I wait on the side of the highway. The sun is boom boom boom on my head. There is no bench, only a bus sign and the asphalt. No people in cars buzzing by, no one to be seen but me.
They let me leave the training base for the weekend because I said my mother was very sick. It was easy to let them let me leave. Dana, Amit, Neta, and Hagar were already discharged, and I enjoyed a special status as the last weaponry trainer who was there during the war, who was there when things were truly crazy and stayed after. Maybe they were scared I’d go crazy if they didn’t let me do what I wanted. I said I had to check my weapon in at the base, because I’d be sleeping at the hospital.
The truth is I need to take the bus to get to the mall to celebrate Noam’s engagement. She’s the first of the girls in our class to get engaged. Avishag called; she’d just been in jail, she begged me to come. She said even Emuna would be there, she convinced her and everyone, so who am I not to come also? And who am I? During our weekly phone call last weekend, I said to her, “Emuna, I want to see you.” She said, “Yael, you want a lot of things.” But she told me she’d come. I usually see her every month on my break, and I said we were coming up to almost one month and a week.
I LIED about my mom being sick, and I have no problem standing here without my uniform shirt, particularly since I am all alone. I stuff the shirt and the beret and the green commanding lace inside my JanSport backpack without folding anything.
I sit on the sand and lower my head; close my eyes and wait for the wait to be over. I feel a respite from the sun and the boom boom boom of the day, as if an invisible tree, or more likely a cloud, had relaxed itself right above me.
But when I raise my head, I see that it is not a cloud but a person—a military police officer—looming above me. He is wearing the military police blue beret and holding an open pocketbook. He is not resting. He is busy looking at me, without blinking, so that I know I am in trouble.
I lower my head, close my eyes, and wait for the wait to be over.
I remember moments that are the worst but also moments that happen all the time.
IN SEVENTH grade, my mother drove my sister and me to school, and our car was right behind Emuna’s car. Behind us stood Avishag’s mom’s car. I looked back and saw Dan sitting up front. I remember waking up that morning and thinking that my dream had hurt me, but I wanted to go back to it and say something more. My eyes were drained and angry. I put on my Dr. Martens and bell-bottomed jeans. We all wore Dr. Martens and bell-bottoms that year. My shoes were blue; Emuna’s were also.
I could see Emuna’s mother’s blonde hair in its bun and Emuna, chewing the sleeve of her red sweater. I could still taste the hot chocolate I had drunk minutes before. Outside, drops of rain fell on the banana fields and I could see the bananas and the dirt through my partially open window. The radio was scratchy; it played an old song, a song about a girl with hair that looks like black gold.
“It’s raining,” my mother said. “Close the window.” Even though our village is in the middle of nowhere, there were always traffic jams on the road leading to the school at this time of day. This was before they started the pickup vans. I liked it then. I liked looking at the cars ahead, particularly if I knew the people in them, and thinking of myself as a part of this chain, a note in this rhythm.
“Close the window,” my mother said. She turned her neck and looked at me in the backseat. “It’s raining.”
At school, Emuna and I walked through the broken gate together, right into the fluorescence and chatter and linoleum floors. The girls all swooped down on my chair as we sat down, and I took out my Bible homework from my JanSport bag. We all had JanSport bags that year. Mine was black; Emuna’s was purple and yellow plaid. She was the one girl who agreed to sit next to me that year, when Avishag and I weren’t talking because of the fight we had had about my crush on Dan.
We were studying Jonah for the second year in a row. There was a new teacher, and she didn’t know that we had already studied Jonah the year before.
The homework was even more insulting the second time around. I had a dream that night that Jonah told me, “You thought you were moving somewhere? You stupid girl.” He was saying that to me while he himself was trapped inside a whale, trying to escape God like some dumbass who didn’t know the rules of the Bible and how all the stories end.
We had to complete sentences by drawing lines from a column of questions—Jonah went to the city of … God told the whale to eat Jonah because … God killed Jonah’s tree because …—to a column of answers.
“She’ll let everyone copy, but I am first, so don’t push,” Emuna told the girls.
“I thought about you all weekend long,” I told her then. “I thought about you all the time. I missed you.”
Later that day, as we were eating our sandwiches (mustard-tomato-mayo for me, butter and cucumbers for Emuna), the new Bible teacher did not talk about Jonah but said that during the weekend her boyfriend had asked her to marry him when they were on top of the Azrieli mall in Tel Aviv. Under them, cars were buzzing, chasing each other, and the whole world hammered on and ahead. But not for our teacher, who said the world stopped.
Then Noam said that when she grows up she will be proposed to on top of the Azrieli mall, and we all agreed that was a good idea, except for Lea, who rolled her eyes. Lea always rolled her eyes.
The problem was that we didn’t realize it wouldn’t be our choice where we would be proposed to, or if at all. Noam’s boyfriend proposed to her on the bus. They had just gotten a call from their realtor, and then he asked her if she’d marry him.
But she wanted us all to meet in Azrieli to celebrate. To honor a time when we were children.
WHEN I twist my neck and see the military police officer, I laugh. Sometimes you have to laugh. Sitting on the sand, I have to. I have spent two years in the army, walking in and out of the busy shops of the Azrieli mall with my hair down during breaks, riding trains with blue eye shadow on my face. Once I even wore my nose piercing, the one Hagar convinced me to get, while in uniform when I was taking a bus from Tel Aviv Central, where it is always swarming with blue berets, eager to write you up.
And here, in this nowhere, two weeks before I am done with my service, this is where I get written up. Now is when they find me.
“Your ID number, soldier,” the officer says without looking at me. He is looking deep into the lines of his pocketbook, clutching the pen. Where the hell did he come from?
I lower my head again. I close my eyes.
“Your ID number, soldier,” the officer says.
I don’t answer. I raise my head and look at him, calm. He moves a bit, so that the sun again explodes on me. I squint and stare. He can’t make me talk. He can’t put his hands on my mouth, make it move and make air and sound come out of my throat. No force in the world can do that.
“Your ID number, soldier,” the officer says. “I am going to ask one more time, and then you’ll be in trouble.”
I know I won’t be in that much trouble. It will take a few days for the complaint to trickle from the military police down to my base. By then I will have only a few days of service left. The most they could do is make me clean bathrooms, but they won’t even do that. My commanders love me. I am the oldest trainer left in the base. Hagar and the other two are already doing Europe. The base has been quiet since the war a year ago. No one will go after me now. I even think my new officer, Shai, is in love with me. After all, I have been a good soldier. I taught a lot of boys how to shoot.
“I am not a soldier,” I say.
“You are wearing uniform pants and military boots. You are a soldier, and you have the chutzpah to walk around with half a uniform on?” the officer says.
“I am not a soldier,” I say. “I am not.”
Imagine that you know someone is something, you know it for certain, but that person keeps on saying that they are not that thing—they deny it and deny it to no end. Is there anything you could do? There is nothing
you could do. If I am a civilian, he has no authority over me. There is no rule that says civilians even have to carry an ID.
The officer crosses his arms, and I smile. There is nothing more I need to say, but I speak.
“These are my sister’s pants,” I say. “I am just a middle-school girl. And you are a big armed man who is harassing me. I should actually cry.”
“Is your sister a soldier? What is her name? She can get in big trouble for giving you this uniform.”
“She is ten,” I say. “She is a very tall ten-year-old. I don’t know where she got these pants.”
“And the boots?”
“I bought them at Zara.”
“You did not.”
“Zara London, I swear. I am a well-traveled middle-school girl.”
“Come on,” the military police officer says. He is thumping his boots on the ground a little like a woman, even though he is a hairy man. He looks like he might throw a tantrum.
“I am not a soldier,” I say. “I am not a soldier.”
I keep denying who I am for a few more minutes. Then the bus arrives.
Sometimes I think of things and wonder why I never thought of them before. Sometimes I remember things and beg for mercy.
I CLIMB into the bus and pretend to be looking for money in my purse. It is only when the door closes that I take out my uniform shirt and put it on without buttoning it and show the driver my military ID, the one that lets me ride public transportation for free whenever I am wearing my uniform.
The driver doesn’t care about the shirt or the buttons or even the road. He is on his cell and signals me with his hand to step inside. As we drive away, I try to wave to the officer, but he is nowhere to be seen.
I sit by the window, two seats behind the driver. The red linoleum of the bus is bursting at the seams with foam and the window is covered in dust. I lower my head and close my eyes and I wait for the bus to get to Azrieli. I wait for the wait to be over.
All the time I fight. Why? It would have made no difference for me to get a citation for inappropriate public attire, or whatever it’s called. No difference at all. Everything—Emuna, me, life, the bus, Jonah—would have hammered on and forward just the same.
On the next stop, a suicide bomber comes and sits right next to me. I have no proof he is one, but I have convinced myself that it is true, so I try to make sure. The last thing I want is to build an elephant made of fear. He looks in his fifties, and his step shows he is tired of the worldliness of the bus and this new land.
As he sits down he is rocking back and forth. His rhythm is that of a man who has given up on this world yet for some reason is still nervous. His seconds are loaded enough so that even in his weariness he finds a reason to worry. He is waiting for something big to happen, something that will change everything forever.
He puts two large black plastic bags under his seat. I can see a plastic container with brown cookies in it bulging out of the bag next to me, but that could be a diversion. A man like that carrying homemade cookies?
If I didn’t suspect that he was a suicide bomber, I would guess that he is Russian. Something about how close his eyes are to each other, and his strange gray hat, a hat that does not belong to this country. But I am almost certain he is Arab: the accent of his grunt to me as he sits down, the way his eyes are sunken inside his face, his yellowing skin. And he looks like a suicide bomber.
Even though it is summer, he is wearing a nice jacket and slacks, a puffy sweater underneath. His clothes were nice once, but now they’re worn out.
I quickly stand up. I look around but there are no empty seats on the bus and none of the other passengers seem alarmed. They are all leaning their heads on dusty windows, texting, or staring ahead in unison.
As the bus rolls us into a tunnel, the man begins to chant. I know what will happen. I have heard the stories on the news many times before. The woman who knew but didn’t say anything and then lost her ear. The boy who texted his mother he was scared and then was dead. The bus driver who knew all along but thought he could pull over and call the police before anything happened; the bus driver who was afraid that doing anything would only make matters worse.
The man continues to chant. At first all I hear is “la la la,” but then I realize he must be chanting the call of prayer, the one I heard entering through my bedroom window at five in the morning, every morning, when I was a child. The call, though tired by its journey from the Lebanese border, entered loudly.
“La ilaha illallah,” the man chants. There is no other God.
I worry more about not dying than dying. That I will be left burned, blind, and a burden. That I won’t be able to walk or use the bathroom on my own. That I’ll want to die even more. I am scared of the nearness of it all, that everything will change in seconds and how do I prepare? What is it that I want to remember from before?
My blood buzzes inside the veins of my neck and my fingers jitter as if I am typing on an invisible keyboard. But I do not scream. I must not make a scene. You must never make a scene.
I ask the suicide bomber a question. Perhaps he will answer me in perfect Hebrew; perhaps nothing will happen.
“You are going to Tel Aviv, huh?”
“Ah-ha,” he grunts. Just air. No words. And he closes his eyes and keeps on rocking and chanting, “La. La. La,” his lips fretting.
As the bus rolls us out of the tunnel and the light hits his face again, his cheeks seem sucked upward, like a demon or a man of grace.
I notice that he is not clean shaven. Is it that God asks them to shave before they do it, or not? I don’t remember. I think, Ok, Ok, you have to make a choice, so I get up and step over him. He will suspect and explode. It will happen right now.
But it doesn’t. He looks back at me walking farther into the bus. So does another passenger, an Ethiopian woman holding her baby like she is afraid of what I may do to it.
I am scared enough that I sit on the back stairs of the bus, rocking back and forth with the bumps along the road. I am scared enough that I sit by the trash can, full of ice cream and tissues and shells of sunflower seeds. I can even stomach the glances of the other passengers, who don’t understand why I got up from my seat, who perhaps have never been scared to death that they may not die.
But I am not scared enough to tell anyone, to scream. I am only scared the amount required to perhaps save my own life. Heroism has never been one of my qualities.
I think about her all the time, Emuna. More than I ever think about Avishag, even though she and I talk on the phone every day. Still. I beg for mercy and drain my brain; lower my head and close my eyes. And even then I think about Emuna.
ON ONE of the last days of seventh grade, my mother drove my sister and me to school, and our car was right behind Emuna’s mother’s car. My eyes were drained and dry and angry.
I could see her mother’s blonde hair in its bun and Emuna, chewing the sleeve of her red sweater. I could still taste the hot chocolate I had drunk minutes before. The banana fields were all brown.
I still liked the cars and the traffic jams then. I liked looking at the cars ahead, particularly if I knew the people in them, and thinking of myself as a part of this chain, a note in this rhythm. I looked at her car and liked it that Emuna couldn’t see me.
That’s when I saw him. The man with the gun was still very far away. It would probably take him five minutes to walk from the banana field to the road. I watched him walk closer and closer. I didn’t say a thing.
Emuna’s mother’s car moved ahead, and our car followed. Emuna was still biting her red sweater. That’s how well I could see her—I could see her teeth.
The man with the gun was wearing a kaffiyeh. I knew, even then, that he came from Lebanon. That he was the only man to infiltrate the border since the army pullout. I knew it, I can’t deny it.
I knew it was a chase, and I was inside a stopped car.
Their car moved ahead. Our car moved ahead. The man with the gun kept walking
. Now, I could have thought, Don’t hurt us. But I thought more. I thought, Not us, them. Go there. Go there. And I stayed quiet.
Their car moved, our car moved, their car moved. Then he pinned his gun to the window and shot Emuna’s mother. He ran; he left.
Emuna in all that red, I see her.
This memory, though, is not the worst. What happened after was much worse.
AFTER THE bus pulls up to the sidewalk across from the Azrieli mall, I walk a few steps and cannot believe I am still alive. I feel like a carbon copy of myself, but after all, nothing happened.
The people scatter; the bus driver helps the Ethiopian woman get her stroller off the bus. The suicide bomber that never was marches alone toward a café, where people who are still very young smoke with their legs up on the tables outside. People, all these people, walk as if guided by invisible strings, across, along, diagonally, fast. I can hear the knock of their steps. The cars murmur like giant fruit flies, the music of the city all about me, touching me. The buildings throw their gloom and I think that even if the bus did explode nothing would have changed. All of this would still be.
I OFTEN think I don’t remember the funeral or the days after, but I know that I was there. I cried a lot, mothers other than my own hugged me, and then my mother hugged me at home.
I knew I wouldn’t have to see Emuna because she was always gone in summer. That summer could have been different, I thought that it might be, but in the end it wasn’t; except I kept thinking it was out of the ordinary that the village and the country had not yet exploded, that I had not yet exploded. I waited for a blast that would never come and that I did not deserve.
I remember something Emuna’s mother had said the day Omer broke up with her and she said she wanted to die. Her mother said she thought her life was starting when Emuna’s father asked her to marry him, and then she thought her life was starting when she did marry him, and then when Emuna was born. Or maybe it was my mother who said that about me?
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel Page 14