I press the trigger, and then I don’t let it go. One second, two seconds, three.
Clank.
“After each bullet you shoot, I want you to count to three. I want you to be able to hear this sound each time, the sound of a new bullet pressing into the chamber.”
“What does it matter what I do after I already shot the bullet?” Boris asks.
It matters for tricking his brain. If he knows he has to wait after each bullet, he is less likely to jump the trigger and bend out of form. I don’t tell him that, though. By now I know people only need to know what they need to know to do well.
“It matters because I said so, and you should do as you are told.”
This time, he hits four out of five, three to the heart and one at the edge of the head.
DURING MY guarding shift, it starts as an idea, then it is a thought, soon a feeling, and then it is so real I can almost see it in front of my eyes, except I cannot; something is terribly off. Missing.
I reach the top of the hill overlooking the ammunition bunker, light my flashlight, and stare at the entire base below. Crickets bay away and close. I blink, then open my eyes.
It is the most ludicrous, charming thing I have ever seen.
The fence around the base, by the ammunition bunker; it is gone. Not there anymore. Vanished.
Those boys. Those devil boys. They have stolen it.
The metal buyer of their village could be melting it in these very moments.
This shift, like all others, is eight hours long, but the seconds and minutes and hours glide by like a child on a slide. I don’t think of my boyfriend, or nature, or time, or boys even. All I can do is think:
The fence.
The fence.
They took. The fence.
Every few minutes, without planning, I find myself saying it out loud, and then, my laughter echoes, across mountains I cannot see in the dark.
AT NIGHT, back in the caravan, after eight hours of laughter alone and staring, I call Moshe. I call him from under the cover of a military blanket.
“You can’t keep doing only the things I tell you to do,” I say.
“But you told me to,” he says. “I thought this was what you wanted.”
“Yes,” I say. “Exactly.”
“I don’t know what you want anymore,” he says. “How come we only speak in code?”
Once, he was fourteen and I was twelve. Once, I was afraid. He was not. He climbed right up to the top of the German widow’s apple tree and threw a shower of red apples on my head so fast and steady I thought I’d drown. All I could see between my winces was his crooked teeth between the highest branches, and all I could hear was him shouting: “Here’s more, more, more, more, more.”
“I don’t want anymore!” I shouted from the ground.
“But this is fun!” he shouted back, and for a second I could catch his eyes as he reached for another apple; for a second I saw in them wanting, really wanting, nothing but that very thing.
“I am waiting for you to tell me what you want,” I say now. “There is no code.”
“Does this mean we are back together again?” he asks.
“What do you think?” I ask back, and I wait for a voice I still can’t believe is long gone.
I SIT on top of Boris’s back as I explain to him what Situation Zero is.
“Breathe in,” I say, and I can feel his lungs swelling below me. “Now empty your lungs completely.”
I explain about the things we can know for certain and the things we cannot. I explain that when you breathe, there is no way for you to know how much air is in your lungs. The only thing we can re-create is the situation in which our lungs are completely empty. In order for all of your bullets to hit at exactly the same spot, you must close your eyes before each shot and empty your lungs completely. This is how you know you are on target, right back where you were with the earlier bullet. Situation Zero.
His lungs rise up, then down, then up as I explain.
“I didn’t say that you could breathe again, young lady,” I say.
He stops, and even without looking I can tell that his mouthful of teeth is showing, that he is smiling.
“Do I look like a blender?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
“Then why are you mixing things up?”
After we laugh, he shoots.
Two out of five, three out of five, three out of five, five out of five.
He doesn’t lose his focus. Every time I run back from checking his hits with a marker, he gets back into position.
We don’t even say, “Again.”
He shoots as I sit by his side until our hair reeks of gunpowder, until our ears ring into our earplugs, until night begins to fall.
Soon his hits become consistent. A constellation of five stars around the heart.
As we walk back, passing one shooting range after another, I ask him what I’ve been wondering about.
“Boris, how the hell did you manage to pass boot camp without learning how to shoot?”
He stops walking, looks at me, and shrugs his wide shoulders.
I put a hand on his shoulder, from a distance. “Well, I am proud of you.”
He is only a step away. I could step closer with ease and kiss him, but I don’t.
He kisses me, then steps back and raises his arms, questioning.
I look at his eyes. His eyes to me are apples, just apples then. I think and smell apples, and I do not think of Moshe; I just hear his shouts. “More, more, more, more, more.”
And then Boris. I see in his eyes wanting, wanting, nothing but that very thing.
Me.
Before I take off my uniform, I take out the glass bottle of vanilla oil I took from Dana and carefully rest it on the sand so that it does not break.
We don’t go inside one of the ranges to do it. We are naked on the sand. Boris’s movements are lumbering and hesitant and young and unknowing.
And he is not afraid.
Our bodies impress and dig and confuse the sand so much that when it is all over, I cannot find the glass bottle of vanilla oil. The truth is I spend little time searching.
After we have our uniforms arranged on our bodies again, I look at him, framing him with the sand behind him. This is how I want to remember him. Young, wide shouldered, victorious, very close and still a little far.
I put a hand on his shoulder, just as I did before.
Then he runs away, away under the roof of a shooting range near us. I can feel his shoulder slipping from under my hand, and for a while I leave it there, suspended in air.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
The boys, I think. The boys. Boris has shot them.
And my breath halts at the entrance of the throat.
Then I run. I can run too.
“They are just kids,” I shout at Boris as I kick him, then jump above him lying on the cement.
“When you see people without uniform in a base, you shoot them,” he says. “It is protocol, no?”
His voice grows quieter as my steps widen ahead.
You don’t shoot boys. Hasn’t anyone taught him that? Was I supposed to teach him that?
The insides of my stomach tighten, and my chest hurts from jumping up and down with my unsteady scurry. I reach the foot of a hill and I stop, and I hear it. A suffocated laughter, just below my feet. The mousy sound of a tiny human. I press a button on my watch, and little rings of neon from my watch scatter on the sand.
Inside a dent in the earth, I notice, through the corner of my eye, the most beautiful boy I have ever seen. He is folded into himself, like a surprise ready to burst.
I notice details about him while I pretend I don’t see him.
“Is there anyone here?” I shout into the air, and I notice.
I notice that his skin is dark, that his hair is jumbled, that his arms are longer than they should be. I notice that he is only a few years younger than me, b
elow my feet, yet further away than anything I have ever before wanted. Boys when at their best are easy as life. They want what they want, and then they walk up and get it, their step balanced, self-assured, lovely, all the same.
I stand there, stretching my arms out as if they are searching, and the boy believes the impossibility that I have yet to spot him. He doesn’t move; he is waiting for me to leave. He does not know I am there, watching him, pleased, my expectations all at once fulfilled.
The boy’s elbows are poking the bushes of the prickly burnet. When I look above, the mountains blend with the sky behind us, as if eating or marrying each other. It could have been me who gave Boris the strength to kill the boy. My body still carries the smell of Boris, and the short minutes in which we confused the sand below us still hover above me as though they have yet to fade. But Boris could not kill the boy, he did not kill the boy, and now the boy is a surprise, my silent surprise inside a dent in the earth. If only I could, I would stare right at him forever, but I only get a fraction of a second to notice, and only out of the corner of my eye.
I blink.
When I open my eyes the boy is gone. I can hear his maddening laughter echoing across the mountains; I got you, I got you, I did, I imagine the echoes of his chuckles chanting. I take as much air as I can into my lungs, and then I smell it, a lingering smell of something that was just there but then was taken. Vanilla.
He took my glass bottle. That boy. I imagine his awe—What is this good for? he will ask his mom as she is chopping onions, onions he stole for her, on the kitchen counter. And he will hold the bottle open and stand and smell and think for a minute, until he knows in his eyes the only use in this world for the smell of vanilla inside a bottle. It is only he who will know, that boy. Not me. He took my glass bottle. He did! Before I laugh, I wait, hoping to catch the brief noises of his body brushing up against the leaves, the sound of bullet shells jangling in his plastic bag.
Checkpoint
I said no. That I was tired. Yaniv asked if I wanted to check cars instead of people, but I said no. He said he was sick of bending over. He said, “Lea, if you had a good woman’s heart, you would say yes and take mercy on me because I have a bad back and problems at home,” but I said no. No and that he was not supposed to be bending over and sticking his head in car windows anyway because that was against the rules. Then he called me a Russian whore, even though I am half Moroccan, half German.
It was four in the morning, and the line of Palestinian construction workers in front of the Hebron checkpoint curled further than I could see. There were hundreds of them, waiting for me and the other transitions unit soldiers to open the rotating metal doors and let them through. There was still an hour to go before we would be allowed to do that. The rules said that we opened at five. We closed at noon. It was not our decision.
It was just my luck that the first and only year of my service in the transitions unit was one of those years the government closed the sky for Filipino and Indian temporary workers, and so Israel started needing the Palestinian construction workers again. We needed them, but we were also a little afraid they’d kill us or, even worse, stay forever. These were both things the Palestinians were sometimes into doing. That’s why I existed. I was responsible for checking to see that the workers owned a permit that assured they weren’t the type likely to stay in Israel forever or try to kill us. The permit said they were only allowed to stay for the daytime. Then they had to leave Israel and go back to the territories. They got to see us every day, if they did what was right. And we got to see them too.
I also had to make sure they weren’t carrying weapons or about to explode their bodies. We were there to notice what the government wanted us to, dangers, but I would still only notice what I happened to notice. This was because I couldn’t realize I was a soldier. I thought I was still a person.
Fadi, the person I first noticed that day, was very close to the front of the line of workers. I noticed him because even though I could not see his face, even though they were all too far away to have faces, I could tell he was looking at me as though I had made a decision. A decision of horror. A future thing I had not yet done wrong yet nevertheless I could not undo. His curved chin was held up, as if destined never to budge, and pointing right at me, as if it were an eye. From that distance I must not have had much of a face for him to see, but I swear I knew he had already chosen me then.
On the asphalt road by the checkpoint, cars were lining up.
It was not my decision to be there, wearing that blue beret. I didn’t want this. I said no.
I DIDN’T know this before I joined the army, but there were three general types of checkpoints, and mine was the dumbest. Some checkpoints were placed in the middle of a Palestinian village or on a main road, like Route 433, that linked one Palestinian town to another; those soldiers checked them while they were inside their land. This may sound crazy, but these were the places most bombs and guns were found. Others checked people for medical permits, people who could only get the treatment they needed in our hospitals. Even if an ambulance came howling and the sick person was howling too, they checked, because of that one pregnant woman from when I was in fourth grade. The one who had a nine-month-old fetus in her stomach and a bomb with a diameter of thirty centimeters under her gurney. Both these types of checkpoints showed that we would not let our lives be cheap, but my checkpoint only showed that we wanted our homes to be cheap, and that the Palestinians’ anger could be bought, that very same anger that was so deep it sometimes killed us.
Most days there were workers in line who didn’t make it through, and the Israeli contractors who waited for their workers at the other end of the checkpoint would curse at us soldiers. And the Palestinian workers would curse at us soldiers. I was usually called a Russian whore, except for one time when someone called me a German bitch. That made me smile, but only for a minute.
THE WEEK before the day I first saw Fadi, one of the Israeli contractors followed me behind the sand dunes where I had just finished peeing and asked me why there were only five soldiers checking people but ten soldiers checking cars. He said that every time one of us went to pee the line slowed and that this was no way for something professional to operate, that a businessman like him didn’t need to be subjected to the mercy of the bladder of a teenager. He didn’t catch me with my pants down, but the fluid that had soaked into the sand stood between us. I had no answer.
“I don’t work for you,” I told the contractor. I thought he would curse me, but instead he asked another question, which was worse.
“Who do you work for?”
When I lowered my eyes and stood without words, I saw that fruit flies swarmed over the wetness.
IT WAS getting close to when we would have to start passing the Palestinian men through into Israel. I heard Hebron’s muezzin through the speakers singing the call of prayer and looked at the first rays of sun spreading like dots of ink. I was so tired I had to slap my face so that I would not fall asleep standing up.
I hated so much and mostly myself when I was this tired. There was sour sloshing in my stomach and up my throat, and I could smell the stench of my own breath mixing with the smell of the toothpaste on my yellow teeth. I hated how disheveled I looked, like a child drowning in a green uniform, playing make-believe. I hated that even though I was wearing a bulletproof vest, and even though I looked like a kid holding a gun, my breasts were so large that I knew they showed through all I was wearing. I hated so many things I said—a long time ago, some lies I told when I was drunk at a high school party, a party I should have stopped but didn’t when I was a senior. But mainly I hated the dumb chatter I exchanged with the Ethiopian and Moroccan girls in my unit outside our caravans on all nights while we smoked our lives away into the smallness of the night. They were worse than the girls in high school.
Waking up every morning was a tragedy, like killing your own mother, or losing your virginity to a guy who will only sleep with you once, and real
izing what you have done just as you are forced to open your eyes. The walls pounded my eyes and head and neck like I was waking up inside a white, shiny boom box. And I never liked music. I would give so much, everything, for sleep, or so I thought. The problem was that every evening I would forget just how much, and I became scared of that bed where tragedy took place every morning. I went to sleep only when I couldn’t help falling asleep.
If I could I would burn the blue beret on my head. But it was on my head.
More men. More men. More men.
I wanted to say that day that there was only one of me and demand to go back to my shabby dreams, but my shift was starting. The gates opened, and the metal rotated, and the men went through the machine that lit up green or red, then they stood across from the cement barricade that protected me and the four other soldiers checking IDs and bags.
MY OLDER sister Sarit told me that if I insisted enough, the sorting officer would cave. That all I had to do was say, “I won’t go, I won’t go, I won’t go.” She even specifically warned me that the worst thing that could happen was that they would place me in a military police unit and make me wear a dreadful blue beret. No other soldier would ever want to talk to me, because they would all see my blue beret and fear that I had the authority to write them up and report them for having a red hair tie instead of a black or an olive green one, or for wearing their everyday uniform coat over their official uniform, or for listening to headphones while crossing the road, or whatever stupid shit military police soldiers were responsible for writing other soldiers up for.
I told her to stop talking. So my sister said anyone that got placed in military police was an idiot. She said there were other army positions to be careful of, and that of course the best was what she was, a paratroopers’ instructor, and I told her to stop talking.
“They might tell you that they’ll put you in jail. That no one will ever hire you after that. That Mom and Dad will disown you. That you will never find love. That you will become a homeless person. Whatever it is they tell you, just say, ‘I won’t go, I won’t go, I won’t go,’ and eventually they’ll assign you somewhere else, and—”
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel Page 5