The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (10 page)

Mother stopped crying right before I was called to get on the bus. “It’s going to be Ok,” she told me. “Everyone does this. These will be the best years of your life,” Mother whispered. She held my face in both hands.

“I am fine. I am sure I will be home for vacation in no time,” I said.

“Yes,” Mother said. “Yes,” she said, and she didn’t let go.

“I need my face, Mother,” I said. “I need my face.”

A
ND THAT
night, the night after Fadi came to the checkpoint with no pitas, Fadi came to visit my head without me even trying.

“I won’t go,” Fadi said. “Don’t make me go to work again.” He was on the floor of his kitchen, sobbing.

“You are not a teenage girl,” Nur said. “You mustn’t cry like that. Grown men don’t cry like that.”

Fadi stood up. He watched Nur chop onions for the weekend casserole. “I won’t go,” he said. He was choking on his words. “My life should be more than this. Avi the contractor said he bought his son a new bike this week. He has a bike, and he is a quarter my age. I never had a bike. This isn’t fair.”

“Who do you think you are? Do you think you are some spoiled Israeli boy? You are a Palestinian man and this is your life. This is what we have to do,” Nur said. She wiped her neck with the dishcloth, and this disgusted Fadi. He had noticed wrinkles around her neck, hanging, useless skin that was not there when he agreed to marry her, and this disgusted him more.

“Who is ‘we’?” he asked. “There is only me. And I know who I am. I won’t go.”

“Oh, but you will go,” Nur said, so knowing and old and chopping onions.

And when she smirked he could feel his fist clenching and he threw it for the blow—he felt his knuckles grazing the blade of the knife and tearing as his fist was in the air. Nur held up the knife, but Fadi didn’t stop, and he punched her, just once, one punch to the jawline.

“I
CAN
’
T
throw a dick at you,” I told Yaniv the next morning. The sun was not yet seen, and I had woken up less tired. I had woken up with enough energy to look at myself in the discolored mirror in the bathroom caravan. I hadn’t looked at myself in months. I had grown accustomed to washing my hands with my eyes planted at my feet.

“What?” Yaniv asked. He had his arm around one of the Ethiopian girls who was also assigned to check cars. They were pouring packets of sugar down their throats and singing Mizrahi music into the defenseless sands ahead.

“I don’t have a dick, so I can’t throw one,” I said. I was so not tired I decided to mess with him for pleasure. I knew this would drive him crazy. It amused me that he would actually believe there is anything in this world he could understand that I didn’t.

“It’s an expression,” Yaniv said. “It’s like, not for real. It means showing that you don’t care, you understand?”

“No, what do you mean? Do you not know that I don’t have a dick?”

“Gosh,” Yaniv said. He breathed in. “It’s … it’s an
expression
. Don’t you understand?” he stretched out his arms, imploring. He was clearly goaded because he didn’t even notice that he shoved the Ethiopian girl a little.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “You are stupid to say something that makes no sense.”

“But … it’s an expression,” Yaniv said. It was clear by his pouting and rapid chewing that he was searching for words that had never been his. Words like “literal” or
“representative” or even “figure of speech.” I let him search for what was not at all there until it was time for the gates to open.

Fadi didn’t try not to get me as his checker this time. He didn’t try anything. I didn’t even notice him in line, and there he was, placing his ID and papers on the cement in front of me like he didn’t even know me. I made him wait before I took them. I pretended to look at Yaniv, who was hunched down and deep in chatter with a Palestinian inside a car. Cars began to honk; he was holding up the entire line.

Then I looked and then I saw and then I was afraid, but only for a second.

I expected it, but it still truly scared me for a minute when I saw it. Scared like someone had just convinced me I was God, or already dead, or on fire.

Fadi’s knuckles were wounded. Cut. Blood had crusted on them.

“Did you hurt yourself?” I asked.

“Yes,” Fadi said. “I hurt myself.”

T
HE SORTING
officer who placed me in military police was right. It was a common misconception that every soldier who wore a blue beret spent her service days giving out reports to soldiers who wore their uniform the wrong way while using the public transportation. I was placed in the transitions unit of the military police, the one that had nothing to do with military attire and everything to do with IDs and checkpoints. Still, it was a very common error, that instant fear of blue berets. When I took the train home on my very
rare weekend vacations, other soldiers hushed when they noticed my blue beret. Then they ran away. I felt like an ogre or an Iraqi dictator or like I was ugly, which I was—I was ugly, wearing that beret.

There were nice things about it, though. There was always at least one soldier on the train who ran away and thus effectively gave me his seat, even when the train was jammed. I always had the quiet I needed to read my
TV Guide
or American novels. On school trips I never had quiet on the bus. Everyone always wanted to know what I thought we should do about a girl who stole someone’s boyfriend, or for me to make sure Yael let everyone copy her homework, because we used to be friends and I was the only one she still kinda obeyed. On the train, as a soldier, I never had to worry about anyone’s problems or weigh in on gossip.

One really cool thing that happened because of the blue beret is that one time a soldier, a boy, wept when he saw me. He must have had a bad record and knew that he was wearing something wrong, missing something, and so he cried and ran, cried and ran faster.

There were some, few, nice things about the blue beret, but none of these things meant having friends. None of these things were things I could imagine in my head before I fell asleep.

T
HAT NIGHT
, after the morning Fadi told me he hurt himself, I imagined that Fadi was now sleeping on the straw doormat outside the front door of his house. I imagined that his Nur had changed the locks on him and that he had to pee in
the street and that he stayed awake till two in the morning so he could pee because he was so ashamed the neighbors might see. He was so ashamed of how much it hurt, that humdrum, human urge, and of the relief he felt when he finally did pee. Of how empty he felt afterward. As if he had emptied out who he was and all he had to show for it was a puddle of urine and a doormat for a bed and a locked door. He woke up to a three-legged dog peeing on his face. He only got one hour of sleep, but it was time to start walking toward the checkpoint, and he did walk, and as he walked he thought that his whole life was his fault, but I knew that it was actually mine, that I was the one who was imagining these things for him, and I felt a tad guilty about bringing him so low, but I also fell asleep within minutes of imagining, and that was a blessing. I had never used the word “blessing” before, not even in my thoughts. People like Yaniv used it all the time, but now it was the first word that came to mind and the only one.

And besides, all of this—the doormat, the locked door, the urine in the street, the three-legged dog—it was only in my head and for my sleep, because the next day Fadi came to the checkpoint driving a car.

I
WAITED
and waited and waited for him. It was past nine, and I found myself elated by every nearly identical worker who showed me his ID but was not my Fadi. I knew it could not be true but was also convinced that after Fadi had woken up as the three-legged dog was peeing on his face, he had started walking toward the checkpoint but then thought better of it and turned around. That he had decided, for real, for
once, that he wouldn’t go. I was not sure where he had gone after he turned around, and I was sure that was only because I had fallen asleep before I could imagine it. I had fallen asleep so fast.

I was happy for my sleep. Happy for myself when Fadi didn’t show up, that there must have been some kindness in my thoughts that I was just unaware of. I was so not tired I had time to hope that I was better than who I thought I was. I felt slightly like I had not joined the army. Like I had not joined the army yet. I looked at Yaniv and tried hard not to hate him. I could see only his body standing on the asphalt because his head was stuck deep inside the window of the car he was checking. I brought up his face, the face I could not see, into my head, and tried not to hate him. He had pointed, bushy eyebrows, like furry arrows.

Then I heard. The scream.

When I saw the red and Yaniv sauntering backward, I didn’t understand that it was blood on his neck. I tried to think of what it was, but I didn’t understand that it was blood. I would later remember that I could see by the way Yaniv flapped his arms as he took a step, and then another, backward, that he did know that it was blood. There was something right then in this world that he understood and I did not.