The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (43 page)

“You weren’t ugly! Are you saying that I am ugly?” This was before I knew about Mom having broken her nose.

“No! You are the most beautiful girl in the world. But it is important to laugh a lot. We need to get you laughing more. How come Avishag and Lea never come by anymore? We need to think what we can do.”

Later I started dating Moshe and believed one person didn’t think I was ugly. Later, in the army one day, after Hagar did my hair, I even became convinced the whole world could find me beautiful.

At some point during her service, Mom got plastic surgery on her nose. It sounds terrible to say, but it is the truth. It was broken and then it was not. I am not sure where she got the money, how she got it done, but she did. The first picture I ever saw of her is her in a full-length yellow bathing suit. Two shirtless boys are lifting her by the arm from either side, and she is laughing so hard the back of her throat shows. Her nose is perfect and long. The beach where Mom swam in a full-length yellow bathing suit, the beach where boys loved Mom, is not the border anymore. On the new border, the closer border, there are today, ten years after my service, torture camps for Eritreans run by Egyptian Bedouins. They promise the Eritreans they will help them get to Israel through Egypt. For money. Then they chase them, keep them, and send an ear or a finger to their families and ask for some more money. But when the end of the beach was still the border, boys chased Mom on it until the skin under her feet grew firm.

My cousin called, whispering and giggling, one time to ask if it was true what she heard, if it was true that Mom’s nose wasn’t real. I was always jealous of Mom’s nose because of how noble it was, and as I looked at her washing the dishes in a torn T-shirt and head scarf, a woman who spent hundreds of shekels on the right acne wash for her daughters but hadn’t
changed her own toothbrush in years, I could not believe she had ever been a woman who would get plastic surgery.

“Well, my mom did say it was because your mom’s nose was broken or something, but
still
, isn’t it funny?” my cousin whispered through the phone. When they were little, my mother had cut her mother so deep, she bled through all the fabrics in the house.

“No,” I said. “It isn’t funny.” I never asked Mom about her nose.

T
HE MONTH
before an airplane was hijacked and Mom had to accidentally make the case for compassion was the happiest month of her life. All the boys on the base loved her when her nose was broken because it was so easy to love her—there was no danger of falling in love with her for real because of her nose, and she was such a good sport, and she tucked them in at night after a game of backgammon and let them drown her in the ocean and let them feel no shame about holding an eighteen-year-old girl in a bathing suit in their arms. Mom grew happier each day. She didn’t fly home once after she arrived on the base, back to that Jerusalem building with the babies and lost lottery tickets and drunken chases and slaughtered chickens and bleeding sisters. The salt air made her hair bigger. The waiting in the control tower made her thoughts longer and the faces she drew more interesting. The boys who made her their queen and relief made her less afraid to think of memories she had spent her whole life convincing herself she did not have, so that she did not have to always distract herself, so that she was less of a less-than-bright lightbulb.

By the time her nose was fixed, the boys thought it was a miracle. Like when, on the Argentinean soaps, the couple finally finds out they are not brother and sister after all.

When she walked on the sand dunes, the boys clapped. The two blonde girls, who later grew to have only sons, then grew quieter. Then they helped her cut her hair right above her shoulders and followed her wherever she went. If it weren’t for what happened next, Mom would have been on her way to becoming a dictator or, at the very least, an evil politician’s wife, or maybe even an evil God.

It was on the day that Ari Milter bit Joseph Gon’s cheek during a fight that was about guarding shifts but was really about Mom’s midriff that Germans and Palestinians hijacked an Israeli plane that stopped for a layover in Athens. Two hundred and sixty civilians were on the plane. It was the hijacking that led to Operation Entebbe, or Operation Yonatan, as I know some call it, because of Yonatan, who was killed.

The hijackers landed in Libya to refuel. A passenger who was a nurse faked a miscarriage and was released during the layover. She had a British and an Israeli passport. Her mother had just died, and her father was ill. She had married only weeks before. She was not pregnant, but she managed to convince the female hijacker she might be losing a baby.

From Libya the hijackers ordered the pilot to fly to Uganda. They landed the plane in the Entebbe airport. Idi Amin, who had started out as an army cook just like the army cook who used to give Mom hard-boiled eggs and kisses on the neck, was then not a cook anymore but the ruler of all of Uganda. He cooperated with the hijackers, so it was easy for them to gather all of the passengers into one of the terminals.
The Germans started screaming orders, separating the Jewish and Israeli and Gentile passengers into different groups.

The captain of the plane, who was a Gentile, insisted on staying because he said he was the captain, after all. His eleven crew members stayed also. None of them died, but Air France suspended the captain for staying behind. In the end he got a plaque from Yitzhak Rabin, who was the prime minister of Israel then, for being a protector of Jews, and then Yitzhak Rabin was the prime minister again and was shot by an Israeli Jew who hated him.

What matters or not is that the captain stayed, although it is unclear what help he was to the rescue mission, if at all. The hijackers wanted all these European nations and Israel to release freedom fighters and anarchists who were in their jails. Everyone, including Mom, thought this was what was going to happen. The soldiers of that beach wondered if the plane with the freedom fighters was going to fuel at their base, and if so, whether or not the cook was going to try to stop the plane from flying off with the freedom fighters because a freedom fighter had once blown up a bus the cook’s mother was on and made her become blind. She was urging the cook to kill her off already all the time. The hijackers said they would start killing people off on July 1, but in the end they agreed to wait until July 4 because it was a symbolic American date. A seventy-five-year-old woman called Dora started choking on her food, so the hijackers let her go into a hospital in Uganda, because it wasn’t July 1 yet and they couldn’t kill her then.

N
O ONE
believed there would be a rescue mission but the people who were sent to rescue the hostages. When Mom’s red phone rang, it was five in the morning and she was alone in the control tower. She was drawing the face of a girl on her own ankle. She didn’t know why, but the girl kept on looking either surprised or angry, and try as she did to fix the girl’s eyes, Mom couldn’t. She was left with a blotch of blue ink on her dark skin.

When the phone rang, she screamed. This was because she was at peace then and because she had never heard a phone ring before. They didn’t own a phone at the Jerusalem apartment. There was a pay phone at the entrance to the market. When she picked up the red phone, she heard the voice of a man on the other line. It sounded nothing like the voices of the pilots coming through the radio. It sounded like the man was standing right there in the room with Mom, breathing the words into her ear.

The man asked for her name, personal ID number, and rank. She had to say her last name twice, because it was a Yemenite last name, and the man was surprised. Then the man told her that if she were to reveal his orders to anyone on the base or in the world she would be prosecuted in a military court and risk the lives of over a hundred Jews.

Everyone thought the hostages would die or be exchanged for other hostages. No one believed in the likelihood of rescue. Everyone but Mom seemed to have a friend of an aunt or a teacher of a brother who was one of the hostages. It only took one worried soldier to tell his worried mother and then the whole country would know the hostages were in the air,
even the Arabs of the country. Even when the plane was in the sky, they were afraid someone would shoot it down. They also didn’t know Dora was already dead and in a trunk. They thought that if they only kept the operation secret they could still save her from that hospital.

But they needed sandwiches. The hostages hadn’t eaten in days. They were expecting to land them in a field hospital the army had built in Kenya and feed them there, but none of the hostages were injured, so there was no point risking the landing there.

The man on the phone asked Mom to tell the cook he must make as many sandwiches as he could.

“What type of sandwiches?” Mom asked, and the man became ha-ha angry with her. Ha-ha angry, but actually relieved because he thought he was sending men to die on top of the hundred Jews who were going to die anyway, and here was this sweet girl with a voice softened by the encounter of first cigarettes and the shock of youth asking him for culinary advice.

“You choose,” the man on the phone said. “I am a lieutenant, and here you are a private asking me for sandwich advice. That is your job.”

Mom had twenty minutes left until the end of her shift. She drew two more faces. She thought of her favorite sandwich. Pastrami with mayo and red peppers. They didn’t have any of these ingredients in the base because all of these things were good only because they go bad quickly.

In the end, giving instructions for the preparation of the sandwiches for the rescued hostages was the most complicated thing Mom had ever done in her life. It was a thing she never thought she could do and would never have done, and
it was because it was so hard that once she did it one time, she knew she could do it again and it turned into a habit.

Mom had to make the case for compassion.

“It’s a prisoners’ exchange, isn’t it? They are going to land those Palestinian prisoners at our base to refuel before they take them to Uganda, and they want
me
to make them sandwiches,” the cook told Mom. He didn’t even try to kiss her neck.

“I can’t tell you what it is. The man on the red phone said that I can’t.”

“Red phone? That’s got to mean a prisoners’ exchange. And they want
me
to make them sandwiches?”

“I can’t tell you what it is. But you do need to make sandwiches. A lot of sandwiches. As many sandwiches as you can.”

“I’ll make them sandwiches all right. I’ll spit in them. I’ll pee in them. I’ll use rat poison.”

Mom did not know what to do. She remembered that she was the daughter of a slow man. She remembered how delighted she had felt when the blade of that razor pierced too deep into her sister’s arm when she was a child. She fondled the ridge of her nose and remembered that it was now straight, and that she was beautiful.

“Please don’t do anything bad to the sandwiches.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t; I won’t let you,” Mom said. Sometimes she liked to say things that were impossible as if they weren’t. “You can’t,” she said.

Had she been born the daughter of a pilot, had she not lived for twelve years with a broken nose, she might have told the cook that he couldn’t enough times that it might have worked. But because Mom was not born any of these things,
she had to say more. She had to make the case for compassion, not because she wanted to but because she was bound by the circumstances.

“What if one of the prisoners is innocent?”

“My mother is blind,” the cook said. “My dad has to take her to the bathroom and sit her on the toilet. And in all likelihood none of them are innocent. The army barely arrests all the people who are guilty.”

“What if one of the prisoners just made one mistake? Something they didn’t want to do and before they knew it they were doing it?”

“Then it is fair, whatever I do. Then they know they made a mistake.”

“What if something happened to them?”

“Like what?”

“Something. They were doing something else and then something happened to them. Haven’t you ever done something else and then something happened to you?”