“THERE IS an empty parking lot by Motza,” Avi said on the day of the twentieth driving lesson, and turned the wheel to the right. He put in a tape, a song he knew even back in Tripoli, where all the women were dark and young, and daughters like his didn’t happen. “It is a great place to start learning to drive,” he said.
Avishag opened her mouth, but it was only to put a chunk of her hair inside of it.
“Say something,” Avi asked.
She knew better.
BEFORE AVISHAG met with the army doctor, the one who signed the papers authorizing an early release from the military, Yael had told her that if things were really that bad on the Egyptian border, all she had to do was say something. Anything, really. She could say she believed she was a butterfly, claim she wet the bed, explain that it was her teddy bear who bought her cigarettes. She could say she had already gotten in trouble once and that if they kept her she’d just do something to end up in military jail again, like she ended up after she got naked in some tower. She liked jail so much it was harder to get back to routine. Something, anything to give the doctor an excuse to claim that she was crazy. It took two weeks to get a referral to an army psychiatrist, but Yael claimed that getting out of being a soldier was not so hard. They don’t want the liability. There are enough soldiers in this country.
But when the doctor leaned over his desk and asked, “What is it you wanted to talk about?” she drew a blank.
She looked around his office. His ashtray was clean; the marble sparkled. On his wall he had the map of the country, like any other officer. On top of the drawers at the side of his desk, a dirty aquarium rested. The fish all swam in circles, gold and sapphire and gilled. Avishag had never seen a doctor before. The Zubaris, being Iraqi, did not believe in them. Choosing a crazy sentence from the millions of options she had was impossible. Her voice would not let her do it.
The doctor coughed and said, “Well?”
In the end she chose to say something that was almost true.
“This aquarium makes me think it is the Holocaust of fish.”
She did not remember where she got that idea; it was scavenged from a bottomless body of water, but it was also not a complete fabrication. She was dismissed two days later. She did not talk to Yael much after that because she could not bear to tell her she had been dismissed for a crazy sentence she almost believed.
ON THE hills around Jerusalem, a pickup truck stood before Avi’s car covered in neon bumper stickers.
“The People of Forever Are Not Afraid,” one of them read. “We Have No One to Lean On But Our Father in the Sky.”
“Don’t do that, hon,” Avi said.
Avishag had the tip of her black ponytail in her mouth. She opened her mouth wide, like an elderly woman, and it fell out, dangling on her chest.
“That’s how I love you,” Avi said.
AFTER THE rabbis finally approved the divorce, Avishag and her father were allowed to meet only with the German social worker present. Her hair was dyed blonde and mounted on her head like a sand castle, and her nose was small and pink—a snout. She sat on a leather office chair, but Avi and Avishag sat on colorful wooden chairs, the chairs of children. Avi’s butt was too big for the chair; he squirmed like a fried worm. Avi had had to drive all the way up north, because that’s where Mira had moved to. On the tiny desk there were puzzles of smiling ducks and Barbie dolls and books. Avishag put a lump of hair in her mouth and stared right at him. His son, Dan, refused to see him. The German social worker said he was big enough to decide that. He was twelve. Mira had said she’d bring the youngest girl if things “go well” with Avishag.
“You could read to her,” the pig-faced social worker suggested. She wiped her nose with her wrinkly hand.
This was, by far, the stupidest suggestion Avi had ever heard. If things had turned out differently, this woman would be stuffing her mouth with a pork sausage in a café in Berlin just now, and he would be riding on a horse with his daughter across the markets in Tripoli, buying her dark eyeliner and purple scarves. In Tripoli, girls started wearing makeup when they were as young as eight, and they always kept a scarf across their faces. This woman, she was not even wearing lipstick, and he could swear that her exposed hairline was receding. This woman, she did not know what being a woman was.
“I don’t read,” Avi said. What he meant was, he couldn’t read, not well enough for a book.
“Oh, I see,” the German woman said. She must have thought he meant he couldn’t read Hebrew, but really he couldn’t read much at all. His family had fled from Tripoli to the refugee camps when he was ten, and he had forgotten the little he had learned. He had lived there, in the tents, which later became a caravan town, right by the ocean, until he was old enough to join the army. He had forever been behind the other kids. He wasn’t smart enough to make out words.
Oh, but he could make his daughter, and he did make his daughter, and his daughter, she knew already what being a woman was. She was only eight, darker than even he was, and she took his face in her tiny palms like a lady, like a mother, and she said, “Father, I do not want these stories. I want your stories. Tell me your stories.”
He had never told a story before. The German woman smirked.
He put his daughter on his lap.
“She has to stay in the chair,” the German said.
“Oh, Ok,” he said. Avishag went back to her chair. She took his hand.
“One time, in this one country, there was this one mom and this one dad,” he started.
“I think your wife would appreciate it if you didn’t get into personal issues with the child,” the German said.
Personal issues! “The child” had been made by him. What could he tell her that wasn’t personal? Those Europeans, Avi thought. All this spiteful formality. They have no hearts. Hitler burned theirs.
“One time, in this one country,” Avi started again. He paused, then spoke again. And that was the beginning of the only story he ever told.
“JUST DO something,” Avi said once they had reached the parking lot. He and Avishag were leaning on the front of the car. It had taken him five minutes to convince her to step out of the passenger seat, and even that was progress from the previous times. That was something, at least. He wouldn’t give up hope yet.
He offered her one of his Time cigarettes, and they stood there smoking. In the abandoned parking lot, there was nothing but asphalt, yellow weeds, and a semi trailer with no wheels.
“Just sit in front of the wheel for one minute,” Avi said. “For me.” He clasped his hands and even considered getting down to his knees.
“I am too hot,” Avishag said. “I am going back in.” The cool air of the car, it was a small thing she wanted, and this for her was something, at least.
Avi thought about giving up.
Then he thought about that bumper sticker, the one glued to the back of the pickup truck. That sticker, cheap, pink, idiotic, real. “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid.”
It was for his daughter that Avi had learned how to read. He had spent hours laboring over a single article in the sports section of the paper. And then suddenly, years later, he had noticed that he had read the whole section in one sitting, with ease, during a visit to the toilet.
He thought about his middle daughter every time since, whenever life was, for a moment, as easy as living. Playing soccer with his little boys, buying his new wife a gorgeous chunk of lamb, buying a used car.
His daughter opened the door to the passenger seat up front slowly, careful not to hit the curb. The door squeaked.
“Sorry,” she said.
So she opened the door faster and indeed scratched the curb. “So sorry,” she said.
Finally inside the car, she closed the door behind her gently, too gently; it didn’t close. So she slammed it harder. Thump.
“Sorry,” she said.
Too hard, she slammed it too hard. “Sorry, sorry,” she said.
Inside the car, Avishag br
ought her palms up, as if defending herself from a bear.
Avi got into the driver’s seat and stared at her with his palms under his armpits, his elbows resting on his belly.
“Sorry” a million times a day. “Sorry,” her only word almost.
“Sorry.”
This was her way of saying, Do something.
“Sorry about what?” Avi asked. “The only thing you should be sorry about is that you won’t even put one hand on the wheel.”
She had this way about her, his middle daughter. He hadn’t spoken to the younger girl since he had left. He had never seen Dan grow older than ten and had been asked not to come to his funeral by his ex-wife’s mother. The younger girl was now going by the dumb nickname “Tzipi” and was happy, Mira, his ex, told him one time after he dropped Avishag off from one of their “driving lessons.” What she meant was, happy not to talk to you. But Avishag, she had this way of making him put words into her mouth. Stories, even. Sometimes he would drive with her for over six hours. They wouldn’t exchange a sentence, and by the time he dropped her off, he would feel as though he had learned something, although he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Like there was something more he could have done but hadn’t.
“Just one hand,” Avi said.
She was quiet for a long time. She was always quiet. But then. “You know,” she said. “One time in the army I saw a Ukrainian woman get shot in the head.”
“A Ukrainian woman?”
“Maybe she was still a girl.”
Avishag brought the tip of her hair to her mouth and then let it fall.
Ok, Avi thought. Ok, and also, at least now I know. And he breathed.
“So, is this the thing?”
Avishag rammed her eyebrows at each other. She almost even turned to look at her father. Her face had more expression in it than it had had in a while. She was confused. “What do you mean? What thing?” she asked.
“You know,” he said. “The thing why you won’t drive and—”
“What thing? There is no thing. I am just scared of driving, that’s all.”
“You are just scared?”
“I just am.”
And with that, Avi knew again what he had thought he knew before, but this time he knew it better, and for real. There was just her. There was no thing. There was just his daughter.
Avi reached over and opened the glove compartment. He could smell the sweat on his daughter’s feet. He wondered when she’d last showered. He pulled out a purple scarf he always carried with him. His mother’s. The only thing he had left of her.
“Close your eyes,” Avi said, and Avishag did. He tied the scarf firmly around her eyes. She didn’t move. He sprung his fist in her face. She did not flinch. He made sure she could not see.
The story:
“One time, in this one country, there were people. Then a king came, and he wanted the country to himself, so he sent the people of that country all across the world. He put one sister in one part of the world and another sister in another part of the world. Some of them he sent to Russia. Others he sent to Africa. A few he even sent to live where polar bears live.”
“Polar bears, Daddy?”
“Yes, baby.”
“What happened then?”
“Then the people of that country lived all around the world. Many years passed. Millions of years. But they couldn’t forget that they were really not from Russia or Africa, that they were from that one country, and they always hoped that one day they could come back.”
“And did they?”
“Not at first, hon. They wanted to, but they didn’t know how. They didn’t have phones then, so the people in Africa didn’t even know if the people in Russia remembered them.”
“So did they ever come back?”
“Well, then one year, the people in Russia and the people in Africa and the polar bears even, all the people and animals who never lived in that one country started killing all of the people who did once live in that one country.”
“Did they drown them?”
“Drown them?”
“Like my fish?”
Avi thought of his mother’s red and purple and swollen body the day they left Tripoli. Of how they had killed her. About the smell coming from the irrigation ditches all around the walls. When he was a child, he knew what death looked like. All Avishag knew at eight was about her fish. It had died when she was four. Her mother hadn’t even made her see it. She had told her it drowned. That was a good thing. But it wasn’t in any way true.
“Yes, hon, they drowned them.”
“Oh no!”
“But some of them climbed out of the water.”
“Good! And then what?”
“And then the ones that made it out of the water decided to go back to that country they left a million years before. They came back to the country from Africa and Russia and all over the world.”
“And then what?”
“What do you mean, ‘Then what’?”
“What did they do there?”
“They lived.”
“But what did they do?”
“They lived. They lived like we live. They built houses and paved roads and planted trees. You know, they worked.”
“And then what?”
The German social worker pointed at her Swiss wrist-watch. Their time was up.
Avishag must have repeated the story to her mother, or maybe the social worker told. And Mira didn’t care for it. The killing part. That was that. She won full custody. She took the kids and went to go teach in some northern village.
The next time he was allowed to see Avishag she was already nineteen. A soldier. Her shoulders bulked under the uniform. They met at a McDonald’s in a gas station outside her base. It was the only thing open all night, and her only free time was at five thirty in the morning. She was an infantry soldier in Egypt, serving in the only female infantry combat unit, and one of the other girls must have wanted her to take her shift for her, because she walked in screaming on her thick military cell phone.
“What do you mean, you missed the bus coming back from your doctor’s appointment?” she spat coldly and raised her hand to gesture for Avi with her fingers, Just a second. Her other small hand held tightly to the black handle of her M-16.
“Fuck you, faggot, you hear me?” his daughter said to the other watch girl on the phone. “I am not your mother that you can fuck me and bury me in the sand.”
She hung up and sat in front of Avi. Her face was still dark, but her hair was raised up in a rigid bun, and her eyebrows were plucked in an odd manner that removed all the similarities to him from her face. There was no sign of the quiet, shy girl he knew. The one-shekel ice cream cone he had bought her was dripping on the red plastic table. The only women he had met in his service days were secretaries who wore green skirts and made the highest officers coffee.
“And what, exactly, do you want?” Avishag asked.
The next time he saw her was after his ex-wife called to report that his oldest daughter hadn’t gotten out of bed in over two months, in case he was interested. The army had discharged her a few weeks after she had gotten out of military jail for some innocent prank, something involving nudity while guarding. But she wasn’t the same when she came back. She was acting a little off.
“I’ll come right over,” Avi said. “I’ll buy her a car.”
“She can’t drive,” his ex-wife said. Her voice was tired, but it was still her voice, the one he hadn’t heard in years.
In Tripoli, husbands disciplined their wives all the time. His father sure did. For years he had regretted that he hadn’t met his first wife in another time, another country, where things would not have gotten so out of hand, where there were no German social workers. But he had met his wife when he did, where he did, in the immigration caravans. She had come from Baghdad, where her father was a jeweler. She spoke four languages. When they met, they were standing naked on the asphalt outside the caravans with dozens of new ref
ugees, covered in the DDT, the pesticide that rained on them from airplanes above. The Europeans in the immigration office thought they could be carrying diseases. His future wife was naked and humiliated and white on the outside with chemicals, but dark in her eyes and through her heart, full of longing for the plane that had brought her. She was fourteen, four years older than he was. He promised her everything was going to be all right, even though he did not yet know her name.
“Everything is going to be all right,” he told his ex-wife, Mira, on the phone when she called after all these years. “I’ll teach her. I’ll buy her a Subaru.”
“A Subaru?” Mira asked.
“I am her father.”
THEY DROVE for a long time. Over two hours. Avi could see them pass the military cemetery at Mount Herzl and the hospital on Mount Scouts where Avishag had been born. Mira’s family had moved from where they had met to Jerusalem, but he had never lost touch with her. She had wanted to have Avishag in Jerusalem, even though they could only afford to live in Bat Yam back then.
Avishag’s eyes were covered the whole way, but she could smell the air descending down the hill from pine and rock into a humid smell, a fried smell, beer, sunscreen, tar, the beach, just the ocean, eventually.
Jerusalem is landlocked. She knew they were in Tel Aviv even before she could see.
The car was not suitable for driving on sand, nor was it suitable for riding on this shaky fishing dock, but Avi didn’t care. The wheels of the car rolled on the old wood. The whole way, he wasn’t sure where he was going. He let the car drive him.
Avishag’s father put his hand on his daughter’s forehead, then removed her scarf. The sun hit her eyes in orange. She kept them open. The sun hit the water in orange, then the water hit her eyes in orange. And still. She kept her eyes open. There was no wind, and the Mediterranean was flat. No one around, not even a seagull, just her and her father in the car. He had driven the car right up to the edge of a dock.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 20