We picked Ari and Gil up near a large metal container the size of a classroom. It was an emergency storage container. The word “greens” was graffitied on its front. The rumor was that it was only half full of green bullets, that there was some room inside of it, and that Gil once snuck his girlfriend to the base and got with her inside that container.
I couldn’t see Hagar’s face, because she was still working on my hair, but I knew she was rolling her eyes at Dana. There were only sixteen females in our training base, all of us infantry weaponry instructors. The caravan in the female residency lot had four rooms, so each four-person clique got its own. But Hagar hated it that we still had to listen to the others on the van rides.
“He said he liked me because I was normal! What does that even mean?” Dana asked.
Dana and Tamara lived in my old room, room 2, the room Hagar called the “family: the future” room, because all the girls in it could talk about was their boyfriends and their future families. Room 4 was called the “family: the past” room, because the girls who lived in it chatted only about their parents and siblings. Room 1 was “the dead” room, because they talked about the dead, even though there had been no action since we were drafted. These were dead they knew from, like, high school, but they still talked about them.
This was the way the army worked. We were all killing time, and at the end of the day every person liked to talk about just one thing. For my new room, it was sex.
“He explained that before he met me, all the girls he knew from Haifa were weird, so I guess that’s a compliment, but still! I mean you tell me, Tamara—isn’t it shocking that ‘normal’ would be the adjective he would choose? I mean, is this why he loves me?” Dana went on.
In life, Hagar said, only three things made her happy: the smell of gas stations, Marlboro Lights, and sex, and her only regret was that she could never delight in all three at the same time because gasoline was flammable.
She finished with my hair, and she tied it quick and tight. Then she pulled on Dana’s ponytail, and when Dana turned, Hagar asked with a voice loud enough so that Ari and Gil in the front of the van could hear, “Hey, Dana, how good are your blowjobs?”
Dana’s face turned red. Neta was moving the lollipop in her mouth in and out. She wasn’t the brightest lightbulb, but she was my friend, and I joined her, and it was so summer, and we made Amit laugh.
“Hey, I’m just trying to help,” Hagar said. “I just wanted to save you time and let you know that that’s why he loves you—you must give pretty good head.”
That was when he turned. Ari. “Hey, play nice,” he said.
His eyes were green, just like those of Dan, a boy I loved when I was a mousy middle schooler. But now Ari looked at me like I was anything but mousy.
I swear he did!
I looked down.
This is what he said next: “Hey, you are beautiful.”
And I didn’t see, but Hagar, Amit, and Neta swore he was still looking at me.
BACK IN our caravan, my face was burning. It was noon. I was sure one of the girls had put him up to it.
Hagar, Amit, and Neta didn’t speak to me at all the first two weeks after I was placed in their room. I used to think that Lea knew how to control a flock of girls like no other, but that was before I met Hagar. During those first two weeks, the number of guys they each mentioned sleeping with was double-digit, while I had had a boyfriend for seven years and only cheated on him once, with a short Russian soldier. They hated the idea of me, or anyone, having a boyfriend. But I hated Moshe, the real boyfriend I had.
When I started hating him, it was not his fault. It was my first Passover at his house. I was sixteen. I was passionate. Ok, I was passionate. I was passionate about work immigrants, Ok, about immigration rights and all. I was young. I was talking very fast. It was past midnight. We had finished eating, said our last prayers. The white tablecloth was stained red, yellow. Empty wine bottles, dirty napkins, toothpicks, chicken bones. His cousin was twelve. She had a lisp. She was listening to me. “I can’t believe this is how we treat the people who build our homes!” she said. She really didn’t know how our country treated work immigrants, and she wanted to know more. I talked faster. I talked more. I was sixteen. I don’t even know if it was how much I spoke or the simple way I looked. I wasn’t a pretty girl, and I knew it.
I remember the weight of his father’s fingers on my shoulders. The parch of the wine as he opened his mouth. He caught me midsentence. “Let me tell you, son, I just hope for you that she’s at least a good lay.”
They pretended not to hear. He was drunk; it is what you do. I didn’t blame my boyfriend. I hated him. I wasn’t trying to prove his father wrong. It was how it happened. When we slept together, I did quadratic equations in my head.
During our last time in bed before the war, I asked him, “How come your mom always puts tahini in her eggplant salad?” He kept at it. There was a sticker I had peeled off an orange on his ceiling’s fan. I had put it there on my break the month before so I would have something to look for when I came back.
“I hate tahini,” I said. “Eggplants are so much better with mayo.”
“What?” he said. He was breathing fast. It was a Friday night. We had just finished the Sabbath dinner. Eggplants were my favorite vegetable. His mom knew that. I hated tahini. She knew that too. He was too heavy on top of me, the room too hot; I grew angry fast.
“She is cheap, that’s why,” I said. “She knows tahini will last longer than mayo.”
“Shh,” he said. “Someone could hear us.”
Hear us talking about eggplants? I went back to tracking the orange’s sticker, around and around and—
And when Hagar finally addressed me, late, in the dark, when the four of us were on our field beds, answering her question was too easy.
“Of course I think about sleeping with guys who aren’t my boyfriend. I even did it once with a soldier I trained. And I think about Ari the American. All the time. I am thinking about him right now.”
Answering the rest of the girls’ questions wasn’t any harder.
“Of course Ari and I would do it outside!”
“I think, just from his height, it has to be at least that big.”
Soon the three girls were the nightly audience for my fantasies. I had friends. Finally. Hours and hours went by, and I never ran out of things to say. Hagar always asked for more about Ari. Dirtier, larger, in colors. Like the movies. Like America. I didn’t know where Ari was from, but he had that accent people referred to as Anglo-Saxon.
THE GIRLS swore they didn’t tell Ari to say I was beautiful in the van. So I said the only other option was that he was trying to kiss up to me, so I wouldn’t work him hard the next day during his Bedouin soldiers’ M-16 week. “Have you thought about the other other option?” Hagar asked, and she handed me her hand mirror. “You look hot,” she said.
On the van, Hagar had braided my hair in two braids and wrapped them around my head so that the skin around my eyes was tighter. My nose looked long but noble, my cheeks were sunken inside, my eyes glistened. It must have been more than the hair—I had lost weight since I joined room 3, the sex room, because all the girls did was smoke and drink Diet Coke. My yearslong acne had cleared up, but it was only that day, through Hagar’s mirror, that I noticed it. In the mornings, Hagar would sometimes get bored and wake me by plucking my black eyebrows, and it was only then that I noticed how gentle my gaze had turned because of it. I had spent years trying, but that day I turned beautiful, accidentally, and it shocked me.
I think I loved Hagar the most in that second, when I turned to look from the mirror to her and realized that she and the world must see what I saw in the mirror just then—me, beautiful.
“WE NEED to cool ourselves down,” Hagar said. “Let’s put ice water in our veins already.” Back then, that month, putting ice water in our veins was her favorite pastime after guns. It was one of her stranger ideas. She said putting ice water in
our veins would probably feel like winter inside of summer, and that we should probably try it.
Getting the frozen IV bags we put in our veins was this whole production. The kitchen sergeant let the four of us use the industrial freezer for our frozen IV bags because he was in love with Neta. One of the medics from the clinic gave us new IV bags and all the rest from the emergency supply room because he thought he was in love with Neta, until he began sleeping with Hagar and then thought he was in love with her more.
We were invincible.
Hagar pinched the vein on the flip side of my elbow hard. “Ouch,” I said, but I was smiling.
“Can it be my turn to stick the needle in you this time?” Hagar asked.
“I love what you did with my hair,” I said. “You can stick whatever you want in me, hon.”
“Aw, baby,” Hagar said.
The four of us went outside the caravan in our bras and underwear, ignoring the stares of the girls who were smoking.
Using her teeth, Hagar tied green elastic above my elbow, and I started opening and closing my fist. Then she stuck the needle, swift. She got up and clipped the IV bag to a cedar branch above us.
After she finished with the veins of Neta and Amit, Hagar did herself and lay down on the cement, smiling. “Refresh me, God!” she shouted.
We were lying on the cement in our underwear. Amit let me borrow a pair of her fake Prada sunglasses. It was noon and I could taste the heat.
I thought of Ari. The cold was swimming close to my head. The ice water in my veins was a ghost licking me from the inside. I changed the speed of the drip to faster, and it made my eyes buzz. It was one of Hagar’s stranger ideas, but not her strangest. She had so many ideas. She wondered what would happen if we put Diet Coke in our IV bags, and I had to tell her that would mean putting oxygen in our circulatory systems. That it would kill us. I don’t know why I knew that. Neta and Amit said they hadn’t thought of that. Hagar said she hadn’t either. Then she said, “But think about it, what a way to go!”
On the cement, Hagar said, “So. You. Ari. Bedouins’ basic training. Exciting. Exciting.”
I didn’t say anything. I let the girls wait.
“So I heard an interesting rumor,” Amit said. “I heard they might start giving the Bedouins M-4s now, instead of M-16s.” I knew she was trying to throw us off the topic of Ari, because they all liked to pretend they were not interested in my fantasy talk, particularly at moments when they were most eager.
“Like they would ever waste green bullets on those retards,” Hagar said slowly.
An M-16 has a range of 100 meters, and regular bullets. An M-4 has an aim that magnifies by ten, a range of 250 meters, and green bullets. The green bullets have a mass in them that weighs 0.008 kilos. They go further, more accurately, because they are heavier, so the metal coils inside the M-4 barrel are wrapped tighter to give the bullets more spin, more momentum. The M-4 is the gun that can actually help you if you need to shoot someone and hit them fast. But if you used a regular bullet with it, it wouldn’t make it past 75 meters. It would never hit where you aimed.
We were silent for a while, but finally I couldn’t wait and I could not let them wait any longer for my words, the words I thought were dirty. “Hagar,” I said, “I am actually going to get with Ari.”
“You have been saying that for months,” Amit said. She had her head on Neta’s bare stomach. Neta and Amit had been best friends before the army, and they were lucky enough to be stationed together. And if they were best friends before, they were now each other’s sister, parent, everything. When we smoked hookah and played truth or dare with Ari and Gil, they didn’t complain when they had to kiss each other. “It’s like I am kissing myself,” Amit said. “It’s kind of a trip!”
“You just wait and see. This time I mean it,” I told them. I opened my mouth to taste the sun. I was frozen from within; I was pretty; the sun didn’t scare me. “He is going to take me in the ranges. In the clinic. On a coffee table.”
“A coffee table?” Neta asked.
“It is this thing they have in America,” I said. “Go with me here.”
“But I heard he was Canadian,” Neta said.
“He is Australian,” Amit said. It was one of the only things I ever heard them disagree on.
“Yep, New Zealand, Australia,” Hagar confirmed.
“Whatever he is, he is mine,” I said.
We had had that exact conversation plenty of times before.
“Listen, girls,” Hagar said.
“Yael.” Hagar said my name. She said it the way I said Avishag’s name on one of those rare moments when I needed her more than she needed me, for just a second.
“Do you think they torture him?” Hagar asked.
For the past five days, since it happened, Hagar had been making us talk about the soldier they took in Gaza. Hagar lived in his school district, and we all knew she knew him, even though she said she didn’t, she was just interested in the topic of torture.
“I don’t know, Hagar,” I said. It was the truth.
“No, they are not torturing him; they give him chocolate and take him to the park,” Dana said. I smelled the vanilla and sweat on her skin. She was the one who had made me move rooms, but now she resented that the girls in the new caravan accepted me. She loomed above us on the cement. “You girls,” Dana said. “No brains, no worries, huh? He is probably getting the life beat out of him right now.”
We were silent for a second. Then, careful of the needle in her vein, Amit took off her bra. Neta did too. It was what the two did to scare Dana off. Nudity made her uncomfortable. Hagar still didn’t move.
“So first, Ari is going to turn me over,” I began, ignoring Dana. A minute later, she ran off, screaming that we were all disgusting. Somewhere in the midst of my fantasy, we all fell asleep, our IV bags empty. In my sun-hunted dreams, icy from within, I visited Vegas, then Bel Air, then the bridge the Full House girls drove on. When I opened my eyes, I was the only one left lying on the cement, and Ari was standing at the gate of the female residency.
He was! I swear.
“I need help,” he said.
Ari had a fear. He was afraid of doing the set of moving targets with his soldiers.
Since I was a weaponry instructor, I was naturally a fan of the moving-targets drill. It sounded bad, but it really wasn’t. The soldiers on the other side of the shooting line would walk around inside a ditch. Their target would be tied to two sticks, so it’d be tall enough for them to hold up without exposing their arms. They’d have goggles and helmets and bulletproof vests. Ari and I would talk on the radio and have a safe word for when he and the soldiers in the ditch could climb out and switch places with the shooting soldiers. The ditch had been clogged that past year, so this was his first time trying it, but I knew he’d do fine. I believed in that drill, as a weaponry instructor. If you were going to shoot someone, odds are he’d be moving; it was important to practice. But Ari had a point. It was a little crazy, or at least it could have sounded crazy to me if my basic training had not been as a weaponry instructor and I had not been told that as a weaponry instructor I must be a fan of it.
“I just mean, really? With all the money the army spends on Popsicles and lollipops, am I really going to train my soldiers on shooting at moving targets by giving half of them a stick with a cardboard target tied to it and sending them behind the shooting line?” Ari said that day.
So I told him we could practice shooting first, just the two of us.
Practicing just the two of us was a good idea, I thought. Most of the Bedouin foot trackers spoke little Hebrew and had a tendency to get into fights where they tried to bite each other’s ankles off, so it was always good to practice for them.
Ari and I walked on the pebble road leading to the shooting range where the ditch was. During the walk, Ari told me that he had been pulled from his regular unit to make the Bedouin foot trackers into soldiers, and that he believed that was worth immigrating t
o Israel for. He said that foot trackers walk in front of the force, looking for tracks, and that during wars they go fast, the fastest. He said that these were guys who needed to know how to fight and that if they didn’t, then it was all on him.
“Do you think they can really know what happened in a sand dune just by looking?” I asked him.
That part wasn’t his responsibility, he said. He said that Bedouin know how to spot tracks from birth. They have elders who serve as professional trainers to sharpen that skill.
“But I believe they are good,” he said. “They say if you stood on a hill tomorrow, two years from now a good foot-tracker would still know you had been there, and when.”
Once we arrived at the range, before he walked behind the shooting line, Ari put his hand on my shoulder. Then he went down the ditch, helmet, goggles, radio, and all. He was holding a target attached to a long stick, and I could only see the target. I looked hard to make sure no part of his body was peeking outside the ditch. I was behind the shooting line.
I shot at his target. And again.
But Ari wasn’t walking fast enough. I went out of position a few times to yell through the radio, “Faster, much faster,” but it didn’t help. The first eight bullets I hit so they made the shape of half a heart in the place where the soldier printed on the cardboard’s heart would have been. Then I thought better of it. I wondered why our targets all had soldiers in green uniforms printed on them, why we were shooting at ourselves this whole time. The next bullet went to the head. The nose. Then one to the right eye. As I did after every bullet, I closed my eyes, emptied my lungs, aligned my aims. When I opened my right eye, the target was gone. Ari had climbed out of the ditch. He was lying on the ground behind it, motionless.
I walked over to him. The walk was heavy on my heart in fear.
He still had his safety goggles and helmet on. When I cast a shadow over his head, he opened his eyes. “You killed me,” he said.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 10