The People of Forever Are Not Afraid

by Shani Boianjiu

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  On the ground, a snail is slowly making its way toward me, leaving a trail of saliva behind it. Soon, there will be the first rain of the year. Soon, Avishag and I will graduate. Join the army. Everything. Even princess Lea will have to join the army. Everyone does.

  And I realize I have no one I know outside the thousand houses of the town and that I am standing here on the lukewarm asphalt all alone.

  I tell the driver I might as well stay where I am.

  I Don’t Go Up the Hill

  And it is because I don’t want to climb anymore just to get reception by the cellular tower, just to talk to someone. I go down the brick path and through the bike racks and the dump yard to the video machine, and I use a twenty-shekel bill to buy Mean Girls, since it is the only movie left in the machine that I have only seen once.

  Now I have change, and I go back to the very end of town. The pay phone’s receiver is so dusty it glistens, and when I pick it up I am almost surprised to hear a dial tone. This might be the very last pay phone in all of Israel. A few years ago the government uprooted them, one by one, and took them all away in a big truck.

  I want to hear my mom’s voice to make sure she didn’t also leave.

  But she is not the one I call.

  Avishag only answers the third time I call. My mom is not the first one I call, not because I chose to call Avishag first but because almost sure is better than risking knowing something you don’t want to know.

  “Your mom is going to come back, you know,” I say.

  When I say it I know that she may not. When I say it I know already that it was Avishag who wrote in the notebook that morning, not Dan.

  “I am alone all the time, Yael,” Avishag replies, and her voice is soupy. “Even right now.”

  Don’t Call Us

  I wait for a long time for Avishag to come get me. I sit on the sand by the pay phone and wait. I can taste sweat and salt and makeup trickling down from my nose to my lips. She said she’ll come.

  And she does. She comes, but she doesn’t come and get me. We don’t go home. We don’t say anything. She walks right up to me and then changes direction. She knows that I will follow her wherever she goes today.

  We walk up and up the hill. I hope we never get there, but I know we will.

  There is no blood on the ground by the cellular tower. Not even a piece of clothing. Not even a boot.

  Avishag takes a while to believe there is nothing there. She wants to see, at least something. Her neck is moving here then there frantically. She stands looking and looking in the shade of the tower, like she did when we were little, trying to find the last word on a word-search puzzle.

  Then it is as if the tower is that word. Like she just notices that it is there, after staring right at it for minutes. She puts both her hands on it and pushes it and kicks it.

  I join her, digging the dirt around the metal rods stuck in the ground with my shoes and shoving my entire weight on the tower.

  We try to collapse the tower until it is dark. We try and we try and we try.

  We don’t talk. We won’t talk. We’ve talked enough.

  We don’t need a cellular tower here.

  RPG Children

  RPG children were usually around nine or ten, so they were very small, and children. And the RPG launcher is this weapon that is very, very heavy, so you can’t have just one child holding it, you have to have two, and the children took the weapons and they held them, two together, one from the front and one from the back. When you shoot an RPG, the front launches a missile so powerful it could even get through an Israeli tank, but the back releases fire, not a lot of fire, not fire that is necessary; it is just a part of how the weapon works, that there is fire at the back. So one RPG child held the launcher on his shoulder, and behind him stood another RPG child, on his toes, holding it from the back. And so when the RPG was launched, the child from the back’s head caught fire, and then his shoulders, and soon his sandals too, if he had them. No one told the RPG children any better.

  No one talked to them, no one told them anything, not the children who held it from the front and not the children who held it from the back, but one thing that is very, very interesting is that many times the child from the front would jump on his burning friend and hug him, and this increased the casualties in a very significant way, that one child didn’t burn alone.

  The

  Sound

  of All

  Girls

  Screaming

  We, the boot-camp girls, stand in a perfect square that lacks one of its four sides. Our commander stands in front of us, facing the noon sun. She squints. She screams.

  “Raise your hand if you are wearing contact lenses.”

  Two girls raise their hands. The commander folds her arm to look at her watch. The two girls do the same.

  “In two minutes and thirty seconds, I want to see you back here from the tents. Without your contact lenses. Understood?” the commander shouts.

  “Yes, commander,” the girls shout, and their watches beep. They run. Dusts of sand trail the quick steps of their boots.

  “Raise your hand if you are asthmatic,” the boot-camp commander shouts.

  None of the girls raise their hands.

  “Are you asthmatic?” the boot camp commander shouts.

  “No, commander,” all the girls shout.

  I don’t shout. I didn’t get it that I was supposed to; I already didn’t raise my hand.

  “Are you asthmatic, Avishag?” the commander yells, looking at me.

  “No, commander,” I shout.

  “Then answer next time,” the commander says. “Speak up so I can hear you, just like everyone else.”

  In my IDF boot camp, the only combat-infantry boot camp for females, we can’t tell what will become of us next based on what questions we raise our hands for. I know the least because I was the first of the girls in my class to be drafted, so I didn’t have any friends to get info from, and my brother Dan never told me anything about the army, even when he was alive. I got so annoyed when people asked me if I was still planning to go into the army after he died, I decided to volunteer for combat just to make people stop assuming. I wanted to do something that would make people never assume, ever.

  One can never assume in my boot camp. A week ago, we were asked to raise our hands if we weighed below fifty kilos. Then we were asked to raise our hands if we had ever shared needles or had unprotected sex shortly before we were drafted. It was hard to know what to assume from that. The army wanted our blood. Two liters, but you got strawberry Kool-Aid and white bread while the needle was inside you. The self-proclaimed sluts and druggies served it to the girls who were pumping their fists, trying to make the blood gush out quicker.

  “Faster,” the commander screamed.

  “My hand feels like there is ice on it,” one of the other soldiers said. “It feels frozen.” She was lying on the field bed across from mine. I wanted to reach over and grab her hand, so that she would be less cold, so that I would be less alone. I couldn’t. Because of the needle in my arm, because it would have been a mistake. Mom said that if I want to get a good posting after boot camp, I have to learn how to control my mouth. Mom was once an officer, and now she is a history teacher, and all. She left for Jerusalem a few weeks after Dan died, but in the end she had to come back and help me get ready for the army. Single moms have to come back always.

  The girl on the field bed next to mine freaked out. She extended the arm with the needle away from her body, like it was cursed. Her face turned red. “I think it is taking too much blood. Can someone check? Can someone see if it is taking too much blood?”

  I knew I should not say anything.

  “I want to go home,” she said. “I don’t like this.”

  She looked very young. And eventually I spoke. “It’s fine” was what I said.

  That’s when the commander intervened. “No one said you could talk,” sh
e shouted.

  I was the only one who was punished. During shower hour, I had to dig a hole in the sand large enough to bury a boulder the size of five heads. The commander said the boulder represented my “shame.” She smiled when she explained that. None of the girls helped. They just stood on the sand, waiting in line for the showers, and watched.

  Now the army wants us to know what it is like to be suffocated. That’s why they asked about contact lenses and asthma. It is ABC day. Atomic, biological, chemical. Every soldier has to go through that, not just girls in combat, they said. But it is especially important for us, because we will have to maintain functionality in the event of an unconventional attack.

  We stand in two lines on top of a sandy hill. We help each other put the gas masks on.

  “You are doing it all wrong, Avishag,” the commander yells at me. “All wrong.”

  She stretches one of the black elastic bands tighter, and my hair is pulled so tightly it is as if someone had taken a handful of my hair and tried to pull it off my scalp. Except that someone doesn’t let go. The mask is on my face to stay.

  With our masks on, we all look like the bodies of soldiers with the heads of robotic dogs. The big gray filter stretches like a snout. The sun heats the black plastic of the mask, and the heat radiates inward. The sheer plastic above my eyes is stained, and wherever I turn the world looks framed and distant, a dirty, cheap painting of sand, then sand from another angle.

  The commander goes down the line, breaking plastic miniatures of bananas. “Each one of your ABC kits has a few of these little bananas. If you break it and you still smell bananas, your mask is not sealed right.”

  I can feel the veins at the back of my head choking. When the commander passes by me, waving the tiny banana, I can smell it. Bananas. Bananas and sand.

  “I can smell bananas and—” I say. My voice vibrates inside of the mask. My words, they fail me. I want to talk. All the time. About Dan. About things Yael said I still don’t understand. The banana fields by our village when they burn. Everything. I am an idiot. Like it matters what I am thinking.

  “No one said you could speak,” my commander shouts. “Just get one of your friends to fix it,” she says. They call the other soldiers “your friends.” I hate that. They are other soldiers. They are not my friends. Even Mom said, you don’t go into the army to make friends. Don’t be fooled. Just look at what happened to Dan.

  The commander lets us into the tent two at a time. My partner is a tall girl called Gali. We watch one of the girls who entered before us lift the cover of the tent and run back outside as if she were on fire, her mouth dripping with saliva, her eyes closed and wet, her nose running in green and yellow. She runs with her mouth open, her arms stretched to the sides. She runs far, her small green body becoming a speck on the empty horizon.

  Gali laughs, and I do too. I did hear from Sarit, Lea’s older sister, that the tear-gas tent is the first place commanders can get personal with their boot-camp soldiers. They ask them the same four questions:

  Do you love the army?

  Do you love the country?

  Who do you love more, your mother or father?

  Are you afraid to die?

  The commanders get a kick out of this because first they ask these questions when the soldier has her mask on, but then they get to ask them when the soldier is in the tear-gas tent, without the mask, and watch her panic. That is the goal of the exercise. To train you not to panic in the event of an atomic, biological, or chemical attack. I fail to see the point of this. I told that to Sarit; I told her, “In that case, why don’t they just shoot us so we know what that feels like?” but she said, “Don’t get smart.” We get to run out of the tent when we feel we are choking. Sarit said they expect you to stay as long as you can. I asked, “What’s as long as you can?” and she asked, “How long can you breathe underwater?”

  It is our turn.

  Gali and I bend below the tent’s folds and enter it. It is dark inside and so warm I feel as though the buttons of my uniform are burning my wrists. I can feel it. I can see it. The tent is full of poison. I know it, but the mask doesn’t let it harm me. I feel like a cheater.

  The commander, strangely, is just as identifiable with the mask on. The way she stands, with her arms behind her back, holding the handle of her gun. Her chin is raised high. She starts with Gali. Gali stands even taller, perking up her chin.

  “How are you feeling with the mask, soldier?”

  “Good.”

  “Do you love the army?”

  “Yes. It is hard but it is a rewarding experience and I learn a lot.”

  “Do you love your country?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who do you love more, your mother or your father?”

  “I can’t really answer that. I think I love them both the same amount, but in different ways.”

  “Are you afraid to die?”

  “No.”

  “Take off your mask. You can run out when you feel you have to.”

  I watch Gali fumble to untie the elastic of her mask and then remove it. Immediately, her face crumbles inward like she is sucking on a punctured straw.

  “Do you love the army?”

  Gali opens her mouth to speak and then closes it quickly. She is drooling already. She opens her mouth again, smaller this time, and grunts out a sound. “Yeah.”

  “Do you love your country?”

  Gali is flapping her arms near her throat, like a fish.

  “Ahhh,” she mumbles, and the mucus from her nose falls to her mouth. She runs out like a stork.

  Now it is me.

  “Do you love the army?” my commander asks.

  “Yes and no. I mean, I definitely believe that it is important in a country like ours to serve in the army, but I hope for peace, and on a personal level of course boot camp presents its own hardships and also—”

  “Enough. Are you afraid to die?” she asks. She skips two questions. She knows I am trouble, although I have barely caused any yet. Maybe trouble isn’t something you do, it is something you are. I think Dan told me that once, but what do I know about what he said or meant?

  “No, I am not afraid to die,” I say. Short and concise. What she wants to hear, and also the truth.

  “Take off your mask. You can run out when you feel you have to,” my commander says. She sounds different than when she said it to Gali. More content.

  I take off my mask and at first I feel nothing but the pain in my scalp. Then I feel the fire, the burn. I cannot open my eyes. I stop taking air in through my nose. But I open my mouth, I do.

  And I talk. I have been waiting for so long. This is my chance. As long as I am choking, I am allowed. Yael and Lea are not here to drown my words with their chatter. No one in my family is around to ignore me. My talking serves a purpose. My talking, my tears, are a matter of national security. A part of our training. I will be prepared for an attack by unconventional weapons. I could save the whole country, that’s how prepared I’ll be. My entire head is burning but my mouth rolls off words; they taste like bananas, and they go on and on and on.

  My commander runs out of the original four questions. She has to make up a new one.

  “What is your earliest memory?” she asks. It is a question they used to ask before someone was brilliant enough to come up with the mom and dad question.

  I don’t leave on my own. She tells me to.

  I talk and I talk and I talk.

  I think I stayed inside the tear-gas tent longer than any soldier has ever before.

  Outside is when I cannot breathe. I cannot open my eyes and, although I do not want them to, my feet start running on their own, faster and faster. I can taste blood in my mouth coming from my nose, and my throat burns as though it is stuffed with boiling oil. The skin of my face is rubbed with sandpaper. I run and I run, until arms catch me midair and hold me for a very long time. When I can finally see again, through the water in my eyes, I see where I was heading: the cli
ff. It was my commander’s arms that grabbed me. She held me, before I fell. My commander, this was her job.

  They are sure I cheated, although they cannot for the life of them imagine how I did it. I am told I stayed in a tent full of tear gas for over two and a half minutes, and they say that is just not possible, that there must have been some funny business going on. It felt like I was talking longer. It felt like in that time I got to tell everything, almost.

  After I change my uniform, I have to see the commander of the base. I enter the room, salute with my gun, and stare at him.

  For a second, I think he is reaching for his gun. That the commander of the base is going to kill me. Sometimes I think things I know are not true. But he is just reaching for his cigarettes. His nostrils flare when he drags in the smoke. He gestures for me to sit across from him, and when I drop onto the office chair I can see that the hairs inside his nose are gray, like lifelines of spiders. He crushes his cigarette in an ashtray made of a green grenade shell and then reaches for another one.

  It seems he is only interested in killing himself, and slowly. He doesn’t care about killing me. It makes me sad that he cares about himself more than about me. Say I am just not being realistic, but it still makes me sad when people are like that. Most people are like that. Dan was like that, in the end. Only interested in killing himself.

  The commander of the base says I need to get my act together. That don’t I know people are dying? He hopes I will take some time to think of ways I can become a better soldier.

  “And just a general point. Your commander says you keep on speaking when you are not spoken to. Why do you do that?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. I guess I have all these thoughts,” I say.

  “One day soon you need to wake up and realize that your thoughts are interrupting everyone else.”

  My punishment is to sleep that night with my gas mask on. Creative and humiliating all at once. I am sort of impressed.

  I wish I were a better soldier. At night, I think about everything except how to become a better soldier, no matter how hard I try. Dan, Mom, Yael. People who are not me and not soldiers. Even my dad; thoughts from when I was little and not a soldier.