“I hid it in my closet. When things calm down I’m going to put it back in the shelter and pretend nothing changed.”
Ashkelon, May 11 – Residents of an apartment complex in this coastal Israeli city near the Gaza Strip breathed a sigh of relief last night as rocket alert sirens sounded, secure in the knowledge that they had gotten rid of one resident’s musical instrument from the underground communal refuge space before they all got stuck in there with him and were subject to his use of it.
Sixteen people rushed into their building’s bomb shelter on Bialik Street Wednesday evening as warning came of incoming missiles from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and allied terrorist groups. Fifteen of them looked around as they entered the shelter and let some of their tension go, observing that Shai Greenstein’s guitar was not in evidence. Two others shared a conspiratorial look of gratification; all fifteen avoided eye contact with Greenstein.
“Anyone seen my guitar?” he asked. “I’m sure I put it here like a week ago.”
“Huh,” responded one of the conspirators. “I thought I heard you say you were going to replace a couple of strings.”
“I was, but I don’t remember…” he trailed off, unsure whether his memory was failing him.
The other residents spoke to a reporter once the alert had ended and everyone had exited the shelter except Greenstein, who continued to scour the space for the guitar.
“We dodged a bullet there, so to speak,” acknowledged Gid’on Peri, who inhabits the apartment across the hallway from Greenstein and understood the threat more acutely than the others. “I took the guitar out over the weekend. I had a gut feeling something was going to happen and we’d all be forced to endure pure hell if he picked that thing up at any point. So I took it and hid it in my closet. When things calm down I’m going to put it back in the shelter and pretend nothing changed.”
Peri had to coordinate with at least one other person, and enlisted Noa Shoval. “Oh, God, I hadn’t even thought of it when Gidi mentioned it,” she recalled, with obvious horror on her face. “I left the little ones alone for like ten minutes to play lookout, and that’s a risk you take, but there was no way I was going to put our mental health in danger by exposing everyone to that… thing.”
The other residents, ignorant of the machinations, nevertheless expressed relief. “I’m glad he forgot to put the guitar there, or changed his mind,” admitted Rotem Biazi. “If I have to hear another rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ I’m going to disembowel myself.”
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