Will independence bring Godzilla back into my dreams?

In Paris, during a recent visit, I find myself thinking about my father’s hands. Walking along the streets and watching thousands of tourists using their digital cameras, I remember the way my father held his old Kodak when he took photographs. He would hold the camera near his stomach and bow his head in order to look at the little prism on the left side of the camera’s accordion-like body. Many years later, after he died, I learned that he had held it near one of the important chakras, the vital points in human body where energy flows in or out, or just sits there waiting to be used. Had I known it earlier, I would not have felt ashamed when he made my sister and me stand motionlessly in front of an old synagogue somewhere in Israel.

Only when I settle down in the back seat of the cab do I notice that on the dashboard there are several stickers with the letter U, the sign of Ustashe. During the Second World War, Ustashe was the ruling party in the Independent State of Croatia. They also had their own army and ran a number of concentration camps where many Serbs, gypsies and Jews were slaughtered.

I haven’t been in Jerusalem for sixteen years and the first thing my friend shows me is the wall that separates them from the Palestinians. At first I don’t see it: I am tired after a long flight and my eyes hurt under bright sunshine, but slowly I realize what it is that I have to see: a greyish, silvery separation wall that slithers like a snake across the opposite hills. “It is terrible,” I finally mutter. My friend agrees and says that the very idea that they have to surround themselves with walls makes him angry, but the wall has stopped the constant flow of suicide bombers. He also points out that we are looking at it across the Valley of Gehinnom, where in ancient times Jerusalem’s refuse was burned. It seems that the valley lent its name to hell (gehenna in Hebrew), although it definitely doesn’t look like Dante’s inferno.

My friend, who writes poems and stories, tells me in the café that he finds it more and more difficult to deal with the writer inside him. “I just hate it,” he says, “when I realize that I am looking at somebody or something and thinking how good that person or that scene would be in my next story.”