What you have to realize is that every sula was a serious problem. A problem that you didn’t remember what it was like not having and could not even imagine your life without. Almost like being pregnant when you don’t want the baby or being infected with a deadly disease, but worse, because no one knew about it and because you suffered from it every second.
My first sula had to do with my neck. Or rather, that area under my jaw. One day when I was five I made a funny face that stretched it out. From then on, it felt as though I was doing it accidentally all the time, and when I looked in the mirror I started worrying that by making that funny face I would give myself a double chin. I was ten and worried about looking fatter in the face, because I had heard Mom say that once you gain weight it doesn’t matter if you lose it; your face will stay fat until the day you die. It got worse. I somehow started believing that snapping my fingers three times when they were under my chin, so that I could feel the snap smacking the skin, would cancel out the influence of the funny face. I had no reason to believe that, but I believed it so much I couldn’t stop. My fingers hurt so much I couldn’t hold a pencil. I would swallow my mayo-mustard-tomato sandwiches so fast at school because I couldn’t wait to have them out of my hands so I would be able to snap my fingers again. It was only when Mom tried to take a picture of me on the eve of the first snow that she noticed and screamed: “Sula!” Then she let me stay home from school the next day and watch my Argentinean soaps as she fed me pita and yogurt and clementines.
I would like to tell you that just knowing that there was someone out there who understood fixed the problem, but this was not true. After the problem with my neck there was that time Mom said that standing next to the microwave would make your eyes run away from each other. She said it to my sister, but I heard. This led to almost half a year of the eyes sula. I would roll them in their sockets till they screeched, then again. I couldn’t watch TV. My head hurt so bad I would sometimes have to sit down as soon as I stood up. In the darkness of my bedroom I worried that I had rolled my eyes so much the darkness was my own blindness.
The teeth were the last of it, and also the worst. Teeth are worse than eyes. I had a whole summer vacation of freedom from sulas until I bit into a corncob and accidentally ground my front bottom tooth with my front upper tooth. I managed to get the bottom tooth above the upper tooth, and this hurt like nothing I had ever felt before, so much so that soon I kept on trying to create the same exact pain just because waiting for it to accidentally happen again was worse than feeling it. And I would do it again. And again. Chills would run down my moves and steps. I had to wear sweaters in the middle of that Israeli August. When September came, I would wait for class to end because I could not bear the grinding, then for lunch at home to end because I could not bear the grinding, then for the day to end, then for sleep. I was waiting, waiting, waiting for a relief that never came.
“I have to make it stop. I can’t go on like this anymore,” I told Mom.
I was paralyzed by a problem that wasn’t even real. I couldn’t even tell Avishag, let alone Lea.
Mom said: “Yael, I understand, I understand, I understand.” She said it again, then again. She looked me in the eyes when she said it. Dad spent months sleeping with his legs folded in my bed. She understood me through the night. Had it not been for someone who understood a problem for which I had no words, I might have gone mad. Minutes chased hours that chased my sleep.
I don’t remember when or how or why it went away. I remember that there came a point where I could only breathe when I fantasized about the moment in which I would no longer think about teeth and that there came a point where I was unable to even remember or imagine what a moment like that would be like.
But it went away. This much I know, because when the neck sula came back when I was eighteen, right after Dan died, all I could do was wait for the teeth to start.
THE BASE on the beach was small. This is the same beach where the president of Egypt would flee, years later, at the finish of a thirty-year rule, when the streets forced him to see they could not love him any longer. Today it costs over five hundred dollars to get a hotel room by that beach in Sinai, and it is so crowded that tourists who visit Egypt waste a lot of time finding a place to lay their towels, but back then twenty or so soldiers possessed that strip of land all by themselves, because it was declared to be a closed military area.
There were only two other girls on the base on the day that Mom arrived. She said that they were both blonde, with short hair. The blondes both grew to have many children, but only sons, and Mom said she could not have imagined it any other way, starting from the day she met them. She could never imagine them having daughters. Mom’s black, sensitive hair reached down to her bony ass, and her nose was still broken. The girls were also air traffic controllers. They were the daughters of pilots. They were even dimmer bulbs than Mom was. The base was not a popular posting for air traffic controllers because it was far away and soldiers only got to go home once a month because the army could not spend much on internal flights for soldiers. Mom didn’t mind. She had wanted to stay on that beach forever since the moment she got there.
The work in the air traffic control tower was simple. Back in those days planes landed there only once in a while, as part of the training of new pilots. All Mom had to do was look at the lane and make sure no other planes were on it, and she had to make sure she didn’t give two planes permission to land at once. If the red phone rang she had to answer it, but it never did. Aside from that, all she had to do was wait. She showed up one hour early for her first shift and then one hour early for every eight-hour shift after that. She picked up smoking and spent all of her pocket money on cigarettes and always made sure she gave more cigarettes to the other two air traffic controllers than she smoked in a day.
Aside from the two blonde girls, there were about twenty other soldiers in the base. Most of them were fuel fillers and ground technicians for the air force. There was one cook, the oldest of all the soldiers, a twenty-seven-year-old man from a kibbutz in the desert who used to make ha-ha-angry jokes at Mom all the time and say her skin was dark as an old chocolate cake or shit, and that she should not be allowed in his dining room because it was a health risk either way, and who gave her kisses on her neck and hard-boiled eggs he had left over.
THE FIRST time Mom ever told me about that beach was after I explained to her about the problem I had with my neck, about how it all started when I began to worry that I might have a fat neck. She reached for what she could say because it was she who had told me that once you get fat you will forever be fat in your face.
“You know, you don’t have a fat neck, but even if you did, and you never will, know that that’s not going to kill you. You know, if you are nice, boys can’t even see you are ugly. Being a good sport and a laugh is much more important than being pretty. Boys and girls don’t like a sour girl. When I was in the army, there were two beautiful, sour girls at my base, and even though I was ugly all the boys loved me because I always smiled.”
“You weren’t ugly! Are you saying that I am ugly?” This was before I knew about Mom having broken her nose.
“No! You are the most beautiful girl in the world. But it is important to laugh a lot. We need to get you laughing more. How come Avishag and Lea never come by anymore? We need to think what we can do.”
Later I started dating Moshe and believed one person didn’t think I was ugly. Later, in the army one day, after Hagar did my hair, I even became convinced the whole world could find me beautiful.
At some point during her service, Mom got plastic surgery on her nose. It sounds terrible to say, but it is the truth. It was broken and then it was not. I am not sure where she got the money, how she got it done, but she did. The first picture I ever saw of her is her in a full-length yellow bathing suit. Two shirtless boys are lifting her by the arm from either side, and she is laughing so hard the back of her throat shows. Her nose is perfect and long. The beach whe
re Mom swam in a full-length yellow bathing suit, the beach where boys loved Mom, is not the border anymore. On the new border, the closer border, there are today, ten years after my service, torture camps for Eritreans run by Egyptian Bedouins. They promise the Eritreans they will help them get to Israel through Egypt. For money. Then they chase them, keep them, and send an ear or a finger to their families and ask for some more money. But when the end of the beach was still the border, boys chased Mom on it until the skin under her feet grew firm.
My cousin called, whispering and giggling, one time to ask if it was true what she heard, if it was true that Mom’s nose wasn’t real. I was always jealous of Mom’s nose because of how noble it was, and as I looked at her washing the dishes in a torn T-shirt and head scarf, a woman who spent hundreds of shekels on the right acne wash for her daughters but hadn’t changed her own toothbrush in years, I could not believe she had ever been a woman who would get plastic surgery.
“Well, my mom did say it was because your mom’s nose was broken or something, but still, isn’t it funny?” my cousin whispered through the phone. When they were little, my mother had cut her mother so deep, she bled through all the fabrics in the house.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t funny.” I never asked Mom about her nose.
THE MONTH before an airplane was hijacked and Mom had to accidentally make the case for compassion was the happiest month of her life. All the boys on the base loved her when her nose was broken because it was so easy to love her—there was no danger of falling in love with her for real because of her nose, and she was such a good sport, and she tucked them in at night after a game of backgammon and let them drown her in the ocean and let them feel no shame about holding an eighteen-year-old girl in a bathing suit in their arms. Mom grew happier each day. She didn’t fly home once after she arrived on the base, back to that Jerusalem building with the babies and lost lottery tickets and drunken chases and slaughtered chickens and bleeding sisters. The salt air made her hair bigger. The waiting in the control tower made her thoughts longer and the faces she drew more interesting. The boys who made her their queen and relief made her less afraid to think of memories she had spent her whole life convincing herself she did not have, so that she did not have to always distract herself, so that she was less of a less-than-bright lightbulb.
By the time her nose was fixed, the boys thought it was a miracle. Like when, on the Argentinean soaps, the couple finally finds out they are not brother and sister after all.
When she walked on the sand dunes, the boys clapped. The two blonde girls, who later grew to have only sons, then grew quieter. Then they helped her cut her hair right above her shoulders and followed her wherever she went. If it weren’t for what happened next, Mom would have been on her way to becoming a dictator or, at the very least, an evil politician’s wife, or maybe even an evil God.
It was on the day that Ari Milter bit Joseph Gon’s cheek during a fight that was about guarding shifts but was really about Mom’s midriff that Germans and Palestinians hijacked an Israeli plane that stopped for a layover in Athens. Two hundred and sixty civilians were on the plane. It was the hijacking that led to Operation Entebbe, or Operation Yonatan, as I know some call it, because of Yonatan, who was killed.
The hijackers landed in Libya to refuel. A passenger who was a nurse faked a miscarriage and was released during the layover. She had a British and an Israeli passport. Her mother had just died, and her father was ill. She had married only weeks before. She was not pregnant, but she managed to convince the female hijacker she might be losing a baby.
From Libya the hijackers ordered the pilot to fly to Uganda. They landed the plane in the Entebbe airport. Idi Amin, who had started out as an army cook just like the army cook who used to give Mom hard-boiled eggs and kisses on the neck, was then not a cook anymore but the ruler of all of Uganda. He cooperated with the hijackers, so it was easy for them to gather all of the passengers into one of the terminals. The Germans started screaming orders, separating the Jewish and Israeli and Gentile passengers into different groups.
The captain of the plane, who was a Gentile, insisted on staying because he said he was the captain, after all. His eleven crew members stayed also. None of them died, but Air France suspended the captain for staying behind. In the end he got a plaque from Yitzhak Rabin, who was the prime minister of Israel then, for being a protector of Jews, and then Yitzhak Rabin was the prime minister again and was shot by an Israeli Jew who hated him.
What matters or not is that the captain stayed, although it is unclear what help he was to the rescue mission, if at all. The hijackers wanted all these European nations and Israel to release freedom fighters and anarchists who were in their jails. Everyone, including Mom, thought this was what was going to happen. The soldiers of that beach wondered if the plane with the freedom fighters was going to fuel at their base, and if so, whether or not the cook was going to try to stop the plane from flying off with the freedom fighters because a freedom fighter had once blown up a bus the cook’s mother was on and made her become blind. She was urging the cook to kill her off already all the time. The hijackers said they would start killing people off on July 1, but in the end they agreed to wait until July 4 because it was a symbolic American date. A seventy-five-year-old woman called Dora started choking on her food, so the hijackers let her go into a hospital in Uganda, because it wasn’t July 1 yet and they couldn’t kill her then.
NO ONE believed there would be a rescue mission but the people who were sent to rescue the hostages. When Mom’s red phone rang, it was five in the morning and she was alone in the control tower. She was drawing the face of a girl on her own ankle. She didn’t know why, but the girl kept on looking either surprised or angry, and try as she did to fix the girl’s eyes, Mom couldn’t. She was left with a blotch of blue ink on her dark skin.
When the phone rang, she screamed. This was because she was at peace then and because she had never heard a phone ring before. They didn’t own a phone at the Jerusalem apartment. There was a pay phone at the entrance to the market. When she picked up the red phone, she heard the voice of a man on the other line. It sounded nothing like the voices of the pilots coming through the radio. It sounded like the man was standing right there in the room with Mom, breathing the words into her ear.
The man asked for her name, personal ID number, and rank. She had to say her last name twice, because it was a Yemenite last name, and the man was surprised. Then the man told her that if she were to reveal his orders to anyone on the base or in the world she would be prosecuted in a military court and risk the lives of over a hundred Jews.
Everyone thought the hostages would die or be exchanged for other hostages. No one believed in the likelihood of rescue. Everyone but Mom seemed to have a friend of an aunt or a teacher of a brother who was one of the hostages. It only took one worried soldier to tell his worried mother and then the whole country would know the hostages were in the air, even the Arabs of the country. Even when the plane was in the sky, they were afraid someone would shoot it down. They also didn’t know Dora was already dead and in a trunk. They thought that if they only kept the operation secret they could still save her from that hospital.
But they needed sandwiches. The hostages hadn’t eaten in days. They were expecting to land them in a field hospital the army had built in Kenya and feed them there, but none of the hostages were injured, so there was no point risking the landing there.
The man on the phone asked Mom to tell the cook he must make as many sandwiches as he could.
“What type of sandwiches?” Mom asked, and the man became ha-ha angry with her. Ha-ha angry, but actually relieved because he thought he was sending men to die on top of the hundred Jews who were going to die anyway, and here was this sweet girl with a voice softened by the encounter of first cigarettes and the shock of youth asking him for culinary advice.
“You choose,” the man on the phone said. “I am a lieutenant, and here you are a private asking
me for sandwich advice. That is your job.”
Mom had twenty minutes left until the end of her shift. She drew two more faces. She thought of her favorite sandwich. Pastrami with mayo and red peppers. They didn’t have any of these ingredients in the base because all of these things were good only because they go bad quickly.
In the end, giving instructions for the preparation of the sandwiches for the rescued hostages was the most complicated thing Mom had ever done in her life. It was a thing she never thought she could do and would never have done, and it was because it was so hard that once she did it one time, she knew she could do it again and it turned into a habit.
Mom had to make the case for compassion.
“It’s a prisoners’ exchange, isn’t it? They are going to land those Palestinian prisoners at our base to refuel before they take them to Uganda, and they want me to make them sandwiches,” the cook told Mom. He didn’t even try to kiss her neck.
“I can’t tell you what it is. The man on the red phone said that I can’t.”
“Red phone? That’s got to mean a prisoners’ exchange. And they want me to make them sandwiches?”
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel Page 26