Natasha Basin-Levina (1951–2013) emigrated to Israel from Moscow in 1970. She worked as a journalist and editor for Israeli radio and for Kol Yisrael television, where she was head of news and Russian-language programs, but much of her writing was discovered only after her death. This autobiographical story was first published in the Jerusalem Russian-language journal Alternativa, under the title “Terror on Ben Yehuda Street” [“Terakt na Ben-Iegude”].

Natasha Basin-Levina (courtesy A. Basin)

I inherited the old wall clock ten years ago from my mother, who had in turn received it from her father. It had not been running for many years and my mother insisted that it stopped when my grandfather died, but it stayed on the wall anyway. 

I took the clock down after the fourth of September 1997. I couldn’t bear to look at it any longer because the time it showed happened to be the exact time of the explosion. I was in the kitchen at the time, trying to be a perfect mother, squeezing some fresh apple juice for my two teenage daughters. That day we all got up late, the girls were still walking around in their pajamas and Basin was still lying in bed in his favorite pose watching TV. I had just squeezed the last apple when I heard the explosion. I rushed towards the open balcony door to look outside. Before I could reach it, I heard the second explosion and was thrown back into the room together with shards of broken glass, pieces of window frames, and a tangled mass of human flesh. Then I heard the third explosion. Through the bedroom door I could see Basin digging himself out from under the blanket covered with debris. I saw my younger daughter Danilka coming out of her room, her eyes frozen in terror, and then I heard a horrify- ing scream from my older daughter Anya. When I turned in the direction of the scream I saw the walls of the kitchen crumbling, the cabinets collapsing, and the bathroom door, twisted and torn off the hinges, collapsing and wedging itself in the rubble, block- ing the doorway to the bathroom. Somewhere behind that door was my daughter. The screaming either stopped or got drowned in the chorus of other screams conjoined into one unified wail. I imagined the bathroom ceiling no longer supported by the walls collapsing too and thought it was the end and I did not have my older daughter any more. 

And then I screamed too. I was holding my head and scream- ing and at the same time with some part of my consciousness watching myself as if from outside my body and thinking how ridiculous it looked, a disheveled woman standing in the middle of the kitchen holding her head and screaming, and with yet another part of my consciousness registering that I had seen it somewhere before and that I was just reenacting a scene from a Bergman movie. I was still screaming when Danilka rushed onto the balcony and from there climbed into the girls’ room window and then into the bathroom through another door and then back the same way with Anya, who was alive and unscathed. We were all alive and none of us had a single scratch. Everybody said it was a miracle. 

We started cleaning right away. The apartment was in ruins, the entire floor covered with broken glass and other debris. We were cleaning and Basin kept offering us something to drink. Anya would periodically start crying but Danilka was not saying anything and her eyes looked dead. I was trying to stay calm and to be in charge but I already knew that we would never be able to manage this by ourselves. 

The telephone was ringing incessantly. I would pick it up and mechanically answer, yes we are alive but I cannot talk right now I will call you later. Irina Reichwarger from Tel Aviv called several times, I told her to wait a minute, put the phone down on the table and forgot about her. Later somebody called her back but by that time she had already told everybody in Tel Aviv that I had fainted while we were talking and was lying uncon- scious, and we all laughed imagining how ridiculous it would be, Natasha fainting and lying around when there was so much work to do. 

Suddenly I felt I had no strength left—run, run far away no matter where, I thought dejectedly, knowing at the same time that it was insane, that all of it was insane, inside of me and outside, and I just had to wait patiently until this insanity vanished.

The house filled with strangers. One was a shamai named Yaki and another was a contractor named Mikhael. The shamai was writing down all the damage and I kept telling him that I wanted everything to be just as it was before. You are strange, he said, look, here is a crack in the toilet and the glass in this picture is broken, and you’re telling me that it was like that before, but we can fix it, who cares, everybody does it. But I kept saying that I wanted everything to be just as it was before, including the picture. Then three women social workers arrived. They looked at us with poorly concealed pessimism and tried to convince us to move to a hotel but we declined and continued to clean. The telephone kept ringing. An odd feeling came over me as if nothing had happened, life had not changed, and it simply was always like this.