The People of Forever Are Not Afraid

by Shani Boianjiu

  The Egyptians are guys, but they don’t have to carry anything on them. Not a vest, no extra bullets, no helmet. Just their thin brown uniform and their M-16. They don’t even have magnifying aims on their rifles like the girls do on their M-4s. Avishag is beginning to hate the enemy, and it surprises and amuses her. Not because of the three wars and the dead and the land mines and the lies and all, but because they don’t even have to wear stupid helmets.

  Gali’s long fingers are moving rapidly, texting then erasing then almost sending then erasing. Sweat gets in her eyes, a fly lands on her nose, and she is nodding her head, then shaking it to negate whatever thought she had just welcomed in.

  But Avishag doesn’t notice any of this. She is looking through her binoculars, thinking of herself, thinking of the enemy, and of a mustache, and that she probably just lost her mind, but it is funny how she still feels altogether the same.

  It is only Gali who knows what we know, because she can look at the time on her cell phone. The girls have exactly seven more hours to go.

  SAMIR LOOKS at Hamody’s strong, dark hands as he gathers the coffee cistern and the ashtray from the floor of the guarding tower and puts them back in his knapsack. He watches as Hamody flings the knapsack with ease on his wide back, and he watches him as they both climb down the ladder, and he watches him as he jumps lightly onto the sand, barely bending his knees.

  “Our four guarding hours are up!” Hamody says, smiling generously. “Say, Samir, you don’t talk much, do you?”

  Samir is grateful that there are only six other soldiers in the showers that afternoon. Samir doesn’t undress quite yet, but he watches Hamody as he takes off his uniform. He keeps his gaze down, and when Hamody takes off his socks he can notice white cotton particles that remain stuck between Hamody’s long toes.

  It is only after Hamody is under the water that Samir begins to undress, slowly. He takes off his brown shirt first, careful not to touch the wet circles that formed under his armpits as he folds it and puts it on the metal bench. After he takes off his pants, and then his underwear, he walks quickly to the shower at the far left side of the caravan, waving his arms in a strange and distracting manner.

  He pulls down the lever and faces the wall, and then steps closer. Careful so that no one might see.

  “HI, AVISHAG, would you help me take a second look at these IDs?” Gali said.

  The truck was pitch black, which was odd, and larger than the girls usually saw at the border checkpoint. Officer Nadav was sitting on a white plastic chair overseeing the two, cracking his fingers.

  The ID Gali showed Avishag read, “Momo Levin.” He was from a suburb of Tel Aviv, according to his ID, which seemed pretty valid. In the passenger’s seat next to him sat an Egyptian man. His passport read, “Nadim Al-Hamid,” and it too seemed pretty valid to Avishag.

  “Hi, Momo,” Avishag said, leaning carefully toward the front-seat window, aiming at it with her M-16 as the procedures required. “Your ID says you live right around Tel Aviv. What are you doing all the way down south?”

  “Come on, dude, don’t give us a hard time,” Momo replied. Avishag wondered if she really did look like a man from this angle, her gun aiming forward and her hair all covered inside the helmet. Or maybe it was just that somewhere along the line, someplace along the line, it had become understood that everyone was a dude of some sort, and she was the only one who had missed it.

  “I am sorry,” Avishag said. “You are going to have to open the back of your truck.”

  Avishag and Gali both at one point had to use a public chemical toilet that hadn’t been cleaned in over two weeks. They both knew the smell of a shirt drenched in blood at the elbows, after crawling training, and they both knew what it smelled like when they had to wear it again the next day. Avishag also knew the smell of the chest of a man who hadn’t showered in days, and the smell of his unwashed hair. She even knew the smell of her dead brother’s body, and how it mixed with the scent of fresh mud.

  But even before the back of the truck was fully open, it was clear to both of the girls that they had never smelled something this awful in their lives. The smell was so strong that Avishag drew a strand of hair from under her helmet with all the force she had left and pinned it below her nose. She didn’t even realize she was doing it until her head began to throb because of how tightly her hair was pulled.

  The truck was three paces wide, and on its floor sat on top of each other twelve young women. One of them was a round-faced little girl, and she had a Coca-Cola T-shirt on but no underwear or pants. The few bits of the visible floor of the truck were brown and red and damp.

  Avishag closed her eyes.

  Gali closed her eyes.

  Gali opened her eyes. Avishag did too.

  Twelve pairs of eyes were staring back at them, waiting, breathing, and silent.

  “Nadav!” Gali shouted alone. “Nadav!”

  Nadav the officer got up and walked toward the girls with a slow step. He tried to place his hand on Avishag’s shoulder, but as soon as his finger touched her she bent down on all fours, breathing in, then out, then more quickly.

  “What’s the problem?” Nadav asked.

  “Women,” Gali said.

  “How many?” Nadav asked.

  “Women, a little girl. They, Nadav—” Gali said, and she pointed to the back of the truck.

  Momo and Nadim stepped out of the car. Momo had his arm around Nadim’s shoulder, and more than anything she had seen that evening, this sight had made Avishag sick. She finally hurled on the ground, and remained there on all fours, breathing in her own sick.

  “They all have passports,” Momo said to Nadav.

  “And they got their visas with the stamps on the other side and everything like this,” Nadim added in his broken Hebrew. He handed Nadav a pile of red passports.

  Nadav looked at the passports.

  “No,” Gali shouted. “Don’t, don’t even look at it. You know, you know they want to leave, Nadav,” Gali screamed.

  Nadav looked at Gali with his quiet eyes. “And how do you know that, Corporal Geva?” he asked her. “Do you speak Ukrainian?”

  But at that moment, Gali wasn’t even sure she knew how to speak Hebrew anymore.

  “No more buts or I will put you up for a trial with the commander of the base. I am the officer on duty, and I say if they have passports and visas, they have passports and visas,” Nadav said.

  As he closed the back of the truck, one of the women stretched her neck out so much, Gali thought she could hear her bones extending.

  “Bye, guys,” Momo shouted as his truck drove away, leaving behind it a cloud of dust that penetrated the nose, the ears, the mouth, the pores of the skin on Gali’s face, but only hovered above Avishag on the ground, tucking her in like a sullied blanket of summer.

  IT WAS only when the checkpoint shift was over two hours later that we saw Avishag get up from all fours. When Nadav put his hand on top of her head, she sprung up, fast.

  She pushed him once. She pushed him twice. He caught her the third time and held her in a hug for a whole minute.

  “Let’s go rest,” he said. “Everything looks better in the morning.”

  IN THE whole town of Berezhany, and maybe even in the entire land of Ukraine, no one had hair as beautiful as Masha’s. It wasn’t its color—although it was speckled with gold. It wasn’t its shape exactly—although it did fall on her slim shoulders in waves like from a fountain. It wasn’t its length precisely either, although she had kept it long, all the way to the small of her back, from the time that she was twelve and was allowed to wear it down, because the regulations of the middle school were less harsh than those of the elementary school. The thing about Masha’s hair was the way in which it structured and restructured itself around her face. It was as if it had a life of its own. It always knew exactly how to fall around her face so that it would give her round cheeks the most flattering light, no matter where Masha was. In school, and later when she wal
ked to the shoe factory at noon, and even when she was walking around on the weekends hand in hand with Phillip, it was as if she had her own personal lighting crew following her around, making sure she always shined, was always at her best.

  So when she cut it short, right up to her shoulders, rumors began to fly across the town. Jakub the hairdresser thought the reason was what the reason always is: money. He thought she had probably sold it in a wig store because she found herself is some sort of an economic bind. Kalyna, the old lady who owned the house right by the small recital hall, thought that the reason was what the reason always is: love. She thought that Masha had fallen in love with a new young man and wanted to test the nature of his devotion to her by cutting off her hair. Eight-year-old Mousia, whom Masha used to babysit on Saturday nights, thought that the only explanation could be that Masha had gone mad. When she first saw Masha with her own eyes, walking through the market with her short hair, Mousia let out a shriek and ran all the way home to sob in her room. She even skipped the vocabulary quiz the second graders were having the next morning.

  In the end, it was Jakub who was right, because it was money, but Kalyna was also a little right, because who knows, maybe Masha was in love. But it wasn’t quite exactly what they thought. You see, Masha had been fired from her job in the shoe factory because of her boss’s jealous wife. Since Masha slept with the boss. A lot. And he had a wife. There were no other places of employment in the town that would take someone with no experience or training, and Masha was going to go to school, except she first had to make enough money so that her mother could keep her house, and, well. It was like taking two steps forward and your whole dumb life backward everywhere she went.

  But wait. She could go abroad, become a nanny to some rich kids, cut off her hair (because let’s be honest, if you had a husband you wouldn’t want him around Masha and her hair either), make enough money for her mom to even buy the stupid house from the landlord, make enough money for Masha to go to accounting school, you name it.

  But the job wasn’t quite exactly what Masha thought.

  IT STARTED out as a thought, something that existed entirely in Avishag’s mind, but by the time the two girls finished the long walk to the guarding tower, it was already a feeling.

  Gali and Avishag climbed up there, and they sat, and they didn’t say a word. And then an hour passed, and then it was more than a feeling.

  It was a burning feeling, like fire ants eating at Avishag’s skin from the inside. It made no sense to her at first because she had showered last night after she left Nadav’s, and it was a good shower, long and drowning and kind to Avishag with the smell of soap.

  And it didn’t make sense. And it didn’t.

  And she sat, and she thought, and she didn’t understand.

  But then she did.

  It was the uniform. The stupid uniform underneath the M-16 and the ammunition vest and bulletproof vest, underneath it was the green uniform all along.

  Avishag was wearing the uniform now, but she had also worn it last night when she was leaving Nadav’s office and heading toward the showers. And she could feel it now: last night her uniform touched where he had kissed her; here, there, then lower, then on the other side. And now the same uniform was touching her again, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, she realized that she could stand this no longer. But realizing it was not enough—she could still feel it; it wasn’t in her head. She could feel his dried spit on her skin, it was real and close and so there.

  There was no escape.

  Except there was.

  She unbuckled her helmet and tossed it on the ground.

  “Avishag?” Gali asked.

  Avishag took off her M-16. Then the ammunition vest, the bulletproof vest, and her dog tag. She sat down on top of them, as if falling, untied her sandy boots, and then took off her socks.

  “Avishag, what is going on?” Gali asked.

  Avishag’s quick fingers unbuttoned her military top and then unbuckled her big brown belt. She took off her green tank top, then her red Mickey Mouse sports bra, then her underwear.

  Finally, when she was completely naked, she got down on the floor of the tower and closed her eyes. The sun was roasting Avishag’s skin in blows, like a child blowing on a ragwort.

  GALI THOUGHT about shouting, or slapping Avishag, or even calling for help on the radio. But then she thought about the oddest thing.

  She thought about how, during her first time, she was actually fully clothed.

  It was only after Gali had her second orgasm that she realized that this was her second, that she had had one before.

  The first one was given to her by the Jordan River. Every Passover in her kibbutz the kids would go bridge jumping to celebrate the end of the long Seder in the kibbutz’s dining hall. But despite how tall she was, Gali was actually afraid of heights. She never quite got the courage to jump.

  During her last year in the kibbutz, when she already knew she would be moving to Tel Aviv, Gali stood again on the cement wall of the bridge in her yellow Passover dress and looked down. She waited and waited. Everyone else had gone home. The pine trees were shedding their orange needles on the water, and old ripples were budding closer toward the river band and its lilac bushes.

  A pigeon flew above her. Gali covered her eyes with her hair. She smelled shampoo; she took a step forward and jumped.

  For a second it was like walking in air, and it was so unnatural, it was clear to Gali that something had gone wrong that could not be made right again. Her skin was sucked upward toward the sun.

  She hit the water with a splash. A warm signal of feathery fairies traveled all over her body in that instant. Her toes curled. Her shoulders bent. Her funny bone laughed. She leaped up out of the green water with her mouth open, gasping for air.

  But Gali’s second one was on the day she met Tom in tenth grade, at his house after geography class.

  And she was completely naked then, and it was still sunny out.

  And it was Tom she wanted to think of now.

  “You are so strong,” he told her when she found herself in his bedroom on that tenth-grade afternoon.

  “Really?” she asked. She was worried she might get sick. She worried Tom would kiss her, she worried he might not, she worried she might have something in her teeth, she worried she was too tall, she worried about the dangers of the city, how loud the city still was, even right then inside Tom’s room.

  “You look so strong,” Tom said, and stepped so close to her, the tips of their noses touched. “Look,” he said and pointed to the mirror on his wall. “You look so strong.”

  In the mirror, all Gali could see was her old self. But then she saw Tom in the mirror, looking at her.

  She wanted his eyes to wash every part of her.

  AVISHAG WAS breathing so heavily, naked on the floor of the tower, it was as if she had fallen asleep. There was no way anyone was going to visit the tower to check on the girls. No one had ever checked on them.

  IF WE could look into the seventh tower from the right on the Israeli side of the Egyptian border on August 7 in the year 2007, what we would see would be two Israeli soldiers with their eyes closed. They’d be on the ground. Naked.

  SAMIR WAS still not really saying anything, and Hamody had already smoked seven cigarettes and boiled two pots of dark coffee, so out of sheer boredom, Hamody decided to maybe try to do what he was in the tower to do in the first place. He picked up his binoculars and looked into the Israeli side.

  At first he thought he was imagining, that maybe the coffee mix his uncle had given him was a bit too strong for him, but he gazed and he gazed. He washed his eyes with that sight, and it was real and far away.

  On the other side of the border, two Israeli soldiers were lying on the ground, naked.

  The first Jewish girl was long, and her breasts were small and firm. Her light brown hair rested on her shoulders. A gazelle of sorts, the type of girl who could give you a run for your money if you ever had to
chase her.

  The second Jewish girl was soft, big breasted, and altogether perfect. With her eyes closed like that and with her auburn hair around her like wings, she almost looked like the Christian bird from Hamody’s town, the one he knew he could never marry.

  Hamody lowered the binoculars and looked at Samir, who was sitting on a white plastic chair with his back to Hamody, looking back at the base in silence. Hamody thought of saying something, of bursting out in joyous cheers, of laughing the whole thing off, but then he realized he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, at least not with Samir. Hamody realized that he wanted to save this all to himself. And he suddenly didn’t care anymore. His uncle had always told him, since childhood, that God hands his treasures to every person on this earth equally; it is just that some people choose not to enjoy their treasures.

  Samir was still looking away, and before he knew it Hamody had his pants low, then lower, and he was using only his left hand to hold the binoculars.

  WHEN SAMIR looked back, he almost couldn’t believe it. At first he thought he was imagining, that maybe the coffee mix Hamody’s uncle had given him was a bit too strong for him, but he gazed and he gazed, he washed his eyes with that sight, and it was real and so close.

  Right in front of him stood Hamody. Bright, handsome Hamody, and he was exposed, and touching himself.

  It was as if Samir’s hands had a mind of their own.

  When Officer Tariq climbed up the tower like a silent cheetah, Samir tried to hold it in. He really did. He could hear Tariq shouting, and he could see him grabbing Hamody by the collar, and he saw when Hamody handed Tariq the binoculars, and he heard Hamody shouting that it was all the Jews’ fault, that it was some sort of a deliberate trick, a new Israeli evil strategy.