The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (23 page)

The man continues to chant. At first all I hear is “la la la,” but then I realize he must be chanting the call of prayer, the one I heard entering through my bedroom window at five
in the morning, every morning, when I was a child. The call, though tired by its journey from the Lebanese border, entered loudly.

“La ilaha illallah,” the man chants. There is no other God.

I worry more about not dying than dying. That I will be left burned, blind, and a burden. That I won’t be able to walk or use the bathroom on my own. That I’ll want to die even more. I am scared of the nearness of it all, that everything will change in seconds and how do I prepare? What is it that I want to remember from before?

My blood buzzes inside the veins of my neck and my fingers jitter as if I am typing on an invisible keyboard. But I do not scream. I must not make a scene. You must never make a scene.

I ask the suicide bomber a question. Perhaps he will answer me in perfect Hebrew; perhaps nothing will happen.

“You are going to Tel Aviv, huh?”

“Ah-ha,” he grunts. Just air. No words. And he closes his eyes and keeps on rocking and chanting, “La. La. La,” his lips fretting.

As the bus rolls us out of the tunnel and the light hits his face again, his cheeks seem sucked upward, like a demon or a man of grace.

I notice that he is not clean shaven. Is it that God asks them to shave before they do it, or not? I don’t remember. I think,
Ok, Ok, you have to make a choice
, so I get up and step over him. He will suspect and explode. It will happen right now.

But it doesn’t. He looks back at me walking farther into the bus. So does another passenger, an Ethiopian woman holding her baby like she is afraid of what I may do to it.

I am scared enough that I sit on the back stairs of the bus,
rocking back and forth with the bumps along the road. I am scared enough that I sit by the trash can, full of ice cream and tissues and shells of sunflower seeds. I can even stomach the glances of the other passengers, who don’t understand why I got up from my seat, who perhaps have never been scared to death that they may not die.

But I am not scared enough to tell anyone, to scream. I am only scared the amount required to perhaps save my own life. Heroism has never been one of my qualities.

I think about her all the time, Emuna. More than I ever think about Avishag, even though she and I talk on the phone every day. Still. I beg for mercy and drain my brain; lower my head and close my eyes. And even then I think about Emuna.

O
N ONE
of the last days of seventh grade, my mother drove my sister and me to school, and our car was right behind Emuna’s mother’s car. My eyes were drained and dry and angry.

I could see her mother’s blonde hair in its bun and Emuna, chewing the sleeve of her red sweater. I could still taste the hot chocolate I had drunk minutes before. The banana fields were all brown.

I still liked the cars and the traffic jams then. I liked looking at the cars ahead, particularly if I knew the people in them, and thinking of myself as a part of this chain, a note in this rhythm. I looked at her car and liked it that Emuna couldn’t see me.

That’s when I saw him. The man with the gun was still very far away. It would probably take him five minutes to
walk from the banana field to the road. I watched him walk closer and closer. I didn’t say a thing.

Emuna’s mother’s car moved ahead, and our car followed. Emuna was still biting her red sweater. That’s how well I could see her—I could see her teeth.

The man with the gun was wearing a kaffiyeh. I knew, even then, that he came from Lebanon. That he was the only man to infiltrate the border since the army pullout. I knew it, I can’t deny it.

I knew it was a chase, and I was inside a stopped car.

Their car moved ahead. Our car moved ahead. The man with the gun kept walking. Now, I could have thought,
Don’t hurt us
. But I thought more. I thought,
Not us, them. Go there. Go there
. And I stayed quiet.

Their car moved, our car moved, their car moved. Then he pinned his gun to the window and shot Emuna’s mother. He ran; he left.

Emuna in all that red, I see her.

This memory, though, is not the worst. What happened after was much worse.

A
FTER THE
bus pulls up to the sidewalk across from the Azrieli mall, I walk a few steps and cannot believe I am still alive. I feel like a carbon copy of myself, but after all, nothing happened.

The people scatter; the bus driver helps the Ethiopian woman get her stroller off the bus. The suicide bomber that never was marches alone toward a café, where people who
are still very young smoke with their legs up on the tables outside. People, all these people, walk as if guided by invisible strings, across, along, diagonally, fast. I can hear the knock of their steps. The cars murmur like giant fruit flies, the music of the city all about me, touching me. The buildings throw their gloom and I think that even if the bus did explode nothing would have changed. All of this would still be.

I
OFTEN
think I don’t remember the funeral or the days after, but I know that I was there. I cried a lot, mothers other than my own hugged me, and then my mother hugged me at home.

I knew I wouldn’t have to see Emuna because she was always gone in summer. That summer could have been different, I thought that it might be, but in the end it wasn’t; except I kept thinking it was out of the ordinary that the village and the country had not yet exploded, that I had not yet exploded. I waited for a blast that would never come and that I did not deserve.

I remember something Emuna’s mother had said the day Omer broke up with her and she said she wanted to die. Her mother said she thought her life was starting when Emuna’s father asked her to marry him, and then she thought her life was starting when she did marry him, and then when Emuna was born. Or maybe it was my mother who said that about me?

The worst moments came after.

On one of the first days of eighth grade, my mother drove my sister and me to school, and our car was right behind your
father’s car. My eyes were drained and dry and ready. I had on my Dr. Martens and bell-bottomed jeans.

I could see you chewing the sleeve of your sweater. I could still taste the hot chocolate I had drunk minutes before. Outside, drops of rain fell on the banana fields and I could see the bananas and the dirt through my partially open window.

“It’s raining,” my mother said. “Close the window.” I looked at the cars ahead and tried thinking of myself as a part of this chain, a note in this rhythm.

“Close the window,” my mother said. She turned her neck and looked at me in the backseat. “It’s raining.”

At school I walked alone, behind Emuna, through the broken gate, right into the fluorescence and chatter and linoleum floors. The girls all swooped down on my desk as I sat down, and I took out my Bible homework from my JanSport bag.

We were studying Jonah for the third year in a row. It was the same teacher, and she had forgotten we had already studied Jonah the year before. Or maybe she didn’t care. She was married.

Jonah was a prophet, but he didn’t want to be a prophet, so God made him one anyway, even though he hid from God. After that, Jonah went to this town of bad people and told them they were really bad and that God was going to kill them all. The bad people didn’t get mad at Jonah; instead, they turned good and God spared them.

Then Jonah became really sad because he felt like an idiot for telling those people God would kill them only to have God change his mind, and he was also dehydrated in the desert. Then he found a tree that saved him from the heat and God killed the tree. Then Jonah was very sad. And then God
said, “You see, Jonah? You are sad about the death of this tree even though you didn’t work at all to raise it, so how do you expect me not to have second thoughts about killing all those people I made?”

But God had promised Jonah a disaster. He had had Jonah make a scene for nothing. Jonah had thought the whole world would end, but God was never going to let that happen. I bet you he knew from the beginning. Some people, and God, know from the beginning that the world won’t end. They pace lightly on sidewalks all around me.

We again had to draw lines between questions and their answers. Same questions, same answers, but it was harder to do this time.

God killed Jonah’s tree because …

“She’ll let everyone copy, but I am first, so don’t push,” Avishag told the girls. She took the seat next to mine. She smiled at me, as if we had never stopped talking. It surprised me, and then I was elated. I could not tell her that I had been saving the seat for Emuna. Not because of anything that had to do with Avishag. Not because I was happy she had forgiven me for falling for Dan. Because I did not want Emuna to sit next to me.

Emuna was real, and the same. She stood amid the girls like decoration and looked at me. They all did.

“I thought about you all summer,” I told Avishag then, loud. “I thought about you all the time. I missed you.” That was the pulse of the worst moments. The pulse of the world rolling forward.

I
RIDE
the escalator higher and higher toward the open bridge that leads to the entrance of the Azrieli mall. In the highway below me the cars are chasing each other’s colors; fast and again and more.

In the years since we all finished middle school, we have met at the Azrieli mall many times. All girls do. The enchantment died off the second, maybe third time.

I know exactly what is going to happen, so it does not even need to. But it will. Things that don’t need to happen happen all the time. We keep doing them.

We’ll all hug, the seven or eight of us who’ll show up. Avishag and I will kiss each other on both cheeks. We’ll all try on shoes we are never going to buy and buy tank tops we may never actually wear. The talk will be of boyfriends and college entrance exams and waitressing jobs and how good it is to be done with the army. We’ll make fun of Tali and Lea for deciding to become officers. They’ll repeat the old mantra of how easy it is to make money by staying in the army for one more year, because as an officer you get paid more than you would on the outside, and you don’t have any expenses. I’ll say, “But you? Lea!” and she’ll shrug her shoulders, or slap my back, her movements mechanical, reminiscent of the authority she once had but lacking strength. We’ll order coffee at the Aroma café and Lea will pour a sugar packet down her throat. Then we’ll all laugh. The bathroom will be flooded and a woman who has no home will spit on us when we wash our hands with the industrial soap. Then we’ll take the elevator to the roof, and one girl will say that from this height, the people
walking the streets of Tel Aviv look like ants. Maybe it will even be me. “It is so good to be together,” someone will say. “I absolutely love Tel Aviv,” another girl will add. We will all hope we don’t grow up to raise our children in a small town.