Moving Kings

by Joshua Cohen

  He’d waited in yards, in tents, in trailers converted to offices: in line. At the Lishkat Ha’Giyus, the Recruitment Bureau, he’d stood for his physical, a stethoscope cupping his back just below its sole tuft of hair. His face was photographed (no smiling), his teeth were photographed (in case his face got mangled). His fingerprints were taken and then two young Persian women took his damp hands into theirs and one told him to turn to her and he did and the other woman stabbed him and so he turned around to her and the woman who’d spoken stabbed him too, inoculating him against tetanus, meningitis, hepatitis, flu, and trust.

  He sat waiting for his haircut, as curls tumbled like desert weeds across the floor and earrings were removed from the people around him, and because the guys doing the shaving and earring removal were fans of a rival team, Hapoel Jerusalem, they joked about eliminating this other guy’s Beitar Jerusalem tattoo by skinning him with their razors.

  He filled in the bubbles of the psychometric exams, grasping for analogies, grasping at the math. Among mankind’s greatest faults is his a) kindness, b) generosity, c) fortitude, d) contentment, e) vanity. That was debatable. But the Pythagorean theorem was not, and if the civilian Uri was one side and the soldier Uri was the other, the true him was the hypotenuse, slanted opposite, the squared sum of both.

  He waited for his ride to the Bakum, the Induction Base, and waited out the ride, counting the kilometers on his way to playing other games with puzzles, blocks, and balls, which he would’ve enjoyed except that they kept him away from the sweltry hut he shared with a gang of rowdy arsim—swaggering Mizrahim descended from families like his that’d fled Casablanca, or been tossed out of Algiers, Tunis, Benghazi, and Baghdad and so who hated the Arabs, but in that special covetous way only a brother hates a brother. They fought over who was the most Arab, meaning the most cruel, but also the coolest, the best, and never kept their shirts on, or their pants on, stroked semen into one another’s boots, and reveled in the license of their youth and the exacting lunacy of their circumstances by beating one another to the ground.

  One noon, Uri was called away from that roughhousing and brought to a climatized shed for an interview. Officers asked him what placements he wanted, which is to say they were asking who he wanted to be, and so he answered them: either Duvdevan or Sayeret Matkal, the dark stuff, the hushed stuff, counterterrorism ops, or, above all, he wanted to be a Tzanchan, he wanted to jump out of a plane—only to be told that his answers were useless, rather that if they were useful in any way it was only insofar as they provided ancillary snippets of psychological data for his profile.

  That would be the last blast of full information he’d get in the army—the rest would be need to know, guesswork, divining: why he’d been placed in the unit he’d been placed in, why the others who’d gotten the same placement had gotten it, and what if anything that might say about him. Because the army never made mistakes. It never failed or lapsed. Each soldier got the assignment he deserved, rather each assignment got the soldier, and if your M16, M4, Galil, or Tavor overheated or jammed, even that was merited too, the malfunctions were intended: to prevent friendly fire or a wrongful slaughter. If your chute didn’t open, or your engine stalled, or your wings fell off, it was better that way: there were reasons. Nothing ever happened out of whim or caprice. Everything was logical, logistical, systematic, each mission backed by a sacrosanct wisdom to which the average grunting soldier would never be privy. The army was a family, the officers were parents, the soldiers their kids: they received instructions, not explanations, the tactics, not the strategies, and the only way to ever survive this regime was to stop seeking its meanings and just submit, subordinate—surrender.

  Imagine this vast staff of shadowy relations that keeps claiming to know what’s best for you, or to know what you’d be best at, through the practice of an official magic, an authoritative mysticism involving myriad complex batteries of mental and physical tests, interviews, background checks, and just standard fulltime surveillance, whose sole objective was to uncover from within the body, mind, and soul of an 18 year old virgin his deepest essential competencies, native ingenuities, and capacities for development—the trail or path for which he’d always been intended. If a soldier was happy with the match that was made for him, then all the magic was true, the mysticism was science, and the organization responsible was close to divine, but if a soldier was unhappy, then the entire system was bankrupt, debunked, and he’d feel like he was losing his religion. This was the first lesson of the army, then, or the first that Uri retained, in the lull before his assignment: that were his wishes ever to be taken into account, the whole edifice would crumble. It was only by ignoring preferences that the theology endured.

  Let the weak be disappointed—Uri was strong and would grow into any situation, like that invasive species of cactus, the pricklypear, which had been imported from South America to flourish in the desert at the fringes of the base: the sabra, it was called.

  Let his fake gangster hutmates flex their pecs that were like the pads of the sabra and grumble about not becoming paratroopers or pilots—let them weep over not being, over officially not being, what they’d been convinced they were at core: paratrooper or pilot material. That was an ugly delusion, though not uncommon among such overconfident prickly youths who came out of the rougher poorer neighborhoods afflicted with bad eyesight, bad hearing, and mild scoliosis. Who, in a country you can’t drive out of, doesn’t want to fly? Or at least want to take a submarine and surface near Ibiza?

  A week later, though it’d felt like a month, Uri had his qualification: his suspicions about himself, his incipient uniqueness, had been confirmed, and he’d been granted a gibush—a next level tryout for the special forces, the eliter commandos.

  He was bussed to another facility, spent a sleepless indeterminacy he regarded as a week getting shrieked at and walloped, bushwhacking up hills, up scrabbly mountains, wading through bramble and thorn with a rockfilled pack. Each day, a handful of guys would drop out. Or be drummed out. Because of broken hands or feet, broken minds.

  Uri’s story was this: once, after they’d rappelled themselves from a particularly strenuous freeclimb ascension, everyone was groveling sloppy with their uniforms untucked, and the drill instructor decided to make an example, he decided to make Uri an example, and so gathered a fistful of his shirttails and jammed the fabric below his belt into his pants, until the faggot was gripping Uri’s dick, he was twisting. Uri keeled. And then got up. And punched the faggot and kept punching, at all his fellow candidates, at every drill instructor at the facility, every officer in the country—the Defense Minister, the Prime Minister, the President, every living member of the Knesset: it took all of them to take him down.

  That, at least, was the indignant yet aggrandizing tale he told the squad to which he was remanded the following month: Kivsa/Akavish/Tziraah/Bet/Bet.

  He’d shown up, toward the conclusion of its basic training, horridly scraped at neck and knees. His cheeks were still puffy and tender. The clinic had been an incarceration, so sterile and tranquilized that even the infantry was preferable. He was in the infantry now.

  He was in Kivsa/Akavish/Tziraah/Bet/Bet, specifically, because it was short a member: this Shimshon the others had barely known—because they hadn’t been together long enough to know him, as anything other than a chunky South African—had been climbing a ladder during an obstacle, fallen off, and shattered his pelvis. The ladder had been positioned by his training partner and squad opinion was still split as to whether it was all the partner’s fault.

  Even if it wasn’t his fault, Yoav, the partner who now became partners with Uri, was the worst soldier in the squad. Uri, to compensate, became the best soldier, meaning he never directly questioned whether their pairing was a punishment or compliment.

  If during their initial krav maga scrimmages he fought as normal and choked Yoav out fast, immediately fast, during subsequent matches he let up and let Yoav thrash all his glib lanky body
for each round’s full duration.

  Uri had realized that by hurting his opponent, he’d only hurt himself—they still had years to go together and there was no way to rush the time.

  But then there was no impatience like that of a graduating recruit standing at attention to be sworn in at the Kotel, while the Chief Rabbi, this squinting screeching Ashkenaz, went on amplifying his remarks with misquotations of the vicious minor prophets.

  After the swearing, saluting, and flag worship, they were finally soldiers, and they flung their berets into the air and then scrambled to scoop them up and put them back on: you can’t stand at the Kotel without keeping your head covered.

  The field days followed in procession: indomitably hot stretches of sentry duty spent just clenching bowel and bladder and greasing your gun, the perspiration coursing, as you stooped, drooped, and melted—the country was melting. The borders shrunk, expanded, kept being moved, until you found yourself trapped between where yesterday’s had been and tomorrow’s would be—until you, yourself, had become the border, dug into sand along roads rived by rebar and garbled with barbedwire. This was a checkpoint, between Israel and a land Palestinians called Palestine and Israelis called Judea and Samaria, because Jews can’t agree on anything, they can’t even agree with themselves and so both names were used. Formerly called the West Bank, though it’s located just east of the country, about 40 billion of the old Canaanite cubits in psychological distance but also only 40 kilometers as the rockets fly, from where the rockets were flying from Gaza. But here you saw none, here you heard none. You just were. Put here, like you’d been put here on earth, to reinforce the patrols. Given all the recent unrest and skirmishing.

  The border felt, from the outset, like a demotion. A disparagement. A squandering. The lines were endless. The days were endless lines. A checkpoint just marks the middle, the sandbagged roadblocked middle, of endless vallar lines. Palestinian workers going to, coming from, the factories in the Israeli industrial zones. Palestinian shepherds coming and going, to graze and water their flocks. Maids heading from Bethlehem to clean at the factories when what they should’ve been cleaning weren’t the factories but Bethlehem. A woman who wasn’t a maid trying to cross using the ID of her sister who was a maid but had a tumor that was preventing her from working and the family couldn’t afford to lose the job. From dawn to dusk checking IDs. Checking permits. Car papers. Fucking sheep papers, as the sheep just shat and pissed. Some days the orders were to let only a certain number through, or a certain designation through, or not to let any through, at certain times. Some days you just invented the orders. You had to act as if your presence here was permanent and your authority just another element of the surrounding inarable wastes. If you convinced yourself, then you convinced the people crossing, and if you convinced the people crossing, then you convinced the wastes. That you were as rooted as the olive trees. As elemental as the clays.

  There were Palestinian police, on the Palestinian side. And Israeli police, on the Israeli side. Your role, as army, was to police the police. To relay the irreconcilability of all their orders. To scan the plates. Get the driver and all passengers out of the car, their arms and legs spread and hijabs off. Put the mirror under the car like you’re checking it for breath. Check the trunk and under the hood, the interior. Check the fluids. You had to be, at once, a soldier, a greasemonkey, and the angel of death. You had to be a brother and a son, even after you were relieved and took your turn in the booth using a contraband cellphone to call your parents, who were slumped in a bunker underground, eating Bissli, drinking Coke, and squabbling—toggling the TV between Sport 5 carrying Maccabi Tel Aviv vs. FC Basel and Channel 1 with its screenblue sky and the smoke of Qassam rockets crazing through like static.

  Occasionally there’d be some Hasidic rabbinic or rabbiesque figure bearing down the settlement road in his dovegray Mercedes Benz 190 between the industrial zone and the settlement on the ridge above the shepherd village and his windows would be downed and with a shake of his payos he’d be screaming at you for making him late and the funny thing would be that every once in a while the guy, because he was a Jewish transplant from America, would be doing all that screaming in English, which Uri wouldn’t understand, or would only half understand, and he’d speak to the guy in Hebrew, which the guy wouldn’t understand, or would only half understand, and the guy would just keep shouting something in English so that Uri would have to get Yoav to moderate the languages, if only to keep from just slapping the guy, which was never advisable, not because the guy was a Jew, or an American, or possibly an Israeli citizen, or a Hasid who resembled a rabbi, or possibly even a bonafide rabbi ordained, but because he was a settler, and as a soldier Uri was basically his employee—basically his bodyguard.

  Occasionally there’d be a protest to break up, to break up the monotony: Palestinian and even Israeli, but then occasionally there’d be a few Israelis out at the Palestinian protests and everything would get confusing.

  Then maybe there’d be some kid at some protest who’d maybe hurled a rock and you’d try not to shoot him, even though your gun only had rubber bullets, even though you’d been so bored you’d spent all your day crushing the rubber bullets up into small sharp pebbles so that while the rules would be respected and no laws would be broken, the skin would be, the skin would be pierced.

  In general, you tried not to hit kids and women—anyone who made a fuss if they were hit: journalists.

  Every once in a while there’d be a midnight run through a village just to light it up. Searching for someone. Or for no one. Finding someone else. Or no one. Going into a house, to surprise the house behind it, to surprise the neighbors nextdoor. Taking the doors off and going room to room. Herding a family into the kitchen and then heading upstairs to ransack the closets and unscrew all the beds nut by bolt. Slashing up the divan in the den and then sitting down on the framed remains to cruise the news on Al Jazeera. Or playing PlayStation. Or Wii. Awaiting further instruction, awaiting Intelligence. Babysitting a son or brother bound to the divan with plasticuffs draining him white and a drenched towel over his face keeping him cool, until the interrogators came. On your way out, confiscating bangles for your sisters, candlesticks and goblets, checkered boards for every game involving kings. A woman keening in the kitchen to the pitch of boiling water, you shut her up with the butt of your gun. You butted a jug and it sharded apart into archaeology even before it hit the floor.

  The time after action was different from the time before—you couldn’t wait to be sent into Gaza, but then once you got out, you could wait again forever.

  The wait to be discharged—should you be feeling so impatient? The wait to get on with the rest of your spared life—why be in such a hurry to get hustled and now have to pay for your own lodging, meals, and clothes?

  But still the army dragged on. With debriefings, memorial services. Notching the days with a pocketknife on the shankbone of a lamb, which you were trying to carve into a dagger. Dribbling your shadow like a football across the halfline, leaving your dead in the dust running wretched behind you, running out the clock, fouling toward the goal.

  The news in Israel was about Israel being condemned by the news of other countries, the countries for which your squadmates were about to depart. And so the main topic of squad conversation, besides pussy, and Ethiopian pussy, was of where and when everyone was going and how, in the different destinations, they’d be treated. Meaning: would the bartenders of Sydney or Auckland overcharge them? And would the ladies of Rio part their knees? A few guys in Kfir, in Nahshon, were passing around a Spanish-Hebrew phrasebook—no entiendo? no comprendo? Por favor, hable más despacio—but Yoav said that in Rio they spoke Portuguese, which was quintessential Yoav, always stamping out the fire.

  The very last days, the rift begins: from thinking about the unit, to thinking about the self, about yourself. About the resources available to you after the army. The scope of the imagination, being circumscribed by family, would revea
l your family: would reveal your finances, culture, class. Menachem started flipping through Harley Davidson brochures, wondering which bike to buy with the reward his parents were giving him just for finishing his stint. Gad started drifting off to lounge under a palm and reacquaint himself with the state of international poetry. Everyone was becoming deequalized, each groping toward his individuality in a great dismemberment of a corpse—the amputation of shredded legs (Rotem’s), the removal of ruptured spleens (Dror’s)—and the pain Uri would come to feel would be like a phantom pain, as the spare parts of what had also been him went out stumping across the earth, or were buried alone below it.

  Finally, there was another ceremony, this at the base in Eliakim, when you were reminded of what you’d been forced, or had forced yourself, to forget. When the same parents who’d said the Shalom that meant Goodbye to their boys at the Kotel now caravanned out to the grassy vale of the Galilee to say the Shalom that meant Hello, to pick their boys up and bring them home again as men—the parents too had aged in the interim.

  You were reminded, by the fathers’ flashy phones and the mothers’ flashy jewels and especially by all the flashy Chevy Malibus they drove, of how divided everyone was, of how disparate your own brooded circumstances.

  Because Uri’s parents didn’t make it: they couldn’t. The family Dugri hadn’t been present at either occasion: neither the induction nor the farewell. They never took off work. Or they’d only have taken off work for a funeral.

  It was Yoav’s parents, then, who offered to drive Uri home—but he refused them. Nika was out of their way and anyway, though this Uri didn’t say, he didn’t know whether, or what, they’d been told by their son, and it enraged him to think they might be grateful to him for whatever oblivious thing he did in that alley doorway in Jabalia. Save a guy’s life and get a ride for your troubles, and maybe a roadside pita, maybe also a beer—save the gestures. He thanked them and, like the hero he was, turned them down.