Person B
Tongue click, no good whisper, what is the point of anything if I am never … if I am never all these millions of things? The magic had won. The thoughts were everything; soon there would be no me. My shoulder was warm and wet from the gunshot, I could hear fewer screams of others, and I could see the fence. There was sand in my mouth and I waited for it to be over. I didn’t feel sad; I felt relieved, saved. I bent to the side not because I wanted to breathe but because my body made me. I curled up my legs and hugged the broken branches of the tree with my arms. I put my chin between my hands. A curled-up creature. My shoulder got warmer. Then my other shoulder got warm too, but a different type of warm, warm from the touch of someone who wasn’t me. Warm like forgiveness, warm like a mother.
Person A
The people that don’t exist, I still can’t find them on the green monitor when I come back from the bathroom. The other watch girls are all excited. Gali, who did boot camp with me, tells me the excitement is because once again some Sudanese people tried to jump the fence, but the Egyptians shot almost all of them before the Sudanese even realized they were close. A lot can happen in ten minutes. I close my eyes to wipe the tears with my eyelids before they roll down. I am crying, but only because in this very second a jab cuts through my stomach, a different pain than before, a pain like no other, and I think now the baby is for sure gone. I only close my eyes for a second, and when I open them there still aren’t any people that don’t exist on the screen, there is only that broken tree, but also, next to it, a person on the ground. The person is much larger than the made-up people usually appear to be on the screen; it is as large as the Sudanese people usually appear on the screen. It is the size of a fingernail and cute, curled up like an alien. I can see it breathing on the bed of sand. We get in trouble if we touch the screen because it gets scratched, but I don’t care. I am thinking about someone who isn’t me. I reach and touch the green monitor—it is cold and far and real. I pretend to touch the child I’ll never meet. I pretend I don’t exist. For that while only, it gets to be only her.
Person B
Lying there on the sand by the broken tree, I could see the fence, and I could feel someone touching me. I felt someone’s hand on my shoulder for a very long time. It wasn’t a broken branch. It was a touch. A glassy, forever touch. Mom, I thought. A million times and more times and more. Mom, Mom, Mom. Once, after my father left, she taught me how to make rice. She held my hand; we stirred together. This was all a very long time ago. She held my hand, but I was small, and the rice came out hard. She said it was the water’s fault. She said the water was no good. But that was the night she stopped braiding my hair. She didn’t braid it that night, and not for any night after, or maybe it was that that was the night I stopped asking. We still ate the rice, and then we went to sleep, and then we woke up. That night, when she held my hand and we stirred—that night could have lasted forever but it didn’t. That other night, by the fence, by the broken tree, that night didn’t last forever either. Lying on the sand, I could swear, someone was touching me. But as hard as I tried to hear it, my mother’s voice was fading. The no good whispers grew quiet, then died. That old evil magic, it was now gone. And still. Someone’s hand, I couldn’t see it, but I could still feel it on my shoulder. That touch, it was not my mom. I knew, on the hospital bed in the little country, in all truth I knew it could never have been her who was touching me by that fence. Being touched like that, from such a distance, it was like being the grape I could never be—I could see it, but it couldn’t see me. When I touched the grape, my finger patted the green surface and it was cold and far and real. What happened was that someone was there but then was not, and then I, I got up and I ran to the fence made of little knives and I jumped it. Only me.
A Machine
Automatic
Gun That
Shoots
Grenades
One day, thirteen days before the war, I turned beautiful. It was the best. Don’t let anyone tell you there is anything better that can happen to a woman.
The day started in the farthest shooting range, the one with safety sleeves long enough to play with the ALGL weapon. It was a great morning, a morning that felt like a beach morning; it smelled of sunscreen.
“Yael,” Hagar told me that morning, “today will be an Ok day.”
She had said that to me every morning, though, since we became friends. This was a few months after Dana accused me of stealing her stuff and said the only way she wouldn’t tell would be if I moved into another caravan. Hagar’s caravan was the only one with a spare bed. The girls weren’t happy about me moving in. They ignored me at first, but on that day I had already gotten them to like me. On that day I had friends.
That day with the ALGL, then, was something more than Ok, because by then I had made friends with the girls in my new caravan, my first real army friends. An automatic light grenade launcher by name, the ALGL weighed as much as a second grader, and we lazily dug a hole in the sand up to our knees to stick in its pedestal. The ALGL hadn’t been used by the Israeli army in over ten years, and aside from weaponry instructors like us, only one soldier in each platoon was trained on how to set it up and aim with it. Setting up was complicated; it involved twisting knobs just enough times and lining up parts in certain angles. But once the froglike machine was planted in the sand and the string of grenades was loaded, aiming was easy. You pulled your hardest to the right. You pressed the trigger with both thumbs.
Hagar evaporated an abandoned Subaru in the range with her fifth grenade. In seconds, she shot ten more.
“A machine automatic gun that shoots grenades,” Hagar said, and removed her safety goggles and helmet. “Now, you know that has to be something only a dude could come up with.”
I looked at the Subaru’s remains through the binoculars, a kilometer and a half away. The dust swirled above it, the wheels black splotches. Each grenade had a five-hundred-meter killing radius.
“I think you are supposed to say ‘automatic machine gun,’ ” I said. “It’s the other way around.”
Hagar ignored me. She got up from the sand and took the binoculars. “I can almost hear it, the conversation when they thought it up: ‘Hey, dude, you know what would be way cool? If we had a machine automatic gun—listen to this—that shot grenades!’ ” Hagar lowered her voice and grabbed her crotch. Neta and Amit laughed, but I only smiled.
She wasn’t that good at impressions, and her long blonde hair was blinding when it met the June sun radiating from the dune. She was unmistakably a girl, and besides, it had been her idea to kill time with the ALGL that morning, and she was no dude.
It was me who told the girls I’d pass on a turn with the dumb ALGL. I remembered from basic training what the recoil felt like, how it electrified my chest cavity, and I was happy, so happy, just being with the three girls. The morning was good, and when Hagar smiled back at me, there was a stain of peach lipstick on her teeth, and there was nothing anyone could do but love her.
“Stop thinking dirty thoughts,” she told me.
“I can’t help it,” I said. “I can’t believe I have a whole week coming up with the American.”
Hagar knew Ari the American better than all of us because she had been assigned to train his foot-tracker rookies during their M-16 week three months earlier. On the side, as one of its less important missions, our base held the boot camp of the Bedouin foot trackers. Ari and another guy, Gil, had been pulled from their infantry unit to our base to serve as the foot trackers’ commanders, because the Bedouin foot trackers were retards and they couldn’t command their own boot camps. The next day, I was starting the M-16 week with Ari and his new soldiers. I was looking forward to having something to do. I was looking forward to it because even though I had a boyfriend, ever since I had cheated on him with Boris, there hadn’t been an hour when I didn’t think about doing it with someone else. More specifically, Ari.
DURING THE war, I tried to remember what we used
to do all day, but I couldn’t. Each day was its own day. The months before the war were slow. The youth in Hebron had calmed, and two of the boys from Hidna village got such a beating when they were caught after they stole the fence, none of the other boys came back to the base again. Our small base conducted five-day trainings every month for the platoon that took up the rotation around Hebron and along Route 433. We refreshed their sharpshooters, and the rest of the month we didn’t have to guard, because the platoons had enough people they could spare a few to guard the base. It was a great place for a teenager to be stationed back then. Most days were any girl’s call; for Neta, Amit, and me they were usually Hagar’s call. Some days, she would feel like shooting some weapon we had learned about in training (“I have this feeling,” she’d say, “I think it’s nostalgia”), and the weapons warehouse officer would let us take the weapon because technically it was the weaponry instructors’ responsibility to make sure all of the wartime machines worked. We never played with the same weapon twice, because afterward we were always too lazy to take the weapon apart and rub the tar inside with a cloth soaked in gasoline, so that the weapon wouldn’t rust and would work a second time.
AROUND TEN that morning, we called the van driver on the radio to take us back from the range. The four of us occupied the backseat. Neta and I had strawberry lollipops in our mouths, and my fingers were sticky. Neta’s ponytail was bobbing; Amit had her head in Neta’s lap, and she put her sandy boots over my legs. On my right, Hagar was doing something to my hair. Her long fingernails felt good when they scratched my scalp; their smell of nicotine mixed with her cucumber perfume relaxed me.
“So then I asked him what he liked about me, why he wanted to be my boyfriend, and you know what he said?” Dana asked Tamara. They were talking about Dana’s twenty-seven-year-old boyfriend. The two of them were yapping away in the two-seater in front of us. The van had picked them up at the gasoline fountain next to the weapons warehouse, where they had just finished cleaning their own personal M-4 guns. They cleaned them there every week. Like they anticipated being shipped to Iran or some shit. Any day now.
We picked Ari and Gil up near a large metal container the size of a classroom. It was an emergency storage container. The word “greens” was graffitied on its front. The rumor was that it was only half full of green bullets, that there was some room inside of it, and that Gil once snuck his girlfriend to the base and got with her inside that container.
I couldn’t see Hagar’s face, because she was still working on my hair, but I knew she was rolling her eyes at Dana. There were only sixteen females in our training base, all of us infantry weaponry instructors. The caravan in the female residency lot had four rooms, so each four-person clique got its own. But Hagar hated it that we still had to listen to the others on the van rides.
“He said he liked me because I was normal! What does that even mean?” Dana asked.
Dana and Tamara lived in my old room, room 2, the room Hagar called the “family: the future” room, because all the girls in it could talk about was their boyfriends and their future families. Room 4 was called the “family: the past” room, because the girls who lived in it chatted only about their parents and siblings. Room 1 was “the dead” room, because they talked about the dead, even though there had been no action since we were drafted. These were dead they knew from, like, high school, but they still talked about them.
This was the way the army worked. We were all killing time, and at the end of the day every person liked to talk about just one thing. For my new room, it was sex.
“He explained that before he met me, all the girls he knew from Haifa were weird, so I guess that’s a compliment, but still! I mean you tell me, Tamara—isn’t it shocking that ‘normal’ would be the adjective he would choose? I mean, is this why he loves me?” Dana went on.
In life, Hagar said, only three things made her happy: the smell of gas stations, Marlboro Lights, and sex, and her only regret was that she could never delight in all three at the same time because gasoline was flammable.
She finished with my hair, and she tied it quick and tight. Then she pulled on Dana’s ponytail, and when Dana turned, Hagar asked with a voice loud enough so that Ari and Gil in the front of the van could hear, “Hey, Dana, how good are your blowjobs?”
Dana’s face turned red. Neta was moving the lollipop in her mouth in and out. She wasn’t the brightest lightbulb, but she was my friend, and I joined her, and it was so summer, and we made Amit laugh.
“Hey, I’m just trying to help,” Hagar said. “I just wanted to save you time and let you know that that’s why he loves you—you must give pretty good head.”
That was when he turned. Ari. “Hey, play nice,” he said.
His eyes were green, just like those of Dan, a boy I loved when I was a mousy middle schooler. But now Ari looked at me like I was anything but mousy.
I swear he did!
I looked down.
This is what he said next: “Hey, you are beautiful.”
And I didn’t see, but Hagar, Amit, and Neta swore he was still looking at me.
BACK IN our caravan, my face was burning. It was noon. I was sure one of the girls had put him up to it.
Hagar, Amit, and Neta didn’t speak to me at all the first two weeks after I was placed in their room. I used to think that Lea knew how to control a flock of girls like no other, but that was before I met Hagar. During those first two weeks, the number of guys they each mentioned sleeping with was double-digit, while I had had a boyfriend for seven years and only cheated on him once, with a short Russian soldier. They hated the idea of me, or anyone, having a boyfriend. But I hated Moshe, the real boyfriend I had.
When I started hating him, it was not his fault. It was my first Passover at his house. I was sixteen. I was passionate. Ok, I was passionate. I was passionate about work immigrants, Ok, about immigration rights and all. I was young. I was talking very fast. It was past midnight. We had finished eating, said our last prayers. The white tablecloth was stained red, yellow. Empty wine bottles, dirty napkins, toothpicks, chicken bones. His cousin was twelve. She had a lisp. She was listening to me. “I can’t believe this is how we treat the people who build our homes!” she said. She really didn’t know how our country treated work immigrants, and she wanted to know more. I talked faster. I talked more. I was sixteen. I don’t even know if it was how much I spoke or the simple way I looked. I wasn’t a pretty girl, and I knew it.
I remember the weight of his father’s fingers on my shoulders. The parch of the wine as he opened his mouth. He caught me midsentence. “Let me tell you, son, I just hope for you that she’s at least a good lay.”
They pretended not to hear. He was drunk; it is what you do. I didn’t blame my boyfriend. I hated him. I wasn’t trying to prove his father wrong. It was how it happened. When we slept together, I did quadratic equations in my head.
During our last time in bed before the war, I asked him, “How come your mom always puts tahini in her eggplant salad?” He kept at it. There was a sticker I had peeled off an orange on his ceiling’s fan. I had put it there on my break the month before so I would have something to look for when I came back.
“I hate tahini,” I said. “Eggplants are so much better with mayo.”
“What?” he said. He was breathing fast. It was a Friday night. We had just finished the Sabbath dinner. Eggplants were my favorite vegetable. His mom knew that. I hated tahini. She knew that too. He was too heavy on top of me, the room too hot; I grew angry fast.
“She is cheap, that’s why,” I said. “She knows tahini will last longer than mayo.”
“Shh,” he said. “Someone could hear us.”
Hear us talking about eggplants? I went back to tracking the orange’s sticker, around and around and—
And when Hagar finally addressed me, late, in the dark, when the four of us were on our field beds, answering her question was too easy.
“Of course I think about sleeping with guys
who aren’t my boyfriend. I even did it once with a soldier I trained. And I think about Ari the American. All the time. I am thinking about him right now.”
Answering the rest of the girls’ questions wasn’t any harder.
“Of course Ari and I would do it outside!”
“I think, just from his height, it has to be at least that big.”
Soon the three girls were the nightly audience for my fantasies. I had friends. Finally. Hours and hours went by, and I never ran out of things to say. Hagar always asked for more about Ari. Dirtier, larger, in colors. Like the movies. Like America. I didn’t know where Ari was from, but he had that accent people referred to as Anglo-Saxon.
THE GIRLS swore they didn’t tell Ari to say I was beautiful in the van. So I said the only other option was that he was trying to kiss up to me, so I wouldn’t work him hard the next day during his Bedouin soldiers’ M-16 week. “Have you thought about the other other option?” Hagar asked, and she handed me her hand mirror. “You look hot,” she said.
On the van, Hagar had braided my hair in two braids and wrapped them around my head so that the skin around my eyes was tighter. My nose looked long but noble, my cheeks were sunken inside, my eyes glistened. It must have been more than the hair—I had lost weight since I joined room 3, the sex room, because all the girls did was smoke and drink Diet Coke. My yearslong acne had cleared up, but it was only that day, through Hagar’s mirror, that I noticed it. In the mornings, Hagar would sometimes get bored and wake me by plucking my black eyebrows, and it was only then that I noticed how gentle my gaze had turned because of it. I had spent years trying, but that day I turned beautiful, accidentally, and it shocked me.
I think I loved Hagar the most in that second, when I turned to look from the mirror to her and realized that she and the world must see what I saw in the mirror just then—me, beautiful.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel Page 9