The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel

by Shani Boianjiu

  “And by Hitler I mean Shakespeare,” Yael said.

  Then she asked for permission to sleep.

  YAEL DOVE inside her body to find sleep. She imagined ocean waves beneath her, demanding calm. Then she thought of all the happy times when she sat on the floor and eagerly listened to the opening theme songs of her favorite TV shows and remembered all her tears that rolled with the song during the credits at the end of each episode. She remembered her childhood body, awakening flooded with delight that curled her toes and opened her nose in the middle of all those dreams in which she was taken by another human being for safe keeping. To a room with a bed that locked, where all that happened was that she was fed and pitied.

  In her daydreams, the ones she used to have during history class, it was always a woman math teacher who took her and kept her. The woman always looked a little different: tall, blonde, dark. In reality all of her math teachers were men who did not see her. After she saw Mean Girls in high school, the image of the woman math teacher was fixed. It was always Tina Fey, or the math teacher she pretended to be in that movie. What a stupid girl I used to be, Yael thought. What a stupid girl I still am.

  But then she thought more. And she opened her eyes.

  “Mean Girls,” Yael said, while still lying down.

  “Let’s not talk unless it means something. My voice is tired,” Avishag said.

  “This means something. Remember how the girls in that movie always say the opposite of what they mean?” Yael asked. She sat up.

  “All Americans always say the opposite of what they mean. Just look at their movies. All heroes. It’s because they don’t have real ones,” Lea said. Ron had a strong anti-American bias that he’d picked up from doing some business with them, and Lea had adopted it.

  “Right,” Yael said. “We have to become a little American. We have to be the opposite of what we are. It will break the boys. Avishag, you stop being sorry. Don’t ever say ‘sorry’ or ‘thank you.’ Just say again and again, ‘I don’t deserve this. I am a good person,’ and Lea, you do the opposite. Apologize. Thank. Smile,” Yael said.

  “Do you think you may have Stockholm syndrome?” Lea asked. “I am just asking,” she said. “I find this all to be very interesting.”

  “No,” Yael said, calm. “I am trying to cause the opposite. The boys must get the Lima syndrome. They must learn to love us, a little.”

  “But if we are acting the opposite of who we are, then they don’t love us us,” Avishag said.

  “They are. They are loving what we can be. And we can be everything we want to be,” Yael said.

  “Now you are sounding like the national children’s channel again,” Lea said.

  “And that’s how you love me,” Yael said, and she looked at Lea.

  “And that’s how she loves you,” Avishag said.

  IT WASN’T until the afternoon that the boys came. A little before that, Yael started to cry.

  “You know, how come you guys didn’t ask me how I am supposed to act now?” she asked. She was sobbing and pulling her hair.

  Avishag and Lea did not speak.

  “I have to not make a sound. Be the opposite of making sounds,” Yael said.

  “Okay,” Lea said.

  “So why are you crying so loud now?” Avishag asked.

  “And pretty soon I may become a song,” Yael said. And she moaned all her knowledge onto the other four ears.

  The caravan was five steps wide and seven steps long and the ceiling was above the three girls on the mattresses.

  THE BOYS came and the boys took and the boys came and the women were what they were not. It was very hard to do.

  PEOPLE DIED in the after war: 6,422 civilians and combatants in Syria the following month.

  THE THING is, Yael’s idea worked. The boys never came back, after.

  In the middle of the fourth night Avishag opened her eyes. And she got up from the mattress. And she opened the door of the caravan. And she walked in the dark to the flag. And she walked in the dark to the war room. One step, one other step, and then more. And she found a flashlight. And it worked. And she walked to the boys’ area. And around. At one point she thought she saw another light, and she grew afraid, because who would hear her, and who would help her? But in the end it was just the reflection of her own light in a neon sticker on a wall. She felt a pang in her stomach and remembered the decision of the tiny baby.

  The artillery unit guards never showed for some reason.

  Lea did not believe that it had worked. And at first she thought that even if it had worked it would not matter. It wouldn’t change what was to come. The only ones who knew were the three of them.

  That night in the caravan, Avishag came back. She saw it with her own eyes that the boys had gone, but she did not know what it meant for the next minute either.

  Yael had to convince them.

  The first thing she decided was that they were not going to drive home that night. That they were going to save that night together. And then she was ready to answer questions.

  They argued on the mattresses for hours. About whether or not what had happened to them was even interesting, about whether or not anything they did mattered. About their mattering, or not. When it was still dark out, right when they almost could not make voices anymore, the lights came back on, and then they talked more.

  “No one but us will know about this anyway,” Avishag said.

  “Yes they will. Lea will write it. And in the end people will believe it. Because this actually already happened, and to us,” Yael said.

  BUT IN the end it was not Lea who told the story. No one knows who told it, and if, and how. What is true is that the women looked so present inside the lit caravan that night, the walls considered dying.

  “I am very tired,” Yael said.

  “Avishag, do you want us to keep the lights on tonight?” Lea asked.

  “No,” Avishag said. “No, Lea. I don’t want to be afraid anymore.”

  Suddenly all the lights went out.

  Lea had the baby seven months later.

  Operation

  Evening

  Light

  When I was eighteen, Mom woke me up. She did it by tapping on my cheek with two of her fingers. “Yael, wake up,” she said.

  When Mom was eighteen, airplanes called her on the radio. She spent three years waiting for airplanes to call her on the radio. When they called, my mother would give the air force planes her permission to land. They needed to land to refuel. Her base was a fuel base. She was an air traffic controller. They waited for her voice. It had been recently hardened by the encounter of first cigarettes and the struggle to conceal youth. Without her permission, the airplanes could not land. They needed her when they were in the sky and she was in the control tower, drawing faces on her dark arm with pen and thinking of ugly jokes she could tell the boys on the base when her shift ended.

  Once, an Israeli plane that stopped for a layover in Athens was hijacked, and even though it was not Mom who rescued the hostages (Mom was a girl), it is true that if it weren’t for Mom the rescued hostages would not have gotten sandwiches when the rescued plane stopped to refuel on its way home. She used to say that her job in the army was not important, but I thought it was. A plane can only circle in the sky without fuel for so long. She could have, in theory, one time, said no. She could have always said no, but she never did, she never said no in her life. A lot of people could have died because of her. She was eighteen when she arrived at that beach.

  I WOKE up after Mom tapped me on the cheek with two of her fingers.

  When I was eighteen I slept in her bed because I was afraid of the future. I didn’t think much of going into the army, except for making sure I had the right underwear and a new watch, but then I saw a news story about a soldier at a checkpoint whose body had been exploded by a suicide bomber like a surprise, and then I became afraid.

  It was not long after I saw the picture of the exploded soldier that I began sna
pping my fingers all the time under my jaw, to scare away scares. This was something I had done before, but not for years. Dad was angry because he was tired of sleeping in my youth bed. He said his legs were too long, and besides, this was not fair. Mom said it was fair because I was her oldest daughter, and she made me from scratch, and here I was eighteen and going into the army soon. Then Dad surrendered because he loved her all the time. It was a problem.

  “Hey, Yael,” she said when we were both in her bed. “Say you want to be in the air force.”

  “I don’t want to be in the air force,” I whispered. “Mom, I don’t want to be a soldier at all. I think I have scares again.”

  “Say you want to be an air traffic controller.”

  “But I already know I am going into infantry. That’s what the draft slip decided. You can’t be an air traffic controller in infantry. There is no air to control.”

  My mom was not listening. I never knew if she believed what she said. “Say you want to be an air traffic controller in Sharm el-Sheikh. Say Sinai.”

  “But. Mom. I can’t be an air traffic controller. I’d get too antsy sitting all day and waiting.”

  “You should ask to be an air traffic controller in Sharm el-Sheikh. It is the best job in the army for a girl.”

  “But there are no Israeli soldiers left in Sharm el-Sheikh. There is no base there. We gave that whole part back to Egypt.”

  My mom passed her finger over the ridge of my nose, and again. “Yes. We gave it back before you were born,” she said.

  She said things that she knew were impossible like she thought they weren’t.

  ON THE day she was drafted my mom walked right into the sorting officer’s office and asked to be placed as an air traffic controller. The sorting officer laughed. This was because her skin was dark and her last name was Yemenite and her nose was broken. It grew broken, like a disaster or a crayon painting of a toddler. She broke it when she was a child, falling from the back of the milkman’s wagon one evening.

  She was not aware on that day that what she asked to be was impossible. She asked her older sister what she should tell the sorting officer she wanted to do, and her older sister laughed. Her older sister knew that the sorting officer would not care what she had to say. Then her older sister wanted to laugh some more. She was not actually the type who laughs. She was a secretary in the army. She advised Mom to say she wanted to be an air traffic controller.

  In those days air force bases were known for having built-in theaters and bowling alleys. Places Mom had never seen before in her life. Female air force soldiers were daughters of politicians and military men. Air traffic controllers were the daughters of combat pilots who later became politicians. My mom’s father bought a lottery ticket every week and promised to make my grandmother a queen, but meanwhile worked for forty years as a dispatcher of Israel’s only bus company. He was just an expected man who aspired in the most expected of ways. He died the year I was born, after he read in the paper that he had lost all the money he had ever saved in the market. He either did it himself or had a heart attack; either way it was something expected that killed him off.

  The sorting officer’s response to Mom’s request was anything but expected. He laughed once. He laughed twice. She asked him why he was laughing and he laughed again.

  “You want to be an air traffic controller?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Mom said. She was not the brightest lightbulb. “This is what I want.”

  I have heard too many versions of how the conversation rolled on from there, and I don’t want to tell you any of them. Sometimes when you tell a story you’ve heard too many times, you remember all the times you’ve heard it before, and you think that maybe it is not very real, and then you think that maybe you are not very real. Maybe you are another woman’s daughter. What’s important is that Mom became an air traffic controller. No one could believe it, but she did. The air force base she was placed on did not have a theater or a bowling alley or a swimming pool. It was located on a beach. She thought the beach was the most beautiful beach in the world. She said, not just Israel. The world. One time we saw a magazine picture of an abandoned beach in Zanzibar. She said the beach in Sinai where she served looked like that, but that it was also more. I asked what she meant by more, but she just said that it was more of everything.

  When she took the bus from the sorting base to the Tel Aviv airport, the driver of the bus knew her. He knew her father. That was the price of having a father who worked for the bus company. You couldn’t go anywhere without the help of those who knew the man who raised you. You could never pretend to be a tourist. The country and its roads owned you.

  The bus driver asked her how her dad was doing and where she was serving. He asked her that but then immediately started cursing a passenger who told him to hurry the fuck up. The passenger was also a girl soldier, but she looked like she had been serving for much longer than Mom. Her uniform was tailored to her size.

  Mom did not want to be rude. She sat behind the driver as he threatened the girl soldier that if she cursed at him one more time he would make her get off the bus. Mom felt good, so good, showing her new army ID and being allowed onto the bus because of it, and not because of her other ID, the one she had been using all of her life. The orange ID that said she was the daughter of a company employee. Mom only paid to ride the bus one time in her life, the day she took me to the army and didn’t want to take the car because she was afraid of driving back home alone. By the time her dad retired, she was already married to a man who owned a company car, so she didn’t need to take the bus any other time, because of that company car. Not a bus-company car. A car from a company that made parts that went into machines that made airplanes.

  She thought the driver had forgotten about her, but as soon as he started the bus he was ha-ha angry with her. Up until that point, the only jokes Mom had ever heard from men and boys were ha-ha-angry jokes. The seller at the market was ha-ha angry with her that she bought his best fish for the Sabbath dinner. “You trickster, you! You took my best fish. What will my other customers say? Ha-ha, I am angry.” The milkman whose wagon she fell off when she broke her nose. “You trickster, you! What were you doing climbing on my wagon anyway? Now every time someone asks you how you broke your nose you’ll tell them you fell off my wagon, and they’ll think I am a bad driver! Ha-ha, I am angry.” She had four sisters, no brothers, and she went to a religious allgirls’ school. Not because she was religious but because her sister had refused to go back to the public school after a boy told her a ha-ha-angry joke and then spat on her hair. So after that, all the sisters were sent to a religious school, because the oldest sister is always the strongest. Mom’s dad didn’t tell any jokes, not even ha-ha-I-am-angry jokes, because he truly was angry all of his life.

  “So what? Now that you are a soldier you are too good to answer a question from an uncle?” the bus driver asked. He was ha-ha angry. He was not her uncle, but he knew her father so he called himself her uncle. “How’s Dad? Where are you serving?”

  The collar of the green uniform chafed Mom under her jaw. What she wanted to do more than anything was make the chafing stop, but no matter how she straightened her collar it didn’t help.

  “Dad is happy. I am serving as an air traffic controller in Sharm el-Sheikh,” she said. When she said it out loud it sounded so correct. This was who she was. This was where she was going. She needed to take the bus to get there. The bus company was there to serve her. So was the driver.

  The driver was angry, angry actually, at her answer. At how confident she had become. This was, at least, what she thought, because it sounded like he was no longer joking, so all that was left was anger.

  “Tell Dad that if he keeps on drinking and missing work, we won’t cover for him for much longer, you hear me?” the driver told Mom.

  She heard him. She thought that by now the skin under her jaw must be pink. But she didn’t touch it.

  “A house full of women, and
you can’t take care of one slow man,” the driver said.

  Mom leaned her head against the window. A lady with too many chins looked ahead with her neck stretched as if she were driving the bus herself. Mom looked at the lady as though if she only looked hard enough, she might never have to become her.

  Mom had never flown before, and she was so eager to see the streets of Tel Aviv from above and to watch the crowded beaches and hotels becoming smaller beneath her that she thought she would stare out the window the whole flight, but instead she fell asleep. She dreamed of her father. He was chasing her like he did in real life, after she cut her oldest sister’s shoulder with a razor so deep there was no choice but to take her to the doctor because she bled through all the fabrics they used to stop her blood. Mom and her sisters often cut each other when they were little. This was because they didn’t have a pencil sharpener, so they used rusty razors to sharpen their pencils for school. They would stand around the trash can and sharpen, and then they would bicker over the same things all sisters do. Over the ways their faces and smells had turned excruciating to each other because they were so near, because they were so much like their own. The only difference was that they had razors in hand when they bickered.

  In her dream her father had chased her just as he did in real life, and he was drunk, just as he was in real life. The difference was that in the dream he was slow. He kept trying to reach her, and although she did not want him to reach her, she also did not want to be one of five women who could not take care of one slow man, and so she ran slowly herself.

  She woke up when the wheels thumped onto the asphalt and bobbed her head sideways. When she looked out the window, she saw sands that stretched as if untouched yet keen and an ocean so quiet she thought it had stopped stirring just for her.

  MOM CALLED my most chronic problems sulas. Over the course of those three years at the beach, Mom once had to practice compassion so well so that it accidentally became a habit, so that she was able to live for the rest of her life without ever desiring half a thing for herself. I could tell her problems that didn’t even have words, problems I could never tell my friends about, not even Emuna or Avishag, and she would give them words just so she could do something about them. She noticed my first sula herself. I didn’t even have to explain it to her. It was she who explained my problem to me. She explained that a sula was a bad habit, like knocking on wood or biting your nails. That it was a type of habit that only you knew what you were hoping to gain by preserving but that you didn’t have words to explain to others. Her explanation sounded perfect. She said it was the worst thing in the world.