When they become shrouds, the book of faces erases or blurs them. I wonder whether the algorithm has learned to identify the unique morphology of this wrapping of a lifeless body, or is fed by reports. I assume ironically that the reports are given not by people who have a hard time with this sight, but by those who are glad to see as many blankets as possible.
At the beginning of the war, we saw more shrouds that gave the wrapped bodies their classical, respectable, anonymous look; now, as cloth for shrouds has run out, it’s the color, the pattern, the texture that speaks. Death in the Gaza Strip is textile, it’s domestic, perhaps actually unheimlich and site-specific.
Only in the Gaza Strip, is in an Amichai poem, do people cover their dead with blankets – not gray army blankets but the blankets that served them in life. Dowry blankets that passed from one generation to the next, purchased for a wedding or a birth; blankets in which couples curled up in bed or watching TV, under and over which they made love, dreamed, leapt into their lives out of these blankets. Now, these people wake up terrified to the sounds of explosions, the end of the world, a nightmare.
And what will happen when no more blankets will be found? Perhaps they have already run out? Perhaps there were already those who had to part from their last blanket in order to cover someone who will no longer be warmed by all the blankets in the world? How can one even fall asleep knowing that the blanket in which you fell asleep might be your shroud?
Shoham Smith is a writer.
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