The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (29 page)

What happens in the morning? We asked and we asked and we asked. More than thirty people. To some of them we explained that it was for our school’s newspaper. To others we said we were reporting for a kids’ show. We didn’t laugh once. I remember that day; it was good like spaghetti after swimming.

We hitchhiked back to the village late at night. We waited at the corner for hours with smiles and no words. Nothing scared us yet. There was no explaining why we asked so many strangers that question, no right answer we expected. God did not plan that day for us. It was so random, only Lea could have planned it herself. In the backseat of the car that took us, Avishag fell asleep as soon as we got in, but Lea and I were so lit we couldn’t stop swaying our feet. She sank her teeth into my hand for a long time so she wouldn’t roar by accident. That’s how alive she was to me that day. She left marks.

T
HE DOOR
to Miller’s house was unlocked. We crept in. I tried not to make a noise, but Lea just marched through the rooms of the house as if it were her own, her steps quick. We passed through the entrance hall into the living room. Some of the kids’ toys were scattered on the carpet; expensive, shiny.

Miller was sitting in the dark by the kitchen table. He was
tossing a banana from one hand to the other, catching it, and again. He didn’t look up from the table, even though we were standing so close he must have known we were there. Intruders. There were plates around the table, with peas and schnitzel and salad on them, and there were forks by the plates, yet the meals were only partially eaten, abandoned midway.

“Miller,” Lea said. “We are here to pour gasoline on you. Just like you did to the olive tree.” Her voice was steady, her feet planted solidly on the floor. She didn’t look at me. She looked straight at the down-facing head of Miller. At his bald spot.

Miller kept on tossing the banana. He followed it with his eyes. He didn’t look up.

When he spoke, his voice scared me. It was prickly, like it came from far away, from a place I’d never been.

“Ahh, meshugana girls,” he said. “You are crazier than I thought. Have you finally, after all these years, come to set me on fire?” he asked.

“You killed the olive tree,” Lea said. “It was thousands of years old, and you poured gasoline on it after the bar mitzvah.”

“I did what? Why would I pour gasoline? We barely had enough that day to keep the fire going,” Miller said.

“It is the only thing that can kill an olive tree. It is the only thing.”

“Well, monkey girl, no matter. Set me on fire. She is gone. Took the kids.” He began tossing the banana more quickly. “This is perfect, actually, just what would happen to someone who stays in this country,” he said. “You can’t scare me.”

“Did she leave because of the signs we put up?” I asked, before I could stop myself. Lea gave me a puzzled look. She
stepped closer to me. This was not part of her plan, talking to him about his wife, but I was curious, curious as a child.

Miller began laughing. His laughter sounded more like a baby choking. “The signs? The signs? It is the missiles. The war. It was always the war. She couldn’t take it anymore, wanted to go back to England,” he said. “ ‘We can’t have something happen to the little ones,’ ” he added in English, imitating the voice of his wife. “ ‘This was all your crazy idea to move here.’ ”

He stopped tossing the banana and just held it in his hand. Then he did something fairly unbelievable, but it was true: he covered his face with his hands, still holding the banana, and began sobbing. It was hard to make out his words, but I think he said: “I should have gone with her. What’s in a country without a woman?”

I was still drunk, but not enough so that this didn’t embarrass me. I lowered my eyes and only then noticed that I was no longer holding the gasoline container. That it was now in Lea’s hand.

She looked displaced for a second. She looked at me like a disgusted kitten. “Why are we talking about this?” she asked, and then she opened the gasoline container and stepped right by Miller’s chair. “Miller, I will now pour gasoline on you,” she said, and this was what she did.

She lifted the container high but then lowered it under the table and, making
whoosh
sounds, she poured the gasoline on Miller’s pants and shoes. On his roots. The smell burst out; it made it easier for me to breathe somehow. Miller’s face was still covered.

Lea put the container on the ground, closed it, and then began to head away from Miller.

He looked up.

“Where are you going?” he asked. “I thought you came to set me on fire.”

“I came to do
exactly
what you did to the olive tree, and I did,” Lea said.

“What the hell?” Miller asked.

“If you were an olive tree, you would start dying right about now, but you are not an olive tree, and that is the point,” Lea said. “What you did is, you poured gasoline.”

Miller began sobbing again, this time without covering his face. It twitched in red and veins and tears. “No,” he said. “You ape! You said you were going to burn me, and this is what you’ll do!”

“No,” Lea said. “I can’t; that’s not what ‘exactly’ means.” She stepped closer to him again, her chin high, strong. Setting him on fire would go against her logic. Since forever, she had done exactly and only what made sense in her world. This was my Lea. Glorious, rigid, a creator of worlds.

“Burn me! Just do it. I don’t care,” Miller said.

“No,” Lea said. “This is what you get. You stay here. You sit here. This is what you get—” and she would have gone on, but Miller got up from the chair and grabbed her, twisting her arm so that her back pressed against him. Then he shoved the unpeeled banana to her mouth, and began cursing, calling her a monkey first, then rapid curses, curses I had never heard before. Lea kept her mouth shut tight, and the banana smooshed out of the peel, its soggy white smearing her face.

I ran toward Miller and kicked him with all I had. I kicked again and again and again and then Lea’s hand was in mine and we ran and we ran, through the door and into the olive grove.

W
HEN
L
EA
was in boot camp, her unit was called up to help with the Gaza pull-out plan. They needed boot-camp soldiers to pack up the belongings left behind by the settlers who refused to leave without being dragged, and they chose the boot-camp girls of the military police. I had not been drafted yet. Lea would call me with stories of a little girl who began eating the sand when she told the girl she couldn’t go back into her house, and of how bulldozers had made an entire college campus into nothing but red dust in less than twelve hours. She had stories, and she needed me as a friend again. One Russian woman set herself on fire right by the road where Lea was guarding.

“The thing that’s weird is the Popsicles,” she said. “I think they are afraid the soldiers would get too upset by all of this, so the army keeps on giving us Popsicles. It’s like it is summer.”

“It
is
summer,” I said through the phone.

“I know,” she said. “That’s what’s weird.”

L
EA AND
I marched through the olive grove back from Miller’s house. It was only five hours before I had to hitchhike to Nahariya and catch the train to Tel Aviv. I kept on walking, my mind unquiet. One step, two step. I began to skip, and then I raised my arms in the air, and then I froze midmoment.

“Lea,” I said. “Let’s pretend we are olive trees. Let’s pretend we lived and we lived for thousands of years and now we are alive.”

Lea stopped walking ahead of me, but she didn’t turn to look at me. “No,” she said. “I can’t.”

“Of course we can,” I said. “We can pretend. We could be trees if we wanted to.”

“No,” Lea said. “I really can’t. I can’t be a tree.” She looked at the dry yellow ground.

And she kept on walking, her body growing smaller, until she reached her backyard. I didn’t go after her. I stayed. And when I closed my eyes and opened them again, frozen still, she was not anywhere anymore, and it was just me, at a halt.

I tried and I tried to pretend that I was an olive tree. I told myself that I lived, and I lived, and even when there were tumors exploding under my bones and predators eating out my eyes, I thought I’d die but I didn’t. I stood frozen, eyes open, my arms misshapen in the air; I tried forever to be an olive tree, I swear. But without her I couldn’t pretend. I tried for hours. Until it was time for me to leave.

W
HAT REALLY
killed the tree was a rabbit. We have never seen a live one in the village, but my mother told me that when she went over to look at the tree a few weeks after I left, she saw the decaying body of a rabbit inside the dead trunk. She went over because Lea’s mother had told her she could smell something very wrong, but she was too scared and worn out to search herself. The rabbit was curled up inside itself, and its fur was almost gone. Its flesh blended with the bark and worms. Had Lea and I gone over to the tree and looked, we would have seen the rabbit ourselves, but we
didn’t. In the end, we never came close enough to see it that night, or maybe we just didn’t look. We never could have imagined a dead rabbit, because we had never seen a live one.

Lea left for Tel Aviv too, a few weeks after I did. She didn’t tell me. I found out about a year later. My mom told me over the phone. By then I was not in Tel Aviv anymore. I found out about that a week after I left the country for the first time, before I took the first of many trips around the world.

Here is what happened in the morning, the morning I left. I took my backpack, the big one, the one I used in the army. I had filled it the afternoon before, before I went to Lea’s, with all the clothes that still fit me, clothes I hadn’t worn in over two years. Aside from clothes, the only thing I took was the Rules. “The Page for Spaceship Rules,” the one I kept from school, after the janitor told us to take it down.

I stood at the hitchhiking spot, and I pointed my finger, and I waited. I waited beyond the shade, the asphalt stretching ahead of me, my back turned to the outskirts of the village, only burned banana fields at my side.