Bus on Jaffa Road Read online

  Riley had entered the US State Department’s diplomatic corps a decade earlier and had already been posted in tense spots, including Haiti and Egypt. She took over the consular chief’s job in Jerusalem in 1993, amid the hopeful feeling that the Oslo Peace Accords might finally provide the blueprint for resolving the grinding conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. Riley quickly realized that finding some measure of peace was not easy. While she felt safe on most days, she had also learned to listen for the sounds of trouble. “If you hear something and then a lot of sirens,” she said, “you assume something bad happened.”

  On that morning, just before 7 a.m., in her home on Mount Scopus, Riley heard a dull thud on the other side of Jerusalem—the bomb on the Number 18 bus on Jaffa Road. Riley had heard that sound before and knew what it meant. She made a mental note to have her staff call Israeli police by mid-morning to check whether any Americans were among the casualties.

  It was now almost 5 p.m. Riley faced one the most painful tasks of any American diplomat. “You have to go into your office and shut the door and sit for a few minutes and get ready to pass some of the worst news that anybody is going to get in their life.” On that day, Riley harbored an additional concern. “You also want to be sure you do it before it gets on the news.”

  In Teaneck, Arline had not been listening to the radio or watching TV. She had no idea that a bomb had torn apart a bus in Jerusalem. But as Riley asked about Sara, Arline felt her mind race. Was Sara in trouble? Was there some difficulty with her passport perhaps? Did she get arrested with that new environmental group she joined, perhaps chaining herself to a tractor in some sort of protest?

  “Have you heard the news reports today?” Riley asked.

  Arline’s mind accelerated. Oh, my God. What are you talking about?

  “I just woke up,” Arline said. “I haven’t heard any news.”

  “There’s been a terrorist attack in Jerusalem,” Riley said.

  Arline fell silent. Oh, my God, she thought. Riley also paused, and the words, “terrorist attack,” seemed to hang within the phone line like a heavy curtain over a window. After a second or two, Arline asked: “Is Sara alright?”

  “She was on the bus that was blown up in the attack,” Riley said.

  “Is she alright?” Arline asked again.

  Riley hesitated, then answered, trying to keep her voice calm and measured.

  “I’m sorry to tell you that your daughter died in the attack.”

  The words could not be clearer. Your daughter died in the attack. For all its delicate and careful negotiations with high-level diplomats from other nations, the US State Department sometimes has to communicate in ways that are not nuanced. Kathleen Riley knew that there was no easy way to pass on this kind of message. As she spoke, Riley tried to gauge how Arline Duker was handling the sudden news that Sara had been killed. In the past, when she had to make similar calls to other American families, Riley had been yelled at by a suddenly grief-stricken relative or told she was surely mistaken and lying. As she listened on the phone on that Sunday morning, Riley felt Arline Duker was doing her best to remain calm.

  The truth is that Arline felt numb as she held the phone, handcuffed momentarily by the desire to scream, the need for more information and simple disbelief. Sara? Dead? In a terrorist attack?

  “I just couldn’t take it in,” Arline remembered.

  As a counselor—as a wife who had lost a husband—Arline knew all too well that delivering news about a death, especially the death of a child, was not easy. No amount of sugar coating or emotional niceties can soften the impact of what needs to be said. And so, the words are often clumsy and constrained. When the news is delivered over the telephone, it takes on an even colder feeling.

  Perhaps just as clumsy and difficult is how to answer such news. For Arline, a single, stunned word leaped into her mind.

  “What?” she said. “What? What?”

  Then, after a pause, Arline asked: “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Riley said. “She has been identified.”

  In such moments, psychologists say the human mind sometimes wraps itself in a protective shield, as if the news is about someone else—someone not connected to you. Sometimes, a person receiving such shockingly terrible news does not immediately collapse emotionally, but briefly has the presence of mind to remain calm and ask succinct questions.

  Arline thought of Matthew and whether Sara was with him.

  “Was she with somebody?” Arline asked.

  “Yes,” Riley said.

  “Matthew Eisenfeld?” Arline asked. “Is he okay?”

  “No,” Riley answered. “He was also killed in the attack.”

  Arline found herself fighting harder to stay calm.

  “Do his parents know?” she asked in a steady voice.

  “Yes, we spoke to the parents,” Riley said.

  Arline stopped. The weight of the news—a terrorist bomb, her daughter and Matthew both dead—began to sink in.

  She needed to ask one more question.

  “Are you absolutely sure?” Arline asked. “Are you sure there is no mistake.”

  Riley said she was sure. After the Israeli police called to say that they had found Sara’s and Matthew’s US passports, Riley had dispatched one of her staffers to the morgue. A few hours later, Israeli authorities positively identified the bodies of Sara and Matthew.

  Riley sensed that Arline was trying to figure out what to do next. Riley asked Arline if she was alone or whether she had anyone at home with her.

  “No I’m here by myself,” Arline said.

  “I think you ought to have somebody with you,” Riley said.

  Riley said she would call back later in the day, but she asked Arline to write down her name and telephone number.

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Arline interrupted. “I have another daughter in Israel.”

  Tamara. Did she know? How to tell her? Arline felt her voice rising. She mentioned to Riley that Tamara was studying at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba.

  “Somebody has to tell her,” Arline said of Tamara. “I can’t call her. I can’t even figure this out myself. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Somebody has to tell my daughter. I don’t want her to find out on the news.”

  As quickly as she felt herself falling apart, Arline regained control and assembled a plan to reach out to Tamara. She thought of a cousin in Jerusalem—Rivkah Fishman and her husband, Joel—and another cousin at Ben-Gurion University. Perhaps they could help to notify Tamara.

  Arline quickly found Rivkah’s phone number and passed it to Riley.

  “I’ll take care of this,” Riley said, promising to call back later.

  Looking back on that conversation years later, Arline could appreciate how difficult it must have been for Riley to make that phone call and deliver such news. Likewise, there is no unpainful way to take in such news.

  Arline hung up the phone. Then she screamed.

  And then something else happened—something that she can’t explain even after years of contemplating it. Arline stopped screaming and began to organize herself and the day ahead. Call Ariella. Call her rabbi, her friends, the neighbors, her parents. Plan a funeral. Plan something to say when friends called.

  She reached for the phone. Before she did anything else, she needed to make one call to a number in West Hartford, Connecticut, to Vicki and Len Eisenfeld.

  Kathleen Riley said she had already called the Eisenfelds five hours earlier, because Matt’s body had been positively identified sooner than Sara’s. As he heard the phone ring by his bedside around 4:30 in the morning, Len was not alarmed or surprised. As a physician specializing in caring for critically ill babies, he had grown accustomed to phone calls at all hours of the night, delivering even the worst kind of news. “It’s no big deal for the phone to ring,” he re
called years later when he thought back to the moment.

  Riley’s voice was steady and measured. She asked if Len was the father of Matthew Eisenfeld.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Did you hear what happened?” Riley said.

  “No.”

  “There’s been a bus bombing in Jerusalem,” Riley continued, then adding that Matthew had been killed.

  Len exhaled.

  “Whew,” he said, falling silent. After pausing for a second or two, he asked Riley, “Would you please talk to my wife?”

  As a doctor, Len had plenty of experience in telling parents that a child had died. But years before, he privately promised himself that he would never place himself in the position of having to tell his wife such news about Matthew or their daughter Amy. “I had already rehearsed in my mind that I never wanted to tell Vicki that one of our children had died,” Len said.

  Vicki was already awake and stirring next to her husband in the bed. She turned on the light. She was accustomed to Len speaking on the phone in the middle of the night with nurses or other physicians about serious medical problems with young children at the hospital. But this time, his tone was different. What’s more, Len was not on call that night. “His voice sounded a little weird,” she thought, especially when she heard Len ask the caller to “talk to my wife.”

  Len handed Vicki the receiver.

  “What? Tell me what?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

  Kathleen Riley identified herself again and explained that she was calling about the bombing of a bus in Jerusalem. Had Vicki heard about it yet?

  Vicki remembers her mind racing. Had I heard? Heard what?

  “As fast as I wonder why she is calling me, my heart is reaching for Matthew, for my son and the sleep falls away completely,” she remembers thinking. “I think he must be hurt. I wonder what hospital he is in and how fast I can get there.”

  As Vicki listened to Riley repeat the story about the bus bombing in Jerusalem and tried to weigh the impact of the message that her son had been killed, she remembered feeling strangely detached and rational, as if all this was happening to someone else and she was just an observer. “Somewhere I was thinking that this was crazy,” Vicki said.

  She was, of course, receiving the worst kind of news for any parent—that her child had died. And yet, Vicki found herself managing to remain steadily focused. “I didn’t know where my voice is coming from,” Vicki recalled. “I heard myself. But I seemed to be somewhere outside of myself. My voice sounded calm and familiar, but the words I was saying couldn’t possibly have made sense.”

  Suddenly, Vicki interrupted Riley.

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  Riley asked Vicki where she and Len wanted to bury Matt. It was an abrupt question but not entirely unreasonable. One of the most difficult concerns when a US citizen dies in a foreign country is determining what the family back home wants to do with the body.

  “I don’t know,” Vicki answered. “I never thought of that before. In Israel? At home? Okay, at home. How do I bring him home? Shall I just hop on a plane and come pick him up?”

  The questions were popping up fast now in Vicki’s mind.

  “Was Matt with anyone?” Vicki asked.

  The question seemed to startle Kathleen Riley. “Who do you think he was with?” she asked.

  Vicki mentioned Sara Duker.

  Riley wrote down the name, then said several victims had still not been identified. But she promised to check on the name and get back to her.

  Vicki paused. Another question flashed through her mind: Suppose this call is some sort of dream, perhaps a perverted prank?

  “Excuse me,” Vicki asked Riley. “Can I call you back?”

  Riley gave Vicki her phone number.

  Vicki hung up. “Who do you call?” she remembers asking out loud.

  Vicki phoned her brother, a lawyer in another Connecticut town, about an hour’s drive from West Hartford. She told him she received a call from the US consulate in Jerusalem and that Matthew had been killed.

  “I think it’s real,” she said. “What am I supposed to do?”

  Meanwhile, Len was looking for the phone number to Sara’s apartment in Jerusalem. Len knew that Sara lived with several other young women. Maybe they might know more.

  He dialed the international telephone code for Israel, then the number to Sara’s apartment. The phone rang and rang. No answer.

  Vicki and Len then called Kathleen Riley.

  In the brief period since they had talked, Riley was able to check with Israeli authorities on whether Sara had been on the bus—and, yes, Sara had died too.

  Riley asked Len and Vicki not to call Arline—not immediately, anyway. Riley would make the call.

  It was not even six o’clock in the morning yet in Connecticut. The sun would not rise for another hour. Len and Vicki pondered what they should do next. There are no guidelines for what just happened, no manual entitled, “How to Behave When Your Child Is Murdered.”

  “I deal with medical emergencies all the time, in life and death situations,” Len said later. “I can usually think pretty clearly right on the spot.”

  As a doctor, he had watched scores of parents take in the news that a child had died. Sometimes Len had delivered the news himself. And as he reflected on those moments, Len recalled sometimes rehearsing how he would react if he ever had to receive the news that Matthew or Amy had died.

  You can’t prepare for the kind of telephone call that Len and Vicki had just received, even if you have been schooled in the meticulous rational thinking that experienced physicians employ.

  “It’s like the wind being knocked out of you,” Len said.

  He walked downstairs and fell into a chair. “My favorite chair,” he remembered.

  Len leaned back and felt the familiar comfort of the cushions nestling his back and arms. And then, he felt the heavy, somber weight of the moment again. Matthew had been killed. His Matthew. His son. Blown up by terrorists on a bus.

  Suddenly Len felt another weight—his own mortality. As he watched Matthew graduate from Yale several years earlier and then enter into rabbinical school and meet a charming young woman named Sara, Len had felt he would be planning for a wedding, his son’s ordination to the rabbinate, perhaps even for the arrival of grandchildren. And now that arc of life had been suddenly broken—literally blown apart. As he sat in his chair, Len thought, I’m forty-nine years old at this point. At least I don’t have much longer to live and I don’t have to deal with this for too many years.

  Just after ten o’clock, the phone rang again. Len and Vicki recognized the familiar voice of Arline Duker.

  The three had become close as they watched their children’s relationship blossom. Len and Vicki picked up separate phone extensions so they could both speak to Arline.

  As parents, they had privately become excited in recent months—without telling Matt and Sara, of course—how they looked forward to planning a wedding. Indeed, each had privately envisioned the day when their children would come to them to announce that they were planning to marry.

  “We had a life where there were certain expectations and plans and things and suddenly our kids are dead,” Arline said. Now they had to plan a funeral. “How are we going to live now?” she asked.

  Just before midnight on Saturday, at almost the same moment that Arline Duker was speaking about Sara to her friends at the bar mitzvah party in Teaneck, another telephone rang, this time in a home in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC. Dennis Ross, the Clinton administration’s special Middle East envoy and one of the principal players from the US in the Oslo peace process, picked up the receiver and was greeted by a familiar voice, the US ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk.

  Ross and Indyk came from far different parts of the world. Ross, the son of a Jewish mother
and Catholic stepfather, had been raised in the San Francisco suburbs of Marin County and studied at the University of California at Los Angeles; Indyk, London-born and raised in Australia in a Jewish family, had been a student in Jerusalem when the 1973 Yom Kippur War erupted and even volunteered to help with the Israeli war effort. Both men knew each other well, though. Just as important, both trusted the other’s judgment and observations. In the 1980s, Ross and Indyk cofounded a Washington think tank that specialized in Middle East policy studies. And in the Clinton administration, both had risen to become influential voices within the White House and the State Department on the often unpredictable winds that swept across Israel and the other nations in the Middle East.

  As he picked up the phone and heard his friend’s voice, Ross was fully aware that Indyk would not call him so late in the evening—and so early on Sunday morning from Israel—unless he had something important to discuss. Years later, Ross remembered checking the time. It was around 11:50 p.m. Saturday—6:50 a.m. on Sunday in Israel. The bomb on Jaffa Road had detonated a mere five minutes earlier.

  Indyk did not mince words, Ross recalled. The ambassador told Ross a commuter bus in downtown Jerusalem had been blown up by a suicide bomber. Casualties were likely to be high.

  Neither man knew yet that two American citizens had been killed and that several others had been wounded. That news would reach them a few hours later. Both nevertheless sensed that this bombing could be an ominous sign of things to come. When the second bomb exploded less than an hour later in Ashkelon, Ross’s and Indyk’s worst fears were confirmed. After months of remaining quiet, Hamas was back on the attack, with more suicide bombers. That these bombs exploded only a few months before Israel’s scheduled elections was no coincidence, they felt.

  Israel’s electorate had become increasingly restless during the three years since the Oslo Peace Accords had been signed. The accords aimed to accomplish many goals, including the ultimate establishment of a Palestinian nation. But they were also supposed to usher in a new era of nonviolence in which Jews and Arabs would be free to visit each other’s neighborhoods and towns without being attacked. It was this kind of hope that prompted Sara Duker and Matt Eisenfeld to plan a trip to Jordan—an Arab nation—to see the archeological ruins of Petra. Only a few years before, no Israelis, probably no Jews from any nation, would have dreamed of making such a trip.