by Assaf Gavron
A seasoned hitchhiker by then, Gabi sensed the difference the moment he closed the car door and the driver released his foot from the brake and stepped on the gas. It filled the air of the car like cement in a bucket, heavy and gray, solidifying gradually. Often, he had accepted a ride without exchanging a single word with the driver, not even “Where do you need to go?” or “Where are you going?” They’d come later, on the understanding that if he had held out his thumb and a car had stopped for him, they’d probably be on the road together for a while, the taker and the giver, the requestor and the facilitator. This time, however, the silence was different, steeped in tension, churning with rage. His body froze, and he felt his hair stand on end. He felt aggressive and ready, catlike, to strike back at the first scratch. There were three men in the car. The driver, a man next to him in the passenger seat, and another behind him, alongside Gabi.
“Where are you going?” Gabi finally asked.
“Right here, nearby,” answered the man next to the driver in an Arabic accent.
“You know what,” Gabi said, his voice steady but his throat trembling, “I’ll get out here, I left something behind, I need to go back.”
“Want us to take you back?” asked the speaker.
“No, no, here is just fine,” Gabi said, the earthquake, the Great Rift Valley, images from the morning flashing through his mind. And suddenly, out of nowhere, he recalled his ride with the Gam-zu-Le-tova family, too. The speaker said something to the driver in Arabic and the driver signaled, slowed down, and pulled over to the side of the road. Turning on the light inside the car, the speaker turned to look at Gabi. The driver turned to face him, too. There was no need for the man sitting next to him to turn, Gabi had been feeling his stare from the moment he got into the car. An unpleasant odor filled the car, and Gabi, his heart pounding, looked back at the speaker.
“Is something wrong, something bothering you?” the speaker asked.
“No, everything’s fine. I simply need to get back to Beit Guvrin, I forgot something in my last ride.”
The speaker said something to the driver. The man sitting next to Gabi added some words of his own. “You’re a soldier where?” he asked, reaching out to take hold of the Golani pin. “What’s this, a cat?”
Gabi didn’t answer. Nor did he remove the man’s hand from his shirt. Beads of sweat began trickling down his brow. I guess this is it, he thought, and through his mind flashed images of Nili and her kiss, and Anna with her newly styled and straightened hair on the backdrop of the yellow desert, and Gam-zu-Le-tova’s blue eyes.
“What do you want from me?” Gabi eventually asked, looking directly at the speaker. The driver snickered.
“We want a soldier, a combat soldier,” the speaker said. “Where’s your rifle?”
“I don’t have a rifle. I’m not a soldier. I’m at school. The uniform belongs to my brother,” Gabi responded, now on the verge of tears. “I’m a kid. I’m not a soldier.”
“No rifle?” the speaker said. He added something in Arabic and the man next to Gabi began frisking him, ripped a button off his shirt, felt his chest, slipped a hand into his pants, gripped his penis, and caressed his testicles.
“You’re a kid? Not a soldier?”
Gabi sat there paralyzed, waiting for the slashing knife. He closed his eyes, a cold sweat told him he had made a mistake, a really big mistake. Why did he take to the road again? Why did he leave, why today, why at all? The Arabs spoke among themselves in high tones. The man sitting next to him let him be. Gabi opened his eyes and saw a car drive by from the opposite direction in a flash of blue. The Peugeot raced ahead, the Arabs continued to argue, louder and louder. Then they went silent. Gabi didn’t know what was happening.
Approaching the next intersection, the driver signaled again, pulled over, turned, and glared at Gabi, and the man next to him exited the car and walked around the vehicle. He opened Gabi’s door, grabbed him by the ends of his army shirt, and dragged him out. This is it, Gabi thought, it’s the end for me. A whimper escaped his lips. The man threw him to the ground and kicked him several times until he rolled into the ditch at the side of the road. Long seconds passed before Gabi dared to raise his head from the ditch. His heart thumping, soaked in sweat, panting, he watched the Peugeot’s taillights disappear into the distance. As his tears started to fall, confusing words danced in his mind: An eye that sees, an ear that hears, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
He heard on the radio the following day about a soldier who was abducted at Eila Junction during the night. His dead body was found a few days later, not far from there, with a bullet in the head, an IDF bullet, fired from an IDF weapon, most likely the soldier’s.
Gabi returned to the kibbutz that same day. He walked through the kibbutz gates in the Palladium boots and Roni’s uniform, with wild hair and the soft-skinned cheeks of a young boy, and went straight to his room to crash on his bed and sleep peacefully and soundly for a few hours. When Yotam returned to their room from the basketball hall, he cautiously approached the bed to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating, and then turned and raced at top speed to Yossi and Gila’s room.
* * *
Roni told Gabi that he didn’t care at all. The commando unit meant nothing, he’d completed the course, he’d lived through the experience. Been there, done that, and he really wasn’t bothered by the fact that he was now stationed in an office job at an Intelligence Corps base in Safed. He was in charge of a storeroom, meaning in essence that he did nothing, because no one ever needed anything from that particular storeroom, so all he did all week long was remove tins of leftover paint from the storeroom and paint the side wall of his living quarters in a myriad of colors, circling and spiraling, blending and mixing, a work of art measuring 4.25 by 2.80 meters, signed in the one corner with Roni Kupper, a vanishing soldier, along with the year—1989.
“We only have each other, that’s all,” Roni said to Gabi. “So fuck the army, and fuck the commando unit. If I thought I saw you in the middle of the orienteering drill and went into that kibbutz and started talking to people—I don’t recall a thing, but that’s what they say I did—then it must have happened for a reason. That’s what guided me. You guided me. And you are more important to me than anything else.”
“I’m sorry,” Gabi said to him, placing a hand on Roni’s, feeling a tug on one of his heartstrings.
“You have nothing to be sorry about. The main thing is that you returned safe and sound. That’s what’s important.”
Besides, as Roni subsequently realized, the intelligence base in Safed is great fun, way more fun than working your butt off in remote geographical locations in the Negev or Golan simply to reach some point or other that someone had marked on a map. The work was easy and quick, the evenings were free, and he came down to the kibbutz whenever he felt like it, and the girls—holy shit, the girls!
The Boot Camp
Gabi, in all likelihood, could have secured an exemption from combat duty, or even army service in general, if he had informed the military authorities of his runaway episode and the incidents of violence, or if he had undergone professional counseling. People around him, Dad Yossi included, encouraged him to do so. But he wanted to volunteer for a combat unit, and said nothing. He listed the Golani commando unit as his first preference and the regular Golani Brigade as his second, didn’t list a third, and ended up in the Combat Engineering Corps. While still in boot camp, he was dispatched to Gaza and entrusted with a tear-gas grenade launcher. His unit was sent out on patrol in the Jabalya refugee camp, which the officer who briefed them defined as “not hostile” and hence suitable for a company of new recruits. And so, just halfway through boot camp training, he and his fellow soldiers found themselves heading down a long dirt road in two lines. Smoke from a burning tire drifted through the air, searing their nostrils. They moved deeper into the refugee camp, walking among children blackened with dirt, loud, self-assured, playing with rags
, and women in long dresses, full-bodied, pug-faced, their eyes dull and unfriendly. Here and there, Gabi spotted a pair of pretty green eyes of a young girl or two. For the most part, however, he focused on the tracks of the soldier ahead of him.
The patrols for the first four days were slow and boring, accompanied by unpleasant odors, and they didn’t get to use the tear-gas grenade launcher. But on the fifth day, they encountered a group of stone-throwing youths. The company commander stopped and crouched, and the other soldiers followed his example. He then stood tall again, took cover behind the wall of a house, and instructed his soldiers to get behind him. There wasn’t enough room for them all, however, and some remained in range of the stone-throwers.
“Gas!” yelled the commander. Gabi failed to register that he was the intended recipient of the order. “Gas!” the commander bellowed again, and only after someone elbowed his arm did Gabi spring to attention and rush over. The commander instructed him to fire the grenades in an arc in the direction of the stone-throwers. Taking the launcher off his shoulder, Gabi then remembered that he hadn’t yet learned how to use it. On their first patrol, he was told there wasn’t sufficient time and that he’d be taught afterward. But the individual who had promised him forgot, and Gabi didn’t ask, and the launcher remained hanging from his shoulder like an empty bag through the quiet, boring patrols of the previous days. Now he was being asked to fire it, and he didn’t know how. Enraged, the commander ripped the launcher from Gabi’s hands and showed him how to open it. “Grenades,” he ordered. Grenades? Apparently, someone had filled Gabi’s flak jacket with tear-gas grenades. The commander found them, showed Gabi how to load the launcher, closed it, aimed the weapon skyward, muttered, “Next time I won’t do it for you, snap out of it,” and pulled the trigger.
The weapon was defective. Instead of being launched into the distance and exploding on the target, the grenade detonated in the barrel itself. The commander immediately threw down the launcher, but the cloud of gray smoke rose and enveloped them nevertheless, in particular the commander and Gabi and the unfortunate soldier at whose feet the weapon had landed. The three writhed in pain, seared by the smoke that ate away at their eyes and noses and mouths and lungs, grasping blindly for water, searching blindly for cover, struggling for breath. Perplexed, the remaining soldiers, their eyes streaming with tears and coughing, stood around them, and the stone-throwers in the distance bared their teeth, laughed gleefully, and continued to throw their stones, and even plucked up the courage to move in closer. Had it not been for Dudi, a slightly built and thus far quiet soldier, who opened fire with his weapon into the air and began screaming like a man possessed, which he might have been, the incident could have resulted in consequences far more serious than three victims of smoke inhalation who were rushed to the army clinic at the Gaza command base and subsequently released toward evening.
Following the incident, the company of new recruits returned to boot camp, but by then, Gabi felt detached, no longer really there. Not only had he lost the desire to ingest gas from defective gas-grenade launchers, to force-feed others with gas from functioning launchers, to walk through alleyways with free-running sewage and through the bedrooms of families living in abject poverty, or to restrain stone-throwers; he also had no appetite for operating heavy engineering machinery or clearing explosive devices or building bridges over rivers. The enthusiasm of his fellow trainees and the words they spewed when discussing mechanization and bombs and weapons—words they had heard from friends or brothers or uncles who had served as combat engineers—meant nothing to him. In fact, he had no inclination at all to roam the country in that green uniform. He had done it once before, and it had almost cost him his life—truth be told, his life was spared only because he wasn’t a genuine soldier at the time. And boot camp, with the contrived and inane hard-nosed attitude of the commanders, the middle-of-the-night scrambles, the mistreatment and shitty food, the stupid guard duty, and the assholes, oh, the assholes. He got on with a few of the guys, but as a kibbutznik, he was immediately relegated to a status that alienated him from most of the soldiers in his company. And the incident in Jabalya did nothing to boost his position.
* * *
Early one morning they were mustered, loaded onto personnel carriers, and transported to the middle of the desert. There they were divided into teams and sent out on orienteering exercises. An entire day under the desert sun, without sufficient water, with food from unattractive field rations. The day would have been bad enough had everything gone according to plan, but there were mishaps, too. Two of the teams went walkabout and failed to reach the endpoint on time. Darkness fell. Flares were fired to light up the night sky, the other teams, under the impression they had already completed the drill, were returned to the field to conduct searches, and one of the search teams went walkabout, too, and also went missing. The soldiers and commanders were tired, hungry, and on edge. After much shouting, scrambling, and punishing, they finally returned to base at around 11 p.m. The company commander and two soldiers—one of them Gabi—went to the kitchen to tell the cooks to prepare a meal. The cooks, however, weren’t in the kitchen, which was locked. The commander and the two soldiers walked over to the cooks’ barracks, knocked on doors, shouted, and pleaded for food. The cooks, engrossed in a game of backgammon and smoking cigarettes, laughed.
“It’s too late,” they said. “No one goes to the kitchen at this time of night. You didn’t make it on time, tough shit.”
They weren’t willing even to hand over the key. Their commander, a staff sergeant major, wasn’t on base, he was out on the town in Beersheba.
“Forget about it,” one of them said.
“Learn not to go walkabout,” said another.
“That’s the way it is in boot camp,” the first added, and all the others laughed and went back to their backgammon.
Impatient and hungry, the company commander confronted the head cook and tried to drag him out by the collar of his shirt. The other cooks responded by jumping the company commander and laying in to him with their fists. They threw him to the floor, kicked him in his ribs, and one even got in a boot to the head. Gabi and the other soldier remained on the sidelines, not daring to intervene. Gabi was hungry and tired. All he had eaten the entire day was a single field ration, which he had shared with another two soldiers.
Barely able to stand, the company commander assured the cooks that they’d soon be eating shit for their actions, but they didn’t appear concerned. With a suspected cracked rib and bearing bad news, he and the two soldiers then returned to the company. They divided the remaining field rations among the soldiers and then released them to shower and sleep, with a promise of good food the following day.
* * *
After the shower, after the disgusting Spam, after my stomach had finished churning, my heart continued to replay the kicking the company commander had suffered, not that I was particularly fond of him, but the cooks were animals, and they were wrong, they weren’t human, not human at all. The events of the whole fucking day swirled in my mind in the shower, the field rations and the sun and dumb walking around with the fucking maps and then after we were done and already in the personnel carrier, having to go out again and search for the assholes who went walkabout and wait some more and walk some more like animals. Inhuman. I couldn’t sleep. It was 2 a.m. by then. I opened Mishali’s footlocker and removed a number of stun grenades I knew he had kept from Gaza in order to take home, large, smooth grenades, purplish-brown, like eggplants. Mishali had more but I took just two, and returned to the cooks’ living quarters. I knew where the head cook slept because I had seen it before. Inhuman. The silence around me was broken only by rhythmic snoring coming from one of the rooms. I identified the room and quietly dragged over a large, heavy wooden bench to serve as a barrier against the door. I walked around and found the window, which I managed to budge and open. I pulled the pins out of both grenades and blocked the firing mechanism with my hands. Then I reached in w
ith both hands, released the grenades, closed the window, and fled from there to my warm bed, hearing on the way the huge booms that shook the entire precast structure. With a smile on my face, I fell soundly asleep.
* * *
This time, at least, the enemies were the ones who took the hit, not him, as in the case of the tear gas. The massive blast sprang the cooks out of bed, deafened them, and literally scared the shit and piss out of them, with one of them losing control of his bowels and the other, his bladder. Consumed by panic, they were unable to escape the room until their somewhat less alarmed neighbors moved aside the bench blocking the door.
They were sent to Soroka Medical Center’s ER to be treated for shock and the ringing in their ears and, beyond their physical ailments, returned humiliated. Gabi took pride in that; he had righted a wrong. All said and done, his fellow soldiers—the investigation and subsequent naming of the guilty party lasted no more than a few hours—adopted a different view of the nerdy Ashkenazi kibbutznik who didn’t know how to operate a gas-grenade launcher. And as for the company commander, although he couldn’t admit it, and although to some extent the incident only deepened his own humiliation—a run-of-the-mill trainee had exacted a price and restored respect for a beating that he, the commander, had suffered—he fixed Gabi with looks of appreciation and spoke to him in a sympathetic tone while supposedly slamming him with harsh words about putting lives at risk and human and military collegiality.