After the men left, she and Tomer walked behind the boy toward the base to make the calls about the arrest. It took the men some time to leave, so night was falling by the time they walked back toward the barricade, but the orange road lamps were not yet on.
She quickened her step, because she wanted to walk in line with the boy. She quickened her step suddenly and then grew afraid that she had startled him. Her hand jumped and grazed his.
It was the boy who could have been afraid, but instead it was she who was afraid, and more, because she could feel it then and too much—the drying wetness of his hand now on her hand, and bits of dust from the rock he had held, and the wind. She could feel it all at once. She thought of how Tomer would later that night slam the entirety of his weight onto her bones, pressing them into the cement barricade. For a passing moment, she wondered if during that time he would call out her real name, rather than “officer.” She wondered if she should ask him, then remembered it was not an important detail to ponder. Those dates, the dates on both ends of her service. Whatever happened inside of them was decoration and air and would not change the place where she would end up.
She decided she would go ask to see the army psychiatrist the next day and ask to get released early, even though she had so little time left to serve.
AFEW years later they opened Route 433 again, but it only lasted a few months. There are still soldiers who spend three years doing little but saying, “Sorry, road is blocked,” to anyone stupid enough to try. When she heard the route was open, and then when she heard it was closed again, she could feel it: her own hand, the boy’s spit, almost as much as she felt it then and there.
Sometimes, at dark parties in Tel Aviv and on street walks and in rooms, she felt the spit on her hand, even when she was not forced to hear about Route 433. She felt it at dark parties and on walks and in rooms where she was never alone, where she was always with a person other than herself, and it was when those persons called her name that she felt it. What do you say, Lea. Thanks a lot, Lea. I agree with you, Lea. Every time she heard her name in the dark, she felt the boy’s spit on her hand that night on the walk.
That night, Tomer had trailed only one step behind her and the boy. They had walked, kicking stones, humming, staring at the stars before the lamps took some of them. She thought about all that had yet to happen but that she knew for certain would happen soon. The cement. The paper. The plea for shock.
“Lea,” Tomer said right before they reached the base. “Let’s remember to take bets on which page in the news this arrest will be. What do you say, Lea?”
And there was that silly question again, the one she had just chased. It came back. She wondered what he might call her that night, though she knew whatever word of the words of this world he chose would not matter. It would not shift the pace of the steps of the days, or even the pace of the steps of that night.
As they walked, the boy put his hand in his mouth again, the hand hers had just grazed.
That night, Lea was twenty-one, Tomer nineteen, the boy thirteen. They passed by the cement barricade in silence and with synchronized steps. Through the eyes of a villager looking out from within the light of a very distant home, they could have been a family.
Once
We Could
Pretend
We Were
Something
Very Else
Three days before I left the village, something almost good happened: Lea once again started caring about something that wasn’t exactly true.
“Listen, Yael. Miller killed an olive tree,” Lea said.
“Yes,” I said.
“It is the hardest thing in the world, to die. If you’re an olive tree.”
“Yes.”
“This was intentional. Premeditated.”
Lea turned her head away from the olive grove by her house and really looked at me, for the first time in weeks. She rested her cigarette in the ashtray. Night was falling around her backyard, purple, orange, huge. The shadow of the amputee lawn dwarf was lengthening, and the wind chimes rattled. Lea squinted, suggesting. She wanted me to say her new wild thought out loud, the one that was still growing, the first one she’d had in a long time.
And of course, I did.
“I believe we have a murderer in our village,” I said.
We were twenty-one years old. We had finished our military service, and I was about to leave the village for a job at the airport. I had been stuck in my parents’ home doing nothing for almost a year, but Lea’s extra time as an officer had only ended a few months ago. I’d lost touch with pretty much everyone except Lea and Avishag. It happened that way, that after all these years I ended up with the same best friends I made when I was in elementary school. I never spoke with Hagar or any of the girls I served with. Avishag was living with her mother at her grandmother’s in Jerusalem. She worked in an office, filing papers. Sometimes I still called Emuna, but she was in college already, in America. Lea planned to go to school, even took some entrance exams, but then realized that she didn’t know what she wanted from the future, and she didn’t know how to study for the future either. I didn’t know how to study for the future either, but I wanted it to come. I was thinking about a job.
It’s been years since Lea and I pretended together. But it’s also been weeks since we talked, since she told me anything that was true, even something true that wasn’t.
The olive tree was very dead. It was just a stem, a short stem. Its branches had turned dark one by one and then fallen to the ground. We weren’t there to see it all happen. We were in the army. When we came back, there was nothing left for us to do.
Miller’s wife began screaming, as she did every night after dinner. We could hear every word, traveling across the olive grove to Lea’s backyard. A drawer was slammed shut. Chinaware broke.
“Keep it down, you hooligans,” I shouted. After Lea grew silent, it was up to me to shout at her neighbors whenever they got loud.
“Meshuganas,” Miller’s scream came back to us.
“Hooligan,” Lea shouted. I pretended I wasn’t excited to hear her voice loud again, although my mouth dropped open without my noticing.
“Monkey girls,” Miller shouted. He called us monkey girls because our grandparents weren’t from Europe. We liked it, though. At least I still did. We once really liked thinking we were animals.
ONCE WE pretended we were wolves. We were twelve, and we were angry because after our bat mitzvahs our mothers told us we were now women. So we bit each other’s ankles. The people of the village spotted us walking on all fours through the streets and around the banana fields. Our mothers told us to stop, but we put their pants between our teeth and wouldn’t let go. On the street, we licked the toes of the girl in the wheelchair, and she laughed. When we got into Miller’s backyard, he screamed, “Meshuganas,” and chased us away with a shovel when we showed him our teeth. We howled stories to each other and we understood them until our bones were very tired.
We always pretended we had different ages, different names. We never ever told our real names when asked. Telemarketers, new teachers, new kids, vendors selling candy at the Arab market—they all wanted a piece of us. They didn’t really want to know our names; it was just a strategy to make us think they liked us. To get us to talk to them. To buy what they were selling. We wanted them to care about us, even if it wasn’t real. Once we cared so much, about everything. We wanted to talk to anyone we could. We lived so far away from the world. But we wouldn’t give our names up. We were Esther and Meek and Olga. Never us. Our world was small then, but larger than life because it happened only in our heads.
IF YOU are a boy and you go into the army, one thing that can happen is that you can die. The other thing that can happen is that you can live. If you are a girl and you go into the army you probably won’t die. You might send reservists to die in a war. You might suppress demonstrations at checkpoints. But you probably won’t die. A lot of things can happen to you after
. You could get a job. Go on a trip. Go to university. Get married. Move back in with your parents. Lea and I both moved back in with our parents, back to the tiny village by the Lebanese border. By now I had a job waiting for me in Tel Aviv, as an airport security guard. My uncle got it for me. I could not have gotten it myself. Not then. It was good money. All you had to do was sit. It was good; even I could see that. Lea saw nothing. She didn’t even see it when the ashtray on the wooden table in her backyard was overflowing. She didn’t even notice when it was light out, because she usually woke up after sundown. Every time I came to visit, her mom would greet me by saying, “You have a job. You have a job, right? You hear that, Lea? Well, isn’t that nice.” And her mom would clasp her hands and go back to the kitchen, and then the two of us would sit outside, look at the olive grove, and smoke so much, we couldn’t talk. There were only eighty-two houses in our village. One house right after the other, until they ended. Except for Lea’s house. There was an empty lot that separated her house from the Miller house. It was an olive grove. Because no matter how much sense it made to put another house there, they couldn’t do it because of the olive trees. It is highly against the law to kill an olive tree. You are not even allowed to uproot one.
We were girls. I know we were just girls. We did what we did in the army, and then it was over. If Lea was having a hard time talking or leaving her parents’ backyard when we were twenty-one, it was not because of the past; I know that. I admit it; the problem was the future of the past. It existed outside our heads, too large.
THE EVENING after Lea told me Miller was a murderer, I went back to her backyard, and everything was almost the same as it had been for the past few weeks. She was wearing her red pajamas. She was sitting on the plastic chair, staring at the olive grove, smoking. The one thing that was different was that she was holding a stack of paper in her hands. I wondered if she was going to spend her whole life sitting in that backyard, staring at that dead tree and smoking. That night, it didn’t seem impossible. She dragged the smoke into her lungs like her life depended on it, until her face rutted. I didn’t know what to say. When we were little, and friends, it was always she who spoke, who told me what we should care about next, who we should be. I sat by her for days and weeks, waiting for her to care about something, anything, even just a little.
And now she did.
“We have to let everyone know he is a murderer,” Lea said. “He needs to know he is a murderer. You can’t just kill an olive tree. You have to want to kill it, you have to murder it.”
Olive trees live for thousands of years. It was always hard for me to believe that, looking at those trees by Lea’s backyard. Their stems swirled into themselves as if caught midsentence, as if someone had just breathed life into them.
“I agree,” I told Lea. I always agreed with her. I will always agree with her, no matter what, I swear.
“It is not a matter of agreeing; it is a fact,” she said.
“I agree, but, Lea, how did you figure it out?”
Lea said that she’d been doing some research. Apparently, there is almost nothing in this world that can cause an olive tree to die. Specific types of fungus and bacteria can make it sick, give it tumors, but they won’t kill it. There is a bug that eats its bark and a caterpillar that attacks its leaves. Flies can reduce the quality of its fruits. Frost and rabbits could kill it, but this was northern Israel, and there was no frost, and there were no rabbits. And rabbits could only kill it if one of them crawled inside, got stuck, and died, and the body poisoned the tree from within. It happened in Spain once, according to Lea.
“And then there is gasoline,” Lea said. “If you pour enough gasoline by the roots of an olive tree, it dies.”
I looked at the remains of the tree ahead. A dark end. A clear beginning of something that had no middle. Its stem broke off in such an abrupt place, I bet that even if someone never knew there used to be more of it, if someone had never seen an olive tree or even any kind of tree before in his life, he could still tell something was missing.
“The bar mitzvah!” I said. “That’s when the murder happened!”
Lea nodded.
I remembered Lea’s mother telling us when we first got back from the army that while we were gone the terrible Miller neighbors became even worse. They moved on from merely throwing their raked leaves in the olive grove. They threw a bar mitzvah for their son in the olive grove, even though it was not their property and they had no right. They brought in all of their relatives from England and made pita from scratch on an authentic taboon, while marveling over the pastoral and holistic nature of their lives on the Holy Land’s border. In loud voices. “You have to understand,” Lea’s mother said, “these people are not originally from here, so they don’t understand.”
“The bar mitzvah!” I said again, and when I looked at Lea, she was smiling. An evil, honest smile.
“Miller used gasoline for the taboon,” Lea said. “My mom saw him. The idiot can’t even light a fire.”
“But why would he pour gasoline by the olive tree?” I asked.
“Because he had some left over. Because the tree was close to the taboon. Who can understand the mind of a murderer?”
We paused.
“A murderer, mind you, not merely a killer,” Lea said.
And then she showed me the posters she had made. Forty posters, on A4 paper. She had made them with crayons. Her baby brother’s. At the bottom they read: “Murderer of an Olive Tree: Wanted Dead or Alive.”
She had drawn Miller’s face herself. She made out his receding hairline in black and red crayon scratches. It got murkier with each poster.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I understood. I always understood her logic.
We left the backyard. We did.
We stuck the posters on the olive trees and on the benches in the street and on Miller’s car and even on his wandering cat. Lea stretched the tape, and I leaned forward and cut piece after piece with my teeth. Then we both banged hard to make sure the poster was stuck just right.
By the time we were back sitting and smoking in Lea’s backyard, Miller’s wife had begun screaming and slamming things as usual. But we didn’t scream at her to keep quiet. We counted till three and shouted, “Murderer! Murderer!” We got no response.
Even so, by the time Miller woke up, we believed he would know we knew what he was.
ONCE I pretended I could get a man killed. Once I said that draft dodgers deserve the death penalty. My mom always says that she bets the Miller kids will leave for England without being drafted, and I agree with her.
I pretended I could kill a man when I was in the army. This was a year after the war, right before I was done with my service. It was a game. I told my officer, Shai, that a man had winked at me. He was just an Arab construction worker, and I was just tired and far from home and bored. He had all the permits. He was brought to the base from his village to build a new part of the shooting ranges. “This is a mistake; I did nothing wrong,” he said with his accent. “I have all the permits,” he said. “I am building things in your base.”
“Don’t worry,” Shai said. “Don’t worry.”
He covered the man’s eyes with a weapon’s cleaning towel. The man put his hands behind his back on his own, and Shai cuffed them with real metal cuffs, not the fake black plastic ones the corporals had. “Don’t worry,” he said, and he sat the man in the back of the Humvee. I climbed into the back and sat across from the man. This was my wild idea, almost entirely my idea, but it was Shai who executed it.
We parked in front of the behind part of the sand dunes. Shai the officer silenced the Humvee. The vibrations stopped. He opened the back door of the vehicle. “Walk,” he said. “Don’t worry,” he said. But the man could not see, and he was breathing in and out, in and out.
“Walk,” Shai the officer said. “You can do it,” he said. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder.
The man walked in front of us like the spaghetti man fro
m dreams. It was hard on his heart in fear.
“Stop,” Shai the officer said. “Face us.”
The man turned as if on a hinge and faced us.
“Don’t worry,” the officer said. “But,” he said, “you can’t wink at girls. There are certain things you just cannot be doing in this world.”
I opened my mouth to breathe. I watched.
“So what I have to do is, I have to give you a chance,” Shai the officer said. “What is gonna happen is that I am going to shoot, and maybe I’ll hit you and maybe I won’t, but if I don’t hit you, and you move when I shoot, then I will hit you for sure.”
“Is that Ok?” Shai the officer asked. “Nod if you understand,” he said. “You have to nod,” he said. “I am sorry about that.”
The man nodded.
I could see it but the blindfolded man could not: Shai was not aiming toward the man. His M-4 was pointing sixty degrees from the ground.
He shot. The man fell to the sand. He hit it with his face first. He shouted for a long time, but only after we couldn’t hear the bullet anymore. One long shout, a shout for a minute, and then a small shout, and then he breathed.
It was a bad thing to pretend about. It was a mistake. I was never good at pretending without Lea. That evening was when I said draft dodgers deserve the death penalty. I said it to Lea. Over the phone.
THE WEEK after she got back from the army, Lea and I had one conversation. We had it in her backyard.
When we had it, missiles were falling, as they tended to do where we lived, since always. We listened to the exit booms and waited for the explosions. We had heard them so many times before, we were pretty good at guessing where they would fall. We saw the thick gray in the sky and it was like seeing the same sky we used to see when we were little, like we were still little.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel Page 17