“That’s everyone who has been there. It’s not you. It’s this fucked-up army; it fucks you up,” he said.
“You don’t know what I did,” she said.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “it won’t change a thing. Tell me you had to kick a grandpa in the balls and I wouldn’t care.” Ron felt angry, sickened, at the city, at the country—at whatever circumstances had made Lea cry like that. It wasn’t right. It had never been right, this whole seventy-year-long war. He had never realized that before now.
“What are we?” Lea said and laughed. “Are you saying we are like some sort of item now, as they say in this city?”
“Yes,” Ron said. “We are an item. Come back to bed.”
He would fix it, he decided then. Whatever it was that made her eyes so knowing the first time he saw her, he would fix. This was what he had to work with, and he would make it work. That’s pragmatism right there.
HE TOOK it very far very quick—but he couldn’t help it. The month he found out the sandwich shop was finally doing more than breaking even, that it was beginning to make a profit less than a year after he had opened it, he told Lea, “In a few years there will be enough money to start a family with.” He was amazed at how well it was going. Were there any other food places in Tel Aviv that had managed to establish themselves this quickly? His brother had told him he would have to invest money for a good two years before it would start paying off.
“Watch it there, tiger,” she said. She wiped the counter. She smiled. At him.
After the lunch rush, a middle-school girl with a brace on her face was giving Lea trouble.
“Your sign says that you will put whatever I ask for in the sandwich, and I want a baguette with pot brownies,” the middle-school girl spat out.
“I wish I could do it, but we don’t even have a liquor license,” Lea tried to reason with her.
“I want what I want,” the girl replied. She was avoiding the gentle way in which Lea tried to catch her eyes, the way Lea tried to humor her in whatever way she could.
“I know, sweetheart, I know—but my hands are tied.”
Before they were together, “an item” as she called it, Ron had wondered where Lea’s supernatural patience for the customers came from, but now that they had been together for a few months, he knew. Still, Lea had yet to let him come see her apartment, hadn’t even agreed to share a cab or tell him where she lived.
“You know what it is like in this city,” she said, resorting to cliché when he asked her about it. “Your apartment is all you are.”
Still. He knew more than just the Lea who worked at the shop; he knew another Lea too. He knew two Leas. Three, actually. There was the Lea who wore dresses short enough to be shirts to dance clubs, who dragged him through the streets of the city from one club to another: the Cat & Dog club, the Oman 17, all the big names. This was the Lea who could dance for hours, whom everyone at the bar knew and liked, and they would chant for her as she finished her fifth, then sixth drink. The Lea who came to his bed almost every night, giggling, laughing, acting as silly as a child and all at once entirely a woman.
Then there was the other Lea, the one whose crying woke him close to dawn, the one he caught in his arms as she tried to run out of the bed, the one with hardly any words.
The third Lea, still his favorite, was the Lea from the sandwich shop, the star employee. She behaved exactly as she had on her first day. But it was he who was different. How could he not be?
“How about you get the fuck out of here?” Ron screamed at the middle-school girl. “You are not being funny. Or cute. Your face looks like a Rottweiler with that brace.”
“You’ll be sorry,” the girl said. She flung her Manga backpack on her back and walked away.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Lea said. “I had it under control.” She turned to peel roasted eggplants.
Ron was trying to calm down. Tel Aviv people pissed him off. This shit would never go down anywhere else, but in this city everything was fair game. A man could not even get away with a gimmick. When Domino’s said they would provide thirty-minute delivery to anywhere in the city or the pizza would be on them, hundreds of people waited for when it was daylight saving time and then yelled at the delivery guy that he was an hour late and demanded their pizza for free. Ron had even started suspecting that the people of the city were stealing things when Lea and Vera looked away. Things had a tendency to disappear—utensils, cups—that day he couldn’t even find the butane torch.
He watched Lea crack walnuts by rolling them on the wooden cutting board. Her ponytail swished. Something was different. He watched her as she bent below the sink to throw out the walnut shells. She moved slowly, methodically, bending her knees, keeping her back straight.
“Did you hurt your back or something?”
“Didn’t I just say I had things under control?” Lea said. She stood upright again, grabbed a butter knife. She gave Ron an unnerving look.
“I am sorry, I am sorry. I just don’t want you to hurt yourself,” Ron said.
“You are gonna get hurt unless you shut your mouth,” Lea said. She pointed at him with the butter knife. Then she stepped closer, dropped the knife on the counter, reached over. She grabbed Ron’s hand. Her hand was soft, and when she smiled, Ron forgot his annoyance, forgot his question, forgot that questions could even be born into this world.
“I LIKE my job a lot.” She suddenly spoke during one of those premorning hours when he held her in his arms. “I like being able to give people what they want. At the checkpoints you’d hear all these fantastical stories—everyone had a mother who had less than a day to live somewhere, the wedding of a child who had survived an attack by evil wolves—and all I could do was say that my hands were tied because they didn’t have the right color permits, or because they were five minutes late.”
Ron didn’t know what he could say. He kissed her shoulder.
“Thanks for giving me the job,” she said.
“Did you ever feel like looking the other way, letting someone through the checkpoint when you weren’t supposed to?” he asked after a few silent minutes.
“I thought about it, a little, sometimes. Then that man stabbed one of us in the neck through a car window. We weren’t supposed to come so close to the cars, but that soldier did—I guess the man in the car pretended to have a story too. And when I was an officer I couldn’t just let people through, because then I was an officer.”
Lea’s body was much smaller than Ron’s; it felt even smaller when he held it. When she drank too much, he sometimes carried her up the stairs. And still he knew she had done things that he couldn’t; well, maybe he could have done them, but either way he hadn’t. He had transcribed Arabic in an office. Knowing this made it easier and harder to hold this naked woman in his arms. Easier because he knew she was stronger; she didn’t need him; she merely wanted him. Harder because he always wondered if his arms were clutching her strongly enough. “Couldn’t have been easy,” he said finally. His words still failed him, but he had to say something, and holding her so close, he hoped Lea would understand.
“It wasn’t,” she said. “Even though I never even liked Yaniv, the boy who was stabbed. He had these pointed bushy eyebrows, like furry arrows.”
“That’s why you didn’t like him?” Ron asked.
“They looked like surprised worms.”
“It is Ok not to like someone. You didn’t know.”
“Maybe.”
THE EVENING after the girl asked for pot brownies, another jokester came. He was drunk, Russian, fat.
“I want baby meat in challah bread,” he demanded.
“Baby lamb? Baby cow?” Lea asked.
“Baby baby, bitch,” he said. “That’s what I want.”
Lea froze and looked at him.
“I can see it in your eyes you’d do it,” the man said. The rims around his eyes glowed sickly yellow. “Your sign does say, ‘whatever you want,’ doesn’t it?” he aske
d. “I can see it in your eyes you’d do it.”
Lea looked at her sandals. Then she looked up. She looked to the left, to the right. Ron had never seen her so scared. It was as if the man had a gun to her head, as if the whole world were out there, waiting to chase her.
She ran out of the kiosk.
Ron heard her sandals slapping the pavement at a steady pace. “Wait!” he called.
He took a five-hundred-shekel bill out of the register and handed it to the old man who always ordered the red-and-yellow-peppers sandwich.
“If you can just keep an eye on the place until Vera gets in for the night shift, I’ll give you more,” he mumbled.
He didn’t wait for the old man to respond. He ran.
She was quick, but he was quick too. He caught a glimpse of her hopping in a cab and lucked into one of his own. Lea did not look back. He wanted to tell the driver, “Follow that cab!” but he felt silly. He didn’t even know if saying something like that was legal in real life. Instead, he just told the driver he’d give him street-by-street directions. He told the driver he remembered the road to where he wanted to go; he just could not remember the place itself.
IT WAS a pricey street. He watched her get off right by Rabin Square and walk down Zeitlin Street. He gave the driver a fifty without waiting for the change, got out, and walked slowly behind her. He followed her into the building and waited in the staircase until he heard her close a door on the third floor. He wondered how she’d respond, why he didn’t just call her name. He realized he was curious about where she lived; and, as happy as he was knowing three or even four Leas, he would be most happy with just one, with just her.
He waited for five minutes. He played with the dust on the plastic plants in the hallway.
He knocked.
She opened the door barefoot, wearing nothing but a long white shirt.
“You shouldn’t have followed me,” she said.
“I had to see what a one and a half bedrooms looked like,” he tried to joke.
She didn’t smile. She looked tired, more tired than he had ever seen her.
“I am coming in,” he said.
She moved to the side without a word, allowing him to enter.
He caught only a glimpse of the living room and kitchen before she pulled him by the arm. It looked like the apartment of someone’s parents. The sofa’s pillows were knitted and matched the paintings of fruit platters and bridges on the walls. He smelled incense; scented, burning wood.
In her bedroom everything moved faster than it did during the drunken nights at his place. She kept on grabbing his hands and putting them there, then quickly there, then another place. She pushed him, hard, onto the bed when he tried to touch her hair. He landed on his back and wondered how much an orthopedic mattress like hers cost and why he hadn’t gotten one yet.
He asked her for the price, and she laughed, softened. He put his hand on the back of her neck. His Lea.
He surrendered. She did too, ultimately. They fell asleep.
HE WOKE up to the familiar sound of someone sobbing and for a second forgot where he was. Lea lay still by his side, and when he leaned over to look at her he saw that she was sound asleep rather than crying, breathing in a rhythm, more peaceful than he had ever seen her.
He heard it again. A sob. A moan. He walked out of the bedroom and stood still in the short hallway in his boxers. He felt foolish, displaced, cold. The air conditioning was blasting, but he hadn’t felt it under the thick covers.
He heard the sound again. It was coming from behind a door next to the bedroom.
The half bedroom, he thought.
He tried to open it, but it was locked. He knew Lea, knew her well enough to know where she’d hide a key. Whenever Vera was late for her shift and Lea absolutely had to go, she would lock down the blinds of the kiosk and hide the key under the trash can in the street. There was no trash can in the hallway, but there was an urn on the carpet, full of decorative fake bamboo sticks.
THE HALF bedroom looked exactly like a regular bedroom, except it was only half the size, and there was no bed, but there was a butane torch on the floor—aluminum, French; the one he had bought for the kiosk. The aluminum was covered in little red splotches.
And the man, of course. It was impossible not to notice the man. A middle-aged Arab man was in the room, on the floor, with his hands and legs cuffed. He was naked, and the skin on his back was burned. His face was a host of colors and bumps, yellow, red, blue. He looked up and opened his mouth. He was missing two bottom front teeth, so that one tooth stood alone, like a baby’s.
Nothing made sense; nothing seemed to match. Ron opened his mouth but no words came out. He felt her hand on his shoulder.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” Lea said. “I saw him passed out drunk on a bench by the construction site under my building two days ago and I knew I recognized him. Fadi. So I took him. He killed a boy in my unit once. Cut his neck. Just reached in through his car and grabbed him by the collar and with the knife …”
“Didn’t anyone say anything when they saw you carrying him?” Ron asked, his voice slow.
“This is Tel Aviv,” she said.
“Help me,” the man said to Ron in Arabic. His voice was hoarse, air with no vocal cords.
“It took me two hours to carry him up here. He was so drunk he didn’t even resist, but I was worried I was going to totally throw out my back,” Lea said. Her voice sounded sleepy. “He keeps on talking to me. On and on and on. You’d think he’d gather by this point I don’t understand a word of Arabic. I thought he’d stop talking after I knocked his teeth out, but he won’t.”
“What did I do?” the man asked Ron. He looked at Ron as if he thought Ron had authority, as if he were a high-ranking Mossad agent who had finally come to do the right thing.
Ron’s head was pounding, a hangover, although he hadn’t drunk a thing last night. Lea kept talking.
“I can’t stop either; I can’t let him go.”
Ron looked at the man and motioned him with his hand to stay quiet. He looked at his watch. In less than two hours it would be time for his shift in the sandwich shop. He picked up the butane torch.
He landed a blow on the back of the man’s neck. The man crumpled; his face smacked the floor. It was an accurate, steady blow. Ron couldn’t help but wonder if the blow had broken the torch, if it would ever work again.
He put his hand on the back of Lea’s neck, and she stepped closer and wet his chest, then began to kiss it, small kisses, like a child sipping soup.
He thought.
Perhaps they could spend a few more hours in bed before they went to the kiosk. Put on some music, have a few drinks. Never mind that it was five in the morning; this job, this city, they were not the boss of them. Sure, he’d have to help Lea let the man go soon, and scare him enough to keep a secret. But there was plenty of time for that.
This morning was theirs.
This city is theirs.
And maybe everything is someone’s imagination.
Please, don’t judge.
III
The
After
War
And when the boy soldiers returned from the war they tortured the girl soldiers who waited for them. This took four days. In the end people died.
This was the after war, but everyone knew about it before it happened. Every reserve soldier was invited to participate, and very few people, perhaps just a few young girls, were surprised.
None of the women had to be there. Lea was married, three months pregnant—though she hadn’t told anyone yet. Avishag was on antidepressants and seeing a shrink. Yael was in Goa, India, at the time, translating the lyrics of a traveling musical commune. They had all kept in slight touch over the years. They did not keep in regular touch with anyone else from the village, not even their parents.
Avishag had a driver’s license. She drove the girls to the training base in her dead Subaru. They got stationed together becaus
e Shai the officer used to fuck Yael and he was waiting for her to come back from the world and fuck him more.
They came back, but they were no longer needed. They were women now. The younger girls hummed songs like milk and honey. “There is a love in me and it will rise and win you” and “Not always I come out with words.” They were in front of their watch monitors in war rooms, fully geared at the gates; checking who everyone entering the base was. Calibrating weapons with the L-beat, a red laser that let you correct a weapon without firing.
“Hey, where do we rest?” Yael asked the girls huddled on the sands outside the war room. They were playing a new card game called Jungle Lies. The rules changed each month with every new deck of cards.
“You just got here,” a young checkpoint girl said, throwing two cards down, taking three. “We don’t even need you cunts.”
“You threw out three cards and now you’ll have to lose four cards the next round,” Lea said. “And since I am an officer, I suggest you mind your words.”
The girl took them to their housing in the Negev guns and ammunition storage caravan.
The women thanked her and she laughed like there was no tomorrow. “You shouldn’t have come. We got this.”
The Negev, named after the desert, was a modest machine automatic gun developed in Israel. The room reeked of gasoline; the weapons had recently been cleaned, and they were crammed against the wall. The floor was wooden, and weeds as high as the girls’ knees sprouted through the cracks. There were four green mattresses in the far left corner.
“Well,” Avishag said.
“LOL,” Lea said.
Yael sang a song about a duck who wanted to ask questions, a song she remembered from when they were little.
Suddenly all the lights on the base went out.
“Why?” Avishag asked.
Then she slipped out of her red dress, her breasts hard in the daylight. Lea poured from a green bag the uniform and equipment that she’d picked up at the supply caravan.
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