The girls looked at her as if she were a wannabe in their clique. Desperation rang false on Yael.
“But. I haven’t been everywhere yet, obvi,” Yael said.
And then they all breathed.
FROM THEN on the days of war were nice to them. They watched Yes satellite TV all day. They all just had regular cable at their parents’ homes and wherever else they lived, so the new channels were a blessing. They watched a Gilmore Girls marathon and a Discovery Channel show about honey badgers. They watched a documentary called My Car Is My Lover, and a Night Court/Who’s the Boss marathon on the oldies channel. In the afternoons Lea and Avishag took the car to get food and alcohol in the nearby Arab town. Lea paid; they got fusion food: fried onions and Muenster cheese and basil on everything that could ever be carved out of bread.
Yael stayed behind when the other two went out to get food. She loved it. It was like babysitting for the richest couple in town after the children had gone to bed. She stretched her legs out and watched fuzzy shows on channel six, the children’s channel. Bully the Snowman and Wonder Shoes and Chiquititas. The songs bounded her, as if their notes were painted in water on the walls. The channel’s theme song between the shows was her favorite. “The channel is my home. This summer the plane is boarding on the children’s channel! Science! Art! Horror stories!” She breathed like she thought nothing of it in those hours. She was the ruler of a domain not her own. The song rang like trumpets when she closed her eyes. “The national channel is the true place! With it I am able, and it is always with me!” If Yael was crying, it was because only then did she start to understand why she thought it was, after all, pretty good to die for her country.
The women were happy in those days.
THE BOYS came back to the base after two weeks. Shai had died. A few others had too. The foot invasion had achieved nothing and the army was taking down Damascus and Aleppo with aerial strikes instead. The younger girls had left the day before, sent back to their original bases. They boarded the bus laughing and pointing their middle fingers at the three women. “Summer vacation is over, grandmas! We are going back to mommy and daddy.” The blonde watch girl giggled at them, slamming her body against the window, looking just as ethereal with her breasts crushed on the glass. Yael thought of Hagar. The reserve officer called her on the phone to chat about the dead they both knew and said that, under the circumstances, the women could go home because the boys were only coming back to wrap up their equipment, and they would have no time to train with the girls or linger in the base. Then the boys would get a week at home.
Yael thought the right thing to do was to wait for the boys until the last bus got them, even though the women had a car. But when the boys arrived they looked through the three of them as if they had been airbrushed out of the base.
Ten guards from an artillery platoon were to guard the base until the firefighters arrived in a month.
It was only when everyone was all packed up and waiting at the gate for the late bus that the boys engaged. They teased Yael. There were twelve boys left, waiting for the last army bus in the sun. The boys said if Yael was going to do just one tiny thing to earn her reserve stipend, that thing would be the fattest guy in the group. That’s Zionism right there.
“I am not going to pity-fuck Baruch,” Yael said. “He is nasty as fuck,” she said. She was sitting on top of the antisniper barricade by the gate of the base. She did not look at Baruch or Oren the officer, the one who had come up with the idea, when she spoke. Her words were mumbled because she had Lea’s bobby pin jabbing out of her red mouth. Lea lay with her head in Yael’s lap. Yael was twisting the sides of Lea’s bangs into tiny braids, as if nothing mattered more than those auburn hairs. Lea’s hair smelled of lavender shampoo. When Yael rubbed her nose, she smelled that the cleanliness of it had stuck to the tips of her fingers.
“Why would you say something like that?” Oren the officer asked. He stood with his arms crossed, turning his gaze from the gate and the road ahead to Yael. “His best friend just died on him, while you were here in the base jerking off.”
“So his best friend died. My boyfriend died. Actually, a few of my boyfriends died. They tend to. Avishag’s brother once died a long time ago. Big deal. He needs to find his balls and move on,” Yael said. She was winking at Lea, rolling her eyes with the teenhood that the young girls infected her with. Avishag held her hands to her ears and closed her eyes.
“Find his balls and move on?” said Yoav. “Shai was not your boyfriend. He said he was not. If he was, you could have made him stay.”
Yoav. The staff sergeant. He joined in the conversation.
AT FIRST Yael thought the boys must be kidding, that they must be just kids. They came with three gurneys and slammed the three girls onto them. They didn’t tie them in for safety or give them helmets. As a weaponry instructor, any deviation from safety protocol disturbed Yael, and her concern grew when the boys jammed the barrels of their guns firmly into her back. She could not see the other two because of the dust clouds that rose from the run up the hill to the flag area, but it was clear to her that had the angle of the jam been different, her spinal cord might have been severed.
The boys let the girls drop like leaflets from the height of their shoulders right by the flag. Then they huddled in a circle, as if the world were their soccer game, and whispered.
“You are going to write, big, with stones, ‘We Are Whores,’ or we’ll … we will torture you,” Yoav said to the girls on the ground after a few minutes. “We will not let you go home.”
Yael rose from the ground and sat on her bottom. She looked up at Yoav. His eyes were red. He’d been smoking weed. She could see that the snot in his nose was black, and she knew he had been too afraid to wash his face and be forced to look in the mirror since he got back. She could not believe he used the word “torture.” It sounded cliché. Like he hadn’t bought the vowels for it.
“We are not writing nothing,” Yael said, low. “Nah, nah, nah. Come on.” The old Rihanna song flew from her mouth. She remembered when Rihanna had overdosed the year before. How she had cried about it while looking at her delayed flight glowing in red in that tiny Romanian airport. “I like it, like it,” she now sang on.
“Listen, girls,” Avishag said. She removed her hands from her eyes. She had been crying for a while; the dry wetness blended with the new.
“You shut up with your baby talk,” Yael said. She hadn’t yelled at Avishag since they were in high school. Maybe that was a problem, Yael thought, and then waited for Lea to talk.
“I am a professional writer and I won’t even write it in stones. Stones are so permanent. And I personally like ‘S&M,’ even on Facebook. I like it, like it,” Lea said. She did not sing the lyrics.
And so the boys did not know what to do. They shrugged at each other, pointed their guns and made the girls go to their caravan, the Negev guns storage container that was already locked. They made the girls crawl on all fours.
“WHAT NOW?” Avishag asked. Night was dropping and all the lights on the base went out, then back on, and again.
“Now we are not scared. There is no fear in the world,” Yael said. There was becoming much more of her with every word. “We have two bottles of sauvignon blanc and tons of pizza crust and pasta left and a whole bottle of Diet Coke, from that time you accidentally bought diet. I brought it here.”
“You brought it here from the boys’ area?” Lea asked.
“I brought it here. I thought it might be wise.”
“So now we wait,” Lea said. “You thought it might be wise …” she said, and shook her head, smirking. It was almost as if she were surprised by something for the first time; at who Yael was, at who she herself was. In her voice Yael heard that Lea got it but was not sure she wanted to.
The girls sat on their mattresses and looked at the door. They did not move. They wanted to remember everything that had happened in the seconds before.
AND SO it began.
The next morning Yoav entered alone and asked for a volunteer, and Yael volunteered by rising and walking and following him.
Avishag cried.
“OMG,” Lea said.
Yael talked through the whole march up to the flag, saying she’d do whatever if he promised not to touch the other two, then giving up hope when she was already naked and saying that she’d do anything and gladly, if he only spared Avishag. She mentioned the dead brother, but in the end it did no good.
The twelve boys and three girls were all active participants. Volunteering proved unproductive.
Nothing that they did was very productive. But they tried. Yael tried talking. She would not shut up. She said she’d been hitchhiking all over Africa; that she probably had exotic diseases and that this was really not a wise move. Lea only spoke on the walk back, saying that this was all rather interesting, that she might write about it or tell her husband about it—they had been meaning to spice up their bedroom routine. She lectured the boys as she was clicking her bra shut, her hands under her uniform shirt. Even Avishag could not be shocked. She kept her eyes closed and whispered apologies for the war, sympathetic chin nods about how difficult it is to be a young man in today’s dating world.
The twelve boys found themselves inside a pickle.
THE GIRLS were fine that first night. Even Avishag was thinking ahead. She spoke as the other two were looking at each other, as if hanging each other and Avishag on the line between their eyes.
“We’ll just have to do a lot of drugs. We’ll travel somewhere and do a lot of drugs and then move on,” Avishag said. She put her head on Yael’s shoulder and Yael did not push her away like she usually did. “Yael, did you do a lot of drugs in India? Which drugs are the most optimal drugs for moving on?” Avishag asked.
“The way you talk sometimes, I swear …” Lea said. “I’ve missed it.”
“Well, I wanted to do a lot of drugs, but it did not work out that way. I smoked pot once and felt like the window was pulling me toward it like a magnet. So I smoked pot in the woods instead, and then I felt like I must find a window so it can pull me toward it like a magnet. Later one time I accidentally did X at a rave in Goa, and it made me so paranoid I decided that drugs were really not my thing,” Yael said.
“Paranoid! But X is the drug of love and trust!” Lea laughed.
“Maybe you should seek psychiatric counseling. There is something chemically wrong with you, perhaps,” Avishag laughed.
“It was the realest thing. A Persian boy with long lashes was running toward me on the road. He screamed his name, it started with a J, and although I did not speak Farsi I knew that it meant ‘the world.’ He smelled of moss, and it was because he was holding a brook trout in his hand that I thought came from the rivers of Babylon but knew didn’t come from there because brook trout don’t swim there, and besides, he was from Persia,” Yael said.
The heat and the thirst might have gotten to the girls, or at least to Yael. Yael would not let them drink the Coke for the first two days that they were trapped.
“You must have been tripping,” Avishag said. “It must have been another drug. X doesn’t trip you. I read about drugs in a pamphlet,” Avishag said.
“But the thing was, I was not the only one who could see the boy. Two of the people I was hanging out with could see him too. And they pointed at the boy and hid behind me because they were scared that the fish was poisonous and it would kill us all if it touched us. I was scared too, but I knew I shouldn’t be. The boy said he wanted his dad, but he wasn’t angry—it was more like he was worried about us partying like that.”
“That’s a very strange story,” Lea said.
“Stranger things happen,” Yael said.
And then a boy other than Yoav opened the door. He was eighteen.
BY THE end of the second day, the boys had developed a routine. They knew each girl better than she knew herself. When Yael got back that afternoon, she got quieter, and this gave the other two the room to talk they had never had before.
Avishag told a story about a fifth grader in her Ethiopian scouts troop who painted nothing but severed toes. The severed toes would all have jobs, they would get married and go to the army, but they were all bloody toes. The school board was upset, and there was a meeting when all the parents decided that he must be sent away because he might cause harm to himself or others. Avishag spoke for him, but it did no good. Maybe that’s why a mom followed her afterward and found out about the psychiatrist.
Lea asked Avishag for another story, to see if another story could make her realize that the first story was really not worth remembering, if she should regret not having the energy to write it down.
Avishag said that because chickens need a lot of calcium to make eggs, her uncle told her to crush all the empty eggshells into a powder with a stone and mix it inside the chickens’ food. But one time she thought she’d try to see if the chickens could just eat the eggshells as crumbs. If they could peck at whole lettuce stems, she did not see why they needed the shells as powder. But what Avishag did not know is that when a chicken eats something that looks like an egg it becomes an egg eater. That was the reason for the powder.
“So an egg eater eats other chickens’ eggs?” Lea asked.
“At first,” Avishag said. “At first she only eats other chickens’ eggs.”
BY THE middle of the third day, they had run out of Coke. They still had some pizza crusts left. Lea had drunk most of the Coke—her body had forced her to—and she was so ashamed that Avishag kept going on and on about how it was she who had drunk most of it instead, and how sorry she was.
When the lights went off, Avishag stopped apologizing and cried. She was most afraid of the dark that was more than the dark she saw inside her eyes when she closed them.
Yael watched her own shadow; when she tilted her head, the shadow of her hair on the wall blended with the shadow of one of the guns so that it looked like the gun was trying to become her.
This was when Lea offered her solution. “You know. We do have ammunition. And automatic guns.”
“We cannot shoot them. Don’t even think it,” Yael said.
“We can threaten to, you little whore. You don’t control us,” Lea said.
“We cannot. They hold our future in their bodies and heads,” Yael said.
“You know, sometimes I really wish you’d stop talking like that,” Lea said.
“Me too,” Yael said.
“Me three,” Avishag said.
The girls were speaking with thirst. The guns were still wet with gasoline. Mocking them, so near, sleeping with them as if on purpose. The boys were in charge. They didn’t understand why, but they knew it through their bones. The door in front of the girls was not theirs to open.
ONE OF the girls’ sweat had begun to smell different. It smelled like an alarm.
Avishag offered her solution. “We should just write it. It is just stones. Someone will move them. It’s just words. We’ll get back at the boys as soon as we’re out. They’ll be sorry later.”
“Just words?” Lea asked. “Maybe.”
“Just stones?” Yael asked. “Nothing is as written as much as a thing written in stones.”
“Yael,” Lea said.
And Avishag was preparing to talk more. Yael wondered if she had been encouraging her to talk too much, after all.
“No!” Yael shouted, and filled the other two with fear; of her, of the boys who might hear. “We are no Harry Potter. We don’t get to have second chances. This is this. We are not Jesus. We don’t get to come back. Either this is the Jewish state, or it is not.”
“Yael,” Lea said.
“Please stop talking,” Avishag said.
“If we don’t face this now, we’ll hurt someone else later. The boys will never forgive themselves. Lea, you’ll always watch TV instead of doing what you really want to be doing. Avishag, you’ll always say ‘sorry’ when someone bumps into you. I will always hate me, me talkin
g like this,” Yael said.
“You sound very passionate about this issue,” Lea said, and she smiled. And she didn’t cry.
That night the boys came only for Lea, then again.
“Lea, princess,” Yael said when she heard the boys approach the third time. “I don’t know everything. I haven’t been everywhere, remember?”
“Do or do not. There is no try,” Lea said.
“May the force be with you,” Avishag said.
Yael felt the weight of all the words and sounds she had ever shared with her friends like a waterfall exploding inside her mouth, in that moment. She needed to imagine a way out, and soon.
BY THE fourth morning the girls did not trade any words. Yael wanted to say something very powerful, to whisper an ancient truth, but the thirst did not let the back of her mouth form the consonants, and besides, she herself knew she was becoming silly.
Avishag was making dolls from the weeds that grew through the cracks on the wooden floor. Hearts and babies and cats. Simple shapes that were the cartoon versions of real objects. Weaving and tightening and ripping. Yael did not notice when she started doing this, but by morning there were six dolls and one becoming one in Avishag’s peeling hands.
When Yael noticed this, she took the bamboo stick that was holding up an anemones office plant that hadn’t been there when the girls first came to the caravan. She made holes in it with her teeth, and then it was a flute.
For her to play.
“If you are playing for me, Yael, then don’t. I told you a million times. I am like Shylock’s daughter, Jessica. I cannot hear music,” Lea said.
“We are not doing Shakespeare right now, are we?” Avishag said.
“I mean, that’s a little gay, I admit it,” Lea said.
“Right. Because we all know Hitler was gay,” Yael said.
The girls looked at her. And they were afraid, and mostly, then, for themselves for listening to her.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel Page 24