The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (18 page)

Nadav got up and walked toward the girls with a slow step and stroked his cheek with his palm. He was only a bit taller than Gali and about thirty centimeters taller than Avishag. He gently placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. His voice sounded as if it were squeezed out of him also.

“What’s the problem?” Nadav asked.

“Movies,” Gali said.

“How many?” Nadav asked.

“Probably around a thousand,” Gali said.

“Not a problem, then,” Nadav said.

“But—” Avishag tried.

“No but. If we detain him, it will be days before we get anyone from legal to press charges and take away the movies. He’ll be out in no time and just get smarter about hiding them,” Nadav said. He wasn’t looking at the girls as he was talking; he was looking at his hand on Avishag’s shoulder.

“So again we do nothing?” Avishag asked, but Nadav just stroked her behind the ear with his index finger and smiled.

“Thanks for being bitches,” Mustafa shouted as his truck
drove away, leaving behind it a cloud of dust that penetrated the nose, the ears, the mouth, the pores of Avishag and Gali’s faces.

O
F THE
twenty-four hours in any given day, Gali and Avishag spent six hours on a border checkpoint shift, eight hours on a guarding tower shift, and the remaining ten hours doing what they wanted. Of course we know that you have to shower every day (they check), eat in the cafeteria tent (they don’t check), keep your weapon clean and your vest fully equipped (they say they’ll do random checks, but they don’t).

And sleep. You need to sleep.

But that still left the girls with some time. There was still time, all this time, hovering about them.

“Y
OU SAY
you love me, but you never listen to a word I say,” Avishag said.

She liked being in this room. Aside from the wooden shower caravan, this officer’s office was one of the only spaces in the whole base that wasn’t a tent. And it wasn’t wooden either; it was a room made out of white cardboard, dropped down by a tractor in the middle of this nothing. There was even a green plant, a desk, and a sofa in it. And it locked from the inside.

“I do listen,” Nadav replied. He put down his M-4 underneath a chair and sat down, then bent down to remove his military boots.

“I don’t even understand what the point of us being here is—we never do anything about anything,” Avishag said. “And I thought being in combat meant something. I thought after I was done with the monitors I would actually get to do something other than just watch.”

“I know it is hard, sweetie,” Nadav said. He glanced at his black Swatch and began to unbutton his green military shirt.

“It is hard because you suck. You never let us arrest anyone. All you care about is how much downtime you get. What if the girls in the guarding tower are calling you on your radio right now? You don’t even have your radio turned on. And what if we get caught? And you never come when I am guarding to check on me or, anything, and you, and you—” Avishag said. It felt as though it has been forever since she had spoken for this long.

She tried to continue, but Nadav went over to the sofa. He lay on top of her and grabbed her thin arms. “Shhh, listen,” he said, and kissed her ear.

“It is not fair,” Avishag said, but her voice was already failing her again.

“It is not fair for me either, having to baby all of you girl soldiers,” Nadav said. He covered her mouth with his hand. “Do you think I like being the officer of this ‘female infantry experiment’? That I chose this? Some days you are the only reason why I even have the strength to put on my uniform.”

He kept her mouth covered, even though there was no need. Avishag was not going to talk. Lying on that sofa, Avishag questioned why our world even gives us words.

T
HE FIRST
time Tom went to 52 Allenby Street was with Oleg and his two cousins. It was three months ago, on Tom’s nineteenth birthday. Both he and Oleg had the weekend off, which almost never happened because they usually took turns with their phone shifts, and Gali was not going to get a break for at least another month. Tom was so down and in his own head that week that Oleg sometimes had to shout at him just to get him to notice his shift was over. He tried to cheer him up by giving him an entire bottle of cheap Russian vodka, but to no avail.

Tom even suspected Oleg of switching his shifts around just so he would get Tom to go out that weekend, but at first Tom was in no mood.

“I just don’t feel like partying this weekend, dude,” Tom said, but it was not in the nature of our Oleg to take no for an answer.

“In Russia we say, ‘No bitch is worth crying like a bitch about.’ You understand?” Oleg said.

Tom was not convinced. “Didn’t you once yell at me that you were from Belarus, not Russia?” he asked. He then looked around the street outside the base, hoping to catch a service cab that would take him back home already.

“Whatever, man. I am telling you, where I am taking you, dude, it will be a night to remember,” Oleg said. He gave Tom his sad Russian puppy smile and pressed his chubby palms together, begging.

The service cab dropped them off in the clothing district, right by Allenby 52. The building looked like a regular clothing
shop from the outside, but when they knocked on the metal door, a young, skinny Russian in sweatpants opened.

“Do you want some oranges?” he asked with a thick accent. “We have a tree right behind the shop. What do I tell you, this country has good oranges. It is on the house.”

The room had two sofas and a huge dining table, but only two white plastic chairs. On the white wall there was a yellow poster on which prices were written in thick black marker. They misspelled “All-incloded.”

“Oleg, what is this? You can’t be serious. A whorehouse?” Tom whispered. But the Russian with the oranges could hear him, and he was laughing.

“Watch your language, will you?” Oranges asked.

But the truth is Tom was surprised to learn that he wasn’t appalled. He was excited. Will these girls be hot? Could he ask them to do anything? Since that day back in tenth-grade gym class he hadn’t even kissed a girl that wasn’t Gali.

Before Tom realized it, Oleg and his cousins had paid and a middle-aged woman was there to walk them upstairs.

“What are you getting?” Oranges asked.

“Whatever is cheapest,” he said finally. “I am not really … You know, I don’t really do this type of stuff.”

“That would be just blow job. Two hundred shekels. We can charge it on credit card as massage.”

Upstairs, the hallway looked just like Tom’s brother’s university dormitory. There were rooms everywhere, as far down the green-carpeted hallway as Tom could see, but the middle-aged woman told him to go into the second room on the right. When she leaned over to point him there, her breath smelled of garlic.

The room was small, and the only furniture in it was a queen-sized white bed, draped with a shawl printed with a Middle Eastern pattern. The walls were white and smelled freshly painted. There was nothing on them.

The girl sat on the bed with her legs crossed. Even though her hair was bleached an industrial shade of blonde and her brown roots were showing at the top, and even though her lips were bright pink and her eye shadow purple, she still looked not much older than seventeen. She was thin. She was drowning in her sweatpants and the strap of her tank top fell from her shoulder almost all the way to her pointy elbow. Her skin was so white that against the background of the wall it was as if chunks of her were not quite there.

When she looked up, all Tom could notice were her eyes. They were so huge, so bulging and blue, it looked as if they were floating in the air.

The girl looked down again and got up to turn off the light. In the dark, Tom could feel her cold hand grabbing his and leading him to the bed. Before she could touch his belt, he got up and walked back to the wall and turned on the light. The room hummed silence.

“How about I just look at you,” he said. “I am not really—” and he stayed standing by the wall.

The girl did not reply. She just sat there on the bed and looked down. Every so often she would look up, and Tom would look and look and look at her. She was beautiful in a way, and all eyes.

That was then, on Tom’s birthday.

A
VISHAG COVERS
her face with her hands, but soon it is hard to breathe because her hands reek of rust from climbing up the metal ladder to the guarding tower. It is noon, and her helmet is drenched in sweat and it makes her hair itch, but she is too lazy to touch it. Besides, she is not allowed to take off her helmet while guarding.

Gali is leaning her torso out of the tower and looking at her cell phone. Avishag wants to tell her she’s stupid, that they are not allowed to have their cell phones while guarding, that they could get caught. But she doesn’t, because she knows that no one is going to catch them here. That no one cares, really, about them there.

Through the binoculars Avishag can see two Egyptian guards in the distance. Technically the girls are supposed to look through the binoculars every ten minutes, but in reality they sometimes never look at all and there is no way for anyone to know. The Egyptians are not looking through their binoculars right now, and it makes Avishag feel good, superior. She thinks that one of them has a mustache, but she can’t quite tell, and the thought of it makes her laugh.

The Egyptians are guys, but they don’t have to carry anything on them. Not a vest, no extra bullets, no helmet. Just their thin brown uniform and their M-16. They don’t even have magnifying aims on their rifles like the girls do on their M-4s. Avishag is beginning to hate the enemy, and it surprises and amuses her. Not because of the three wars and the dead and the land mines and the lies and all, but because they don’t even have to wear stupid helmets.

Gali’s long fingers are moving rapidly, texting then erasing
then almost sending then erasing. Sweat gets in her eyes, a fly lands on her nose, and she is nodding her head, then shaking it to negate whatever thought she had just welcomed in.

But Avishag doesn’t notice any of this. She is looking through her binoculars, thinking of herself, thinking of the enemy, and of a mustache, and that she probably just lost her mind, but it is funny how she still feels altogether the same.