“Yes, can’t a man just see the beauties of Egypt in a truck?” Mustafa said, trying his luck. But it was already too late, and he knew it. He was pressing the button to open the back of the truck as he was talking.
The truck was empty for the most part, except for three small carton boxes. It was rather clean, too, and smelled of Febreze. Gali knelt down from all her height and looked inside one of the boxes while Avishag lit her way with the massive, painfully bright flashlight. For a moment there, the two resembled searching pirates, or searching pirate princesses, at least in their inner eyes.
On top were oranges, and that was okay because it wasn’t a large enough amount that he would have to pay customs. But at the bottom of the carton box were hundreds of bootlegged DVDs. Shrek 2, Love Actually, Harold and Kumar; also Riding Miss Daisy and Gangbangs of New York.
“Officer Nadav!”
“Nadav!” the girls shouted and climbed out of the truck.
Nadav got up and walked toward the girls with a slow step and stroked his cheek with his palm. He was only a bit taller than Gali and about thirty centimeters taller than Avishag. He gently placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. His voice sounded as if it were squeezed out of him also.
“What’s the problem?” Nadav asked.
“Movies,” Gali said.
“How many?” Nadav asked.
“Probably around a thousand,” Gali said.
“Not a problem, then,” Nadav said.
“But—” Avishag tried.
“No but. If we detain him, it will be days before we get anyone from legal to press charges and take away the movies. He’ll be out in no time and just get smarter about hiding them,” Nadav said. He wasn’t looking at the girls as he was talking; he was looking at his hand on Avishag’s shoulder.
“So again we do nothing?” Avishag asked, but Nadav just stroked her behind the ear with his index finger and smiled.
“Thanks for being bitches,” Mustafa shouted as his truck drove away, leaving behind it a cloud of dust that penetrated the nose, the ears, the mouth, the pores of Avishag and Gali’s faces.
OF THE twenty-four hours in any given day, Gali and Avishag spent six hours on a border checkpoint shift, eight hours on a guarding tower shift, and the remaining ten hours doing what they wanted. Of course we know that you have to shower every day (they check), eat in the cafeteria tent (they don’t check), keep your weapon clean and your vest fully equipped (they say they’ll do random checks, but they don’t).
And sleep. You need to sleep.
But that still left the girls with some time. There was still time, all this time, hovering about them.
“YOU SAY you love me, but you never listen to a word I say,” Avishag said.
She liked being in this room. Aside from the wooden shower caravan, this officer’s office was one of the only spaces in the whole base that wasn’t a tent. And it wasn’t wooden either; it was a room made out of white cardboard, dropped down by a tractor in the middle of this nothing. There was even a green plant, a desk, and a sofa in it. And it locked from the inside.
“I do listen,” Nadav replied. He put down his M-4 underneath a chair and sat down, then bent down to remove his military boots.
“I don’t even understand what the point of us being here is—we never do anything about anything,” Avishag said. “And I thought being in combat meant something. I thought after I was done with the monitors I would actually get to do something other than just watch.”
“I know it is hard, sweetie,” Nadav said. He glanced at his black Swatch and began to unbutton his green military shirt.
“It is hard because you suck. You never let us arrest anyone. All you care about is how much downtime you get. What if the girls in the guarding tower are calling you on your radio right now? You don’t even have your radio turned on. And what if we get caught? And you never come when I am guarding to check on me or, anything, and you, and you—” Avishag said. It felt as though it has been forever since she had spoken for this long.
She tried to continue, but Nadav went over to the sofa. He lay on top of her and grabbed her thin arms. “Shhh, listen,” he said, and kissed her ear.
“It is not fair,” Avishag said, but her voice was already failing her again.
“It is not fair for me either, having to baby all of you girl soldiers,” Nadav said. He covered her mouth with his hand. “Do you think I like being the officer of this ‘female infantry experiment’? That I chose this? Some days you are the only reason why I even have the strength to put on my uniform.”
He kept her mouth covered, even though there was no need. Avishag was not going to talk. Lying on that sofa, Avishag questioned why our world even gives us words.
THE FIRST time Tom went to 52 Allenby Street was with Oleg and his two cousins. It was three months ago, on Tom’s nineteenth birthday. Both he and Oleg had the weekend off, which almost never happened because they usually took turns with their phone shifts, and Gali was not going to get a break for at least another month. Tom was so down and in his own head that week that Oleg sometimes had to shout at him just to get him to notice his shift was over. He tried to cheer him up by giving him an entire bottle of cheap Russian vodka, but to no avail.
Tom even suspected Oleg of switching his shifts around just so he would get Tom to go out that weekend, but at first Tom was in no mood.
“I just don’t feel like partying this weekend, dude,” Tom said, but it was not in the nature of our Oleg to take no for an answer.
“In Russia we say, ‘No bitch is worth crying like a bitch about.’ You understand?” Oleg said.
Tom was not convinced. “Didn’t you once yell at me that you were from Belarus, not Russia?” he asked. He then looked around the street outside the base, hoping to catch a service cab that would take him back home already.
“Whatever, man. I am telling you, where I am taking you, dude, it will be a night to remember,” Oleg said. He gave Tom his sad Russian puppy smile and pressed his chubby palms together, begging.
The service cab dropped them off in the clothing district, right by Allenby 52. The building looked like a regular clothing shop from the outside, but when they knocked on the metal door, a young, skinny Russian in sweatpants opened.
“Do you want some oranges?” he asked with a thick accent. “We have a tree right behind the shop. What do I tell you, this country has good oranges. It is on the house.”
The room had two sofas and a huge dining table, but only two white plastic chairs. On the white wall there was a yellow poster on which prices were written in thick black marker. They misspelled “All-incloded.”
“Oleg, what is this? You can’t be serious. A whorehouse?” Tom whispered. But the Russian with the oranges could hear him, and he was laughing.
“Watch your language, will you?” Oranges asked.
But the truth is Tom was surprised to learn that he wasn’t appalled. He was excited. Will these girls be hot? Could he ask them to do anything? Since that day back in tenth-grade gym class he hadn’t even kissed a girl that wasn’t Gali.
Before Tom realized it, Oleg and his cousins had paid and a middle-aged woman was there to walk them upstairs.
“What are you getting?” Oranges asked.
“Whatever is cheapest,” he said finally. “I am not really … You know, I don’t really do this type of stuff.”
“That would be just blow job. Two hundred shekels. We can charge it on credit card as massage.”
Upstairs, the hallway looked just like Tom’s brother’s university dormitory. There were rooms everywhere, as far down the green-carpeted hallway as Tom could see, but the middle-aged woman told him to go into the second room on the right. When she leaned over to point him there, her breath smelled of garlic.
The room was small, and the only furniture in it was a queen-sized white bed, draped with a shawl printed with a Middle Eastern pattern. The walls were white and smelled freshly painted. There was nothing on them.
>
The girl sat on the bed with her legs crossed. Even though her hair was bleached an industrial shade of blonde and her brown roots were showing at the top, and even though her lips were bright pink and her eye shadow purple, she still looked not much older than seventeen. She was thin. She was drowning in her sweatpants and the strap of her tank top fell from her shoulder almost all the way to her pointy elbow. Her skin was so white that against the background of the wall it was as if chunks of her were not quite there.
When she looked up, all Tom could notice were her eyes. They were so huge, so bulging and blue, it looked as if they were floating in the air.
The girl looked down again and got up to turn off the light. In the dark, Tom could feel her cold hand grabbing his and leading him to the bed. Before she could touch his belt, he got up and walked back to the wall and turned on the light. The room hummed silence.
“How about I just look at you,” he said. “I am not really—” and he stayed standing by the wall.
The girl did not reply. She just sat there on the bed and looked down. Every so often she would look up, and Tom would look and look and look at her. She was beautiful in a way, and all eyes.
That was then, on Tom’s birthday.
AVISHAG COVERS her face with her hands, but soon it is hard to breathe because her hands reek of rust from climbing up the metal ladder to the guarding tower. It is noon, and her helmet is drenched in sweat and it makes her hair itch, but she is too lazy to touch it. Besides, she is not allowed to take off her helmet while guarding.
Gali is leaning her torso out of the tower and looking at her cell phone. Avishag wants to tell her she’s stupid, that they are not allowed to have their cell phones while guarding, that they could get caught. But she doesn’t, because she knows that no one is going to catch them here. That no one cares, really, about them there.
Through the binoculars Avishag can see two Egyptian guards in the distance. Technically the girls are supposed to look through the binoculars every ten minutes, but in reality they sometimes never look at all and there is no way for anyone to know. The Egyptians are not looking through their binoculars right now, and it makes Avishag feel good, superior. She thinks that one of them has a mustache, but she can’t quite tell, and the thought of it makes her laugh.
The Egyptians are guys, but they don’t have to carry anything on them. Not a vest, no extra bullets, no helmet. Just their thin brown uniform and their M-16. They don’t even have magnifying aims on their rifles like the girls do on their M-4s. Avishag is beginning to hate the enemy, and it surprises and amuses her. Not because of the three wars and the dead and the land mines and the lies and all, but because they don’t even have to wear stupid helmets.
Gali’s long fingers are moving rapidly, texting then erasing then almost sending then erasing. Sweat gets in her eyes, a fly lands on her nose, and she is nodding her head, then shaking it to negate whatever thought she had just welcomed in.
But Avishag doesn’t notice any of this. She is looking through her binoculars, thinking of herself, thinking of the enemy, and of a mustache, and that she probably just lost her mind, but it is funny how she still feels altogether the same.
It is only Gali who knows what we know, because she can look at the time on her cell phone. The girls have exactly seven more hours to go.
SAMIR LOOKS at Hamody’s strong, dark hands as he gathers the coffee cistern and the ashtray from the floor of the guarding tower and puts them back in his knapsack. He watches as Hamody flings the knapsack with ease on his wide back, and he watches him as they both climb down the ladder, and he watches him as he jumps lightly onto the sand, barely bending his knees.
“Our four guarding hours are up!” Hamody says, smiling generously. “Say, Samir, you don’t talk much, do you?”
Samir is grateful that there are only six other soldiers in the showers that afternoon. Samir doesn’t undress quite yet, but he watches Hamody as he takes off his uniform. He keeps his gaze down, and when Hamody takes off his socks he can notice white cotton particles that remain stuck between Hamody’s long toes.
It is only after Hamody is under the water that Samir begins to undress, slowly. He takes off his brown shirt first, careful not to touch the wet circles that formed under his armpits as he folds it and puts it on the metal bench. After he takes off his pants, and then his underwear, he walks quickly to the shower at the far left side of the caravan, waving his arms in a strange and distracting manner.
He pulls down the lever and faces the wall, and then steps closer. Careful so that no one might see.
“HI, AVISHAG, would you help me take a second look at these IDs?” Gali said.
The truck was pitch black, which was odd, and larger than the girls usually saw at the border checkpoint. Officer Nadav was sitting on a white plastic chair overseeing the two, cracking his fingers.
The ID Gali showed Avishag read, “Momo Levin.” He was from a suburb of Tel Aviv, according to his ID, which seemed pretty valid. In the passenger’s seat next to him sat an Egyptian man. His passport read, “Nadim Al-Hamid,” and it too seemed pretty valid to Avishag.
“Hi, Momo,” Avishag said, leaning carefully toward the front-seat window, aiming at it with her M-16 as the procedures required. “Your ID says you live right around Tel Aviv. What are you doing all the way down south?”
“Come on, dude, don’t give us a hard time,” Momo replied. Avishag wondered if she really did look like a man from this angle, her gun aiming forward and her hair all covered inside the helmet. Or maybe it was just that somewhere along the line, someplace along the line, it had become understood that everyone was a dude of some sort, and she was the only one who had missed it.
“I am sorry,” Avishag said. “You are going to have to open the back of your truck.”
Avishag and Gali both at one point had to use a public chemical toilet that hadn’t been cleaned in over two weeks. They both knew the smell of a shirt drenched in blood at the elbows, after crawling training, and they both knew what it smelled like when they had to wear it again the next day. Avishag also knew the smell of the chest of a man who hadn’t showered in days, and the smell of his unwashed hair. She even knew the smell of her dead brother’s body, and how it mixed with the scent of fresh mud.
But even before the back of the truck was fully open, it was clear to both of the girls that they had never smelled something this awful in their lives. The smell was so strong that Avishag drew a strand of hair from under her helmet with all the force she had left and pinned it below her nose. She didn’t even realize she was doing it until her head began to throb because of how tightly her hair was pulled.
The truck was three paces wide, and on its floor sat on top of each other twelve young women. One of them was a round-faced little girl, and she had a Coca-Cola T-shirt on but no underwear or pants. The few bits of the visible floor of the truck were brown and red and damp.
Avishag closed her eyes.
Gali closed her eyes.
Gali opened her eyes. Avishag did too.
Twelve pairs of eyes were staring back at them, waiting, breathing, and silent.
“Nadav!” Gali shouted alone. “Nadav!”
Nadav the officer got up and walked toward the girls with a slow step. He tried to place his hand on Avishag’s shoulder, but as soon as his finger touched her she bent down on all fours, breathing in, then out, then more quickly.
“What’s the problem?” Nadav asked.
“Women,” Gali said.
“How many?” Nadav asked.
“Women, a little girl. They, Nadav—” Gali said, and she pointed to the back of the truck.
Momo and Nadim stepped out of the car. Momo had his arm around Nadim’s shoulder, and more than anything she had seen that evening, this sight had made Avishag sick. She finally hurled on the ground, and remained there on all fours, breathing in her own sick.
“They all have passports,” Momo said to Nadav.
“And they got their vi
sas with the stamps on the other side and everything like this,” Nadim added in his broken Hebrew. He handed Nadav a pile of red passports.
Nadav looked at the passports.
“No,” Gali shouted. “Don’t, don’t even look at it. You know, you know they want to leave, Nadav,” Gali screamed.
Nadav looked at Gali with his quiet eyes. “And how do you know that, Corporal Geva?” he asked her. “Do you speak Ukrainian?”
But at that moment, Gali wasn’t even sure she knew how to speak Hebrew anymore.
“No more buts or I will put you up for a trial with the commander of the base. I am the officer on duty, and I say if they have passports and visas, they have passports and visas,” Nadav said.
As he closed the back of the truck, one of the women stretched her neck out so much, Gali thought she could hear her bones extending.
“Bye, guys,” Momo shouted as his truck drove away, leaving behind it a cloud of dust that penetrated the nose, the ears, the mouth, the pores of the skin on Gali’s face, but only hovered above Avishag on the ground, tucking her in like a sullied blanket of summer.
IT WAS only when the checkpoint shift was over two hours later that we saw Avishag get up from all fours. When Nadav put his hand on top of her head, she sprung up, fast.
She pushed him once. She pushed him twice. He caught her the third time and held her in a hug for a whole minute.
“Let’s go rest,” he said. “Everything looks better in the morning.”
IN THE whole town of Berezhany, and maybe even in the entire land of Ukraine, no one had hair as beautiful as Masha’s. It wasn’t its color—although it was speckled with gold. It wasn’t its shape exactly—although it did fall on her slim shoulders in waves like from a fountain. It wasn’t its length precisely either, although she had kept it long, all the way to the small of her back, from the time that she was twelve and was allowed to wear it down, because the regulations of the middle school were less harsh than those of the elementary school. The thing about Masha’s hair was the way in which it structured and restructured itself around her face. It was as if it had a life of its own. It always knew exactly how to fall around her face so that it would give her round cheeks the most flattering light, no matter where Masha was. In school, and later when she walked to the shoe factory at noon, and even when she was walking around on the weekends hand in hand with Phillip, it was as if she had her own personal lighting crew following her around, making sure she always shined, was always at her best.
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