Person A
I made up the game I play with the people that don’t exist when I was eight and had lice; I used to pretend the people were the dots on the tiles of the bathroom floor. Now I play it with the people I pretend to see between the pixels of the monitor during my entire shift. I don’t even notice the twelve hours pass. When my shift is over, I even miss these people. The game goes like this: I pretend some group of pixels on the monitor is actually a group of people. Sometimes they are in a country. Sometimes they are in space. Other times they are just in a gigantic room. It doesn’t matter. Then I pretend that I am their ruler, and I make a special announcement, that one of them has been found to be very special, the most special person of all. Sometimes that one person is very good at singing, another time that person is the smartest person ever to be born, and one time she is the kindest person in the world. But that person, always a girl, doesn’t know that she is so special. She thinks that she is a nobody. Usually she is just the tiniest pixel, the one at the edge of the screen, and when I tell her what she actually is, let me tell you, she gets so excited she can taste her heart in her mouth. She could never imagine. Then the game starts again with another group of pixels, maybe the pixels below the broken willow tree or the ones at the very bottom. I never get bored of it because I think my memory is so shot by now that soon after one round of the game is over I forget all about the people. I forget real things too, like all the games I played at school with Yael and my favorite shows and the sound of Dan’s voice and my mother’s birthday and who I am. Nadav says that happens to a lot of watch soldiers, that it’s the job. Nadav thinks that I have gone crazy, that I am too calm, complacent. He asked me what I thought about all the Sudanese that jump across the Egyptian-Israeli border, and I said they only distract me from my games with the made-up people, because if they jump through my part of the fence, I have to report it on the radio, and when they get shot, even if they don’t die, that can be very distracting. Nadav was mad at that response, so I thought maybe I sounded anti-Zionist, so I added, “But of course I also think the Egyptians are animals.” Then Nadav said I was naive. He said that we can’t shoot the Sudanese because that would look bad, but we also don’t want them here because then we would have to give them jobs, and they bring diseases, and they lower the Jewish rates. So we let the Egyptians shoot them instead because the Egyptians don’t care if they look bad because the world already thinks they are bad but forgives them because they are Arabs. I couldn’t quite follow his whole explanation, so I looked into the white of his eyes and imagined a room full of made-up people. That’s when he told me I only think about myself. I couldn’t win. But I didn’t care so much then. Now I wish I did. My stomach is cramping as if it is trying to push itself between my legs, and my eyes twitch so much that all the made-up people are gone and all I can see is a fence through a green monitor and that one broken tree, and I still have eight hours left on my shift. The Sudanese man’s body is still skewered there, right at the edge, smudged on the bends of the monitor.
Person B
We walked toward the fence of the Israeli-Egyptian border in a single line and in utter darkness, one hand on another’s shoulder. The guide had left us an hour before and told us to just keep walking straight and pray to God. I didn’t know why I was walking, but I didn’t know what to do if I didn’t walk, so I did. Ahead there was a willow tree; it was broken, but its top half was still green, lying on the ground. The magic thoughts, the no good whispers, got worse with every step. I tried to convince my legs to just reach the tree, and then we’ll see. I could never fly like a bird, so what was the point? Step. Tongue clicks. No good. I could never be a man, so what was the point? Step. Tongue clicks. No good at all. I could never be a child again, so what was the point? Step. Tongue clicks. No good, no point. When I reached the broken tree, I told my legs that now they just needed to reach the fence ahead, to just take a few more steps. But it was too late. The no good whispers reached all the way to my sandals, and they were stuck in the sand. I stopped. The woman behind me and the man in front of me turned to look at me, but all they could see were my eyes, and we had been told to make no noise because of the watch-towers, so they quickly walked away from me. I could never stop the magic, the thoughts, so what was the point, I thought, and that’s when the lights came on from the Egyptian towers, towers we had not seen at all but that were so close I could see the paint peeling through the flashes, the paint peeling and the gunshots and the screams and the fence ahead; we were so close and they were all running, but I stood still until something pushed me from the back, a gunshot, and my head fell and got buried deep in the branches of the broken tree and then the thoughts and the world grew quiet and cold, but only for one small minute.
Person A
We get a ten-minute bathroom break every six hours, and that’s a good thing because I have to change my pad, and it is also good because, right then and there, I also decide to change who I am. And it is not because of what Nadav says. I don’t care what Nadav says, I never have, because no matter what he says he still tells me to show up every night at his tent. It is because now that the pain has made it so that all the people that don’t exist have disappeared from the monitor, I realize that I won’t be able to rely on them forever. That it is time to start caring about someone who is not myself. I only have a few minutes of break left to start caring about someone other than myself, so I concentrate very hard. I close my eyes and I start with the baby. I never considered having it, and the doctor didn’t even ask me. She assumed. They always assume about soldiers. I try to imagine that we do the kinds of things I did when I was a kid, but after five months of green-monitor shifts my memory is so shot I can’t remember anything about being a kid that well, well enough to pretend about, well enough to remember the smell. All I smell now is blood and sweat. All I remember well is the lice. So I try to imagine myself combing my little girl’s hair with a lice comb, but that doesn’t work because when she turns she has no face, just a blank circle in the color of skin. And I think that that’s the opposite of thinking about another person, to give my child a head with no face, so I stop imagining her as she would be and start imagining her as she really is, and I try so so hard to feel bad. I even rub my eyes and try to cry. I imagine the baby like you see in pictures of fetuses on the abortion pamphlets, as small as a fingernail and cute like a curled-up alien; I imagine it swimming all happy inside blood and tissue, until suddenly it is pushed out toward a huge, scary light and it knows it is going to die. But that’s more of an interesting thought experiment than sadness because I know the baby doesn’t really know it is going to die. I switch to thinking about all those Sudanese that get shot by the fence every night, how they come from hell and walk and walk with blisters on their feet only to die, but I only have two minutes of break left and besides, you have to understand, it is hard to feel bad for them because in all truth they look African and different from anyone I ever talked to and there are so, so many of them and they always die, and also my stomach starts feeling a little better and I decide that maybe changing who I am is going to be very hard.
Person B
Tongue click, no good whisper, what is the point of anything if I am never … if I am never all these millions of things? The magic had won. The thoughts were everything; soon there would be no me. My shoulder was warm and wet from the gunshot, I could hear fewer screams of others, and I could see the fence. There was sand in my mouth and I waited for it to be over. I didn’t feel sad; I felt relieved, saved. I bent to the side not because I wanted to breathe but because my body made me. I curled up my legs and hugged the broken branches of the tree with my arms. I put my chin between my hands. A curled-up creature. My shoulder got warmer. Then my other shoulder got warm too, but a different type of warm, warm from the touch of someone who wasn’t me. Warm like forgiveness, warm like a mother.
Person A
The people that don’t exist, I still can’t find them on the green monitor when I c
ome back from the bathroom. The other watch girls are all excited. Gali, who did boot camp with me, tells me the excitement is because once again some Sudanese people tried to jump the fence, but the Egyptians shot almost all of them before the Sudanese even realized they were close. A lot can happen in ten minutes. I close my eyes to wipe the tears with my eyelids before they roll down. I am crying, but only because in this very second a jab cuts through my stomach, a different pain than before, a pain like no other, and I think now the baby is for sure gone. I only close my eyes for a second, and when I open them there still aren’t any people that don’t exist on the screen, there is only that broken tree, but also, next to it, a person on the ground. The person is much larger than the made-up people usually appear to be on the screen; it is as large as the Sudanese people usually appear on the screen. It is the size of a fingernail and cute, curled up like an alien. I can see it breathing on the bed of sand. We get in trouble if we touch the screen because it gets scratched, but I don’t care. I am thinking about someone who isn’t me. I reach and touch the green monitor—it is cold and far and real. I pretend to touch the child I’ll never meet. I pretend I don’t exist. For that while only, it gets to be only her.
Person B
Lying there on the sand by the broken tree, I could see the fence, and I could feel someone touching me. I felt someone’s hand on my shoulder for a very long time. It wasn’t a broken branch. It was a touch. A glassy, forever touch. Mom, I thought. A million times and more times and more. Mom, Mom, Mom. Once, after my father left, she taught me how to make rice. She held my hand; we stirred together. This was all a very long time ago. She held my hand, but I was small, and the rice came out hard. She said it was the water’s fault. She said the water was no good. But that was the night she stopped braiding my hair. She didn’t braid it that night, and not for any night after, or maybe it was that that was the night I stopped asking. We still ate the rice, and then we went to sleep, and then we woke up. That night, when she held my hand and we stirred—that night could have lasted forever but it didn’t. That other night, by the fence, by the broken tree, that night didn’t last forever either. Lying on the sand, I could swear, someone was touching me. But as hard as I tried to hear it, my mother’s voice was fading. The no good whispers grew quiet, then died. That old evil magic, it was now gone. And still. Someone’s hand, I couldn’t see it, but I could still feel it on my shoulder. That touch, it was not my mom. I knew, on the hospital bed in the little country, in all truth I knew it could never have been her who was touching me by that fence. Being touched like that, from such a distance, it was like being the grape I could never be—I could see it, but it couldn’t see me. When I touched the grape, my finger patted the green surface and it was cold and far and real. What happened was that someone was there but then was not, and then I, I got up and I ran to the fence made of little knives and I jumped it. Only me.
A Machine
Automatic
Gun That
Shoots
Grenades
One day, thirteen days before the war, I turned beautiful. It was the best. Don’t let anyone tell you there is anything better that can happen to a woman.
The day started in the farthest shooting range, the one with safety sleeves long enough to play with the ALGL weapon. It was a great morning, a morning that felt like a beach morning; it smelled of sunscreen.
“Yael,” Hagar told me that morning, “today will be an Ok day.”
She had said that to me every morning, though, since we became friends. This was a few months after Dana accused me of stealing her stuff and said the only way she wouldn’t tell would be if I moved into another caravan. Hagar’s caravan was the only one with a spare bed. The girls weren’t happy about me moving in. They ignored me at first, but on that day I had already gotten them to like me. On that day I had friends.
That day with the ALGL, then, was something more than Ok, because by then I had made friends with the girls in my new caravan, my first real army friends. An automatic light grenade launcher by name, the ALGL weighed as much as a second grader, and we lazily dug a hole in the sand up to our knees to stick in its pedestal. The ALGL hadn’t been used by the Israeli army in over ten years, and aside from weaponry instructors like us, only one soldier in each platoon was trained on how to set it up and aim with it. Setting up was complicated; it involved twisting knobs just enough times and lining up parts in certain angles. But once the froglike machine was planted in the sand and the string of grenades was loaded, aiming was easy. You pulled your hardest to the right. You pressed the trigger with both thumbs.
Hagar evaporated an abandoned Subaru in the range with her fifth grenade. In seconds, she shot ten more.
“A machine automatic gun that shoots grenades,” Hagar said, and removed her safety goggles and helmet. “Now, you know that has to be something only a dude could come up with.”
I looked at the Subaru’s remains through the binoculars, a kilometer and a half away. The dust swirled above it, the wheels black splotches. Each grenade had a five-hundred-meter killing radius.
“I think you are supposed to say ‘automatic machine gun,’ ” I said. “It’s the other way around.”
Hagar ignored me. She got up from the sand and took the binoculars. “I can almost hear it, the conversation when they thought it up: ‘Hey, dude, you know what would be way cool? If we had a machine automatic gun—listen to this—that shot grenades!’ ” Hagar lowered her voice and grabbed her crotch. Neta and Amit laughed, but I only smiled.
She wasn’t that good at impressions, and her long blonde hair was blinding when it met the June sun radiating from the dune. She was unmistakably a girl, and besides, it had been her idea to kill time with the ALGL that morning, and she was no dude.
It was me who told the girls I’d pass on a turn with the dumb ALGL. I remembered from basic training what the recoil felt like, how it electrified my chest cavity, and I was happy, so happy, just being with the three girls. The morning was good, and when Hagar smiled back at me, there was a stain of peach lipstick on her teeth, and there was nothing anyone could do but love her.
“Stop thinking dirty thoughts,” she told me.
“I can’t help it,” I said. “I can’t believe I have a whole week coming up with the American.”
Hagar knew Ari the American better than all of us because she had been assigned to train his foot-tracker rookies during their M-16 week three months earlier. On the side, as one of its less important missions, our base held the boot camp of the Bedouin foot trackers. Ari and another guy, Gil, had been pulled from their infantry unit to our base to serve as the foot trackers’ commanders, because the Bedouin foot trackers were retards and they couldn’t command their own boot camps. The next day, I was starting the M-16 week with Ari and his new soldiers. I was looking forward to having something to do. I was looking forward to it because even though I had a boyfriend, ever since I had cheated on him with Boris, there hadn’t been an hour when I didn’t think about doing it with someone else. More specifically, Ari.
DURING THE war, I tried to remember what we used to do all day, but I couldn’t. Each day was its own day. The months before the war were slow. The youth in Hebron had calmed, and two of the boys from Hidna village got such a beating when they were caught after they stole the fence, none of the other boys came back to the base again. Our small base conducted five-day trainings every month for the platoon that took up the rotation around Hebron and along Route 433. We refreshed their sharpshooters, and the rest of the month we didn’t have to guard, because the platoons had enough people they could spare a few to guard the base. It was a great place for a teenager to be stationed back then. Most days were any girl’s call; for Neta, Amit, and me they were usually Hagar’s call. Some days, she would feel like shooting some weapon we had learned about in training (“I have this feeling,” she’d say, “I think it’s nostalgia”), and the weapons warehouse officer would let us take the weapon because technically it w
as the weaponry instructors’ responsibility to make sure all of the wartime machines worked. We never played with the same weapon twice, because afterward we were always too lazy to take the weapon apart and rub the tar inside with a cloth soaked in gasoline, so that the weapon wouldn’t rust and would work a second time.
AROUND TEN that morning, we called the van driver on the radio to take us back from the range. The four of us occupied the backseat. Neta and I had strawberry lollipops in our mouths, and my fingers were sticky. Neta’s ponytail was bobbing; Amit had her head in Neta’s lap, and she put her sandy boots over my legs. On my right, Hagar was doing something to my hair. Her long fingernails felt good when they scratched my scalp; their smell of nicotine mixed with her cucumber perfume relaxed me.
“So then I asked him what he liked about me, why he wanted to be my boyfriend, and you know what he said?” Dana asked Tamara. They were talking about Dana’s twenty-seven-year-old boyfriend. The two of them were yapping away in the two-seater in front of us. The van had picked them up at the gasoline fountain next to the weapons warehouse, where they had just finished cleaning their own personal M-4 guns. They cleaned them there every week. Like they anticipated being shipped to Iran or some shit. Any day now.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 9