The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel

by Shani Boianjiu

  “I missed home. We missed home, right?” I asked Lea.

  “I missed home so much. That’s all I did. I missed and I missed,” she said.

  “So much,” I said.

  “But these missiles, they remind me of the army.”

  “Well, they are missiles.”

  “Exactly.”

  “They are the same missiles from before we left, though,” I said.

  “Exactly. But not to me, you understand?”

  What she meant was, we missed home, and we waited for the moment when we finally wouldn’t have to miss it anymore. But now that we were home, we still missed it just as much. It didn’t go away.

  This is what I thought she meant, but then again, she had no interest in leaving home again, and I did, so maybe I didn’t understand at all.

  ONCE LEA and I pretended we were fish and cripples and stones. And when the school put in an elevator for the one human damage ever to be caused by the daily missiles—the crippled girl—we printed rules for it. We called the elevator a spaceship and posted rules for proper conduct in it, “The Page for Spaceship Rules.” No eating in the spaceship. No licking in the spaceship. No peeing in the spaceship. No speaking Romanian in the spaceship. No jumping up and down more than four times. The janitor took the page we made down right after he saw us hanging it and asked for our names. We were so happy we forgot all about the spaceship. Made-up names were our favorite thing.

  “What are your names?” the janitor asked, looming above us.

  We said we were Arnilan and Di.

  THE EVENING after we hung the murderer posters, when I came to Lea’s backyard, everything was the same, except she was wearing sneakers instead of just socks, and there were two containers of liquids that had never been there before. The first was a big yellow gasoline container. The second was a bottle of peach schnapps that I recognized from her parents’ liquor cabinet. Last time we had taken sips from it we were twelve. Last time I had drunk had been two and a half years ago.

  “This is what we are doing now? We are drinking?” I asked.

  “Who’s we? There is only me. You are leaving tomorrow morning.”

  This was the closest that Lea had gotten to showing anger because I was leaving, and I couldn’t help but think the alcohol must have had something to do with it. I wanted to be angry too.

  I sat on the chair beside hers and took the bottle from her and had a sip. The pollen from the cedar trees had gotten everywhere, my eyes, my throat, even when my mouth was closed; the schnapps washed it away.

  I tapped the gasoline container lightly and looked at Lea.

  “What are we going to do to Miller?” I asked.

  “He hasn’t responded to the signs at all, you know. No call to my mother, no shouting through the olive trees.”

  I looked ahead and saw that Miller’s windows were dark. Even though it was time, I couldn’t hear him and his wife screaming or slamming drawers. I couldn’t even hear the chatter of the children talking about their cartoons and the toys their English relatives sent them.

  “But what are we actually going to do to Miller?” I asked. “And where did you get gasoline?”

  “I found it. It is easy to find. And I am going to do to Miller exactly what he did to that olive tree.”

  “We,” I said. And I added, “Exactly?”

  “Exactly.”

  I understood Lea’s logic. How she thought of things. Things that were real and things that were not. I knew exactly what she meant by “exactly.”

  Not too far from us missiles set fire to a banana field, and slowly the green fruit burned and the scent filled the night.

  YOU WILL think I am saying something that is not true or that I think what I am saying is true but it isn’t, but I know it is true. When I was twenty-one there were times when what I wanted was to die. I don’t know why, but it is true. But most of the time what I wanted was to go work in the airport because it was good money. This is even truer.

  I had only been to the airport once. It was to visit my uncle, who works in security there. It was a little before the army, in the few weeks I had after school ended and before boot camp started. I remember watching a mother running to greet her son. She kept on rubbing her hands through his greasy hair when she reached him. He seemed blinded by the fluorescent light. He was wearing dirty clothes, a striped shirt and red Thai fisherman pants. I remember a young couple in line to enter the boarding gates. They spoke English and kept looking at their airplane tickets. The guy rolled a pink suitcase and rubbed the girl’s shoulder with his other hand. A young security guard, wearing a blue uniform and a leopard-spotted handkerchief around her neck, kept on passing through the lines, asking the same questions. “Did you pack it yourself? Did anyone give you anything to take on the plane? I am only asking because in the past people were given packages that looked innocent and turned out to be bombs.” She sounded sincere every time she spoke to someone new, but no one confessed.

  I won’t even have to ask questions. My uncle said the job he got me involves only sitting at a desk in between the airlines’ check-in and the duty-free counters and making sure no one passes through who looks suspicious. I will spend hours and months and days watching people leaving. And they will all look suspicious. It is always suspicious when someone leaves. I’ll never leave myself. After my shift is over, I’ll take the train to Tel Aviv and sleep alone. Then I’ll come back the next day. So that I can do the opposite of leaving again. People who see me on the train and don’t recognize my uniform, newcomers, visitors, may think I am going to the airport to fly away. I won’t even have to pretend. They’ll think it all on their own.

  WE WALKED through the olive grove to get to Miller’s house. It was dark and the only light was the orange fire, far away and in the fields. I was the one who held the gasoline container. The olive trees were alive around us. We were drunk but felt drunker than we were. Not elated, exactly, but we felt for a few minutes like we were no longer waiting. The silver leaves were everywhere; the convoluted branches swarmed around our bodies. The trunks were stuck solid in the ground by their roots, but with every step we took the trees felt closer, animated, eager. The explosions from the missiles stopped.

  Lea began running forward and then stumbled, held up her arms for balance, and stopped by a tree. Not the dead one. A live and short one.

  “Think about this tree,” she said.

  So I did. I stood in front of Lea and looked at her face and I thought about that olive tree.

  Lea explained a lot of things, her speech rapid, improbable. She said that the tree lives, and it lives and it lives and it lives. For thousands of years. Flies attack its fruits and they nibble through its branches and it thinks it should just die, but it doesn’t. It lives, and then bacteria makes tumors grow in it, grow from the inside, dangerously and slowly, and no one knows and so then it thinks again that it will die but it doesn’t; it lives and it lives. It stays; it stays forever.

  “It hurts,” Lea said, but she was smiling. I could see her gapped teeth in the dark. “It hurts to be in the midst of these trees. Can’t you feel them buzzing with too much life?”

  I stretched my arms out into the air and tried to feel her words.

  ONCE WE pretended we were reporters. Ten years before, when Lea still wasn’t too cool to hang out with Avishag and me, after the ocean one day, we pretended we were reporters and asked what happens in the morning. We asked it all day. We didn’t just ask one person. We asked a lot of people. I was sucking the salt off the edge of my braid when Lea asked the first person.

  “Excuse me, swimsuit lady,” Lea called. We were running after a lady on a Nahariya beach. Avishag stayed on her towel. Our public pretend games always embarrassed her.

  “Lady with the swimsuit! Excuse me!” Lea shouted.

  The lady turned.

  We were little girls and the lady was sorry for us.

  “I am sorry. I am sorry,” Lea said. She was always sorry first, never after. �
��But excuse me. We are reporters, and we need to know, what happens in the morning?”

  Back then Lea could draw her hand from mine, fast and far away, and I would only notice minutes later.

  “What do you mean, ‘What happens in the morning?’ Is tomorrow a holiday?” The lady said. The lady didn’t know what Lea meant.

  Neither did Lea. But she asked a man who smoked a cigarette the same question. He said that in the morning we wake up. We brush our teeth. We go to work or to school.

  I didn’t know what Lea meant. But I asked a woman eating watermelon and she said that maybe I thought she was someone she was not, because she didn’t know what I was talking about and she didn’t know what I thought she was supposed to do tomorrow morning. I told her I didn’t think she was someone she was not, and she cursed me because she wasn’t a woman, she was actually a young woman.

  What happens in the morning? We asked and we asked and we asked. More than thirty people. To some of them we explained that it was for our school’s newspaper. To others we said we were reporting for a kids’ show. We didn’t laugh once. I remember that day; it was good like spaghetti after swimming.

  We hitchhiked back to the village late at night. We waited at the corner for hours with smiles and no words. Nothing scared us yet. There was no explaining why we asked so many strangers that question, no right answer we expected. God did not plan that day for us. It was so random, only Lea could have planned it herself. In the backseat of the car that took us, Avishag fell asleep as soon as we got in, but Lea and I were so lit we couldn’t stop swaying our feet. She sank her teeth into my hand for a long time so she wouldn’t roar by accident. That’s how alive she was to me that day. She left marks.

  THE DOOR to Miller’s house was unlocked. We crept in. I tried not to make a noise, but Lea just marched through the rooms of the house as if it were her own, her steps quick. We passed through the entrance hall into the living room. Some of the kids’ toys were scattered on the carpet; expensive, shiny.

  Miller was sitting in the dark by the kitchen table. He was tossing a banana from one hand to the other, catching it, and again. He didn’t look up from the table, even though we were standing so close he must have known we were there. Intruders. There were plates around the table, with peas and schnitzel and salad on them, and there were forks by the plates, yet the meals were only partially eaten, abandoned midway.

  “Miller,” Lea said. “We are here to pour gasoline on you. Just like you did to the olive tree.” Her voice was steady, her feet planted solidly on the floor. She didn’t look at me. She looked straight at the down-facing head of Miller. At his bald spot.

  Miller kept on tossing the banana. He followed it with his eyes. He didn’t look up.

  When he spoke, his voice scared me. It was prickly, like it came from far away, from a place I’d never been.

  “Ahh, meshugana girls,” he said. “You are crazier than I thought. Have you finally, after all these years, come to set me on fire?” he asked.

  “You killed the olive tree,” Lea said. “It was thousands of years old, and you poured gasoline on it after the bar mitzvah.”

  “I did what? Why would I pour gasoline? We barely had enough that day to keep the fire going,” Miller said.

  “It is the only thing that can kill an olive tree. It is the only thing.”

  “Well, monkey girl, no matter. Set me on fire. She is gone. Took the kids.” He began tossing the banana more quickly. “This is perfect, actually, just what would happen to someone who stays in this country,” he said. “You can’t scare me.”

  “Did she leave because of the signs we put up?” I asked, before I could stop myself. Lea gave me a puzzled look. She stepped closer to me. This was not part of her plan, talking to him about his wife, but I was curious, curious as a child.

  Miller began laughing. His laughter sounded more like a baby choking. “The signs? The signs? It is the missiles. The war. It was always the war. She couldn’t take it anymore, wanted to go back to England,” he said. “ ‘We can’t have something happen to the little ones,’ ” he added in English, imitating the voice of his wife. “ ‘This was all your crazy idea to move here.’ ”

  He stopped tossing the banana and just held it in his hand. Then he did something fairly unbelievable, but it was true: he covered his face with his hands, still holding the banana, and began sobbing. It was hard to make out his words, but I think he said: “I should have gone with her. What’s in a country without a woman?”

  I was still drunk, but not enough so that this didn’t embarrass me. I lowered my eyes and only then noticed that I was no longer holding the gasoline container. That it was now in Lea’s hand.

  She looked displaced for a second. She looked at me like a disgusted kitten. “Why are we talking about this?” she asked, and then she opened the gasoline container and stepped right by Miller’s chair. “Miller, I will now pour gasoline on you,” she said, and this was what she did.

  She lifted the container high but then lowered it under the table and, making whoosh sounds, she poured the gasoline on Miller’s pants and shoes. On his roots. The smell burst out; it made it easier for me to breathe somehow. Miller’s face was still covered.

  Lea put the container on the ground, closed it, and then began to head away from Miller.

  He looked up.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. “I thought you came to set me on fire.”

  “I came to do exactly what you did to the olive tree, and I did,” Lea said.

  “What the hell?” Miller asked.

  “If you were an olive tree, you would start dying right about now, but you are not an olive tree, and that is the point,” Lea said. “What you did is, you poured gasoline.”

  Miller began sobbing again, this time without covering his face. It twitched in red and veins and tears. “No,” he said. “You ape! You said you were going to burn me, and this is what you’ll do!”

  “No,” Lea said. “I can’t; that’s not what ‘exactly’ means.” She stepped closer to him again, her chin high, strong. Setting him on fire would go against her logic. Since forever, she had done exactly and only what made sense in her world. This was my Lea. Glorious, rigid, a creator of worlds.

  “Burn me! Just do it. I don’t care,” Miller said.

  “No,” Lea said. “This is what you get. You stay here. You sit here. This is what you get—” and she would have gone on, but Miller got up from the chair and grabbed her, twisting her arm so that her back pressed against him. Then he shoved the unpeeled banana to her mouth, and began cursing, calling her a monkey first, then rapid curses, curses I had never heard before. Lea kept her mouth shut tight, and the banana smooshed out of the peel, its soggy white smearing her face.

  I ran toward Miller and kicked him with all I had. I kicked again and again and again and then Lea’s hand was in mine and we ran and we ran, through the door and into the olive grove.

  WHEN LEA was in boot camp, her unit was called up to help with the Gaza pull-out plan. They needed boot-camp soldiers to pack up the belongings left behind by the settlers who refused to leave without being dragged, and they chose the boot-camp girls of the military police. I had not been drafted yet. Lea would call me with stories of a little girl who began eating the sand when she told the girl she couldn’t go back into her house, and of how bulldozers had made an entire college campus into nothing but red dust in less than twelve hours. She had stories, and she needed me as a friend again. One Russian woman set herself on fire right by the road where Lea was guarding.

  “The thing that’s weird is the Popsicles,” she said. “I think they are afraid the soldiers would get too upset by all of this, so the army keeps on giving us Popsicles. It’s like it is summer.”

  “It is summer,” I said through the phone.

  “I know,” she said. “That’s what’s weird.”

  LEA AND I marched through the olive grove back from Miller’s house. It was only five hours before I had to hitch
hike to Nahariya and catch the train to Tel Aviv. I kept on walking, my mind unquiet. One step, two step. I began to skip, and then I raised my arms in the air, and then I froze midmoment.

  “Lea,” I said. “Let’s pretend we are olive trees. Let’s pretend we lived and we lived for thousands of years and now we are alive.”

  Lea stopped walking ahead of me, but she didn’t turn to look at me. “No,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “Of course we can,” I said. “We can pretend. We could be trees if we wanted to.”

  “No,” Lea said. “I really can’t. I can’t be a tree.” She looked at the dry yellow ground.

  And she kept on walking, her body growing smaller, until she reached her backyard. I didn’t go after her. I stayed. And when I closed my eyes and opened them again, frozen still, she was not anywhere anymore, and it was just me, at a halt.

  I tried and I tried to pretend that I was an olive tree. I told myself that I lived, and I lived, and even when there were tumors exploding under my bones and predators eating out my eyes, I thought I’d die but I didn’t. I stood frozen, eyes open, my arms misshapen in the air; I tried forever to be an olive tree, I swear. But without her I couldn’t pretend. I tried for hours. Until it was time for me to leave.

  WHAT REALLY killed the tree was a rabbit. We have never seen a live one in the village, but my mother told me that when she went over to look at the tree a few weeks after I left, she saw the decaying body of a rabbit inside the dead trunk. She went over because Lea’s mother had told her she could smell something very wrong, but she was too scared and worn out to search herself. The rabbit was curled up inside itself, and its fur was almost gone. Its flesh blended with the bark and worms. Had Lea and I gone over to the tree and looked, we would have seen the rabbit ourselves, but we didn’t. In the end, we never came close enough to see it that night, or maybe we just didn’t look. We never could have imagined a dead rabbit, because we had never seen a live one.