The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel

by Shani Boianjiu

  “Stop. Talking!” I said.

  In the sorting officer’s office the day I was drafted, the sorting officer spoke before I sat down.

  “Military police,” she told me. Of course that was what she said. Naturally. “It is the only boot camp I have open this week.”

  “I won’t go,” I said.

  “Everyone says that,” the officer said, and crossed her arms. She was smiling.

  “I won’t go. I am smart. I got good grades. I can translate things.”

  “I don’t have any intel spots. All I have is the spots they give me, and all I have left is military police. Besides, they are trying to diversify the unit, make it more socioeconomically diverse or something, and you have great grades.”

  “You mean that everyone there can’t read. I won’t go. I am not about to spend two years of my life handing out reports in some bus station to soldiers who are wearing yellow socks,” I said. I was afraid, shy about how confident I was. This was my first day as a soldier. I was eighteen and spiteful. After graduation, when there were no more girls to be bitchy to, I read a lot and followed sophisticated American TV shows: The West Wing, Sex and the City. It was just my luck that I was randomly drafted last.

  “Look, if you physically resist going, I’ll have to throw you in jail for a few weeks that won’t count toward your mandatory service time, and then when you come out I’ll still place you in military police.”

  “I won’t go. I won’t go.”

  “There is more to military police than the proper-appearance write-ups. It is actually a really important role. Different soldiers do different things. You’ll like it, I swear.”

  “But I won’t go,” I said. I believed it when I said it.

  “Oh, but you will,” the officer said.

  “No.”

  “Your parents will never speak to you again.”

  “No.”

  “No one will hire you.”

  “No.”

  “You’ll have regrets.”

  “But I won’t go.”

  In the end I went, because the officer knew even before I did that I’d go. That I was always going to go.

  THERE WAS actually nothing special about Fadi, the man I noticed that day, or so I thought until I looked, and stopped, and thought hard. It had been a few months since I had thought hard, so I wasn’t used to doing it.

  He was one of the first men to show me his ID that morning. He passed through the machine with a lowered head and put his ID on the cement barricade. It was a green ID. It said his name was Fadi. Inside the ID was the white permit. It was stained brown, but it was the right permit, the construction-work permit that was the only permit we were allowed to accept at that checkpoint, other than a medical permit. I pointed to his plastic bag.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “What is in there? What could be in there? Food. Pita,” Fadi answered. His voice exploded at the vowels.

  “Can I see it?” I asked. I signaled with my hand. I didn’t always check all the bags. I was supposed to check them at random, so I usually checked every third or fifth one, but suddenly I didn’t want this man to leave me. There was something about him. His outfit was standard—a cheap old button-down shirt that was meant to garnish him with dignity but only intensified his sadness, its collar mocking his drained, barely shaven face.

  He had murky rims under his eyes and hairs in his nose. He smelled of sweat and aftershave. He was like the rest of them, but he stood with urgency. He did not want to be there. He was almost not there, but he was. He was clasping his plastic bag and he was almost not there but he was and I could feel my eyes jolt.

  “Can I see it?” I asked again. I was crying, but it was a physical cry, one brought on by exhaustion and the wind hitting my face. I cried all the time, but only physically. The man, Fadi, still would not let go of his bag, and I knew, I decided, that I would sleep that night and think of him. There was something about him, and that something would help me sleep.

  Fadi flipped the plastic bag and shook it, and pitas fell to the sand like leaves. This was not the first time one of the men in my line had done that, but there was something different about how he did it, how injured he was by my request. It was more than a gesture. Behind him I could see Yaniv sticking his head inside the car of one of the Palestinians and making small talk. Talking very small, I was sure.

  “Here, here you go. I don’t need food. You have it and be happy,” Fadi said, and then took his ID from the cement barricade and walked away, flailing his arms.

  AT NIGHT I could hear the Ethiopian and Moroccan girls talking and smoking in the wooden pergola outside our caravan. They were talking about what’s better, to tell a friend if someone is gossiping about her or not to tell a friend. They were stupid. Their problems were all outside of their heads. Everyone in the transitions unit was stupid. It was a unit designed for stupid poor people. People the army thought could do little except check IDs. We were stationed in places just as dangerous as the exalted infantry units, but when an infantry soldier passed through our checkpoint with his green or red or brown beret, he pointed, and then he laughed. He was a hero and we were not heroes; we were just the police.

  I buried myself under the wool blanket of my field bed and thought of Fadi. After boot camp, when I was first stationed, I used other things to make me sleep. At first I thought about my boyfriend, about when we slept together, one of the dads of the girls I hated in my class, all the best times and times that never happened as I imagined but now I could imagine. In my thoughts my boyfriend was much stronger than I ever let him be in real life, and he would always start by pushing me against a wall, and I would always be surprised. In life, my boyfriend said that I should stop crying every time after it was all finished, because he would break up with me if I didn’t stop, because it freaked him out. Also because he worried that if I kept doing it, then one day he would not be able to tell the difference between when I was sad and when I wanted sex. In the end he broke up with me, and he was also right. I would always cry when I remembered the sex, and so I stopped thinking about that at night in my field bed because I assumed I cried too much during the day already.

  For a week I thought about Dawson’s Creek and Ally McBeal when I tried to fall asleep. Shows that were popular before I had a boyfriend. I remembered every episode. I remembered the punch lines and the way the light fell on the water. But everything that seemed so wonderful to me then, the things I imagined myself doing if I were a part of the show, the characters I thought I could be or meet—none of it seemed interesting anymore. I knew I would never enjoy watching those shows again.

  Then I thought about the games I used to play with Yael. The time we pretended we were reporters, the time we pretended an elevator was a spaceship, the times we let Avishag join and play Exquisite Corpse with us. All the stories we made up. But after a while I realized I was inventing most of those memories. I stared at the bulletproof vest on the floor and realized I did not truly remember what it felt like to play games. And I knew if I invented any more memories of games it would only remind me of the memories I had lost, so I stopped.

  This is how small my life was: after the games, after my third idea, there was nothing more I could think of.

  The evening I began thinking about Fadi, he became my new idea. I imagined him talking with his wife, Nur, as they smoked a hookah stuffed with apple-flavored tobacco on their sun porch. I imagined that must have been the evening Nur put her foot down. On the specific evening I was imagining, an evening from the past, Nur asked Fadi to get a job in construction in Israel. Fadi did not want to go. He did not want to take money from the Israelis. He did not want to be torn from his dreams only to stand in line for hours and wait for a girl half his age to bark orders at him. He did not want to go. He wouldn’t.

  “I won’t go,” Fadi said.

  “But we have five children,” Nur said. “We need money for Nadia’s university. We need better formula for the baby.”
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  “I won’t go.”

  “But you haven’t worked in months. You won’t find a job in Hebron.”

  “I won’t go.”

  “But I will leave you if you don’t. I will leave you and no one in the family would blame me for it and you will die alone.”

  “I won’t go.”

  “Oh, but you will,” his wife said and looked out to the lights coming from a neighbor’s home, and because she knew that he would surrender, he did surrender and he did go.

  I felt sleep touching me then leaving, touching me then almost staying. It was hard to breathe under the blanket. Outside, I could hear the girls talking and smell their cigarettes and shampoos. They said “calories” many times, and also

  “That’s what’s really bad.”

  I tried to think of what Fadi could be doing right then, rather than in the past, and decided that he must be arguing with Nur. That he was yelling at her as she made him his pita sandwiches filled with okra and hummus for the next morning. That he was still saying he wouldn’t go. That Nur, beautiful Nur, was not even looking at him, but that when he said she was the devil she threw his sandwiches in the trash and then walked behind the kitchen counter and passed him and that all Fadi wanted was for her to touch his shoulder for one second, but Nur walked right by him and into their bedroom and Fadi fell asleep on the floor in the kitchen, his head resting on Nur’s coat that he pulled from the coat hanger by the door, by the door, the closed door, that door that is closed—

  When I woke up the next morning, I was tired, but less.

  The ride to the checkpoint was usually all the torture that is inherent in movement. Breaths and moans and the webs of sleepy eyes of all of us jumbled. I was yanked from slumber and immediately boarded the bulletproof green van, with its miniature barred windows and thick metal skin. My head bobbed and smashed and hurt as the van glided along the territories we occupied. When the movement halted, all I arrived at was men, a line of men, all these men, waiting for me, raging through stillness.

  The ride the morning in which I was less tired, the morning after I first thought of Fadi, was almost just a regular nice ride, though. Almost, I swear.

  I SAID no again when Yaniv asked me to do cars for a bit, and then he told me a dick is like a boomerang.

  “A dick is like a boomerang,” he said. He was chewing gum like a dumb cow, but he was a boy. “You understand?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

  “You know what it means to throw a dick at someone?” Yaniv asked. “It means that you are showing you don’t care about them.”

  I had never heard this expression before. There were so many expressions I never heard before I joined the transitions unit. Hyperbolic, Moroccan, so many inane forms of speech.

  “Well, I actually don’t care about you,” I said.

  It was true. I hated him, and on mornings like that one when I was not so tired, I hated him even more than I hated myself. I hated the way he chewed gum as he high-fived the people he knew in the cars. I hated the way he would kiss all the girls who would let him on both cheeks. I hated his cologne and that he plucked his eyebrows. I hated that he wore a giant golden Star of David around his neck and that he sang Mizrahi music to himself and always talked jokingly about how much he hated our officers and his blue beret and of how he guessed that this must be his messed-up destiny. I hated that he smiled and that despite his whining I would sometimes catch him enjoying it—he loved bending down and sticking his neck inside windows and chatting up the drivers, and he did not understand the difference between horror and honor or he did understand but didn’t care. He lugged his neck as if it were light.

  “Well, that’s why the whole point is that a dick is like a boomerang. You throw it at someone, and it comes right back at you,” Yaniv said.

  When I saw him smiling and sticking his neck down a window later that day, I thought about telling. I knew everyone would hate me for it, but I actually thought about telling my officer, who was walking between the cement barricades and the cars and must have seen Yaniv sticking his neck in cars, chatting and kissing babies and taking figs and olive oil bottled in used Coca-Cola bottles. The officer saw everything, but if I told, he would have to do something; he would have to. If I were an officer, I would never let one of my soldiers violate regulations like that. The regulations we learned in boot camp said that we must always place our guns between our bodies and the open windows of the Palestinians passing through checkpoints. That the Palestinians had to put their IDs and papers on the hood of the car and then close the window as the soldier approached to look through them. No one followed that, but at least they didn’t kiss babies, and they didn’t lie about their bad backs and—

  I truly might have told on him except Fadi was back. I saw him nearing the head of the line and I knew that he was hoping I wouldn’t be the one who would call him to approach the barricade. I watched him lower his stare and scratch his nose and kick the sand and hope for someone other than me. But I was also watching the other soldiers and delayed the man I was checking by looking long and hard at his ID until I saw that it was about to be Fadi’s turn and that all the other soldiers were still checking IDs, and then I called for him.

  He looked me straight in the eyes like he did not know me at all or like he wanted me to die, but I knew I knew him and the sum of him.

  This is how I knew: he did not have a plastic bag. I had been right in imagining what I had. His wife had not given him pitas the night before. He was wearing the same button-down shirt, and his face was marked with edgy sleep. He reeked of sweat.

  It was not that I believed that all the things I imagined happened in real life; it was that I thought that maybe it would be better if I did believe them, and I was not crying, and I wanted to keep being less tired.

  I watched Fadi walk away after I gave him back his ID and papers. A contractor with a cigarette in his mouth put a hand on Fadi as soon as he neared, and I could see Fadi’s body flinching, how much wrong was in that very touch, how he wished he could punch the man, or scurry, or revolutionize his life, but he couldn’t.

  I knew that that night I would fall asleep thinking about Fadi coming home and punching his wife, Nur, just one punch to the jawline and then Nur’s calm.

  I SPENT the weeks prior to my draft trailing after Mother, who was holding the list of supplies the army had sent and comparing prices across stores, in outlet malls that were placed hours away from our village up north. Seven pairs of olive green socks. Sunscreen. Toothpaste. Enough sanitary napkins for two months. Mosquito repellent. Twenty sturdy rubber bands, to hold up the bottoms of the uniform pants.

  My huge backpack, the one our high school gave to every graduate, was printed with the blessing “Go in peace, dear graduates. We are here for you and we will always love you.” The backpack was packed and ready for the morning to come.

  Mother and I took a bus to the Haifa drop-off spot, where another bus was waiting to take all the northern kids to Tel Aviv, to the central sorting base, where we would get the military equipment and our assignments for the next few years.

  Girls with too much makeup held signs with painted hearts and kisses. These girls were crying and hugging and screaming to their friend as she climbed on the bus. “Read our letters only once the bus pulls away! We love you, babe!”

  A boy kept trying to get his girlfriend to stop kissing him. She was teary and her nose was dripping, but she would not stop kissing him even when he had to get on the bus. One boy who wore a yarmulke brought his whole family. Really, that must have been the entirety of his family. All grandparents. All aunts. All uncles. All and all. They were crying. But also clapping. All of them.

  I had thought about telling my friend to come, Yael, but I didn’t, because Yael was more my only friend who was not yet drafted than my actual, true friend. Because I was not a girl who had friends. I had a herd of retarded girls who followed me around for most of high school, but I never quite saw the need
for friends, and I actually liked that it was only Mother and me that day. It was as if it proved my suspicion that friends are frivolous at the end of it all.

  Mother kept on humming a song I had never heard before as we stood in the parking lot and waited to hear my name.

  “Stop it!” I shouted, and then Mother started to cry. She was nervous because I was her last child; because I was her weakest.

  Mother stopped crying right before I was called to get on the bus. “It’s going to be Ok,” she told me. “Everyone does this. These will be the best years of your life,” Mother whispered. She held my face in both hands.

  “I am fine. I am sure I will be home for vacation in no time,” I said.

  “Yes,” Mother said. “Yes,” she said, and she didn’t let go.

  “I need my face, Mother,” I said. “I need my face.”

  AND THAT night, the night after Fadi came to the checkpoint with no pitas, Fadi came to visit my head without me even trying.

  “I won’t go,” Fadi said. “Don’t make me go to work again.” He was on the floor of his kitchen, sobbing.

  “You are not a teenage girl,” Nur said. “You mustn’t cry like that. Grown men don’t cry like that.”

  Fadi stood up. He watched Nur chop onions for the weekend casserole. “I won’t go,” he said. He was choking on his words. “My life should be more than this. Avi the contractor said he bought his son a new bike this week. He has a bike, and he is a quarter my age. I never had a bike. This isn’t fair.”

  “Who do you think you are? Do you think you are some spoiled Israeli boy? You are a Palestinian man and this is your life. This is what we have to do,” Nur said. She wiped her neck with the dishcloth, and this disgusted Fadi. He had noticed wrinkles around her neck, hanging, useless skin that was not there when he agreed to marry her, and this disgusted him more.