“Oh,” she said.
“The army didn’t do it,” Tomer said. He flicked his cigarette butt down to the asphalt of Route 433. He was talking about Huda, the little Palestinian girl on the beach. The newspaper picture showed her screaming amid red sand, near the body parts of the six people that were her family.
“I know,” she said. “This is a manipulation.”
The world said the Israeli army had done it with an air strike, but the Israeli army knew that the family had been killed by a dormant shell that Palestinian militants had left by the ocean. Lea looked at Tomer. The orange light of the road lamps lit him from behind, so that he could have been a demon. He was nineteen, two years younger than the officer.
“It’s just that I can’t feel my body all of a sudden,” she said.
“Again?”
Lea often told him that she couldn’t feel her body. That she could move it but not feel it. That those were two separate things. He never questioned her; he pushed her. This was what she wanted.
Tomer took his weapon off his back and pressed her shoulders into the cement. When their pants were pulled down, he pressed his hands on her neck, then her arms. He called her “Lea” during the day because this was her name, and because she said he could. At night, when he was pulling her hair so tight her scalp buzzed, he called her “officer,” because this was what she said he should call her then, and this was what she was. She wanted him to call her that then, because it was when he was closest and roughest that she knew he most needed to be kept at bay. When she looked to the side, she could see the warm glow that came from inside the homes in villages of other people.
She knew her service days were nearing their finish line but could not feel it. She could not imagine or remember any of the things she had wanted before she became a soldier, and she struggled to find things she wanted for her civilian life ahead. She guessed she must want a family or to get into a good school, but she guessed it from the data around her. She did not feel the want herself. When she had first begun feeling this way, less than a year into her service, after the neck of one of the soldiers at her checkpoint was cut almost in two, she had decided the only reasonable thing she could truly want must exist inside the army, and so she decided to become an officer. She did not want to be a dumb checkpoint soldier anymore, the type whose neck could get cut almost in two. She wanted to be able to yell at soldiers who put their necks where they might get cut. She grew to accept that her service days would begin and end in the transitions unit but figured that if she had to be at a checkpoint she might as well be a checkpoint officer.
Tomer did almost everything she asked him to without asking a lot of questions. He was a reasonable nineteen-year-old boy. And Lea, she had this certain beauty, after all. A cold, humming, unfazed beauty, and great breasts. She was also the only girl who was sprinkled inside his days. And he was passing his own time—his own time as a soldier.
Lea woke up alone in her field bed the next morning. She was in her own tent because she was the only female at the post.
It was an odd posting. Route 433 bred oddness all along it. It cut through the West Bank but had been closed to Palestinians since 2002, when the motorcyclists were shot. The army somehow needed four soldiers and a commanding officer for an improvised checkpoint every hundred or so kilometers, so she found herself commanding four boys who manned daytime guarding shifts in an always deserted checkpoint. All so there would be someone to say, “Sorry, the road is blocked,” in case someone did decide to show, even after all this time. This had little to do with her earlier service days in a gigantic checkpoint and had almost nothing to do with who she was. This posting would have made her angry, except she knew her service was over in a few weeks anyhow.
She spent the day in bed reading a prep book for university entrance exams. She hoped to make high enough marks to study business. She was supposed to check in with the boy on duty twice a shift, but she didn’t bother because nothing ever happened. Except that day something did. Tomer, who had the afternoon shift, called her military cell to say that there were three male demonstrators at the checkpoint.
“Have they thrown rocks or anything?” she asked.
“No, but they have a sign. And they keep on arguing with me that I, like, disperse them, even though I explained we don’t have any means of suppressing demonstrations here.”
“That’s not true.”
She was suddenly more excited than she had been since before she had been posted on Route 433. As an officer, she knew that every checkpoint had a supply box to be used for demonstrations. Finally, she thought, her training was good for something. And if the demonstrators insisted, she must aim to please.
She unlocked the metal supply closet in her tent and pulled out a wooden box. It was heavy, so it took her a while to carry it to the antisniper barricade and then to cross the road to the sun umbrella that marked the checkpoint.
“We had a lesson about demonstrations and stuff in boot camp, but I forget,” Tomer said.
Two of the three Palestinian demonstrators were in their thirties, and one was just a boy, a boy with fingers in his mouth. They had one sign, a piece of A4 paper on which they had written with a marker in English: “Open 433.” One of the men was wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. He raised his hand, so she signaled him with her hand to step forward. She signaled him to halt when he was four steps away.
“Officer, we are here to demonstrate against the restriction of our mobility, which is a collective punishment and against international law,” the demonstrator said in solid, accented Hebrew.
She put one hand on the handle of her weapon and one in her pocket. “How come there are only three of you? This is hardly a demonstration.”
“I do apologize, officer. We have a wedding this week in the village, and, you see, other people, they are not serious,” he said. He bowed a little as he spoke. “Is there any way you could disperse us just a little, enough for a press blast, or something?”
She had meant to be cruel, but the man was being rather sweet. He squinted his eyes at her as he spoke and looked more like a bank customer asking for an increase of his credit limit than a demonstrator. It made her feel, a little, like it was the real world.
“We’ll see what we can do,” she said.
She sat on the asphalt and opened the wooden box. There were printed instructions inside, tucked inside a sheer nylon sleeve. Tomer signaled the man to step back and wait. He sat by her and they both read.
The purpose of Means of Suppressing Demonstrations is to suppress demonstrations. It is intended to intimidate and at most injure, but the purpose is not to kill. One general guideline:
*Use from light to heavy: shock, tear gas, rubber. We must minimize damage when possible.
Grenade 30, the shock grenade, was designed to stun and scare by creating a loud noise. The instructions said that if exploded within a two-meter radius of people, it could cause problems in the eardrums and light injuries from the plastic, so Lea told the demonstrators to step back a bit. They walked back while still facing the sun umbrella, and after a while, the boy took his fingers from his mouth and gave her a hesitant thumbs-up. She didn’t quite know how to respond to that, so she gave him a thumbs-up as well—he was far enough. Then she quickly put her hand back on her weapon.
The shock grenade was orange and cone shaped. It had a red stripe encircling it. She held it in her hand and then bent to the ground to lift a rock. Her fingers were stiff around the rock’s dry surface. She dropped it from the air into Tomer’s hand.
“You are the soldier,” she said. “And besides, it’s been longer since I last learned about this stuff. Let’s practice.”
They pretended the rock was a grenade. She gave him the instructions as if she knew them by heart, though she had just read them moments earlier. She reminded him to keep the grenade in the palm of his hand and to secure the lever with his index finger. She explained to him how to thread the middle finger of his left hand inside the safety as i
f it were a ring and to pull the safety with a spin of his wrist, as he would if someone were to ask him what time it was. She raised her voice at him a bit, because he pulled his arm back for the practice throw without accompanying it with a constant look.
“The instructions say after you take the safety out you have to look at the grenade at all times, because you only have three and a half seconds until it explodes. What if you took your hand back and hit a wall?”
“But I know there is no wall behind me,” he said.
“What if there were suddenly? What if a bird came? It is not nice to have something explode in your hand, even a shock grenade.”
After a couple of dry runs, it was time for the real thing. The boy had his hand in his mouth again, and one of the men was wiping his brow with his forearm. The heat radiated from the asphalt between them.
“Ok?” she shouted at them. Then she and Tomer put their earplugs in their ears.
She thought that anything in this world that one could guard against with pieces of foam in the ears could not be so powerful, but every time a grenade exploded, she felt the noise in her hip bones like a jolt and in her mouth like a hint of metal.
She thought that the three of them would stay longer, but after four grenades the demonstration was dispersed. Everything went according to plan, just as she and anyone who was standing in her position would have anticipated.
During her school years, she had felt like every minute was part of a race. Get that grade. That boy. Buy that shirt. Be the most popular girl. Don’t let any other girl disobey you. Throw the best parties. Go. Go. Go, before someone else gets there before you. But the army was a numbing respite from that eighteen-year-long, breathless race. The army—it began and it ended, and she knew that. All of it was owned by the predetermined dates of its start and finish, dates within which none of what she had done would matter. Whatever it was she did, the army would end when it would. She would arrive at the same spot, that same station near the base where soldiers returned their uniforms at long last. It was difficult to feel anything, knowing this. Most of her days were procedures and orders, going from one dot to the next in what appeared to be the one and only possible straight line.
She tried, a bit, still, sometimes, to jut out of the line, the way a drawn line jutted during her school years when her thumb on a ruler forced the pencil off course. She tried with sex, with hurt, and shocking newspaper articles, sometimes, but she did not try too hard.
Tear Gas
The newspaper page Tomer brought to the barricade that night was about a girl who had been killed by her mother. The girl was an Israeli Arab from a northern village, and she had become pregnant by one of her brothers, who had both raped her and were expected to receive a harsh sentence. The picture showed the girl on the day of her high school graduation, smiling and wearing jeans. She had a generous, good-girl smile, the smile of that schoolgirl you couldn’t even gossip with about the actions of soap opera characters. The mother was expected to receive a light sentence, because the killing had been done in the name of honor, and with passion, and one has to respect another’s culture. The mother had used knives and a cane and a plastic bag, and she swore that she had first urged the girl to take her own life. The article ended with a quote by a butcher from the girl’s village, who explained how a woman shamed is always like rotting meat, and sometimes there is no choice. If you don’t cut it off immediately, the shame will fester its way into the whole family.
The officer let the boys keep the newspaper that the delivery truck brought every morning, with the promise that Tomer would save her the most shocking parts to read at night. She didn’t want to waste time reading the things that would make her feel less than what was most.
“I thought that little boy was going to cry,” Tomer said. He was wearing his undershirt and uniform pants, even though she had told him she didn’t like it when he stepped out of the residential section not in full uniform.
“No, he wasn’t,” she said. “It was just some noise. I didn’t even think that would disperse them, but maybe they just wanted something symbolic.” She could hear a radio from a house singing in a language not her own.
“It was like, boom!” Tomer said. Then they didn’t talk anymore.
She hadn’t told him she couldn’t feel parts of her body that night, but on the cement they had acted as though she could not feel anything at all and everything was fair and necessary as long as the other soldiers could not hear their noises. The tents were only half a kilometer away from the antisniper barricade, and sometimes she screamed loud enough she thought she should worry.
Her hours, the sands. She passed through them like a ghost she had read about in a teenage book she had once bought at the supermarket. The ghost was in a house but could not open drawers or pick up a coffee cup. She could not move a thing and her existence did not matter, was not felt. Lea lived encircled by a fog made of cotton balls.
The demonstrators came back the next afternoon. She spent the first part of the day wondering if they would. She made mistakes on one of the practice tests she took, even on one math question that was little more than algebra and common sense.
The demonstrators came back, this time with earplugs.
She didn’t need to carry the wooden box to the checkpoint this time because she had told the early-morning shift soldier to take it there just in case.
“What is it we can do for you now?” she asked the man as he carefully approached. He was wearing the same T-shirt as yesterday. The boy was the one holding the sign this time, but he still had his fingers in his mouth.
“The thing is, no one is going to write a story about a few noise crackers,” the man said. “That’s the thing, officer.” He was cautious, like a customer who had bought a shirt and demanded a refund even though he had already worn the shirt more than once. But he stood strong, like he was determined to insist as much as he could.
“The boy could get hurt,” she said. Tomer stood behind her, drumming on his collarbone with his fingernails.
“He is thirteen,” the man said. “That’s a man for you. That’s bar mitzvah.”
He looked younger. She remembered the instructions said that no matter what, means of suppressing demonstrations should not be used against children. She also remembered a long discussion in her officers’ training school about children being anyone whom you could not possibly imagine already having had his bar mitzvah, wearing a suit and reading at the temple and all that. These demonstrators really knew their stuff—informed consumers or whatnot.
The Federal, the gun used for shooting gas grenades, looked more like a toy gun than any actual toy gun she had ever seen. It was essentially a brown tube with two silver handles, one in front and one in back. It looked like it had been spray-painted. The instructions for it were long, and besides, she didn’t want the man to think he had the power to make her move faster, and so she shooed him away without a word of promise and sat on the plastic chair under the sun umbrella to read.
For some reason, the instructions were half history. By the end of a few minutes she knew that the Federal gun was invented by the Federal Police in New York, America, by a company called Federal, hence the name! In the army, sometimes, she had to wonder who wrote certain instructions for certain procedures and who supervised that writing. It seemed like each document was allowed to have its own life. Sometimes there were still surprises and a bit of life in the army. Small times.
The grenade used as the Federal’s ammunition had a diameter of thirty-seven millimeters, and its gas was of the CS type. It was silver with a blue stripe and looked very pretty and technological. The Federal had aims, and this worried her because both she and Tomer were terrible marksmen, which is what had landed them on Route 433 in the first place. But the instructions said that the aims were not to be used, because the shooter doesn’t aim directly at an individual target, since gas disperses, duh. She felt stupid when she read that, but probably not as stupid as the person who had
designed the weapon. The instructions actually warned against shooting through aims, because gas could seep out into the eyes of the shooter. When she put her hand to her nose, she could smell a bit of the gas already, cutting into her lungs like grain.
The instructions said that the effective range was up to eighty meters, but it didn’t say which range was close to being dangerous, and so she positioned the demonstrators at a distance that appeared to her to be about fifty meters, then thought better of it and told them to take a few steps farther back.
She licked her finger to check the direction of the wind but could not feel a thing. She loaded the gun with the grenade, pointing the barrel to the ground and then snapping it shut. She hoped for the best wind and aimed at a forty-five-degree angle from the ground.
All this time, she had not said a word to Tomer and he had not said a word to her. But then she signaled him to take her place holding the gun and said, “Literally, all you have to do now is press the trigger, but press it hard because the gun has no safety, so the designers compensated by giving it a stubborn trigger.”
Then she waved to the demonstrators, and even though Tomer had not counted, had not warned, there was the slightest sound of a thing coming undone, and then the demonstrators’ faces were red and wet and screaming and then they ran and were gone.
Rubber
There were not enough stars that night, and on the barricade Lea looked like she was crying. The lights of the homes around her went out one after the other. The picture in the newspaper page Tomer brought was that of a bird that in two years was said to be going extinct. The bird was an eagle with a gray tail, but the newspaper said it was called the white-tailed eagle, which had made her think the picture and story could have been lies. But the bird looked angry through its eyes in a way she had not known birds could be, even ones who knew they were going extinct.
“This is the worst you could find today?” she asked.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 16