NOW IT’S ALL PEACHY

BY Chaviva Locker

Courtesy of Hamodia Magazine

     There I was, sitting in a car in Jerusalem yawning away the night’s sleep, grumbling in my head about the inhumanly early hour, my job, and why my home’s newly painted walls had come out peachy instead of peachish, while my clueless driver would not stop smiling.

     How annoying!  He was one of those only-in-Israel drivers: enthusiastic even in the morning, cracking jokes about politics, smiling at the snarled traffic, and chatting away about this and that until I wanted to tell him how rude it was to interrupt a passenger’s conversation with herself, even if it was only in her head.

     The car in front of us veered dangerously to the right.  I muttered under my breath.  Three schoolgirls crossed slowly in front of us just as the light turned green.  The youngest one’s wrapped sandwich fell, and she slowly picked it up and put it in her briefcase, totally oblivious to the angry drivers beeping around her.  My driver chuckled. “Eizeh chamudah!  Isn’t she adorable?”

     Then he pulled off his hand.

     Now, I have seen many things in my life, but I have never, never watched someone take off his hand.  And then pull it back on like it was a glove.

     I stared so hard that the driver, still yapping, noticed in the rearview mirror and laughed.

     “Zeh lo amiti.  It’s not real,” he explained, pointing casually to his hand.  “It’s a prosthetic.”

     Oh.

     He pulled it off again and I saw the stump at the end of his arm.  Then, as drivers beeped crazily behind us, he pulled it back on and continued driving.

     “It happened in the Yom Kippur war,” he explained as he navigated the traffic.  “We were a unit of twenty one year olds, sitting ducks in a tank by the border, when boom—a bomb hit us.”

     I forgot my peachy walls.

     “The next thing I knew I had flow off the tank and was rolling around in the dirt, and there was my hand hanging from my wrist.”

     I held onto the door of the taxi for dear life.  The driver veered away from a bus just in time.

     “I blacked out.  When I woke up, I was in the hospital and there was no hand at all.”

     I stared at him.  You see, he was still smiling.  What was he on a high about?  We almost crashed again.

     “I’ve been living with this perfect hand ever since.  Isn’t it amazing?  I do everything with it.”

     And then he regaled me with stories about his daughter, his son, his neighbor’s child, and how much money a cab driver could make if he worked over ten hours a day, as he had done for twenty years.

     Finally, I couldn’t resist.  My words spilled out—I simply needed to understand.

     “Then how come you’re so happy?  Weren’t you angry when you saw that you had no hand at the age of twenty-one?”

     “Angry?” He chuckled.  “No, I was never angry.  You see, I was in a military hospital.  I saw young men with no legs, no noses, with burns over most of their bodies.  And for this—“ he waved his prosthetic hand like it was nothing—“I should be angry?”

     “Imagine if it had happened to one of my friends instead!  I would have felt guilty for the rest of my life.  This way it happened to me, and look—I am alive and I have this amazing hand.  Back then they sent me to a psychologist.  She kept urging me to let out my anger, but I had none, so I never went back.  I can pick up anything with this hand.  I take passengers to the airport and lift he heaviest suitcases…”

     On and on he went about all the boxes he picked up, the furniture he built for his apartment.  And did I know that the prices of apartments in his neighborhood had tripled over the last year, so that if he sold his apartment now he’d be a rich man?

     We reached my destination.  I tipped him an extra five shekels.  He thanked me and said, “Have a great day, giveret!”  I watched him drive off and noticed that he was already smiling at his next passenger, who was waving him down at the end of the block.

     As that young woman got into the cab, struggling to fit her bags into he cramped back seat, I wondered if she too would be fortunate enough to realize what kind of man sat behind the steering wheel.  I wondered if she too would be changed by the end of her short ride, and if she too would stand on the street staring after him in awe—in awe of how a simple cab driver can rearrange the unnecessary contents of one’s mind.

    Like mine, which—now liberated from its previous fog of dissatisfaction—thought that peachy was just fine.