The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (36 page)

I
T
WAS
a pricey street. He watched her get off right by Rabin Square and walk down Zeitlin Street. He gave the driver a fifty without waiting for the change, got out, and walked slowly behind her. He followed her into the building and waited in the staircase until he heard her close a door on the third floor. He wondered how she’d respond, why he didn’t just call her name. He realized he was curious about where she lived; and, as happy as he was knowing three or even four Leas, he would be most happy with just one, with just her.

He waited for five minutes. He played with the dust on the plastic plants in the hallway.

He knocked.

She opened the door barefoot, wearing nothing but a long white shirt.

“You shouldn’t have followed me,” she said.

“I had to see what a one and a half bedrooms looked like,” he tried to joke.

She didn’t smile. She looked tired, more tired than he had ever seen her.

“I am coming in,” he said.

She moved to the side without a word, allowing him to enter.

He caught only a glimpse of the living room and kitchen before she pulled him by the arm. It looked like the apartment of someone’s parents. The sofa’s pillows were knitted and matched the paintings of fruit platters and bridges on the walls. He smelled incense; scented, burning wood.

In her bedroom everything moved faster than it did during the drunken nights at his place. She kept on grabbing his hands and putting them there, then quickly there, then another place. She pushed him, hard, onto the bed when he tried to touch her hair. He landed on his back and wondered how much an orthopedic mattress like hers cost and why he hadn’t gotten one yet.

He asked her for the price, and she laughed, softened. He put his hand on the back of her neck. His Lea.

He surrendered. She did too, ultimately. They fell asleep.

H
E WOKE
up to the familiar sound of someone sobbing and for a second forgot where he was. Lea lay still by his side, and when he leaned over to look at her he saw that she was sound asleep rather than crying, breathing in a rhythm, more peaceful than he had ever seen her.

He heard it again. A sob. A moan. He walked out of the
bedroom and stood still in the short hallway in his boxers. He felt foolish, displaced, cold. The air conditioning was blasting, but he hadn’t felt it under the thick covers.

He heard the sound again. It was coming from behind a door next to the bedroom.

The half bedroom
, he thought.

He tried to open it, but it was locked. He knew Lea, knew her well enough to know where she’d hide a key. Whenever Vera was late for her shift and Lea absolutely had to go, she would lock down the blinds of the kiosk and hide the key under the trash can in the street. There was no trash can in the hallway, but there was an urn on the carpet, full of decorative fake bamboo sticks.

T
HE HALF
bedroom looked exactly like a regular bedroom, except it was only half the size, and there was no bed, but there was a butane torch on the floor—aluminum, French; the one he had bought for the kiosk. The aluminum was covered in little red splotches.

And the man, of course. It was impossible not to notice the man. A middle-aged Arab man was in the room, on the floor, with his hands and legs cuffed. He was naked, and the skin on his back was burned. His face was a host of colors and bumps, yellow, red, blue. He looked up and opened his mouth. He was missing two bottom front teeth, so that one tooth stood alone, like a baby’s.

Nothing made sense; nothing seemed to match. Ron opened his mouth but no words came out. He felt her hand on his shoulder.

“I don’t expect you to understand,” Lea said. “I saw him passed out drunk on a bench by the construction site under my building two days ago and I knew I recognized him. Fadi. So I took him. He killed a boy in my unit once. Cut his neck. Just reached in through his car and grabbed him by the collar and with the knife …”

“Didn’t anyone say anything when they saw you carrying him?” Ron asked, his voice slow.

“This is Tel Aviv,” she said.

“Help me,” the man said to Ron in Arabic. His voice was hoarse, air with no vocal cords.

“It took me two hours to carry him up here. He was so drunk he didn’t even resist, but I was worried I was going to totally throw out my back,” Lea said. Her voice sounded sleepy. “He keeps on talking to me. On and on and on. You’d think he’d gather by this point I don’t understand a word of Arabic. I thought he’d stop talking after I knocked his teeth out, but he won’t.”

“What did I do?” the man asked Ron. He looked at Ron as if he thought Ron had authority, as if he were a high-ranking Mossad agent who had finally come to do the right thing.

Ron’s head was pounding, a hangover, although he hadn’t drunk a thing last night. Lea kept talking.

“I can’t stop either; I can’t let him go.”

Ron looked at the man and motioned him with his hand to stay quiet. He looked at his watch. In less than two hours it would be time for his shift in the sandwich shop. He picked up the butane torch.

He landed a blow on the back of the man’s neck. The man crumpled; his face smacked the floor. It was an accurate,
steady blow. Ron couldn’t help but wonder if the blow had broken the torch, if it would ever work again.

He put his hand on the back of Lea’s neck, and she stepped closer and wet his chest, then began to kiss it, small kisses, like a child sipping soup.

He thought.

Perhaps they could spend a few more hours in bed before they went to the kiosk. Put on some music, have a few drinks. Never mind that it was five in the morning; this job, this city, they were not the boss of them. Sure, he’d have to help Lea let the man go soon, and scare him enough to keep a secret. But there was plenty of time for that.

This morning was theirs.

This city is theirs.

And maybe everything is someone’s imagination.

Please, don’t judge.

A
nd when the boy soldiers returned from the war they tortured the girl soldiers who waited for them. This took four days. In the end people died.

This was the after war, but everyone knew about it before it happened. Every reserve soldier was invited to participate, and very few people, perhaps just a few young girls, were surprised.

None of the women had to be there. Lea was married, three months pregnant—though she hadn’t told anyone yet. Avishag was on antidepressants and seeing a shrink. Yael was in Goa, India, at the time, translating the lyrics of a traveling musical commune. They had all kept in slight touch over the years. They did not keep in regular touch with anyone else from the village, not even their parents.

Avishag had a driver’s license. She drove the girls to the training base in her dead Subaru. They got stationed together because Shai the officer used to fuck Yael and he was waiting for her to come back from the world and fuck him more.

They came back, but they were no longer needed. They were women now. The younger girls hummed songs like milk and honey. “There is a love in me and it will rise and win you” and “Not always I come out with words.” They were in front of their watch monitors in war rooms, fully geared at the gates; checking who everyone entering the base was. Calibrating weapons with the L-beat, a red laser that let you correct a weapon without firing.

“Hey, where do we rest?” Yael asked the girls huddled on the sands outside the war room. They were playing a new card game called Jungle Lies. The rules changed each month with every new deck of cards.

“You just got here,” a young checkpoint girl said, throwing two cards down, taking three. “We don’t even need you cunts.”

“You threw out three cards and now you’ll have to lose four cards the next round,” Lea said. “And since I am an officer, I suggest you mind your words.”

The girl took them to their housing in the Negev guns and ammunition storage caravan.

The women thanked her and she laughed like there was no tomorrow. “You shouldn’t have come. We got this.”

The Negev, named after the desert, was a modest machine automatic gun developed in Israel. The room reeked of gasoline; the weapons had recently been cleaned, and they were crammed against the wall. The floor was wooden, and weeds
as high as the girls’ knees sprouted through the cracks. There were four green mattresses in the far left corner.

“Well,” Avishag said.

“LOL,” Lea said.

Yael sang a song about a duck who wanted to ask questions, a song she remembered from when they were little.

Suddenly all the lights on the base went out.

“Why?” Avishag asked.

Then she slipped out of her red dress, her breasts hard in the daylight. Lea poured from a green bag the uniform and equipment that she’d picked up at the supply caravan.

The girls changed and gossiped.

The cardboard sign in the supply caravan read:
IF YOU WILL IT, WE DON
’
T HAVE ANY OF IT
. It was a joke, and Lea laughed.

They were on an abandoned base built in 2012 for the purpose of training firefighters, who arrived from different cities for one month every year, how to prepare for a fire like the one that had happened in the Carmel forest in 2011.

The base was yellow, oversized, American.

S
HAI WAS
talking on his cell phone, but when he saw Yael, he hung up. He walked on the sand toward her, and Lea and Avishag froze. Yael trod lightly.

Shai put both hands on her hip bones.

“I waited for you, and now I am leaving tomorrow with my soldiers,” Shai said. He and Yael had met at a Jerusalem gay pride parade a few months after she got out of the army;
he was signed on for five more years, which suggested forever. They were waiting in line for colored ice, and their sweat mixed when a float with transgendered people dressed as flamingos pushed everyone closer together. They had known each other briefly before; he was her officer toward the end of her service.

Now Lea and Avishag watched Yael and crossed their arms. Even Avishag was interested. They waited to see what Yael would do; it seemed to Yael that other people were always waiting to see what she would do. As if she knew.

“Show me where and how you are taking them,” Yael said. Then she kissed him. She never liked kissing. Sticking her tongue inside another person’s mouth. It seemed like a poor survival tactic. She tasted the bread he had recently swallowed.

“What have you all been up to?” Shai asked after, instead.

Lea was married to the guy who had started the WDJ sandwich chain stores. She was living in Tel Aviv and smoking her days away in cafés, writing porn books about Nazis fucking the life out of Jews in showers and seven-year-old girls losing their virginity via incest and double penetration. She used a pseudonym and was well received globally. Avishag had left her mother in Jerusalem and was living with her uncle in a small development town in the Negev desert, working as the youth organizer of the local Ethiopian scouts’ troop and integrating horse-riding lessons into their curriculum. On the side she drew fan-fiction comic books based on Emily the Strange called
Emily the Sad
. Emily the Sad was always losing her keys or missing her bus, but nobody helped her and then she would sit on a bucket in a poppy field and cry. Avishag scanned the images and e-mailed them only to Yael, but Yael
never opened the attachments after the first one, the one where Emily forgets how to add and cannot figure out if she has enough money to buy a hairbrush. Yael was busy doing the world at the time, an idea she had promised to herself the day she quit her airport job with seven thousand shekels saved up, translating works she found in China, Romania, Zimbabwe, India, and putting them up online for free. And she wrote music. In all languages. Songs she put on the Internet and that people loved, though they never knew were hers.