The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (32 page)

“And did they?”

“Not at first, hon. They wanted to, but they didn’t know
how. They didn’t have phones then, so the people in Africa didn’t even know if the people in Russia remembered them.”

“So did they ever come back?”

“Well, then one year, the people in Russia and the people in Africa and the polar bears even, all the people and animals who never lived in that one country started killing all of the people who did once live in that one country.”

“Did they drown them?”

“Drown them?”

“Like my fish?”

Avi thought of his mother’s red and purple and swollen body the day they left Tripoli. Of how they had killed her. About the smell coming from the irrigation ditches all around the walls. When he was a child, he knew what death looked like. All Avishag knew at eight was about her fish. It had died when she was four. Her mother hadn’t even made her see it. She had told her it drowned. That was a good thing. But it wasn’t in any way true.

“Yes, hon, they drowned them.”

“Oh no!”

“But some of them climbed out of the water.”

“Good! And then what?”

“And then the ones that made it out of the water decided to go back to that country they left a million years before. They came back to the country from Africa and Russia and all over the world.”

“And then what?”

“What do you mean, ‘Then what’?”

“What did they do there?”

“They lived.”

“But what did they do?”

“They lived. They lived like we live. They built houses and paved roads and planted trees. You know, they worked.”

“And then what?”

The German social worker pointed at her Swiss wrist-watch. Their time was up.

Avishag must have repeated the story to her mother, or maybe the social worker told. And Mira didn’t care for it. The killing part. That was that. She won full custody. She took the kids and went to go teach in some northern village.

The next time he was allowed to see Avishag she was already nineteen. A soldier. Her shoulders bulked under the uniform. They met at a McDonald’s in a gas station outside her base. It was the only thing open all night, and her only free time was at five thirty in the morning. She was an infantry soldier in Egypt, serving in the only female infantry combat unit, and one of the other girls must have wanted her to take her shift for her, because she walked in screaming on her thick military cell phone.

“What do you mean, you missed the bus coming back from your doctor’s appointment?” she spat coldly and raised her hand to gesture for Avi with her fingers,
Just a second
. Her other small hand held tightly to the black handle of her M-16.

“Fuck you, faggot, you hear me?” his daughter said to the other watch girl on the phone. “I am not your mother that you can fuck me and bury me in the sand.”

She hung up and sat in front of Avi. Her face was still dark, but her hair was raised up in a rigid bun, and her eyebrows were plucked in an odd manner that removed all the similarities to him from her face. There was no sign of the quiet, shy
girl he knew. The one-shekel ice cream cone he had bought her was dripping on the red plastic table. The only women he had met in his service days were secretaries who wore green skirts and made the highest officers coffee.

“And what, exactly, do
you
want?” Avishag asked.

The next time he saw her was after his ex-wife called to report that his oldest daughter hadn’t gotten out of bed in over two months, in case he was interested. The army had discharged her a few weeks after she had gotten out of military jail for some innocent prank, something involving nudity while guarding. But she wasn’t the same when she came back. She was acting a little off.

“I’ll come right over,” Avi said. “I’ll buy her a car.”

“She can’t drive,” his ex-wife said. Her voice was tired, but it was still her voice, the one he hadn’t heard in years.

In Tripoli, husbands disciplined their wives all the time. His father sure did. For years he had regretted that he hadn’t met his first wife in another time, another country, where things would not have gotten so out of hand, where there were no German social workers. But he had met his wife when he did, where he did, in the immigration caravans. She had come from Baghdad, where her father was a jeweler. She spoke four languages. When they met, they were standing naked on the asphalt outside the caravans with dozens of new refugees, covered in the DDT, the pesticide that rained on them from airplanes above. The Europeans in the immigration office thought they could be carrying diseases. His future wife was naked and humiliated and white on the outside with chemicals, but dark in her eyes and through her heart, full of longing for the plane that had brought her. She
was fourteen, four years older than he was. He promised her everything was going to be all right, even though he did not yet know her name.

“Everything is going to be all right,” he told his ex-wife, Mira, on the phone when she called after all these years. “I’ll teach her. I’ll buy her a Subaru.”

“A Subaru?” Mira asked.

“I am her father.”

T
HEY DROVE
for a long time. Over two hours. Avi could see them pass the military cemetery at Mount Herzl and the hospital on Mount Scouts where Avishag had been born. Mira’s family had moved from where they had met to Jerusalem, but he had never lost touch with her. She had wanted to have Avishag in Jerusalem, even though they could only afford to live in Bat Yam back then.

Avishag’s eyes were covered the whole way, but she could smell the air descending down the hill from pine and rock into a humid smell, a fried smell, beer, sunscreen, tar, the beach, just the ocean, eventually.

Jerusalem is landlocked. She knew they were in Tel Aviv even before she could see.

The car was not suitable for driving on sand, nor was it suitable for riding on this shaky fishing dock, but Avi didn’t care. The wheels of the car rolled on the old wood. The whole way, he wasn’t sure where he was going. He let the car drive him.

Avishag’s father put his hand on his daughter’s forehead, then removed her scarf. The sun hit her eyes in orange. She kept them open. The sun hit the water in orange, then the
water hit her eyes in orange. And still. She kept her eyes open. There was no wind, and the Mediterranean was flat. No one around, not even a seagull, just her and her father in the car. He had driven the car right up to the edge of a dock.

“Do you want to change seats?” her father asked. “Be sure about this,” her father said. “The sun is setting. Just sit in the driver’s seat,” her father said. “All you have to do is sit. This car isn’t going anywhere.”

He wanted to shake her, but he didn’t.

After five minutes she decided she wanted to change seats.

That’s how right some parts of this country can be sometimes
, her father thought.

They changed seats. He had never before managed to get her to sit in the driver’s seat.

He watched her hands, her small hands, as they clutched the wheel. Her hands were small, even for her small body, disproportionate. He had noticed it the day he saw her with her uniform, how unexpected it was to see a hand as small as hers clasp the handle of an M-16.

He remembered the soft touch of her palms grabbing his face when she was eight, the day he told her the first and last story he ever told in his life. Her hands were clammy, but her child sweat smelled sugary. He remembered her high-pitched, excited voice when she asked, again and again, “And then what? And then what?” And then he remembered when it was that their time was gone.

His daughter tightened her grip on the wheel. The sun was setting; he could see its orange strokes lengthening on the water. This moment too would soon pass. He and his daughter would switch seats; he would drive her away from the ocean and up the hills of Jerusalem all the way back to
her mother’s home. Even in that moment, silently watching and adoring his daughter’s small hands, he couldn’t help but worry, wonder.
And then what?

He wanted more. He knew that it might be months before he would be able to get her in the driver’s seat again.

Right before the orange sun thumped the water, he heard himself mumble. His lips said that if she wanted to, she could drive the car into the water. If they didn’t drown, he’d buy her a new one.

He was joking but then he wasn’t.

S
HE TURNED
the key in the ignition. She didn’t know what to do next. The car grumbled; her thighs shook with it under her boy shorts. She looked at her father. She touched the stick shift, it was difficult to move it, she didn’t believe she could move it, it was like a sword stuck in a stone, but then it moved; it got stuck in one spot, then another; then her hand had no more strength, none at all; if someone had held a gun to her hand she could not even have made a fist.

She thought she was paralyzed, and so she tried to wiggle her toes, and it was a surprise: they moved, her long toenails curling inward inside her sandals. She could also turn her neck. She looked at her father. She didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what to do. He thought he should do something, but he didn’t know what. He thought,
There is never a bad time to start
.

He moved the stick shift for her. He could feel it, before she pressed the gas. Her foot. Her body. It was a part of him, and the machine and country.

U
NDERWATER, AFTER
she had opened the door and swum out, her eyes could see nothing but musky green. She remembered her foot, how it had moved, how it had moved the whole car, all that power. She kicked with her foot and she could feel the bottom of the ocean, soft and cold between her toes. Her hair scratched the surface of the water, and then her whole face was out, out in the warm air and sun. She opened her mouth, gasping for air. Then she didn’t know what to do. She was sucked back down. She kicked with her foot again and could feel her body floating up, but not far enough. She thought of her father, but she could not see him, and she didn’t know what to do but then she did. She punched the water with her fist. Then she kicked it with her leg. Then she punched it with her other hand. She kicked with the other leg. Hand, leg, hand, leg, hand, hand, hand, and again, and soon, though she was a Jerusalem girl, though she had never done it before, she was moving forward, floating, swimming. It was the oddest thing; she could barely breathe, ashen dots flitted across her eyes, but with each violent act of her body she could hear them, hear that she was hitting them, those who had drowned, in the Holocaust and in Tripoli and in Baghdad and the North Pole even, and they answered back not in pain but with questions, two questions.
Where to, hon? What’s next, kid?

After her father pushed his way out of the car, he swam out to shore alone and then watched her swim for minutes that seemed like days that were all years, years he had not seen her grow. And there was his daughter, swimming, and he knew that she would eventually reach the shore, and him. She reached the shore, her clothes dripping water, and sat on
the sand very close to him, in silence. He put his wet arm around her and his heart pulsated into her forehead, her unsteady breath slowing, becoming one with his. She smelled his sweat and knew one new thing, one thing no one but her knew and that she had not known until that second but was now so sure of, her lungs might burst. She knew that she did not have that passing Zubari hysteria. That she was going to be sad her whole life, her life ahead.