Miller was sitting in the dark by the kitchen table. He was tossing a banana from one hand to the other, catching it, and again. He didn’t look up from the table, even though we were standing so close he must have known we were there. Intruders. There were plates around the table, with peas and schnitzel and salad on them, and there were forks by the plates, yet the meals were only partially eaten, abandoned midway.
“Miller,” Lea said. “We are here to pour gasoline on you. Just like you did to the olive tree.” Her voice was steady, her feet planted solidly on the floor. She didn’t look at me. She looked straight at the down-facing head of Miller. At his bald spot.
Miller kept on tossing the banana. He followed it with his eyes. He didn’t look up.
When he spoke, his voice scared me. It was prickly, like it came from far away, from a place I’d never been.
“Ahh, meshugana girls,” he said. “You are crazier than I thought. Have you finally, after all these years, come to set me on fire?” he asked.
“You killed the olive tree,” Lea said. “It was thousands of years old, and you poured gasoline on it after the bar mitzvah.”
“I did what? Why would I pour gasoline? We barely had enough that day to keep the fire going,” Miller said.
“It is the only thing that can kill an olive tree. It is the only thing.”
“Well, monkey girl, no matter. Set me on fire. She is gone. Took the kids.” He began tossing the banana more quickly. “This is perfect, actually, just what would happen to someone who stays in this country,” he said. “You can’t scare me.”
“Did she leave because of the signs we put up?” I asked, before I could stop myself. Lea gave me a puzzled look. She stepped closer to me. This was not part of her plan, talking to him about his wife, but I was curious, curious as a child.
Miller began laughing. His laughter sounded more like a baby choking. “The signs? The signs? It is the missiles. The war. It was always the war. She couldn’t take it anymore, wanted to go back to England,” he said. “ ‘We can’t have something happen to the little ones,’ ” he added in English, imitating the voice of his wife. “ ‘This was all your crazy idea to move here.’ ”
He stopped tossing the banana and just held it in his hand. Then he did something fairly unbelievable, but it was true: he covered his face with his hands, still holding the banana, and began sobbing. It was hard to make out his words, but I think he said: “I should have gone with her. What’s in a country without a woman?”
I was still drunk, but not enough so that this didn’t embarrass me. I lowered my eyes and only then noticed that I was no longer holding the gasoline container. That it was now in Lea’s hand.
She looked displaced for a second. She looked at me like a disgusted kitten. “Why are we talking about this?” she asked, and then she opened the gasoline container and stepped right by Miller’s chair. “Miller, I will now pour gasoline on you,” she said, and this was what she did.
She lifted the container high but then lowered it under the table and, making whoosh sounds, she poured the gasoline on Miller’s pants and shoes. On his roots. The smell burst out; it made it easier for me to breathe somehow. Miller’s face was still covered.
Lea put the container on the ground, closed it, and then began to head away from Miller.
He looked up.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “I thought you came to set me on fire.”
“I came to do exactly what you did to the olive tree, and I did,” Lea said.
“What the hell?” Miller asked.
“If you were an olive tree, you would start dying right about now, but you are not an olive tree, and that is the point,” Lea said. “What you did is, you poured gasoline.”
Miller began sobbing again, this time without covering his face. It twitched in red and veins and tears. “No,” he said. “You ape! You said you were going to burn me, and this is what you’ll do!”
“No,” Lea said. “I can’t; that’s not what ‘exactly’ means.” She stepped closer to him again, her chin high, strong. Setting him on fire would go against her logic. Since forever, she had done exactly and only what made sense in her world. This was my Lea. Glorious, rigid, a creator of worlds.
“Burn me! Just do it. I don’t care,” Miller said.
“No,” Lea said. “This is what you get. You stay here. You sit here. This is what you get—” and she would have gone on, but Miller got up from the chair and grabbed her, twisting her arm so that her back pressed against him. Then he shoved the unpeeled banana to her mouth, and began cursing, calling her a monkey first, then rapid curses, curses I had never heard before. Lea kept her mouth shut tight, and the banana smooshed out of the peel, its soggy white smearing her face.
I ran toward Miller and kicked him with all I had. I kicked again and again and again and then Lea’s hand was in mine and we ran and we ran, through the door and into the olive grove.
WHEN LEA was in boot camp, her unit was called up to help with the Gaza pull-out plan. They needed boot-camp soldiers to pack up the belongings left behind by the settlers who refused to leave without being dragged, and they chose the boot-camp girls of the military police. I had not been drafted yet. Lea would call me with stories of a little girl who began eating the sand when she told the girl she couldn’t go back into her house, and of how bulldozers had made an entire college campus into nothing but red dust in less than twelve hours. She had stories, and she needed me as a friend again. One Russian woman set herself on fire right by the road where Lea was guarding.
“The thing that’s weird is the Popsicles,” she said. “I think they are afraid the soldiers would get too upset by all of this, so the army keeps on giving us Popsicles. It’s like it is summer.”
“It is summer,” I said through the phone.
“I know,” she said. “That’s what’s weird.”
LEA AND I marched through the olive grove back from Miller’s house. It was only five hours before I had to hitchhike to Nahariya and catch the train to Tel Aviv. I kept on walking, my mind unquiet. One step, two step. I began to skip, and then I raised my arms in the air, and then I froze midmoment.
“Lea,” I said. “Let’s pretend we are olive trees. Let’s pretend we lived and we lived for thousands of years and now we are alive.”
Lea stopped walking ahead of me, but she didn’t turn to look at me. “No,” she said. “I can’t.”
“Of course we can,” I said. “We can pretend. We could be trees if we wanted to.”
“No,” Lea said. “I really can’t. I can’t be a tree.” She looked at the dry yellow ground.
And she kept on walking, her body growing smaller, until she reached her backyard. I didn’t go after her. I stayed. And when I closed my eyes and opened them again, frozen still, she was not anywhere anymore, and it was just me, at a halt.
I tried and I tried to pretend that I was an olive tree. I told myself that I lived, and I lived, and even when there were tumors exploding under my bones and predators eating out my eyes, I thought I’d die but I didn’t. I stood frozen, eyes open, my arms misshapen in the air; I tried forever to be an olive tree, I swear. But without her I couldn’t pretend. I tried for hours. Until it was time for me to leave.
WHAT REALLY killed the tree was a rabbit. We have never seen a live one in the village, but my mother told me that when she went over to look at the tree a few weeks after I left, she saw the decaying body of a rabbit inside the dead trunk. She went over because Lea’s mother had told her she could smell something very wrong, but she was too scared and worn out to search herself. The rabbit was curled up inside itself, and its fur was almost gone. Its flesh blended with the bark and worms. Had Lea and I gone over to the tree and looked, we would have seen the rabbit ourselves, but we didn’t. In the end, we never came close enough to see it that night, or maybe we just didn’t look. We never could have imagined a dead rabbit, because we had never seen a live one.
Lea left for Tel Aviv too, a
few weeks after I did. She didn’t tell me. I found out about a year later. My mom told me over the phone. By then I was not in Tel Aviv anymore. I found out about that a week after I left the country for the first time, before I took the first of many trips around the world.
Here is what happened in the morning, the morning I left. I took my backpack, the big one, the one I used in the army. I had filled it the afternoon before, before I went to Lea’s, with all the clothes that still fit me, clothes I hadn’t worn in over two years. Aside from clothes, the only thing I took was the Rules. “The Page for Spaceship Rules,” the one I kept from school, after the janitor told us to take it down.
I stood at the hitchhiking spot, and I pointed my finger, and I waited. I waited beyond the shade, the asphalt stretching ahead of me, my back turned to the outskirts of the village, only burned banana fields at my side.
A green Fiat stopped, and it took me south and away from the border to Nahariya, the most northern train stop in the country. I waited with four soldiers and a mom at the train station. Then I took the train; I took the train asleep.
When I took the train to Tel Aviv, I didn’t yet know about the rabbit. And I didn’t even think or dream about the tree. I just slept. I woke up minutes before we arrived. The train station was swarming with people, all these people, walking here and there. A woman rubbed against my backpack and I was pushed forward. When I looked up, my eyes met a man. He was promoting a cell phone service. I could tell because his shirt read: “Connecting People.” He smiled at me and stepped forward, a neon orange pamphlet in his hand. I stood there, frozen. The heavy backpack chafed my skin.
“Excuse me,” the man said. “What’s your name?”
“No thanks,” I said. “No thank you.”
And Then
the People
of Forever
Are Not
Afraid
Having been born into the Zubari family, the largest Iraqi family in all of Israel, even Avishag’s hysteria was not her own. It belonged to the many women who lived in her time and to generations of Zubari women who lived before her in Baghdad. At first she called her hysteria sadness and nurtured it as if it were her child. One February morning, she woke up and forgot what it felt like to want anything. She was twenty-one, eight months out of the army, and she should have gone downstairs to grab her morning tea and the olive sandwich her mom had made for her lunch in the offices, but she could not, because she didn’t see the point. Instead, she stayed in bed all day until hunger was acid pooling at the bottom of her stomach and she had to run downstairs and stuff her throat with frozen pita and gulps of water she drank by pressing her lips to the kitchen faucet. As she was running down the stairs, there was something she wanted, at least for that minute, but after she ate, she would climb back to bed because there was nothing else she wanted.
When the nightmares started, her grandmother said to her mother, “She has hysteria” and also “We don’t want a repeat of what happened to her brother Dan.” Avishag and Mira, her mother, were living in Jerusalem at the time. The house where Avishag lost the will to move was her grandmother’s. Her mother had moved there before Avishag was drafted. In American television, being hysterical meant shouting and crying and turning red and breaking chinaware and laughing cruelly. But for the Zubari women, these were behaviors they engaged in regularly. When they did have hysteria, Zubari women were quiet and motionless, chinaware you wanted to break. Hysteria was not forever; it came and went. But it was a thing to hide—from future Zubari husbands, from the rest of Israel that wasn’t Zubari and female.
When his ex-wife started allowing Avi to visit his daughter again, when she told him that Avishag hadn’t left her bed in months, Avi didn’t know what to do, but he knew this time he had to do something. He had already lost a son he barely knew. Then he remembered that when he first got out of the army the only thing that soothed the lizards in his brain was driving around the stone walls of Jerusalem for hours and nights. So he bought his daughter, who had never gotten her license, a used car. A car that was once used by a person who was now desperate. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and the car Avi got his daughter Avishag went for two thousand shekels below market price.
“Six million Jews, that’s not nothing,” Avi said to Avishag the day he gave her the car.
His daughter wasn’t sure what nothing was not. She stared at him and then shielded her eyes from the Jerusalem summer with her hand.
“Two thousand shekels, that’s not nothing,” Avi said.
He had gotten the car from a survivor. He said, “She is a beauty.” He said, “She is American.” The car. The survivor was Polish. She survived the Nazis, but the whore couldn’t play him in price.
Avi had come to Israel from Libya. He was sick of hearing about the Holocaust because he had never even been to Europe, not even to Turkey on one of those “all-included” trips. And Europeans, the ones who had survived and made it to this country, they were the ones who ruined his life.
He told Avishag that driving around in the car was the only thing that made his days breathable after he got out of the army. He wanted her to learn.
Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and Avi had squeezed the woman who sold him the car two thousand shekels below market price. Not once had Avishag agreed to sit in the driver’s seat. He would come often and take her for rides after he got the new car. Weeks passed. Then he couldn’t come so much because he was busy being a contractor, or with his new wife, his new boys. Someone was always sick; one of the Palestinian construction workers was always missing his shift.
Then he’d wake up in the middle of the night. Thinking he had given up made his nightly sweats tepid.
“SMILE,” HE told Avishag at the start of the day of their twentieth “driving lesson.” It had been months since he had bought her the car. Avishag stood in her boy shorts in the parking lot outside her mother’s building and squinted at him. “This is the part where you smile,” Avi said. He took his Time cigarettes out of his jeans pocket.
Avishag pressed a chin to a collarbone and breathed out. When she glided her tongue behind her teeth, she tasted morning. It was past two in the afternoon, but her mother had managed to get her out of bed only ten minutes earlier. This was the earliest she had gotten out of bed all month. Those green boy shorts, she must have been wearing them for more than a week. Even her mother had given up on her. “Let your father take care of you for a bit,” she said. “Let him deal with it.”
“Blood-sucking dead fish, this whole family,” Avi said and tapped the hood of the car, like a man would to another man’s shoulder. “Your mother, and her sisters, and your mother’s mother, and your sister, and you.” He pointed at Avishag.
Avishag didn’t want to be a blood-sucking dead fish like her father called her. She didn’t want to be a blood-sucking dead woman. She didn’t want to be a dead woman. But what she did want, she didn’t know.
It was not her fault, Avi reminded himself. She had hysteria. This was hereditary, an Iraqi thing. At first he had still tried to ask her what was wrong. He had wanted there to be a certain thing that was wrong. He had hoped even for that thing to be a boyfriend, maybe an officer, someone who had hurt her, so that he could hurt him back. But when he asked her what it was, if there was a boy or even a man in her life, she said no. Lately, he didn’t ask about much anymore. He just asked for her to get better.
“Please,” Avi said, clasping his hands together, balancing his cigarette in his fleshy lips.
“Thank you for coming, Daddy,” Avishag said finally.
“Oh hon,” Avi said, removing his nicotine-stained grin and sunglasses. He tapped Avishag on her back. “All I want is for you to have whatever you want,” he said.
Avishag wanted to climb back to sleep. She had been forced to get out of the house for a bit. Her mother had gotten her out of bed by splashing water on her head. Her eyes were open, and they still stung a bit, still remembered the shock.
&
nbsp; Avi put his cheap sunglasses back on and blew a kiss in Avishag’s direction by gesturing an explosion with his hand from his lips, a gesture more appropriate for an Italian chef praising pasta than for a Libyan father cheering up his gloomy daughter.
“Come on, kid, let’s drive!”
This was their twentieth “lesson.” Enough was enough, he thought. There are times you have to decide that it is enough.
He twirled the keys in his fingers. His key chain was the symbol of Jerusalem’s soccer team. Avishag couldn’t stop staring at it swirling around his hairy knuckles; it was yellow, black, and foamy. When Avi was Avishag’s age, he was already married to her mother.
WHEN AVISHAG was five, her mother had hysteria. She had it for a year. Then another year, after she had their third child. Avi could count on one hand the times he had seen her out of bed that month. With one of his hands, he broke an almost empty bottle of Araq on the granite kitchen counter. He could smell the anise; it reminded him of chewing the dark licorice his grandfather had bought him in a candy store in Tripoli. Avi went into the bedroom. His wife was lying there in the dark, her eyes closed, her lips pressed together. Avi was very, very drunk. He put the entirety of his weight over her thin body but she didn’t wake up. He started crying. “Wake up. Wake up.”
He started cutting. The glass of the bottle was much sharper than he could ever have dreamed.
Oh, and he did dream. He did. For years after that. A decade. More.
In his dream he was holding just a dot of shiny glass, and when he pressed it into the sharp collarbone of his wife, a red line, a geometric line, flew into the ceiling. When the line hit the ceiling, it became a hovering puddle in the air of the room and then suddenly came pouring down on the bed in a splash of red. In his dream, he was drowning in his wife’s warm blood.
In life, he had merely injured her. The scar on her neck was no longer visible by the time they were divorced. In life, it was the social worker, the German social worker, who made her divorce him.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 19