And now she did.
“We have to let everyone know he is a murderer,” Lea said. “He needs to know he is a murderer. You can’t just kill an olive tree. You have to want to kill it, you have to murder it.”
Olive trees live for thousands of years. It was always hard for me to believe that, looking at those trees by Lea’s backyard. Their stems swirled into themselves as if caught midsentence, as if someone had just breathed life into them.
“I agree,” I told Lea. I always agreed with her. I will always agree with her, no matter what, I swear.
“It is not a matter of agreeing; it is a fact,” she said.
“I agree, but, Lea, how did you figure it out?”
Lea said that she’d been doing some research. Apparently, there is almost nothing in this world that can cause an olive tree to die. Specific types of fungus and bacteria can make it sick, give it tumors, but they won’t kill it. There is a bug that eats its bark and a caterpillar that attacks its leaves. Flies can reduce the quality of its fruits. Frost and rabbits could kill it, but this was northern Israel, and there was no frost, and there were no rabbits. And rabbits could only kill it if one of them crawled inside, got stuck, and died, and the body poisoned the tree from within. It happened in Spain once, according to Lea.
“And then there is gasoline,” Lea said. “If you pour enough gasoline by the roots of an olive tree, it dies.”
I looked at the remains of the tree ahead. A dark end. A clear beginning of something that had no middle. Its stem broke off in such an abrupt place, I bet that even if someone never knew there used to be more of it, if someone had never seen an olive tree or even any kind of tree before in his life, he could still tell something was missing.
“The bar mitzvah!” I said. “That’s when the murder happened!”
Lea nodded.
I remembered Lea’s mother telling us when we first got back from the army that while we were gone the terrible Miller neighbors became even worse. They moved on from merely throwing their raked leaves in the olive grove. They threw a bar mitzvah for their son in the olive grove, even though it was not their property and they had no right. They brought in all of their relatives from England and made pita from scratch on an authentic taboon, while marveling over the pastoral and holistic nature of their lives on the Holy Land’s border. In loud voices. “You have to understand,” Lea’s mother said, “these people are not originally from here, so they don’t understand.”
“The bar mitzvah!” I said again, and when I looked at Lea, she was smiling. An evil, honest smile.
“Miller used gasoline for the taboon,” Lea said. “My mom saw him. The idiot can’t even light a fire.”
“But why would he pour gasoline by the olive tree?” I asked.
“Because he had some left over. Because the tree was close to the taboon. Who can understand the mind of a murderer?”
We paused.
“A murderer, mind you, not merely a killer,” Lea said.
And then she showed me the posters she had made. Forty posters, on A4 paper. She had made them with crayons. Her baby brother’s. At the bottom they read: “Murderer of an Olive Tree: Wanted Dead or Alive.”
She had drawn Miller’s face herself. She made out his receding hairline in black and red crayon scratches. It got murkier with each poster.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I understood. I always understood her logic.
We left the backyard. We did.
We stuck the posters on the olive trees and on the benches in the street and on Miller’s car and even on his wandering cat. Lea stretched the tape, and I leaned forward and cut piece after piece with my teeth. Then we both banged hard to make sure the poster was stuck just right.
By the time we were back sitting and smoking in Lea’s backyard, Miller’s wife had begun screaming and slamming things as usual. But we didn’t scream at her to keep quiet. We counted till three and shouted, “Murderer! Murderer!” We got no response.
Even so, by the time Miller woke up, we believed he would know we knew what he was.
ONCE I pretended I could get a man killed. Once I said that draft dodgers deserve the death penalty. My mom always says that she bets the Miller kids will leave for England without being drafted, and I agree with her.
I pretended I could kill a man when I was in the army. This was a year after the war, right before I was done with my service. It was a game. I told my officer, Shai, that a man had winked at me. He was just an Arab construction worker, and I was just tired and far from home and bored. He had all the permits. He was brought to the base from his village to build a new part of the shooting ranges. “This is a mistake; I did nothing wrong,” he said with his accent. “I have all the permits,” he said. “I am building things in your base.”
“Don’t worry,” Shai said. “Don’t worry.”
He covered the man’s eyes with a weapon’s cleaning towel. The man put his hands behind his back on his own, and Shai cuffed them with real metal cuffs, not the fake black plastic ones the corporals had. “Don’t worry,” he said, and he sat the man in the back of the Humvee. I climbed into the back and sat across from the man. This was my wild idea, almost entirely my idea, but it was Shai who executed it.
We parked in front of the behind part of the sand dunes. Shai the officer silenced the Humvee. The vibrations stopped. He opened the back door of the vehicle. “Walk,” he said. “Don’t worry,” he said. But the man could not see, and he was breathing in and out, in and out.
“Walk,” Shai the officer said. “You can do it,” he said. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder.
The man walked in front of us like the spaghetti man from dreams. It was hard on his heart in fear.
“Stop,” Shai the officer said. “Face us.”
The man turned as if on a hinge and faced us.
“Don’t worry,” the officer said. “But,” he said, “you can’t wink at girls. There are certain things you just cannot be doing in this world.”
I opened my mouth to breathe. I watched.
“So what I have to do is, I have to give you a chance,” Shai the officer said. “What is gonna happen is that I am going to shoot, and maybe I’ll hit you and maybe I won’t, but if I don’t hit you, and you move when I shoot, then I will hit you for sure.”
“Is that Ok?” Shai the officer asked. “Nod if you understand,” he said. “You have to nod,” he said. “I am sorry about that.”
The man nodded.
I could see it but the blindfolded man could not: Shai was not aiming toward the man. His M-4 was pointing sixty degrees from the ground.
He shot. The man fell to the sand. He hit it with his face first. He shouted for a long time, but only after we couldn’t hear the bullet anymore. One long shout, a shout for a minute, and then a small shout, and then he breathed.
It was a bad thing to pretend about. It was a mistake. I was never good at pretending without Lea. That evening was when I said draft dodgers deserve the death penalty. I said it to Lea. Over the phone.
THE WEEK after she got back from the army, Lea and I had one conversation. We had it in her backyard.
When we had it, missiles were falling, as they tended to do where we lived, since always. We listened to the exit booms and waited for the explosions. We had heard them so many times before, we were pretty good at guessing where they would fall. We saw the thick gray in the sky and it was like seeing the same sky we used to see when we were little, like we were still little.
“I missed home. We missed home, right?” I asked Lea.
“I missed home so much. That’s all I did. I missed and I missed,” she said.
“So much,” I said.
“But these missiles, they remind me of the army.”
“Well, they are missiles.”
“Exactly.”
“They are the same missiles from before we left, though,” I said.
“Exactly. But not to me, you understand?”
What she meant
was, we missed home, and we waited for the moment when we finally wouldn’t have to miss it anymore. But now that we were home, we still missed it just as much. It didn’t go away.
This is what I thought she meant, but then again, she had no interest in leaving home again, and I did, so maybe I didn’t understand at all.
ONCE LEA and I pretended we were fish and cripples and stones. And when the school put in an elevator for the one human damage ever to be caused by the daily missiles—the crippled girl—we printed rules for it. We called the elevator a spaceship and posted rules for proper conduct in it, “The Page for Spaceship Rules.” No eating in the spaceship. No licking in the spaceship. No peeing in the spaceship. No speaking Romanian in the spaceship. No jumping up and down more than four times. The janitor took the page we made down right after he saw us hanging it and asked for our names. We were so happy we forgot all about the spaceship. Made-up names were our favorite thing.
“What are your names?” the janitor asked, looming above us.
We said we were Arnilan and Di.
THE EVENING after we hung the murderer posters, when I came to Lea’s backyard, everything was the same, except she was wearing sneakers instead of just socks, and there were two containers of liquids that had never been there before. The first was a big yellow gasoline container. The second was a bottle of peach schnapps that I recognized from her parents’ liquor cabinet. Last time we had taken sips from it we were twelve. Last time I had drunk had been two and a half years ago.
“This is what we are doing now? We are drinking?” I asked.
“Who’s we? There is only me. You are leaving tomorrow morning.”
This was the closest that Lea had gotten to showing anger because I was leaving, and I couldn’t help but think the alcohol must have had something to do with it. I wanted to be angry too.
I sat on the chair beside hers and took the bottle from her and had a sip. The pollen from the cedar trees had gotten everywhere, my eyes, my throat, even when my mouth was closed; the schnapps washed it away.
I tapped the gasoline container lightly and looked at Lea.
“What are we going to do to Miller?” I asked.
“He hasn’t responded to the signs at all, you know. No call to my mother, no shouting through the olive trees.”
I looked ahead and saw that Miller’s windows were dark. Even though it was time, I couldn’t hear him and his wife screaming or slamming drawers. I couldn’t even hear the chatter of the children talking about their cartoons and the toys their English relatives sent them.
“But what are we actually going to do to Miller?” I asked. “And where did you get gasoline?”
“I found it. It is easy to find. And I am going to do to Miller exactly what he did to that olive tree.”
“We,” I said. And I added, “Exactly?”
“Exactly.”
I understood Lea’s logic. How she thought of things. Things that were real and things that were not. I knew exactly what she meant by “exactly.”
Not too far from us missiles set fire to a banana field, and slowly the green fruit burned and the scent filled the night.
YOU WILL think I am saying something that is not true or that I think what I am saying is true but it isn’t, but I know it is true. When I was twenty-one there were times when what I wanted was to die. I don’t know why, but it is true. But most of the time what I wanted was to go work in the airport because it was good money. This is even truer.
I had only been to the airport once. It was to visit my uncle, who works in security there. It was a little before the army, in the few weeks I had after school ended and before boot camp started. I remember watching a mother running to greet her son. She kept on rubbing her hands through his greasy hair when she reached him. He seemed blinded by the fluorescent light. He was wearing dirty clothes, a striped shirt and red Thai fisherman pants. I remember a young couple in line to enter the boarding gates. They spoke English and kept looking at their airplane tickets. The guy rolled a pink suitcase and rubbed the girl’s shoulder with his other hand. A young security guard, wearing a blue uniform and a leopard-spotted handkerchief around her neck, kept on passing through the lines, asking the same questions. “Did you pack it yourself? Did anyone give you anything to take on the plane? I am only asking because in the past people were given packages that looked innocent and turned out to be bombs.” She sounded sincere every time she spoke to someone new, but no one confessed.
I won’t even have to ask questions. My uncle said the job he got me involves only sitting at a desk in between the airlines’ check-in and the duty-free counters and making sure no one passes through who looks suspicious. I will spend hours and months and days watching people leaving. And they will all look suspicious. It is always suspicious when someone leaves. I’ll never leave myself. After my shift is over, I’ll take the train to Tel Aviv and sleep alone. Then I’ll come back the next day. So that I can do the opposite of leaving again. People who see me on the train and don’t recognize my uniform, newcomers, visitors, may think I am going to the airport to fly away. I won’t even have to pretend. They’ll think it all on their own.
WE WALKED through the olive grove to get to Miller’s house. It was dark and the only light was the orange fire, far away and in the fields. I was the one who held the gasoline container. The olive trees were alive around us. We were drunk but felt drunker than we were. Not elated, exactly, but we felt for a few minutes like we were no longer waiting. The silver leaves were everywhere; the convoluted branches swarmed around our bodies. The trunks were stuck solid in the ground by their roots, but with every step we took the trees felt closer, animated, eager. The explosions from the missiles stopped.
Lea began running forward and then stumbled, held up her arms for balance, and stopped by a tree. Not the dead one. A live and short one.
“Think about this tree,” she said.
So I did. I stood in front of Lea and looked at her face and I thought about that olive tree.
Lea explained a lot of things, her speech rapid, improbable. She said that the tree lives, and it lives and it lives and it lives. For thousands of years. Flies attack its fruits and they nibble through its branches and it thinks it should just die, but it doesn’t. It lives, and then bacteria makes tumors grow in it, grow from the inside, dangerously and slowly, and no one knows and so then it thinks again that it will die but it doesn’t; it lives and it lives. It stays; it stays forever.
“It hurts,” Lea said, but she was smiling. I could see her gapped teeth in the dark. “It hurts to be in the midst of these trees. Can’t you feel them buzzing with too much life?”
I stretched my arms out into the air and tried to feel her words.
ONCE WE pretended we were reporters. Ten years before, when Lea still wasn’t too cool to hang out with Avishag and me, after the ocean one day, we pretended we were reporters and asked what happens in the morning. We asked it all day. We didn’t just ask one person. We asked a lot of people. I was sucking the salt off the edge of my braid when Lea asked the first person.
“Excuse me, swimsuit lady,” Lea called. We were running after a lady on a Nahariya beach. Avishag stayed on her towel. Our public pretend games always embarrassed her.
“Lady with the swimsuit! Excuse me!” Lea shouted.
The lady turned.
We were little girls and the lady was sorry for us.
“I am sorry. I am sorry,” Lea said. She was always sorry first, never after. “But excuse me. We are reporters, and we need to know, what happens in the morning?”
Back then Lea could draw her hand from mine, fast and far away, and I would only notice minutes later.
“What do you mean, ‘What happens in the morning?’ Is tomorrow a holiday?” The lady said. The lady didn’t know what Lea meant.
Neither did Lea. But she asked a man who smoked a cigarette the same question. He said that in the morning we wake up. We brush our teeth. We go to work or to school.
&
nbsp; I didn’t know what Lea meant. But I asked a woman eating watermelon and she said that maybe I thought she was someone she was not, because she didn’t know what I was talking about and she didn’t know what I thought she was supposed to do tomorrow morning. I told her I didn’t think she was someone she was not, and she cursed me because she wasn’t a woman, she was actually a young woman.
What happens in the morning? We asked and we asked and we asked. More than thirty people. To some of them we explained that it was for our school’s newspaper. To others we said we were reporting for a kids’ show. We didn’t laugh once. I remember that day; it was good like spaghetti after swimming.
We hitchhiked back to the village late at night. We waited at the corner for hours with smiles and no words. Nothing scared us yet. There was no explaining why we asked so many strangers that question, no right answer we expected. God did not plan that day for us. It was so random, only Lea could have planned it herself. In the backseat of the car that took us, Avishag fell asleep as soon as we got in, but Lea and I were so lit we couldn’t stop swaying our feet. She sank her teeth into my hand for a long time so she wouldn’t roar by accident. That’s how alive she was to me that day. She left marks.
THE DOOR to Miller’s house was unlocked. We crept in. I tried not to make a noise, but Lea just marched through the rooms of the house as if it were her own, her steps quick. We passed through the entrance hall into the living room. Some of the kids’ toys were scattered on the carpet; expensive, shiny.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 18