Lea left for Tel Aviv too, a few weeks after I did. She didn’t tell me. I found out about a year later. My mom told me over the phone. By then I was not in Tel Aviv anymore. I found out about that a week after I left the country for the first time, before I took the first of many trips around the world.
Here is what happened in the morning, the morning I left. I took my backpack, the big one, the one I used in the army. I had filled it the afternoon before, before I went to Lea’s, with all the clothes that still fit me, clothes I hadn’t worn in over two years. Aside from clothes, the only thing I took was the Rules. “The Page for Spaceship Rules,” the one I kept from school, after the janitor told us to take it down.
I stood at the hitchhiking spot, and I pointed my finger, and I waited. I waited beyond the shade, the asphalt stretching ahead of me, my back turned to the outskirts of the village, only burned banana fields at my side.
A green Fiat stopped, and it took me south and away from the border to Nahariya, the most northern train stop in the country. I waited with four soldiers and a mom at the train station. Then I took the train; I took the train asleep.
When I took the train to Tel Aviv, I didn’t yet know about the rabbit. And I didn’t even think or dream about the tree. I just slept. I woke up minutes before we arrived. The train station was swarming with people, all these people, walking here and there. A woman rubbed against my backpack and I was pushed forward. When I looked up, my eyes met a man. He was promoting a cell phone service. I could tell because his shirt read: “Connecting People.” He smiled at me and stepped forward, a neon orange pamphlet in his hand. I stood there, frozen. The heavy backpack chafed my skin.
“Excuse me,” the man said. “What’s your name?”
“No thanks,” I said. “No thank you.”
And Then
the People
of Forever
Are Not
Afraid
Having been born into the Zubari family, the largest Iraqi family in all of Israel, even Avishag’s hysteria was not her own. It belonged to the many women who lived in her time and to generations of Zubari women who lived before her in Baghdad. At first she called her hysteria sadness and nurtured it as if it were her child. One February morning, she woke up and forgot what it felt like to want anything. She was twenty-one, eight months out of the army, and she should have gone downstairs to grab her morning tea and the olive sandwich her mom had made for her lunch in the offices, but she could not, because she didn’t see the point. Instead, she stayed in bed all day until hunger was acid pooling at the bottom of her stomach and she had to run downstairs and stuff her throat with frozen pita and gulps of water she drank by pressing her lips to the kitchen faucet. As she was running down the stairs, there was something she wanted, at least for that minute, but after she ate, she would climb back to bed because there was nothing else she wanted.
When the nightmares started, her grandmother said to her mother, “She has hysteria” and also “We don’t want a repeat of what happened to her brother Dan.” Avishag and Mira, her mother, were living in Jerusalem at the time. The house where Avishag lost the will to move was her grandmother’s. Her mother had moved there before Avishag was drafted. In American television, being hysterical meant shouting and crying and turning red and breaking chinaware and laughing cruelly. But for the Zubari women, these were behaviors they engaged in regularly. When they did have hysteria, Zubari women were quiet and motionless, chinaware you wanted to break. Hysteria was not forever; it came and went. But it was a thing to hide—from future Zubari husbands, from the rest of Israel that wasn’t Zubari and female.
When his ex-wife started allowing Avi to visit his daughter again, when she told him that Avishag hadn’t left her bed in months, Avi didn’t know what to do, but he knew this time he had to do something. He had already lost a son he barely knew. Then he remembered that when he first got out of the army the only thing that soothed the lizards in his brain was driving around the stone walls of Jerusalem for hours and nights. So he bought his daughter, who had never gotten her license, a used car. A car that was once used by a person who was now desperate. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and the car Avi got his daughter Avishag went for two thousand shekels below market price.
“Six million Jews, that’s not nothing,” Avi said to Avishag the day he gave her the car.
His daughter wasn’t sure what nothing was not. She stared at him and then shielded her eyes from the Jerusalem summer with her hand.
“Two thousand shekels, that’s not nothing,” Avi said.
He had gotten the car from a survivor. He said, “She is a beauty.” He said, “She is American.” The car. The survivor was Polish. She survived the Nazis, but the whore couldn’t play him in price.
Avi had come to Israel from Libya. He was sick of hearing about the Holocaust because he had never even been to Europe, not even to Turkey on one of those “all-included” trips. And Europeans, the ones who had survived and made it to this country, they were the ones who ruined his life.
He told Avishag that driving around in the car was the only thing that made his days breathable after he got out of the army. He wanted her to learn.
Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and Avi had squeezed the woman who sold him the car two thousand shekels below market price. Not once had Avishag agreed to sit in the driver’s seat. He would come often and take her for rides after he got the new car. Weeks passed. Then he couldn’t come so much because he was busy being a contractor, or with his new wife, his new boys. Someone was always sick; one of the Palestinian construction workers was always missing his shift.
Then he’d wake up in the middle of the night. Thinking he had given up made his nightly sweats tepid.
“SMILE,” HE told Avishag at the start of the day of their twentieth “driving lesson.” It had been months since he had bought her the car. Avishag stood in her boy shorts in the parking lot outside her mother’s building and squinted at him. “This is the part where you smile,” Avi said. He took his Time cigarettes out of his jeans pocket.
Avishag pressed a chin to a collarbone and breathed out. When she glided her tongue behind her teeth, she tasted morning. It was past two in the afternoon, but her mother had managed to get her out of bed only ten minutes earlier. This was the earliest she had gotten out of bed all month. Those green boy shorts, she must have been wearing them for more than a week. Even her mother had given up on her. “Let your father take care of you for a bit,” she said. “Let him deal with it.”
“Blood-sucking dead fish, this whole family,” Avi said and tapped the hood of the car, like a man would to another man’s shoulder. “Your mother, and her sisters, and your mother’s mother, and your sister, and you.” He pointed at Avishag.
Avishag didn’t want to be a blood-sucking dead fish like her father called her. She didn’t want to be a blood-sucking dead woman. She didn’t want to be a dead woman. But what she did want, she didn’t know.
It was not her fault, Avi reminded himself. She had hysteria. This was hereditary, an Iraqi thing. At first he had still tried to ask her what was wrong. He had wanted there to be a certain thing that was wrong. He had hoped even for that thing to be a boyfriend, maybe an officer, someone who had hurt her, so that he could hurt him back. But when he asked her what it was, if there was a boy or even a man in her life, she said no. Lately, he didn’t ask about much anymore. He just asked for her to get better.
“Please,” Avi said, clasping his hands together, balancing his cigarette in his fleshy lips.
“Thank you for coming, Daddy,” Avishag said finally.
“Oh hon,” Avi said, removing his nicotine-stained grin and sunglasses. He tapped Avishag on her back. “All I want is for you to have whatever you want,” he said.
Avishag wanted to climb back to sleep. She had been forced to get out of the house for a bit. Her mother had gotten her out of bed by splashing water on her head. Her eyes were open, and they still stung
a bit, still remembered the shock.
Avi put his cheap sunglasses back on and blew a kiss in Avishag’s direction by gesturing an explosion with his hand from his lips, a gesture more appropriate for an Italian chef praising pasta than for a Libyan father cheering up his gloomy daughter.
“Come on, kid, let’s drive!”
This was their twentieth “lesson.” Enough was enough, he thought. There are times you have to decide that it is enough.
He twirled the keys in his fingers. His key chain was the symbol of Jerusalem’s soccer team. Avishag couldn’t stop staring at it swirling around his hairy knuckles; it was yellow, black, and foamy. When Avi was Avishag’s age, he was already married to her mother.
WHEN AVISHAG was five, her mother had hysteria. She had it for a year. Then another year, after she had their third child. Avi could count on one hand the times he had seen her out of bed that month. With one of his hands, he broke an almost empty bottle of Araq on the granite kitchen counter. He could smell the anise; it reminded him of chewing the dark licorice his grandfather had bought him in a candy store in Tripoli. Avi went into the bedroom. His wife was lying there in the dark, her eyes closed, her lips pressed together. Avi was very, very drunk. He put the entirety of his weight over her thin body but she didn’t wake up. He started crying. “Wake up. Wake up.”
He started cutting. The glass of the bottle was much sharper than he could ever have dreamed.
Oh, and he did dream. He did. For years after that. A decade. More.
In his dream he was holding just a dot of shiny glass, and when he pressed it into the sharp collarbone of his wife, a red line, a geometric line, flew into the ceiling. When the line hit the ceiling, it became a hovering puddle in the air of the room and then suddenly came pouring down on the bed in a splash of red. In his dream, he was drowning in his wife’s warm blood.
In life, he had merely injured her. The scar on her neck was no longer visible by the time they were divorced. In life, it was the social worker, the German social worker, who made her divorce him.
“THERE IS an empty parking lot by Motza,” Avi said on the day of the twentieth driving lesson, and turned the wheel to the right. He put in a tape, a song he knew even back in Tripoli, where all the women were dark and young, and daughters like his didn’t happen. “It is a great place to start learning to drive,” he said.
Avishag opened her mouth, but it was only to put a chunk of her hair inside of it.
“Say something,” Avi asked.
She knew better.
BEFORE AVISHAG met with the army doctor, the one who signed the papers authorizing an early release from the military, Yael had told her that if things were really that bad on the Egyptian border, all she had to do was say something. Anything, really. She could say she believed she was a butterfly, claim she wet the bed, explain that it was her teddy bear who bought her cigarettes. She could say she had already gotten in trouble once and that if they kept her she’d just do something to end up in military jail again, like she ended up after she got naked in some tower. She liked jail so much it was harder to get back to routine. Something, anything to give the doctor an excuse to claim that she was crazy. It took two weeks to get a referral to an army psychiatrist, but Yael claimed that getting out of being a soldier was not so hard. They don’t want the liability. There are enough soldiers in this country.
But when the doctor leaned over his desk and asked, “What is it you wanted to talk about?” she drew a blank.
She looked around his office. His ashtray was clean; the marble sparkled. On his wall he had the map of the country, like any other officer. On top of the drawers at the side of his desk, a dirty aquarium rested. The fish all swam in circles, gold and sapphire and gilled. Avishag had never seen a doctor before. The Zubaris, being Iraqi, did not believe in them. Choosing a crazy sentence from the millions of options she had was impossible. Her voice would not let her do it.
The doctor coughed and said, “Well?”
In the end she chose to say something that was almost true.
“This aquarium makes me think it is the Holocaust of fish.”
She did not remember where she got that idea; it was scavenged from a bottomless body of water, but it was also not a complete fabrication. She was dismissed two days later. She did not talk to Yael much after that because she could not bear to tell her she had been dismissed for a crazy sentence she almost believed.
ON THE hills around Jerusalem, a pickup truck stood before Avi’s car covered in neon bumper stickers.
“The People of Forever Are Not Afraid,” one of them read. “We Have No One to Lean On But Our Father in the Sky.”
“Don’t do that, hon,” Avi said.
Avishag had the tip of her black ponytail in her mouth. She opened her mouth wide, like an elderly woman, and it fell out, dangling on her chest.
“That’s how I love you,” Avi said.
AFTER THE rabbis finally approved the divorce, Avishag and her father were allowed to meet only with the German social worker present. Her hair was dyed blonde and mounted on her head like a sand castle, and her nose was small and pink—a snout. She sat on a leather office chair, but Avi and Avishag sat on colorful wooden chairs, the chairs of children. Avi’s butt was too big for the chair; he squirmed like a fried worm. Avi had had to drive all the way up north, because that’s where Mira had moved to. On the tiny desk there were puzzles of smiling ducks and Barbie dolls and books. Avishag put a lump of hair in her mouth and stared right at him. His son, Dan, refused to see him. The German social worker said he was big enough to decide that. He was twelve. Mira had said she’d bring the youngest girl if things “go well” with Avishag.
“You could read to her,” the pig-faced social worker suggested. She wiped her nose with her wrinkly hand.
This was, by far, the stupidest suggestion Avi had ever heard. If things had turned out differently, this woman would be stuffing her mouth with a pork sausage in a café in Berlin just now, and he would be riding on a horse with his daughter across the markets in Tripoli, buying her dark eyeliner and purple scarves. In Tripoli, girls started wearing makeup when they were as young as eight, and they always kept a scarf across their faces. This woman, she was not even wearing lipstick, and he could swear that her exposed hairline was receding. This woman, she did not know what being a woman was.
“I don’t read,” Avi said. What he meant was, he couldn’t read, not well enough for a book.
“Oh, I see,” the German woman said. She must have thought he meant he couldn’t read Hebrew, but really he couldn’t read much at all. His family had fled from Tripoli to the refugee camps when he was ten, and he had forgotten the little he had learned. He had lived there, in the tents, which later became a caravan town, right by the ocean, until he was old enough to join the army. He had forever been behind the other kids. He wasn’t smart enough to make out words.
Oh, but he could make his daughter, and he did make his daughter, and his daughter, she knew already what being a woman was. She was only eight, darker than even he was, and she took his face in her tiny palms like a lady, like a mother, and she said, “Father, I do not want these stories. I want your stories. Tell me your stories.”
He had never told a story before. The German woman smirked.
He put his daughter on his lap.
“She has to stay in the chair,” the German said.
“Oh, Ok,” he said. Avishag went back to her chair. She took his hand.
“One time, in this one country, there was this one mom and this one dad,” he started.
“I think your wife would appreciate it if you didn’t get into personal issues with the child,” the German said.
Personal issues! “The child” had been made by him. What could he tell her that wasn’t personal? Those Europeans, Avi thought. All this spiteful formality. They have no hearts. Hitler burned theirs.
“One time, in this one country,” Avi started again. He paused, then spoke again. And that w
as the beginning of the only story he ever told.
“JUST DO something,” Avi said once they had reached the parking lot. He and Avishag were leaning on the front of the car. It had taken him five minutes to convince her to step out of the passenger seat, and even that was progress from the previous times. That was something, at least. He wouldn’t give up hope yet.
He offered her one of his Time cigarettes, and they stood there smoking. In the abandoned parking lot, there was nothing but asphalt, yellow weeds, and a semi trailer with no wheels.
“Just sit in front of the wheel for one minute,” Avi said. “For me.” He clasped his hands and even considered getting down to his knees.
“I am too hot,” Avishag said. “I am going back in.” The cool air of the car, it was a small thing she wanted, and this for her was something, at least.
Avi thought about giving up.
Then he thought about that bumper sticker, the one glued to the back of the pickup truck. That sticker, cheap, pink, idiotic, real. “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid.”
It was for his daughter that Avi had learned how to read. He had spent hours laboring over a single article in the sports section of the paper. And then suddenly, years later, he had noticed that he had read the whole section in one sitting, with ease, during a visit to the toilet.
He thought about his middle daughter every time since, whenever life was, for a moment, as easy as living. Playing soccer with his little boys, buying his new wife a gorgeous chunk of lamb, buying a used car.
His daughter opened the door to the passenger seat up front slowly, careful not to hit the curb. The door squeaked.
“Sorry,” she said.
So she opened the door faster and indeed scratched the curb. “So sorry,” she said.
Finally inside the car, she closed the door behind her gently, too gently; it didn’t close. So she slammed it harder. Thump.
“Sorry,” she said.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel Page 19