The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (30 page)

A green Fiat stopped, and it took me south and away from the border to Nahariya, the most northern train stop in the country. I waited with four soldiers and a mom at the train station. Then I took the train; I took the train asleep.

When I took the train to Tel Aviv, I didn’t yet know about the rabbit. And I didn’t even think or dream about the tree. I just slept. I woke up minutes before we arrived. The train station was swarming with people, all these people, walking here and there. A woman rubbed against my backpack and I was pushed forward. When I looked up, my eyes met a man. He was promoting a cell phone service. I could tell because
his shirt read: “Connecting People.” He smiled at me and stepped forward, a neon orange pamphlet in his hand. I stood there, frozen. The heavy backpack chafed my skin.

“Excuse me,” the man said. “What’s your name?”

“No thanks,” I said. “No thank you.”

H
aving been born into the Zubari family, the largest Iraqi family in all of Israel, even Avishag’s hysteria was not her own. It belonged to the many women who lived in her time and to generations of Zubari women who lived before her in Baghdad. At first she called her hysteria sadness and nurtured it as if it were her child. One February morning, she woke up and forgot what it felt like to want anything. She was twenty-one, eight months out of the army, and she should have gone downstairs to grab her morning tea and the olive sandwich her mom had made for her lunch in the offices, but she could not, because she didn’t see the point. Instead, she stayed in bed all day until hunger was acid pooling at the bottom of her stomach and she had to run downstairs and stuff her throat with frozen pita and gulps of water she drank by pressing her
lips to the kitchen faucet. As she was running down the stairs, there was something she wanted, at least for that minute, but after she ate, she would climb back to bed because there was nothing else she wanted.

When the nightmares started, her grandmother said to her mother, “She has hysteria” and also “We don’t want a repeat of what happened to her brother Dan.” Avishag and Mira, her mother, were living in Jerusalem at the time. The house where Avishag lost the will to move was her grandmother’s. Her mother had moved there before Avishag was drafted. In American television, being hysterical meant shouting and crying and turning red and breaking chinaware and laughing cruelly. But for the Zubari women, these were behaviors they engaged in regularly. When they did have hysteria, Zubari women were quiet and motionless, chinaware
you
wanted to break. Hysteria was not forever; it came and went. But it was a thing to hide—from future Zubari husbands, from the rest of Israel that wasn’t Zubari and female.

When his ex-wife started allowing Avi to visit his daughter again, when she told him that Avishag hadn’t left her bed in months, Avi didn’t know what to do, but he knew this time he had to do something. He had already lost a son he barely knew. Then he remembered that when he first got out of the army the only thing that soothed the lizards in his brain was driving around the stone walls of Jerusalem for hours and nights. So he bought his daughter, who had never gotten her license, a used car. A car that was once used by a person who was now desperate. Six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and the car Avi got his daughter Avishag went for two thousand shekels below market price.

“Six million Jews, that’s not nothing,” Avi said to Avishag the day he gave her the car.

His daughter wasn’t sure what nothing was not. She stared at him and then shielded her eyes from the Jerusalem summer with her hand.

“Two thousand shekels, that’s not nothing,” Avi said.

He had gotten the car from a survivor. He said, “She is a beauty.” He said, “She is American.” The car. The survivor was Polish. She survived the Nazis, but the whore couldn’t play him in price.

Avi had come to Israel from Libya. He was sick of hearing about the Holocaust because he had never even been to Europe, not even to Turkey on one of those “all-included” trips. And Europeans, the ones who had survived and made it to this country, they were the ones who ruined his life.

He told Avishag that driving around in the car was the only thing that made his days breathable after he got out of the army. He wanted her to learn.

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, and Avi had squeezed the woman who sold him the car two thousand shekels below market price. Not once had Avishag agreed to sit in the driver’s seat. He would come often and take her for rides after he got the new car. Weeks passed. Then he couldn’t come so much because he was busy being a contractor, or with his new wife, his new boys. Someone was always sick; one of the Palestinian construction workers was always missing his shift.

Then he’d wake up in the middle of the night. Thinking he had given up made his nightly sweats tepid.

“S
MILE
,”
HE
told Avishag at the start of the day of their twentieth “driving lesson.” It had been months since he had bought her the car. Avishag stood in her boy shorts in the parking lot outside her mother’s building and squinted at him. “This is the part where you smile,” Avi said. He took his Time cigarettes out of his jeans pocket.

Avishag pressed a chin to a collarbone and breathed out. When she glided her tongue behind her teeth, she tasted morning. It was past two in the afternoon, but her mother had managed to get her out of bed only ten minutes earlier. This was the earliest she had gotten out of bed all month. Those green boy shorts, she must have been wearing them for more than a week. Even her mother had given up on her. “Let your father take care of you for a bit,” she said. “Let
him
deal with it.”

“Blood-sucking dead fish, this whole family,” Avi said and tapped the hood of the car, like a man would to another man’s shoulder. “Your mother, and her sisters, and your mother’s mother, and your sister, and you.” He pointed at Avishag.

Avishag didn’t want to be a blood-sucking dead fish like her father called her. She didn’t want to be a blood-sucking dead woman. She didn’t want to be a dead woman. But what she did want, she didn’t know.

It was not her fault, Avi reminded himself. She had hysteria. This was hereditary, an Iraqi thing. At first he had still tried to ask her what was wrong. He had wanted there to be a certain thing that was wrong. He had hoped even for that thing to be a boyfriend, maybe an officer, someone who had hurt her, so that he could hurt him back. But when he asked
her what it was, if there was a boy or even a man in her life, she said no. Lately, he didn’t ask about much anymore. He just asked for her to get better.

“Please,” Avi said, clasping his hands together, balancing his cigarette in his fleshy lips.

“Thank you for coming, Daddy,” Avishag said finally.

“Oh hon,” Avi said, removing his nicotine-stained grin and sunglasses. He tapped Avishag on her back. “All I want is for you to have whatever you want,” he said.

Avishag wanted to climb back to sleep. She had been forced to get out of the house for a bit. Her mother had gotten her out of bed by splashing water on her head. Her eyes were open, and they still stung a bit, still remembered the shock.

Avi put his cheap sunglasses back on and blew a kiss in Avishag’s direction by gesturing an explosion with his hand from his lips, a gesture more appropriate for an Italian chef praising pasta than for a Libyan father cheering up his gloomy daughter.

“Come on, kid, let’s drive!”

This was their twentieth “lesson.” Enough was enough, he thought. There are times you have to decide that it is enough.

He twirled the keys in his fingers. His key chain was the symbol of Jerusalem’s soccer team. Avishag couldn’t stop staring at it swirling around his hairy knuckles; it was yellow, black, and foamy. When Avi was Avishag’s age, he was already married to her mother.

W
HEN
A
VISHAG
was five, her mother had hysteria. She had it for a year. Then another year, after she had their third child.
Avi could count on one hand the times he had seen her out of bed that month. With one of his hands, he broke an almost empty bottle of Araq on the granite kitchen counter. He could smell the anise; it reminded him of chewing the dark licorice his grandfather had bought him in a candy store in Tripoli. Avi went into the bedroom. His wife was lying there in the dark, her eyes closed, her lips pressed together. Avi was very, very drunk. He put the entirety of his weight over her thin body but she didn’t wake up. He started crying. “Wake up. Wake up.”

He started cutting. The glass of the bottle was much sharper than he could ever have dreamed.

Oh, and he did dream. He did. For years after that. A decade. More.

In his dream he was holding just a dot of shiny glass, and when he pressed it into the sharp collarbone of his wife, a red line, a geometric line, flew into the ceiling. When the line hit the ceiling, it became a hovering puddle in the air of the room and then suddenly came pouring down on the bed in a splash of red. In his dream, he was drowning in his wife’s warm blood.

In life, he had merely injured her. The scar on her neck was no longer visible by the time they were divorced. In life, it was the social worker, the German social worker, who made her divorce him.

“T
HERE IS
an empty parking lot by Motza,” Avi said on the day of the twentieth driving lesson, and turned the wheel to
the right. He put in a tape, a song he knew even back in Tripoli, where all the women were dark and young, and daughters like his didn’t happen. “It is a great place to start learning to drive,” he said.

Avishag opened her mouth, but it was only to put a chunk of her hair inside of it.

“Say something,” Avi asked.

She knew better.

B
EFORE
A
VISHAG
met with the army doctor, the one who signed the papers authorizing an early release from the military, Yael had told her that if things were really that bad on the Egyptian border, all she had to do was say something. Anything, really. She could say she believed she was a butterfly, claim she wet the bed, explain that it was her teddy bear who bought her cigarettes. She could say she had already gotten in trouble once and that if they kept her she’d just do something to end up in military jail again, like she ended up after she got naked in some tower. She liked jail so much it was harder to get back to routine. Something, anything to give the doctor an excuse to claim that she was crazy. It took two weeks to get a referral to an army psychiatrist, but Yael claimed that getting out of being a soldier was not so hard. They don’t want the liability. There are enough soldiers in this country.