I took off the broken vest. When the smoke began to fade, I saw Alamo on the ground with his MAG lying next to him. He had tried to run towards us and was hit. He was surrounded by sand, blood, and smoke. The gunshots sounded like an insane argument. The terrorists fired, and the platoon lay low. Then the platoon fired, and the terrorists lay low.
Blood dripped from my forehead onto Buchnik’s muddy uniform. A warm feeling spread through my arm. When I looked down, I saw that I was also bleeding.
I stood up and fired at the window from where the son of a bitch was firing at my friends. I don’t know if I hit him, but he disappeared. There was more shouting in Arabic. I ran towards Alamo, firing continuously until I ran out of bullets. I grabbed him by his vest and dragged him back toward the courtyard. My legs were burning.
Alamo was born in Ethiopia and immigrated to Israel at age eight. He was a huge guy, and he was carrying the heaviest infantry weapon in the IDF.
“Evron! Let go of me!” he shouted at me. “Evron, run!”
His teeth, usually pearly white, were at this moment painted a thick red. Every word he yelled caused him to spit out blood, which mixed with mine.
I stopped the story when Donna wiped away a tear. “Go on. It’s because of the onion,” she said, although the onion on the cutting board was still whole.
I was silent. I remembered the blood on Alamo’s teeth. Every word from him made blood spit on his face, which mixed with the blood that dripped from my wounded shoulder. I didn’t tell her that, since it seemed to me that it was enough for her today.
“And that’s why you’re in this God-only-knows-what job?” she asked.
“The truth is, I work for the ISA,” I told her. She did not look very surprised. “And yes, I think that’s why I was accepted. I can’t think of another reason; everyone else there is just much more suited to it than me.”
“That’s not what I asked.” She put down the knife and looked up at the spice rack, looking for the exact words between thyme and turmeric. “Why did you choose to get this kind of job? Don’t you understand that it could happen to you again tomorrow?”
“Maybe I should go back to that fight,” I told her. The fibers of the wooden table stuck under my nails as I scratched it. I knew the answer, even though it was a pretty bad one.
“Maybe I need to close the circle,” I said, and added, “It’ll be okay.”
The pot of boiling water had not yet infused the beets, which floated on its surface. Drops of dark red beet water dripped from the knife.
Chapter 13
“Hey, slow down!” Amit yelled at Captain Billal, who was driving the jeep. Not a minute passed, and the seatbelt tightened on my body as I was thrown forward when Billal hit the brakes and a cacophony of honking cars surrounded us.
The back seats in these jeeps were designed for a talk show − one passenger facing the other. The design was meant to leave room for equipment in the back of the vehicle, and no one thought of how awkward it would be to get stuck in front of your boss.
“If you brake like that again, I’ll make sure you have a talk with the head of your subdistrict. Do you hear me?” Amit shouted, as spit flew onto the back of Captain Yunas’s seat.
“He’s right,” said Captain Yunas, slapping Captain Billal’s seat with the hands of a construction worker. “These vehicles are not meant to go over 50 miles an hour.”
Billal looked into the mirror at Amit. “Can you guys shut up? You’re giving me a headache.”
It was early in the morning, perhaps 5:00 or 5:30. I signed up for a morning patrol in the village of Halhul to make some more money and to have a few hours to get to know the area. On campus, Wednesdays were relatively free. All I had was a two-hour comparative politics class, so I could do short missions in the morning. Donna said I was overdoing it, but what did she know? Her training at the sushi restaurant on Azza St. in Jerusalem had taken just three days, in a comfortable, air-conditioned dining hall. It certainly wasn’t three months of semi-military training.
The rains came late this year, but it was very cold and the early sunset shortened my days. Donna and I spent less time together, the night hours were mainly all that were left for us.
An agent operated by Billal reported that IDF uniforms were found in the yard of a house in this village.
“There are so many idiots in the headquarters,” Billal said as he completed a full detour of the village’s entrance square. “Did they call us because of fucking uniforms? Come on! Half of my agents come to our meetings with Air Force officers’ coats. God knows where they get ‘em from.”
“We’re not gonna find shit in here,” Captain Yunas complained.
“Great time to get back,” Billal replied. His phone rang. He answered and from the car’s hands-free system came the voice of a bored bank clerk who told him: “I’m calling regarding the joint account with your wife . . .”
“Later,” he said and sent a kebab-finger to cut off the call.
“You don’t have enough money to cover . . .”
“Later!” he barked, and hung up.
Breathing heavily, Yunas returned to his tablet and tried to suggest a new topic. “Amit, did you get those tablets, too? It saves me... wait for it... half an hour a day.”
He was younger than Captain Billal, about the same age as Amit. He didn’t have short hair, like all the other thugs here. His was long and light and parted in the middle, like a mushroom.
“You can be sarcastic,” Amit said, “but half an hour a day is exactly what I need so I can see my kids before they go to sleep.”
“You really don’t see your kids?” I asked him.
Outside in the village, there was not a soul in sight. Piles of wet garbage were sitting beside the improvised soccer fields. The only people on the street were a boy carrying a sack and a limping old woman. A light, pleasant rain was falling on the reinforced windows.
“I see them when they’re asleep,” Amit answered after a short silence. His eyes were uncomfortably fixed on Yunas’s seat.
“If you choose this job as your profession, you give up a part of yourself, Evron,” he said.
“So my personal life is over?” I smiled.
“You’re here as a student, a position that developed in the last 20 years when they couldn’t find enough qualified people to do the job for more than a year and a half. Enjoy it while you can,” he said, as an awkward bump in the road sent us all flying, “because when you finish your studies and you’re in a senior position, the party is over.”
The rain intensified and washed the dusty streets. This village of Halhul was familiar to me for some reason. I must have been here during my army service as backup or something, or maybe all the villages look the same. I had been on a thousand patrols like this in the army. We would patrol in the morning and at night, and then again in the morning. I remember myself as a soldier patrolling those territories. It was strange that as an ISA security guard, wearing civilian clothes, I felt as if I were dressed in disguise.
“What about the kidnapped soldier? Do we have any clue?”
Amit blinked twice and awkwardly moved in his chair. “They’ll find him at the end. A soldier is something hard to hide.”
“What’s his name?” I asked him.
“Don’t ask me difficult questions.”
“Why is it forbidden to ask?”
“There’s a gag order on it.”
“But he was a soldier here, right in this very unit; surely people noticed that a soldier was absent.”
“Well,” Billal declared, and turned around to the main square of the village. “No people, no intelligence. I guess we won’t find Corporal Seffi Keinan today.”
Amit was mad. “Gag order, captain!” He shouted, and Billal said, “Dude, everyone here knows . . .” but his sentence was cut off as our eyes met in the rear-view mirror.
“Shit,” he said.
I sank into the passenger seat, the combat gear pressed to my stomach.
I wrote a reminder on the phone: “Seffi Keinan” before I forgot his name. The calendar reminded me that I had an exam the next day. The sudden braking of the jeep threw the phone out of my hand.
There were huge steel garbage bins in the road blocking the way out of the village.
“Here we go,” Billal said as the first rocks hit the vehicle. He put the gear in reverse and drove back into the village in an attempt to find a way out.
“So what do we do?” Amit asked me with a fatherly smile. The bright sunlight that had been reflecting on his baldness disappeared at once when a can of white paint hit the side of the vehicle and covered the window.
“I’ll report to headquarters,” I said.
“You can do that after we get out of here,” Amit said. Unlike him, I couldn’t find a reason to smile. Billal started cursing and put the car in forward gear again. He shouted into his rear-view mirror, “Hey, mister security officer!” but Amit didn’t even turn his head.
“Now you finally acknowledge that we’re here,” he replied to Billal. “We’re training, so you’ll have to wait a bit.”
I had rocks thrown at me when I was in the army but we were always a large force, not like this. Amit’s indifference only annoyed Billal even more, and made me uncomfortable. The rocks kept coming at an increasing pace, and the asphalt started to look like a carpet of gravel. The rock- throwers, who at first hid behind dirt mounds and trees, came out of their hiding places and fearlessly stood a few meters from us.
“Well, Itay, what do we do now?” Amit asked.
Looking out my window, I saw green trees, a gray sky, and faces full of hatred. The rocks that hit the jeep didn’t cause any damage to it; they just made a lot of noise. The rocks wouldn’t harm us, but all they needed was enough cover to put 250 grams of explosives under the vehicle. That would be enough to wrap our blood and flesh in steel.”
“Try to run the blockade?” I guessed. Amit ignored my answer and leaped over me, rushing to lock my door, just seconds before two rioters could open it. That was the end of the day’s training.
“Turn left and go forward. And turn on the loudspeaker,” Amit said, leaning forward between the seats of the two agent handlers. The double magazine in his vest squashed my face against the reinforced window, which was odd because a Palestinian tried to hit me from the other side of it.
The captain did exactly as Amit said.
“Now put it in reverse, honk, and step on the gas,” Amit said with the confidence of a driving instructor to his students.
“Good. Now put it in reverse, turn a bit to the right and separate those idiots from the garbage can. Exactly. Yes. There. Now quickly honk and step on the gas. Now stop.”
The rocks were only hitting the right side of the car, the side where Amit was sitting. The bald battle ox put his hand on the doorknob and pulled it open almost all the way.
“Evron,” he said, pointing in front of us. “I’m going outside to distract them. You go out to the left side of the garbage can and get rid of the big rocks.”
Not a second passed and he was out of the vehicle, as if the rocks flying at us were just a Hollywood stunt.
I opened the door and ran to the garbage can. I heard Amit cocking his gun and shouting in the distance. The magazines in my vest rattled like a jar of coins. The distance to the garbage can was short but felt like an eternity to me. I heard bleeding Buchnik’s disgusting heavy breathing in my ear with every step I took.
Amit stood on the vehicle, high above everyone, and opened fire. He pulled the trigger and hit his target and pulled the trigger again and hit another target. I knew this because I heard the pinging sound of the metal moan after every shot he fired. People who get shot don’t make such a sound, they just go down silently. He was hitting electricity poles and metal gates, anything that would make a threatening noise without leading to an investigation.
I pushed myself up against the huge garbage can that blocked the middle of the road, got rid of three large rocks, and ran back to the vehicle. Amit’s door slammed shut just as I slammed mine. Billal didn’t wait for any kind of order. He hit the gas, passed the blockade, and we were out of the village.
The ride back to Jerusalem was quiet. Billal opened the window to let some fresh air in, while Yunas cursed his tablet when the battery ran out. I looked out the window at the green bushes and rugged hills of Gush Etzion as I tried to get rid of the sound of Buchnik blowing in my ear.
When we got back to headquarters, Amit gave me his bulletproof vest and asked me, “Could you take this to the storeroom too?”
I took it and went to the stockkeeper. A young, blond guy with a cast on his hand stopped by and asked me, “Are you Itay Evron?” Something in his speech turned the “t” into an “s”.
“Yes.” I told him.
“Oh... Hi... My name is Avihu Penn. I came back today,” the man said. And Koby the stock keeper added:
“This is Seffi’s friend, from the kidnapping.”
“Oh, nice to meet you. Hope you’re okay,” I said to him and turned to the stockkeeper.
“Koby, take these things, please. I’m in a hurry.”
On the way to the car, Donna sent me a message: “I’m just outside your flat, buying green onions. Can you check if you have any beets left in the fridge?”
The distance between me and my flat is less than a 20-minute drive and yet, eat kubbeh beet soup on my balcony with Donna felt so far away from me.
Before I met Donna, my cooking skills were limited to the ultimate trinity for the lone survivor: omelets, pasta, and schnitzel. By contrast, when Donna moved to Jerusalem she knew that she was going to have a good life here. Every Friday she would go to Mahane Yehuda and buy various ingredients. But since the time that we tried the Jerusalem-style kubbeh beet soup and I said, “God, this is so amazing,” Donna has been buying beets every time she goes to the market. As our love grew over time, so did the amount of beets in the soup.
Chapter 14
Once a week Donna was killing herself with a double shift at the sushi restaurant in the city center. After such a shift, she was so exhausted from customers and so rich from cash tips that she always came home with a pint of Ben and Jerry’s or a bowl of malabi. She tries to do her double shifts on Mondays because those are the days that I also busted my ass − most of the time I start those days with five hours of field patrols, and right after lunch I rush to school for two afternoon classes.
Yesterday was such a day; it was so intense that I took the day off and I crashed on my sofa for two hours. I had a nightmare that Seffi Keinan was choking me. I kicked and struggled, but the skinny, bespectacled soldier was surprisingly strong. I screamed “Enough!” and tried to hit him, but he cried. Donna shook me and shouted, “Wake up! What’s wrong with you?”
Donna was wrapped in a pink robe with a towel around her head. When she realized it was just a bad dream, she held me and asked me if I was dreaming about the battle. I told her “No” and went to the balcony. If I were a smoker, this would have been perfect time to smoke. I thought to myself, I’m so lucky to have Donna in my life. Classic girl, the kind that anyone would love to introduce to their parents. Even Leroy told me, “I have no idea what she’s doing with you,” in his so-Leroy-way to compliment.
Drops of rain sent me back to my room. Donna was sitting on the bed, polishing her toenails in purple.
“Donna.”
“Yes, dear.”
“At the science campus, are things . . . going down?”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Like... boys-and-girls-wise.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“People there aren’t weird?” I asked.
“Some are really cool, and some
are aliens like me. Is everyone on the Mount Scopus campus jealous like you?”
She was right, obviously. When I heard about one of her classmates, who has an embroidered cool bag from some volunteer activity in Nepal, I immediately wanted to see a picture of him. He looked like a tormented artist: a pretty tall guy with a baby face and the floating look of a daydreamer. I immediately explained to her all the reasons that he was not right for her, but she smiled and put a warm hand on me – which draws all my fears into it and then makes them disappear.
“You have nothing to worry about,” she told me.
She learned from her sister how a relationship should feel. She kept quoting her as if she were the smartest person in the world. “In a healthy relationship, you talk about everything − even tensions,” she told me once and I raised my head as if I heard a war alarm.
“Tensions! What tensions, exactly?!”
“It’s natural when that happens,” she laughed. “Aren’t we humans?”
“You and the pale, skinny guy − is there any tension between you?” I asked her. If she would have answered yes, I promised myself, the guy would be dead by sunset.
“Well . . .” she waited with her reply, but broke into a mischievous smile, “No! And don’t talk about him like that It’s really not very nice.”
She was right. I tried hard to keep my mouth shut, but then she said, “And next time, before you start to bad mouth my campus, try to finish your own studies first.”
“What are you talking about? I have a test next week in research methods.” I told her and waved with my MacBook lying by the pillow.
“And do you plan on passing it?”
“Yes, I’m going to get at least 60. Anything higher would be a contribution to science. I’ll feel like I wasted time. The guys in the field need me.”
“You mean that you need the field.”
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