The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (27 page)

O
NCE WE
pretended we were wolves. We were twelve, and we were angry because after our bat mitzvahs our mothers told us we were now women. So we bit each other’s ankles. The people of the village spotted us walking on all fours through the streets and around the banana fields. Our mothers told us to stop, but we put their pants between our teeth and wouldn’t let go. On the street, we licked the toes of the girl in the wheelchair, and she laughed. When we got into Miller’s backyard, he screamed, “Meshuganas,” and chased us away with a shovel when we showed him our teeth. We howled stories to each other and we understood them until our bones were very tired.

We always pretended we had different ages, different names. We never ever told our real names when asked. Telemarketers, new teachers, new kids, vendors selling candy at the Arab market—they all wanted a piece of us. They didn’t really want to know our names; it was just a strategy to make us think they liked us. To get us to talk to them. To buy what they were selling. We wanted them to care about us, even if it wasn’t real. Once we cared so much, about everything. We wanted to talk to anyone we could. We lived so far away from the world. But we wouldn’t give our names up. We were Esther and Meek and Olga. Never us. Our world was small then, but larger than life because it happened only in our heads.

I
F YOU
are a boy and you go into the army, one thing that can happen is that you can die. The other thing that can happen is that you can live. If you are a girl and you go into the army you probably won’t die. You might send reservists to die in a war. You might suppress demonstrations at checkpoints. But you probably won’t die. A lot of things can happen to you after. You could get a job. Go on a trip. Go to university. Get married. Move back in with your parents. Lea and I both moved back in with our parents, back to the tiny village by the Lebanese border. By now I had a job waiting for me in Tel Aviv, as an airport security guard. My uncle got it for me. I could not have gotten it myself. Not then. It was good money. All you had to do was sit. It was good; even I could see that. Lea saw nothing. She didn’t even see it when the ashtray on the wooden table in her backyard was overflowing. She didn’t even notice when it was light out, because she usually woke
up after sundown. Every time I came to visit, her mom would greet me by saying, “You have a job. You have a job, right? You hear that, Lea? Well, isn’t
that
nice.” And her mom would clasp her hands and go back to the kitchen, and then the two of us would sit outside, look at the olive grove, and smoke so much, we couldn’t talk. There were only eighty-two houses in our village. One house right after the other, until they ended. Except for Lea’s house. There was an empty lot that separated her house from the Miller house. It was an olive grove. Because no matter how much sense it made to put another house there, they couldn’t do it because of the olive trees. It is highly against the law to kill an olive tree. You are not even allowed to uproot one.

We were girls. I know we were just girls. We did what we did in the army, and then it was over. If Lea was having a hard time talking or leaving her parents’ backyard when we were twenty-one, it was not because of the past; I know that. I admit it; the problem was the future of the past. It existed outside our heads, too large.

T
HE EVENING
after Lea told me Miller was a murderer, I went back to her backyard, and everything was almost the same as it had been for the past few weeks. She was wearing her red pajamas. She was sitting on the plastic chair, staring at the olive grove, smoking. The one thing that was different was that she was holding a stack of paper in her hands. I wondered if she was going to spend her whole life sitting in that backyard, staring at that dead tree and smoking. That night, it didn’t seem impossible. She dragged the smoke into
her lungs like her life depended on it, until her face rutted. I didn’t know what to say. When we were little, and friends, it was always she who spoke, who told me what we should care about next, who we should be. I sat by her for days and weeks, waiting for her to care about something, anything, even just a little.

And now she did.

“We have to let everyone know he is a murderer,” Lea said. “He needs to know he is a murderer. You can’t just kill an olive tree. You have to want to kill it, you have to murder it.”

Olive trees live for thousands of years. It was always hard for me to believe that, looking at those trees by Lea’s backyard. Their stems swirled into themselves as if caught midsentence, as if someone had just breathed life into them.

“I agree,” I told Lea. I always agreed with her. I will always agree with her, no matter what, I swear.

“It is not a matter of agreeing; it is a fact,” she said.

“I agree, but, Lea, how did you figure it out?”

Lea said that she’d been doing some research. Apparently, there is almost nothing in this world that can cause an olive tree to die. Specific types of fungus and bacteria can make it sick, give it tumors, but they won’t kill it. There is a bug that eats its bark and a caterpillar that attacks its leaves. Flies can reduce the quality of its fruits. Frost and rabbits could kill it, but this was northern Israel, and there was no frost, and there were no rabbits. And rabbits could only kill it if one of them crawled inside, got stuck, and died, and the body poisoned the tree from within. It happened in Spain once, according to Lea.

“And then there is gasoline,” Lea said. “If you pour enough gasoline by the roots of an olive tree, it dies.”

I looked at the remains of the tree ahead. A dark end. A clear beginning of something that had no middle. Its stem broke off in such an abrupt place, I bet that even if someone never knew there used to be more of it, if someone had never seen an olive tree or even any kind of tree before in his life, he could still tell something was missing.

“The bar mitzvah!” I said. “That’s when the murder happened!”

Lea nodded.

I remembered Lea’s mother telling us when we first got back from the army that while we were gone the terrible Miller neighbors became even worse. They moved on from merely throwing their raked leaves in the olive grove. They threw a bar mitzvah for their son in the olive grove, even though it was not their property and they had no right. They brought in all of their relatives from England and made pita from scratch on an authentic taboon, while marveling over the pastoral and holistic nature of their lives on the Holy Land’s border. In loud voices. “You have to understand,” Lea’s mother said, “these people are not originally from here, so they don’t understand.”

“The bar mitzvah!” I said again, and when I looked at Lea, she was smiling. An evil, honest smile.

“Miller used gasoline for the taboon,” Lea said. “My mom saw him. The idiot can’t even light a fire.”

“But why would he pour gasoline by the olive tree?” I asked.

“Because he had some left over. Because the tree was close to the taboon. Who can understand the mind of a murderer?”

We paused.

“A murderer, mind you, not merely a killer,” Lea said.

And then she showed me the posters she had made. Forty posters, on A4 paper. She had made them with crayons. Her baby brother’s. At the bottom they read: “Murderer of an Olive Tree: Wanted Dead or Alive.”

She had drawn Miller’s face herself. She made out his receding hairline in black and red crayon scratches. It got murkier with each poster.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I understood. I always understood her logic.

We left the backyard. We did.

We stuck the posters on the olive trees and on the benches in the street and on Miller’s car and even on his wandering cat. Lea stretched the tape, and I leaned forward and cut piece after piece with my teeth. Then we both banged hard to make sure the poster was stuck just right.

By the time we were back sitting and smoking in Lea’s backyard, Miller’s wife had begun screaming and slamming things as usual. But we didn’t scream at her to keep quiet. We counted till three and shouted, “Murderer! Murderer!” We got no response.

Even so, by the time Miller woke up, we believed he would know we knew what he was.

O
NCE
I pretended I could get a man killed. Once I said that draft dodgers deserve the death penalty. My mom always says that she bets the Miller kids will leave for England without being drafted, and I agree with her.

I pretended I could kill a man when I was in the army.
This was a year after the war, right before I was done with my service. It was a game. I told my officer, Shai, that a man had winked at me. He was just an Arab construction worker, and I was just tired and far from home and bored. He had all the permits. He was brought to the base from his village to build a new part of the shooting ranges. “This is a mistake; I did nothing wrong,” he said with his accent. “I have all the permits,” he said. “I am building things in your base.”

“Don’t worry,” Shai said. “Don’t worry.”

He covered the man’s eyes with a weapon’s cleaning towel. The man put his hands behind his back on his own, and Shai cuffed them with real metal cuffs, not the fake black plastic ones the corporals had. “Don’t worry,” he said, and he sat the man in the back of the Humvee. I climbed into the back and sat across from the man. This was my wild idea, almost entirely my idea, but it was Shai who executed it.

We parked in front of the behind part of the sand dunes. Shai the officer silenced the Humvee. The vibrations stopped. He opened the back door of the vehicle. “Walk,” he said. “Don’t worry,” he said. But the man could not see, and he was breathing in and out, in and out.

“Walk,” Shai the officer said. “You can do it,” he said. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder.

The man walked in front of us like the spaghetti man from dreams. It was hard on his heart in fear.

“Stop,” Shai the officer said. “Face us.”

The man turned as if on a hinge and faced us.

“Don’t worry,” the officer said. “But,” he said, “you can’t wink at girls. There are certain things you just cannot be doing in this world.”

I opened my mouth to breathe. I watched.

“So what I have to do is, I have to give you a chance,” Shai the officer said. “What is gonna happen is that I am going to shoot, and maybe I’ll hit you and maybe I won’t, but if I don’t hit you, and you move when I shoot, then I will hit you for sure.”

“Is that Ok?” Shai the officer asked. “Nod if you understand,” he said. “You have to nod,” he said. “I am sorry about that.”

The man nodded.

I could see it but the blindfolded man could not: Shai was not aiming toward the man. His M-4 was pointing sixty degrees from the ground.

He shot. The man fell to the sand. He hit it with his face first. He shouted for a long time, but only after we couldn’t hear the bullet anymore. One long shout, a shout for a minute, and then a small shout, and then he breathed.

It was a bad thing to pretend about. It was a mistake. I was never good at pretending without Lea. That evening was when I said draft dodgers deserve the death penalty. I said it to Lea. Over the phone.