“I can’t tell you what it is. But you do need to make sandwiches. A lot of sandwiches. As many sandwiches as you can.”
“I’ll make them sandwiches all right. I’ll spit in them. I’ll pee in them. I’ll use rat poison.”
Mom did not know what to do. She remembered that she was the daughter of a slow man. She remembered how delighted she had felt when the blade of that razor pierced too deep into her sister’s arm when she was a child. She fondled the ridge of her nose and remembered that it was now straight, and that she was beautiful.
“Please don’t do anything bad to the sandwiches.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t; I won’t let you,” Mom said. Sometimes she liked to say things that were impossible as if they weren’t. “You can’t,” she said.
Had she been born the daughter of a pilot, had she not lived for twelve years with a broken nose, she might have told the cook that he couldn’t enough times that it might have worked. But because Mom was not born any of these things, she had to say more. She had to make the case for compassion, not because she wanted to but because she was bound by the circumstances.
“What if one of the prisoners is innocent?”
“My mother is blind,” the cook said. “My dad has to take her to the bathroom and sit her on the toilet. And in all likelihood none of them are innocent. The army barely arrests all the people who are guilty.”
“What if one of the prisoners just made one mistake? Something they didn’t want to do and before they knew it they were doing it?”
“Then it is fair, whatever I do. Then they know they made a mistake.”
“What if something happened to them?”
“Like what?”
“Something. They were doing something else and then something happened to them. Haven’t you ever done something else and then something happened to you?”
“Like what?”
“Something that happened to you. You were in one place and then you were in another, like you took a bus but you didn’t remember why you wanted to take it once you got there.”
“I don’t take buses,” the cook said.
“Please don’t do anything bad to the sandwiches.”
“I don’t take buses.”
When he said he didn’t take buses the second time, she knew that he understood her. She only understood herself word by word, but by the time she stopped talking, another person who was a cook who used to kiss her neck even when her nose was broken understood her also.
After she finished her three years, Mom took the three thousand shekels her father gave to each of his daughters after they finished their service. She flew to France and worked as a nanny and met a man she loved too much and who made her want to live a very expected life on the day he told her they could not be together. When she flew back to Israel, she had just enough money to register for summer classes in drawing, but nothing more. Her older sisters were already teachers or social workers or mothers. She would later grow most ashamed of taking those summer classes. That was her final landing from those three years of glory on the beach. I have never seen anything she drew, have never seen her draw. After I was born.
NO ONE believed there would be a rescue mission except for the people who actually rescued the hostages. Only one of the people who rescued the hostages died. The name of the dead was Yonatan Netanyahu. His younger brother became the prime minister, then again. The planes did not stop on the base on the beach to fuel on the way to Uganda. They stopped in Nairobi, Kenya. At that time, the government was still talking about the possibility of coming in through the ocean for the rescue. It was only in Ethiopia that the rescuers got permission to go ahead with their plan. They landed in the dark, a smooth landing. Cars were waiting for them there; one of them looked exactly like Idi Amin’s Mercedes. One of the Ugandan security patrollers, who had never gotten his license but was always interested in cars and always hoped his first car would be a Mercedes, knew that Amin had changed his car the week before. He called his friend and they stopped the car. Then one Israeli soldier shot him dead with a silenced gun. Then the Israeli soldier shot the friend. The car began to drive away. A soldier named Roy looked out the window and saw that the friend was still moving. Roy was a sergeant and twenty, and all of those who died during the rescue lived on his shoulders now. He shot the friend dead with a Kalashnikov through the window, loud. This was how the hijackers knew they were done for three minutes before the Israelis busted into the terminal. They hid in the bathroom and one woman hijacker cried, but in the end they were all killed.
It was the Israeli soldiers who accidentally shot fifty-four-year-old Ida. She had immigrated to Israel from Russia, seeking safety. They also shot a nineteen-year-old boy who would have been a soldier just like the Israeli soldiers who accidentally shot him when they burst in, but he was born in France and studied in college. One Israeli soldier was shot in the neck by Ugandan snipers and could only move his eyelids until the day he died, thirty-two years later. Forty-seven Ugandan soldiers died. Hundreds of Kenyans died two days later, because Idi Amin was mad that they had let the Israelis fuel. They hadn’t let the Israelis fuel; they were just people and Kenyans, but then they were dead. In 1979, after the Ugandan-Tanzanian war was over and Idi Amin was gone, they found the body of Dora, the woman who choked on her food. And was sent to the hospital. They found it buried on a sugar plantation twenty miles from the Kampala hospital. Ugandan soldiers had dragged her from her hospital bed a few hours after the rescue mission was over. Her Ugandan doctor and two of the nurses tried to stop them, so the soldiers shot them and left them to die in the hallway. They shot Dora after they put her inside the trunk. They shot her right before Mom’s red phone rang.
I USED to think my mother lived for me.
The Entebbe rescue mission was the most successful hostage-rescue operation in history. Armies modeled their rescue missions after it but kept on failing because of reasons that were not their fault. The earliest imitation failure was Operation Evening Light, in Iran, ten years before I was born. The Americans never even had a chance. Airplanes kept on not having enough fuel, then crashing into each other, then catching fire, then forgetting spare parts of themselves in lands that were too far. In the end, people died. Then there was a prisoner exchange. I would like to tell you that before I went into the army I thought about the daughter of the American woman who was in a control tower and had to tell an American cook to make sandwiches for the prisoner exchanges and did not care if he put poison in them or not, but in all truth I was so afraid I only saw my fingertips and thought only of myself.
“MOM. I am scared. I am scared of going in.”
“What do you have to be afraid of? You are eighteen, Yael. Your sister did just fine. All of your friends have been drafted already.”
“Of the possibilities. Of all the things that may happen.”
“Like what?”
“What made you convince the cook not to poison the sandwiches? Tell me. Tell me again like you never told me before.”
“What are you talking about? I was just following orders,” Mom said. Sometimes she said things as though she had never spoken other words before.
“I am scared that they will put me in a checkpoint, that I might explode.”
“That only happened to that soldier because he wasn’t following orders. He was the type of soldier who never followed orders. He wasn’t careful enough with that Palestinian he was passing through. Follow orders and you’ll do fine.”
“How do you know that about the soldier? How do you know he never followed orders?”
“Dahlia told me. This blonde woman I served with. I haven’t talked to her in a few years, but she called to ask about what type of jobs exist where we live. Anyway, her daughter served with that boy. She saw him slacking off.”
But she had said before. Again and more. The blondes, both of them, had only sons. Sometimes she said things that were impossible and I could think they weren’t, until
I couldn’t.
I used to think my mother lived not for her but for me, but when she told me about Dahlia’s call I thought the only part that was true is that she didn’t live, even for herself. Even if she did live for herself, she still could not live for me.
And still. I was glad it was just she and I going to the sorting base that day. I was glad that I didn’t bring any friends.
“Mom, I am scared,” I said. “I am so scared I can’t feel my fingertips. I am snapping them under my jaw again. I am scared something could happen.”
“Like what, Yaeli?”
“A lot of possibilities.”
These were the words of Mom, and me, on the bus that took us to the bus that took me to the sorting base. In time the bus driver joked with us, and even though he said we were loud as a joke, he also truly wanted us to be quiet.
The sandwiches the cook made were kind. Turkey and tomato and mustard. Mom wished she got to see the hostages bite into them.
At the start of that one day, I thought that maybe something would happen and in the end I would get to stay home with Mom, but in the end nothing happened. We spent the morning buying socks and shoe polish. In the afternoon we took the bus to the bus that took me to the sorting base. We fought for a while. Then I said I’d be fine. She kept on brushing my hair, and she kept the hairbrush in her hand after I got on the bus. Through the window of the bus, I saw her dark hands holding it as she stood on the sidewalk. Then the driver pressed the gas and I could not see her anymore. And that was the beginning.
About the Author
SHANI BOIANJIU was born in Jerusalem in 1987. She served in the Israeli Defense Forces for two years. Her fiction has appeared in Vice, Zoetrope: All Story, and the New Yorker. Shani is a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35, and The People of Forever Are Not Afraid is her first novel. She currently lives in Israel.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel Page 27