoulders rotate smoothly, I spend much of each backstroke lap with my neck cranked awkwardly to the right, keeping anxious watch over familiar landmarks sliding past: the hot dog stand, the lifeguard’s chair, the coiled green hose. Anything to avoid the painful (trust me) bonk against the concrete wall. This means that only for sixty or ninety seconds at a time do I allow myself to stare straight upward, into a blue sky that somehow creates the sensation of falling upward.

Whether swimming face-up beneath the cerulean sky or face-down studying the red lane markings below, it is during pool time that my mind wanders.

Often, I notice the small white clouds that drift overhead. Birds of prey circle seemingly motionlessly, tilting this way and that as they ride the hot afternoon updrafts, scanning the ground for snakes, lizards and other unfortunate creatures. The most common one is called the Short-toed Snake Eagle, which does remarkably little justice to so impressive a bird. Its Latin name, Circaetus gallicus, suits it much better. I have decided to think of them, collectively, as Douglass. No reason.

I think about what a brilliant novel Mrs. Dalloway is, especially the second time through. I wonder whether I should identify with Clarissa Dalloway as much as I do now. What does that say about me? About growing older? And why had I chosen to read Orlando, back-to-back with Mrs. Dalloway and, being forced at gunpoint (which I certainly wasn’t) to choose which is the better novel, can only sputter that, by the name of all that is Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Orlando is superior!

At any rate, I had become engrossed in themes of aging, mortality, the surreal nature of time passing, sky-writing planes over London in 1923, stream of consciousness and halfway through the next lap, another question presented itself:

How does the Short-toed Snake Eagle find an updraft, stay in it, and remain suspended there for so long? What would happen if an incoming ballistic missile alert sounded while I was underwater and couldn’t hear my phone? Would everyone around the pool suddenly freeze? Would they start running? Would the lifeguard blow his whistle?

That weekend found Gidon and me in Mi’ilya, an Arab Christian village in Israel’s Upper Galilee, about five miles from the Lebanese border. We stayed at the lovely Château du Roi, said to have been built during the reign of King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem, who, despite ruling while afflicted with leprosy, evidently had an excellent eye for scenery but, as a way of evening things out, lacked the foresight to install a swimming pool.

Though the day’s heat had begun to ease, it occurred to me that the Crusaders must have been extraordinarily sweaty. I settled outside at dusk with my Kindle and A Room with a View. Somewhere beyond the bougainvillea, a neighbor turned on a radio, and pleasant wisps of music drifted through the warm evening air. It was exactly the sort of music one doesn’t mind not recognizing.

Then came the unmistakable WHUMP of a tremendous explosion.

A split second of silence.

Then the window-rattling shock wave.

The radio kept playing.

It wasn’t a rocket or a missile. No alarms had sounded, and rockets have their own unmistakable signature: a sharp crack before the impact, then several violent explosions in succession.

Nor was it artillery, whose rhythm I have unfortunately come to know almost as well: WHUMP. WHUMP. WHUMP. A pause. Then the echo. Then the recoil rolling through your chest, depending on how close you happen to be. I’ve been close enough.

The music continued without interruption.

No one appeared at a window or stepped onto a balcony.

“Did you hear that?” I asked Gidon.

“Of course.”

“What was it?”

The ceasefire with Iran had already unraveled. Hezbollah remained entrenched just over the border. Had we made a mistake coming this far north?

I refreshed the news on my phone twelve or maybe fifty times.

Nothing.

A few minutes later, another explosion came.

Then another.

By morning I had concluded that this was simply part of the soundtrack of villages this close to the border: the Israeli army methodically demolishing Hezbollah tunnels and military infrastructure.

When I asked our hostess, Salma, she nodded politely in the affirmative when I think she really wanted to say “Great deduction, Sherlock.”

Gidon and I decided to drive another half hour north to Bar’Am, which is 300 meters (or 6 laps) from the blue line. The blue line was established in 2000 as a kind of “demilitarized” safety/buffer zone between two countries. It is not, as you may already suspect, blue or even visible to the naked eye. But sure enough, it’s jaggedy outline shows up on Google Maps.

As Gidon said the night before, during the intermittent explosions - if something happens to us while we are here, then it was simply meant to happen. I couldn’t argue with this logic. It was comforting, somehow.

So to hell with it, there we were, marveling at the ancient ruins of a synagogue when, with God as my witness, the sound of singing drifted to us from among the surrounding pine and oak trees. Curious to find the source of the singing, I came upon a small, stone Maronite church. There was a service going on inside in what I later learned was Aramaic. A few latecomers glanced at me with frank curiosity. Chastened, I turned and made my way back to Gidon.

As we made our way back home, there were many birds of prey riding the hot updrafts and soaring over the forests of Northern Israel, looking down on history and not knowing or caring what comes next in this or that ceasefire, blocked strait or Trump mood.

That night, I went to the pool at an unusual time - after dark. Goodbye sunscreen, goodbye UV-protective swim shirt, hello glorious, warm water, lit up from within, shimmering like the dang Trevi Fountain.

At the end of a lap, I rested my elbows on the edge of the pool and took in the scene around me: a few laughing kids and their good-natured parents letting them enjoy a hot summer night. A few winking stars and a velvety sky overhead, absent of birds of prey and sky-writing planes. And in the medium distance, the call of the muezzin. I struggled to make sense of these strange, stacked realities of life. Perhaps I’m not supposed to. Perhaps none of us are.