The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel

by Shani Boianjiu

  I breathed in the gunpowder that was on all of our fingers and the cedar trees of the base. And I just understood that there are people who live for the fight; for the moments before you lose or win. People for whom this world is not enough; they want ice water in their veins, beauty at any cost, climbing out of ditches under gunfire, exploding necklaces of grenades. Fascinating people for whom torture is not even within the realm of imagination. And I looked at the many men on the sands. Each one of them had shoulders much wider than my own that I knew would probably do him no good in what was to come. And then I knew: those fascinating people—I was never one of them.

  II

  The

  Diplomatic

  Incident

  The first thing we need to know is that when the diplomatic incident occurred, Yael was stationed at a training base near Hebron. Lea was in officers’ training school. They had nothing to do with it. Avishag was on the Egyptian border when the incident unfolded, in guarding towers and at checkpoints. She got through the months of her watch-monitor shifts just fine. She was serving in the army’s only female-dominated infantry unit, as a common soldier on the border, when it happened. But Avishag did not have the power to script what happened that day. We could blame Avishag, or Israel, or Egypt, or even America if we felt like it. But what good would that do us?

  The second thing we need to know is that infantry officer Nadav has no complaints with us. None. He is not pointing any fingers at his school friends, or at his dad, or at the Israeli government, or at any government, really, and he is not about to blame it on “War.” If Nadav has a problem with anyone, it is with God. When he was seven, six even, he would often stop in the middle of his homework or in the middle of watching the Ninja Turtles, put his miniature chin in his chubby hands, and say, “If I have a problem with anyone, it is with God.”

  He would actually say that. A six-year-old! He was very mature for his age, our Nadav, and absolutely adorable, even before his mother died in the bus suicide bombing of line 5 (the 1991 one, by Afula Central; not the first one, the one that was in the spring). And it was the little things that Nadav would like to complain about. Like when you have your birthday in kindergarten and they make you bring your parents and cake to school. Nadav only had his dad and the cake was store bought. They made Nadav sit on a chair surrounded by balloons in front of the entire class and stare at the cake that rested on the tiny table. When he blew out his candles, the smell of dead fire mixed with that of the balloon rubber and cheap chocolate icing. On his right, his dad was trying to make himself small enough to fit on the child-sized wooden chair. On his left sat no one.

  He is just saying, if you make a plan that every child should have two parents, and then you make a world where everywhere you go there is a right side of a kid and a left side of a kid, a wrong and a right, a white and a black, a chair and another chair, a dad and a mom, a mom, well, it is just not fair to all of a sudden say to just one specific person, “Sorry, you are not going to fit in with the plan.” Nadav is just saying, as a God you shouldn’t go around doing shit like that. It is sick, that’s what it is.

  That’s all officer Nadav has to say. He does not wish to talk further.

  WE MAY think that Tom had the easiest job in the Israeli Defense Forces, but he knew that in all truth he actually had the hardest job in the whole world. Yes, he did spend his entire service in Tel Aviv, only a five-minute walk from Azrieli, the biggest and brightest mall in the country—that is, after all, where the headquarters of the army are located, and the general chief of staff’s office; and he did get to go home every night at eight o’ clock and sleep at his parents’ house, even; and all he had to do for the eleven hours he was on duty was to sit behind a wooden desk and stare at a red phone. But wait—do we really know how hard it is to stare at a red phone that never rings? Every day, from eight to eight, with only two thirty-minute breaks for eating and peeing? For three years? Put nothing but a phone on your desk and try staring at it. You won’t make it past fifteen minutes.

  There are thirty-four cubicles in Tom’s office, and luckily for him his is located so that if he stretches out his neck he can see the two leaves of a ficus plant and the clock on the wall. He has made a deal with himself that he can’t start thinking about Gali until he only has fifteen minutes left. Before that, he does everything else. He plucks his eyebrows with his fingers. He counts his teeth with his purple tongue piercing. He thinks of Katie Holmes, then Shakira. But of Gali Tom doesn’t daydream until there are only fifteen minutes left in his shift. He can’t; otherwise it hurts too much.

  He is going to see Gali tonight for the first time in two months, so that could explain the third leg he immediately gets as he allows the smell of her Herbal Essences pomegranate shampoo to resurface in his mind, but we know he actually gets it every time he lets himself think of her. The worst is when he gets it right in the middle of a shift. There could be the tiniest speck of dust in the still office air, he could sneeze and remember the time she sneezed when he last saw her—her tight copper ponytail bouncing up and down—and that would be it: he would be done for for the remainder of his shift, and it would hurt.

  DOES ANYONE know how to say “Don’t do it” in Ukrainian? We should have learned how to speak Ukrainian. Not the whole language—it would have been enough if we just knew how to say “Don’t do it.” Anything could have stopped Masha that day. She was not really all that bad of a girl.

  Even though Berezhany, Ukraine, is a small town, Masha got to be alone all the time because of her job. She was responsible for numbering and filing the completed order forms of the shoes that were made in the factory on any given day, so she only really had to work after other people had already been working for quite a few hours making the shoes. She didn’t have to be at the office until noon each day, and sometimes even if she came in at one Julian would let her get away with it. She got to have lunch with her old mother, who would kiss her on the forehead when she stood at the threshold heading out. When she walked through the market to work, she got to stop by the tomato man and watch him as he restacked his tomatoes into a perfect triangle and then started all over again, sighing. All the children were at school, all their parents were at work, and the only people around were the elderly and the unemployed, who all roamed the streets with patient, soft steps. Everything was ordinary, but lighter—like seeing a video recording of your bedroom when you were not there.

  At first she liked staying in the office and recording the completed order forms after everyone was already at home, having dinner with their families. All the cubicles around her were dark, and she would close her eyes and imagine that if someone were to look at the office from an aerial view, all he would see were two dots of light sparkling in the dark of the office—her cubicle and Julian the boss’s office.

  But then she got bored. She had been dating Phillip for two years, and when she would look to the cubicle on her right, she would see a framed picture of a stranger’s family by a Christmas tree, and she would see herself as the wife, holding the little one and pointing up to the Nativity star. And when she would look to the cubicle to her left, she would see another framed picture and it would be her as the wife again, a little fatter and redheaded this time, and surrounded by four boys with too many freckles.

  The first thing she took from the desk of one of the cubicles was a pen. It was red and had teeth marks on it, and she placed it two cubicles to the right of where she had found it. From that cubicle she took a stapler and placed it four cubicles to the left. But no one noticed, even though she waited for a week, then two more days. Deep down she knew that sooner or later she would get to the pictures. She loved imagining what it would be like to look up from your cubicle one day and see that your wife wasn’t your wife, and your kids were not your kids. Or better yet, what it would be like to have a picture of another family at your desk and never notice.

  And no one did notice. And a week passed, then two days, then a month. Soon, none of t
he framed pictures on the desks belonged to their rightful owners. She was beginning to rotate them, spending a whole night arranging the pictures of the wives in a pattern of blonde, brunette, blonde, when—

  “You are a bad girl, aren’t you?” she heard Julian whispering from behind her. His wife’s picture was the only one she couldn’t touch—he always spent his nights closed in his office. But something else told her she shouldn’t do it. That something told her she should never have started the job in the first place, and that no good was ever going to come out of a job that requires you to stay in the office until midnight with your married boss. Masha had always been a smart, observant girl.

  Don’t do it, Masha.

  Julian gently grasped her by her boney wrist, but she clenched the picture frame she was holding strongly in her hand and looked him in the eyes. She breathed once. She breathed twice. She was breathing.

  And that was that.

  WHEN TOM and Gali first kissed in high school, he swore he would never let a girl like that go. And he never did let her go, except the army came; then he and Gali wanted different things; then they were different things; then they seemed to be in different places all the time. It was clear to Tom from the time he was ten that he was not going into anything resembling combat. The official doctor’s note that got him out of combat service cited chronic migraines, and the truth was that the problem did have something to do with his head: he paid 120 shekels a month to get his auburn hair highlighted, and he would die before subjecting his hair to a helmet. His eyes were the shade of green that required just a touch of eyeliner every morning to make them stand out. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep up with that while fighting terrorists and all.

  But it was also clear to Gali from the time she was ten that she wanted to fire off weapons and make things explode and run after suicide bombers on the hills. Gali knew her parents had made her limbs from scratch, and she always hoped that those limbs had a purpose. Luckily for her, by the year she was old enough to join the army, the first-ever predominately female infantry unit was already in existence, and the opportunity was too good for her to pass up. Despite what we might be inclined to think of her, Gali actually enjoyed the company of female friends quite a bit and was always popular among them at school despite her looks. But little did she know that they were going to put this experimental female-friendly unit on the Egyptian border, on a border that had been peaceful for the last thirty years. Now she was stuck guarding in towers where nothing ever happened and manning checkpoints where the most excitement was when someone caught smuggled DVDs or smuggled people or smuggled produce or smuggled pot. Her hands were tied most of the time; someone higher up would give an order to let whatever those things were into Israel. She only got to go home to see her boyfriend once every two months.

  AND NOW it is Friday. Tom has the weekend off, Gali has the weekend off too, and it is the weekend. She should be coming into Tel Aviv’s central bus station right now, or maybe she is already in a service cab on the way to his house. Tom gets every other weekend off, but again, this doesn’t mean he agrees with us that his job is easy. Staring at a phone he knows is not going to ring. When he first learned he would be stationed at these offices, only twenty minutes away from his house, he thanked his mom profusely for pulling all the strings she had with the wife of the general chief of staff’s personal assistant. They treated him like a king, in a way, and his direct commander even said that he could choose which phone to sit by. Each phone was meant to be a forever open channel of communication between the Israeli army and the armies of other countries, and Tom was even given the opportunity to choose the phone given to the Lebanese army, which had rung many times during that recent nasty war.

  He knew the phone connected to the Egyptian army would probably never ring. And he knew that even if it did, the phone call would have nothing to do with Gali. And he knew that even if the phone call did have something to do with Gali, it would almost a million percent not be her on the line. And still he chose Egypt, because if he was going to spend three years waiting for a phone to ring, he wanted to preserve the possibility that maybe, somehow, in a weird and unbelievable way, that phone call was going to be from her.

  “ONE DAY is onion; another day is honey,” Hamody’s uncle mumbled, signaling his wife to fill his china white coffee cup by lifting it and tilting it side to side.

  “But uncle,” Hamody said. He wanted to say, “But uncle, I love her,” but he didn’t, because he didn’t want to sound cliché.

  “This too shall pass,” his uncle continued. “Moa’alems don’t marry Christian girls.”

  Most of the time Hamody loved that his uncle was the head imam of the entire western part of Egypt. Most of the time he loved his uncle more than anything in this world.

  “She will never marry you either,” his uncle said. The smoke in the room got into Hamody’s eyes. He wasn’t crying. “Better one bird in your hand than two birds on the tree,” his uncle said, and laughed.

  But Hamody wanted the girl precisely because of that. Not because she was a Christian girl, because she wasn’t really; at least not in Hamody’s eyes. She wasn’t a Muslim girl in his eyes either—she wasn’t a girl at all. She was a bird on a tree, that one, waiting for Hamody to climb up, too strong headed to use her wings and fly to him. During his junior year of high school he had watched her walk to the grocery store every Friday with her baby brother under one dark arm and a chorus of her other siblings humming around her. She would balance the wheeled grocery bag with her other dark arm. Whenever young men offered to help her with her groceries, and they did, what she would do was place the baby in their arms and continue wheeling away the groceries.

  “Why, thank you for your help,” Hamody heard her say once to one of the many unsuspecting suitors who were left cradling a fussy baby, running after the dark girl in silent disbelief. And Hamody laughed, and he laughed.

  “Why put a healthy head into a sickbed?” Hamody’s uncle said. Hamody could feel the river of creamy black coffee gushing through his veins, pooling in his brain. He had wondered before why he had ever told his uncle about his feelings, and he now remembered that it had not been him talking the other week; it had been the coffee.

  “Oh, Hamody. God hands his treasures to every person on this earth equally; it is just that some people choose not to enjoy their treasures,” his uncle said. “We can’t want everything we see, only what we can have.”

  “DUDE, WHAT are you doing here so early?” Tom asked Oleg, the Russian guy who covered the night shift on the phone connecting the Egyptian army and the general chief of staff of the Israeli forces.

  “You know, bus got in early, figured I’d spare you the last five minutes,” Oleg replied.

  Tom was really in awe at how bighearted those Russians could be sometimes. He wouldn’t add a minute to his time there. He got up, careful to use his JanSport backpack to cover the front of his pants, and walked all the way through the office and by the barbed-wire fences of the base and right through the gates that led to the heart of the bustling, gaudy streets of Tel Aviv. The Azrieli mall tower loomed above him, shining like a mouthful of diamonds. Cars were chasing and catching one another’s colors on the highway. It was then, standing by a street vendor of organic juices made from oranges and wheatgrass, that he could feel something vibrating inside the pants of his green uniform. He pushed the M-16 further down his back and reached toward his pocket to read Gali’s text.

  plz dont be mad stuck in the base till 2 weekend from now plz reply plz don’t be mad i miss u

  Tom put the phone back in his pocket. He was already starting to feel it hurting. And we do know, we do, how impossible it is to do nothing but stare at a phone for eleven hours. Yes, a phone. And so we cannot really blame Tom for not texting Gali back, and we cannot truly blame him for where his legs took him next.

  IT WAS already ten at night, and Tom still hadn’t texted Gali back. She knew because even though she was not technically all
owed to bring her cell phone with her to the border checkpoint, she still did it, putting it on vibrate and hiding it between her heart and the bulletproof cement vest she was wearing. From afar, she sort of looked like a man, or a frog, or a frog man, with her green outer vest full of bullets and smoke grenades and green helmet on top. When Jenna the Russian was taken to the hospital for dehydration (that stupid overachieving cow), Gali volunteered to stay on base even though it was time for her weekend vacation at home.

  “Hi, Gali. Would you take a look at this ID?” Avishag asked. She was the other corporal on truck-gate duty with Gali that night. Her straight hair was jabbing out of her helmet as if it were suffocating at the roots. Officer Nadav was sitting on a white plastic chair overseeing the two, cracking his fingers and leisurely observing Avishag’s every move.

  The ID Avishag showed Gali read, “Mustafa Al-Zain.” He was an Israeli Arab, according to his ID, which seemed pretty valid. In his picture he was smiling so hard his red nose was curling inward, and although his ID said he was forty-two years old, he looked about twenty, and rather sweet.

  “Hi, Mustafa,” Gali said, leaning carefully toward the front-seat window, aiming at it with her M-16 as the procedures required. “Your ID says you live in one of the villages up north. What are you doing all the way down south?”

  “Come on, dude, don’t give me a hard time. I was just seeing the beauties of Egypt. Can’t a man just see the beauties of Egypt?” Mustafa replied. Behind him were nothing but hills of sand, like giant tan spoons lying upside-down on a beige dinner table.

  “But in a truck?” Avishag chimed in, faking a curious tone and raising her eyebrows.