The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (24 page)

W
HEN
I see Noam, she runs and hugs me. Then she shows me her ring.

“Topaz and white gold,” she says.

It takes me a couple of minutes to notice that Emuna is not around. I think too much, and only of myself.

When I realize Emuna is not around, it excites me.

And perhaps this can be the boom. Maybe Emuna took off to India. Maybe she is in her childhood room, broken, in conclusion and after all broken. And maybe she decided that she just didn’t want to see us, that this won’t be fun, that enough is enough.

This all happened before, and it will happen again just the same, so in all truth there is no need for it to ever happen, this whole meeting, the mall, us.

I say I think about Emuna all the time, but I don’t even ask about her. Not right away. I wait.

“I can’t believe we are finally almost grown-ups,” I say and kiss Noam on both cheeks.

Standing behind her are six other girls I have known since I was born. We are in front of a shoe store on the third floor of the epic mall, people walking around us, engulfing us, humming language.

“You are so crazy,” Noam says. “How come you’re not
wearing your uniform shirt?” she asks after I apologize for my sweatiness and uniform pants and explain I came straight from the base. “You’ll get in so much trouble,” Noam adds.

“If anyone asks, I’ll just say I am not a soldier,” I say.

“You can’t do that, crazy face,” Lea says and punches me on the shoulder.

“Well, I already did, Ms. Officer. I already said it once and I can say it again.”

We laugh.

Aside from Lea, who also came straight from a base, they are all wearing bell-bottomed jeans. We never grew out of that.

E
MUNA
. I want to tell you something. Some things.

Do you remember that one time, in sixth grade, when we saw the movie? That was the first time we ever saw a movie in a theater. We sat that day on the floor of Lea’s kitchen. There must have been eight of us. Lea called for a car. The smell of that call, to me, still, is stolen perfume and bananas and feet.

“We would like to order a taxi. A big one. There are a lot of us. And we’re going to the movies,” Lea said.

Remember the van that came and got us? The ride? We tried to make our faces and words and joy look like those of the adults we thought we were becoming.

“Here is a tip,” Lea told the driver when we arrived at Nahariya’s attempt at a mall. “A tip, as is customary.”

The movie wanted to scare us. It was
Scream 2
. We screamed. Right after Neve Campbell shot Mrs. Loomis in the head, right as she said, “Just in case,” all the lights went
on and the movie stopped and an usher screamed, “Don’t be alarmed. A suspicious object was found in the mall, and we need everyone to walk to the parking lot.”

“Just our luck. Just. Our. Luck,” Lea said in the parking lot. Remembering it now, I know these were the most adult-sounding words any of us said that day, but I didn’t notice it then. The act was over.

“Remember this one time when we pretended we were wolves and crawled all over Nina’s street?” I asked Lea.

“And?” Lea asked.

“And nothing,” I said. “Just something I remembered.”

“You do that
all
the time,” Lea said. “Remember this one time
this
, and remember this one time
that
.” She was imitating my voice, talking like a slow person. That year I still hoped she’d change back to the girl I used to play with, and the more I hoped the more she mocked me.

“Yea, she does that all time,” Noam said. “It’s annoying.”

Avishag looked away. Not once has she ever spoken for me, I now realize. Not since the beginning.

But you.

And you said, “Leave her. Leave her alone.”

And you. Remember?

Why don’t you ever leave me?

O
NLY AFTER
all the words without weight are done falling from our mouths do I ask Noam, “Where is Emuna?” I face her. “She is not coming, is she?”

Emuna. It takes me a long time to ask where you are. A long time.

I wanted to tell you something. When I am with you, when we are breathing the same air, I also remember you; still and always and all at once.

Ok.

“Oh, Emuna? She just went to the bathroom,” Noam says. “There she is, right behind you,” Noam gestures with her chin.

I can smell you, standing behind me and real, before I turn. I smell the industrial soap of the Azrieli bathroom on your hands. I smell the urine that soaked into the frayed ends of your bell-bottomed jeans. You are right here.

The smell is the opposite of memory. A thing other than other.

Lea, the officer, had stopped feeling her own body. She lay on her back on top of an antisniper barricade, holding a newspaper page, blocking the stars. She had to stretch her arms to hold the wide page above her head.

“Oh,” she said.

“The army didn’t do it,” Tomer said. He flicked his cigarette butt down to the asphalt of Route 433. He was talking about Huda, the little Palestinian girl on the beach. The newspaper picture showed her screaming amid red sand, near the body parts of the six people that were her family.

“I know,” she said. “This is a manipulation.”

The world said the Israeli army had done it with an air
strike, but the Israeli army knew that the family had been killed by a dormant shell that Palestinian militants had left by the ocean. Lea looked at Tomer. The orange light of the road lamps lit him from behind, so that he could have been a demon. He was nineteen, two years younger than the officer.

“It’s just that I can’t feel my body all of a sudden,” she said.

“Again?”

Lea often told him that she couldn’t feel her body. That she could move it but not feel it. That those were two separate things. He never questioned her; he pushed her. This was what she wanted.

Tomer took his weapon off his back and pressed her shoulders into the cement. When their pants were pulled down, he pressed his hands on her neck, then her arms. He called her “Lea” during the day because this was her name, and because she said he could. At night, when he was pulling her hair so tight her scalp buzzed, he called her “officer,” because this was what she said he should call her then, and this was what she was. She wanted him to call her that then, because it was when he was closest and roughest that she knew he most needed to be kept at bay. When she looked to the side, she could see the warm glow that came from inside the homes in villages of other people.

She knew her service days were nearing their finish line but could not feel it. She could not imagine or remember any of the things she had wanted before she became a soldier, and she struggled to find things she wanted for her civilian life ahead. She guessed she must want a family or to get into a good school, but she guessed it from the data around her. She did not feel the want herself. When she had first begun
feeling this way, less than a year into her service, after the neck of one of the soldiers at her checkpoint was cut almost in two, she had decided the only reasonable thing she could truly want must exist inside the army, and so she decided to become an officer. She did not want to be a dumb checkpoint soldier anymore, the type whose neck could get cut almost in two. She wanted to be able to yell at soldiers who put their necks where they might get cut. She grew to accept that her service days would begin and end in the transitions unit but figured that if she had to be at a checkpoint she might as well be a checkpoint officer.

Tomer did almost everything she asked him to without asking a lot of questions. He was a reasonable nineteen-year-old boy. And Lea, she had this certain beauty, after all. A cold, humming, unfazed beauty, and great breasts. She was also the only girl who was sprinkled inside his days. And he was passing his own time—his own time as a soldier.

Lea woke up alone in her field bed the next morning. She was in her own tent because she was the only female at the post.

It was an odd posting. Route 433 bred oddness all along it. It cut through the West Bank but had been closed to Palestinians since 2002, when the motorcyclists were shot. The army somehow needed four soldiers and a commanding officer for an improvised checkpoint every hundred or so kilometers, so she found herself commanding four boys who manned daytime guarding shifts in an always deserted checkpoint. All so there would be someone to say, “Sorry, the road is blocked,” in case someone did decide to show, even after all this time. This had little to do with her earlier service days in a gigantic checkpoint and had almost nothing to do with who she was.
This posting would have made her angry, except she knew her service was over in a few weeks anyhow.

She spent the day in bed reading a prep book for university entrance exams. She hoped to make high enough marks to study business. She was supposed to check in with the boy on duty twice a shift, but she didn’t bother because nothing ever happened. Except that day something did. Tomer, who had the afternoon shift, called her military cell to say that there were three male demonstrators at the checkpoint.

“Have they thrown rocks or anything?” she asked.

“No, but they have a sign. And they keep on arguing with me that I, like, disperse them, even though I explained we don’t have any means of suppressing demonstrations here.”

“That’s not true.”

She was suddenly more excited than she had been since before she had been posted on Route 433. As an officer, she knew that every checkpoint had a supply box to be used for demonstrations. Finally, she thought, her training was good for something. And if the demonstrators insisted, she must aim to please.

She unlocked the metal supply closet in her tent and pulled out a wooden box. It was heavy, so it took her a while to carry it to the antisniper barricade and then to cross the road to the sun umbrella that marked the checkpoint.

“We had a lesson about demonstrations and stuff in boot camp, but I forget,” Tomer said.

Two of the three Palestinian demonstrators were in their thirties, and one was just a boy, a boy with fingers in his mouth. They had one sign, a piece of A4 paper on which they had written with a marker in English: “Open 433.” One of the men was wearing a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. He raised his
hand, so she signaled him with her hand to step forward. She signaled him to halt when he was four steps away.

“Officer, we are here to demonstrate against the restriction of our mobility, which is a collective punishment and against international law,” the demonstrator said in solid, accented Hebrew.

She put one hand on the handle of her weapon and one in her pocket. “How come there are only three of you? This is hardly a demonstration.”

“I do apologize, officer. We have a wedding this week in the village, and, you see, other people, they are not serious,” he said. He bowed a little as he spoke. “Is there any way you could disperse us just a little, enough for a press blast, or something?”

She had meant to be cruel, but the man was being rather sweet. He squinted his eyes at her as he spoke and looked more like a bank customer asking for an increase of his credit limit than a demonstrator. It made her feel, a little, like it was the real world.