All night long, I stare at the ceiling of the tent through the sheer plastic; it frames the thick green cloth, all this green, like an impressionist painting. The knobs at the back of the mask pierce into my scalp.
If I cry, it is not because I hope that one of the girls in the tent will hear me and wake up. We only get five hours of sleep each night. And we are not friends.
I cannot sleep, so I imagine one of two things could happen.
I could wake up after a night with my gas mask on and find out that Iran had bombed Israel and that I was the last living person in the whole country, that the mask had saved me. The other girls in the tent would be dead and blue faced, and I would march out of the gates of the base and into the Negev desert, where dehydration could kill me, or chemicals poisoning the skin of my body could kill me, but those things don’t kill me. What kills me is that I have no one to talk to.
Another thing that could happen is that Iran doesn’t bomb Israel, at least not on that day, and that I reach the place Yael says is the end of the world. I finish boot camp. I finish the army. I go to Panama and Guatemala and Argentina. There are Israelis, of course, swarms of them everywhere. But finally they all leave, and I am the last Israeli tourist left in Ushuaia, Argentina, the closest city to Antarctica, the end of the world. The bookstores are all in Spanish. The lakes are too cold for a swim. At the bars, all the clients are middle-aged Frenchmen, and I am alone.
My earliest memory. I open my eyes and see the small room through plastic. My father is wearing his mask, and my baby sister is on the carpet inside a gas-protective incubator, because she is too small for a mask of her own. Dan keeps on taking his mask off, and Dad slaps him. Dad takes off his own mask to take sips from his Araq bottle. It is 1991 and missiles are falling from Iraq. On the radio they say not to go into the underground shelters. They say to seal one room of the house with duct tape, wear the masks, drink a lot of water, and hope for the best. On the radio they say missiles are falling in region M, our region. We live in some town other than the village then. I don’t know where. My parents are arguing. “Duct tape?” my mother asks. “This is silly.”
I do not know all the details of this—I hear about it later, and it becomes my memory. That night, I do not yet have enough words to make a sentence. All I remember is my mother, her dark face bare, collecting me in her arms and running up the wooden steps onto the roof. Rain falls on the palm trees below, but my mother removes my mask and pulls my chin up, high up in the air. A ball of light rips through the night sky in pink and ember and blaze. My mother drowns her chin in my hair. We watch, and if I am alone I do not yet know it.
I stare at the ceiling of the tent through the sheer plastic into the night. The knobs at the back of the mask pierce into my scalp, still. I am crying, and not because I hope that one of the girls in the tent will wake up.
But then one does wake up. The blood one, the one who thought too much of her blood was being taken. She is awake, but she does not realize that I am a person, her fellow soldier, and in my field bed and crying inside a gas mask. My suffocated whines sound to her like the words of an animal.
“Is that a cat?” she whispers, a sound as spiky as a blade that pierces through the air and tent and ears. “Girls! There is a cat in the tent.”
“A cat?” Gali asks. She does not bother whispering.
“Help me. I am allergic. I may die.” The blood girl waits for the words of another person.
The mask protects me. They cannot see my face. They cannot see my mouth. They do not know that it was me who made the sound. If I scream, if I scream right now, a deafening and smashing and muted scream, there is a chance, there is always a small chance that no one will ever know it was me. It will be the sound of all girls screaming.
And so.
I scream. I scream as if this is the last time in my life I’ll ever speak my voice, and maybe it is. It is as if no one hears me, hears me right now.
I scream the fear of blood, and ember, and blaze. I scream the terror of the beeping watches and boots treading the sand, and the panic brought upon by a reek that thinks it is bananas. The sound of the words I scream is the groan of my shame, my shame that is not a boulder, my shame that I never agreed to bury.
If you really want me to, I will tell you the words I scream, I will tell you all the sounds and words and letters. But first you have to, you have to swear that you really want to hear it from me.
Boys
I stretch my arms out, as if I am trying to push the darkness beyond the cement barricade. I braid my hair and then braid it tighter, even though I know no one will be able to see me for hours.
Eventually I allow myself to yawn and look down at the ammunition bunker hidden below the small hill where I stand. The eight-hour shift and the night broaden and spiral before me like my whole life ahead. When the wait is almost too much, I write my name on the ground in stones.
Yael.
I hate even my name when I am waiting, at least after I look at it and it looks at me for a while, at least when I see it written in stones. So I kick the stones.
I have been doing this since they stationed me in this training base near Hidna after boot camp. At first I wrote other words, but then I felt bad about kicking them, even though I hated them, and I hated that I grew to hate each name and word.
After I am done kicking stones, I bend over and reach for the helmet, where I placed a plastic jar filled with chocolate spread. I jammed a plastic knife in it for me to lick when the night starts crowding in on me. I put it a few meters outside of the barricade so that I have to step out of it into the yellow weeds and dust of the hill. This makes time pass.
But the helmet and the chocolate are gone. The weeds where I dropped them are imprinted by the shape of the helmet, holding its absence. The night hums with silence and cold. I place my hand on the handle of my M-16 and click the safety once, then twice, then again.
The helmet should have been on my head, but none of the girls ever put theirs on. I had rested it outside the barricade, because the open chocolate spread has to be outside to make life interesting, and the helmet would make it harder for bugs to climb in.
I take out a flashlight from my ammunition vest. The light stretches in a giant triangle, exposing green shrubbery and fruit flies. I think I see movement on the mountain ahead, a movement methodical and curvy, like that of a giant mouse.
I close my eyes and hear giggles, or maybe it’s just the radio coming from the houses of the Palestinian village nearby, or a car driving along Route 433.
I open my eyes. I take my hand off my gun. I turn off the flashlight. Then I see a flash of white, glistening on the ground straight ahead.
Whoever stole my helmet and chocolate crawled in silence all the way up the hill and right outside the guarding barricade. Then, before crawling away with the goods, he paused for a second, low on the ground and silent, took out the plastic knife from the jar, licked it clean, and left it right outside the barricade for me to find. That knife. Like a wink—I got you!
I know I’ll get in trouble for losing the helmet, but I cannot help it. I can feel laughter growing in my stomach, then in my lungs, and then I am laughing so hard my eyes get wet and it is hard to breathe.
There is no doubt about it. This theft was the genius work of a boy. One of the boys from the Hidna village. And boys, well. I love everything about them.
I walk back crazed, confused, and knowing. I think I know something new after every shift. The thin metal fence around the base engulfs my body. The signs glued to the fence, reading CLOSED MILITARY AREA, blur. They’ve hung them up so that one glows in red, and the next is black, red, black, red. But with every step I take they become nothing more than letters in all the colors that there are.
IN THE middle of night, back in the caravan, after eight hours of laughter alone and staring, I call my boyfriend, Moshe, back in the village. He finished his service a year ago. I call him from under cover of a military blanket.
“We are breaking up,” I say.
“Is it me?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “It is you.”
“But I just got a job in the next town over. It’s not great, but by the time you’re out of the army we’ll have something to start with,” he says. “How can it be me?”
“For sure you,” I say.
THE VILLAGES around Hebron and even the youth in Hebron itself have grown restless and begun rioting. The entire unit of infantry boys we trained the week before has been called up. They could only spare four or five boys to help us guard the training base. The burden of guarding the base fell on our shoulders, the weaponry instructors, the girls. We had to do eight-eight. Eight hours of standing alone in the dark with nothing but your thoughts and full gear, your weapon loaded. Waiting for the minutes to crawl by like crippled snakes, waiting, waiting, waiting. Then eight hours of haunted sleep in the caravan, where I’d wonder what I had been waiting for all those hours. And again.
“One of the Hidna boys stole my helmet last night,” I tell Dana in the morning. She sleeps in the bed across from mine.
“I don’t get why we even have to guard,” Dana says. She gets ready for her shift, sticking her thumb inside the five magazines in her vest to make sure there are exactly twenty-nine bullets in each. “These boys are like rats,” she says. “I swear they’d steal the entire base if they could.”
“I know,” I say. “And it’s like, they’re kids. What are we going to do, arrest them?”
Dana rattles a water canteen by her ear, making sure it is filled all the way and makes no noise. “You’re in trouble now,” she says after listening to the silence. “That’s for sure.”
The door of the caravan of the more popular girls is open, and they have a clear view into our open door. Their leader, Hagar, the blonde, is looking right in at us. Her European face reminds me of Lea’s. She is as mean as her, too.
“Aww,” she says. “What did the new girl do?” she asks, smiling.
The other two girls burst out laughing, and I wish the joke wasn’t on me, so that I could laugh too. The girls in my caravan never laugh.
MY TROUBLE has a name. It’s Boris. And he’s great, he’s great. Well, not great at everything. His unit chose to leave him behind at the training base because he can’t shoot, really can’t shoot. When I told my officer my helmet fell off the hill and I couldn’t find it, he asked why it wasn’t on my head. Then I said it fell off my head. Then he asked why it wasn’t properly fastened. I wanted to scream at him that it wasn’t properly fastened because there is nothing to be afraid of, because our only assailants are kids who would steal lollipop wrappers just so they can lick them, but instead I looked at the ground and waited to hear my punishment.
My punishment is to make Boris a better shooter. Boris’s buzz cut is so blond it’s almost white. He is exactly my height, a very short dude, but he is also bulky and firm and real. His blue eyes hide behind long lashes. He can’t bear to look at me. “This is so humiliating, commander,” he says as we walk on the sands leading to the shooting range. He is carrying a giant army radio on his back, a metal container of bullets in his right hand, and ten liters of water in his left. I have my weapon on my back, and a coat. Also, the carton of targets and wooden sticks. Chips of wood scratch my palms, like thrill. The cold pinches my nose, and walking by Boris’s side I feel light. Lighter. Elated.
“You can call me Yael,” I say. “I mean, we are the same age.”
“I am eighteen,” he says.
I am nineteen and two months. I was drafted late. It occurs to me that in a few years it will never again be accepted for me to even dream about the body of an eighteen-year-old boy. Then of any boy, really. I will only be allowed to dream of a man. There are nineteen-year-olds who are still boys. Twenty-year-olds too. I think it was after he turned twenty-one that I started noticing that Moshe was not a boy anymore.
We reach the shooting range that I booked with operations for us. The range is a small roof and a surface of cement. Boris lays down the equipment. He turns his shoulders in their sockets, and for a second it is as if the relief from the weight he was carrying has made him into a child, despite his embarrassment. I talk with operations on the radio, letting them know shots will be fired on range 11. When I turn back to face Boris, I see him lying down on the cement, holding his gun. His body is all wrong. I mean, his body is all right, but it is all wrong for shooting a weapon. The buttstock is not even in the dent between his shoulder and chest. It is resting, flying, somewhere above.
“Boris,” I say. “Do I look like an ocean to you?”
He puts his gun down and sits on the cement. “No,” he says.
“Then why are you getting carried away?” I ask. “There is no need to start on the cement. I am sure you are not that bad.”
Boris laughs. He laughs for a long time, his teeth showing and his nose twitching. “I really am that bad, though,” he says.
We step ahead nonetheless, away from the cement and into the rocky sand of the shooting range. “I don’t like practicing on cement,” I say. “It is not realistic. Wars are not fought on cement.”
I tell Boris to first show me what he can do on his own. I plant a stick in the ground and hang a fresh carton target, shaped like a green soldier, fifty meters ahead. Then I show him something small. I stand facing him, then take his hand in mine and place it at the dent between his shoulder and chest.
“Press around here,” I say, “and pretend like you are swimming in strokes.”
He doesn’t argue. He does as he is told. My fingers are a little wet from the sweat of his body. I keep my hand on his, touching. “Now stop when you feel a dent or a hole,” I say.
We move together until he says, “I can feel it! I can!”
“That’s where you should put the buttstock when you shoot. It’s is the best place for your body to absorb the recoil.”
We spend a minute kicking away the copper bullet shells that litter the ground.
He lies down on the ground. Excited. “I’m gonna give it all I got, commander,” he says in a voice nothing like the one he used before. That’s how quickly, how physically, boys can flip.
“How about you give five bullets to the heart for now?” I say, and stick in my earplugs.
Boom, boom, boom. Boom. Boom.
I tell him to stay behind as I go and check his target. I run fast, aware that he is watching me, waiting, waiting but also watching me run.
There are no hits on the heart. I check the entire central mass area, but there are no hits there either. Nothing on the head. Nothing on the legs.
I run back, trying to hide the look of surprise on my face.
“Your weapon is just really not calibrated,” I say.
Boris is sitting on the sand, holding his cheek in his big hand. “Oh, it’s calibrated,” he says, confident, gloriously confident, yet cheerless.
I bend over and lift his weapon off his back. I don’t lie down. I put the weapon in the dent of my shoulder, standing. I tell Boris to step back and put his earplugs back in.
Boomboomboomboomboom.
I run ahead to check the target. Even though it is hard to be accurate with an M-16 while standing, I hit all the bullets right at the heart. They are less than ten centimeters apart. I contemplate calling Boris to see what I’ve done, to impress him, but then think better of it. This is not what he needs.
I run back to him and he looks at me, knowing, yet still somewhat hopeful.
“You are much smarter than me, actually,” I say. “I changed my mind. Any good trainer knows that in order to achieve perfection, you have to start from the beginning.”
“Cement?” he says.
“Cement and no bullets. We are gonna dry hump for a bit.”
It’s what practicing shooting a gun without bullets is commonly called, but I also said it to embarrass him, yet he is not embarrassed. He is not looking at me. The boy’s eyes are on the goal, and he sees nothing but
. As I unload his weapon, I notice that he is practicing his swim stroke, his eyes ahead, finding that dent again, making a mental note of it in his mind. He doesn’t even see me or the sand or the hills in this moment, and his focused eyes are fantastic, unreal, not for me.
AT NIGHT, back in the caravan before another eight-hour shift, I call Moshe again. I call him upon waking, from under cover of a military blanket.
“We are back together now,” I say.
“Is it me?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “It’s us again. Aren’t you listening?”
“Good,” he says. “Because I’ve already started looking for an apartment for us. The market these days. It takes years.”
Once, he was fourteen and I was twelve. Once, I was afraid. He was not. Now we both are.
I SPEND two hours out of my next eight-hour shift thinking about Moshe, about how he is a man now, and how that is what nature is, or time, nature and time, and soon my thoughts loop.
Nature and him and him and nature and. On the third hour, I think I see boys running, glowing in red, on top of the hill. Small figures holding large squares. I blink, and they are gone.
When I get back to the caravan, I land my ammunition vest on the floor with a thump, and it wakes Dana.
“Haven’t you noticed?” she asks.
“What?” I say.
“Hagar has been telling everyone the village boys have ripped the ‘closed military area’ signs off the fence.”
“What do they need them for?”
“The officer said they sell the metal. That metal sells for melting. But listen to this—they only took the red ones. Isn’t that weird?”
I cannot help but laugh. These little crawling boys have no qualms. They are not afraid. And now they have begun stealing our base.
“It’s not funny!” Dana says, her whisper louder than a shout.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 4