Yesterday, marathon runners raced all over Tel Aviv, cafes were full, and strollers and surfers enjoyed a sunny day on the beach.
But Saturday morning, all semblance of normality in the Israeli city that never sleeps came to a crashing halt as missile sirens rang out, and the city turned into a virtual ghost town.
I was jolted awake by the rattling sound of the homefront command app on my phone. My boyfriend and I had gotten a last-minute deal on a hotel near the beach, and Friday night we went to a sold-out Electric Light Orchestra tribute show by the Blues Messengers band at the Gray club. It was a great show. Sure, we could have canceled due to what Israelis call “the situation,” but things never seemed as normal on Tel Aviv as they did on Friday afternoon, with runners drinking ice coffee after the marathon.
We walked back to the hotel at night past bustling restaurants and bars still full after midnight, and window shopped at stores selling elaborate costumes for the Purim holiday coming up this week.
But a different war with Iran than the one commemorated by the holiday upended our plans for a walk along the sea Saturday morning. Startled after not hearing a missile alert for four months, we ran to the hotel’s room safe room, which, luckily for us, was the employee kitchen just across from our room.
A mix of Israelis out for the weekend and tourists huddled together, as the hotel’s new manager struggled to find the light.
When it came on, we all looked at each other: the manager, a man in his 50s who instantly got a call from his mother, three Israeli couples of different ages, a Sri Lankan couple who recently came to Tel Aviv to work, an American-German tourist, and a young Russian-Israeli woman who had run the marathon.
Pretzel the dog
And Pretzel.
Pretzel was the Israeli-Russian woman’s small brown dog, who growled when she kept him in her lap. Encouraged by the other occupants of the shelter, she let him roam free, and he kept us all entertained as we listened to the news.
As it turned out, this initial alarm was a warning that the war had started but that there were no missiles headed our way - yet.
We headed back to our room and realized that during our hasty exit, we had left without the key. Worse, we had left it in the door inside, so the manager couldn’t open it with his master key. We were without our shoes, and had left our wallets and phones inside.
If this had been five months ago, we wouldn’t have panicked like this. We would have had our shoes right next to the bed and our key and phones in hand before we left the room. We had made a rookie mistake.
We implored the manager to call a locksmith, knowing that if missiles fell before we got the door open, we could end up spending days barefoot.
To our surprise and relief, a young locksmith pulled up on his motorcycle in half an hour. He opened our door in two seconds and charged us what seemed like a very reasonable price for opening our door on a Saturday morning, during a war to boot. He raced off, saying he had a dozen more calls just like ours to take care of.
Putting on our shoes and grabbing our stuff, we ran to the corner for coffee and sandwiches, since our hotel doesn’t serve breakfast. The cafe was doing a brisk business.
Another alert
Before we had time to finish our first cup, there was another alert, this time, the real thing. We all sat down again. The Sri Lankans called their families to reassure them as the manager talked to his mother.
I longed to speak to my older son, a young adult on the autism spectrum, who was spending the weekend at his therapeutic village in central Israel. But he doesn’t like to talk on the phone. More important, I knew that the staff there had their hands full without having to facilitate phone calls with families and that they knew well how to handle the situation from two years of war, including the previous 12-day war with Iran in June. The shelter there is in the basement. They bring instruments and play music and read stories. My son keeps busy chatting up everyone, including volunteers from Nepal who have stayed with them despite everything. My other son was staying with family, who have a safe room in their house.
Feeling asccalm as it was possible to be in a city under missile attack, I listened as the manager played a news broadcast on his phone. Reporters who didn’t have much to report yet and pundits who didn’t have anything to say that was too different from their comments a day ago weighed in. I translated the gist of it for the couple from Sri Lanka.
Fortunately, in the two hours that followed, we had Pretzel to amuse us. He climbed into different laps - there were only two chairs and most of us were sitting on the floor. He ate snacks that his owner had thought to bring. Most entertainingly, he gnawed on a plush toy in the shape of a pepperoni pizza.
When more alerts sounded for different parts of the country - and they kept coming- he whimpered, and everyone took turns calming him down.
Yonit Levi, the Channel 12 News anchor, said she didn’t mean to be nudnik but that we should all stay put in our shelters, even if we had gotten contradictory reports from the app.
When the all-clear finally came, Pretzel trotted out happily to go for a walk. I sat at a table in the sun on the hotel patio, feeling gratitude for being outdoors - and for the locksmith who reunited me with my shoes.