“Well, I wanted to do a lot of drugs, but it did not work out that way. I smoked pot once and felt like the window was pulling me toward it like a magnet. So I smoked pot in the woods instead, and then I felt like I must find a window so it can pull me toward it like a magnet. Later one time I accidentally did X at a rave in Goa, and it made me so paranoid I decided that drugs were really not my thing,” Yael said.
“Paranoid! But X is the drug of love and trust!” Lea laughed.
“Maybe you should seek psychiatric counseling. There is something chemically wrong with you, perhaps,” Avishag laughed.
“It was the realest thing. A Persian boy with long lashes was running toward me on the road. He screamed his name, it started with a J, and although I did not speak Farsi I knew that it meant ‘the world.’ He smelled of moss, and it was because he was holding a brook trout in his hand that I thought came from the rivers of Babylon but knew didn’t come from there because brook trout don’t swim there, and besides, he was from Persia,” Yael said.
The heat and the thirst might have gotten to the girls, or at least to Yael. Yael would not let them drink the Coke for the first two days that they were trapped.
“You must have been tripping,” Avishag said. “It must have been another drug. X doesn’t trip you. I read about drugs in a pamphlet,” Avishag said.
“But the thing was, I was not the only one who could see the boy. Two of the people I was hanging out with could see him too. And they pointed at the boy and hid behind me because they were scared that the fish was poisonous and it would kill us all if it touched us. I was scared too, but I knew I shouldn’t be. The boy said he wanted his dad, but he wasn’t angry—it was more like he was worried about us partying like that.”
“That’s a very strange story,” Lea said.
“Stranger things happen,” Yael said.
And then a boy other than Yoav opened the door. He was eighteen.
BY THE end of the second day, the boys had developed a routine. They knew each girl better than she knew herself. When Yael got back that afternoon, she got quieter, and this gave the other two the room to talk they had never had before.
Avishag told a story about a fifth grader in her Ethiopian scouts troop who painted nothing but severed toes. The severed toes would all have jobs, they would get married and go to the army, but they were all bloody toes. The school board was upset, and there was a meeting when all the parents decided that he must be sent away because he might cause harm to himself or others. Avishag spoke for him, but it did no good. Maybe that’s why a mom followed her afterward and found out about the psychiatrist.
Lea asked Avishag for another story, to see if another story could make her realize that the first story was really not worth remembering, if she should regret not having the energy to write it down.
Avishag said that because chickens need a lot of calcium to make eggs, her uncle told her to crush all the empty eggshells into a powder with a stone and mix it inside the chickens’ food. But one time she thought she’d try to see if the chickens could just eat the eggshells as crumbs. If they could peck at whole lettuce stems, she did not see why they needed the shells as powder. But what Avishag did not know is that when a chicken eats something that looks like an egg it becomes an egg eater. That was the reason for the powder.
“So an egg eater eats other chickens’ eggs?” Lea asked.
“At first,” Avishag said. “At first she only eats other chickens’ eggs.”
BY THE middle of the third day, they had run out of Coke. They still had some pizza crusts left. Lea had drunk most of the Coke—her body had forced her to—and she was so ashamed that Avishag kept going on and on about how it was she who had drunk most of it instead, and how sorry she was.
When the lights went off, Avishag stopped apologizing and cried. She was most afraid of the dark that was more than the dark she saw inside her eyes when she closed them.
Yael watched her own shadow; when she tilted her head, the shadow of her hair on the wall blended with the shadow of one of the guns so that it looked like the gun was trying to become her.
This was when Lea offered her solution. “You know. We do have ammunition. And automatic guns.”
“We cannot shoot them. Don’t even think it,” Yael said.
“We can threaten to, you little whore. You don’t control us,” Lea said.
“We cannot. They hold our future in their bodies and heads,” Yael said.
“You know, sometimes I really wish you’d stop talking like that,” Lea said.
“Me too,” Yael said.
“Me three,” Avishag said.
The girls were speaking with thirst. The guns were still wet with gasoline. Mocking them, so near, sleeping with them as if on purpose. The boys were in charge. They didn’t understand why, but they knew it through their bones. The door in front of the girls was not theirs to open.
ONE OF the girls’ sweat had begun to smell different. It smelled like an alarm.
Avishag offered her solution. “We should just write it. It is just stones. Someone will move them. It’s just words. We’ll get back at the boys as soon as we’re out. They’ll be sorry later.”
“Just words?” Lea asked. “Maybe.”
“Just stones?” Yael asked. “Nothing is as written as much as a thing written in stones.”
“Yael,” Lea said.
And Avishag was preparing to talk more. Yael wondered if she had been encouraging her to talk too much, after all.
“No!” Yael shouted, and filled the other two with fear; of her, of the boys who might hear. “We are no Harry Potter. We don’t get to have second chances. This is this. We are not Jesus. We don’t get to come back. Either this is the Jewish state, or it is not.”
“Yael,” Lea said.
“Please stop talking,” Avishag said.
“If we don’t face this now, we’ll hurt someone else later. The boys will never forgive themselves. Lea, you’ll always watch TV instead of doing what you really want to be doing. Avishag, you’ll always say ‘sorry’ when someone bumps into you. I will always hate me, me talking like this,” Yael said.
“You sound very passionate about this issue,” Lea said, and she smiled. And she didn’t cry.
That night the boys came only for Lea, then again.
“Lea, princess,” Yael said when she heard the boys approach the third time. “I don’t know everything. I haven’t been everywhere, remember?”
“Do or do not. There is no try,” Lea said.
“May the force be with you,” Avishag said.
Yael felt the weight of all the words and sounds she had ever shared with her friends like a waterfall exploding inside her mouth, in that moment. She needed to imagine a way out, and soon.
BY THE fourth morning the girls did not trade any words. Yael wanted to say something very powerful, to whisper an ancient truth, but the thirst did not let the back of her mouth form the consonants, and besides, she herself knew she was becoming silly.
Avishag was making dolls from the weeds that grew through the cracks on the wooden floor. Hearts and babies and cats. Simple shapes that were the cartoon versions of real objects. Weaving and tightening and ripping. Yael did not notice when she started doing this, but by morning there were six dolls and one becoming one in Avishag’s peeling hands.
When Yael noticed this, she took the bamboo stick that was holding up an anemones office plant that hadn’t been there when the girls first came to the caravan. She made holes in it with her teeth, and then it was a flute.
For her to play.
“If you are playing for me, Yael, then don’t. I told you a million times. I am like Shylock’s daughter, Jessica. I cannot hear music,” Lea said.
“We are not doing Shakespeare right now, are we?” Avishag said.
“I mean, that’s a little gay, I admit it,” Lea said.
“Right. Because we all know Hitler was gay,” Yael said.
The girls looked at her. A
nd they were afraid, and mostly, then, for themselves for listening to her.
“And by Hitler I mean Shakespeare,” Yael said.
Then she asked for permission to sleep.
YAEL DOVE inside her body to find sleep. She imagined ocean waves beneath her, demanding calm. Then she thought of all the happy times when she sat on the floor and eagerly listened to the opening theme songs of her favorite TV shows and remembered all her tears that rolled with the song during the credits at the end of each episode. She remembered her childhood body, awakening flooded with delight that curled her toes and opened her nose in the middle of all those dreams in which she was taken by another human being for safe keeping. To a room with a bed that locked, where all that happened was that she was fed and pitied.
In her daydreams, the ones she used to have during history class, it was always a woman math teacher who took her and kept her. The woman always looked a little different: tall, blonde, dark. In reality all of her math teachers were men who did not see her. After she saw Mean Girls in high school, the image of the woman math teacher was fixed. It was always Tina Fey, or the math teacher she pretended to be in that movie. What a stupid girl I used to be, Yael thought. What a stupid girl I still am.
But then she thought more. And she opened her eyes.
“Mean Girls,” Yael said, while still lying down.
“Let’s not talk unless it means something. My voice is tired,” Avishag said.
“This means something. Remember how the girls in that movie always say the opposite of what they mean?” Yael asked. She sat up.
“All Americans always say the opposite of what they mean. Just look at their movies. All heroes. It’s because they don’t have real ones,” Lea said. Ron had a strong anti-American bias that he’d picked up from doing some business with them, and Lea had adopted it.
“Right,” Yael said. “We have to become a little American. We have to be the opposite of what we are. It will break the boys. Avishag, you stop being sorry. Don’t ever say ‘sorry’ or ‘thank you.’ Just say again and again, ‘I don’t deserve this. I am a good person,’ and Lea, you do the opposite. Apologize. Thank. Smile,” Yael said.
“Do you think you may have Stockholm syndrome?” Lea asked. “I am just asking,” she said. “I find this all to be very interesting.”
“No,” Yael said, calm. “I am trying to cause the opposite. The boys must get the Lima syndrome. They must learn to love us, a little.”
“But if we are acting the opposite of who we are, then they don’t love us us,” Avishag said.
“They are. They are loving what we can be. And we can be everything we want to be,” Yael said.
“Now you are sounding like the national children’s channel again,” Lea said.
“And that’s how you love me,” Yael said, and she looked at Lea.
“And that’s how she loves you,” Avishag said.
IT WASN’T until the afternoon that the boys came. A little before that, Yael started to cry.
“You know, how come you guys didn’t ask me how I am supposed to act now?” she asked. She was sobbing and pulling her hair.
Avishag and Lea did not speak.
“I have to not make a sound. Be the opposite of making sounds,” Yael said.
“Okay,” Lea said.
“So why are you crying so loud now?” Avishag asked.
“And pretty soon I may become a song,” Yael said. And she moaned all her knowledge onto the other four ears.
The caravan was five steps wide and seven steps long and the ceiling was above the three girls on the mattresses.
THE BOYS came and the boys took and the boys came and the women were what they were not. It was very hard to do.
PEOPLE DIED in the after war: 6,422 civilians and combatants in Syria the following month.
THE THING is, Yael’s idea worked. The boys never came back, after.
In the middle of the fourth night Avishag opened her eyes. And she got up from the mattress. And she opened the door of the caravan. And she walked in the dark to the flag. And she walked in the dark to the war room. One step, one other step, and then more. And she found a flashlight. And it worked. And she walked to the boys’ area. And around. At one point she thought she saw another light, and she grew afraid, because who would hear her, and who would help her? But in the end it was just the reflection of her own light in a neon sticker on a wall. She felt a pang in her stomach and remembered the decision of the tiny baby.
The artillery unit guards never showed for some reason.
Lea did not believe that it had worked. And at first she thought that even if it had worked it would not matter. It wouldn’t change what was to come. The only ones who knew were the three of them.
That night in the caravan, Avishag came back. She saw it with her own eyes that the boys had gone, but she did not know what it meant for the next minute either.
Yael had to convince them.
The first thing she decided was that they were not going to drive home that night. That they were going to save that night together. And then she was ready to answer questions.
They argued on the mattresses for hours. About whether or not what had happened to them was even interesting, about whether or not anything they did mattered. About their mattering, or not. When it was still dark out, right when they almost could not make voices anymore, the lights came back on, and then they talked more.
“No one but us will know about this anyway,” Avishag said.
“Yes they will. Lea will write it. And in the end people will believe it. Because this actually already happened, and to us,” Yael said.
BUT IN the end it was not Lea who told the story. No one knows who told it, and if, and how. What is true is that the women looked so present inside the lit caravan that night, the walls considered dying.
“I am very tired,” Yael said.
“Avishag, do you want us to keep the lights on tonight?” Lea asked.
“No,” Avishag said. “No, Lea. I don’t want to be afraid anymore.”
Suddenly all the lights went out.
Lea had the baby seven months later.
Operation
Evening
Light
When I was eighteen, Mom woke me up. She did it by tapping on my cheek with two of her fingers. “Yael, wake up,” she said.
When Mom was eighteen, airplanes called her on the radio. She spent three years waiting for airplanes to call her on the radio. When they called, my mother would give the air force planes her permission to land. They needed to land to refuel. Her base was a fuel base. She was an air traffic controller. They waited for her voice. It had been recently hardened by the encounter of first cigarettes and the struggle to conceal youth. Without her permission, the airplanes could not land. They needed her when they were in the sky and she was in the control tower, drawing faces on her dark arm with pen and thinking of ugly jokes she could tell the boys on the base when her shift ended.
Once, an Israeli plane that stopped for a layover in Athens was hijacked, and even though it was not Mom who rescued the hostages (Mom was a girl), it is true that if it weren’t for Mom the rescued hostages would not have gotten sandwiches when the rescued plane stopped to refuel on its way home. She used to say that her job in the army was not important, but I thought it was. A plane can only circle in the sky without fuel for so long. She could have, in theory, one time, said no. She could have always said no, but she never did, she never said no in her life. A lot of people could have died because of her. She was eighteen when she arrived at that beach.
I WOKE up after Mom tapped me on the cheek with two of her fingers.
When I was eighteen I slept in her bed because I was afraid of the future. I didn’t think much of going into the army, except for making sure I had the right underwear and a new watch, but then I saw a news story about a soldier at a checkpoint whose body had been exploded by a suicide bomber like a surprise, and then I became afraid.
It wa
s not long after I saw the picture of the exploded soldier that I began snapping my fingers all the time under my jaw, to scare away scares. This was something I had done before, but not for years. Dad was angry because he was tired of sleeping in my youth bed. He said his legs were too long, and besides, this was not fair. Mom said it was fair because I was her oldest daughter, and she made me from scratch, and here I was eighteen and going into the army soon. Then Dad surrendered because he loved her all the time. It was a problem.
“Hey, Yael,” she said when we were both in her bed. “Say you want to be in the air force.”
“I don’t want to be in the air force,” I whispered. “Mom, I don’t want to be a soldier at all. I think I have scares again.”
“Say you want to be an air traffic controller.”
“But I already know I am going into infantry. That’s what the draft slip decided. You can’t be an air traffic controller in infantry. There is no air to control.”
My mom was not listening. I never knew if she believed what she said. “Say you want to be an air traffic controller in Sharm el-Sheikh. Say Sinai.”
“But. Mom. I can’t be an air traffic controller. I’d get too antsy sitting all day and waiting.”
“You should ask to be an air traffic controller in Sharm el-Sheikh. It is the best job in the army for a girl.”
“But there are no Israeli soldiers left in Sharm el-Sheikh. There is no base there. We gave that whole part back to Egypt.”
My mom passed her finger over the ridge of my nose, and again. “Yes. We gave it back before you were born,” she said.
She said things that she knew were impossible like she thought they weren’t.
ON THE day she was drafted my mom walked right into the sorting officer’s office and asked to be placed as an air traffic controller. The sorting officer laughed. This was because her skin was dark and her last name was Yemenite and her nose was broken. It grew broken, like a disaster or a crayon painting of a toddler. She broke it when she was a child, falling from the back of the milkman’s wagon one evening.
The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Page 25