He’d always had girlfriends, but before Yael they’d been the kind who lounged inside on their cell phones rather than working in the fields. I’d known her for years—back in high school we used to ride the bus home together while Asaaf stayed after for track practice, sharing vending machine junk, playing cards and road games I knew were childish but liked because I usually won. It would be inaccurate to say I enjoyed those rides together, when I always felt both terrified and thrilled sitting beside her as the bus bumped through the valley. She was more serious than almost anyone I knew back then, as if she were constantly looking beyond school, our neighborhood, even the country. That she believed she deserved a different, better life than the people around her hadn’t even struck me as snobbish, simply because she made whomever she was talking to, myself included, feel as though we deserved it too. Still, whenever I was with her I felt as if I were on uneven ground, that I could say one stupid thing and she’d find someplace else to sit.
But that never happened, and those rides carried through to graduation, which was right around the time Asaaf noticed her. She’d never seemed his type—not just that she was always in sweats and flip-flops; more that she didn’t even seem to exist within the same orbit as the other girls he usually dated, the ones who threw as much of themselves into getting his attention as he did into winning the hundred-meter dash. But then he went for her, without a thought that I might be interested myself, and she surprised me by falling for him as quickly and gushingly as all the others. And just like that, our time together seemed blotted-out and forgotten, as she lay beside Asaaf on our sofa, watching TV at night, or scrambling eggs in the morning while he leaned against the counter in his boxers, swigging juice straight from the carton. But that wasn’t the worst part. It was that they actually made sense together. She made him nicer, he made her more relaxed, and together they were like some strong, unstoppable force, breezing through life on a sleek and glorious ship while the rest of us watched from the shore.
She was the one girlfriend of his my mother could stand, the one girl who helped around the house, the dairy, in the garden, sifting through the mud for nightcrawlers. That’s disgusting, Asaaf had said as the bugs skirted down her fingers and into the compost, but Yael shook her head. You see their pink bellies? They’re kind of beautiful, she said, and in her hands they actually were.
AND NOW, for the second time this week, I welcomed Asaaf back home. He was in a clean white t-shirt with the medical tag still dangling from his wrist, and my mother had to swerve his wheelchair around the driveway to avoid potholes. His face was the same—three days in the hospital hadn’t paled him—but his eyes were sleepy and red from the painkillers, and his left sweatpant leg was folded over neatly, like the flap of an envelope.
Asaaf squinted up at me as my mother ran back to the car for his duffel. “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing.” I wanted to stare at him for a long time, but looked at the ground instead.
He tried to tip himself back to get through the open screen door, but the wheels banged against the raised wood I only now noticed separated the porch from the kitchen. He grunted and pushed again, but the wheelchair didn’t budge. “Here,” I said, reaching for the arms, “let me help.” But he swatted my hand away, and for a minute I just stood there, listening to the wheels hit the threshold over and over.
Behind us, people trickled up the driveway, carrying foil-wrapped cookies and cakes. Dedy and the neighbors were here again, along with high school classmates Asaaf probably hadn’t thought about in years. I’d made a dozen family visits like this one—earlier this month, even, when a soldier from the moshav had been wounded in a raid on his base—and knew to wheel Asaaf to his room and stay out of the way while the guests lined up to see him. But every one of them came forward and slapped my back and asked about the drive—and as I stood beside his bed, the only thing stopping me from holding court all day was knowing I’d seem even more impressive if I didn’t.
As the crowd shuffled into his room I followed my mother, hoping to be of use. She moved quickly, making sure guests’ glasses were filled and then rushing outside to pull our good napkins and tablecloth from the clothesline. She’d always been this kind of worker, quick and impatient, and I saw it reflected throughout our house: in the sagging shelves filled with paperbacks and my father’s old Yehoram Gaon records; in the herbs she repotted in anything she could find, coffee cans or olive oil tins. It felt good working as a team, and for the first time she didn’t seem annoyed as I trailed behind her: handing me cucumbers to dice into a salad, asking me to drag over the picnic benches from the groves so there was enough seating in our yard.
When I checked on Asaaf, he was in bed with the guests all around him. His bandaged leg was propped on a pillow and hidden beneath a blanket. The shades were up, and his bedside table, which a few days ago had held gum wrappers and cigarettes and keys, was now cluttered with orange prescription bottles and rolls of gauze.
“It’s good it was below the knee,” Dedy, self-proclaimed expert on everything, was saying.
“Better for the prosthesis,” Yael said. She twisted her long dark hair into a braid and curled up beside Asaaf. I had no idea how she could seem so unfazed. Maybe it was hearing guns fired all day as a shooting instructor in the army, or maybe she was just tougher than I’d thought.
“And that won’t be a problem,” Asaaf said. “I’ll be so bored by tomorrow I’ll be doing laps around the house.” This was the solid, capable tone he always used in public, but when he sat up to face the group, his blanket slid off. Everyone stood there, silently rocking back on their heels, looking as if they wanted to leave but didn’t know if they should. They all had to know what a bandaged leg looked like, and anyway there was nothing to see, just that sweatpant leg pinned back. But still they stared, and suddenly the last place I wanted to be was in that room, so I slipped out the front door.
Outside the moshav gates, the brown roads were almost desolate: just a few kids selling sunflowers at the bus stop. Sheep huddled together in the open yellow field, as if desperate for contact, and above them, far beyond, ran the long barbed fence tracing the Syrian border. Being in these hills reminded me of all the days Asaaf and I spent playing out here as boys. Other times it made me miss a part of my life I couldn’t even remember, before I lost my father to a mine while he was on reserve duty, almost twenty years ago. I imagined a different mother then, sleepy and smiling, leaning into my father’s knees like in the photos she kept shelved away in albums.
Across the road, I climbed down a hill and peered into the valley. Lake Kinneret glittered below, dotted with figures so small I couldn’t tell whether they were swimmers or ducks bobbing along in the ripples. If I stood still in this spot, sometimes my voice would bounce off the hills and I’d yell things I couldn’t say to anyone, like for my mother to get off my back or for Lieutenant HaLevi to drive his sedan off a cliff.
But this time I didn’t know what to say. I stood there, looking out at the water, then down at my feet. Finally I yelled, “Fuuuuck!” which felt so good that I yelled it again. I threw it out into the distance, but nothing came back.
THAT NIGHT every sound jolted me awake: the insect chorus outside my window, my mother’s slippers flapping down the hall. I wanted to say it was thoughts of Asaaf that kept me up, but in truth I was too amped from the past couple days. I’d never gotten so much attention in my life—and before I could stop myself, I let my thoughts speed to where they always wanted to go, sliding a hand into my boxers, thinking about Yael.
I finished off and walked into the bathroom, and there she was, brushing her teeth. Her hair was long and loose and crinkly from the braid, and she wore one of Asaaf’s t-shirts and a pair of his sweatpants, folded low at her hips.
She spit in the sink. “I’ll be out in a second.”
I turned to leave, but didn’t. Shadows rimmed her eyes, and though they could have been remnants of makeup, I saw the exhaustion behind them. “He
asleep?” I said, pulling my toothbrush from the medicine cabinet, as if this were our nighttime ritual.
“He’s taking up the whole bed. I don’t want to move him over, not like it would work anyway, he’s so knocked out, and—”
“You’d rather be on the couch.”
She scrutinized her face in the mirror. Her beauty had always seemed like more of a distraction to her than anything else, though she had to be aware of it—everyone knew the army placed the best-looking girls at the shooting range so the guys would perform better. But now I saw how mottled her skin looked beneath the yellow lights, the way her mouth cinched together.
“God, listen to me,” she said. “I sound horrible. But it’s just—you know tonight I had to scoot him over so he could reach the bedpan? He can’t even do that by himself.” Then she let out a long slow breath I hadn’t even known she was holding, and all at once it was as if something inside her had split straight open, and there she was, this whole other Yael, drained and exhausted and quiet. I thought about pulling her into a hug, but wasn’t sure she wanted me to. She could back away, or, worse, stand stiffly until I let go. But then I went for it, just like that. Up close she smelled fresh, like a bar of soap just unwrapped from its package. Her cheek was warm against my shoulder, and under the lights I could see the pink gleam of her scalp. She was tiny inside Asaaf’s t-shirt. Her hair was falling over my arms, and as I held her, I felt the night expanding. Moths were banging into the window, sprinklers were tinkling through the grass, but all of that seemed distant and irrelevant. Everything real was happening right here, inside this blue-and-white tiled bathroom, as if we were reaching some different, newer kind of intimacy that had nothing and everything to do with my brother, and the longer I stood there, the more I wanted him to stay sequestered in his bed, drugged and dependent, so my life could finally roll into place.
Then she let go. “Thanks, Oren,” she said, squeezing my arm. She picked up her toothbrush and opened the door, and though that squeeze felt more sisterly than anything else, it was something. “Anytime,” I said, and slipped down the hall back to bed.
IT WAS still dark that night when I awoke to my brother’s screams. When I ran into his room, my mother and Yael were standing at his bed, trying to wake him. His shirt was pushed over his stomach, and he was sobbing in his sleep, reaching for the place where his leg used to be.
“We think the Dilaudid wore off,” Yael said, “but not the sleeping pills.” I could see what she’d meant about sharing a bed with Asaaf: he consumed the entire mattress, his one leg splayed and his arms out on either side of him, as if in a permanent stretch. His eyes were closed, and he still smelled like the hospital, of bleach and rubbing alcohol. My mother shook him by the shoulders. “Wake up, Asaafaleh,” she said. I hadn’t heard her call him that since elementary school, but it seemed to work. He looked up, as if he recognized us but was in too much pain to nod. He was crying, but that wasn’t how I knew he was hurting—I could see it in the way his eyes rolled back, the way he gripped the sheet with both hands. “Sit up for a second while I give you a pill,” my mother whispered, and when I glanced at Yael, hunched beside him with her arms across her chest, I swiped a pillow off my brother’s bed and set her up on the couch.
BY THE time I woke the following morning, my mother had already talked to Asaaf’s doctor, a nurse and an orthopedic surgeon up at Rambam Medical, who suggested he be switched to morphine. When she asked me to pick up the prescription while she waited for the nurse to stop by, I happily agreed: anything to get out of the house, even for an hour. I was unlocking the door to my mother’s hatchback when Yael ran out. “Okay if I tag along?”
I hadn’t left the moshav in days, except to go to and from the hospital, and as I pulled onto Sapir Street now, it felt good to speed again, my foot pressing effortlessly onto the gas. I’d always liked the mornings best, before the heat settled in and mist hovered over the valley. But today the sun was so strong it felt as though a hot-air fan was blowing right in my face, and all the workers along the road were already taking a water break. I turned on the AC as Yael fiddled with the radio dial, and for a few minutes we rode in silence. Then she said, “Your mom’s so on top of things. Makes me feel a little guilty.”
“She makes everybody feel guilty,” I said. “That’s her thing. She’s just good under pressure.”
“I guess she did raise you two alone.”
“Yeah, but I’ll bet she was always that way. When a bunch of our neighbors got jobs outside the moshav, she just took on more farmwork,” I said. “And you know she used to work folding chutes? If she messed up even once, some soldier could have died.” I regretted the words before they’d left my mouth. There was no point in reminding Yael that I was the only one doing immigrant work in a family of commanders—starting with my grandfather, who’d escaped Vilna, fought in the Givati Brigade back in ’48 and helped found the moshav, back when it was four families dredging a swamp. No point reminding her that I’d failed my placements while my brother was out collecting medals. The physical part hadn’t been so tough, but ever since I was little I’d frozen during exams—and during the interview, I’d stared at the officer’s boots tapping the linoleum floor to a quick, steady beat and gone completely blank. Then my army assignment came in the mail and I had to hand that letter over to my mother—and the worst part was the nonchalance she’d feigned, saying, “Everyone’s good at different things,” and I’d had to pretend to believe her bullshit answer.
Yael and I had forty minutes to kill at the mall before Asaaf’s prescription was filled, so we flipped through magazines at the newsstand, then rode the escalator up to Ozen HaShlishi and listened to music. I bought chips and we shared them on a bench. A guy I knew from high school walked out of McDonald’s and was halfway down the escalator when he turned and saw me. I waved, grateful someone noticed us.
“So you’re really just going home when you’re discharged?” she said, and I stared at her: she talked this way with my brother, sharing random bits of conversations that must have been running in her head and assuming he’d understand. It had always made them seem so close, as if every sentence were some intimate, privileged thing. Of course I wanted to go traveling. But the other drivers in my unit couldn’t afford vacations like the U.S.—Amare had already lined up a job with Nesher Cabs at the airport, and Stas was saving up to visit his family in Odessa.
“Who told you that?” I said.
“Asaaf. He was worried you didn’t have anything going on.”
“When did he say that?”
“I don’t know. A month ago?”
I hated thinking about them pitying me—as if my life could be sketched out so easily, going straight from finishing the army next month to tilling the same fields for sixty years to being one of those old moshavniks who was too arthritic to milk the goats but still hung out by the dairy, just to have a place to spend his days. “Maybe I like the moshav.” I was filled with a sudden need to let her know I’d be missed if I left. “I help put on the harvest fest in September, and it’s nice how quiet it gets during the winter.”
“Asaaf can’t stand the winter there,” she said. “He goes crazy during the rain.”
“Asaaf doesn’t do shit during the rainy season. He just likes to complain.”
She smiled. “He does like to complain, doesn’t he?”
“You have no idea,” I said, getting excited. “The moment he’s back in civilian clothes he’s a fucking baby. I still don’t know how you got him to agree to another farm.”
“Oh, he whined,” she said. “But it’s totally worth it—the woman who runs it does biodynamic everything on land twice the size of yours. Everybody pitches tents and sleeps out there too, not like here where the moment the sun’s down we’re all in front of the TV.” It was just like her to have found this place, some secret part of America I never would have known to look for myself, beautiful and forested and calm, where people slept in the middle of a field, unafraid of anyone
or anything coming after you. Suddenly she looked like the Yael I’d always known, so enthusiastic that on any other girl her earnestness might have embarrassed me, and before I could stop myself I said, “What’s with California now?”
“I’m not going without him.”
“What does he say?”
“That I should, of course. But there’s no way he means it.”
“He does,” I said, and knew it. I wondered what it was like to love someone so deeply their happiness overpowered your own. I had no idea—I only knew that right then, sitting beside her, I was seized by a genuine moment of boldness and wanted to use it, before it disappeared.
“I’ll be discharged in a month,” I said. “Let me come with you.”
“You?” she said. And then she didn’t say anything else. She wasn’t even looking at me. I followed her eyes, but all I saw was the never-ending line of people outside the mall entrance, waiting for the guards to scan them through. We were so close I could see all these things that should have made her less beautiful: the faint fuzz above her lip, the constellation of acne scars on her jawline. It was requiring a lot of effort to breathe, and I hadn’t realized I was flicking at a hangnail until my thumb started to bleed.
“This is all so crazy,” she said finally. Her voice was flat and small, and I didn’t even know which part of the craziness she was referring to.
Then she turned to me. “Just promise,” she said, swallowing, “that when we’re out on the farm, you’ll let me win at cards at least a couple times.”
The UnAmericans: Stories Page 4