Life Returns--With Nervous Looks--to Bombed Mall

Soldiers searched handbags and friends sipped cappuccino along the Ben Yehuda promenade on Friday as shoppers gathered around a duo playing Dixieland jazz.

“Stop!” an elderly man cried indignantly to the banjo and clarinet players. “People were killed here.”

“I feel pain the same as you do, but I want music,” answered another man in the crowd.

“We have to show them we won’t let them win,” shouted a third.

The musicians played on. A week after three suicide bombers detonated explosives on the pedestrian mall, killing five Israelis and wounding more than 190, thousands of Jerusalemites reined in their fear and anger to return downtown.

Shopping, eating, pushing strollers and making music, they sought to force the city back to normal at the end of the seven-day shiva, or Jewish mourning period for the dead.

“Our enemies came to the marketplace, and this is my response to their effort to quiet the marketplace and joy in Jerusalem,” said David Perkins, the clarinet player. “We come, buy, enjoy. . . . We go toward the Red Sea. It is the Jewish imperative. Just because it is impossible doesn’t mean you can’t do it.”

The Friday morning kaffeeklatsches were smaller than usual.

Some people did their weekend errands with dread, as if shopping were a game of Russian roulette. Others hurriedly bought flowers and bread for the Jewish Sabbath, then made their escape.

Still others stayed away from crowds altogether. For them, the message of the suicide bombers was painfully clear: You are not safe anywhere, not in your buses, in your central market or your chic cafes. Not in the heart of Jerusalem.

And yet many Israelis reclaimed the streets.

“We have no choice. We have to continue living,” said Joseph Monsonego, 70, who sat at an outdoor cafe with a friend visiting from France.

“We know the purpose of these attacks is to interfere with regular patterns of life, and as soon as we capitulate to that, they have won,” said Philip Kaiser, 30, walking down the center of the mall.

“People are fearful, depressed, worried about the future. For a few days, you stay home and watch the news. Then you go back to normal until the next time. This is the Jewish homeland, and we’re not going anywhere. The Arabs need to understand they’ll have to live with us here,” Kaiser said.

As Kaiser spoke, squads of soldiers and police officers combed the three blocks of Ben Yehuda with their automatic weapons at hand. They searched for suspicious characters, which in most cases meant stopping Palestinian workers--or anyone dark with a beard--and demanding to see their identity cards. Undercover agents were no doubt patrolling too.

The blood and broken glass from last week’s bombing were gone. Sun umbrellas stood upright; windows had been replaced. And yet the tragedy was still too vivid for Avraham Zakain, who pointed to the spot outside his silver shop where a suicide bomber’s head had landed.

“The killing is horrible,” Zakain said. “These things don’t make us afraid, but we have to stop them. This is a street for people who want to enjoy.”

At the cafes, customers drank fancy coffees with whipped cream and wafers on top, seeming to enjoy them but staring nervously into a stream of pedestrians staring back. They eyed each other knowing that suicide bombers come not in the checkered headdresses that Yasser Arafat wears but in Israeli army uniforms, dark business suits, women’s dresses and wigs.

A few tourists mixed with the Israeli throngs: South Africans with memories of their own ethnic violence, Britons who had traveled in Northern Ireland.

“Terrorism is international,” shrugged John Kirke, a retired police officer on holiday from England.

But Israelis Ruth and Drew Tick were not so nonchalant. Immigrants from Canada and the United States, they debated at some length before going to one of their favorite cafes to celebrate her 33rd birthday.

“I kept thinking, God forbid something should happen, we’d orphan our children,” Ruth Tick said.

“I said I would not be blackmailed. We had to come out,” her husband said.