AND NOW it is Friday. Tom has the weekend off, Gali has the weekend off too, and it is the weekend. She should be coming into Tel Aviv’s central bus station right now, or maybe she is already in a service cab on the way to his house. Tom gets every other weekend off, but again, this doesn’t mean he agrees with us that his job is easy. Staring at a phone he knows is not going to ring. When he first learned he would be stationed at these offices, only twenty minutes away from his house, he thanked his mom profusely for pulling all the strings she had with the wife of the general chief of staff’s personal assistant. They treated him like a king, in a way, and his direct commander even said that he could choose which phone to sit by. Each phone was meant to be a forever open channel of communication between the Israeli army and the armies of other countries, and Tom was even given the opportunity to choose the phone given to the Lebanese army, which had rung many times during that recent nasty war.
He knew the phone connected to the Egyptian army would probably never ring. And he knew that even if it did, the phone call would have nothing to do with Gali. And he knew that even if the phone call did have something to do with Gali, it would almost a million percent not be her on the line. And still he chose Egypt, because if he was going to spend three years waiting for a phone to ring, he wanted to preserve the possibility that maybe, somehow, in a weird and unbelievable way, that phone call was going to be from her.
“ONE DAY is onion; another day is honey,” Hamody’s uncle mumbled, signaling his wife to fill his china white coffee cup by lifting it and tilting it side to side.
“But uncle,” Hamody said. He wanted to say, “But uncle, I love her,” but he didn’t, because he didn’t want to sound cliché.
“This too shall pass,” his uncle continued. “Moa’alems don’t marry Christian girls.”
Most of the time Hamody loved that his uncle was the head imam of the entire western part of Egypt. Most of the time he loved his uncle more than anything in this world.
“She will never marry you either,” his uncle said. The smoke in the room got into Hamody’s eyes. He wasn’t crying. “Better one bird in your hand than two birds on the tree,” his uncle said, and laughed.
But Hamody wanted the girl precisely because of that. Not because she was a Christian girl, because she wasn’t really; at least not in Hamody’s eyes. She wasn’t a Muslim girl in his eyes either—she wasn’t a girl at all. She was a bird on a tree, that one, waiting for Hamody to climb up, too strong headed to use her wings and fly to him. During his junior year of high school he had watched her walk to the grocery store every Friday with her baby brother under one dark arm and a chorus of her other siblings humming around her. She would balance the wheeled grocery bag with her other dark arm. Whenever young men offered to help her with her groceries, and they did, what she would do was place the baby in their arms and continue wheeling away the groceries.
“Why, thank you for your help,” Hamody heard her say once to one of the many unsuspecting suitors who were left cradling a fussy baby, running after the dark girl in silent disbelief. And Hamody laughed, and he laughed.
“Why put a healthy head into a sickbed?” Hamody’s uncle said. Hamody could feel the river of creamy black coffee gushing through his veins, pooling in his brain. He had wondered before why he had ever told his uncle about his feelings, and he now remembered that it had not been him talking the other week; it had been the coffee.
“Oh, Hamody. God hands his treasures to every person on this earth equally; it is just that some people choose not to enjoy their treasures,” his uncle said. “We can’t want everything we see, only what we can have.”
“DUDE, WHAT are you doing here so early?” Tom asked Oleg, the Russian guy who covered the night shift on the phone connecting the Egyptian army and the general chief of staff of the Israeli forces.
“You know, bus got in early, figured I’d spare you the last five minutes,” Oleg replied.
Tom was really in awe at how bighearted those Russians could be sometimes. He wouldn’t add a minute to his time there. He got up, careful to use his JanSport backpack to cover the front of his pants, and walked all the way through the office and by the barbed-wire fences of the base and right through the gates that led to the heart of the bustling, gaudy streets of Tel Aviv. The Azrieli mall tower loomed above him, shining like a mouthful of diamonds. Cars were chasing and catching one another’s colors on the highway. It was then, standing by a street vendor of organic juices made from oranges and wheatgrass, that he could feel something vibrating inside the pants of his green uniform. He pushed the M-16 further down his back and reached toward his pocket to read Gali’s text.
plz dont be mad stuck in the base till 2 weekend from now plz reply plz don’t be mad i miss u
Tom put the phone back in his pocket. He was already starting to feel it hurting. And we do know, we do, how impossible it is to do nothing but stare at a phone for eleven hours. Yes, a phone. And so we cannot really blame Tom for not texting Gali back, and we cannot truly blame him for where his legs took him next.
IT WAS already ten at night, and Tom still hadn’t texted Gali back. She knew because even though she was not technically allowed to bring her cell phone with her to the border checkpoint, she still did it, putting it on vibrate and hiding it between her heart and the bulletproof cement vest she was wearing. From afar, she sort of looked like a man, or a frog, or a frog man, with her green outer vest full of bullets and smoke grenades and green helmet on top. When Jenna the Russian was taken to the hospital for dehydration (that stupid overachieving cow), Gali volunteered to stay on base even though it was time for her weekend vacation at home.
“Hi, Gali. Would you take a look at this ID?” Avishag asked. She was the other corporal on truck-gate duty with Gali that night. Her straight hair was jabbing out of her helmet as if it were suffocating at the roots. Officer Nadav was sitting on a white plastic chair overseeing the two, cracking his fingers and leisurely observing Avishag’s every move.
The ID Avishag showed Gali read, “Mustafa Al-Zain.” He was an Israeli Arab, according to his ID, which seemed pretty valid. In his picture he was smiling so hard his red nose was curling inward, and although his ID said he was forty-two years old, he looked about twenty, and rather sweet.
“Hi, Mustafa,” Gali said, leaning carefully toward the front-seat window, aiming at it with her M-16 as the procedures required. “Your ID says you live in one of the villages up north. What are you doing all the way down south?”
“Come on, dude, don’t give me a hard time. I was just seeing the beauties of Egypt. Can’t a man just see the beauties of Egypt?” Mustafa replied. Behind him were nothing but hills of sand, like giant tan spoons lying upside-down on a beige dinner table.
“But in a truck?” Avishag chimed in, faking a curious tone and raising her eyebrows.
“Yes, can’t a man just see the beauties of Egypt in a truck?” Mustafa said, trying his luck. But it was already too late, and he knew it. He was pressing the button to open the back of the truck as he was talking.
The truck was empty for the most part, except for three small carton boxes. It was rather clean, too, and smelled of Febreze. Gali knelt down from all her height and looked inside one of the boxes while Avishag lit her way with the massive, painfully bright flashlight. For a moment there, the two resembled searching pirates, or searching pirate princesses, at least in their inner eyes.
On top were oranges, and that was okay because it wasn’t a large enough amount that he would have to pay customs. But at the bottom of the carton box were hundreds of bootlegged DVDs. Shrek 2, Love Actually, Harold and Kumar; also Riding Miss Daisy and Gangbangs of New York.
“Officer Nadav!”
“Nadav!” the girls shouted and climbed out of the truck.
Nadav got up and walked toward the girls with a slow step and stroked his cheek with his palm. He was only a bit taller than Gali and about thirty centimeters taller than Avishag. He gently placed his han
d on her shoulder and squeezed. His voice sounded as if it were squeezed out of him also.
“What’s the problem?” Nadav asked.
“Movies,” Gali said.
“How many?” Nadav asked.
“Probably around a thousand,” Gali said.
“Not a problem, then,” Nadav said.
“But—” Avishag tried.
“No but. If we detain him, it will be days before we get anyone from legal to press charges and take away the movies. He’ll be out in no time and just get smarter about hiding them,” Nadav said. He wasn’t looking at the girls as he was talking; he was looking at his hand on Avishag’s shoulder.
“So again we do nothing?” Avishag asked, but Nadav just stroked her behind the ear with his index finger and smiled.
“Thanks for being bitches,” Mustafa shouted as his truck drove away, leaving behind it a cloud of dust that penetrated the nose, the ears, the mouth, the pores of Avishag and Gali’s faces.
OF THE twenty-four hours in any given day, Gali and Avishag spent six hours on a border checkpoint shift, eight hours on a guarding tower shift, and the remaining ten hours doing what they wanted. Of course we know that you have to shower every day (they check), eat in the cafeteria tent (they don’t check), keep your weapon clean and your vest fully equipped (they say they’ll do random checks, but they don’t).
And sleep. You need to sleep.
But that still left the girls with some time. There was still time, all this time, hovering about them.
“YOU SAY you love me, but you never listen to a word I say,” Avishag said.
She liked being in this room. Aside from the wooden shower caravan, this officer’s office was one of the only spaces in the whole base that wasn’t a tent. And it wasn’t wooden either; it was a room made out of white cardboard, dropped down by a tractor in the middle of this nothing. There was even a green plant, a desk, and a sofa in it. And it locked from the inside.
“I do listen,” Nadav replied. He put down his M-4 underneath a chair and sat down, then bent down to remove his military boots.
“I don’t even understand what the point of us being here is—we never do anything about anything,” Avishag said. “And I thought being in combat meant something. I thought after I was done with the monitors I would actually get to do something other than just watch.”
“I know it is hard, sweetie,” Nadav said. He glanced at his black Swatch and began to unbutton his green military shirt.
“It is hard because you suck. You never let us arrest anyone. All you care about is how much downtime you get. What if the girls in the guarding tower are calling you on your radio right now? You don’t even have your radio turned on. And what if we get caught? And you never come when I am guarding to check on me or, anything, and you, and you—” Avishag said. It felt as though it has been forever since she had spoken for this long.
She tried to continue, but Nadav went over to the sofa. He lay on top of her and grabbed her thin arms. “Shhh, listen,” he said, and kissed her ear.
“It is not fair,” Avishag said, but her voice was already failing her again.
“It is not fair for me either, having to baby all of you girl soldiers,” Nadav said. He covered her mouth with his hand. “Do you think I like being the officer of this ‘female infantry experiment’? That I chose this? Some days you are the only reason why I even have the strength to put on my uniform.”
He kept her mouth covered, even though there was no need. Avishag was not going to talk. Lying on that sofa, Avishag questioned why our world even gives us words.
THE FIRST time Tom went to 52 Allenby Street was with Oleg and his two cousins. It was three months ago, on Tom’s nineteenth birthday. Both he and Oleg had the weekend off, which almost never happened because they usually took turns with their phone shifts, and Gali was not going to get a break for at least another month. Tom was so down and in his own head that week that Oleg sometimes had to shout at him just to get him to notice his shift was over. He tried to cheer him up by giving him an entire bottle of cheap Russian vodka, but to no avail.
Tom even suspected Oleg of switching his shifts around just so he would get Tom to go out that weekend, but at first Tom was in no mood.
“I just don’t feel like partying this weekend, dude,” Tom said, but it was not in the nature of our Oleg to take no for an answer.
“In Russia we say, ‘No bitch is worth crying like a bitch about.’ You understand?” Oleg said.
Tom was not convinced. “Didn’t you once yell at me that you were from Belarus, not Russia?” he asked. He then looked around the street outside the base, hoping to catch a service cab that would take him back home already.
“Whatever, man. I am telling you, where I am taking you, dude, it will be a night to remember,” Oleg said. He gave Tom his sad Russian puppy smile and pressed his chubby palms together, begging.
The service cab dropped them off in the clothing district, right by Allenby 52. The building looked like a regular clothing shop from the outside, but when they knocked on the metal door, a young, skinny Russian in sweatpants opened.
“Do you want some oranges?” he asked with a thick accent. “We have a tree right behind the shop. What do I tell you, this country has good oranges. It is on the house.”
The room had two sofas and a huge dining table, but only two white plastic chairs. On the white wall there was a yellow poster on which prices were written in thick black marker. They misspelled “All-incloded.”
“Oleg, what is this? You can’t be serious. A whorehouse?” Tom whispered. But the Russian with the oranges could hear him, and he was laughing.
“Watch your language, will you?” Oranges asked.
But the truth is Tom was surprised to learn that he wasn’t appalled. He was excited. Will these girls be hot? Could he ask them to do anything? Since that day back in tenth-grade gym class he hadn’t even kissed a girl that wasn’t Gali.
Before Tom realized it, Oleg and his cousins had paid and a middle-aged woman was there to walk them upstairs.
“What are you getting?” Oranges asked.
“Whatever is cheapest,” he said finally. “I am not really … You know, I don’t really do this type of stuff.”
“That would be just blow job. Two hundred shekels. We can charge it on credit card as massage.”
Upstairs, the hallway looked just like Tom’s brother’s university dormitory. There were rooms everywhere, as far down the green-carpeted hallway as Tom could see, but the middle-aged woman told him to go into the second room on the right. When she leaned over to point him there, her breath smelled of garlic.
The room was small, and the only furniture in it was a queen-sized white bed, draped with a shawl printed with a Middle Eastern pattern. The walls were white and smelled freshly painted. There was nothing on them.
The girl sat on the bed with her legs crossed. Even though her hair was bleached an industrial shade of blonde and her brown roots were showing at the top, and even though her lips were bright pink and her eye shadow purple, she still looked not much older than seventeen. She was thin. She was drowning in her sweatpants and the strap of her tank top fell from her shoulder almost all the way to her pointy elbow. Her skin was so white that against the background of the wall it was as if chunks of her were not quite there.
When she looked up, all Tom could notice were her eyes. They were so huge, so bulging and blue, it looked as if they were floating in the air.
The girl looked down again and got up to turn off the light. In the dark, Tom could feel her cold hand grabbing his and leading him to the bed. Before she could touch his belt, he got up and walked back to the wall and turned on the light. The room hummed silence.
“How about I just look at you,” he said. “I am not really—” and he stayed standing by the wall.
The girl did not reply. She just sat there on the bed and looked down. Every so often she would look up, and Tom would look and look and look at her. She was
beautiful in a way, and all eyes.
That was then, on Tom’s birthday.
AVISHAG COVERS her face with her hands, but soon it is hard to breathe because her hands reek of rust from climbing up the metal ladder to the guarding tower. It is noon, and her helmet is drenched in sweat and it makes her hair itch, but she is too lazy to touch it. Besides, she is not allowed to take off her helmet while guarding.
Gali is leaning her torso out of the tower and looking at her cell phone. Avishag wants to tell her she’s stupid, that they are not allowed to have their cell phones while guarding, that they could get caught. But she doesn’t, because she knows that no one is going to catch them here. That no one cares, really, about them there.
Through the binoculars Avishag can see two Egyptian guards in the distance. Technically the girls are supposed to look through the binoculars every ten minutes, but in reality they sometimes never look at all and there is no way for anyone to know. The Egyptians are not looking through their binoculars right now, and it makes Avishag feel good, superior. She thinks that one of them has a mustache, but she can’t quite tell, and the thought of it makes her laugh.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 12