And also, I know I remember Fadi because even though my sleep has been a blessing since the day of Yaniv’s neck, lately, somehow, I have had a night, maybe two, when I had to watch TV until I fell asleep. I needed the colors radiating from the box into my eyes for them to shut.
THAT NIGHT. That night, I could hear the chatter of the Ethiopian and Moroccan girls on the pergola outside the caravans.
I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I took my gun and put it under the handle of the door so that no one could enter it, though I knew the girls were all smoking, that they would smoke for hours, and that I would be left alone.
I took off my boots and then peeled off my socks. They were white, and I remember being most horrified when I realized that I had been wearing white socks that whole day, because we were only allowed to wear dark socks when we were at the checkpoints. And even though I was a military police soldier in the transitions unit, I was still a military police soldier, representing the blue beret and all.
Those white socks. I remember that this was the thing that had horrified me that night.
My belt, green pants, green shirt, green undershirt, bra, the underwear I had flipped inside out because I had run out of clean ones. I took it all off and I looked at myself naked in that stained mirror. The breasts that were too big, the new lines that had formed at the edges of my mouth.
I saw that I was a soldier then, and I looked and looked and looked, and I was not afraid. It was a few weeks before I turned nineteen. It was the night before I filled out the forms volunteering to go to officers’ school. I saw that I was a soldier then and knew that I would be an officer, and I was not afraid.
I never showered that night. I thought of Nur; I thought that she must have showered and that she was already working on getting Fadi out of the Israeli jail, and that she was a strong woman, and then I remembered that I had created her, had invented her, and that I was a soldier and she was not real.
That night. That night I could hear the chatter of the Ethiopian and Moroccan girls on the pergola outside the caravans.
When I was in bed, unwashed, I heard them say that Yaniv’s neck was cut almost in two by the knife the Palestinian in the car used to kill him, and I would have thought of Yaniv’s face, his pointed, furry eyebrows. And I would have wondered what the girls meant by “almost in two,” but I fell asleep before I could. I fell asleep without thinking of any single thing. It was easy. Anything is possible when you insist.
People
That
Don’t
Exist
Person A
The Sudanese’s body is still skewered on the barbed-wire fence. Nadav says the Egyptian soldiers and we, the Israeli soldiers, are like two children on a dock, waiting for the other kid to plunge in and claim the body. One arm of the Sudanese man reaches in a stroke over his head, and his tongue dangles. He looks like a frozen swimmer. Nadav says I am a special girl. He says, “Avishag, the only person you think about is yourself.” It was not my shift when the Egyptians shot the man. When it is my shift, I stare at the fence through the green monitor for twelve hours and think about people that don’t exist. We know each other well, the made-up people and I. But Nadav says that is the opposite of thinking about another person. We drive in the Humvee along the fence because Nadav is an officer and he has to check on the older girls, the ones at the guarding towers and checkpoints. The base’s gatekeeper asks for my soldier pass and I show her I have signed off a vacation day. It was a little hard to do, because the base never has enough new girls, girls who have to be watch girls for four months after they finish boot camp and do nothing but stare at monitors. Before we reach the bus station, I ask if it is bad I only think about myself. Nadav has forgotten he told me that once. He says everyone is sold on the idea that if this person or that person is different than they are, then they are not who they are, and that I am the only person in the world who is not sold on that idea because I only think about myself. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if that means bad or good. I want a burger. Two.
Person B
After it is all over, after I am safe, I open my eyes and everyone can see that I am alive. I am the only girl in a hospital room full of injured men who are also from my country. They are silent but I scream, because I can, because I want water. The doctor woman from the little country comes over and asks a question in the language of the little country and the translator translates. The doctor wants to know how I escaped Sudan. She wants to know what I was thinking. She gives me some water in a cup. She means, the translator explains, what was I thinking of when I threw my body on the fence that was made from little knives. I didn’t think, I want to tell the doctor. It was not my decision. I felt her. She was there. Mom. Mom. Mom. A million times and again and another time and more. She was a giant and a young girl and a grape and the wind all at once. She was there and then she was not. The guide who took us out of Egypt said, in Israel, in the little country, they don’t believe in magic. They believe in people. In the little country, believe what they believe, do as they do.
Person A
At the bus station, Nadav gets himself two burgers but says I should only get one. He says I never finish two burgers. I say that’s not true, but it is. I say this time I’ll finish. I joke. I ask, “What if I am eating for two?” He lifts his eyebrows and surprises me. He says, “Avishag, let’s keep it. Let’s raise it on a pepper farm in the Negev desert and be happy.” He is finishing his service in a year anyway. It is going to be awesome. It is awesome. It is the solution, to anything and everything. Nadav gets to say a lot of things to me, and I let him, because he is my first boyfriend, or because he is an officer. But then I laugh and I say I was joking, as if I would ever tell him such a thing in line at McDonald’s. I say I am eating only for myself but I still want two burgers. And fries. I am eating only for myself, but it is true that I am pregnant. I don’t tell him because I can’t really feel it. My body still feels like it’s just me. Even my body betrays me nowadays, and I betray it. The point is that it is just me in the world. I get hungry, sick, hungrier, sicker. And I don’t talk too much anyway. I haven’t tried doing something that stupid since boot camp. I still have half a burger left, and Nadav says I should man up. He is not leaving until I finish. I tear what’s left of the burger in two and I stuff one piece down my throat. The pickle gets jammed sliding down and the ketchupy acid flows up, then the meat. After I puke on the floor of the bus station’s McDonald’s, Nadav says that’s the perfect example of how I think only about myself. I want to tell him he is right, but I have to catch the 72 bus.
Person B
You’d want to think I don’t exist, but I do. This happened. This is what happened. He drove a three-wheeled bike with a carry-on like a cub, and that’s how he made money in the camps. He was my mother’s husband but not my father, and in months he had made enough money for the three of us to pay for the guide to take us first to Egypt, and from there to the little country. We were not allowed to say “Israel,” but people called it the little country. Everyone everywhere in Sudan whispered about it, about how to get to the little country, how that was the solution. When they came and started killing people at the camp, my mother’s husband hid me under a blanket in his bike’s carry-on and no one touched me and no one hurt me and I was safe, but only in a way and only for a while. The three of us were safe, and we all survived the first day. That was a problem. The guide said he was leaving the next morning and he wanted more money per head, so much money, if he was going to take anyone at all. That’s when I knew I would have to kill him. My mother’s husband. And from that it was very easy to know that I would have to kill her too. Everyone at the camp was saving to go to the little country, and now everyone needed more money and in every tent sons were killing their parents for money and fathers were killing their children and wives—depending on who was stronger. But they, my mother and her husband, went to sleep. They loved each other. They loved me. They went to
sleep but really they were waiting to die, because once the people hit a camp, they don’t leave, they come back the next morning and the next, and morning always comes, that is just a fact, until soon the last person in the camp is no more and so it ends in days. The story ends in days. I wanted the money we already had, but they said no, that they are going to hope and hope, and the money was barely enough for one person and if we go, we all go. There is hope; they thought there is always hope. They believed in magic. They didn’t fear me because I was not a son. I was a daughter, and short, very short. That’s why I had to use fire and not a rock; that’s why I had to be fast, and I was. I got the money; it worked. Soon I started believing in magic, too.
Person A
The 72 bus driver stops next to an ice cream store just because he can, and he buys his daughter ice cream—peach sorbet, actually—and all the passengers have to wait. A high school boy who sits behind him yells that that is no way to behave, and the bus driver says he can suck his cock, even though his daughter is right there and she is little and that is so wrong to do. I want to say something too because I am worried about being late for my doctor’s appointment, but I don’t say anything because if I were a bus driver I would totally stop for ice cream whenever I wanted, except I would buy apple sorbet and I wouldn’t stop because my kid wanted ice cream, I would stop because I wanted ice cream, sorbet, actually. So I understand the bus driver’s heart. Maybe that counts as thinking about another person, and I want to tell Nadav about this but I can’t, of course, because he is already back at the base, because I am alone. At the clinic the doctor says I have two options, and I am excited because my favorite thing in life is when I get to make a choice, and I didn’t think I had any choice in the matter; I thought it was just this thing I had to do, like all of regular life, like the army. The doctor says they can suck it out and scrape what’s left, or I can take two pills, and then the fetus would just fall away on its own. I am conflicted. If they suck it out, they’ll do it right away, and I am kind of bored and anxious to know what that would feel like, if I would feel any different or even sad, which is something I haven’t felt in a very long time. But if I take the pill I could just leave right away and go back to the base and then maybe my officer would let me sign only half a vacation day off and then I’d get to save that half day, because the watch girls’ officer is very nice; he is friends with Nadav. Also, it could be interesting to just do my shift and smoke a cigarette in the watch room while a tiny tiny baby is falling out and no one knows it but me. I didn’t even know that pill thing existed! The wonders of science. I like it that both options are interesting. It makes the whole decision thing that much more special. But in the end I decide on the pills just because I miss them. I miss the made-up people on the green monitor.
Person B
The magic that happened after I left the camp was a very unusual magic; it was brought upon me by my mother, and it was not the magic you’d expect. You may think by what I will tell you that I was very lucky, but I was not. Some people had to walk out of Darfur into Khartoum, but my group only walked for a few hours, and then our guide transferred us to the truck of a Bedouin. One of the other women had to sit in the front of the truck and pretend to be the Bedouin’s wife, and the rest of us sat at the back between wooden boxes of potatoes and flour. As I watched the Bedouin take the woman’s hand and help her climb to the front of the truck, that’s when I heard it first, inside the holes of my ears, the two disapproving clicks of someone’s tongue, and it sounded like my mother, I think. No good, this is no good, I heard a whisper thumping at the front of my forehead. The woman who climbed to the front looked about eighteen, my age. Her skin was unusually fair, almost like that of the Indian work immigrants. I then realized that no matter what happens, if I live or die, even if I become a queen, my skin will never be as fair as that woman’s. I will never be that beautiful. This broke my heart; it broke it very much. Everything was in vain. I had never thought about anything even remotely resembling that type of concern before, but now it was all that I could think of, my skin. For all the hours and days as the wheels rolled through the sands, I cried so much the others offered me their rations of bread and dry beef. They could not imagine what I had seen that could possibly make me sadder than they were, because they had seen the worst, and this softened the hearts of even the sons who had broken their fathers’ skulls with rocks. Still, I cried because the movement of the wheels offended me. I kept on thinking that it did not matter if or where we’d arrive. My mom and her husband would still be dead, and it would be me who had killed them. Worse than that, I would still be me, and I had nothing anywhere, and I would be nothing anywhere. When we arrived in Egypt, our guide was terrified because they had just busted two trucks bringing in illegals and they didn’t just kill the illegals; they killed the Bedouin guides too. But we were let in without an incident. That’s when it all turned darker, then even more dark.
Person A
Four hours after I take the second pill, I think I am going to die, but I know I won’t. My stomach hurts from the outside, like a drummer is hitting it with bare hands. I crumple forward but I crank up my neck, because I know they’ll yell if I take my eyes off the monitor. In the eighteen years I have been alive, there were times I thought I’d die but then I lived and I lived and I lived. When I was first stationed here two months ago and had my first shift in front of the green screen, I made it till the fourth hour, but then I thought I’d for sure die. All around me there were girls staring at their strip of the fence and I could not understand how they did it for twelve hours, and then again, and then another time, and more. I kept on thinking this was my life for the next four months, until I was allowed to do checkpoints and guard towers, until I was “broken into the unit” as Nadav called it, and I couldn’t even figure out how to make it till the next hour. The green pixels swam inside each other. I’d gone cross-eyed. I counted till a thousand in my head, and again and again. Then I decided to die, or at least shoot my foot after the shift so that they’d have to release me from the army. I thought about which foot I should shoot, the right or the left, and that was sort of fun and helped me pass time, and just as I smiled, that’s when I saw them. Between the pixels, static white streaks formed the shapes of people, hundreds of miniature people, my people, the people that don’t exist. This was not the first time I had seen those people, but I hadn’t seen them since six years before, when I was twelve, the last time I had lice. The first time I had lice I was eight, and I thought I would die but I didn’t. I scratched my head with a pencil really hard into my scalp, and when I took the pencil out there was lice with blood on it. I didn’t think that would kill me. Still, I told my mom, and then with a brush she smeared gasoline all over my hair and made me watch TV with a handkerchief on my head. The lice were escaping my head like from a gas chamber. I could feel them flicking away and see them crawling all over my neck, a stream of tiny legs and round bodies. I didn’t think that would kill me either. It was super cool. But then my mom said we had to get the eggs out too. I had to stand in the shower for hours while she passed a lice comb through my hair. She would also talk to me, and I hated that the most because at the time she was very busy with having three children, teaching high schoolers history, and having no husband, so she figured she would use the time effectively to lecture me about how I never put the dishes in the sink, how I always left my backpack by the front door, how I brought mud into the house, and how all of those things were killing her and that her only hope was that I would grow up to have a daughter who was just like myself, so that I’d finally understand what a shit I was. I wouldn’t have thought any of that would kill me except I hate swear words, I hate them now and I hated them then when I was little, and they made me feel lumps in my throat whenever she would use them, and she used them a lot when she took out the lice eggs. It took her four years to get rid of the lice once and for all, and at the beginning every single time, I had to stand in the bathroom and I thought I was go
ing to die every time she cursed—until I invented them, the people that don’t exist. They were made of the brown dots on the white tiles of the bathroom floor.
Person B
I grew up hearing stories about people who were abandoned or raped by their guides and left to die midway, but in Egypt the twenty people in my group were invited to stay for a few days with the Bedouin’s real wife on a vineyard. The wife was very wrinkled but could read and did read from her Quran every night, and I couldn’t read, and then came the thought that I’d never learn how to read, and I thought that even if I did learn how to read I would never be very good at it and I had already missed out on eighteen years, so what was the point? Again I could hear my mother’s disappointed tongue clicks, the no good, it is no good whispers. I had never thought thoughts even similar to that in my whole life; these thoughts were in my head but they were not my own. I realized they were magic, and that magic can exist, and that it is evil. The magic just got stronger and stronger. The Bedouin and his wife were very kind to us and most of all to me; they smiled like children in the morning, and the wife even took me on a walk in the vineyard, and then came the thought that I would never be this kind, not to strangers and not to anyone in the world, that my heart was dark like coal, like a witch’s, and wasn’t that a shame and wasn’t there nothing in the world that could make that better? We walked along the vineyard, and for a second, for the first time since I left the camp, everything was a little good, everything was real and without magic. I’d never seen grapes before. I leaned in between the green leaves and stared at one, just one grape. It was perfectly round and green and so peaceful I grew jealous of it. Its skin was smooth and it glowed in the sun so that you could see lines lengthen within, lines of mystery and flesh and dignity. I touched it, gently. And then came the tongue clicks again. The no good whisper. That’s when I knew I was done for, when that thought came; that no matter what happens, no matter what I’d do, it would all be in vain—I could never, ever, even in a million years, become a grape.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 8