The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (16 page)

I looked at the men. All these men; I knew something terrible these men did not know. These men, a few of them are dead now, and that day, before they died, I knew something terrible they did not know.

The green bullets go further, more accurately, because they are heavier, so the metal coils inside the M-4 barrel are wrapped tighter than the M-16’s, to give the bullets more spin, more momentum. The M-4 is the gun that can actually
help you if you need to shoot someone and hit them fast. But if you didn’t use a green bullet with it, it wouldn’t make it past 75 meters. It would never hit where you aimed.

At first I thought I was the only one who knew there were no green bullets in the emergency container. But then I looked to my right, at Hagar.

Then I looked quickly at the sand, then again at her. I forced myself to look at her face. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing fast. I had never before seen her afraid. Perhaps she had never been afraid before. Her face looked not her own, more beautiful, gone from this earth.

She knew too. She knew what wasn’t in that container. She had been there. She had been there with him. Maybe on those same purple sheets.

She knew the men would still have to go, as is, with their M-4s and no green bullets. These reservists, the husbands that we could have had if we had been born ten years before—some of them would have not died if the color of their bullets had been different. This is a historical fact. The government admitted it in the report later—the one about how we weren’t prepared for that war.

At first, for a second, I wanted to yell at Hagar for lying, for not telling me she had already been with Ari, for the madness in her encouragement of my attraction to him. I could almost see it; her hand on the back of his neck, and his neck growing stiff. Ari.

But then for one second, I thought of Ari only, Ari climbing out of that ditch.

“You killed me,” he joked. He thought that this was very funny.

And then I looked at Hagar’s fear, her closed eyes. I looked
at a girl who was afraid for the first time in her life, and maybe only a little, and maybe for the very last time.

I breathed in the gunpowder that was on all of our fingers and the cedar trees of the base. And I just understood that there are people who live for the fight; for the moments before you lose or win. People for whom this world is not enough; they want ice water in their veins, beauty at any cost, climbing out of ditches under gunfire, exploding necklaces of grenades. Fascinating people for whom torture is not even within the realm of imagination. And I looked at the many men on the sands. Each one of them had shoulders much wider than my own that I knew would probably do him no good in what was to come. And then I knew: those fascinating people—I was never one of them.

T
he first thing we need to know is that when the diplomatic incident occurred, Yael was stationed at a training base near Hebron. Lea was in officers’ training school. They had nothing to do with it. Avishag was on the Egyptian border when the incident unfolded, in guarding towers and at checkpoints. She got through the months of her watch-monitor shifts just fine. She was serving in the army’s only female-dominated infantry unit, as a common soldier on the border, when it happened. But Avishag did not have the power to script what happened that day. We could blame Avishag, or Israel, or Egypt, or even America if we felt like it. But what good would that do us?

The second thing we need to know is that infantry officer Nadav has no complaints with us. None. He is not pointing
any fingers at his school friends, or at his dad, or at the Israeli government, or at any government, really, and he is not about to blame it on “War.” If Nadav has a problem with anyone, it is with God. When he was seven, six even, he would often stop in the middle of his homework or in the middle of watching the Ninja Turtles, put his miniature chin in his chubby hands, and say, “If I have a problem with anyone, it is with God.”

He would actually say that. A six-year-old! He was very mature for his age, our Nadav, and absolutely adorable, even before his mother died in the bus suicide bombing of line 5 (the 1991 one, by Afula Central; not the first one, the one that was in the spring). And it was the little things that Nadav would like to complain about. Like when you have your birthday in kindergarten and they make you bring your parents and cake to school. Nadav only had his dad and the cake was store bought. They made Nadav sit on a chair surrounded by balloons in front of the entire class and stare at the cake that rested on the tiny table. When he blew out his candles, the smell of dead fire mixed with that of the balloon rubber and cheap chocolate icing. On his right, his dad was trying to make himself small enough to fit on the child-sized wooden chair. On his left sat no one.

He is just saying, if you make a plan that every child should have two parents, and then you make a world where everywhere you go there is a right side of a kid and a left side of a kid, a wrong and a right, a white and a black, a chair and another chair, a dad and a mom, a mom, well, it is just not fair to all of a sudden say to just one specific person, “Sorry, you are not going to fit in with the plan.” Nadav is just saying, as
a God you shouldn’t go around doing shit like that. It is sick, that’s what it is.

That’s all officer Nadav has to say. He does not wish to talk further.

W
E MAY
think that Tom had the easiest job in the Israeli Defense Forces, but he knew that in all truth he actually had the hardest job in the whole world. Yes, he did spend his entire service in Tel Aviv, only a five-minute walk from Azrieli, the biggest and brightest mall in the country—that is, after all, where the headquarters of the army are located, and the general chief of staff’s office; and he did get to go home every night at eight o’ clock and sleep at his parents’ house, even; and all he had to do for the eleven hours he was on duty was to sit behind a wooden desk and stare at a red phone. But wait—do we really know how hard it is to stare at a red phone that never rings? Every day, from eight to eight, with only two thirty-minute breaks for eating and peeing? For three years? Put nothing but a phone on your desk and try staring at it. You won’t make it past fifteen minutes.

There are thirty-four cubicles in Tom’s office, and luckily for him his is located so that if he stretches out his neck he can see the two leaves of a ficus plant and the clock on the wall. He has made a deal with himself that he can’t start thinking about Gali until he only has fifteen minutes left. Before that, he does everything else. He plucks his eyebrows with his fingers. He counts his teeth with his purple tongue piercing. He thinks of Katie Holmes, then Shakira. But of Gali Tom doesn’t
daydream until there are only fifteen minutes left in his shift. He can’t; otherwise it hurts too much.

He is going to see Gali tonight for the first time in two months, so that could explain the third leg he immediately gets as he allows the smell of her Herbal Essences pomegranate shampoo to resurface in his mind, but we know he actually gets it every time he lets himself think of her. The worst is when he gets it right in the middle of a shift. There could be the tiniest speck of dust in the still office air, he could sneeze and remember the time she sneezed when he last saw her—her tight copper ponytail bouncing up and down—and that would be it: he would be done for for the remainder of his shift, and it would hurt.

D
OES ANYONE
know how to say “Don’t do it” in Ukrainian? We should have learned how to speak Ukrainian. Not the whole language—it would have been enough if we just knew how to say “Don’t do it.” Anything could have stopped Masha that day. She was not really all that bad of a girl.

Even though Berezhany, Ukraine, is a small town, Masha got to be alone all the time because of her job. She was responsible for numbering and filing the completed order forms of the shoes that were made in the factory on any given day, so she only really had to work after other people had already been working for quite a few hours making the shoes. She didn’t have to be at the office until noon each day, and sometimes even if she came in at one Julian would let her get away with it. She got to have lunch with her old mother, who would kiss her on the forehead when she stood at the
threshold heading out. When she walked through the market to work, she got to stop by the tomato man and watch him as he restacked his tomatoes into a perfect triangle and then started all over again, sighing. All the children were at school, all their parents were at work, and the only people around were the elderly and the unemployed, who all roamed the streets with patient, soft steps. Everything was ordinary, but lighter—like seeing a video recording of your bedroom when you were not there.

At first she liked staying in the office and recording the completed order forms after everyone was already at home, having dinner with their families. All the cubicles around her were dark, and she would close her eyes and imagine that if someone were to look at the office from an aerial view, all he would see were two dots of light sparkling in the dark of the office—her cubicle and Julian the boss’s office.

But then she got bored. She had been dating Phillip for two years, and when she would look to the cubicle on her right, she would see a framed picture of a stranger’s family by a Christmas tree, and she would see herself as the wife, holding the little one and pointing up to the Nativity star. And when she would look to the cubicle to her left, she would see another framed picture and it would be her as the wife again, a little fatter and redheaded this time, and surrounded by four boys with too many freckles.

The first thing she took from the desk of one of the cubicles was a pen. It was red and had teeth marks on it, and she placed it two cubicles to the right of where she had found it. From that cubicle she took a stapler and placed it four cubicles to the left. But no one noticed, even though she waited for a week, then two more days. Deep down she knew that sooner
or later she would get to the pictures. She loved imagining what it would be like to look up from your cubicle one day and see that your wife wasn’t your wife, and your kids were not your kids. Or better yet, what it would be like to have a picture of another family at your desk and never notice.

And no one did notice. And a week passed, then two days, then a month. Soon, none of the framed pictures on the desks belonged to their rightful owners. She was beginning to rotate them, spending a whole night arranging the pictures of the wives in a pattern of blonde, brunette, blonde, when—

“You are a bad girl, aren’t you?” she heard Julian whispering from behind her. His wife’s picture was the only one she couldn’t touch—he always spent his nights closed in his office. But something else told her she shouldn’t do it. That something told her she should never have started the job in the first place, and that no good was ever going to come out of a job that requires you to stay in the office until midnight with your married boss. Masha had always been a smart, observant girl.

Don’t do it, Masha.

Julian gently grasped her by her boney wrist, but she clenched the picture frame she was holding strongly in her hand and looked him in the eyes. She breathed once. She breathed twice. She was breathing.

And that was that.