The Art of Leaving

by Ayelet Tsabari

  My post after basic training was in the army ombudsman’s office in a large administrative base in Tel Aviv. A colorless cluster of concrete buildings with trees and bushes placed in an orderly fashion, it was a world of serial numbers, strict regulations, and abbreviated lingo. For the first few months, I came home every day, locked myself in my room, and cried into my pillow. I walked through the base in awe that other soldiers could laugh or enjoy small talk with each other. My only saving grace was Shelly, who had been stationed in the same base, in an office not far from mine, but she seemed as shell-shocked and depressed as I was. Sometimes I took off my glasses and wandered blind, hiding in the blur, like a child who puts her hands to her eyes and believes no one can see her. Without my glasses, the base appeared softer, an abstract watercolor painting in cool shades of pale gray and khaki green.

  Over the next few months, things got progressively worse. I developed a minor eating disorder, and a juvenile crush on Amos, an aging married officer who showed a fatherly interest in me. I collected a record number of court appearances for breaching army regulations: I neglected to tie my hair in a proper ponytail, untucked my shirt, lost my ID, and misplaced my cap. On my long daily commute to my mother’s house in Petah Tikva, I wrote short stories about miserable female soldiers whose lives were falling apart.

  My nineteenth birthday fell on my weekend watch duties, a monthly task I dreaded. I had to spend the entire weekend at the base, patrolling the fences with an Uzi, making sure no one tried to break in to, say, steal guns. Unlike in civilian workplaces, I couldn’t ask to switch shifts, and nobody cared that it was my birthday.

  I arrived in the girls’ dorm on a Friday and settled into the bare narrow room, which was framed with rows of metal bunk beds. The girls occupying the other beds unzipped backpacks and pulled out lotions and hairsprays, sweets and snacks, Walkmans and fashion magazines. Some changed into lounging clothes, revealing lacy bras and G-strings underneath the khaki.

  Netta was the last to arrive. When we saw each other, we gasped and fell into each other’s arms. Many years earlier, Netta and I had been best friends. I had lost my father in fourth grade and she lost hers in fifth grade. She had four miniature pinscher dogs that munched on my feet when I slept over. Her mom used to make figurines out of avocado pits. Netta had that hot soldier look going for her, a look I never mastered. Her cotton uniform was worn-out, fitting her bum snugly, as if it were a perfect pair of jeans, and her button-up shirt offered a glimpse of cleavage that just barely met with army regulations.

  I got the top bunk, by a smeared window overlooking Tel Aviv streets. That night, as my birthday officially began, I lay awake and watched cars filled with young partyers on their way to the clubs, arms leaning on window ledges, fingers flicking out cigarette butts, long hair blowing in the wind. Music blared as they stopped at the light, and then faded away as they sped off. The traffic lights from the nearest intersection cast a tricolor slideshow on our white walls, and the whining of sirens sawed through the starless night, sneaking into our dreams.

  It was still dark out when the officers’ hollers woke us up for our two-hour watch. I put on my uniform, then grabbed my Uzi from under my bunk and flung it over my shoulder. Netta reached under the bed for her Uzi. “Hey, girls,” she said slowly. “Where is my gun?”

  “Oh my God.” Another girl patted the space under her bunk with increasing panic. “Mine’s gone too.”

  * * *

  —

  ON SUNDAY MORNING, the first day of the week in Israel, I was back at the office. After the phone call from the military police, I packed my bag and cheerfully informed my boss that I was a suspect in a gun theft investigation and I must leave everything and go. Of course, the army police had already informed him. “I probably won’t be back today,” I said with a large grin. My boss was a lieutenant colonel with a protruding belly and freckled face whose rank was all he had going for him. I was the worst secretary he’d ever had. My coffee was barely drinkable, my phone manners were a disgrace, and I typed with one finger and refused to get better at it. He waved me out of his office with a dismissive sigh.

  An hour and a half later, I arrived at the military police headquarters. Away from the city, the sky was bigger and bluer, and the breeze sifted through the row of cypress trees that lined the barbed wire fence.

  Waiting on the wooden bench outside the investigation room, I tried to make out the muffled conversations. When the door finally opened, a cute, skinny soldier with spiky hair and thick-framed glasses—just my type—gestured me in. The room was small and windowless and smelled of a typical canteen lunch: cheesy and fried. The soldier—a detective, I soon determined—joined a female detective, who raised her head briefly from behind the large desk and then continued to jot notes on a scratch pad. They were both about my age. Finally, the girl looked up, intertwined her hands on the desk, and studied me. I smirked.

  They started with questions similar to the ones I had answered at the scene, then repeated them, differently phrased. They seemed to have borrowed their investigating techniques from a Starsky & Hutch episode: they paced around the room, shooting questions at me with narrowed eyes. The girl—who had dirty-blond hair and beady eyes—was playing Bad Cop, and the guy was Good Cop. Every now and then, they exchanged meaningful glances or scribbled quick notes in my file. I sprawled in the chair in front of them with my legs stretched out and my arms crossed, smiling with my mouth closed, as though I found the entire thing highly entertaining.

  “How long have you had an overdraft?” Bad Cop bent over the desk with both hands firmly planted in front of her. I bristled, suddenly less amused. How did they know that? What else did they know? It was clear, even to me, that I had a solid motive. Selling guns would certainly fill the bottomless pit that was my bank account.

  “When was your credit card revoked?” Good Cop leaned against the front of the desk with his hands in his pockets, facing me. His voice was soft and his eyes kind. I gave him a generous smile with my answer, and checked him out as he turned around. An image flashed in my head and I indulged it for a moment: Good Cop clears the desk with one swift motion, clouding the room with flapping paper. He flings me on the desk, rips my khaki shirt open to reveal a bra much sexier than the one I am actually wearing. My buttons fall to the floor in quick succession, like the shells of an Uzi.

  “How exactly are you planning to cover your debts?” Bad Cop snarled, killing the moment. I suspected her family was well-off. I was willing to bet that her daddy took care of her debts.

  I told them that due to financial hardship, I was granted a special permit to work outside the army, and that I had an evening job in a little movie theater that screened foreign films. I watched every single movie, ate heaps of free buttery popcorn, and cried at all the appropriate parts and sometimes at other parts as well. Since I worked for minimum wage, my paychecks were a few drops of rain to a desert soil. Still, instead of eating free lunch at the base’s dining room, I’d take myself out to a café in town, order pasta in cream sauce and a chocolate cake for dessert. Outside the base, on a sunny patio surrounded by civilians on their business lunches, I let my hair down, unbuttoned my shirt, and pretended I was free.

  Over the next few weeks, I returned to the military police headquarters several times. I’d go about my day at the office until they called—cold official voices ordering me to appear for an interrogation immediately. The sessions all seemed to blend into one. They repeated the same questions, exchanged the same glances, wrote notes in my ever-growing file. Sometimes we sat in different rooms. Sometimes new officers came to question me. I was bored and let it show, yawning liberally, staring at an imaginary speck of dust on my pants, weaving hormone-saturated fantasies in my head.

  One day, I ran into Netta in the waiting room. She gave me a quick guilty look, and I could tell that she was frightened. We didn’t talk about it, but we both knew that we would
never tell them how we had teamed up to commit our very first crime. We were eleven; it was a couple of months after Netta’s father died. We stole a chocolate bar from the supermarket by our school, then ran to the park and ate it greedily, our hearts racing and our cheeks flushed. We were astonished by how easy it had been to fool a store full of adults. We went back a few more times after that, becoming more daring, pushing the boundaries further. We were never caught.

  * * *

  —

  A COUPLE OF months into my investigation, I sat at a police station in front of an officer with a bushy mustache. It was a gray morning in Tel Aviv. Fall had just arrived, heralded by the first rain, a heavy downpour that washed away the summer dust and turned the roads into slippery mirrors. I was wired up to a lie detector, strapped in with two rubber belts over my breasts, a few wires attached to my fingers, and a big cuff wrapped tightly around my arm. I couldn’t help but find it kinky.

  This was a civilian police station: a maze of long corridors with closed doors, filled with the echoes of dragging feet, clanking handcuffs, and persistent phone rings. This officer was a real cop, much older than those young army detectives, and not the least impressed by my attitude. As far as he was concerned, I could be a gun thief. Why not me, who had barely finished high school? Whose behavior sheet was littered with regulation breaches? Who had nine disciplinary trials in the past year? Who clearly lacked money management skills?

  “Sit straight,” he barked.

  I reluctantly sat up.

  “I’m going to ask you a few questions before we begin,” he said as he browsed through my file. His voice was tired and monotonous. “I need to know if you ever stole anything.”

  My eyes widened. “Like, ever?”

  “Yes.”

  I’d been a small-time thief as a kid. Sometimes I stole things I desired but couldn’t afford, like books and magazines. Other times I stole for the thrill of it: candies and pop, the occasional scarf or sunglasses from a large department store. I was good at it too. Never got caught. “Yes, I have stolen things before.”

  “Have you ever stolen anything from the army?”

  I hated the army, and I was broke. There were the pens and paper, the occasional binder, and maybe a couple of stamps. I told him that. He glared at me. “Are you so strapped for money that you have to steal from the army?”

  I looked at him blankly, the way people do when they have nothing to lose. “Are you here to perform a test or are you here to question my morals?”

  And so we proceeded.

  He asked a set of questions to establish my reactions when answering truthfully: my name, my rank, my age. I watched the needle move erratically as I answered, wishing I was one of those people who could manipulate lie detectors, who had control over their anxiety and perspiration. Then he asked, “Did you ever steal anything from the army except for what you already told me?”

  I shifted in my chair. What if I’d forgotten something? “I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

  “This is a yes-or-no question.”

  Hesitation. Could I possibly fail the lie detector test? Could I really be charged with gun theft? Until now, it was all a joke, an entertaining anecdote, a way for me to get out of the office. Now I was thinking of Kafka, remembering The Trial, which I had watched earlier that year at Habima, Israel’s national theater in Tel Aviv. It was around that time that I began throwing the word Kafkaesque into conversations and was pleased by the intellectual air it bestowed upon me.

  Finally, I said, “No.”

  This would be my last interrogation, but I didn’t know that. They would never tell me I was off the hook, but after the polygraph, the phone calls stopped. I stepped outside the station to a city renewed by the first rain, smelling as fresh as clothes off the laundry lines. I ran into Good Cop in the parking lot—he must have been there to collect my test results. It was the first time I’d seen him outside the investigation room. He smiled at me. We chatted. I blushed. Still, I didn’t see it as a good sign. I didn’t feel relieved.

  Instead, I gave up trying to pretend that I gave a shit. If this was happening, if I was truly a suspect in a gun theft and accused of treason, I figured I could get away with pretty much anything. I concentrated on being rude, talking back, and lying. I was often late and always grumpy. After I neglected to complete an archiving job my boss had requested and lied about the reasons for it, he finally decided he had suffered through enough of my bitter coffee and bad attitude and threw me out of the unit. When I said goodbye to Amos, the aging officer I fancied, he shook his head at me with disappointment. I had grown inured to these kinds of reactions from people foolish enough to have faith in me. I was relocated to another unit in the same base, where the office was duller, the men older. Within a month, I managed to get myself kicked out of that unit as well.

  I had now paved my way to the base’s recycling bin, a transit unit consisting of misfits and rejects, troubled and authority-challenged soldiers. Soldiers who ended up there were assigned to the dirtiest and most mindless jobs, mostly cleaning and standing at the base’s gates. I noticed most of us were Mizrahi.

  My new job required no training and no skills. A seven-year-old could have done it just as well, or in my case, maybe better. It involved standing by the gate and following an armed military policeman’s hand signals. When a car approached, the policeman authorized it and waved at me to open the gate by pressing a button. Once the car passed, it was up to me to push another button to shut the gate. Long hours of standing in the heat made me daydream of traveling to tropical islands with names that rolled in my mouth like candy. Mozambique, Martinique, Mauritius. I dreamed of making love to exotic men who fed me pineapple and coconut on sandy beaches.

  I damaged two cars in a two-week period. The first one was a little Fiat. The gate was the kind that dropped like a drawbridge onto the ground for the car to drive over. Once the Fiat had passed, I pressed a button to lift the gate back up. Except the car was still passing. I heard the metallic clatter of the gate lifting and a loud thump as it met with the bottom of the car. The little Fiat bounced several times, bumping the angry driver’s head against the roof.

  A week later, I was standing at another gate, which closed like elevator doors. Distracted by an imaginary world filled with romance and sweets, I shut it while a brand-new Volvo belonging to a high-ranking officer was still driving through. The heavy metal gate closed on it three times, denting the car’s back doors repeatedly. I heard somebody calling my name like in a dream and turned to see my finger on the wrong button.

  It became clear I wasn’t good at pressing buttons. Following another round of investigations, this time with the road safety department, they—the faceless voices on the phone, the scribbled signatures on official documents—recommended that I be transferred to another unit, where I wouldn’t have access to button-operated machinery. But before they had a chance to do so, I managed to get myself into more trouble.

  That day, the meanest officer in the base, notorious for his bad temper and ruthless punishments, came by the gate for a routine check. Soldiers avoided eye contact when he walked by, urgently tidying up their uniforms in an attempt to look inconspicuous. Something about my attitude ticked him off. He wasn’t impressed by my sloppy salute and my unkempt appearance. He yelled at me to stand straight, to fix my shirt, to retie my ponytail. And why was I sitting at the gate? Shouldn’t I be standing? His face was so close to mine that I could smell digested falafel on his breath. My body grew tingly, my anger simmering. Other soldiers congregated at a safe distance to watch the show.

  The blood rushed into my brain like a burning fuse, and then my rage erupted—a white-hot, blinding flood of it. “You can’t talk to me like that!” I shouted. “This is not about officers and soldiers; it’s a basic human interaction! Maybe you should take a human relations course that will teach you how to treat people!”
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  The crowd emitted a collective gasp. For a moment, nobody spoke. I heard an impatient car horn, the clamor of a gate opening, my own shallow breathing. Then the officer exploded. His face turned from red to purple. I took a small step back and cowered as he roared, “Get out of my face! To the major’s office! NOW!”

  Waiting at the office of the female major I’d visited many times over the past year, my trembles began to subside, my heartbeat slowed, and my body resumed a normal temperature. I hesitantly approached her secretary. She was browsing through a fashion magazine with a bored expression, twirling a curl around her finger.

  “What do you think is going to happen to me?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry,” she said without looking at me. “They’ll probably just demote you. They won’t put you in jail.”

  “Demote me?” I snorted. “I press buttons at the gate.”

  “Oh.” She raised her gaze to examine me in the light of this new information. “Then I really don’t know.”

  They didn’t put me in jail, but I was now on probation. I’d been grounded, fined, and given warnings before. But this was the first time I’d been put on probation. I almost felt proud. I almost wanted to go to jail.