The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (13 page)

We get a ten-minute bathroom break every six hours, and that’s a good thing because I have to change my pad, and it is also good because, right then and there, I also decide to change who I am. And it is not because of what Nadav says. I don’t care what Nadav says, I never have, because no matter what he says he still tells me to show up every night at his tent. It is because now that the pain has made it so that all the people that don’t exist have disappeared from the monitor, I realize that I won’t be able to rely on them forever. That it is time to start caring about someone who is not myself. I only have a few minutes of break left to start caring about someone other than myself, so I concentrate very hard. I close my eyes and I start with the baby. I never considered having it, and the doctor didn’t even ask me. She assumed. They always assume about soldiers. I try to imagine that we do the kinds of things I did when I was a kid, but after five months of green-monitor shifts my memory is so shot I can’t remember anything about being a kid that well, well enough to pretend about, well enough to remember the smell. All I smell now is blood and sweat. All I remember well is the lice. So I try to imagine myself combing my little girl’s hair with a lice comb, but that doesn’t work because when she turns she has no face, just a blank circle in the color of skin. And I think that that’s the opposite of thinking about another person, to give my child a head with no face, so I stop imagining her as she would be and start imagining her as she really is, and I try so so hard to feel bad. I even rub my eyes and try to cry. I imagine the baby like you see in pictures of
fetuses on the abortion pamphlets, as small as a fingernail and cute like a curled-up alien; I imagine it swimming all happy inside blood and tissue, until suddenly it is pushed out toward a huge, scary light and it knows it is going to die. But that’s more of an interesting thought experiment than sadness because I know the baby doesn’t really know it is going to die. I switch to thinking about all those Sudanese that get shot by the fence every night, how they come from hell and walk and walk with blisters on their feet only to die, but I only have two minutes of break left and besides, you have to understand, it is hard to feel bad for them because in all truth they look African and different from anyone I ever talked to and there are so, so many of them and they always die, and also my stomach starts feeling a little better and I decide that maybe changing who I am is going to be very hard.

Tongue click,
no good
whisper, what is the point of anything if I am never … if I am never all these millions of things? The magic had won. The thoughts were everything; soon there would be no me. My shoulder was warm and wet from the gunshot, I could hear fewer screams of others, and I could see the fence. There was sand in my mouth and I waited for it to be over. I didn’t feel sad; I felt relieved, saved. I bent to the side not because I wanted to breathe but because my body made me. I curled up my legs and hugged the broken branches of the tree with my arms. I put my chin between my hands. A curled-up creature. My shoulder got warmer. Then my other shoulder got warm too, but a different type of warm, warm from the touch of someone who wasn’t me. Warm like forgiveness, warm like a mother.

The people that don’t exist, I still can’t find them on the green monitor when I come back from the bathroom. The other watch girls are all excited. Gali, who did boot camp with me, tells me the excitement is because once again some Sudanese people tried to jump the fence, but the Egyptians shot almost all of them before the Sudanese even realized they were close. A lot can happen in ten minutes. I close my eyes to wipe the tears with my eyelids before they roll down. I am crying, but only because in this very second a jab cuts through my stomach, a different pain than before, a pain like no other, and I think now the baby is for sure gone. I only close my eyes for a second, and when I open them there still aren’t any people that don’t exist on the screen, there is only that broken tree, but also, next to it, a person on the ground. The person is much larger than the made-up people usually appear to be on the screen; it is as large as the Sudanese people usually appear on the screen. It is the size of a fingernail and cute, curled up like an alien. I can see it breathing on the bed of sand. We get in trouble if we touch the screen because it gets scratched, but I don’t care. I am thinking about someone who isn’t me. I reach and touch the green monitor—it is cold and far and real. I pretend to touch the child I’ll never meet. I pretend I don’t exist. For that while only, it gets to be only her.

Lying there on the sand by the broken tree, I could see the fence, and I could feel someone touching me. I felt someone’s hand on my shoulder for a very long time. It wasn’t a broken branch. It was a touch. A glassy, forever touch.
Mom
, I thought. A million times and more times and more.
Mom,
Mom, Mom
. Once, after my father left, she taught me how to make rice. She held my hand; we stirred together. This was all a very long time ago. She held my hand, but I was small, and the rice came out hard. She said it was the water’s fault. She said the water was no good. But that was the night she stopped braiding my hair. She didn’t braid it that night, and not for any night after, or maybe it was that that was the night I stopped asking. We still ate the rice, and then we went to sleep, and then we woke up. That night, when she held my hand and we stirred—that night could have lasted forever but it didn’t. That other night, by the fence, by the broken tree, that night didn’t last forever either. Lying on the sand, I could swear, someone was touching me. But as hard as I tried to hear it, my mother’s voice was fading. The
no good
whispers grew quiet, then died. That old evil magic, it was now gone. And still. Someone’s hand, I couldn’t see it, but I could still feel it on my shoulder. That touch, it was not my mom. I knew, on the hospital bed in the little country, in all truth I knew it could never have been her who was touching me by that fence. Being touched like that, from such a distance, it was like being the grape I could never be—I could see it, but it couldn’t see me. When I touched the grape, my finger patted the green surface and it was cold and far and real. What happened was that someone was there but then was not, and then I, I got up and I ran to the fence made of little knives and I jumped it. Only me.

O
ne day, thirteen days before the war, I turned beautiful. It was the best. Don’t let anyone tell you there is anything better that can happen to a woman.

The day started in the farthest shooting range, the one with safety sleeves long enough to play with the ALGL weapon. It was a great morning, a morning that felt like a beach morning; it smelled of sunscreen.

“Yael,” Hagar told me that morning, “today will be an Ok day.”

She had said that to me every morning, though, since we became friends. This was a few months after Dana accused me of stealing her stuff and said the only way she wouldn’t tell would be if I moved into another caravan. Hagar’s caravan was the only one with a spare bed. The girls weren’t happy
about me moving in. They ignored me at first, but on that day I had already gotten them to like me. On that day I had friends.

That day with the ALGL, then, was something more than Ok, because by then I had made friends with the girls in my new caravan, my first real army friends. An automatic light grenade launcher by name, the ALGL weighed as much as a second grader, and we lazily dug a hole in the sand up to our knees to stick in its pedestal. The ALGL hadn’t been used by the Israeli army in over ten years, and aside from weaponry instructors like us, only one soldier in each platoon was trained on how to set it up and aim with it. Setting up was complicated; it involved twisting knobs just enough times and lining up parts in certain angles. But once the froglike machine was planted in the sand and the string of grenades was loaded, aiming was easy. You pulled your hardest to the right. You pressed the trigger with both thumbs.

Hagar evaporated an abandoned Subaru in the range with her fifth grenade. In seconds, she shot ten more.

“A machine automatic gun that shoots grenades,” Hagar said, and removed her safety goggles and helmet. “Now, you know that has to be something only a dude could come up with.”

I looked at the Subaru’s remains through the binoculars, a kilometer and a half away. The dust swirled above it, the wheels black splotches. Each grenade had a five-hundred-meter killing radius.

“I think you are supposed to say ‘automatic machine gun,’ ” I said. “It’s the other way around.”

Hagar ignored me. She got up from the sand and took the binoculars. “I can almost hear it, the conversation when they
thought it up: ‘Hey, dude, you know what would be way cool? If we had a machine automatic gun—listen to this—that shot grenades!’ ” Hagar lowered her voice and grabbed her crotch. Neta and Amit laughed, but I only smiled.

She wasn’t that good at impressions, and her long blonde hair was blinding when it met the June sun radiating from the dune. She was unmistakably a girl, and besides, it had been her idea to kill time with the ALGL that morning, and she was no dude.

It was me who told the girls I’d pass on a turn with the dumb ALGL. I remembered from basic training what the recoil felt like, how it electrified my chest cavity, and I was happy, so happy, just being with the three girls. The morning was good, and when Hagar smiled back at me, there was a stain of peach lipstick on her teeth, and there was nothing anyone could do but love her.

“Stop thinking dirty thoughts,” she told me.

“I can’t help it,” I said. “I can’t believe I have a whole week coming up with the American.”

Hagar knew Ari the American better than all of us because she had been assigned to train his foot-tracker rookies during their M-16 week three months earlier. On the side, as one of its less important missions, our base held the boot camp of the Bedouin foot trackers. Ari and another guy, Gil, had been pulled from their infantry unit to our base to serve as the foot trackers’ commanders, because the Bedouin foot trackers were retards and they couldn’t command their own boot camps. The next day, I was starting the M-16 week with Ari and his new soldiers. I was looking forward to having something to do. I was looking forward to it because even though I had a boyfriend, ever since I had cheated on him with Boris,
there hadn’t been an hour when I didn’t think about doing it with someone else. More specifically, Ari.

D
URING THE
war, I tried to remember what we used to do all day, but I couldn’t. Each day was its own day. The months before the war were slow. The youth in Hebron had calmed, and two of the boys from Hidna village got such a beating when they were caught after they stole the fence, none of the other boys came back to the base again. Our small base conducted five-day trainings every month for the platoon that took up the rotation around Hebron and along Route 433. We refreshed their sharpshooters, and the rest of the month we didn’t have to guard, because the platoons had enough people they could spare a few to guard the base. It was a great place for a teenager to be stationed back then. Most days were any girl’s call; for Neta, Amit, and me they were usually Hagar’s call. Some days, she would feel like shooting some weapon we had learned about in training (“I have this feeling,” she’d say, “I think it’s nostalgia”), and the weapons warehouse officer would let us take the weapon because technically it was the weaponry instructors’ responsibility to make sure all of the wartime machines worked. We never played with the same weapon twice, because afterward we were always too lazy to take the weapon apart and rub the tar inside with a cloth soaked in gasoline, so that the weapon wouldn’t rust and would work a second time.

A
ROUND TEN
that morning, we called the van driver on the radio to take us back from the range. The four of us occupied the backseat. Neta and I had strawberry lollipops in our mouths, and my fingers were sticky. Neta’s ponytail was bobbing; Amit had her head in Neta’s lap, and she put her sandy boots over my legs. On my right, Hagar was doing something to my hair. Her long fingernails felt good when they scratched my scalp; their smell of nicotine mixed with her cucumber perfume relaxed me.