The worst moments came after.
On one of the first days of eighth grade, my mother drove my sister and me to school, and our car was right behind your father’s car. My eyes were drained and dry and ready. I had on my Dr. Martens and bell-bottomed jeans.
I could see you chewing the sleeve of your 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.
“It’s raining,” my mother said. “Close the window.” I looked at the cars ahead and tried 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 I walked alone, behind Emuna, through the broken gate, right into the fluorescence and chatter and linoleum floors. The girls all swooped down on my desk as I sat down, and I took out my Bible homework from my JanSport bag.
We were studying Jonah for the third year in a row. It was the same teacher, and she had forgotten we had already studied Jonah the year before. Or maybe she didn’t care. She was married.
Jonah was a prophet, but he didn’t want to be a prophet, so God made him one anyway, even though he hid from God. After that, Jonah went to this town of bad people and told them they were really bad and that God was going to kill them all. The bad people didn’t get mad at Jonah; instead, they turned good and God spared them.
Then Jonah became really sad because he felt like an idiot for telling those people God would kill them only to have God change his mind, and he was also dehydrated in the desert. Then he found a tree that saved him from the heat and God killed the tree. Then Jonah was very sad. And then God said, “You see, Jonah? You are sad about the death of this tree even though you didn’t work at all to raise it, so how do you expect me not to have second thoughts about killing all those people I made?”
But God had promised Jonah a disaster. He had had Jonah make a scene for nothing. Jonah had thought the whole world would end, but God was never going to let that happen. I bet you he knew from the beginning. Some people, and God, know from the beginning that the world won’t end. They pace lightly on sidewalks all around me.
We again had to draw lines between questions and their answers. Same questions, same answers, but it was harder to do this time.
God killed Jonah’s tree because …
“She’ll let everyone copy, but I am first, so don’t push,” Avishag told the girls. She took the seat next to mine. She smiled at me, as if we had never stopped talking. It surprised me, and then I was elated. I could not tell her that I had been saving the seat for Emuna. Not because of anything that had to do with Avishag. Not because I was happy she had forgiven me for falling for Dan. Because I did not want Emuna to sit next to me.
Emuna was real, and the same. She stood amid the girls like decoration and looked at me. They all did.
“I thought about you all summer,” I told Avishag then, loud. “I thought about you all the time. I missed you.” That was the pulse of the worst moments. The pulse of the world rolling forward.
I RIDE the escalator higher and higher toward the open bridge that leads to the entrance of the Azrieli mall. In the highway below me the cars are chasing each other’s colors; fast and again and more.
In the years since we all finished middle school, we have met at the Azrieli mall many times. All girls do. The enchantment died off the second, maybe third time.
I know exactly what is going to happen, so it does not even need to. But it will. Things that don’t need to happen happen all the time. We keep doing them.
We’ll all hug, the seven or eight of us who’ll show up. Avishag and I will kiss each other on both cheeks. We’ll all try on shoes we are never going to buy and buy tank tops we may never actually wear. The talk will be of boyfriends and college entrance exams and waitressing jobs and how good it is to be done with the army. We’ll make fun of Tali and Lea for deciding to become officers. They’ll repeat the old mantra of how easy it is to make money by staying in the army for one more year, because as an officer you get paid more than you would on the outside, and you don’t have any expenses. I’ll say, “But you? Lea!” and she’ll shrug her shoulders, or slap my back, her movements mechanical, reminiscent of the authority she once had but lacking strength. We’ll order coffee at the Aroma café and Lea will pour a sugar packet down her throat. Then we’ll all laugh. The bathroom will be flooded and a woman who has no home will spit on us when we wash our hands with the industrial soap. Then we’ll take the elevator to the roof, and one girl will say that from this height, the people walking the streets of Tel Aviv look like ants. Maybe it will even be me. “It is so good to be together,” someone will say. “I absolutely love Tel Aviv,” another girl will add. We will all hope we don’t grow up to raise our children in a small town.
WHEN I see Noam, she runs and hugs me. Then she shows me her ring.
“Topaz and white gold,” she says.
It takes me a couple of minutes to notice that Emuna is not around. I think too much, and only of myself.
When I realize Emuna is not around, it excites me.
And perhaps this can be the boom. Maybe Emuna took off to India. Maybe she is in her childhood room, broken, in conclusion and after all broken. And maybe she decided that she just didn’t want to see us, that this won’t be fun, that enough is enough.
This all happened before, and it will happen again just the same, so in all truth there is no need for it to ever happen, this whole meeting, the mall, us.
I say I think about Emuna all the time, but I don’t even ask about her. Not right away. I wait.
“I can’t believe we are finally almost grown-ups,” I say and kiss Noam on both cheeks.
Standing behind her are six other girls I have known since I was born. We are in front of a shoe store on the third floor of the epic mall, people walking around us, engulfing us, humming language.
“You are so crazy,” Noam says. “How come you’re not wearing your uniform shirt?” she asks after I apologize for my sweatiness and uniform pants and explain I came straight from the base. “You’ll get in so much trouble,” Noam adds.
“If anyone asks, I’ll just say I am not a soldier,” I say.
“You can’t do that, crazy face,” Lea says and punches me on the shoulder.
“Well, I already did, Ms. Officer. I already said it once and I can say it again.”
We laugh.
Aside from Lea, who also came straight from a base, they are all wearing bell-bottomed jeans. We never grew out of that.
EMUNA. I want to tell you something. Some things.
Do you remember that one time, in sixth grade, when we saw the movie? That was the first time we ever saw a movie in a theater. We sat that day on the floor of Lea’s kitchen. There must have been eight of us. Lea called for a car. The smell of that call, to me, still, is stolen perfume and bananas and feet.
“We would like to order a taxi. A big one. There are a lot of us. And we’re going to the movies,” Lea said.
Remember the van that came and got us? The ride? We tried to make our faces and words and joy look like those of the adults we thought we were becoming.
“Here is a tip,” Lea told the driver when we arrived at Nahariya’s attempt at a mall. “A tip, as is customary.”
The movie wanted to scare us. It was Scream 2. We screamed. Right after Neve Campbell shot Mrs. Loomis in the head, right as she said, “Just in case,” all the lights went on and the movie stopped and an usher screamed, “Don’t be alarmed. A suspicious object was found in the mall, and we need everyone to walk to the parking lot.”
“Just our luck. Just. Our. Luck,” Lea said in the parking lot. Remembering it now, I know these were the most adult-sounding words any of us said that day, but I didn’t notice it then. The act was over.
“Remember this one time when we pretended
we were wolves and crawled all over Nina’s street?” I asked Lea.
“And?” Lea asked.
“And nothing,” I said. “Just something I remembered.”
“You do that all the time,” Lea said. “Remember this one time this, and remember this one time that.” She was imitating my voice, talking like a slow person. That year I still hoped she’d change back to the girl I used to play with, and the more I hoped the more she mocked me.
“Yea, she does that all time,” Noam said. “It’s annoying.”
Avishag looked away. Not once has she ever spoken for me, I now realize. Not since the beginning.
But you.
And you said, “Leave her. Leave her alone.”
And you. Remember?
Why don’t you ever leave me?
ONLY AFTER all the words without weight are done falling from our mouths do I ask Noam, “Where is Emuna?” I face her. “She is not coming, is she?”
Emuna. It takes me a long time to ask where you are. A long time.
I wanted to tell you something. When I am with you, when we are breathing the same air, I also remember you; still and always and all at once.
Ok.
“Oh, Emuna? She just went to the bathroom,” Noam says. “There she is, right behind you,” Noam gestures with her chin.
I can smell you, standing behind me and real, before I turn. I smell the industrial soap of the Azrieli bathroom on your hands. I smell the urine that soaked into the frayed ends of your bell-bottomed jeans. You are right here.
The smell is the opposite of memory. A thing other than other.
Means of
Suppressing
Demonstrations
Shock
Lea, the officer, had stopped feeling her own body. She lay on her back on top of an antisniper barricade, holding a newspaper page, blocking the stars. She had to stretch her arms to hold the wide page above her head.
“Oh,” she said.
“The army didn’t do it,” Tomer said. He flicked his cigarette butt down to the asphalt of Route 433. He was talking about Huda, the little Palestinian girl on the beach. The newspaper picture showed her screaming amid red sand, near the body parts of the six people that were her family.
“I know,” she said. “This is a manipulation.”
The world said the Israeli army had done it with an air strike, but the Israeli army knew that the family had been killed by a dormant shell that Palestinian militants had left by the ocean. Lea looked at Tomer. The orange light of the road lamps lit him from behind, so that he could have been a demon. He was nineteen, two years younger than the officer.
“It’s just that I can’t feel my body all of a sudden,” she said.
“Again?”
Lea often told him that she couldn’t feel her body. That she could move it but not feel it. That those were two separate things. He never questioned her; he pushed her. This was what she wanted.
Tomer took his weapon off his back and pressed her shoulders into the cement. When their pants were pulled down, he pressed his hands on her neck, then her arms. He called her “Lea” during the day because this was her name, and because she said he could. At night, when he was pulling her hair so tight her scalp buzzed, he called her “officer,” because this was what she said he should call her then, and this was what she was. She wanted him to call her that then, because it was when he was closest and roughest that she knew he most needed to be kept at bay. When she looked to the side, she could see the warm glow that came from inside the homes in villages of other people.
She knew her service days were nearing their finish line but could not feel it. She could not imagine or remember any of the things she had wanted before she became a soldier, and she struggled to find things she wanted for her civilian life ahead. She guessed she must want a family or to get into a good school, but she guessed it from the data around her. She did not feel the want herself. When she had first begun feeling this way, less than a year into her service, after the neck of one of the soldiers at her checkpoint was cut almost in two, she had decided the only reasonable thing she could truly want must exist inside the army, and so she decided to become an officer. She did not want to be a dumb checkpoint soldier anymore, the type whose neck could get cut almost in two. She wanted to be able to yell at soldiers who put their necks where they might get cut. She grew to accept that her service days would begin and end in the transitions unit but figured that if she had to be at a checkpoint she might as well be a checkpoint officer.
Tomer did almost everything she asked him to without asking a lot of questions. He was a reasonable nineteen-year-old boy. And Lea, she had this certain beauty, after all. A cold, humming, unfazed beauty, and great breasts. She was also the only girl who was sprinkled inside his days. And he was passing his own time—his own time as a soldier.
Lea woke up alone in her field bed the next morning. She was in her own tent because she was the only female at the post.
It was an odd posting. Route 433 bred oddness all along it. It cut through the West Bank but had been closed to Palestinians since 2002, when the motorcyclists were shot. The army somehow needed four soldiers and a commanding officer for an improvised checkpoint every hundred or so kilometers, so she found herself commanding four boys who manned daytime guarding shifts in an always deserted checkpoint. All so there would be someone to say, “Sorry, the road is blocked,” in case someone did decide to show, even after all this time. This had little to do with her earlier service days in a gigantic checkpoint and had almost nothing to do with who she was. This posting would have made her angry, except she knew her service was over in a few weeks anyhow.
She spent the day in bed reading a prep book for university entrance exams. She hoped to make high enough marks to study business. She was supposed to check in with the boy on duty twice a shift, but she didn’t bother because nothing ever happened. Except that day something did. Tomer, who had the afternoon shift, called her military cell to say that there were three male demonstrators at the checkpoint.
“Have they thrown rocks or anything?” she asked.
“No, but they have a sign. And they keep on arguing with me that I, like, disperse them, even though I explained we don’t have any means of suppressing demonstrations here.”
“That’s not true.”
She was suddenly more excited than she had been since before she had been posted on Route 433. As an officer, she knew that every checkpoint had a supply box to be used for demonstrations. Finally, she thought, her training was good for something. And if the demonstrators insisted, she must aim to please.
She unlocked the metal supply closet in her tent and pulled out a wooden box. It was heavy, so it took her a while to carry it to the antisniper barricade and then to cross the road to the sun umbrella that marked the checkpoint.
“We had a lesson about demonstrations and stuff in boot camp, but I forget,” Tomer said.
Two of the three Palestinian demonstrators were in their thirties, and one was just a boy, a boy with fingers in his mouth. They had one sign, a piece of A4 paper on which they had written with a marker in English: “Open 433.” One of the men was wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. He raised his hand, so she signaled him with her hand to step forward. She signaled him to halt when he was four steps away.
“Officer, we are here to demonstrate against the restriction of our mobility, which is a collective punishment and against international law,” the demonstrator said in solid, accented Hebrew.
She put one hand on the handle of her weapon and one in her pocket. “How come there are only three of you? This is hardly a demonstration.”
“I do apologize, officer. We have a wedding this week in the village, and, you see, other people, they are not serious,” he said. He bowed a little as he spoke. “Is there any way you could disperse us just a little, enough for a press blast, or something?”
She had meant to be cruel, but the man was being rather sweet. He squinted his eyes
at her as he spoke and looked more like a bank customer asking for an increase of his credit limit than a demonstrator. It made her feel, a little, like it was the real world.
“We’ll see what we can do,” she said.
She sat on the asphalt and opened the wooden box. There were printed instructions inside, tucked inside a sheer nylon sleeve. Tomer signaled the man to step back and wait. He sat by her and they both read.
The purpose of Means of Suppressing Demonstrations is to suppress demonstrations. It is intended to intimidate and at most injure, but the purpose is not to kill. One general guideline:
*Use from light to heavy: shock, tear gas, rubber. We must minimize damage when possible.
Grenade 30, the shock grenade, was designed to stun and scare by creating a loud noise. The instructions said that if exploded within a two-meter radius of people, it could cause problems in the eardrums and light injuries from the plastic, so Lea told the demonstrators to step back a bit. They walked back while still facing the sun umbrella, and after a while, the boy took his fingers from his mouth and gave her a hesitant thumbs-up. She didn’t quite know how to respond to that, so she gave him a thumbs-up as well—he was far enough. Then she quickly put her hand back on her weapon.
The shock grenade was orange and cone shaped. It had a red stripe encircling it. She held it in her hand and then bent to the ground to lift a rock. Her fingers were stiff around the rock’s dry surface. She dropped it from the air into Tomer’s hand.
“You are the soldier,” she said. “And besides, it’s been longer since I last learned about this stuff. Let’s practice.”
They pretended the rock was a grenade. She gave him the instructions as if she knew them by heart, though she had just read them moments earlier. She reminded him to keep the grenade in the palm of his hand and to secure the lever with his index finger. She explained to him how to thread the middle finger of his left hand inside the safety as if it were a ring and to pull the safety with a spin of his wrist, as he would if someone were to ask him what time it was. She raised her voice at him a bit, because he pulled his arm back for the practice throw without accompanying it with a constant look.
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