The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel

by Shani Boianjiu

  So when she cut it short, right up to her shoulders, rumors began to fly across the town. Jakub the hairdresser thought the reason was what the reason always is: money. He thought she had probably sold it in a wig store because she found herself is some sort of an economic bind. Kalyna, the old lady who owned the house right by the small recital hall, thought that the reason was what the reason always is: love. She thought that Masha had fallen in love with a new young man and wanted to test the nature of his devotion to her by cutting off her hair. Eight-year-old Mousia, whom Masha used to babysit on Saturday nights, thought that the only explanation could be that Masha had gone mad. When she first saw Masha with her own eyes, walking through the market with her short hair, Mousia let out a shriek and ran all the way home to sob in her room. She even skipped the vocabulary quiz the second graders were having the next morning.

  In the end, it was Jakub who was right, because it was money, but Kalyna was also a little right, because who knows, maybe Masha was in love. But it wasn’t quite exactly what they thought. You see, Masha had been fired from her job in the shoe factory because of her boss’s jealous wife. Since Masha slept with the boss. A lot. And he had a wife. There were no other places of employment in the town that would take someone with no experience or training, and Masha was going to go to school, except she first had to make enough money so that her mother could keep her house, and, well. It was like taking two steps forward and your whole dumb life backward everywhere she went.

  But wait. She could go abroad, become a nanny to some rich kids, cut off her hair (because let’s be honest, if you had a husband you wouldn’t want him around Masha and her hair either), make enough money for her mom to even buy the stupid house from the landlord, make enough money for Masha to go to accounting school, you name it.

  But the job wasn’t quite exactly what Masha thought.

  IT STARTED out as a thought, something that existed entirely in Avishag’s mind, but by the time the two girls finished the long walk to the guarding tower, it was already a feeling.

  Gali and Avishag climbed up there, and they sat, and they didn’t say a word. And then an hour passed, and then it was more than a feeling.

  It was a burning feeling, like fire ants eating at Avishag’s skin from the inside. It made no sense to her at first because she had showered last night after she left Nadav’s, and it was a good shower, long and drowning and kind to Avishag with the smell of soap.

  And it didn’t make sense. And it didn’t.

  And she sat, and she thought, and she didn’t understand.

  But then she did.

  It was the uniform. The stupid uniform underneath the M-16 and the ammunition vest and bulletproof vest, underneath it was the green uniform all along.

  Avishag was wearing the uniform now, but she had also worn it last night when she was leaving Nadav’s office and heading toward the showers. And she could feel it now: last night her uniform touched where he had kissed her; here, there, then lower, then on the other side. And now the same uniform was touching her again, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, she realized that she could stand this no longer. But realizing it was not enough—she could still feel it; it wasn’t in her head. She could feel his dried spit on her skin, it was real and close and so there.

  There was no escape.

  Except there was.

  She unbuckled her helmet and tossed it on the ground.

  “Avishag?” Gali asked.

  Avishag took off her M-16. Then the ammunition vest, the bulletproof vest, and her dog tag. She sat down on top of them, as if falling, untied her sandy boots, and then took off her socks.

  “Avishag, what is going on?” Gali asked.

  Avishag’s quick fingers unbuttoned her military top and then unbuckled her big brown belt. She took off her green tank top, then her red Mickey Mouse sports bra, then her underwear.

  Finally, when she was completely naked, she got down on the floor of the tower and closed her eyes. The sun was roasting Avishag’s skin in blows, like a child blowing on a ragwort.

  GALI THOUGHT about shouting, or slapping Avishag, or even calling for help on the radio. But then she thought about the oddest thing.

  She thought about how, during her first time, she was actually fully clothed.

  It was only after Gali had her second orgasm that she realized that this was her second, that she had had one before.

  The first one was given to her by the Jordan River. Every Passover in her kibbutz the kids would go bridge jumping to celebrate the end of the long Seder in the kibbutz’s dining hall. But despite how tall she was, Gali was actually afraid of heights. She never quite got the courage to jump.

  During her last year in the kibbutz, when she already knew she would be moving to Tel Aviv, Gali stood again on the cement wall of the bridge in her yellow Passover dress and looked down. She waited and waited. Everyone else had gone home. The pine trees were shedding their orange needles on the water, and old ripples were budding closer toward the river band and its lilac bushes.

  A pigeon flew above her. Gali covered her eyes with her hair. She smelled shampoo; she took a step forward and jumped.

  For a second it was like walking in air, and it was so unnatural, it was clear to Gali that something had gone wrong that could not be made right again. Her skin was sucked upward toward the sun.

  She hit the water with a splash. A warm signal of feathery fairies traveled all over her body in that instant. Her toes curled. Her shoulders bent. Her funny bone laughed. She leaped up out of the green water with her mouth open, gasping for air.

  But Gali’s second one was on the day she met Tom in tenth grade, at his house after geography class.

  And she was completely naked then, and it was still sunny out.

  And it was Tom she wanted to think of now.

  “You are so strong,” he told her when she found herself in his bedroom on that tenth-grade afternoon.

  “Really?” she asked. She was worried she might get sick. She worried Tom would kiss her, she worried he might not, she worried she might have something in her teeth, she worried she was too tall, she worried about the dangers of the city, how loud the city still was, even right then inside Tom’s room.

  “You look so strong,” Tom said, and stepped so close to her, the tips of their noses touched. “Look,” he said and pointed to the mirror on his wall. “You look so strong.”

  In the mirror, all Gali could see was her old self. But then she saw Tom in the mirror, looking at her.

  She wanted his eyes to wash every part of her.

  AVISHAG WAS breathing so heavily, naked on the floor of the tower, it was as if she had fallen asleep. There was no way anyone was going to visit the tower to check on the girls. No one had ever checked on them.

  IF WE could look into the seventh tower from the right on the Israeli side of the Egyptian border on August 7 in the year 2007, what we would see would be two Israeli soldiers with their eyes closed. They’d be on the ground. Naked.

  SAMIR WAS still not really saying anything, and Hamody had already smoked seven cigarettes and boiled two pots of dark coffee, so out of sheer boredom, Hamody decided to maybe try to do what he was in the tower to do in the first place. He picked up his binoculars and looked into the Israeli side.

  At first he thought he was imagining, that maybe the coffee mix his uncle had given him was a bit too strong for him, but he gazed and he gazed. He washed his eyes with that sight, and it was real and far away.

  On the other side of the border, two Israeli soldiers were lying on the ground, naked.

  The first Jewish girl was long, and her breasts were small and firm. Her light brown hair rested on her shoulders. A gazelle of sorts, the type of girl who could give you a run for your money if you ever had to chase her.

  The second Jewish girl was soft, big breasted, and altogether perfect. With her eyes closed like that and with her auburn hair around her like wings, she almost looked like the Christian bird from Hamody’s tow
n, the one he knew he could never marry.

  Hamody lowered the binoculars and looked at Samir, who was sitting on a white plastic chair with his back to Hamody, looking back at the base in silence. Hamody thought of saying something, of bursting out in joyous cheers, of laughing the whole thing off, but then he realized he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, at least not with Samir. Hamody realized that he wanted to save this all to himself. And he suddenly didn’t care anymore. His uncle had always told him, since childhood, that God hands his treasures to every person on this earth equally; it is just that some people choose not to enjoy their treasures.

  Samir was still looking away, and before he knew it Hamody had his pants low, then lower, and he was using only his left hand to hold the binoculars.

  WHEN SAMIR looked back, he almost couldn’t believe it. At first he thought he was imagining, that maybe the coffee mix Hamody’s uncle had given him was a bit too strong for him, but he gazed and he gazed, he washed his eyes with that sight, and it was real and so close.

  Right in front of him stood Hamody. Bright, handsome Hamody, and he was exposed, and touching himself.

  It was as if Samir’s hands had a mind of their own.

  When Officer Tariq climbed up the tower like a silent cheetah, Samir tried to hold it in. He really did. He could hear Tariq shouting, and he could see him grabbing Hamody by the collar, and he saw when Hamody handed Tariq the binoculars, and he heard Hamody shouting that it was all the Jews’ fault, that it was some sort of a deliberate trick, a new Israeli evil strategy.

  Samir could hear all of that and see it, but he understood nothing of it. He also saw the glance of shock that Hamody gave him, the way he looked at him down there, at Samir still touching himself, at Samir with his pants rolled down.

  But even as all of this was happening, and even though he had thought his brain had signaled his hands to stop, and even though he knew Tariq and Hamody were looking at him then, and they would know, and they would see it, even so, Samir couldn’t help it. It was going to happen, it almost already happened, and then—

  It did.

  IT TOOK Tariq two minutes to collect himself and straighten up his beret and get on the radio with the commander of the base. It took the commander of the base five minutes to understand Tariq and two minutes to contact Abou Kir, the commander of the northern military region’s headquarters. It took Abou Kir seven minutes to understand and thirteen minutes until the secretary of the Egyptian army chief of staff believed him that his matter was urgent enough to justify an urgent call to the highest-ranking officer in the entire Egyptian army.

  Forty-two minutes after Tariq saw the naked Jewish girls with his own eyes through the binoculars, somewhere in the heart of Tel Aviv, a particular red phone rang for the first time in six years, and it was Oleg the Russian who picked it up.

  It would take two months for the Israeli press to get a hold of the story, two and a half months for the Egyptian press, seven years for the BBC. But when the press did get a hold of it, they would title the whole situation “A Diplomatic Incident.”

  Right after the commander of the base found Nadav in the junior officers’ office, where Nadav was spending time with corporal Rona Mizrahi, Nadav finally made the fifteen-minute walk in the sands to check on the girls in tower seven, to scream at them, to let them know the extent of the damage that they had caused. Nadav’s pace was quick through the sands, eager, but by the time he climbed up the ladder of the tower, all he could find there were the girls covering the shift after Gali and Avishag’s. Ilana Rotem and little Shonit Miller were standing there in the tower, biting their nails, fully clothed, and armed.

  IT WAS Tuesday, and it would take two weeks for legal to get down and sentence both Gali and Avishag to seven weeks in military prison, the harshest punishment a female in active combat service had ever received by the lenient military courts to date. When Avishag’s friend Yael heard about it, she thought it was hysterical that of the two of them it was Avishag who had ended up in jail. Everyone was surprised, but the girls were delighted to get a short break from the base. They would spend the seven weeks sleeping in their cell and playing cards with former on-base pot dealers.

  But until then, there were still twenty-four hours in each day, and during eight of them the girls were back in the tower, their left hands on the handles of their guns, their eyes rotating through the binoculars, waiting for the variety of junior officers who came up every hour to check on them under the new orders of the commander of the base.

  AND THAT night, Tom was already starting to feel it hurting. And we do know, or at least we think we do, how impossible it is to do nothing but stare at a phone for eleven hours, so we cannot really blame Tom for coming back to Allenby 52.

  This time when the girl looked at him, she kept her eyes locked on him and didn’t look down. It was he who turned off the light. They both knew he was going to get what he paid for, and if he was going to look into her eyes, that would only be after. He kept his eyes shut the whole time.

  FOR SIX hours of the day the girls were still manning the border checkpoint.

  It was Tuesday, and night had come, late and warm. In the back of a red truck, four blonde women were staring at Gali and Avishag; waiting, breathing, looking, not crying.

  “Come on, dude.” The driver got out of the car and pleaded with Avishag, putting his hand on her shoulder. “This is all approved and authorized. I got places to be,” the driver said.

  Avishag looked into his blue eyes. They were so large they took up half his face. Gali looked into the eyes of the women, and she did not remove her gaze, even though she had to blink. The truck was so small, one of the women, one with short freshly cut blonde hair, was sitting on her knees in a pretzel-like manner so painful it seemed as though the bones would pierce through her skin if she sat like that for even one more minute.

  “I am not a dude,” Avishag said to the driver, and she took off her helmet, and her dark hair fell down all the way below her shoulders. “I am not,” she said. As she said it, she thought of the baby she didn’t have and realized that no one could deny that it was true.

  Nadav got up from his chair with a slow pace and stood between the girls and the open back of the truck. “Avishag,” he said, “how about you put your helmet back on before we all get in trouble?”

  “I won’t let you do this to me,” Avishag said, and she grabbed Nadav by the arm. “You don’t know who I am. I am nothing like this.”

  “You,” Nadav said, and he laughed. “All you do is complain. You, you, you …” He said it again and again. He pushed Avishag aside by the shoulder. He laughed. He repeated the word until it lost all meaning, until his speech was a growl, a foreign tongue.

  THE DOORS of the truck are open, and outside the man who took Masha’s passport in France is standing and talking with three soldiers with guns. One of the soldiers is chanting a sound, and in Masha’s ears the chant becomes a song like the ones the elementary-school children sing at the end of each year in the small recital hall of her town. And soon the song is without a human voice; it is a mere melody, and then it is a battle cry, a faint one, and it is enough for Masha, and she leaps out of the truck and she begins running south, as far as her feet can carry her.

  When her feet pound on the sand they send a shock that passes through her stomach and echoes in her lungs. Masha’s thin legs coil underneath her stained skirt, and when they uncurl she can hear her bones cracking, laughing. She feels as though her legs are running faster than her heart can pump life into them, fast enough so that the wind is a soft curtain she keeps piercing through.

  NOW, THERE are a lot of things we know. Masha is running south toward the fence on the Egyptian side, and there are land mines sleeping deep below where she is heading. We know that although Samir is already in jail, Hamody’s uncle got him off easy, and he is already back in the tower, and the figure running toward his gate in the dark is close enough so he can see it without the binoculars. He already has a
bullet in the barrel, and twenty-eight more in his magazine, and from a distance like this, we know that he can do just fine even without a magnifying aim.

  And we know that no red phone is going to ring in order to ask for details about this figure coming from the Israeli side. We know that Tom is going to stare at the silent red phone, as always. And we know that Gali is going to shout, “Nadav,” but it will do no good, and that Avishag is not going to shout his name, because she knows better, and we know that Nadav is not going to look right below Avishag’s eyebrows and do what she wants, because we know Nadav has no complaints to anyone but God.

  Hamody closes his left eye and looks at the figure through gunpoint. She is four hundred meters from the land mines, now three hundred. She is running fast. Hamody releases his safety and takes a deep breath. His fingers are a bit jittery from the coffee, but he knows how to calm his nerves. There will be no surprises.

  And yet as we watch Masha’s hair panting up and down in the wind, illuminating her from above like a gentle lamp, we cannot help but say:

  Run, girl, run.

  Faster.

  The

  Opposite

  of

  Memory

  I wait for the bus to come get me.

  I take off my uniform shirt but stay in a tank top. I let my hair down, let all the bobby pins plummet to the sand, let my curls drop to my shoulders; and then I hide my eyes with them. Because of the sun—it is so hot, my neck can’t hold my head up.