“It is sort of funny,” I say. “I mean, I bet the boys stole only the red ones to be funny.”
Dana doesn’t get it. Her boyfriend is twenty-seven. They met when she was a senior in high school. She never knew him like I know Moshe; she never knew him as a boy. She is rubbing vanilla oil behind her ear, on her wrists and neck. This is because her boyfriend likes vanilla. He told her that once. She rubs it on her skin twice a day, even though he is so far away and cannot smell her.
She asks, “Why would they care about being funny?” but I don’t even try to explain. I take off my military boots and climb onto the field bed with my uniform on, so I have more time to sleep before I wake up to train Boris. How could I explain to her that boys don’t care about being funny, that they just are?
I don’t explain it to her. Instead I wake up when she is still asleep and take the little glass bottle of vanilla oil and put it for safekeeping in the pocket of my pants.
BORIS HOPES we’ll start the training with actual bullets this time, but after we set up, I take his weapon from him without a word and unload it. He lies down on the cement, and I hover about him, correcting his body.
I make sure that his left hand is at a ninety-degree angle and that his palm lets the gun rest on it without strain.
“We are working with bone here,” I say. “If you work your muscles, they’ll shake.”
As I adjust the angle of his hand, I can feel his pulse and smell industrial soap.
“Don’t break your wrist!” I shout, straightening his right hand, the one holding the handle. “We talked about this yesterday.”
I kick his legs, hard, so that his left leg continues the exact line of the barrel and his right leg is spread apart, making a forty-five-degree angle. His butt clamps with every kick.
When I lean down and show him how to splatter his cheek on the buttstock, starting up then down until he is on target, I feel the softness of him, his pores with no hair.
I place a coin on the edge of his barrel and lie down right in front of it, holding my head up with my hands.
I tell him to look at me. “Aim for my eye,” I say.
He slowly clicks the safety, then presses the trigger.
The coin falls, hitting the cement with a tiny rattle.
“Again,” I say. “We’ll do this until you are stable.”
I place the coin back on the edge of the barrel. I lie back down. He closes his left eye. His right eye looks into mine through gunpoint, circular and intending and blue. He presses the trigger.
The coin falls.
“Again,” I say.
“Again,” I say.
“Again.”
I am going to do this all day. I’ll do it until it’s time for my shift. I’ll do it even longer. The hell with the shift, the hell with everything, again, again, again, and then—
He presses the trigger and the coin stays on the barrel. The only part of him that moves is his left eyelid. Our eyes are staring right at each other, and we are silent.
“Again,” he says, barely moving his chapped lips.
The coin falls, then stays, then falls, then stays, then stays, then stays.
I keep my eyes on his the whole time, but as soon as I let them wander I notice that his left elbow is wet, bleeding into his shirt from holding the gun for so long.
“You are ready to shoot,” I say.
I put five bullets in his magazine. We shoot from the flat cement.
Three out of five! I swear! Two in the legs, but still, I swear! I run back to the cement after checking his target and load five more bullets in his magazine. “How did I do?” he asks.
“Again,” I say, as calmly as I can, but I can almost feel the joy buzzing from my cheeks and into his blue eyes.
Boomboomboom.
“Stop!”
Boom.
“Stop!” I kick him.
Four boys have crawled onto the range, under Boris’s fire. They are dark and small and elastic, moving faster and faster on the ground like lizards, collecting empty bullet shells in their plastic bags—fast, lit, their movements as exact as acrobats.
“What is that?” Boris asks, still lying on the ground.
“Boys,” I say. “They are stealing our bullet shells. I mean, actually stealing bullet shells.” Bullet shells are not even real metal. Even in Israel, they could probably only sell them for five shekels a kilo. I can’t even imagine. It’s brilliant. It is hysterical.
I know I should not smile, but I do, and with the smile I blink, and when I open my eyes again the boys are gone.
“Palestinian boys?” Boris asks. “How could we just let them go?”
“They are just boys,” I say. “They steal things from our base all the time.”
Boris gets up from the cement, and for a second we are standing very close. I smell the copper of his blood and his unwashed scalp.
“Tomorrow I’ll teach you more things,” I say. “Secrets, tricks.”
Boris straightens his back and nods, like a gentleman, holding himself as tall as he can, the muscles of his neck shaking, loose.
AT NIGHT, back in the caravan, before another eight-hour shift, I call Moshe.
“We are broken up,” I say.
“Now, I know it isn’t me this time,” he says.
“No,” I say. “It is you. Aren’t you listening?”
“Good,” he says. “If it’s me, then that’s good. I never worry about me. I worry about you.”
He is the only boy I ever kissed. Moshe. I have been kissing him since he was a very young boy, and I was even younger.
BORIS AND I move ahead to shooting from sand and rocks, an unsteady surface. Before we start, I tell him to give me his hand. Mine is more coarse. Though I am his height, my hand looks in his a lifetime smaller. I take his right index finger and explain.
“The lowest third of your finger is called the ‘Indifferent.’ It is not perceptive enough to accurately push the trigger. The top part of your finger is called the ‘Sensitive.’ It is too vulnerable to remain steady when you press the trigger.” My breath releases fumes into the cold air. My nose drips a tiny drop into our hands, and when I look up Boris’s white smile hits my eyes.
I look down again. “And this part,” I say and pinch the middle part of his finger, “this part is called the ‘Hammer,’ and this is the part you should press the trigger with. This part is perfect.”
“I never knew there was a part of me that’s perfect,” Boris says. His eyes are beaming at my words, just like Dan’s did once when I was very young, when we both stood by a bench in Jerusalem Street. His hand moves in mine, and I cannot tell if it is the cold or intention. I hesitate.
“Well,” I say. “Now you know.”
We stand silent for a minute, until at once we both pull away. The hills of Hebron loom above us like monsters and the sky feels larger, further away when I look up at it, as if we are at the very bottom of an ocean.
“Hey Boris,” I say. “Have you heard what they are doing behind the new mall in Jerusalem?”
“What are they doing?”
“Your mom,” and with that I kick his leg, making him fall to the ground, hearing him laugh before he even hits it. A glorious laughter, deep and uncontrollable.
He shoots and hits two out of five. I run back from marking his target, and without a word I take the magazine out of his weapon and make sure it is unloaded.
“Get up,” I shout. “Take your earplugs out.”
I am sure the two bullets he hit are his first two. After that, he kept on moving out of position.
I point the gun in the sky and bring it close to Boris’s ear. There are small yellow dots of dirt in his inner ear, and this makes me love him. Love him more.
I press the trigger, and then I don’t let it go. One second, two seconds, three.
Clank.
“After each bullet you shoot, I want you to count to three. I want you to be able to hear this sound each time, the sound of a new bullet press
ing into the chamber.”
“What does it matter what I do after I already shot the bullet?” Boris asks.
It matters for tricking his brain. If he knows he has to wait after each bullet, he is less likely to jump the trigger and bend out of form. I don’t tell him that, though. By now I know people only need to know what they need to know to do well.
“It matters because I said so, and you should do as you are told.”
This time, he hits four out of five, three to the heart and one at the edge of the head.
DURING MY guarding shift, it starts as an idea, then it is a thought, soon a feeling, and then it is so real I can almost see it in front of my eyes, except I cannot; something is terribly off. Missing.
I reach the top of the hill overlooking the ammunition bunker, light my flashlight, and stare at the entire base below. Crickets bay away and close. I blink, then open my eyes.
It is the most ludicrous, charming thing I have ever seen.
The fence around the base, by the ammunition bunker; it is gone. Not there anymore. Vanished.
Those boys. Those devil boys. They have stolen it.
The metal buyer of their village could be melting it in these very moments.
This shift, like all others, is eight hours long, but the seconds and minutes and hours glide by like a child on a slide. I don’t think of my boyfriend, or nature, or time, or boys even. All I can do is think:
The fence.
The fence.
They took. The fence.
Every few minutes, without planning, I find myself saying it out loud, and then, my laughter echoes, across mountains I cannot see in the dark.
AT NIGHT, back in the caravan, after eight hours of laughter alone and staring, I call Moshe. I call him from under the cover of a military blanket.
“You can’t keep doing only the things I tell you to do,” I say.
“But you told me to,” he says. “I thought this was what you wanted.”
“Yes,” I say. “Exactly.”
“I don’t know what you want anymore,” he says. “How come we only speak in code?”
Once, he was fourteen and I was twelve. Once, I was afraid. He was not. He climbed right up to the top of the German widow’s apple tree and threw a shower of red apples on my head so fast and steady I thought I’d drown. All I could see between my winces was his crooked teeth between the highest branches, and all I could hear was him shouting: “Here’s more, more, more, more, more.”
“I don’t want anymore!” I shouted from the ground.
“But this is fun!” he shouted back, and for a second I could catch his eyes as he reached for another apple; for a second I saw in them wanting, really wanting, nothing but that very thing.
“I am waiting for you to tell me what you want,” I say now. “There is no code.”
“Does this mean we are back together again?” he asks.
“What do you think?” I ask back, and I wait for a voice I still can’t believe is long gone.
I SIT on top of Boris’s back as I explain to him what Situation Zero is.
“Breathe in,” I say, and I can feel his lungs swelling below me. “Now empty your lungs completely.”
I explain about the things we can know for certain and the things we cannot. I explain that when you breathe, there is no way for you to know how much air is in your lungs. The only thing we can re-create is the situation in which our lungs are completely empty. In order for all of your bullets to hit at exactly the same spot, you must close your eyes before each shot and empty your lungs completely. This is how you know you are on target, right back where you were with the earlier bullet. Situation Zero.
His lungs rise up, then down, then up as I explain.
“I didn’t say that you could breathe again, young lady,” I say.
He stops, and even without looking I can tell that his mouthful of teeth is showing, that he is smiling.
“Do I look like a blender?” I ask.
“No,” he says.
“Then why are you mixing things up?”
After we laugh, he shoots.
Two out of five, three out of five, three out of five, five out of five.
He doesn’t lose his focus. Every time I run back from checking his hits with a marker, he gets back into position.
We don’t even say, “Again.”
He shoots as I sit by his side until our hair reeks of gunpowder, until our ears ring into our earplugs, until night begins to fall.
Soon his hits become consistent. A constellation of five stars around the heart.
As we walk back, passing one shooting range after another, I ask him what I’ve been wondering about.
“Boris, how the hell did you manage to pass boot camp without learning how to shoot?”
He stops walking, looks at me, and shrugs his wide shoulders.
I put a hand on his shoulder, from a distance. “Well, I am proud of you.”
He is only a step away. I could step closer with ease and kiss him, but I don’t.
He kisses me, then steps back and raises his arms, questioning.
I look at his eyes. His eyes to me are apples, just apples then. I think and smell apples, and I do not think of Moshe; I just hear his shouts. “More, more, more, more, more.”
And then Boris. I see in his eyes wanting, wanting, nothing but that very thing.
Me.
Before I take off my uniform, I take out the glass bottle of vanilla oil I took from Dana and carefully rest it on the sand so that it does not break.
We don’t go inside one of the ranges to do it. We are naked on the sand. Boris’s movements are lumbering and hesitant and young and unknowing.
And he is not afraid.
Our bodies impress and dig and confuse the sand so much that when it is all over, I cannot find the glass bottle of vanilla oil. The truth is I spend little time searching.
After we have our uniforms arranged on our bodies again, I look at him, framing him with the sand behind him. This is how I want to remember him. Young, wide shouldered, victorious, very close and still a little far.
I put a hand on his shoulder, just as I did before.
Then he runs away, away under the roof of a shooting range near us. I can feel his shoulder slipping from under my hand, and for a while I leave it there, suspended in air.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
The boys, I think. The boys. Boris has shot them.
And my breath halts at the entrance of the throat.
Then I run. I can run too.
“They are just kids,” I shout at Boris as I kick him, then jump above him lying on the cement.
“When you see people without uniform in a base, you shoot them,” he says. “It is protocol, no?”
His voice grows quieter as my steps widen ahead.
You don’t shoot boys. Hasn’t anyone taught him that? Was I supposed to teach him that?
The insides of my stomach tighten, and my chest hurts from jumping up and down with my unsteady scurry. I reach the foot of a hill and I stop, and I hear it. A suffocated laughter, just below my feet. The mousy sound of a tiny human. I press a button on my watch, and little rings of neon from my watch scatter on the sand.
Inside a dent in the earth, I notice, through the corner of my eye, the most beautiful boy I have ever seen. He is folded into himself, like a surprise ready to burst.
I notice details about him while I pretend I don’t see him.
“Is there anyone here?” I shout into the air, and I notice.
I notice that his skin is dark, that his hair is jumbled, that his arms are longer than they should be. I notice that he is only a few years younger than me, below my feet, yet further away than anything I have ever before wanted. Boys when at their best are easy as life. They want what they want, and then they walk up and get it, their step balanced, self-assured, lovely, all the same.
I stand there, stretching my arms out as if
they are searching, and the boy believes the impossibility that I have yet to spot him. He doesn’t move; he is waiting for me to leave. He does not know I am there, watching him, pleased, my expectations all at once fulfilled.
The boy’s elbows are poking the bushes of the prickly burnet. When I look above, the mountains blend with the sky behind us, as if eating or marrying each other. It could have been me who gave Boris the strength to kill the boy. My body still carries the smell of Boris, and the short minutes in which we confused the sand below us still hover above me as though they have yet to fade. But Boris could not kill the boy, he did not kill the boy, and now the boy is a surprise, my silent surprise inside a dent in the earth. If only I could, I would stare right at him forever, but I only get a fraction of a second to notice, and only out of the corner of my eye.
I blink.
When I open my eyes the boy is gone. I can hear his maddening laughter echoing across the mountains; I got you, I got you, I did, I imagine the echoes of his chuckles chanting. I take as much air as I can into my lungs, and then I smell it, a lingering smell of something that was just there but then was taken. Vanilla.
He took my glass bottle. That boy. I imagine his awe—What is this good for? he will ask his mom as she is chopping onions, onions he stole for her, on the kitchen counter. And he will hold the bottle open and stand and smell and think for a minute, until he knows in his eyes the only use in this world for the smell of vanilla inside a bottle. It is only he who will know, that boy. Not me. He took my glass bottle. He did! Before I laugh, I wait, hoping to catch the brief noises of his body brushing up against the leaves, the sound of bullet shells jangling in his plastic bag.
Checkpoint
I said no. That I was tired. Yaniv asked if I wanted to check cars instead of people, but I said no. He said he was sick of bending over. He said, “Lea, if you had a good woman’s heart, you would say yes and take mercy on me because I have a bad back and problems at home,” but I said no. No and that he was not supposed to be bending over and sticking his head in car windows anyway because that was against the rules. Then he called me a Russian whore, even though I am half Moroccan, half German.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 5