by Joshua Cohen
911—Tom had to tell Yoav what to dial, but after that Yoav’s voice held firm and before hanging up he even told the operator, “Thank you.”
Back inside the house, they had just enough sun to clear the trees from the parlor, and then they nailed the door and left at dark.
Snow had started falling on the forest in the dumpster.
—
And it kept falling, contrary to every forecast.
All the predictions had the storm weakening after burying Jersey, but another front blowing down the Hudson collided with it and kept it trapped, blocking all the exits and boarding up the sky. The storm stalked around and raged and finally just dug in and squatted.
That night, the white came down on everything, came down equally. Driving hard, driving straight down, and as the winds shrieked like an ambulance down the cross streets what’d fallen was whipped up again, until even the blacktop felt as unstable as a cloud, like any step might be the wrong step, might be fatal.
That’s what brought the kids out. The risk.
On TV, that teacherly white meteorology lady spraytanned to an indeterminate race had confirmed: school was officially cancelled.
The kids mustered on corners, they gathered at the tops of the overpass stairs, to sled down the smoothed enslopements atop trashcan lids, hubcaps, and flatpack cardboard. They outfitted a quadbike with a towrope and towed each other atop sheets of tyvek, scudding for flips and wiping out. They made idols of themselves and outfitted the idols in trashbag rags and enlivened them with features made of candy, chocolate eyes, fruit rings ears, mouths of Swedish fish.
They hurled snow at one another, and snow packed with ice, and snow packed with stones. Then ice and stones without snow.
The younger kids were called inside. Only a minor gang of the older kids stayed out and went throwing at the house.
The next morning Yoav and Uri were woken from dreams (about failing a squad equipment inspection) (about the former Finance Minister Yair Lapid parading Batya Neder on a leash down Boulevard Rothschild) by the reveille bells of the American phone.
Tom was just calling to say the job was still on and he wouldn’t be picking them up.
Transit was running but only underground and delayed, so for a mile or three they walked it: dopey, haggard, glum. The sidewalks were indistinguishable from the streets and neither had any traffic. Stopsigns shivered in the gusts, stoplights flashed for no one. Christ would return to earth before this neighborhood got plowed.
The Raelis were greeted by a door like a jaw dropped open. All the house’s windows were shattered into jagged vacancies caged by bars.
Tom was late and the Raelis were alone and cold and so exposed by the snow that it hardly felt like they even had each other.
Uri grasped a roughsnapped pinebranch from out of the snowjammed dumpster and mounted the steps to the porch. Yoav was just behind—“You’re thinking there’s someone inside?” and then, “If you’re thinking there’s someone, let’s wait?”
Uri turned and put a finger to his lips and motioned with the pinebranch along the flanking fencelines.
“Uri, it’s early and my stomach hurts. Let’s not do this.”
Uri shook his head and smacked, lightly but still treesmacked, Yoav—sharp icicles across the cheek.
Of course Yoav hadn’t forgotten, of course he hadn’t misunderstood: how it went was that one team would go in the front and sweep toward the rear and one team would go in the rear and sweep toward the front—they’d meet in the middle and try not to annihilate each other. Though usually there’d be more than just a single soldier per team and more than two teams per house and snipers posted up on the roofs.
Yoav bootcrunched through the snowbank against the house’s splintered siding. He wasn’t going to surprise anyone, but then he wasn’t even trying. The snow was immaculate and crusted with glass. Glary panes he ground into hoar. As he turned into the backyard, he was feeling that familiar, yet never familiar, unsettledness or flux, the approach of an unplanned-for, untrained-for moment, coming up like bile through the throat. That moment when no protocols apply and authority falls away, when anyone who acts becomes basically a general.
A whistle came in on the wind—Uri was giving a signal.
Then other voices were yelling, and not in Hebrew, as three kids in puffy parkas with their hoodies up and hitching up their jeans dashed out of the house by the knobless backdoor, two of them going around Yoav, but the middle one sprinting straight at him and knocking him down, just as Uri burst into the yard.
Yoav staggered upright and groped to restrain him, but Uri lashed out with the pinebranch and beat him back down and wailed, because the kids had already slid through a gap in the chainlink and split into the whiteness.
“Ben zonah, ben sharmuta, you can’t even hold your position against a bunch of wasted kids?”
He huffed off to track them like a Bedouin in winter.
Yoav flicked the rime from himself and slunk inside.
The kitchen had been ravaged. The cabinets had been wrenched off the wall. Yoav was stepping on bowls, on plates, in shards. He was kicking bottles and cans across the smutted tile.
A skunkish stripe coursed along the hall. The mirror was sharpied, the pocketdoors jarred offtrack and sprayed: Da Fuck Off Our Block, 718 187 Fuck U Chaze BanKKK, BAM B✡WER, Kingz Moving We Gone Your House Now.
In the parlor, it was like a greedy hand had torn through the walls and brought the stainedglass of the transom crashing down. The staircase railing had been hacked apart, the landing was a mix of plaster and snow. Loosed bookpages swirled in the gusts. Up at the height of the house a pigeon flapped trapped under the skylight.
Coming back toward the foyer, Yoav turned into a gun. Tom had it leveled at his mouth.
Ronriguez and Talc were outside shoveling out the truck—yesterday they’d taken the rolloff but left the tractortrailer.
Uri stood in the street. Phonecalls were made, as Yoav hunched by the dumpster sucking air.
The house, left unattended for a single white night, had been defiled. By wilding children registering their fuck you. But fuck whom? The movers or the moved?
It might’ve been that even they weren’t quite sure.
Every time Yoav glanced over, Tom was talking on the phone. Then Uri was talking too, but Yoav wasn’t listening or whatever Uri was saying got blustered around with the questions Tom was asking and Yoav was stuck between them: between Tom wanting a report, because his father Paul wanted a report, and Uri who by way of apology was telling Yoav about the first time he ever saw snow, when his family went up to Mount Hermon, where a sister of his was stationed briefly, all of them packed into the car with him sitting between his two other sisters forever as they drove lost through the Druze villages up in the hills, the only way the car could hold them all was because they were visiting Orly who was doing her service, and finally they got on the road they were supposed to have been on and drove as close as they could to the top, but had to stop at a checkpoint and they got out and stretched and his mother said, “Look, there’s snow,” and his father said, “Look, there’s Beirut and over there’s Damascus.”
“You hearing me, Raelis?” Tom was yelling. “It’s meeting time, come in for a huddle.”
—
The situation was this: despoilment.
About half the take, the stuff—the furniture—was too far gone to move and store, because it was too far gone to monetize. There’d be no way to recoup. Not from a kneecapped wardrobe and brokenhandled chest. A cracked casement clock and leaky aquarium with just a hunk of polyurethane coral rattling around.
If this were any other contract, Tom said he’d drop it, or recommend dropping it to his father, but because this was the first contract from Bower, they’d stay. To protect the half of the assets left, to protect their reputation. Mitigate the loss. Fraunces Bower didn’t hire heavylifters just to have them call the cops.
This was what Tom’s father Paul was saying to
everyone on speakerphone.
Reinforcements were being mobilized, though with Jersey in deepfreeze and the GWB unnavigable, no one was trucking in to roll another dumpster. Not until later today, at the latest tomorrow—whenever sanitation defrosted the roads.
Meanwhile, all the house’s salvageable items were to be piled in the parlor, the rest was to be scraped and dumped out in the yard. No one was leaving—they’d be spending the night.
“Fuck that, Talc.”
“Fucking hazard pay, Ronriguez.”
The tractortrailer had an emergency kit: a gaspowered generator, a lightpod, and a spaceheater, which they set up in the parlor and Tom recharged his phone and Talc and Ronriguez took turns sharing Yoav’s charger and each called his wife or girlfriend or whatever the status was of whoever it was who put up with him.
Then they put on their masks, but there weren’t enough masks, so Tom tied on his bandana—they were already wearing their gloves.
They’d take the basement before the floor above, where the only light would be the sun that was left and the only heat that of their own exertion.
They worked their way through various techniques, from individual trips walking in and out to a chain passing the trashbags down to the sidewalk to the Raelis, who stacked them into an approximation of a barricade around the dumpster and propped them like bulging bodybags against the house’s siding.
It was the repetition, that’s what did it. What dulled. Bend, lift, throw. Bend, lift, throw. Run out of bags, get a new box. Run out of boxes, check the truck. Soldiers weren’t supposed to clean up messes, they were supposed to make messes. “Yes, Uri.” Soldiers made, they destroyed, what the others cleaned up. “Uri, yes.” But what Yoav really said was, “Keyn, Aluf.” “Affirmative, General.”
What else was there to say? What did it mean that it was always easier to labor than to question, always easier to sweat than to ask? It dulled the mind but that wasn’t all, it also dulled whatever muscle was responsible for judgment. What was effective, what wasn’t. What was wrong and what was right. This was actually the most traumatic lesson of the army, that the most atrocious things they’d ever done were just the products of repetition. The missions, which had felt like maneuvers, which had felt like training scenarios, the footsteps were the same. One step after another. Feet concussing snow. His holes ahead of Uri’s, through all that white sprawled out in front, sinister in its semblance, blank. Matching Timberlands, size 9 being an Israeli 42, half off for Christmas at Macy’s. His boots printed the snow, which was so untouched and isolating that even after Uri had gotten his bearings by the minaret’s moon risen over the impound grove and cut ahead to lead, Yoav felt like he was following a specter.
They’d volunteered to go to the deli, if the deli was open. Yoav had volunteered them, just to get out of the house and be doing anything different.
Uri stopped at a traffic median of work zone cones and took from his pocket a joint like a loosely rolled bandage and lit it with a lighter belonging to that bouncer Arik or that other club brother Zeev and puffed on it and handed it behind him.
The walk back was difficult. So far and so slippery, they were dizzy and burdened with too many bags.
Yoav kept dropping behind, so Uri stopped at corners to let him catch up and then Yoav wasn’t catching up, so Uri turned and trundled to him and held out a laden hand and tried to disburden him.
“Don’t, Uri. I got it.”
“At least let me take the beer one.”
“Don’t touch me.”
“The one with the beer—what’s the matter?”
“Enough, it’s cold. Yalla, kapara.”
Uri went on and Yoav just after, but at the next corner Uri said, “I was only fucking around.”
“That’s what that was?”
“Come on, it was a joke, it was funny—you weren’t laughing?”
“I laughed out of embarrassment.”
“We scared him out of his kafiya.”
“We didn’t do anything—you did—but the guy wasn’t scared. He’s just a nice average guy, a Jordanian with a deli. One day you tell him I’m a retard, the next day you tell him we’re mukhabarat, CIA agents investigating potential terror activities just wondering if he’s noticed anything strange in the area and you don’t think he got that we were Israeli? That you were being a prick?”
“You got all that with your basic course Arabic?”
“You’re lucky I didn’t speak to him in English and embarrass you.”
“I don’t put my dick on you,” Uri said, which meant the same, in the obscure illogic of slang, as if he’d said that he did in fact put his dick on Yoav: the negative and positive versions of the phrase communicated the identical sentiment.
They slogged on, but crossing Spice Street, Yoav broke away and through the alley of Viamaris Bros. Uri, noticing the desertion at the curbcut, had to backtrack and overtook Yoav by the loadingdocks.
“What?” He was out of breath. “You expect him to still be here?”
“I don’t even expect him to still be alive.”
“He is—or was when we left him here.” Uri swung his bags and chipped at the ice with his heel. “So what are we doing—just taking a shortcut?”
“Affirmative, General. That’s what this is, a shortcut.”
Yoav leaned against the loadingdock where they’d laid the homeowner, #3 it was. Or #5—Yoav couldn’t recall, so he just alternated his attention between, as if trying to discern some remnant amid the irreproachably snowed cement.
Uri smirked, “You think there’s something wrong with what we do.”
“With what—getting high?”
“You know what I mean. Why do you act stupid?”
“I do? Maybe I act that way to avoid treating you stupid—maybe to avoid telling you what I think.”
Uri tensed up, but he couldn’t hit Yoav because his hands were full of groceries.
“If you want to hit me,” Yoav said, “I can hold your bags.”
Uri snorted and sucked some snot back into a nostril. “You’re a cocksucker, you know that?”
“Uri, what if I’m not? What if you have no idea who I am? Just because we served together, that doesn’t entitle you to anything. What I’m thinking, what I’m feeling. Did I shit today. How many times did I shit. Remember that? How we’d talk about shit all day and anyone coming back from the latrines, they’d have to give an update? How big or small their shit was? How many bombs they’d dropped or was it watery? Long and thin like a rocket, but a Gill or a Hutra? Or rounded like an M26 grenade, before or after fragmenting? And sometimes, or not just sometimes, we’d even check up. To keep everyone honest. We’d all march over to the ditch and crowd around in that stench standing over the suspect dump. Counting, evaluating, making sure no one got away with fabricating his payload. That’s what I’m talking about, how fucked up that was. How fucked we got by the army. But, Uri, this is life. I don’t need to tell you what’s going on in my head or coming out of my ass now just to survive.”
“OK, so if this is our life, what are you doing with it? The same as me.”
“No, not the same. Because I’m trying to be alone here.”
“That’s why you have me living with you, working like a slave for your thief cousin and a goy amateur named Tom?”
“Like I said, Uri, I don’t have to tell you anything, but one last time, I will. One last. I’m just trying to have a thought. A thought that the moment I have it my family or Sami or Eli or Natan or you aren’t popping out of a mousehole to take it away from me.”
He put his bags up on the loadingdock, Uri set his down in the wet.
“OK,” Yoav said, “you haven’t experienced this yet, but here’s what happens when someone finds out you’re Israeli. Someone from America, I’m talking about, even an American Jew. Either they say (he said this in English, in the voice of a young American girl), Oh my God it very horrible that the Palestinians they hate you and do to you the violence. Which mea
ns (he said this in Hebrew), Israel might be horrible, but at least all that violence lets you live a true Jewish life. Or they say (and again he said this in English, in the voice of a young American girl), Oh my God you have such privilege because you can leave from that not legitimate apartheid state that she make you to do the military service. Which means (and again he said this in Hebrew), You’re so lucky you’re able to quit that country founded on an obsolete nationalism devolved even further into racism and the massacre of innocents, I can never be your rehearsal partner for the audition or touch your penis, you’re so evil.”
“OK.”
“Not OK, because I’m not that person—not the Jew to pity, not the Israeli to condemn.”
“Yoavik, forget it—stop talking like you’re fainting. Whatever we did in the army, it’s done. If we were right, we don’t get credit. If we were wrong, we’re not responsible.”
“But I’m not just talking about the army, Uri, I’m talking about everything. It was always just following orders. To be an Israeli is to follow Israeli orders. To be Jewish is to follow Jewish orders. Work follows work orders. Friends follow friend orders. Yoav follows Yoav orders. Uri follows Uri orders.”
“So what? Whose orders would you rather follow?”
“We’ve always just been forced to become who we are and still everyone has an opinion about it, treating us like we chose this.”
“So you’re ashamed of who you are?”
“Everywhere we go we’re Israelis, and if not that, we’re Jews. Everywhere we’re the Jews of Jews, and if you think Palestinian is the best cover identity to assume—you know what they say: if your mother had balls she’d be your father.”
“And if you had balls too you’d be a man.”
“And the thing is,” Yoav went on, “the only way I can separate myself from it all, in the minds of other people, even in my own mind, is to admit to what a piece of shit I was as a soldier. A big small piece of clusterbomb shit, already blown by the time I joined up. So answer me this: how did it happen that we were put in the same unit? Why did I get the same assignment as you, given my incompetence?”