The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (31 page)

But when the doctor leaned over his desk and asked, “What is it you wanted to talk about?” she drew a blank.

She looked around his office. His ashtray was clean; the marble sparkled. On his wall he had the map of the country,
like any other officer. On top of the drawers at the side of his desk, a dirty aquarium rested. The fish all swam in circles, gold and sapphire and gilled. Avishag had never seen a doctor before. The Zubaris, being Iraqi, did not believe in them. Choosing a crazy sentence from the millions of options she had was impossible. Her voice would not let her do it.

The doctor coughed and said, “Well?”

In the end she chose to say something that was almost true.

“This aquarium makes me think it is the Holocaust of fish.”

She did not remember where she got that idea; it was scavenged from a bottomless body of water, but it was also not a complete fabrication. She was dismissed two days later. She did not talk to Yael much after that because she could not bear to tell her she had been dismissed for a crazy sentence she almost believed.

O
N THE
hills around Jerusalem, a pickup truck stood before Avi’s car covered in neon bumper stickers.

“The People of Forever Are Not Afraid,” one of them read. “We Have No One to Lean On But Our Father in the Sky.”

“Don’t do that, hon,” Avi said.

Avishag had the tip of her black ponytail in her mouth. She opened her mouth wide, like an elderly woman, and it fell out, dangling on her chest.

“That’s how I love you,” Avi said.

A
FTER THE
rabbis finally approved the divorce, Avishag and her father were allowed to meet only with the German social worker present. Her hair was dyed blonde and mounted on her head like a sand castle, and her nose was small and pink—a snout. She sat on a leather office chair, but Avi and Avishag sat on colorful wooden chairs, the chairs of children. Avi’s butt was too big for the chair; he squirmed like a fried worm. Avi had had to drive all the way up north, because that’s where Mira had moved to. On the tiny desk there were puzzles of smiling ducks and Barbie dolls and books. Avishag put a lump of hair in her mouth and stared right at him. His son, Dan, refused to see him. The German social worker said he was big enough to decide that. He was twelve. Mira had said she’d bring the youngest girl if things “go well” with Avishag.

“You could read to her,” the pig-faced social worker suggested. She wiped her nose with her wrinkly hand.

This was, by far, the stupidest suggestion Avi had ever heard. If things had turned out differently, this woman would be stuffing her mouth with a pork sausage in a café in Berlin just now, and he would be riding on a horse with his daughter across the markets in Tripoli, buying her dark eyeliner and purple scarves. In Tripoli, girls started wearing makeup when they were as young as eight, and they always kept a scarf across their faces. This woman, she was not even wearing lipstick, and he could swear that her exposed hairline was receding. This woman, she did not know what being a woman was.

“I don’t read,” Avi said. What he meant was, he couldn’t read, not well enough for a book.

“Oh, I see,” the German woman said. She must have thought he meant he couldn’t read Hebrew, but really he couldn’t read much at all. His family had fled from Tripoli to the refugee camps when he was ten, and he had forgotten the little he had learned. He had lived there, in the tents, which later became a caravan town, right by the ocean, until he was old enough to join the army. He had forever been behind the other kids. He wasn’t smart enough to make out words.

Oh, but he could make his daughter, and he did make his daughter, and his daughter, she knew already what being a woman was. She was only eight, darker than even he was, and she took his face in her tiny palms like a lady, like a mother, and she said, “Father, I do not want these stories. I want your stories. Tell me your stories.”

He had never told a story before. The German woman smirked.

He put his daughter on his lap.

“She has to stay in the chair,” the German said.

“Oh, Ok,” he said. Avishag went back to her chair. She took his hand.

“One time, in this one country, there was this one mom and this one dad,” he started.

“I think your wife would appreciate it if you didn’t get into personal issues with the child,” the German said.

Personal issues! “The child” had been made by him. What could he tell her that wasn’t personal?
Those Europeans
, Avi thought.
All this spiteful formality. They have no hearts. Hitler burned theirs
.

“One time, in this one country,” Avi started again. He paused, then spoke again. And that was the beginning of the only story he ever told.

“J
UST DO
something,” Avi said once they had reached the parking lot. He and Avishag were leaning on the front of the car. It had taken him five minutes to convince her to step out of the passenger seat, and even that was progress from the previous times. That was something, at least. He wouldn’t give up hope yet.

He offered her one of his Time cigarettes, and they stood there smoking. In the abandoned parking lot, there was nothing but asphalt, yellow weeds, and a semi trailer with no wheels.

“Just sit in front of the wheel for one minute,” Avi said. “For me.” He clasped his hands and even considered getting down to his knees.

“I am too hot,” Avishag said. “I am going back in.” The cool air of the car, it was a small thing she wanted, and this for her was something, at least.

Avi thought about giving up.

Then he thought about that bumper sticker, the one glued to the back of the pickup truck. That sticker, cheap, pink, idiotic, real. “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid.”

It was for his daughter that Avi had learned how to read. He had spent hours laboring over a single article in the sports section of the paper. And then suddenly, years later, he had noticed that he had read the whole section in one sitting, with ease, during a visit to the toilet.

He thought about his middle daughter every time since, whenever life was, for a moment, as easy as living. Playing soccer with his little boys, buying his new wife a gorgeous chunk of lamb, buying a used car.

His daughter opened the door to the passenger seat up front slowly, careful not to hit the curb. The door squeaked.

“Sorry,” she said.

So she opened the door faster and indeed scratched the curb. “So sorry,” she said.

Finally inside the car, she closed the door behind her gently, too gently; it didn’t close. So she slammed it harder.
Thump
.

“Sorry,” she said.

Too hard, she slammed it too hard. “Sorry, sorry,” she said.

Inside the car, Avishag brought her palms up, as if defending herself from a bear.

Avi got into the driver’s seat and stared at her with his palms under his armpits, his elbows resting on his belly.

“Sorry” a million times a day. “Sorry,” her only word almost.

“Sorry.”

This was her way of saying,
Do something
.

“Sorry about what?” Avi asked. “The only thing you should be sorry about is that you won’t even put one hand on the wheel.”

She had this way about her, his middle daughter. He hadn’t spoken to the younger girl since he had left. He had never seen Dan grow older than ten and had been asked not to come to his funeral by his ex-wife’s mother. The younger girl was now going by the dumb nickname “Tzipi” and was happy, Mira, his ex, told him one time after he dropped Avishag off from one of their “driving lessons.” What she meant was,
happy not to talk to you
. But Avishag, she had this way of making him put words into her mouth. Stories, even. Sometimes he would
drive with her for over six hours. They wouldn’t exchange a sentence, and by the time he dropped her off, he would feel as though he had learned something, although he wasn’t quite sure what it was. Like there was something more he could have done but hadn’t.

“Just one hand,” Avi said.

She was quiet for a long time. She was always quiet. But then. “You know,” she said. “One time in the army I saw a Ukrainian woman get shot in the head.”

“A Ukrainian woman?”

“Maybe she was still a girl.”

Avishag brought the tip of her hair to her mouth and then let it fall.

Ok
, Avi thought.
Ok
, and also,
at least now I know
. And he breathed.

“So, is this the thing?”

Avishag rammed her eyebrows at each other. She almost even turned to look at her father. Her face had more expression in it than it had had in a while. She was confused. “What do you mean? What
thing
?” she asked.

“You know,” he said. “The thing why you won’t drive and—”

“What thing? There is no thing. I am just scared of driving, that’s all.”

“You are just scared?”

“I just am.”

And with that, Avi knew again what he had thought he knew before, but this time he knew it better, and for real. There was just her. There was no thing. There was just his daughter.

Avi reached over and opened the glove compartment. He could smell the sweat on his daughter’s feet. He wondered when she’d last showered. He pulled out a purple scarf he always carried with him. His mother’s. The only thing he had left of her.

“Close your eyes,” Avi said, and Avishag did. He tied the scarf firmly around her eyes. She didn’t move. He sprung his fist in her face. She did not flinch. He made sure she could not see.

“One time, in this one country, there were people. Then a king came, and he wanted the country to himself, so he sent the people of that country all across the world. He put one sister in one part of the world and another sister in another part of the world. Some of them he sent to Russia. Others he sent to Africa. A few he even sent to live where polar bears live.”

“Polar bears, Daddy?”

“Yes, baby.”

“What happened then?”

“Then the people of that country lived all around the world. Many years passed. Millions of years. But they couldn’t forget that they were really not from Russia or Africa, that they were from that one country, and they always hoped that one day they could come back.”