When she opens her eyes, the car is gone. No, that’s not right. The car door is open. She unbuckles her seat belt. She gets out. Up ahead, a burning bus. Car crash and a burning bus. In the car, Jeremy is moaning, his face smeared in blood. “I think it’s broken,” he says. The woman next to him is all white—the white dust of her airbag like baby powder. Emily is standing outside the car. She runs a hand over her face, her scalp. Adjusts the pale blue scarf. Nothing hurts. Even her clothes seem clean.
A minor crash. Poor Jeremy’s nose. But up there—where the checkpoint is, or should be—a bus is burning. A suicide bomber? Has there been one since the ’90s? Above them, helicopters now, circling and dipping.
Emily did not realize she was still holding her phone, but she takes a picture of the helicopters flying so low she can make out the sunglasses of a soldier up there. She isn’t scared. Even now, especially now, because she has always felt—a feeling so true why bother putting it into words—that she will be an exception.
Thursday
Meir is hunting for a stapler because his own stapler, shit fuck balls, is broken again. This is the main function of his army duties—stapling reports to other reports, duplicates to other duplicates, all placed in one filing cabinet or another. For what? Don’t ask that question. It’s only taken a few months in the army for him to figure out that this is the one question you can’t ask yourself if you want to survive the mindless boredom of it all: Why?
He’s lucky, he knows. He’s on base mostly half days, heads to practice in the afternoons, and some weeks, he doesn’t have to come in at all. He shares a desk at an office in a trailer filled with papers, piles of papers. Most of them are soldiers’ applications to greet Birthright trips, to be the Israeli soldiers that step onto the buses of American/Canadian/South African/French/whatever Jews and introduce themselves as real, live IDF soldiers. That’s all this office handles: processing those applications, which, for Meir, means making duplicates, duplicates, duplicates. He glances at the applications sometimes. How will you embrace your role as a cultural ambassador to diaspora Jews? All of the answers are bullshit: about wanting to show the Jews of America that Israelis are normal teenagers with abnormal responsibilities; about helping them see how Israel keeps all Jews safe; about wanting to inspire young Jews everywhere to stand with us. Bullshit. Just say the truth, Meir thinks. You want three days’ leave from your service to go hook up with American girls—notoriously easy—whose panties will drop when you show them a photo of you holding a Tavor, an M16—hell, a water gun, probably. All the guys want to do it. Why the girl soldiers want to greet Birthright trips is a little beyond him. Maybe they want to practice their English?
The girls in his office are plain and nervous, many of them religious in their swishy olive-green skirts and leather sandals. He imagines them shy and overwhelmed on a bus filled with American teenagers who are so free they have no idea how free they are as they roll into breakfast an hour late or demand an entire tour bus pull over because they didn’t go pee at the last stop.
Right now, it’s just Meir and Pnina, everyone else getting lunch. She doesn’t say much to him, and Meir has decided it’s because she’s nervous. She parts her dark, oily hair in the middle and walks in the least inviting way possible, like she is leaning into the wind. “Hey, Pnina,” he says, standing over her desk. It’s piled in papers, manila folders, stamps, dead pens, empty coffee cups with brown sticky residue. All their desks look like this. “Can I use your stapler?”
“I’m using it,” she says, not looking up and also not using her stapler. She’s making notes on a form.
He leans over more, trying to make his arm muscles pop. Meir has a habit of rolling his uniform sleeves up as much as they will go, which, Amir told him, makes him look like he’s running a gay car wash. “Come on,” Meir says. He says it the way he imagines Amir might say it to a girl, like, Come on, I know you want to, the way that, probably, combat soldiers say it to American girls after telling them about the friends they have that died in Gaza or were stabbed to death while waiting for the bus. Meir has stories like that too, but nobody is sucking his dick about it.
Pnina looks up, her sallow face annoyed. The room is stuffy and badly lit by a dirty fluorescent. Everything smells vaguely damp. “Fine,” she says, handing him a stapler decorated with her name in sparkles. A functioning stapler is a precious commodity. Someone even made a movie about it.
“Thanks,” Meir says. He winks, but she’s looking at her phone now. Her phone case is elaborately pink.
“I don’t believe this,” she says.
Meir is halfway between their desks. “What?”
“Have you seen this?”
“What?” he asks, more impatient now. The impatience in Meir has been building ever since the guys who planned the attack—that is, who planned to attack a random Arab at the mall that night—were arrested and tried. They each got maybe a month in juvie, which Ima says will be mostly counseling anyway. At the trial, there were protestors every day in support of the guys, along with a few Arab-lovers protesting against them. Nobody else was named, which was good, of course, because Meir might have been kicked out of the league—you never know when there will be some politically correct gesture or whatever. And yet, he wants everyone to know what he did that night. Everyone. Ori, Amir, Ima, Pnina, the American Jews who flood into Israel to fuck a warrior and then go home. He wants everyone to see him as he is.
But whatever is on Pnina’s phone, Meir doesn’t get a chance to see it, because all at once the base sirens are going. Rising and falling like a baby screaming, like a cat in heat. Pnina looks at him, panicked. Is it rockets? Do they go to the shelter? Or something else? The red lights are flashing, and now, over the speakers outside, someone is telling them what to do. “This base is on lockdown,” the voice says. “Until further notice, this base is on lockdown.”
Ido has just gotten off the phone with his wife. “I’m coming home,” Emily said. “I love you. I’m coming home.” Ido sits at the kitchen table, holding Mayan above his head, saying, “Ima will be home soon.” Mayan squeals, her eager, chubby legs motoring in the air. Maybe she’ll be a swimmer. He lowers her to the ground, where she stands unsteadily by gripping on to his calf. He picks up his pencil, taps his sketch pad.
For a while now, he’s been trying and failing to draw Mayan for the web comic. Emily and Ido. The way he draws himself and Emily is almost realistic. Her tits a little bigger, waist a little smaller; his chest a little broader, arms a little hairier. It’s fine; it works with the feel of it—a glossy domesticity. But he is not sure what trait of Mayan’s to exaggerate. Does he make her eyes wider, anime style? Or play up the chub of her cheeks? He finds himself unwilling to distort her. When he attempts to draw Mayan, it’s in a more naturalist style, like a sketch you’d make before filling in with watercolors. It won’t work in the script.
“Mama,” Mayan cries out, from where she is now sitting on the floor. “Mama” means everything. Pick me up, feed me, I’ve shit myself. Mama, mama.
Ido picks her up again. Up and down, up and down. “Your crazy leftist ima will be home soon,” he says. Mayan is on his thigh now. He bounces her up and down gently, the way she likes. With one hand steadying her, he continues sketching out the scene he’s been attempting all afternoon: Emily curled around Mayan, Ido curled around Emily. Three concentric bodies in a bed.
Mayan babbles.
Ido keeps bouncing his knee. “That’s right,” he says. “Ima is done with the Hamasniks.” He speaks to Mayan in Hebrew when they are alone, always in Hebrew. He likes the idea that as Mayan begins to grow up, he and she will eventually get into good-natured arguments in Hebrew about a novel Mayan is assigned to read for class, a novel that Ido read years ago, and whether it is—whatever—too ideological or if the Hebrew feels too stilted. But what he likes to imagine is Mayan and him going back and forth, and Emily struggling to follow along, because her husband and her daughter are speaking a Hebrew too f
ast for her to follow, and anyway, she hasn’t read any books in Hebrew. Ido can picture Emily’s head turning to him and then to Mayan, then back to him, back and forth. He’s not sure why he finds the prospect of excluding her so satisfying.
A breeze moves the white curtains of the kitchen, and somewhere, the minor notes of a wind chime and a police siren sound in the distance.
Mayan grabs his pencil in an eager fist. She’s wearing a diaper and her teething necklace. “You want to draw? You want to be a cartoonist?” he asks, in the voice he uses just for her. “Yalla,” he says, and forms his hand over his daughter’s to help her draw a heart. Outside, another police siren.
“Mama!” Mayan screams, shrill and joyful.
There are more sirens now; he can hear them outside, nudging the wind chime as they float in the window. Three, four. Four sirens is too many sirens. Five sirens, six, and then more than he can count. What now? If Ido got up to look out the window, he would see only the quiet order of the front garden and the tall cypress trees that shield them from the street. He is careful to put the sketching pencil out of Mayan’s reach before he checks his phone. No new messages from Emily. Where are you? he types. She should be through by now, right? She should be back in Jerusalem by now. He waits a long beat. The sirens are everywhere; the whole city is sirens. Mayan is reaching for the pencil. Looking on his phone, he sees that there is nothing new from Emily, not even the blue marks to indicate that she’s seen the message. Ido opens Twitter: if there’s been an incident, the army will post there first.
Shibi and his wife have taken little Nasir out grocery shopping when the news begins to spread. Amal is inspecting each cucumber before she puts it in the bulging clear plastic bag. Shibi is consistently amazed at how much produce they buy, and then how much they eat, apparently, over the course of a week. Now that he is four, Nasir is allowed to pick out one treat each time they come to do their weekly grocery shopping. He has run off to the candy aisle—his paradise—and is no doubt looking for the biggest chocolate bar commercially available.
“Are you craving cucumbers?” Shibi asks his wife as she continues to fill the bag, which is now as big as Nasir’s torso. “My little wife wants cucumbers?” The more pregnant Amal becomes, the more he needs to adore her.
“Not cucumbers,” she says, fake pouting. “Chocolate. Godiva.”
“Oum Nasir wants chocolates? You little sweet?” He can’t stop talking to her like she’s a baby.
“Shibi!” she scolds him, embarrassed that he is so affectionate in public. But what can he do? She is a sweet. He wants to eat her! He wants to eat his precious wife.
They are speaking Arabic in the Jewish supermarket, which is generally fine, maybe a few looks, but nothing they haven’t learned to ignore. At first, they tried to go to a Palestinian grocer in East Jerusalem, but wallah it was inconvenient. It was farther now that they live in West Jerusalem, and anyway, the vegetables all come from the same Israeli farms. So week after week, they come to a big Israeli supermarket to do their shopping.
A Jewish woman and her teenage daughter, both of them in heavy makeup with too much jewelry, are looking a little too hard at his wife. The woman who must be the mother has her phone to her face. She is shaking her head, saying something to her teenager, and Shibi is suddenly aware of a strange energy in the grocery store, a tension that goes beyond the threshold he has developed for low-grade hostility. Long looks from the settler men comparing bags of sunflower seeds. A young woman holding her baby close and turning to leave the store when she sees Amal in her head scarf. It’s only like this when something is going on. When a boy had been kidnapped. When a soldier has been stabbed. When a bus has been bombed. Where is Nasir? Panic rises. His eyes are dry. “Where is Nasir?” he says aloud, and Amal, bless her, picks up on everything immediately.
“I will find him,” she says. She puts the cucumbers in the cart, not bothering to knot the bag before running off. “Nasir!” she cries out, but not too loud, more like a strained call. “Nasir!” She is heading toward the candy aisle in the back. They abandon the cart. Shibi heads past the dairy fridges, toward the checkout line, because sometimes Nasir gets distracted by the junk there. He doesn’t know what has happened. He doesn’t have time to check his phone. He needs to find his son.
Miriam is kneeling on her front lawn surrounded by her daughters. “Ima, we don’t know!” they cry out. “B’ezrat haShem, b’ezrat haShem.” They don’t finish the sentence, just repeat the phrase. G-d willing, G-d willing.
Miriam heard the boom faintly but didn’t connect it to the checkpoint—the Tunnels Checkpoint, where Ori is stationed this week—until the text alerts began coming in. Explosion at the checkpoint. Explosion at the Tunnels Checkpoint. Then she ran outside; she ran into the lawn, her daughters running after her. She would have kept running out into the street, but the little ones clung to her legs and the bigger ones grabbed her from behind. “Daddy is coming home,” they said, but how will he get home? The roads will be blocked.
“My boy,” Miriam is moaning on her knees.
The neighbors cover their faces to pray.
She could run to him. If they would let her. She could run on Highway 60, run toward Jerusalem until she reached the checkpoint, run all the way to her baby, her baby, her baby. What have they done to her baby?
Cunts! Vera could have been at the checkpoint today. Like, it was not inconceivable that she would be at the Tunnels Checkpoint today. She runs to the front gates of the church to see smoke rising up from Highway 60, down toward Bethlehem. Cunts, cunts, cunts. Something is happening, and someone else is getting there first. She had to come to this stupid church to write a stupid sidebar for a stupid in-flight magazine, and, like, shit, she could have gone to the Church of the Nativity. She chose this church because it’s closer. But if she’d gone to the Church of the Nativity, she might have been at the checkpoint right now.
Police cars race toward the tunnels. Army jeeps, too. All lights, all sirens. The civilian cars pull over to the side of the road, their drivers getting out to watch the emergency vehicles fly by. Vera takes some photos on her phone because she might as well try to get something. The nun she was interviewing comes out to the threshold to see what the fuss is, looking past Vera toward the highway. Vera stands by the church gates—pulled toward the action yet separated from it—scrolling through her phone, desperately looking for an update.
Already, a location tag for “Tunnels Checkpoint” is active online. Photos of a burning bus. Suicide bombing? There hasn’t been one of those in a few years. And on a Palestinian bus? Maybe Israeli settlers? A revenge attack? Or something else entirely? An actual accident? The IDF Twitter has not posted anything helpful. Developing situation, they tweeted. Explosion on Highway 60. This stands in contrast to the usual snark of the Israeli army social media presence, which reads like it’s run by a bunch of teenagers (it is), who have been known to post videos of air strikes in Gaza with a bull’s-eye emoji. Vera scrolls through civilian-uploaded photos of the explosion. More photos of the burning bus. Ambulances with the red Star of David (no crosses here). The sirens continue to scream down Highway 60. Vera finds a photo of helicopters circling through the smoke, unbelievably close up. She “favorites” it so she can find it later—maybe she’ll use it in coverage of the explosion. Not that she has anything to say except that she saw maybe thirty police cars and some smoke. She refreshes her feed. Cunts.
“Go home,” a soldier is saying through the megaphone. “This highway is closed. Turn around.” There are more army vehicles than Oum Hamid can count, blocking the road toward Bethlehem. Squat and green. Fifteen? Twenty? Everyone in the Bethlehem-bound van has gotten out. They were near the front of the queue when the soldiers shut everything down—a few minutes earlier, and they would have made it past this roadblock and home to Bethlehem. But now they are standing in the sun, held back by soldiers in combat vests and the knee pads, some of them talking into walkie-talkies, and from the cars next to and
behind Oum Hamid, the shabaab begin to emerge from the vans and cars in line—“What’s the holdup?”—their agitation mounting.
“Stay back!” a soldier yells into a megaphone as a man approaches, not a young guy in jeans, but a man in a suit. The man continues toward the soldiers. Everyone watches as he approaches the soldiers. What does he think? That he can explain his way through? The soldier yells something in Hebrew at him. The man is gesturing. He says he needs to get through. “This is inhumane!” the man exclaims. Maybe he knows someone at the checkpoint, someone hurt in the explosion. Oum Hamid texts her son again. Where are you? Tell me you are home. No responses yet. But there’s no reason for Hamid to be at the Tunnels Checkpoint. There isn’t, is there? Then why does she feel dread pressing at her throat? She dials Hamid. The man in the suit is yelling. The soldier pushes him back, pushes on his chest. A young man behind Oum Hamid cries out in anger. Hamid’s phone is ringing, no answer. Another young man, this one in jeans, younger, runs forward to help the professional man up off the ground. The other soldiers have become alert, are beginning to step toward the two men. She dials Hamid again. One soldier is speaking into a walkie-talkie; another has his weapon raised in the air. More young men are emerging from the line. Hamid’s voice mail again. A stone flies up, over the rest of the traffic, and lands among the soldiers. Then, that horrible sound that nobody should ever get used to: a warning shot.
Samar is at her office desk, her fingers hovering above her keyboard as she searches for the right word in English—the word she has been looking for, one of those four-syllable English words that comes from Greek and conveys something unbelievably specific. The word is about to come to her. She can feel it—emerging from the folds of her mind.
She’s alone in the office. The three other professors who share desk space here have left for the weekend. Samar relishes the quiet of the empty office; soon, she’ll go home to check on Mother and countenance the constant, invasive presence of her youngest brother’s young wife, meddlesome little Fatima. But not yet. A soft breeze comes through the window left ajar, playing with Samar’s hair. Outside, she can hear the murmur of students calling to one another. Voices of young men, laughter of young women. She remains stuck in the sentence she is composing. What is that word? She feels it hovering just beyond her, like a dream receding. She closes her eyes. She doesn’t think about what the word would be in Arabic or German or French. She waits for it to come in English, because she’s writing this paper in English. The word is elusive by its nature; it means to draw attention to something by downplaying it. Talking around it. Yes, here it is. One of those rhetoric terms. Here it is.
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