The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (19 page)

It is only Gali who knows what we know, because she can look at the time on her cell phone. The girls have exactly seven more hours to go.

S
AMIR LOOKS
at Hamody’s strong, dark hands as he gathers the coffee cistern and the ashtray from the floor of the guarding tower and puts them back in his knapsack. He watches as Hamody flings the knapsack with ease on his wide back, and he watches him as they both climb down the ladder, and he watches him as he jumps lightly onto the sand, barely bending his knees.

“Our four guarding hours are up!” Hamody says, smiling generously. “Say, Samir, you don’t talk much, do you?”

Samir is grateful that there are only six other soldiers in the showers that afternoon. Samir doesn’t undress quite yet, but he watches Hamody as he takes off his uniform. He keeps his gaze down, and when Hamody takes off his socks he can notice white cotton particles that remain stuck between Hamody’s long toes.

It is only after Hamody is under the water that Samir begins to undress, slowly. He takes off his brown shirt first, careful not to touch the wet circles that formed under his armpits
as he folds it and puts it on the metal bench. After he takes off his pants, and then his underwear, he walks quickly to the shower at the far left side of the caravan, waving his arms in a strange and distracting manner.

He pulls down the lever and faces the wall, and then steps closer. Careful so that no one might see.

“H
I
, A
VISHAG
, would you help me take a second look at these IDs?” Gali said.

The truck was pitch black, which was odd, and larger than the girls usually saw at the border checkpoint. Officer Nadav was sitting on a white plastic chair overseeing the two, cracking his fingers.

The ID Gali showed Avishag read, “Momo Levin.” He was from a suburb of Tel Aviv, according to his ID, which seemed pretty valid. In the passenger’s seat next to him sat an Egyptian man. His passport read, “Nadim Al-Hamid,” and it too seemed pretty valid to Avishag.

“Hi, Momo,” Avishag said, leaning carefully toward the front-seat window, aiming at it with her M-16 as the procedures required. “Your ID says you live right around Tel Aviv. What are you doing all the way down south?”

“Come on, dude, don’t give us a hard time,” Momo replied. Avishag wondered if she really did look like a man from this angle, her gun aiming forward and her hair all covered inside the helmet. Or maybe it was just that somewhere along the line, someplace along the line, it had become understood that everyone was a dude of some sort, and she was the only one who had missed it.

“I am sorry,” Avishag said. “You are going to have to open the back of your truck.”

Avishag and Gali both at one point had to use a public chemical toilet that hadn’t been cleaned in over two weeks. They both knew the smell of a shirt drenched in blood at the elbows, after crawling training, and they both knew what it smelled like when they had to wear it again the next day. Avishag also knew the smell of the chest of a man who hadn’t showered in days, and the smell of his unwashed hair. She even knew the smell of her dead brother’s body, and how it mixed with the scent of fresh mud.

But even before the back of the truck was fully open, it was clear to both of the girls that they had never smelled something this awful in their lives. The smell was so strong that Avishag drew a strand of hair from under her helmet with all the force she had left and pinned it below her nose. She didn’t even realize she was doing it until her head began to throb because of how tightly her hair was pulled.

The truck was three paces wide, and on its floor sat on top of each other twelve young women. One of them was a round-faced little girl, and she had a Coca-Cola T-shirt on but no underwear or pants. The few bits of the visible floor of the truck were brown and red and damp.

Avishag closed her eyes.

Gali closed her eyes.

Gali opened her eyes. Avishag did too.

Twelve pairs of eyes were staring back at them, waiting, breathing, and silent.

“Nadav!” Gali shouted alone. “Nadav!”

Nadav the officer got up and walked toward the girls with a slow step. He tried to place his hand on Avishag’s shoulder,
but as soon as his finger touched her she bent down on all fours, breathing in, then out, then more quickly.

“What’s the problem?” Nadav asked.

“Women,” Gali said.

“How many?” Nadav asked.

“Women, a little girl. They, Nadav—” Gali said, and she pointed to the back of the truck.

Momo and Nadim stepped out of the car. Momo had his arm around Nadim’s shoulder, and more than anything she had seen that evening, this sight had made Avishag sick. She finally hurled on the ground, and remained there on all fours, breathing in her own sick.

“They all have passports,” Momo said to Nadav.

“And they got their visas with the stamps on the other side and everything like this,” Nadim added in his broken Hebrew. He handed Nadav a pile of red passports.

Nadav looked at the passports.

“No,” Gali shouted. “Don’t, don’t even look at it. You know, you know they want to leave, Nadav,” Gali screamed.

Nadav looked at Gali with his quiet eyes. “And how do you know that, Corporal Geva?” he asked her. “Do you speak Ukrainian?”

But at that moment, Gali wasn’t even sure she knew how to speak Hebrew anymore.

“No more buts or I will put you up for a trial with the commander of the base. I am the officer on duty, and I say if they have passports and visas, they have passports and visas,” Nadav said.

As he closed the back of the truck, one of the women stretched her neck out so much, Gali thought she could hear her bones extending.

“Bye, guys,” Momo shouted as his truck drove away, leaving behind it a cloud of dust that penetrated the nose, the ears, the mouth, the pores of the skin on Gali’s face, but only hovered above Avishag on the ground, tucking her in like a sullied blanket of summer.

I
T WAS
only when the checkpoint shift was over two hours later that we saw Avishag get up from all fours. When Nadav put his hand on top of her head, she sprung up, fast.

She pushed him once. She pushed him twice. He caught her the third time and held her in a hug for a whole minute.

“Let’s go rest,” he said. “Everything looks better in the morning.”

I
N THE
whole town of Berezhany, and maybe even in the entire land of Ukraine, no one had hair as beautiful as Masha’s. It wasn’t its color—although it was speckled with gold. It wasn’t its shape exactly—although it did fall on her slim shoulders in waves like from a fountain. It wasn’t its length precisely either, although she had kept it long, all the way to the small of her back, from the time that she was twelve and was allowed to wear it down, because the regulations of the middle school were less harsh than those of the elementary school. The thing about Masha’s hair was the way in which it structured and restructured itself around her face. It was as if it had a life of its own. It always knew exactly how to fall
around her face so that it would give her round cheeks the most flattering light, no matter where Masha was. In school, and later when she walked to the shoe factory at noon, and even when she was walking around on the weekends hand in hand with Phillip, it was as if she had her own personal lighting crew following her around, making sure she always shined, was always at her best.

So when she cut it short, right up to her shoulders, rumors began to fly across the town. Jakub the hairdresser thought the reason was what the reason always is: money. He thought she had probably sold it in a wig store because she found herself is some sort of an economic bind. Kalyna, the old lady who owned the house right by the small recital hall, thought that the reason was what the reason always is: love. She thought that Masha had fallen in love with a new young man and wanted to test the nature of his devotion to her by cutting off her hair. Eight-year-old Mousia, whom Masha used to babysit on Saturday nights, thought that the only explanation could be that Masha had gone mad. When she first saw Masha with her own eyes, walking through the market with her short hair, Mousia let out a shriek and ran all the way home to sob in her room. She even skipped the vocabulary quiz the second graders were having the next morning.

In the end, it was Jakub who was right, because it was money, but Kalyna was also a little right, because who knows, maybe Masha was in love. But it wasn’t quite exactly what they thought. You see, Masha had been fired from her job in the shoe factory because of her boss’s jealous wife. Since Masha slept with the boss. A lot. And he had a wife. There were no other places of employment in the town that would
take someone with no experience or training, and Masha was going to go to school, except she first had to make enough money so that her mother could keep her house, and, well. It was like taking two steps forward and your whole dumb life backward everywhere she went.

But wait. She could go abroad, become a nanny to some rich kids, cut off her hair (because let’s be honest, if you had a husband you wouldn’t want him around Masha and her hair either), make enough money for her mom to even buy the stupid house from the landlord, make enough money for Masha to go to accounting school, you name it.

But the job wasn’t quite exactly what Masha thought.