Returning to Carthage

It is a warm, slightly overcast Saturday on the foreshore of Narrabeen Lagoon in Sydney’s Northern Beaches. A mother and her two-year-old son are standing at the water’s edge, feeding pieces of stale Tip-Top bread to the throng of ducks gathered around them. A lone pelican floats at a safe distance, apparently undecided whether to join in the fray. Atop a tropical tree whose name I do not know, three rainbow lorikeets screech, feeding on the bright red berry-like fruit that is now in season. On the footpath a ten-year-old girl proceeds gingerly on her brand-new roller blades, trying not to bump into a couple of retirees who are walking an ugly-faced yet pleasant-looking Staffordshire terrier.

Holding my eighteen-month-old daughter Sophie in my arms, I undo the childproof latch of the security gate and place Sophie on the synthetic rubber-covered ground. She runs at once towards the swing. I follow her, lift her up and put her feet through the two round holes at the bottom of the soft plastic seat. I then buckle up the safety chain across the front.

“Push,” Sophie says. It is one of the few words she has already mastered. When I push, she starts giggling with pleasure.

Half an hour later an elevator-music rendition of “Greensleeves” wafts into the air. “Let’s go get an ice-cream,” I say and lift Sophie up into my arms. We walk towards the old Bedford van, which has been repainted pink with a paintbrush. I order a choc top and Sophie watches with wonder how the balding, overweight, middle-aged man can take a cone in his hand, press a lever and make a flow of white semi-liquid come out. He then dips the cone in a warm brown liquid, which hardens instantaneously.

I pay, and we walk back towards the playground, which has become almost deserted. The sky has darkened within the last few minutes and I can see people getting hurriedly into their cars. A first drop of rain hits the bridge of my nose. After looking around for shelter I sit on a bed of fallen needles under a pine tree, which would give us at least some protection from the drizzle. Sophie sits on my lap, cocooned in my arms. I bite off the tip of the chocolate icing and let her taste the vanilla ice-cream. For a fraction of a second she is taken aback by the coldness, but once it has melted in her mouth it appears that she cannot believe her luck. Such sumptuous sweetness, such smoothness, the subtle flavour of vanilla—these things are beyond anything she could have imagined prior to this moment. And how many more wonders, how many more discoveries are still ahead of her? 

After dinner the phone rings. It is my mother, calling from her twelfth-storey flat overlooking the Mediterranean, in a northern suburb of Tel Aviv. Due to the difference in time zones it is still morning in Israel, and my mother has just received the little video clip in avi format which I emailed her this morning. The clip shows Sophie, wearing her Piglet hat, riding her pink-and-blue tricycle along the waterfront at Palm Beach. Can Sophie actually pedal, my mother wants to know, or does she have to be pushed along by the handle attached to the back of the tricycle?

The arrival of Sophie, a first grandchild after such a long wait, has been a bitter-sweet experience for my mother. Such a beautiful little girl—and yet she is so far away. International phone calls are so cheap these days my mother and I can talk to each other frequently and share Sophie’s growth, and I also send her a steady stream of photos and videos via email. And yet no advance in technology can replace the feeling of holding one’s grandchild in one’s arms.

Towards the end of the conversation my mother asks: “So when are you coming over to visit us?” For it has now been over a year since my mother’s last trip to Australia, and a return visit is overdue. 

On Monday morning I receive a card in the mail advising me that an international registered article has arrived. After picking Sophie up from the childcare centre that afternoon, I stop at our neighbourhood shopping strip. The newsagent there also handles Australia Post, so I have to wait while an old man from the nearby RSL retirement village, his nose and cheeks covered in broken capillaries, takes his time buying a lottery ticket. The large number of available options doesn’t help, and neither does the difficulty he and the Chinese newsagent have understanding each other’s accent. Meanwhile, Sophie has found the Chupa Chup stand, thoughtfully positioned just above her nose. At last I present my card to the newsagent. She hands me a standard letter-sized envelope, posted from the Republic of San Marino, of all places, and covered with large gaudily-coloured postage stamps—similar to those I used to collect as a child. I sign the ledger, pay for the lollypop and give it to Sophie.

Back home, I am about to open the envelope when a small crisis looms: Sophie has dropped the lollypop. I pick up the sticky lump of coloured sugar, wash it at the kitchen sink and give it back to her. I then dry my fingertips with a tea towel and open the envelope with a steak knife. Inside there’s an invoice from Maria Antonia Manfredi, an Italian ancient coin dealer, and a clear square plastic pocket containing a small bronze coin. I remove the coin from the plastic pocket and hold it in my hand. On the obverse there is a profile of the goddess Tanit, on the reverse a horse’s head—the horse being the symbol of the ancient city of Carthage. This coin was minted in Sardinia at the beginning of the third century BC, while the island was under Carthaginian control.

In the year 535 BC the Carthaginians and their Etruscan allies fought against the Phocaean Greeks near Alalia in Corsica. Their decisive victory thwarted Phocaean plans to extend their influence from their colony in Masalia (modern Marseilles) further south. It ensured that for the following three centuries Sardinia would remain under Carthaginian control. During this period, these little bronze coins bearing the goddess Tanit and the horse’s head were minted in large quantities and circulated widely—they’ve been found at excavations in locations as remote as Britain, Morocco and Croatia. And yet, despite this type of coin being so common, the specimen I’ve just received is still unique. Bronze deteriorates very easily, and ancient bronze coins found today are usually corroded and oxidised, often beyond recognition. The coin in my hand is perfectly preserved: covered in a thin, even layer of dark brown patina, showing beautifully the original design that the ancient engraver cut into the dies. 

As a young boy I used to have a small collection of old coins, stored in a rectangular Strepsils cough lozenge tin. My collection included an early nineteenth-century silver five-franc piece which my cousin had bought for me at a Paris flea market during his pre-military service trip to Europe; a small Roman or Byzantine bronze coin, found by one of my classmates at an ancient mound on the Mediterranean coast, which was covered with green encrustation to the point that it resembled a little flat stone; and a one-mil coin issued by the British Mandate government in the 1920s, which I had found while digging tunnels in my grandparents’ back yard. (The legend on these coins was in three languages—English, Arabic and Hebrew. The Jews had wanted the Hebrew legend to read Erez Israel; the Arabs had insisted on Palestina; the actual legend was the British-brokered compromise Palestina-E.I.—with which neither side was happy.)

I remember a few family trips to the old city of Jerusalem that we had made in my father’s company car—a white Ford Taunus station wagon. I’d wander down the narrow cobblestone alleys which were crowded with shops selling olive-wood crucifixes and camels, glazed Armenian pottery covered in intricate floral patterns, small boxes containing genuine Holy Land earth, Turkish pipes and all kinds of oriental paraphernalia manufactured for the tourist trade. My father would then inquire in his broken Arabic about old coins. The winter downpours swept away the topsoil in the West Bank hill country, my father explained to me once, and exposed ancient coin hoards, which the peasants sold to market traders. The shopkeeper would vanish to the back of his shop and return with a small plastic bucket. I’d fossick through it: a New York subway token, Jordanian small change, crude cast copies of ancient Judaean coins. Occasionally I’d find something for my collection: Ottoman coins—a silver mejidie or a small copper bishlik; or else a medieval Islamic coin minted by Egypt’s Mamluk rulers, all worn out.

I do not remember encountering any displays of open hostility. Back then the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories was still in its first decade. The older market traders—those in their sixties and seventies—had been born when Jerusalem was part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by a Sultan who kept in his palace in Istanbul a harem guarded by eunuchs. They had seen the British and the Jordanian occupations come and go. Now it was the Israelis’ turn. As they sat on their low wood-and-wickerwork stools, holding the mouthpiece of a Turkish pipe in one hand and amber prayer beads in the other, their heads covered in white kafiyehs, their wrinkled, wizened, patient faces seemed to suggest: We’ve outlasted them, and we will outlast you. 

My boyhood coin collection had been gathering dust somewhere in my parents’ flat for more than two decades when a Google search for “Carthage coins” led me to the discovery of Carthaginian coins for sale on eBay and on the websites of various ancient coin auction houses and dealers in Europe and the United States. No more fossicking through plastic buckets full of junk. A previously unimaginable wealth of ancient coins was opening up before me, ready to be purchased at the click of a mouse.

Could the resurgence of my interest in ancient coins be explained by improvements in access to information alone? An armchair psychologist might say that faced with my own mortality following the birth of my child, I was seeking to extend my self back in time by possessing these ancient artefacts.

But why Carthaginian coins?

To me, Carthage presents a fascinating blend of the oddly familiar and the exotic. The city, on the North African coast near modern Tunis, was founded by Phoenician traders from Tyre in the eighth century BC as a relay station on the way to their ultimate destination—the silver mines of southern Spain. The Phoenician homeland was located on the Mediterranean coastline in what is today’s Lebanon and northern Israel.

Since the coastal Phoenician city-states and the highland sister-kingdoms of Israel and Judea where my ancestors lived evolved from the same Canaanite population, they shared many similarities in language and culture. As a native speaker of Modern Hebrew, I find it astonishing that I can still understand Phoenician inscriptions written by the Carthaginians two and a half thousand years ago, with roughly the same degree of difficulty as that of an English speaker reading Chaucer’s original works.

The language may be familiar, but the inscriptions depict an exotic, cosmopolitan world far removed from the isolated mountain kingdoms of Israel and Judea. A bilingual inscription, written in Phoenician and Etruscan on three gold sheets, commemorates a treaty between Carthage and the Etruscans, which included a sacrifice made by the Etruscan ruler to the Phoenician goddess Astarte.

Despite the foreign setting, the people of Carthage preserved the customs of their ancestral homeland. Gold amulets found in large quantities in Carthaginian graves contained tiny scrolls of magic incantations, which scholars assume the Carthaginians wore around their necks for protection against evil. They remind me of the phylacteries that Orthodox Jews put on their foreheads and forearms every day, and of the silver mezuzah that my parents insisted on nailing to my doorpost. When I read that the priests in the Carthaginian temple of Eshmoun were not allowed to eat certain foods I am immediately reminded of Jewish dietary laws.

Carthage had always been outward looking. Its fleet traded all over the Mediterranean and ventured beyond the Pillars of Heracles as far as the Atlantic coast of the Iberian peninsula and north-western Africa. The wealth of this trade created a thriving metropolis, with buildings up to six storeys high. The Carthaginians imported the best of everything the ancient world had to offer: Greek art, Campanian pottery and Etruscan jewellery. In the temples of Carthage, the locals worshipped Phoenician, Greek, Cypriot and African gods. According to the Greek writer Iamblichus, Carthage had a famous school of Pythagorean philosophy, and Hannibal himself is said to have studied Greek books about strategy. It is perhaps this openness to the outside world, this willingness to mix with others and absorb new ways of thinking that appeals to me the most in my distant, ancient Carthaginian cousins.

In turn, the Carthaginians spread their alphabet all over the western Mediterranean—the source of all modern European alphabets. Members of the Roman aristocracy thought so highly of the Carthaginian agronomist Mago that they translated all twenty-eight volumes of his work into Latin. Aristotle, in his Politics, admired the sophisticated way the Carthaginians combined the best of the three systems of government prevalent in antiquity in their constitution: monarchic, aristocratic and democratic. The writer Eratosthenes was so impressed by the political institutions of Carthage that he paid the Carthaginians the ultimate compliment to come from a Greek—that they could no longer be regarded as barbarians. 

The following Sunday morning I am standing on the deck under the shade of our huge liquidambar tree with a pool-cleaning net in my hands. I’m trying to scoop out fresh deposits of possum poo that have accumulated in the pool overnight. Sophie stands beside me, watching my actions with interest, the dummy in her mouth moving rhythmically in and out. I have to keep an eye on her to make sure she does not venture too close to the water. Luckily she moves in the opposite direction, chasing a little lizard. The disposable nappy she is wearing under her purple corduroy trousers makes her bottom look unnaturally big. That, combined with her penguin-like movements, makes the lizard chase hard not to watch.

After Sophie has fallen asleep, I go to my home office and pull out the plush-lined wooden box that contains my collection of Carthaginian coins. I’m intending to put my latest acquisition at an appropriate place inside. How strange is the collector’s urge to own the objects of their fascination, like someone who cannot enjoy the beauty of a butterfly unless they have pierced its body with a pin and put it inside a box.

I reopen the envelope and take the bronze coin out of the plastic pocket, and then I notice something strange: there are two small bright green spots—the colour of copper chloride—on Tanit’s face. Their prominence is increased by the contrast of their saturated green colour with the dark chestnut patina of the coin’s surface. Oddly enough, I cannot remember having seen these spots before. I remove them carefully with a toothpick and place the coin for the time being next to a silver tetradrachm from Punic Sicily. 

The next morning there are three bright green spots on the coin and I realise that I’ve got a problem. A quick Google search leads me to an article that tells me what it is: a condition called bronze disease in which cuprous chloride—a chemical occurring naturally in bronze coins—turns into cupric chloride and hydrochloric acid in a process of oxidisation. On learning this I feel somewhat relieved, like a patient hearing from their doctor that their symptoms form a condition known to medical science, which has a proper Latin name.

My relief is short-lived. The article then explains that if not arrested, this oxidisation keeps spreading across the surface of the coin, eventually completely disfiguring it. The only known remedy is to remove the oxidised spots with a brush, place the damaged coin in a container full of distillate water and leave it there for a couple of weeks, removing the oxidisation and replacing the water daily. This process should get rid of the problem, but the side effect would be the complete or partial dissolution of the coin’s patina.

Reading this I feel like a surgeon who has to amputate a patient’s leg in order to give them a chance to survive. The cause for the onset of bronze disease is sudden exposure to moisture, the article adds. I then recall that I handled the coin straight after washing Sophie’s fallen Chupa Chup. The coin had survived twenty-three centuries unscathed, and yet I’ve managed to irreversibly damage it during its first two days under my custody.

That night I have a dream: I find an ancient treasure, but as soon as I try to hold the gold coins in my hands they start to melt away, the molten metal threatening to burn a hole in my hand. I wake in fright, shaken, astonished by the intensity of my emotions. 

While my wife is bathing Sophie I stop the DVD player from replaying a Hi-5 DVD for the umpteenth time, and switch to the ABC news. National Party MPs are opposed to the sale of the federal government’s remaining stake in Telstra; a new study has found that the national literacy and numeracy test scores of New South Wales public school students lag behind those from Victoria and South Australia; and so on and on. And then it comes: eight people have been killed in a suicide bombing at a café north of Tel Aviv. The footage shows a screaming young woman in her early twenties held by a policeman; the charred remains of the café’s interior; ultra-Orthodox volunteers in fluorescent orange jackets engaged in the gruesome task of collecting pieces of human flesh for burial.

I go downstairs to my home office and check the website of Haaretz, Israel’s most moderate daily newspaper. According to their headline only seven people were killed, since they do not count the bomber among the casualties. The bombing took place in Hadera, a grey commuter town halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa. No one I know lives there or would have any reason to go there for a coffee. I do not have to be a descendant of the prophets of the Old Testament to foresee what will happen next. An Israeli helicopter fires a missile at the car of an Islamic Jihad activist (who’s “number two on the IDF’s most-wanted list, according to senior military sources”) while it’s travelling down a busy street in the centre of Gaza, killing the man, his wife, his eight-year-old son, and two bystanders. If my mother is to see her granddaughter again, I will have to take Sophie to the country where such things happen. 

In most people’s minds Carthage is not remembered for its finely-balanced Constitution or its famed school of Pythagorean philosophy. For most people, Carthage conjures up two powerful and vivid images: Hannibal crossing the Alps with his war elephants, and sacrificed children being thrown into the flames.

A number of classical writers—among them Diodorus of Sicily, Kleitarchos and Plutarch—condemned the Carthaginians’ practice of child sacrifice, and their reports about its prevalence seem to be supported by archaeological evidence. Modern excavations in Carthage have uncovered a large sanctuary (the Tophet) where thousands of terracotta urns containing charred bones have been found. Analysis of the bones has shown that some of them were of young animals—lambs and kids—and some of them of humans whose ages ranged from newborn to about four years old. It therefore appears that in many instances a young animal was sacrificed to the gods as a substitution for child sacrifice.

Oddly enough, the ratio of animal-to-human remains seems to have dropped over the centuries. This suggests that human sacrifice, rather than being gradually phased out and replaced with animal sacrifice, actually made a resurgence. Some researchers link this to a string of military disasters suffered by the Carthaginians between the late fourth century and the late third century BC. According to this hypothesis, rather than weakening the Carthaginians’ belief in divine protection, calamity had reinforced it, leading them to adhere more strictly to the commands of their religion. This again is reminiscent of Jewish history.

It is also interesting to note that in the Old Testament there are a number of references to child sacrifice, among them the story of Jephtah’s daughter and of course Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac. Although these stories do not necessarily describe historical events, they suggest the existence of oral traditions about child sacrifice among the inhabitants of the kingdoms of Judea and Israel. Orthodox Jews still observe today a custom called pidyon haben—“redemption of the son”—where the father of a first-born son is required to give a man of priestly descent a donation of five shekels of silver—equivalent to between 92 and 117 grams of pure silver (depending on which rabbi you ask). These days the donation is made using silver coins or other silver objects.                  

The next morning I walk up the steps leading from our front door to the driveway, holding Sophie in my arms. The air is full of the deafening drone of cicadas, and the trunk of the jacaranda tree—now in full bloom—is teeming with them, so it looks almost completely black. Cicadas are also in the air everywhere, occasionally spraying down some acidic liquid. It is a scene reminiscent of a Hitchcock movie. After dropping Sophie off at the childcare centre I drive to Warringah Mall to buy some distillate water.

I collect a ticket from the machine at the entrance to the car park, park my car at one of the upper levels and walk straight into the mall. It is a procedure so routine as to not warrant a detailed description; yet in Israel it would be different. I would be stopped in front of a boom gate at the entrance to the car park and a security guard—a recently arrived migrant from one of the former Soviet republics or from Ethiopia, working for minimum wages—would ask me to open the boot of my car, then examine it for explosives. At the entrance to the shopping centre itself another security guard would ask me if I were carrying any weapons, check my bag and then motion me to walk through a metal detector. Back at Warringah Mall, I walk to Woolworths and buy a one-litre bottle of distillate water.

At home I fill a disposable plastic cup with distillate water, remove the latest crop of green spots from the surface of the coin with a toothpick and place the coin carefully in the water, standing it upright, leaning at an angle against the side of the cup. Almost immediately the coin’s colour looks different—somewhat lighter—and I can spot some minor imperfections that I hadn’t noticed before. Has it already started to deteriorate, or is the prism effect created by the water playing tricks on my eyes? 

It hasn’t always been like that in Israel. My childhood had been safe and innocent. From my first year of primary school I’d walk to school unaccompanied every day—a fifteen-minute walk—and after school, instead of having carefully-planned play-dates with designated drop-off and pick-up times I’d just walk down the stairs to our apartment block’s car park and play with all the other kids there, without any adult supervision. An outsider, gleaning their information from the evening news, might imagine Israel as a war-torn and dangerous place; and yet I have never personally witnessed any violent incidents. That is not to say that Israel’s precarious geopolitical situation and its never-ending conflict with its neighbours had not been in the background throughout my childhood. I remember one day at kindergarten when I was four, coming across two friends who were talking animatedly. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Haven’t you heard?” they replied, “Nasser is dead!” I didn’t really understand what that meant, but from their joyous expressions I understood it was tremendous good news. I discovered later that Gamal Abdel Nasser had been the Egyptian president at the time, a self-proclaimed pan-Arabist leader who was fond of vehement anti-Israeli rhetoric.

Later on at primary school there was a poster on the wall instructing us how to identify various types of tiny land mines which Palestinian terrorist factions might reportedly plant in public places throughout Israel. I remember that the short descriptive caption under one photo of a small, black, button-shaped object stated that it was “Made in China”. I was astounded to learn that the Chinese could actually manufacture something so technologically advanced. Back then, I thought the only things the Chinese could produce were rice, porcelain and silk.

And yet, all that had been barely audible background noise throughout those childhood years. At kindergarten the teacher would repeatedly warn us not to throw banana skins on the footpath, as someone could accidentally step on them, slip and get injured. My impression at the time was that half the children in my age group would die or become permanently incapacitated in banana-skin-related incidents, while the other lucky half would make it in one piece to adulthood. By the time I turned eighteen none of my friends had been injured by slipping on a banana skin and none of them had seen a real land mine. 

A few days have gone by. Day after day I’ve pulled the Carthaginian coin out of the water, removed the newly-formed green spots and replaced the distillate water. I’ve watched the gradual deterioration of the patina with discomfort, and yet now that I understand the root cause of my anxiety, my feeling about the coin has become less intense—merely annoyance and disappointment in myself. I’ve gradually become a skilled technician, performing the daily cleaning routine in practised, perfunctory movements.

On Friday I pick Sophie up from day care. She runs towards me, smiling. As soon as I lift her up she asks for Boing, her soft-toy rabbit. That day I also collect our family photo, taken at the day care centre as part of a fund-raising drive. It shows Sophie cradled in my wife’s arms with me behind them, my right arm around my wife’s shoulder in a protective gesture—a composition carefully orchestrated by the photographer. All three of us are looking at the camera, smiling. I remember seeing similar photos in my single days, their distinctive light blue lime-wash effect background and cheesy smiles making me think how tacky they looked. Now my own happiness is encapsulated in such a photo, inseparably linked to the well-being of this little family. 

The suicide bombings in Israeli cities had started in the mid-nineties, as the hopes for peace were dying a slow death by a thousand cuts due to the failure of the Oslo peace process. Going back to Israel during those years, first on my own and then with my wife, I had never feared for our safety. The attacks had been isolated incidents, typically taking place in Jerusalem or in towns close to the West Bank—Netanya or Hadera—and I knew that as long as we avoided a few danger spots, we were ten times more likely to be involved in a car accident than in a suicide bombing. My wife, who is not Israeli, has always trusted my judgment on when and where to go, and our visits have always been incident-free. This time, again, the decision is mine to make—and yet I find myself torn, unable to make it.

Every day a free copy of the Manly Daily is delivered to our letterbox, a tiny component of Rupert Murdoch’s far-flung empire. As its strong local focus (“North Balgowlah residents up in arms over Council’s new cricket ground proposal”) does not match my interests, I usually put it straight into the recycling bin, unless I need to look through the classified ads for a local plumber or electrician. Today, however, the front page headline catches my eye. A whole family perished yesterday in a horrific car accident on Pittwater Road: father and mother in their thirties and their one-year-old daughter. Police are investigating the possibility that the driver of the other car—a middle-aged man—had an epileptic fit, and are not ruling out criminal prosecution against him for failing to disclose his medical condition to the licensing authorities.

Bad things can happen anywhere. Perhaps my fears and anxieties have less to do with the Middle Eastern conflict and more with coming to terms with something that every new parent has to learn: that my love for my daughter, by establishing a permanent, inexorable link between her well-being and my happiness, has made me vulnerable in a new and unfamiliar way. The source of my anxiety has been my growing realisation that this vulnerability is here to stay, for as long as I live. 

Some scholars offer a different interpretation of the human remains found in the Tophet and the references made by classical writers to the practice of child sacrifice in Carthage. They point out that despite the very high rate of infant mortality prevalent in antiquity, the number of young children’s bones found in the main cemetery in Carthage is extremely low, and hypothesise that the Tophet was merely a specialised cemetery dedicated to stillborn babies and young children.

The references to the practice in literature may have been an early example of xenophobic propaganda, written in the context of ongoing wars between the Carthaginians and the Greeks (and later on the Romans). An overwhelming majority among the classical authors who wrote about Carthage made no mention of the practice.

So what was child sacrifice in Carthage—a historical reality, or a heinous lie concocted by the Carthaginians’ enemies? If a minor car accident which happened yesterday at the car park of a suburban supermarket can produce two completely conflicting accounts of the sequence of events and the person at fault, what hope do we have in attempting to reconstruct events that may or may not have taken place at an ancient metropolis in North Africa more than two thousand years ago? 

According to the website I’ve consulted about how to deal with bronze disease, the clean-up process should continue for three weeks. On the twenty-first day I pull the coin from the water for the last time. I dry it carefully with a clean tea towel, take a deep breath and look at it: Not too bad. The remaining patina is now of a lighter colour, a reddish copper-brown, and a few imperfections on the coin’s surface have now been exposed. The dreaded green spots are gone. Although its value in the collectors’ market may have dropped a bit, it is still a beautiful artefact. Perhaps if we waited for another twenty-three centuries its original dark patina would be restored.

Six weeks later my wife, Sophie and I are on a Cathay Pacific flight to Hong Kong, where we will board an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. There have been no Palestinian suicide bombings for a few weeks now, and the Israeli military has also been showing some restraint. The warring sides are like two exhausted boxers who are awkwardly embracing each other’s shoulders in an attempt to get a momentary respite. Taking advantage of this lull in the violence we are going to visit my family. Life is inherently uncertain; the only thing to anchor us is those we love.