She didn’t smile. She looked tired, more tired than he had ever seen her.
“I am coming in,” he said.
She moved to the side without a word, allowing him to enter.
He caught only a glimpse of the living room and kitchen before she pulled him by the arm. It looked like the apartment of someone’s parents. The sofa’s pillows were knitted and matched the paintings of fruit platters and bridges on the walls. He smelled incense; scented, burning wood.
In her bedroom everything moved faster than it did during the drunken nights at his place. She kept on grabbing his hands and putting them there, then quickly there, then another place. She pushed him, hard, onto the bed when he tried to touch her hair. He landed on his back and wondered how much an orthopedic mattress like hers cost and why he hadn’t gotten one yet.
He asked her for the price, and she laughed, softened. He put his hand on the back of her neck. His Lea.
He surrendered. She did too, ultimately. They fell asleep.
HE WOKE up to the familiar sound of someone sobbing and for a second forgot where he was. Lea lay still by his side, and when he leaned over to look at her he saw that she was sound asleep rather than crying, breathing in a rhythm, more peaceful than he had ever seen her.
He heard it again. A sob. A moan. He walked out of the bedroom and stood still in the short hallway in his boxers. He felt foolish, displaced, cold. The air conditioning was blasting, but he hadn’t felt it under the thick covers.
He heard the sound again. It was coming from behind a door next to the bedroom.
The half bedroom, he thought.
He tried to open it, but it was locked. He knew Lea, knew her well enough to know where she’d hide a key. Whenever Vera was late for her shift and Lea absolutely had to go, she would lock down the blinds of the kiosk and hide the key under the trash can in the street. There was no trash can in the hallway, but there was an urn on the carpet, full of decorative fake bamboo sticks.
THE HALF bedroom looked exactly like a regular bedroom, except it was only half the size, and there was no bed, but there was a butane torch on the floor—aluminum, French; the one he had bought for the kiosk. The aluminum was covered in little red splotches.
And the man, of course. It was impossible not to notice the man. A middle-aged Arab man was in the room, on the floor, with his hands and legs cuffed. He was naked, and the skin on his back was burned. His face was a host of colors and bumps, yellow, red, blue. He looked up and opened his mouth. He was missing two bottom front teeth, so that one tooth stood alone, like a baby’s.
Nothing made sense; nothing seemed to match. Ron opened his mouth but no words came out. He felt her hand on his shoulder.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” Lea said. “I saw him passed out drunk on a bench by the construction site under my building two days ago and I knew I recognized him. Fadi. So I took him. He killed a boy in my unit once. Cut his neck. Just reached in through his car and grabbed him by the collar and with the knife …”
“Didn’t anyone say anything when they saw you carrying him?” Ron asked, his voice slow.
“This is Tel Aviv,” she said.
“Help me,” the man said to Ron in Arabic. His voice was hoarse, air with no vocal cords.
“It took me two hours to carry him up here. He was so drunk he didn’t even resist, but I was worried I was going to totally throw out my back,” Lea said. Her voice sounded sleepy. “He keeps on talking to me. On and on and on. You’d think he’d gather by this point I don’t understand a word of Arabic. I thought he’d stop talking after I knocked his teeth out, but he won’t.”
“What did I do?” the man asked Ron. He looked at Ron as if he thought Ron had authority, as if he were a high-ranking Mossad agent who had finally come to do the right thing.
Ron’s head was pounding, a hangover, although he hadn’t drunk a thing last night. Lea kept talking.
“I can’t stop either; I can’t let him go.”
Ron looked at the man and motioned him with his hand to stay quiet. He looked at his watch. In less than two hours it would be time for his shift in the sandwich shop. He picked up the butane torch.
He landed a blow on the back of the man’s neck. The man crumpled; his face smacked the floor. It was an accurate, steady blow. Ron couldn’t help but wonder if the blow had broken the torch, if it would ever work again.
He put his hand on the back of Lea’s neck, and she stepped closer and wet his chest, then began to kiss it, small kisses, like a child sipping soup.
He thought.
Perhaps they could spend a few more hours in bed before they went to the kiosk. Put on some music, have a few drinks. Never mind that it was five in the morning; this job, this city, they were not the boss of them. Sure, he’d have to help Lea let the man go soon, and scare him enough to keep a secret. But there was plenty of time for that.
This morning was theirs.
This city is theirs.
And maybe everything is someone’s imagination.
Please, don’t judge.
III
The
After
War
And when the boy soldiers returned from the war they tortured the girl soldiers who waited for them. This took four days. In the end people died.
This was the after war, but everyone knew about it before it happened. Every reserve soldier was invited to participate, and very few people, perhaps just a few young girls, were surprised.
None of the women had to be there. Lea was married, three months pregnant—though she hadn’t told anyone yet. Avishag was on antidepressants and seeing a shrink. Yael was in Goa, India, at the time, translating the lyrics of a traveling musical commune. They had all kept in slight touch over the years. They did not keep in regular touch with anyone else from the village, not even their parents.
Avishag had a driver’s license. She drove the girls to the training base in her dead Subaru. They got stationed together because Shai the officer used to fuck Yael and he was waiting for her to come back from the world and fuck him more.
They came back, but they were no longer needed. They were women now. The younger girls hummed songs like milk and honey. “There is a love in me and it will rise and win you” and “Not always I come out with words.” They were in front of their watch monitors in war rooms, fully geared at the gates; checking who everyone entering the base was. Calibrating weapons with the L-beat, a red laser that let you correct a weapon without firing.
“Hey, where do we rest?” Yael asked the girls huddled on the sands outside the war room. They were playing a new card game called Jungle Lies. The rules changed each month with every new deck of cards.
“You just got here,” a young checkpoint girl said, throwing two cards down, taking three. “We don’t even need you cunts.”
“You threw out three cards and now you’ll have to lose four cards the next round,” Lea said. “And since I am an officer, I suggest you mind your words.”
The girl took them to their housing in the Negev guns and ammunition storage caravan.
The women thanked her and she laughed like there was no tomorrow. “You shouldn’t have come. We got this.”
The Negev, named after the desert, was a modest machine automatic gun developed in Israel. The room reeked of gasoline; the weapons had recently been cleaned, and they were crammed against the wall. The floor was wooden, and weeds as high as the girls’ knees sprouted through the cracks. There were four green mattresses in the far left corner.
“Well,” Avishag said.
“LOL,” Lea said.
Yael sang a song about a duck who wanted to ask questions, a song she remembered from when they were little.
Suddenly all the lights on the base went out.
“Why?” Avishag asked.
Then she slipped out of her red dress, her breasts hard in the daylight. Lea poured from a green bag the uniform and equipment that she’d picked up at the supply caravan.
The girls changed and gossiped.
The cardboard sign in the supply caravan read: IF YOU WILL IT, WE DON’T HAVE ANY OF IT. It was a joke, and Lea laughed.
They were on an abandoned base built in 2012 for the purpose of training firefighters, who arrived from different cities for one month every year, how to prepare for a fire like the one that had happened in the Carmel forest in 2011.
The base was yellow, oversized, American.
SHAI WAS talking on his cell phone, but when he saw Yael, he hung up. He walked on the sand toward her, and Lea and Avishag froze. Yael trod lightly.
Shai put both hands on her hip bones.
“I waited for you, and now I am leaving tomorrow with my soldiers,” Shai said. He and Yael had met at a Jerusalem gay pride parade a few months after she got out of the army; he was signed on for five more years, which suggested forever. They were waiting in line for colored ice, and their sweat mixed when a float with transgendered people dressed as flamingos pushed everyone closer together. They had known each other briefly before; he was her officer toward the end of her service.
Now Lea and Avishag watched Yael and crossed their arms. Even Avishag was interested. They waited to see what Yael would do; it seemed to Yael that other people were always waiting to see what she would do. As if she knew.
“Show me where and how you are taking them,” Yael said. Then she kissed him. She never liked kissing. Sticking her tongue inside another person’s mouth. It seemed like a poor survival tactic. She tasted the bread he had recently swallowed.
“What have you all been up to?” Shai asked after, instead.
Lea was married to the guy who had started the WDJ sandwich chain stores. She was living in Tel Aviv and smoking her days away in cafés, writing porn books about Nazis fucking the life out of Jews in showers and seven-year-old girls losing their virginity via incest and double penetration. She used a pseudonym and was well received globally. Avishag had left her mother in Jerusalem and was living with her uncle in a small development town in the Negev desert, working as the youth organizer of the local Ethiopian scouts’ troop and integrating horse-riding lessons into their curriculum. On the side she drew fan-fiction comic books based on Emily the Strange called Emily the Sad. Emily the Sad was always losing her keys or missing her bus, but nobody helped her and then she would sit on a bucket in a poppy field and cry. Avishag scanned the images and e-mailed them only to Yael, but Yael never opened the attachments after the first one, the one where Emily forgets how to add and cannot figure out if she has enough money to buy a hairbrush. Yael was busy doing the world at the time, an idea she had promised to herself the day she quit her airport job with seven thousand shekels saved up, translating works she found in China, Romania, Zimbabwe, India, and putting them up online for free. And she wrote music. In all languages. Songs she put on the Internet and that people loved, though they never knew were hers.
“Geez, Yael,” Shai said, after all the highly small talk. He himself had nothing to tell. “Is there anything you don’t do?” he asked.
“Nope,” Lea said, and she tapped Yael on the back. Yael felt her nails on her skin like moans. “Our little Yael is quite the renaissance-cunt-woman.”
“All right,” Yael said.
“Lea, please. We are in a war,” Avishag said.
“I asked for the plan for tomorrow,” Yael said. And she looked at Shai. Her stare was like a fisherman’s string. She would not let him go.
SHAI EMPTIED the war room so the two of them could talk. The room was covered with maps on the wall, cereal on the floor, and rainbow hair ties and radios all over the desks.
Yael asked Shai not to go.
This was after he showed her the sketches of the school they were taking down, the location of each sniper, every window.
“You’ll die. We cannot enter Syria by land,” Yael said.
“I have to go,” Shai said. “I am an officer.”
“I’ll do whatever,” Yael said. She scratched his nose and got down, like a cat, on her knees. The floor was covered in dust and cereal; dead cells she could feel through her pant legs.
“Yael. You are paranoid.”
“I’d walk around the base, the world, forever, on all fours, with your dick in my mouth.”
“Marry me?” Shai asked. He looked down at her. He was joking, but they both knew that jokes are what’s most precise when death feels intimate.
“I need to travel. But maybe one day.”
“One day is not enough. Whatever is whatever.” Yael knew better than to say no, so she said die and gave up. In truth she knew there was no real solution in her words. Not for Shai. On her way back to the caravan, grasshoppers were catching their reflections in the gasoline pools that had formed from all the weapon cleanings, and plunging into them.
SHE ENTERED the caravan smiling. She figured she had to. The lights were off again.
“You are home!” Avishag said. She was braiding her thin hair after a shower, wearing a summer pajama set decorated with pies.
“Let’s play story,” Lea said. She pulled a soul candle from her bottomless pocket and lit it.
The girls got out their pens and paper and each of them wrote a sentence. It was a game they had not played since they were in seventh grade. Their enhanced version of Exquisite Corpse. Lea got to see Yael’s sentences but not Avishag’s. She continued the sentence she saw. Yael’s continued Avishag’s; she never saw Lea’s.
The stories they wrote were mainly about dead dogs making love in a place almost like Antarctica, modified song lyrics from American Idol, and stepmothers so fat they emptied the kibbutz pools they jumped into headfirst. The three pages went on in a circle, each girl folding the sentence she saw and leaving hers to be seen by the girl on her right, like a fan of the words that were in all of them, drowned in ink.
They did not set up a clock. They whispered across the beds the night before that they would wake up by themselves. “Natural awakening”—it was an army phrase no one used anymore, meant for those rare clockless dawns when you have nothing to wake up for in the morning.
THE BOYS were away, in a rolling bus or in another land, when the girls woke; only the younger girls were left. It was past noon already by the time the women felt that urge to step out and roam the base.
The hotter clique of younger girls were covering each other in ice and sunbathing naked by the flag. There was no one left to train in the base, no shooting range or open gate to watch on a monitor. One of the girls, a gorgeous one with a thin plume of blonde hair covering her neck, was jumping between the girls who were splayed on the floor. “Bim bam bap, I ate a rat,” she sang as she jumped, and the girls had to roll over and increase the space between them, because she kept on succeeding to jump into the spaces no matter how far apart they got. “We are a rare breed, an odd bleed,” the girl’s chant rattled on as the three women walked away.
“So are we going to raid the guys’ caravans or what?” Lea asked. “You know you always wanted to.”
Lea stopped walking and approached Yael. She kissed Yael on the forehead. There was something softer about her. Her lips were shaky on Yael’s skin. Perhaps it was the baby inside her, but Yael thought it was the mere unruffledness of aging.
They walked through the base and encountered the less popular younger girls in their red and leopard-print bathing suits. They were holding hands in a circle so firmly that their knuckles turned white. It pleased Avishag that the girls were playing a game she knew. A birthday game. The special girl of the day got to stand inside the circle and be the cat. Outside stood the girl who was the designated mouse. The goal was for the circle of girls to never let the cat break free of the circle. The girls were chanting an ancient army girls’ song: “What a mess, what a mess. Whores get screwed for money; we do it for free.”
“It’s nostalgia day,” a tall redhead, the mouse outside the circle, said to Avishag. She looked right through Avishag. “So you can join us, even though you are old. Later
we can play teachers and schoolgirls, and you’d get to beat us with the L-beat laser-calibration sticks.”
“That’s thirty-four hundred shekels for each stick. You must be joking. Who here is a weaponry instructor?” Yael asked. Since she had first seen the young girls, she had been looking for her younger self. The shortest girl, the thin one. But she was nowhere to be found. The girls’ bodies all reminded her of Amazons.
“There is no use for them no more,” said a girl with dark circles around her eyes that were large enough to penetrate her cheeks. She was a weaponry instructor, and it showed. “The boys are entering Syria by foot. We are all kaput now. I wonder what will happen!”
“Ignore, ignore,” Lea said, and brushed an imaginary spider off her shoulder. “I never liked children. Let’s go to the boys’ castle and have some grown-up fun.”
The three could hear that the cat girl broke free as they approached the boys’ caravan area. She broke the circle with the groan of a muffled robot. None of the women looked back to see her catch the mouse.
THE BOYS’ caravan area was structurally identical to the one Avishag had slept in during her service days near Egypt. The rooms looked as if the boys had been asked to leave in the middle of dinner. The dark mud of a coffee cistern was spilled on a mattress. Yellow underwear stained brown was left on a threshold. Uniforms, razors, pretzels, even money, were scattered on the floors.
Yael heard a voice talking. It was the voice of a woman, but it sounded more like that metallic groan of the cat girl breaking free. The boys must have left a TV on, she thought. At the end of the long two rows of caravans, the “recreation room” stood open. She had always hated it, that because there were more boys in every training base, they were the only ones who got to have recreation at night. The girls could watch TV if they walked in accompanied during the day, but she was always guarding or training during the day. Unless you were fucking someone important, it was “No TV for you after supper, young lady!”
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 23