There is a specific kind of 3 a.m. that belongs only to Israel. Wednesday’s 3 a.m. was one of them. It began with two missiles over Jerusalem. Then, somewhere between night and morning, a ceasefire.

We opened an exhibition in late February called Shesh Acharei HaMilchama — Six After the War (As Soon as the War is Over). The title comes from Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk, where two friends make a plan to meet “at six after the war.” The joke, if you want to call it that, is that “after the war” is not a time. It sounds like one. It has the grammatical structure of an appointment. But it is not a time. It is a wish dressed up as a coordinate.

In Israel the phrase became something else after 1967. Shesh acharei hamilchama. It entered the language as shorthand for the hinge moment — the impossible, longed-for, slightly absurd point at which everything returns to normal. Shigra. Routine. The word everyone has been saying for months. We want shigra. When will we have shigra again.

We named the exhibition before this war started. We opened it ten days before the sirens came. We did not plan that timing. ——— So: is this six after?

We are less than twenty-four hours into a ceasefire that is holding, for now, in the way things hold when everyone is watching very carefully and nobody wants to be the one responsible for what happens next. Twenty-four hours is not nothing. Twenty-four hours is also not a peace treaty. It is a condition of the guns, not a condition of anything else.

I keep thinking about the word after. It implies a clean break — a before and an after, a line you cross. What we have instead is a pause with a name. And in the pause, everyone is coming out of their shelters and doing the same calculation: how much do I trust this. How much do I let myself. How far ahead do I plan before I stop. Do I book the flight. Do I schedule the meeting. Do I stop sleeping with one ear open.

The answers vary. Nobody is certain. We are all pretending, at different levels of convincingness, that we know where we stand. ——— Hašek’s soldiers made their plan and it was a joke — a joke about the unknowability of endings, about the human need to make appointments in the middle of catastrophe, about the gap between the moment violence stops and the moment you can actually believe it has stopped. Hašek had just survived a world war. He understood that the gap could be very long. He understood that “after” was something you claimed before you could prove it.

We built an exhibition around that idea. We thought we were describing ancient history.

It turns out we were also describing this week, and last week, and the week before, and whatever comes next — which we don’t know yet, which is the whole point, which is what I keep circling back to every time I check my phone and the ceasefire is still holding and I still don’t know whether to call it after or not.

There’s a song from the seventies — it dates me, I know — that asks: does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? I used to think that was a rhetorical question. Standing here, less than a day into a ceasefire that may or may not hold, in a museum full of objects that have already outlasted every war they witnessed, I’m not so sure it is.

Shesh acharei hamilchama. Six after the war. Whenever that turns out to be. Does anybody really know?

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)