“But we must all will it,” the British man exclaims robustly. “Think about it, the Jewish girl is murdered on the settlement, then the Palestinian boy is murdered in the parking lot.” He looks at all their faces. “On and on, for what?”
“Perhaps, think in terms of proportions,” Oum Hamid says, keeping her voice friendly. “Who has power? Who has the water?” She wants to explain the basic facts of climate change to him. That one industrial Jewish settlement can contribute more to climate change than all of agrarian Palestine. But she finds herself exhausted before she can even start. She wishes the woman from the taxi-bus were here—someone who had the energy to yell about each injustice.
“Listen,” the British man continues, “I tell the Israelis that the Palestinians don’t hate you.” He nods at Oum Hamid. “There is no hate in their hearts.”
“About the treatment project—” the director starts to say, clearly trying to pivot away from this man’s theories about peace.
But Mona cuts in. “It is impossible not to hate them,” she says.
“What?” the British man turns toward her. The director’s eyes are huge.
“I hate them,” Mona says. “I hate them and you would, too.”
The director rubs his brow in agitation.
Mona continues. “It’s not an eye for an eye,” she says. “An eye for ten eyes, an eye for a whole village.”
“Look, I’m Scottish,” the man says, looking pleased. This is his moment. You can tell. He’s going to explain their own lives to them. He says that in Scotland, the people were tortured and oppressed for three centuries. “But we moved on,” he says, “in the name of progress.” He smiles sadly in the belief—it’s all over his face—that this insight is beyond his audience. “Because if you hold hate in your heart, it will kill you.” He repeats this last part. “It will kill you.”
“Either way, the Israelis will kill me,” Mona says. And Oum Hamid feels a surge of what can only be called love for this uncompromising girl.
Before Mona can say anything else, the director cuts in. “Please,” he says to the British dignitary, “allow me to show you the model of the water treatment plant we are trying to fund.” He leads him down the hallway, exchanging a quick deal with it look with Oum Hamid.
The women are left alone. Mona is fiddling with one of her pearl buttons in agitation. Oum Hamid reaches out, touches her hand. “They bulldozed his house today,” she says.
“Whose?” Mona asks. She looks very young when she takes Oum Hamid’s hand.
“The man that the Jews say killed the settler.” Her hand is on Mona’s hand.
“Is that why you were late?”
Oum Hamid nods. The women are not friends, but they are holding hands. “What about Salem Abu-Khdeir?” she says. “Who will bulldoze the houses of the men who killed Salem Abu-Khdeir?”
Mona shakes her head. “Nobody.”
“Nobody,” echoes Oum Hamid. There is a pause. Neither of them has to say what the other knows. That the Jews, deep down, are happy that the settler Yael Salomon was murdered in her room. They are happy for the excuse to do what they were going to do anyway, and now they can do it in the dead girl’s name. “My daughter,” Oum Hamid says to Mona, and it is the first time she is referring to her this way. And then, just as quickly, the moment is over. The women retract their hands simultaneously. “What did I tell you about snooping around my desk?” she snaps.
Mona shrugs and walks away.
Foudah
Miriam’s phone lights up on the nightstand. She’d been dreaming—lightly, thinly, close to the surface—of a crowded room. I am all these people, she thought, shouldering her way toward some invisible center, saying, “Hello, hello, how are you, hello.” But as soon as his message came through, she was up. She knew it was Ori before she checked. She knew it was her son.
You up, ima? His chat icon is a photo of his army boots. Miriam remembers when he sent that photo to the family group chat. The girls had cooed appreciatively—“Thank you for guarding over us!”—and little Tovah insisted Ori make it his profile photo.
Yuval, beside Miriam in bed, is long asleep. His breath is childlike—rhythmic and oblivious. The room is dark but for the light from Miriam’s phone.
What happened? she pokes into her phone. Are you okay? If Ori were going out on a mission, he’d have sent her a golden heart emoji. That’s their system. No words, just the heart. And only to her: nothing in the family group chat, no need to upset his sisters.
She’d call, but knows he can’t answer. It’s well past midnight, nearly one in the morning. No matter. Tomorrow isn’t such a long day, only a few appointments with her brides—the newly engaged who come to her for the required learning before marriage. Her youngest client right now is a girl Ori’s age from Los Angeles. Rachel. A moody, difficult bride—Miriam’s favorite kind. She likes having someone to convince. It gives her an excuse to fall in love with her own observance, again and again.
She sends another text message to Ori: Where are you? She rubs her foot gently against Yuval’s leg. It’s almost like touching her own leg, touching the leg of her husband. The windows of their bedroom are locked; the curtains press out against the dark. Little Tovah’s room is reinforced as a bomb shelter. Ever since that Arab boy died in the hospital—the one who had been in a fight—there has been talk of revenge attacks from the nearby Palestinian villages. Death and honor. Over the sound of her husband’s gentle sleeping, Miriam can hear periodic pops of gunfire from over there. That’s how the Arabs mark weddings. Even this late at night, it could be a wedding.
Ori kicks another pebble. He checks his watch, again. Not even 01:00, cus emek. With him are all the familiar pricklings. Boredom edged with exhaustion and a bleak, low-grade horniness that never quite goes away. He’s posted inside the closed gate of the base, guarding the big tinny shed that is the armory. He can’t see past the gate’s camo netting but knows that outside, the road is badly paved. Really, this is less of a base than an outpost—not even a real mess hall, just some big pots to boil pasta.
Night air cools his cheeks and neck, but it can’t reach under his vest, packed heavy with extra clips and stun grenades, rubber tubing, unexplained stray bullets he doesn’t know what to do with, a notebook, and a dead pen. His right hand secures his Tavor in a gesture so ingrained he does not know he is doing it.
Here’s a typical army atrocity: The armory is empty. Empty! It’s locked and guarded and completely empty. Under the pus-yellow light of the empty armory, his shadow is long. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were someone else with him. But everyone is either asleep or out on patrol.
On guard duty, you’re not supposed to have your phone, but obviously he does. With his free hand, his left hand, he maneuvers to his chats. Ima has responded to his bored and desperate messages. She’s asking if he’s okay. But the girl he’s been messaging with has not responded. He took his shot an hour ago: Awake? He knows by the little blue check marks that she saw the message and is ignoring him. Still, he thinks he might have a chance. The photos she posts are invitations, according to Danny, who grabbed Ori’s phone when they were killing time between rotations. “Achi, look at the filter she’s using!” Danny pushed Ori back with his fingertips so he could keep scrolling through the photos. “Do they teach you what that means in yeshiva?” Ori laughed as he sat back down on a cot, not minding the gentle ribbing about his background. They were all hanging out in a trailer. Danny and fat Moshik shirtless, bouncing around to some mindless dance-hall track that had the tiny speakers in seizures. “Yalla, Moshik,” said Danny, still looking at the photos on Ori’s phone, “she’s almost as pretty as our Ori.”
On guard duty, you’re also not supposed to close your eyes, but he does that, too. Senses heighten. The air rushes in through his nostrils. A squeal of acceleration floats up from Highway 60. Arab or Jew, impossible to say. Pop of a rifle. Village wedding. There’s another sound too, or it’s not exactly a sound but a vibration under
neath all the other sounds, the kind of buzz you’d expect from a live high-voltage wire. He opens his eyes.
Since that Palestinian kid died over Passover—Salem Abu-Something—things have been hot. East Jerusalem was insane for the funeral: Arabs waving around their shitty AKs smuggled in from wherever, dumpsters burning in the streets, the body wrapped in a flag, bricks through the glass of light-rail stops. He saw all of this online. Bethlehem is quieter, but still it’s hot. You can feel it on patrol, knocking on doors in the camps, thick hijabis pushing you back, screaming, “There are no shabaab here,” like, Okay, lady, sure. He’d rather be on patrol than stuck in a static position. Who’s out with Alon tonight? Moshik? Not Danny, since it’s Danny replacing him at 04:00 in cus emek more than three hours.
Tomorrow, he and Danny both rotate to washing dishes in the afternoon. Danny will put a huge tinny pot on his head and say something like, “Achi, this is real combat.” Later this week they’ll be backing up the Tunnels Checkpoint, which is boring but not as boring as this. Really, anything is better than being alone. He checks his phone again: nothing. Responds to Ima that yes, sure, he’s okay.
This base isn’t even that far from his settlement. So close, yet he’s released to go home only every other weekend for sleep, hot shower, sleep, clean socks, sleep, TV, sleep, Ima’s food, a bed with sheets, a pillow, and sleep, sleep, sleep.
Even when her son is close, he is in another world. And he is so close. Miriam could walk to Ori’s base from home. Theoretically. As the ghost walks. If Highway 60 were safe at night, or safe on foot, ever. If it didn’t wind past Palestinian villages and camps, if it weren’t haunted by rusted-out sedans cruising silently, headlights turned off, waiting to kidnap a Jew. Basically, if everyone in the world froze for an hour, everyone but Miriam, she could walk to Ori’s base. Out the front door in her long, fuzzy nightgown, which is decorated with hearts and coffee mugs. She’d cover her hair—simply, with one of her berets maybe, but she’d cover it, even if she were invisible to everyone but HaShem. Barefoot in the silent street. Past the Drors, past the Farbers, past the Chabad family that just moved in, past the Levis. Silent houses of white stone walls, red tile roofs, just like her own. The road curves down toward the settlement gates, widens. The gates would open silently for her, close silently behind her. Left on the highway in the silver-lit dark, past scrub brush and bullet casings, past the gates of the next settlement over. On Highway 60, she’d pass bus stops reinforced against car rammings, guard towers along the road, closed gates of communities like her own. She hasn’t been to this particular base—they don’t open it for Parents’ Day like on bigger bases—but she can picture the way the water jugs begin to turn black as you curve up the road toward Palestinian homes. From photos that Ori has sent, she knows that once you get inside the base’s camo netting, it’s nothing more than a dirt lot scattered with a handful of trailers like shipping containers. Her son, she hopes, she prays, is bunked safe and sound in one of them.
Mostly, he wants her to worry about him. Then, when she’s worried, he wants her to leave him alone. He can feel himself doing it—sending her texts that make her concerned about how he’s eating, sleeping, if he’s safe. Then, when she calls him or threatens to call Commander Alon, he gets annoyed. Annoyed and something else. On the Friday nights when he is home, she holds his head between her hands for the blessing of the children. She closes her eyes. All around them are the candles that she and the girls have lit and blessed. Her smell is familiar. So familiar. It’s the smell of rooms that she’s been in all day with the windows closed. Suffocating, comforting. Mother. When Ima blesses him her eyes close hard, but she holds him gently, and he knows, of course he knows, that she’s thinking about stabbings, car rammings, stones to the back of the skull, shots to the gut with a secreted rifle. She’s thinking of all the ways there are for him to die. She kisses his forehead forcefully, like she’s trying to reach his brain, or maybe his soul. That’s what he hates. It’s her fear that makes him feel insane.
She’s only called his commander once, as far as he knows. This was back before the final rotation of their training, which meant, wow, almost ten months ago, back when he was not even a year into his service. He was a new soldier, and Ima called Alon to ask why her son kept falling asleep at the table, falling asleep in the car, falling asleep on the toilet. And why was he losing weight? Wasn’t he eating and sleeping right? Alon relayed all of this to Ori, in front of the guys. She wasn’t the first mother to do it. Their first rotation was a tough one, everyone running on two hours of sleep. Alon decided to make an example of Ori.
“I told her, ‘No, Madame Lev, he’s not eating right, and no, he’s not getting enough sleep, do you know why?’” Alon had one leg up on a rusted-out tank when he told this story. With his face cut up from shaving over his acne, Alon looks like a kid even though he’s at least twenty-two. They were all sitting around the skeletal tank, waiting for something, Ori can’t remember what. In one base or another, surrounded by dead things, waiting. Alon said, “‘Because he’s in the army.’” Then he turned to Ori. “Nu, tell your ima this isn’t the fucking scouts.” He gave the same little speech a few weeks later, when Moshik’s ima called worried about his constipation.
I’m fine, he writes. Go to bed.
Something feels wrong, feels off. Miriam texts Ori: Where are you? You’re on base?
You are supposed to get ugly with a girl in your belly, because, they say, she steals your beauty. But Miriam was pretty and glowing when pregnant with each of her older girls. It was Ori who drained her, sapped the color and glow from her cheeks, clogged her pores. She was swollen and lethargic. She took offense at everything. It must be a girl, people said, for her to take so much from you. She heard a smugness in their comments: You’re ugly and you can’t give Yuval a son. But it was Ori. Beautiful boy with such fine features. So sweet-faced as a toddler that you had to squish him to you, like something out of an old German fairy tale, yellow curls and dimpled apple cheeks. Now he is tall, broad, erect. He cuts off the necks of his T-shirts in the kibbutznik style; it shows off the new swell in the muscles of his shoulders, so at odds with the soft, full mouth. Little Avital’s seminary friends giggle and whisper around him. Young teenage girls in long jersey skirts, all wearing T-shirts from their brothers’ combat units. Over Passover—she loves to think about this—one girl dropped a plate when Ori walked into the kitchen. She looked at him and dropped it. The thing shattered.
From his shadowy side of the bed, closer to the window, Yuval lets out a small cry. He rolls toward her, and because she’s sitting up, his nose smooshes against her belly as he flings his arm over her lap. A tuft of his hair, so gray now, sticks out to the side and she tucks it behind his ear with her free hand. Her phone light dims automatically. Yuval is breathing. Miriam is breathing. The room is dark.
Ori is startled at a low growl behind him. He spins around to see a border police jeep—the sound is the crunch of slow tires on gravel—coming at him from the heart of the base. Headlights killed. Could it be Alon? He can’t see into the windshield, protected as it is with metal grating against stone-throwers. A grille like bared teeth. From here, under the uncertain light of the armory, the jeep looks like a dark mouth approaching him.
“Ahlan.” He waves, but the vehicle curves by him, not stopping.
Inside, he can just make out the figure in the passenger seat, but not the driver. It’s not Alon, he sees now; it’s nobody in his unit. It must be one of the guys from the intelligence team that also uses this base. Cherries, they are called. They specialize in disguising themselves as Arabs.
The Cherry in the jeep does not wave. Nor does the jeep stop. It disappears behind the trailers where soon—but not soon enough—Ori will be sleeping. Maybe they are doing some kind of surveillance. Not even Alon knows much about the Cherries or where their orders come from. They lean against the backs of trailers, smoking, growing quiet when anyone approaches. Maybe the weirdest part is that they don
’t wear a uniform. The Cherries dress like civilians: jeans and T-shirts. Either they’re never in uniform or they’re always in uniform. It depends how you look at it.
Ori is not exactly scared of them. But it’s weird how much the Cherries look like Arabs, talk like Arabs. They cover their faces and join in on the wrong side of demonstrations, or a mob of stone-throwers, and then—it’s so crazy to see—they are on either side of an Arab, a real one, before he can even throw the stone, lifting him up, pushing his head down. The guy never gets it at first, like, “Who are you? Who’s your father?” The Arabs can’t believe there were Jews among them, looking like them, speaking Arabic like them the whole time. Ori and Danny have watched this at demonstrations, when they’re shooting teargas and sound bombs in arcs over crowds of villagers who wave olive branches, scurry like bugs, duck from the sound of it. But the Palestinians aren’t really scared of flash-bang or even a little live fire. It’s Cherries who really freak them out, who cause a panic to rise up. Ori thinks the Arabic word for the chaos sounds cool: “foudah.” It’s a word that sounds like what it is. Foudah.
Sometimes Miriam becomes aware of a ringing in the silence. Not a ringing like a telephone, and not an alarm for a fire or an air raid either. More like the sound a spoon makes when circled again and again around the rim of a full glass. An accumulation of vibration. She can’t tell if the sound comes from inside her, or from something out in the silence, or if that is what people mean when they talk about silence. How could she ask anyone about this? What would the question even be? “Does your silence buzz?” Impossible.
There is death all over the settlement. Yael, of course Yael. And others since. One of the Weisner twins committed suicide when he was home for Passover from a yeshiva near Hebron. Nobody got close to the truth except to say that he’d had a funny walk. Yehudit’s son was shot by an Arab who wrestled away his handgun at a bus stop near the junction. You were always going to funerals, to and from funerals, in cars filled with grieving mothers.
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