Samir could hear all of that and see it, but he understood nothing of it. He also saw the glance of shock that Hamody gave him, the way he looked at him down there, at Samir still touching himself, at Samir with his pants rolled down.
But even as all of this was happening, and even though he had thought his brain had signaled his hands to stop, and even though he knew Tariq and Hamody were looking at him then, and they would know, and they would see it, even so, Samir couldn’t help it. It was going to happen, it almost already happened, and then—
It did.
IT TOOK Tariq two minutes to collect himself and straighten up his beret and get on the radio with the commander of the base. It took the commander of the base five minutes to understand Tariq and two minutes to contact Abou Kir, the commander of the northern military region’s headquarters. It took Abou Kir seven minutes to understand and thirteen minutes until the secretary of the Egyptian army chief of staff believed him that his matter was urgent enough to justify an urgent call to the highest-ranking officer in the entire Egyptian army.
Forty-two minutes after Tariq saw the naked Jewish girls with his own eyes through the binoculars, somewhere in the heart of Tel Aviv, a particular red phone rang for the first time in six years, and it was Oleg the Russian who picked it up.
It would take two months for the Israeli press to get a hold of the story, two and a half months for the Egyptian press, seven years for the BBC. But when the press did get a hold of it, they would title the whole situation “A Diplomatic Incident.”
Right after the commander of the base found Nadav in the junior officers’ office, where Nadav was spending time with corporal Rona Mizrahi, Nadav finally made the fifteen-minute walk in the sands to check on the girls in tower seven, to scream at them, to let them know the extent of the damage that they had caused. Nadav’s pace was quick through the sands, eager, but by the time he climbed up the ladder of the tower, all he could find there were the girls covering the shift after Gali and Avishag’s. Ilana Rotem and little Shonit Miller were standing there in the tower, biting their nails, fully clothed, and armed.
IT WAS Tuesday, and it would take two weeks for legal to get down and sentence both Gali and Avishag to seven weeks in military prison, the harshest punishment a female in active combat service had ever received by the lenient military courts to date. When Avishag’s friend Yael heard about it, she thought it was hysterical that of the two of them it was Avishag who had ended up in jail. Everyone was surprised, but the girls were delighted to get a short break from the base. They would spend the seven weeks sleeping in their cell and playing cards with former on-base pot dealers.
But until then, there were still twenty-four hours in each day, and during eight of them the girls were back in the tower, their left hands on the handles of their guns, their eyes rotating through the binoculars, waiting for the variety of junior officers who came up every hour to check on them under the new orders of the commander of the base.
AND THAT night, Tom was already starting to feel it hurting. And we do know, or at least we think we do, how impossible it is to do nothing but stare at a phone for eleven hours, so we cannot really blame Tom for coming back to Allenby 52.
This time when the girl looked at him, she kept her eyes locked on him and didn’t look down. It was he who turned off the light. They both knew he was going to get what he paid for, and if he was going to look into her eyes, that would only be after. He kept his eyes shut the whole time.
FOR SIX hours of the day the girls were still manning the border checkpoint.
It was Tuesday, and night had come, late and warm. In the back of a red truck, four blonde women were staring at Gali and Avishag; waiting, breathing, looking, not crying.
“Come on, dude.” The driver got out of the car and pleaded with Avishag, putting his hand on her shoulder. “This is all approved and authorized. I got places to be,” the driver said.
Avishag looked into his blue eyes. They were so large they took up half his face. Gali looked into the eyes of the women, and she did not remove her gaze, even though she had to blink. The truck was so small, one of the women, one with short freshly cut blonde hair, was sitting on her knees in a pretzel-like manner so painful it seemed as though the bones would pierce through her skin if she sat like that for even one more minute.
“I am not a dude,” Avishag said to the driver, and she took off her helmet, and her dark hair fell down all the way below her shoulders. “I am not,” she said. As she said it, she thought of the baby she didn’t have and realized that no one could deny that it was true.
Nadav got up from his chair with a slow pace and stood between the girls and the open back of the truck. “Avishag,” he said, “how about you put your helmet back on before we all get in trouble?”
“I won’t let you do this to me,” Avishag said, and she grabbed Nadav by the arm. “You don’t know who I am. I am nothing like this.”
“You,” Nadav said, and he laughed. “All you do is complain. You, you, you …” He said it again and again. He pushed Avishag aside by the shoulder. He laughed. He repeated the word until it lost all meaning, until his speech was a growl, a foreign tongue.
THE DOORS of the truck are open, and outside the man who took Masha’s passport in France is standing and talking with three soldiers with guns. One of the soldiers is chanting a sound, and in Masha’s ears the chant becomes a song like the ones the elementary-school children sing at the end of each year in the small recital hall of her town. And soon the song is without a human voice; it is a mere melody, and then it is a battle cry, a faint one, and it is enough for Masha, and she leaps out of the truck and she begins running south, as far as her feet can carry her.
When her feet pound on the sand they send a shock that passes through her stomach and echoes in her lungs. Masha’s thin legs coil underneath her stained skirt, and when they uncurl she can hear her bones cracking, laughing. She feels as though her legs are running faster than her heart can pump life into them, fast enough so that the wind is a soft curtain she keeps piercing through.
NOW, THERE are a lot of things we know. Masha is running south toward the fence on the Egyptian side, and there are land mines sleeping deep below where she is heading. We know that although Samir is already in jail, Hamody’s uncle got him off easy, and he is already back in the tower, and the figure running toward his gate in the dark is close enough so he can see it without the binoculars. He already has a bullet in the barrel, and twenty-eight more in his magazine, and from a distance like this, we know that he can do just fine even without a magnifying aim.
And we know that no red phone is going to ring in order to ask for details about this figure coming from the Israeli side. We know that Tom is going to stare at the silent red phone, as always. And we know that Gali is going to shout, “Nadav,” but it will do no good, and that Avishag is not going to shout his name, because she knows better, and we know that Nadav is not going to look right below Avishag’s eyebrows and do what she wants, because we know Nadav has no complaints to anyone but God.
Hamody closes his left eye and looks at the figure through gunpoint. She is four hundred meters from the land mines, now three hundred. She is running fast. Hamody releases his safety and takes a deep breath. His fingers are a bit jittery from the coffee, but he knows how to calm his nerves. There will be no surprises.
And yet as we watch Masha’s hair panting up and down in the wind, illuminating her from above like a gentle lamp, we cannot help but say:
Run, girl, run.
Faster.
The
Opposite
of
Memory
I wait for the bus to come get me.
I take off my uniform shirt but stay in a tank top. I let my hair down, let all the bobby pins plummet to the sand, let my curls drop to my shoulders; and then I hide my eyes with them. Because of the sun—it is so hot, my neck can’t hold my head up.
I wait on the side of the highway. The sun is
boom boom boom on my head. There is no bench, only a bus sign and the asphalt. No people in cars buzzing by, no one to be seen but me.
They let me leave the training base for the weekend because I said my mother was very sick. It was easy to let them let me leave. Dana, Amit, Neta, and Hagar were already discharged, and I enjoyed a special status as the last weaponry trainer who was there during the war, who was there when things were truly crazy and stayed after. Maybe they were scared I’d go crazy if they didn’t let me do what I wanted. I said I had to check my weapon in at the base, because I’d be sleeping at the hospital.
The truth is I need to take the bus to get to the mall to celebrate Noam’s engagement. She’s the first of the girls in our class to get engaged. Avishag called; she’d just been in jail, she begged me to come. She said even Emuna would be there, she convinced her and everyone, so who am I not to come also? And who am I? During our weekly phone call last weekend, I said to her, “Emuna, I want to see you.” She said, “Yael, you want a lot of things.” But she told me she’d come. I usually see her every month on my break, and I said we were coming up to almost one month and a week.
I LIED about my mom being sick, and I have no problem standing here without my uniform shirt, particularly since I am all alone. I stuff the shirt and the beret and the green commanding lace inside my JanSport backpack without folding anything.
I sit on the sand and lower my head; close my eyes and wait for the wait to be over. I feel a respite from the sun and the boom boom boom of the day, as if an invisible tree, or more likely a cloud, had relaxed itself right above me.
But when I raise my head, I see that it is not a cloud but a person—a military police officer—looming above me. He is wearing the military police blue beret and holding an open pocketbook. He is not resting. He is busy looking at me, without blinking, so that I know I am in trouble.
I lower my head, close my eyes, and wait for the wait to be over.
I remember moments that are the worst but also moments that happen all the time.
IN SEVENTH grade, my mother drove my sister and me to school, and our car was right behind Emuna’s car. Behind us stood Avishag’s mom’s car. I looked back and saw Dan sitting up front. I remember waking up that morning and thinking that my dream had hurt me, but I wanted to go back to it and say something more. My eyes were drained and angry. I put on my Dr. Martens and bell-bottomed jeans. We all wore Dr. Martens and bell-bottoms that year. My shoes were blue; Emuna’s were also.
I could see Emuna’s mother’s blonde hair in its bun and Emuna, chewing the sleeve of her red sweater. I could still taste the hot chocolate I had drunk minutes before. Outside, drops of rain fell on the banana fields and I could see the bananas and the dirt through my partially open window. The radio was scratchy; it played an old song, a song about a girl with hair that looks like black gold.
“It’s raining,” my mother said. “Close the window.” Even though our village is in the middle of nowhere, there were always traffic jams on the road leading to the school at this time of day. This was before they started the pickup vans. I liked it then. I liked looking at the cars ahead, particularly if I knew the people in them, and thinking of myself as a part of this chain, a note in this rhythm.
“Close the window,” my mother said. She turned her neck and looked at me in the backseat. “It’s raining.”
At school, Emuna and I walked through the broken gate together, right into the fluorescence and chatter and linoleum floors. The girls all swooped down on my chair as we sat down, and I took out my Bible homework from my JanSport bag. We all had JanSport bags that year. Mine was black; Emuna’s was purple and yellow plaid. She was the one girl who agreed to sit next to me that year, when Avishag and I weren’t talking because of the fight we had had about my crush on Dan.
We were studying Jonah for the second year in a row. There was a new teacher, and she didn’t know that we had already studied Jonah the year before.
The homework was even more insulting the second time around. I had a dream that night that Jonah told me, “You thought you were moving somewhere? You stupid girl.” He was saying that to me while he himself was trapped inside a whale, trying to escape God like some dumbass who didn’t know the rules of the Bible and how all the stories end.
We had to complete sentences by drawing lines from a column of questions—Jonah went to the city of … God told the whale to eat Jonah because … God killed Jonah’s tree because …—to a column of answers.
“She’ll let everyone copy, but I am first, so don’t push,” Emuna told the girls.
“I thought about you all weekend long,” I told her then. “I thought about you all the time. I missed you.”
Later that day, as we were eating our sandwiches (mustard-tomato-mayo for me, butter and cucumbers for Emuna), the new Bible teacher did not talk about Jonah but said that during the weekend her boyfriend had asked her to marry him when they were on top of the Azrieli mall in Tel Aviv. Under them, cars were buzzing, chasing each other, and the whole world hammered on and ahead. But not for our teacher, who said the world stopped.
Then Noam said that when she grows up she will be proposed to on top of the Azrieli mall, and we all agreed that was a good idea, except for Lea, who rolled her eyes. Lea always rolled her eyes.
The problem was that we didn’t realize it wouldn’t be our choice where we would be proposed to, or if at all. Noam’s boyfriend proposed to her on the bus. They had just gotten a call from their realtor, and then he asked her if she’d marry him.
But she wanted us all to meet in Azrieli to celebrate. To honor a time when we were children.
WHEN I twist my neck and see the military police officer, I laugh. Sometimes you have to laugh. Sitting on the sand, I have to. I have spent two years in the army, walking in and out of the busy shops of the Azrieli mall with my hair down during breaks, riding trains with blue eye shadow on my face. Once I even wore my nose piercing, the one Hagar convinced me to get, while in uniform when I was taking a bus from Tel Aviv Central, where it is always swarming with blue berets, eager to write you up.
And here, in this nowhere, two weeks before I am done with my service, this is where I get written up. Now is when they find me.
“Your ID number, soldier,” the officer says without looking at me. He is looking deep into the lines of his pocketbook, clutching the pen. Where the hell did he come from?
I lower my head again. I close my eyes.
“Your ID number, soldier,” the officer says.
I don’t answer. I raise my head and look at him, calm. He moves a bit, so that the sun again explodes on me. I squint and stare. He can’t make me talk. He can’t put his hands on my mouth, make it move and make air and sound come out of my throat. No force in the world can do that.
“Your ID number, soldier,” the officer says. “I am going to ask one more time, and then you’ll be in trouble.”
I know I won’t be in that much trouble. It will take a few days for the complaint to trickle from the military police down to my base. By then I will have only a few days of service left. The most they could do is make me clean bathrooms, but they won’t even do that. My commanders love me. I am the oldest trainer left in the base. Hagar and the other two are already doing Europe. The base has been quiet since the war a year ago. No one will go after me now. I even think my new officer, Shai, is in love with me. After all, I have been a good soldier. I taught a lot of boys how to shoot.
“I am not a soldier,” I say.
“You are wearing uniform pants and military boots. You are a soldier, and you have the chutzpah to walk around with half a uniform on?” the officer says.
“I am not a soldier,” I say. “I am not.”
Imagine that you know someone is something, you know it for certain, but that person keeps on saying that they are not that thing—they deny it and deny it to no end. Is there anything you could do? There is nothing you could do. If I am a civilian, he has no authority over me. Th
ere is no rule that says civilians even have to carry an ID.
The officer crosses his arms, and I smile. There is nothing more I need to say, but I speak.
“These are my sister’s pants,” I say. “I am just a middle-school girl. And you are a big armed man who is harassing me. I should actually cry.”
“Is your sister a soldier? What is her name? She can get in big trouble for giving you this uniform.”
“She is ten,” I say. “She is a very tall ten-year-old. I don’t know where she got these pants.”
“And the boots?”
“I bought them at Zara.”
“You did not.”
“Zara London, I swear. I am a well-traveled middle-school girl.”
“Come on,” the military police officer says. He is thumping his boots on the ground a little like a woman, even though he is a hairy man. He looks like he might throw a tantrum.
“I am not a soldier,” I say. “I am not a soldier.”
I keep denying who I am for a few more minutes. Then the bus arrives.
Sometimes I think of things and wonder why I never thought of them before. Sometimes I remember things and beg for mercy.
I CLIMB into the bus and pretend to be looking for money in my purse. It is only when the door closes that I take out my uniform shirt and put it on without buttoning it and show the driver my military ID, the one that lets me ride public transportation for free whenever I am wearing my uniform.
The driver doesn’t care about the shirt or the buttons or even the road. He is on his cell and signals me with his hand to step inside. As we drive away, I try to wave to the officer, but he is nowhere to be seen.
I sit by the window, two seats behind the driver. The red linoleum of the bus is bursting at the seams with foam and the window is covered in dust. I lower my head and close my eyes and I wait for the bus to get to Azrieli. I wait for the wait to be over.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 14