我们去哪里，阿诺德几乎都跟我们在一起——宠物用品超市、沃尔马超市、生日派对，圣诞假期他还跟我们一起到奶奶家去。他喜欢坐在手推车或者购物篮里，所到之处都大受欢迎。阿诺德已经在我们生活中占据了一个重要的位置，所以当我们要搬到另一个州买房子时，我们都坚持要在合同里附上街坊邻居的联合书面允诺，同意让阿诺德在该区生活，这样我们才会考虑在那些名区里买房。
离开老家的那天，我们和教友一起吃了饯行午餐。在场的每个人都走到货柜车旁边，跟里面的阿诺德和我们的其他宠物告别。可悲的是，在路上一辆半拖车呼啸而过，强烈的侧风气流使我们的拖车失控，货柜继而被抛到40英尺的桥下。那天家中成员损失惨重，我们的宠物阿诺德、甜甜和莲娜都离开我们了。阿诺德如此地信任我，我却没法保护他，我真的很难受。不过，我将永远珍藏和他一起的深情片断，感激他带来的这段美好回忆。
谢谢你们读这篇文章，让我和你们分享阿诺德的生活点滴。拥有阿诺德，我们得益匪浅，如果你也决定要养只小猪做宠物，那我祝愿你也有一样多的收获。
My Safe Child我那安全的孩子
I am thirty-three years old, and I am so happy that I am not a mother. I do not hear a biological clock ticking, only the nerve wrecking ticks of bombs yet to explode. My friends are leaping whenever their cell phones ring. “Where are you? No, you can’t go out. No, I don’t care if all the other children are going.” How naive children are when they tell lies. What mother in Israel now would believe that “all the children are going” anywhere?
And where are the children going? Where will their fears take them? In many places in the world children are afraid of the unknown, of the unreal. You know that you live in a war zone when you realize that the greatest fears of the children are of what they know only too well.
Two years ago, when my younger brother was ten, he came home from school, and as he opened the door he heard the familiar sound of explosion rising from the street he just left behind him. Sitting in front of the television five minutes later, he could see his friend wandering blindly in the street, which was covered with body parts and injured people. The friend’s father, who picked him up from school and took him for a pizza, was killed in front of his eyes. My brother refused to talk about it. “This kid wasn’t really a friend of mine,” is all he would say, “I don’t really know him that well.” That evening he told my father that he is afraid of Freddy Kruger, a monstrous murderer from a common horror film. My father didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I suspect he felt some relief. How good it is to caress your child’s hair and to tell him that Kruger doesn’t really exist.
But the man who exploded himself in the centre of a busy street did exist. And the man who will explode himself in another one of our busy streets in a few years is now my brother’s age. His mother doesn’t have to worry about the dangers which lurk on the way to school. There are no schools anymore. We have demolished them all, when we crushed the infrastructure of the Palestinian Authority. His younger brother was killed when our soldiers exploded their home. Our soldiers exploded their home because his older brother was a “wanted person”. Exploding his family’s home was our way to insure that he will soon turn from a wanted person into an unwanted body, torn to a thousand pieces, surrounded by his victims.
The young terrorist to be sleeps now in a tent provided by UNRWA. What is he afraid of? Not much to fear anymore. The worst already took place. But the bulldozers are still around, demolishing the neighbours’ homes. Every day a few new tents join the raw. His mother tells him how they were deported from their home in Latrun in 1967. His grandmother tells him it was nothing compared to what she had to go through when she was driven away from Jaffa in 1948, carrying his screaming mother, then a newborn, in her arms.
My grandmother doesn’t understand her plight. It had never occurred to her to go back to her home in Poland, which she had to flee as a refugee, haunted by the rise of Nazism in Europe. The fact that the Palestinians still talk about Jaffa, she says, just proves that they want to exterminate us. Whenever a suicide bombing strikes our cities, my grandmother calls me and tells me of her secret plan. “I am an old woman, and I have nothing to loose,” she says in a conspiratorial tone. “I will wear rags like their women, and go and explode myself in the centre of Nablus. This will teach them a lesson. I will show them what it’s like.” I am trying to tell her that they already know what it is like, that the number of their dead is three times bigger than ours, that the fear and terror we spread in their lives is much bigger than ours. But my grandmother doesn’t hear me, because she is crying. “They are not human beings,” she says. “What people can do such things, kill children like this?” De-humanised people, I want to answer, but I keep my mouth shut, and think about the child that I don’t want to have.
The child I won’t have will never feel the guilt of being an occupier, or the fear of becoming a victim. I will never tell him not to be scared, when fear is the only rational thing to feel. I will not have to teach him that the Palestinian child is a human being just like him, while everybody else will tell him that it is not so. The child I won’t have will keep sleeping, curled in a secret corner of my mind. The child I will never have is going to be the only safe child in the Middle East.
我今年三十三岁，很高兴没有成为一名母亲。我听不见生物钟的滴答作响，只听到即将爆炸的炸弹那令人神经崩溃的走秒声。我的朋友们一听到自己的手机铃响就会惊跳起来。“你在哪里？不行，你不能出去。不行，我才不管是不是别的孩子都去呢。”孩子们撒谎时是多么的天真啊。如今在以色列会有什么母亲相信“所有孩子都去”哪个地方呢？
那么，孩子们要去哪儿呢？他们的恐惧会将他们带往哪儿呢？在世界上许多地方，孩子们害怕的是那些未知的、不真实的东西。而当你意识到孩子们最恐惧的恰恰是那些他们最为熟知的事物时，你知道你是生活在战区。