The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (17 page)

W
HEN
T
OM
and Gali first kissed in high school, he swore he would never let a girl like that go. And he never did let her
go, except the army came; then he and Gali wanted different things; then they were different things; then they seemed to be in different places all the time. It was clear to Tom from the time he was ten that he was not going into anything resembling combat. The official doctor’s note that got him out of combat service cited chronic migraines, and the truth was that the problem did have something to do with his head: he paid 120 shekels a month to get his auburn hair highlighted, and he would die before subjecting his hair to a helmet. His eyes were the shade of green that required just a touch of eyeliner every morning to make them stand out. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep up with that while fighting terrorists and all.

But it was also clear to Gali from the time she was ten that she wanted to fire off weapons and make things explode and run after suicide bombers on the hills. Gali knew her parents had made her limbs from scratch, and she always hoped that those limbs had a purpose. Luckily for her, by the year she was old enough to join the army, the first-ever predominately female infantry unit was already in existence, and the opportunity was too good for her to pass up. Despite what we might be inclined to think of her, Gali actually enjoyed the company of female friends quite a bit and was always popular among them at school despite her looks. But little did she know that they were going to put this experimental female-friendly unit on the Egyptian border, on a border that had been peaceful for the last thirty years. Now she was stuck guarding in towers where nothing ever happened and manning checkpoints where the most excitement was when someone caught smuggled DVDs or smuggled people or smuggled produce or smuggled pot. Her hands were tied most of the
time; someone higher up would give an order to let whatever those things were into Israel. She only got to go home to see her boyfriend once every two months.

A
ND NOW
it is Friday. Tom has the weekend off, Gali has the weekend off too, and it is
the
weekend. She should be coming into Tel Aviv’s central bus station right now, or maybe she is already in a service cab on the way to his house. Tom gets every other weekend off, but again, this doesn’t mean he agrees with us that his job is easy. Staring at a phone he knows is not going to ring. When he first learned he would be stationed at these offices, only twenty minutes away from his house, he thanked his mom profusely for pulling all the strings she had with the wife of the general chief of staff’s personal assistant. They treated him like a king, in a way, and his direct commander even said that he could choose which phone to sit by. Each phone was meant to be a forever open channel of communication between the Israeli army and the armies of other countries, and Tom was even given the opportunity to choose the phone given to the Lebanese army, which had rung many times during that recent nasty war.

He knew the phone connected to the Egyptian army would probably never ring. And he knew that even if it did, the phone call would have nothing to do with Gali. And he knew that even if the phone call did have something to do with Gali, it would almost a million percent not be her on the line. And still he chose Egypt, because if he was going to spend three years waiting for a phone to ring, he wanted to
preserve the possibility that maybe, somehow, in a weird and unbelievable way, that phone call was going to be from her.

“O
NE DAY
is onion; another day is honey,” Hamody’s uncle mumbled, signaling his wife to fill his china white coffee cup by lifting it and tilting it side to side.

“But uncle,” Hamody said. He wanted to say, “But uncle, I love her,” but he didn’t, because he didn’t want to sound cliché.

“This too shall pass,” his uncle continued. “Moa’alems don’t marry Christian girls.”

Most of the time Hamody loved that his uncle was the head imam of the entire western part of Egypt. Most of the time he loved his uncle more than anything in this world.

“She will never marry you either,” his uncle said. The smoke in the room got into Hamody’s eyes. He wasn’t crying. “Better one bird in your hand than two birds on the tree,” his uncle said, and laughed.

But Hamody wanted the girl precisely because of that. Not because she was a Christian girl, because she wasn’t really; at least not in Hamody’s eyes. She wasn’t a Muslim girl in his eyes either—she wasn’t a girl at all. She was a bird on a tree, that one, waiting for Hamody to climb up, too strong headed to use her wings and fly to him. During his junior year of high school he had watched her walk to the grocery store every Friday with her baby brother under one dark arm and a chorus of her other siblings humming around her. She would balance the wheeled grocery bag with her other dark arm. Whenever
young men offered to help her with her groceries, and they did, what she would do was place the baby in their arms and continue wheeling away the groceries.

“Why, thank you for your help,” Hamody heard her say once to one of the many unsuspecting suitors who were left cradling a fussy baby, running after the dark girl in silent disbelief. And Hamody laughed, and he laughed.

“Why put a healthy head into a sickbed?” Hamody’s uncle said. Hamody could feel the river of creamy black coffee gushing through his veins, pooling in his brain. He had wondered before why he had ever told his uncle about his feelings, and he now remembered that it had not been him talking the other week; it had been the coffee.

“Oh, Hamody. God hands his treasures to every person on this earth equally; it is just that some people choose not to enjoy their treasures,” his uncle said. “We can’t want everything we see, only what we can have.”

“D
UDE, WHAT
are you doing here so early?” Tom asked Oleg, the Russian guy who covered the night shift on the phone connecting the Egyptian army and the general chief of staff of the Israeli forces.

“You know, bus got in early, figured I’d spare you the last five minutes,” Oleg replied.

Tom was really in awe at how bighearted those Russians could be sometimes. He wouldn’t add a minute to his time there. He got up, careful to use his JanSport backpack to cover the front of his pants, and walked all the way through the
office and by the barbed-wire fences of the base and right through the gates that led to the heart of the bustling, gaudy streets of Tel Aviv. The Azrieli mall tower loomed above him, shining like a mouthful of diamonds. Cars were chasing and catching one another’s colors on the highway. It was then, standing by a street vendor of organic juices made from oranges and wheatgrass, that he could feel something vibrating inside the pants of his green uniform. He pushed the M-16 further down his back and reached toward his pocket to read Gali’s text.

Tom put the phone back in his pocket. He was already starting to feel it hurting. And we do know, we do, how impossible it is to do nothing but stare at a phone for eleven hours. Yes, a phone. And so we cannot really blame Tom for not texting Gali back, and we cannot truly blame him for where his legs took him next.

I
T WAS
already ten at night, and Tom still hadn’t texted Gali back. She knew because even though she was not technically allowed to bring her cell phone with her to the border checkpoint, she still did it, putting it on vibrate and hiding it between her heart and the bulletproof cement vest she was wearing. From afar, she sort of looked like a man, or a frog, or a frog man, with her green outer vest full of bullets and smoke grenades and green helmet on top. When Jenna the
Russian was taken to the hospital for dehydration (that stupid overachieving cow), Gali volunteered to stay on base even though it was time for her weekend vacation at home.

“Hi, Gali. Would you take a look at this ID?” Avishag asked. She was the other corporal on truck-gate duty with Gali that night. Her straight hair was jabbing out of her helmet as if it were suffocating at the roots. Officer Nadav was sitting on a white plastic chair overseeing the two, cracking his fingers and leisurely observing Avishag’s every move.

The ID Avishag showed Gali read, “Mustafa Al-Zain.” He was an Israeli Arab, according to his ID, which seemed pretty valid. In his picture he was smiling so hard his red nose was curling inward, and although his ID said he was forty-two years old, he looked about twenty, and rather sweet.

“Hi, Mustafa,” Gali said, leaning carefully toward the front-seat window, aiming at it with her M-16 as the procedures required. “Your ID says you live in one of the villages up north. What are you doing all the way down south?”

“Come on, dude, don’t give me a hard time. I was just seeing the beauties of Egypt. Can’t a man just see the beauties of Egypt?” Mustafa replied. Behind him were nothing but hills of sand, like giant tan spoons lying upside-down on a beige dinner table.

“But in a truck?” Avishag chimed in, faking a curious tone and raising her eyebrows.

“Yes, can’t a man just see the beauties of Egypt in a truck?” Mustafa said, trying his luck. But it was already too late, and he knew it. He was pressing the button to open the back of the truck as he was talking.

The truck was empty for the most part, except for three small carton boxes. It was rather clean, too, and smelled of
Febreze. Gali knelt down from all her height and looked inside one of the boxes while Avishag lit her way with the massive, painfully bright flashlight. For a moment there, the two resembled searching pirates, or searching pirate princesses, at least in their inner eyes.

On top were oranges, and that was okay because it wasn’t a large enough amount that he would have to pay customs. But at the bottom of the carton box were hundreds of bootlegged DVDs.
Shrek 2
,
Love Actually
,
Harold and Kumar;
also
Riding Miss Daisy
and
Gangbangs of New York
.

“Officer Nadav!”

“Nadav!” the girls shouted and climbed out of the truck.