Amid Death, City Gets Back to Life

Just hours after an Israeli injured in Jerusalem’s latest suicide bombings staggered into an all-night minimarket and collapsed on the floor, cashier David Abargail was back at work Sunday morning.

“The pool of blood was so deep, I had to push it out the front door with a squeegee,” Abargail said as he rang up a customer’s purchases inches from the spot where he had tied a tourniquet around the victim’s shattered leg.

“The man kept asking me: ‘Is the leg still there? Is the leg still there?’ People were hysterical, running, screaming,” said Abargail, 41. “I saw things I will never forget last night.”

And yet he reopened for business just three hours after two Palestinians blew themselves up on Ben Yehuda Street and a car bomb exploded nearby. The three blasts killed the bombers and 10 males between the ages of 14 and 20, all from Jerusalem. An additional 180 people were wounded, many of them youths.

On a two-block stretch of the cobblestoned heart of Jerusalem’s downtown, others followed Abargail’s example. Call it resilience, denial or defiance, but even before the first victims of Saturday’s carnage were buried, Jerusalem residents threw themselves into the task of getting on with life.

Shopkeepers, waitresses, barbers and others pushed past police barricades and crowds of onlookers. They swept up shattered glass, scrubbed blood off their doorsteps and opened their damaged stores for business.

For a few hours Sunday--before another Palestinian blew himself up and killed at least 15 other people on a bus in the northern port of Haifa--Ben Yehuda Street was the latest ground zero for Israelis in more than 14 months of fighting with the Palestinians. Windows were shattered as high as five stories up. Cleanup crews collected hundreds of nails, screws and bolts that had been packed into the bombs to maximize their destructive force.

The horror of the night before was evident, from the smell of sulfur still hanging in the air to clusters of flickering memorial candles lighted by Israelis who gathered around them to read prayer books and weep.

But by 8:30 a.m., customers were patronizing the businesses that were hit, and shopkeepers were putting aside their brooms and mops and stripping off their rubber gloves to serve them.

“I just sold something to my first customer,” Yoshko Nahmias, owner of Chic Parisien, a women’s clothing boutique, reported with quiet pride. His plate-glass windows were destroyed by one of the blasts, and clerks were picking shards off the mannequins’ gold lame evening wear as he spoke.

“I’ve owned this shop for 27 years, and it has been 27 years of attack after attack,” Nahmias said. “We’re already experienced in this.” He said he planned to stay open all day. “The damage inside is minimal.”

Up the street, Natan Katz was open for business even though the windows of his shop, Photo Eden, had been shattered. As Katz showed a pair of reporters a bolt he found, one that he assumes was packed in a bomb, lawyer Amir Rachmani, 46, stopped in to pick up a set of pictures.

“We must just continue with life,” Rachmani said. “What else can we do? They [the terrorists] want us to stop our lives. If we stop, they achieve their goal.” Rachmani said he heard the sirens late Saturday--70 ambulances were used to ferry the dead and wounded from the scene--and knew with the instincts of a lifelong Jerusalem resident that there had been an attack.

His first concern was the safety of his 15-year-old son, Guy, who was out with friends, Rachmani said. After he reached his son on his cell phone, Rachmani said, it never occurred to him to put off his trip to the photo store.

“I’m sure that in New York, life is going on” despite the devastation wrought by the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center, Rachmani said.

Farther up the street, florist David Zakheim put bouquets of freshly delivered pink and blue chrysanthemums on display outside his shop. He couldn’t explain why he came to work Sunday, after coming all too close to Saturday’s attacks, he said.

“I was spared twice last night,” the 49-year-old said. He had just parked his car on a downtown side street when he heard the explosions on Ben Yehuda, Zakheim said. Frightened, he stood on the street for 10 minutes, asking passersby what happened. “When I understood that one of the bombers blew up right by my shop, I went down there to see the damage,” Zakheim said. Moments after he left Rabbi Kook Street, the car bomb exploded in the vehicle Zakheim had been standing beside, injuring dozens of people.

“There have been five bombs on this street in the 27 years I have owned a shop here,” Zakheim said. “There have been bombs in refrigerators, in cars, on people.”

He came to work Sunday morning, Zakheim said, “because I didn’t know what else to do. I sent my children to school this morning. So, can I stay home? Are my children less precious than me?”

Hanan Hershcovitz, 33, also found it hard to explain why he opened his money-changing store for business Sunday. Only one window of the shop was cracked by the blasts, but Hershcovitz was up most of Saturday night and was still shaken by the attacks.

“I was at a bar on Jaffa Road with friends when I heard the explosion,” Hershcovitz said. “I ran to Zion Square and found myself staring at a piece of somebody’s body that was lying there. I stood over it, just to make sure nobody stepped on it until a rescue worker picked it up.”

On Sunday morning, Hershcovitz said, customers began stopping in to change money as soon as he opened, even as the burglar alarm of a nearby shop, set off by the blasts, wailed on unnervingly.

“What should we do, sit at home and cry? You live with terror here,” Hershcovitz said. “It is your breakfast, your dinner, your life. People die every day. There is no place in the world where there is this amount of terror. Sometimes, you feel like you are getting used to it.”