“There was no mention of the demonstrators,” Tomer said. They had reported the incidents to the Route 433 headquarters over the phone by the end of the first day, but no one seemed to care too much about them.
Tomer was on his back too that night, looking at the paper and then over at her. He crushed her shoulder with his. “You are crying, though,” he said. He had not seen her cry before. “Or is it the tear gas? You’re the one who told me to wash my hands twice before touching my face,” he said.
“I am not that stupid,” she said. “I am going to go to TAU for accounting, you know.” She had never talked to him about when she would leave before, and she did not know if he knew it would be soon.
“Then what?”
“My shoulder. You are hurting it.”
She had known they would come the next morning, and so she could study without being distracted. She only made four mistakes on the practice exam, all of them in the English section. All of them she had known were wrong before she checked, but she could not have guessed what the answers would have been on her own.
She had known they would come back, and so she went with Tomer to the checkpoint at the start of his shift. What she did not know was that the demonstrators would come with lab goggles and surgical masks. They looked like mad scientists, and she wondered where they had gotten those costumes, in their pathetic town in the West Bank and all. The boy wore cheap plastic sunglasses over his goggles, and she smiled when she saw them, and so he smiled back.
But when the man with the Guns N’ Roses T-shirt shouted, “It’s rubber day!” her face hardened. She used only her chin to signal him. She let him come closer than she had the days before.
“No,” she said. “A rubber bullet could kill you guys. This has gone on long enough.”
“But, but—” the man said. He thought better of the tone of his voice. He realized that he was not a customer, that he had every reason to be afraid of upsetting her. “That’s the point, though. They are going to report rubber for sure. They always report rubber.”
Lea shook her head.
“We won’t ask for anything ever again, we swear.”
She didn’t move.
“We just want this one thing, and you can give it to us. I mean—” he said. “Think about that.”
She thought about that and she knew then that she was done for, and that her face showed it. The man stepped away on his own, raising his arms slightly to signify that he was giving her all the time there was in the world.
“The boy has to move away because you have to be eighteen for rubber,” she said. She wasn’t sure if that was a rule but thought it might be.
The boy sat by the side of the road for half an hour and waited with his fingers in his mouth, and they wrinkled. That’s how long it took her to read the instructions. Longer. Tomer was standing above her as she read.
The instructions warned that the rubber bullets could kill. Aside from that, everything about them seemed designed to entertain and complicate a soldier’s life. It occurred to her to wonder how many soldiers had read those instructions recently.
The Romay was a metal barrel that you screwed onto the barrel of an unloaded rifle. Then you stuffed four steel bullets covered in rubber inside it from the top and blasted them out with a single demibullet you loaded in your magazine. If you blasted out fewer than four rubber bullets at a time, the demibullet would expel too forcefully, and the effect would be like that of real live fire. The bullets spread in a ten-degree angle from top to bottom, and you had to make sure you hit only the target’s legs, because if you hit other parts of the body, the effect would be like that of real live fire. If the target was farther than fifty meters, then it was out of the range of the rubber bullets. If it was closer than thirty meters away, then it was too close, because the rubber bullets would have the effect of real live fire.
The instructions were written so that if the rubber bullets killed a man, it was the finger that pressed the trigger that was to blame. It must have been the finger that was to blame because the instructions had cautioned against every other thing. She wondered how this would work in most cases, when the demonstrators were not three cooperative individuals with an A4 sign but an actual angry mob. But she did not wonder too much because her demonstrators were three cooperative individuals, and so what she did next was measure.
She told them to go very far and then walked toward them, counting her steps, like she had learned in boot camp’s measurement lesson. According to her calculations, they were a little less than fifty meters away from the sun umbrella. She signaled for them to take a few steps forward and then walked all the way back to Tomer.
The two men stood quiet, positioned in the exact measured spot where she told them to wait to be shot. They stood patiently, like tame children waiting for permission to go play in the park.
The kit had only a few demibullets, and so she put two inside Tomer’s magazine. The bullets were the same as regular bullets except they had no copper arrowheads.
“Below the knees,” she told Tomer. “Get on the ground and aim below the knees.”
It was the other man, the one she had never conversed with, who took the hit. He held his leg on the ground like a soccer player who had sustained an injury on the field. But before it was dark he limped away. His limping looked worse because he was supported by the other man on his left, and by the boy on his right, and the boy was shorter; he was small.
Live Fire
The one thing that is not a means of suppressing demonstrations is live fire, and Lea knew that the cooperative demonstrators knew this—they knew all the rules—and so she knew they would not come back. That night Tomer brought the entire newspaper to her out of laziness, and he was so rough that she spent moments on the cement imagining her spine as a string, and then that it had knotted, and then that it had snapped.
But they came back. The two men came back with bits of mattresses tied around their legs with pieces of cloth. They looked like they were half sumo wrestlers. And the boy with wet fingers just came back as a boy.
“We won’t shoot you with live fire,” she said. That was the only option left.
“Please,” the man said. He stepped closer. He stepped closer without invitation, and so did the boy and the other man. “Shoot and miss, just shoot and miss.”
“You have to have means and intent to kill for us to shoot,” she said. “That’s IDF Guidebook 101.”
“Please,” the man said. “We need to be in the newspaper. Page five, even.”
But she said means. Then she said intent. Then she said means.
“Means?” the boy asked.
“A gun,” Tomer said.
“Or a knife,” she said.
“Or a rock,” Tomer said.
He didn’t know what he was saying, because with that, the boy slowly bent to pick up a rock from the asphalt. It could not have been there, but it was, because it was the rock Tomer had used to practice throwing a shock grenade.
She raised her gun to her shoulder and charged the weapon and aimed at the boy. Tomer raised his gun to his shoulder and charged the weapon and aimed at the boy.
It was before the boy heard the man whisper in Arabic that he dropped the rock to the ground, as if he had been caught shoplifting it.
Then the boy put his fingers in his mouth and the guns were lowered and she thought the day and summer and place were almost over, but Tomer spoke up behind her.
“We could technically arrest him for that,” Tomer said. “We could, technically,” he repeated, and shrugged his shoulders.
“Please?” the boy said. He wasn’t asking her. He was asking the man. An arrest of a child was always at least page five, she knew. He’d be out in days; probably he’d be out in days.
The man shook his head, but then the boy said that the thing is, they just wanted this one thing, and now they could give it to themselves, and then he told the man to think about that and the man knew that he was done for.
&
nbsp; “Whore,” the man said to Lea as Tomer took the boy by the arm. It was what he needed to say to her. After all, she was a female checkpoint officer, and he played the role of the poor Palestinian, but the word felt forced and she was embarrassed for him.
After the men left, she and Tomer walked behind the boy toward the base to make the calls about the arrest. It took the men some time to leave, so night was falling by the time they walked back toward the barricade, but the orange road lamps were not yet on.
She quickened her step, because she wanted to walk in line with the boy. She quickened her step suddenly and then grew afraid that she had startled him. Her hand jumped and grazed his.
It was the boy who could have been afraid, but instead it was she who was afraid, and more, because she could feel it then and too much—the drying wetness of his hand now on her hand, and bits of dust from the rock he had held, and the wind. She could feel it all at once. She thought of how Tomer would later that night slam the entirety of his weight onto her bones, pressing them into the cement barricade. For a passing moment, she wondered if during that time he would call out her real name, rather than “officer.” She wondered if she should ask him, then remembered it was not an important detail to ponder. Those dates, the dates on both ends of her service. Whatever happened inside of them was decoration and air and would not change the place where she would end up.
She decided she would go ask to see the army psychiatrist the next day and ask to get released early, even though she had so little time left to serve.
AFEW years later they opened Route 433 again, but it only lasted a few months. There are still soldiers who spend three years doing little but saying, “Sorry, road is blocked,” to anyone stupid enough to try. When she heard the route was open, and then when she heard it was closed again, she could feel it: her own hand, the boy’s spit, almost as much as she felt it then and there.
Sometimes, at dark parties in Tel Aviv and on street walks and in rooms, she felt the spit on her hand, even when she was not forced to hear about Route 433. She felt it at dark parties and on walks and in rooms where she was never alone, where she was always with a person other than herself, and it was when those persons called her name that she felt it. What do you say, Lea. Thanks a lot, Lea. I agree with you, Lea. Every time she heard her name in the dark, she felt the boy’s spit on her hand that night on the walk.
That night, Tomer had trailed only one step behind her and the boy. They had walked, kicking stones, humming, staring at the stars before the lamps took some of them. She thought about all that had yet to happen but that she knew for certain would happen soon. The cement. The paper. The plea for shock.
“Lea,” Tomer said right before they reached the base. “Let’s remember to take bets on which page in the news this arrest will be. What do you say, Lea?”
And there was that silly question again, the one she had just chased. It came back. She wondered what he might call her that night, though she knew whatever word of the words of this world he chose would not matter. It would not shift the pace of the steps of the days, or even the pace of the steps of that night.
As they walked, the boy put his hand in his mouth again, the hand hers had just grazed.
That night, Lea was twenty-one, Tomer nineteen, the boy thirteen. They passed by the cement barricade in silence and with synchronized steps. Through the eyes of a villager looking out from within the light of a very distant home, they could have been a family.
Once
We Could
Pretend
We Were
Something
Very Else
Three days before I left the village, something almost good happened: Lea once again started caring about something that wasn’t exactly true.
“Listen, Yael. Miller killed an olive tree,” Lea said.
“Yes,” I said.
“It is the hardest thing in the world, to die. If you’re an olive tree.”
“Yes.”
“This was intentional. Premeditated.”
Lea turned her head away from the olive grove by her house and really looked at me, for the first time in weeks. She rested her cigarette in the ashtray. Night was falling around her backyard, purple, orange, huge. The shadow of the amputee lawn dwarf was lengthening, and the wind chimes rattled. Lea squinted, suggesting. She wanted me to say her new wild thought out loud, the one that was still growing, the first one she’d had in a long time.
And of course, I did.
“I believe we have a murderer in our village,” I said.
We were twenty-one years old. We had finished our military service, and I was about to leave the village for a job at the airport. I had been stuck in my parents’ home doing nothing for almost a year, but Lea’s extra time as an officer had only ended a few months ago. I’d lost touch with pretty much everyone except Lea and Avishag. It happened that way, that after all these years I ended up with the same best friends I made when I was in elementary school. I never spoke with Hagar or any of the girls I served with. Avishag was living with her mother at her grandmother’s in Jerusalem. She worked in an office, filing papers. Sometimes I still called Emuna, but she was in college already, in America. Lea planned to go to school, even took some entrance exams, but then realized that she didn’t know what she wanted from the future, and she didn’t know how to study for the future either. I didn’t know how to study for the future either, but I wanted it to come. I was thinking about a job.
It’s been years since Lea and I pretended together. But it’s also been weeks since we talked, since she told me anything that was true, even something true that wasn’t.
The olive tree was very dead. It was just a stem, a short stem. Its branches had turned dark one by one and then fallen to the ground. We weren’t there to see it all happen. We were in the army. When we came back, there was nothing left for us to do.
Miller’s wife began screaming, as she did every night after dinner. We could hear every word, traveling across the olive grove to Lea’s backyard. A drawer was slammed shut. Chinaware broke.
“Keep it down, you hooligans,” I shouted. After Lea grew silent, it was up to me to shout at her neighbors whenever they got loud.
“Meshuganas,” Miller’s scream came back to us.
“Hooligan,” Lea shouted. I pretended I wasn’t excited to hear her voice loud again, although my mouth dropped open without my noticing.
“Monkey girls,” Miller shouted. He called us monkey girls because our grandparents weren’t from Europe. We liked it, though. At least I still did. We once really liked thinking we were animals.
ONCE WE pretended we were wolves. We were twelve, and we were angry because after our bat mitzvahs our mothers told us we were now women. So we bit each other’s ankles. The people of the village spotted us walking on all fours through the streets and around the banana fields. Our mothers told us to stop, but we put their pants between our teeth and wouldn’t let go. On the street, we licked the toes of the girl in the wheelchair, and she laughed. When we got into Miller’s backyard, he screamed, “Meshuganas,” and chased us away with a shovel when we showed him our teeth. We howled stories to each other and we understood them until our bones were very tired.
We always pretended we had different ages, different names. We never ever told our real names when asked. Telemarketers, new teachers, new kids, vendors selling candy at the Arab market—they all wanted a piece of us. They didn’t really want to know our names; it was just a strategy to make us think they liked us. To get us to talk to them. To buy what they were selling. We wanted them to care about us, even if it wasn’t real. Once we cared so much, about everything. We wanted to talk to anyone we could. We lived so far away from the world. But we wouldn’t give our names up. We were Esther and Meek and Olga. Never us. Our world was small then, but larger than life because it happened only in our heads.
IF YOU are a boy and you go into the army, one thing that can happen is that you can die. The other thing that c
an happen is that you can live. If you are a girl and you go into the army you probably won’t die. You might send reservists to die in a war. You might suppress demonstrations at checkpoints. But you probably won’t die. A lot of things can happen to you after. You could get a job. Go on a trip. Go to university. Get married. Move back in with your parents. Lea and I both moved back in with our parents, back to the tiny village by the Lebanese border. By now I had a job waiting for me in Tel Aviv, as an airport security guard. My uncle got it for me. I could not have gotten it myself. Not then. It was good money. All you had to do was sit. It was good; even I could see that. Lea saw nothing. She didn’t even see it when the ashtray on the wooden table in her backyard was overflowing. She didn’t even notice when it was light out, because she usually woke up after sundown. Every time I came to visit, her mom would greet me by saying, “You have a job. You have a job, right? You hear that, Lea? Well, isn’t that nice.” And her mom would clasp her hands and go back to the kitchen, and then the two of us would sit outside, look at the olive grove, and smoke so much, we couldn’t talk. There were only eighty-two houses in our village. One house right after the other, until they ended. Except for Lea’s house. There was an empty lot that separated her house from the Miller house. It was an olive grove. Because no matter how much sense it made to put another house there, they couldn’t do it because of the olive trees. It is highly against the law to kill an olive tree. You are not even allowed to uproot one.
We were girls. I know we were just girls. We did what we did in the army, and then it was over. If Lea was having a hard time talking or leaving her parents’ backyard when we were twenty-one, it was not because of the past; I know that. I admit it; the problem was the future of the past. It existed outside our heads, too large.
THE EVENING after Lea told me Miller was a murderer, I went back to her backyard, and everything was almost the same as it had been for the past few weeks. She was wearing her red pajamas. She was sitting on the plastic chair, staring at the olive grove, smoking. The one thing that was different was that she was holding a stack of paper in her hands. I wondered if she was going to spend her whole life sitting in that backyard, staring at that dead tree and smoking. That night, it didn’t seem impossible. She dragged the smoke into her lungs like her life depended on it, until her face rutted. I didn’t know what to say. When we were little, and friends, it was always she who spoke, who told me what we should care about next, who we should be. I sat by her for days and weeks, waiting for her to care about something, anything, even just a little.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 17