The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (3 page)

“She said she is moving back in with her mom in Jerusalem. She said she is not going to raise kids all by herself if they are just going to go shoot themselves, and she said I never offer to do the dishes, and that I am a grown woman now and she—”

“She can’t be gone,” I say. “Wake up.”

But Avishag closes her eyes and turns her back to me, pulling the white blanket above her head as if it were a cave.

I go to school alone. I don’t know where else to go and I can’t stare at Avishag sleeping any longer. The classroom has only three boys in it, sitting on their desks and looking at a magazine about Japanese cars. One of the chairs is flipped on its side, and someone has knocked over the trash can so there are orange peels and notebook pages on the floor.

“Lea’s mom is gone too,” one of the boys says. “She told Lea she decided she was just going to stay in that town that has the massages forever,” he adds and bites one of his fingers. “But I don’t think she can actually do that. And Mira the teacher will come back soon too.”

“This is a whole town of crazy bitches,” another boy adds. Then they turn their backs to me and huddle over the magazine.

I step outside and try to catch my breath, so I look down, but above me there are ravens and sycamores and the birds circle below the sun so there are dots on the asphalt underneath my feet, winking at me first here, then there, and I open my mouth and puke, until I am able to raise my head up again, and I keep it up.

I can’t see a single person out in the streets. When they built this town less than thirty years ago, it was because people had this brilliant idea that they should Jewdify the Galilee, and in particular the Lebanese border. There is one empty brown hill after another in that region, the government said, and if we are a country, we can’t all live in just one part of it. So they gave plots of land for barely any money to couples who promised to work in the factory they built in the village, and that way the couples had money and a home and then they had children.

The only thing they didn’t think of is that money and houses create children and that children need buses, among other things. The only way to get out now is through hitchhiking.

I stand by the old pay phone at the outskirts of town and stick out my thumb. I first think about calling someone, but I don’t have any coins to use the pay phone.

When a red Subaru stops, I lean over and smell the aftershave of the bearded driver. He is listening to “Macarena,” really, he is.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

On the ground, a snail is slowly making its way toward
me, leaving a trail of saliva behind it. Soon, there will be the first rain of the year. Soon, Avishag and I will graduate. Join the army. Everything. Even princess Lea will have to join the army. Everyone does.

And I realize I have no one I know outside the thousand houses of the town and that I am standing here on the lukewarm asphalt all alone.

I tell the driver I might as well stay where I am.

And it is because I don’t want to climb anymore just to get reception by the cellular tower, just to talk to someone. I go down the brick path and through the bike racks and the dump yard to the video machine, and I use a twenty-shekel bill to buy
Mean Girls
, since it is the only movie left in the machine that I have only seen once.

Now I have change, and I go back to the very end of town. The pay phone’s receiver is so dusty it glistens, and when I pick it up I am almost surprised to hear a dial tone. This might be the very last pay phone in all of Israel. A few years ago the government uprooted them, one by one, and took them all away in a big truck.

I want to hear my mom’s voice to make sure she didn’t also leave.

But she is not the one I call.

Avishag only answers the third time I call. My mom is not the first one I call, not because I chose to call Avishag first but because almost sure is better than risking knowing something you don’t want to know.

“Your mom is going to come back, you know,” I say.

When I say it I know that she may not. When I say it I
know already that it was Avishag who wrote in the notebook that morning, not Dan.

“I am alone all the time, Yael,” Avishag replies, and her voice is soupy. “Even right now.”

I wait for a long time for Avishag to come get me. I sit on the sand by the pay phone and wait. I can taste sweat and salt and makeup trickling down from my nose to my lips. She said she’ll come.

And she does. She comes, but she doesn’t come and get me. We don’t go home. We don’t say anything. She walks right up to me and then changes direction. She knows that I will follow her wherever she goes today.

We walk up and up the hill. I hope we never get there, but I know we will.

There is no blood on the ground by the cellular tower. Not even a piece of clothing. Not even a boot.

Avishag takes a while to believe there is nothing there. She wants to see, at least something. Her neck is moving here then there frantically. She stands looking and looking in the shade of the tower, like she did when we were little, trying to find the last word on a word-search puzzle.

Then it is as if the tower is that word. Like she just notices that it is there, after staring right at it for minutes. She puts both her hands on it and pushes it and kicks it.

I join her, digging the dirt around the metal rods stuck in the ground with my shoes and shoving my entire weight on the tower.

We try to collapse the tower until it is dark. We try and we try and we try.

We don’t talk. We won’t talk. We’ve talked enough.

We don’t need a cellular tower here.

RPG children were usually around nine or ten, so they were very small, and children. And the RPG launcher is this weapon that is very, very heavy, so you can’t have just one child holding it, you have to have two, and the children took the weapons and they held them, two together, one from the front and one from the back. When you shoot an RPG, the front launches a missile so powerful it could even get through an Israeli tank, but the back releases fire, not a lot of fire, not fire that is necessary; it is just a part of how the weapon works, that there is fire at the back. So one RPG child held the launcher on his shoulder, and behind him stood another RPG child, on his toes, holding it from the back. And so when the RPG was launched, the child from the back’s head caught fire, and then his shoulders, and soon his sandals too, if he had them. No one told the RPG children any better.

No one talked to them, no one told them anything, not the children who held it from the front and not the children who held it from the back, but one thing that is very, very interesting is that many times the child from the front would jump on his burning friend and hug him, and this increased the casualties in a very significant way, that one child didn’t burn alone.

W
e, the boot-camp girls, stand in a perfect square that lacks one of its four sides. Our commander stands in front of us, facing the noon sun. She squints. She screams.

“Raise your hand if you are wearing contact lenses.”

Two girls raise their hands. The commander folds her arm to look at her watch. The two girls do the same.

“In two minutes and thirty seconds, I want to see you back here from the tents. Without your contact lenses. Understood?” the commander shouts.

“Yes, commander,” the girls shout, and their watches beep. They run. Dusts of sand trail the quick steps of their boots.

“Raise your hand if you are asthmatic,” the boot-camp commander shouts.

None of the girls raise their hands.

“Are you asthmatic?” the boot camp commander shouts.

“No, commander,” all the girls shout.

I don’t shout. I didn’t get it that I was supposed to; I already didn’t raise my hand.

“Are you asthmatic, Avishag?” the commander yells, looking at me.

“No, commander,” I shout.

“Then answer next time,” the commander says. “Speak up so I can hear you, just like everyone else.”

In my IDF boot camp, the only combat-infantry boot camp for females, we can’t tell what will become of us next based on what questions we raise our hands for. I know the least because I was the first of the girls in my class to be drafted, so I didn’t have any friends to get info from, and my brother Dan never told me anything about the army, even when he was alive. I got so annoyed when people asked me if I was still planning to go into the army after he died, I decided to volunteer for combat just to make people stop assuming. I wanted to do something that would make people never assume, ever.

One can never assume in my boot camp. A week ago, we were asked to raise our hands if we weighed below fifty kilos. Then we were asked to raise our hands if we had ever shared needles or had unprotected sex shortly before we were drafted. It was hard to know what to assume from that. The army wanted our blood. Two liters, but you got strawberry Kool-Aid and white bread while the needle was inside you. The self-proclaimed sluts and druggies served it to the girls who were pumping their fists, trying to make the blood gush out quicker.

“Faster,” the commander screamed.

“My hand feels like there is ice on it,” one of the other soldiers said. “It feels frozen.” She was lying on the field bed across from mine. I wanted to reach over and grab her hand, so that she would be less cold, so that I would be less alone. I couldn’t. Because of the needle in my arm, because it would have been a mistake. Mom said that if I want to get a good posting after boot camp, I have to learn how to control my mouth. Mom was once an officer, and now she is a history teacher, and all. She left for Jerusalem a few weeks after Dan died, but in the end she had to come back and help me get ready for the army. Single moms have to come back always.

The girl on the field bed next to mine freaked out. She extended the arm with the needle away from her body, like it was cursed. Her face turned red. “I think it is taking too much blood. Can someone check? Can someone see if it is taking too much blood?”

I knew I should not say anything.

“I want to go home,” she said. “I don’t like this.”

She looked very young. And eventually I spoke. “It’s fine” was what I said.

That’s when the commander intervened. “No one said you could talk,” she shouted.

I was the only one who was punished. During shower hour, I had to dig a hole in the sand large enough to bury a boulder the size of five heads. The commander said the boulder represented my “shame.” She smiled when she explained that. None of the girls helped. They just stood on the sand, waiting in line for the showers, and watched.

Now the army wants us to know what it is like to be suffocated.
That’s why they asked about contact lenses and asthma. It is ABC day. Atomic, biological, chemical. Every soldier has to go through that, not just girls in combat, they said. But it is especially important for us, because we will have to maintain functionality in the event of an unconventional attack.

We stand in two lines on top of a sandy hill. We help each other put the gas masks on.

“You are doing it all wrong, Avishag,” the commander yells at me. “All wrong.”

She stretches one of the black elastic bands tighter, and my hair is pulled so tightly it is as if someone had taken a handful of my hair and tried to pull it off my scalp. Except that someone doesn’t let go. The mask is on my face to stay.

With our masks on, we all look like the bodies of soldiers with the heads of robotic dogs. The big gray filter stretches like a snout. The sun heats the black plastic of the mask, and the heat radiates inward. The sheer plastic above my eyes is stained, and wherever I turn the world looks framed and distant, a dirty, cheap painting of sand, then sand from another angle.

The commander goes down the line, breaking plastic miniatures of bananas. “Each one of your ABC kits has a few of these little bananas. If you break it and you still smell bananas, your mask is not sealed right.”

I can feel the veins at the back of my head choking. When the commander passes by me, waving the tiny banana, I can smell it. Bananas. Bananas and sand.

“I can smell bananas and—” I say. My voice vibrates inside of the mask. My words, they fail me. I want to talk. All the time. About Dan. About things Yael said I still don’t
understand. The banana fields by our village when they burn. Everything. I am an idiot. Like it matters what I am thinking.

“No one said you could speak,” my commander shouts. “Just get one of your friends to fix it,” she says. They call the other soldiers “your friends.” I hate that. They are other soldiers. They are not my friends. Even Mom said, you don’t go into the army to make friends. Don’t be fooled. Just look at what happened to Dan.

The commander lets us into the tent two at a time. My partner is a tall girl called Gali. We watch one of the girls who entered before us lift the cover of the tent and run back outside as if she were on fire, her mouth dripping with saliva, her eyes closed and wet, her nose running in green and yellow. She runs with her mouth open, her arms stretched to the sides. She runs far, her small green body becoming a speck on the empty horizon.

Gali laughs, and I do too. I did hear from Sarit, Lea’s older sister, that the tear-gas tent is the first place commanders can get personal with their boot-camp soldiers. They ask them the same four questions:

Do you love the army?

Do you love the country?

Who do you love more, your mother or father?

Are you afraid to die?

The commanders get a kick out of this because first they ask these questions when the soldier has her mask on, but then they get to ask them when the soldier is in the tear-gas tent, without the mask, and watch her panic. That is the goal of the exercise. To train you not to panic in the event of an
atomic, biological, or chemical attack. I fail to see the point of this. I told that to Sarit; I told her, “In that case, why don’t they just shoot us so we know what that feels like?” but she said, “Don’t get smart.” We get to run out of the tent when we feel we are choking. Sarit said they expect you to stay as long as you can. I asked, “What’s as long as you can?” and she asked, “How long can you breathe underwater?”