The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (4 page)

It is our turn.

Gali and I bend below the tent’s folds and enter it. It is dark inside and so warm I feel as though the buttons of my uniform are burning my wrists. I can feel it. I can see it. The tent is full of poison. I know it, but the mask doesn’t let it harm me. I feel like a cheater.

The commander, strangely, is just as identifiable with the mask on. The way she stands, with her arms behind her back, holding the handle of her gun. Her chin is raised high. She starts with Gali. Gali stands even taller, perking up her chin.

“How are you feeling with the mask, soldier?”

“Good.”

“Do you love the army?”

“Yes. It is hard but it is a rewarding experience and I learn a lot.”

“Do you love your country?”

“Yes.”

“Who do you love more, your mother or your father?”

“I can’t really answer that. I think I love them both the same amount, but in different ways.”

“Are you afraid to die?”

“No.”

“Take off your mask. You can run out when you feel you have to.”

I watch Gali fumble to untie the elastic of her mask and then remove it. Immediately, her face crumbles inward like she is sucking on a punctured straw.

“Do you love the army?”

Gali opens her mouth to speak and then closes it quickly. She is drooling already. She opens her mouth again, smaller this time, and grunts out a sound. “Yeah.”

“Do you love your country?”

Gali is flapping her arms near her throat, like a fish.

“Ahhh,” she mumbles, and the mucus from her nose falls to her mouth. She runs out like a stork.

Now it is me.

“Do you love the army?” my commander asks.

“Yes and no. I mean, I definitely believe that it is important in a country like ours to serve in the army, but I hope for peace, and on a personal level of course boot camp presents its own hardships and also—”

“Enough. Are you afraid to die?” she asks. She skips two questions. She knows I am trouble, although I have barely caused any yet. Maybe trouble isn’t something you do, it is something you are. I think Dan told me that once, but what do I know about what he said or meant?

“No, I am not afraid to
die
,” I say. Short and concise. What she wants to hear, and also the truth.

“Take off your mask. You can run out when you feel you have to,” my commander says. She sounds different than when she said it to Gali. More content.

I take off my mask and at first I feel nothing but the pain
in my scalp. Then I feel the fire, the burn. I cannot open my eyes. I stop taking air in through my nose. But I open my mouth, I do.

And I talk. I have been waiting for so long. This is my chance. As long as I am choking, I am allowed. Yael and Lea are not here to drown my words with their chatter. No one in my family is around to ignore me. My talking serves a purpose. My talking, my tears, are a matter of national security. A part of our training. I will be prepared for an attack by unconventional weapons. I could save the whole country, that’s how prepared I’ll be. My entire head is burning but my mouth rolls off words; they taste like bananas, and they go on and on and on.

My commander runs out of the original four questions. She has to make up a new one.

“What is your earliest memory?” she asks. It is a question they used to ask before someone was brilliant enough to come up with the mom and dad question.

I don’t leave on my own. She tells me to.

I talk and I talk and I talk.

I think I stayed inside the tear-gas tent longer than any soldier has ever before.

Outside is when I cannot breathe. I cannot open my eyes and, although I do not want them to, my feet start running on their own, faster and faster. I can taste blood in my mouth coming from my nose, and my throat burns as though it is stuffed with boiling oil. The skin of my face is rubbed with sandpaper. I run and I run, until arms catch me midair and hold me for a very long time. When I can finally see again, through the water in my eyes, I see where I was heading: the
cliff. It was my commander’s arms that grabbed me. She held me, before I fell. My commander, this was her job.

They are sure I cheated, although they cannot for the life of them imagine how I did it. I am told I stayed in a tent full of tear gas for over two and a half minutes, and they say that is just not possible, that there must have been some funny business going on. It felt like I was talking longer. It felt like in that time I got to tell everything, almost.

After I change my uniform, I have to see the commander of the base. I enter the room, salute with my gun, and stare at him.

For a second, I think he is reaching for his gun. That the commander of the base is going to kill me. Sometimes I think things I know are not true. But he is just reaching for his cigarettes. His nostrils flare when he drags in the smoke. He gestures for me to sit across from him, and when I drop onto the office chair I can see that the hairs inside his nose are gray, like lifelines of spiders. He crushes his cigarette in an ashtray made of a green grenade shell and then reaches for another one.

It seems he is only interested in killing himself, and slowly. He doesn’t care about killing me. It makes me sad that he cares about himself more than about me. Say I am just not being realistic, but it still makes me sad when people are like that. Most people are like that. Dan was like that, in the end. Only interested in killing himself.

The commander of the base says I need to get my act together. That don’t I know people are dying? He hopes I will take some time to think of ways I can become a better soldier.

“And just a general point. Your commander says you keep
on speaking when you are not spoken to. Why do you do that?” he asks.

“I don’t know. I guess I have all these thoughts,” I say.

“One day soon you need to wake up and realize that your thoughts are interrupting everyone else.”

My punishment is to sleep that night with my gas mask on. Creative and humiliating all at once. I am sort of impressed.

I wish I were a better soldier. At night, I think about everything except how to become a better soldier, no matter how hard I try. Dan, Mom, Yael. People who are not me and not soldiers. Even my dad; thoughts from when I was little and not a soldier.

All night long, I stare at the ceiling of the tent through the sheer plastic; it frames the thick green cloth, all this green, like an impressionist painting. The knobs at the back of the mask pierce into my scalp.

If I cry, it is not because I hope that one of the girls in the tent will hear me and wake up. We only get five hours of sleep each night. And we are not friends.

I cannot sleep, so I imagine one of two things could happen.

I could wake up after a night with my gas mask on and find out that Iran had bombed Israel and that I was the last living person in the whole country, that the mask had saved me. The other girls in the tent would be dead and blue faced, and I would march out of the gates of the base and into the Negev desert, where dehydration could kill me, or chemicals poisoning the skin of my body could kill me, but those things don’t kill me. What kills me is that I have no one to talk to.

Another thing that could happen is that Iran doesn’t bomb Israel, at least not on that day, and that I reach the place Yael says is the end of the world. I finish boot camp. I finish the army. I go to Panama and Guatemala and Argentina. There are Israelis, of course, swarms of them everywhere. But finally they all leave, and I am the last Israeli tourist left in Ushuaia, Argentina, the closest city to Antarctica, the end of the world. The bookstores are all in Spanish. The lakes are too cold for a swim. At the bars, all the clients are middle-aged Frenchmen, and I am alone.

My earliest memory. I open my eyes and see the small room through plastic. My father is wearing his mask, and my baby sister is on the carpet inside a gas-protective incubator, because she is too small for a mask of her own. Dan keeps on taking his mask off, and Dad slaps him. Dad takes off his own mask to take sips from his Araq bottle. It is 1991 and missiles are falling from Iraq. On the radio they say not to go into the underground shelters. They say to seal one room of the house with duct tape, wear the masks, drink a lot of water, and hope for the best. On the radio they say missiles are falling in region M, our region. We live in some town other than the village then. I don’t know where. My parents are arguing. “Duct tape?” my mother asks. “This is silly.”

I do not know all the details of this—I hear about it later, and it becomes my memory. That night, I do not yet have enough words to make a sentence. All I remember is my mother, her dark face bare, collecting me in her arms and running up the wooden steps onto the roof. Rain falls on the palm trees below, but my mother removes my mask and pulls my chin up, high up in the air. A ball of light rips through the
night sky in pink and ember and blaze. My mother drowns her chin in my hair. We watch, and if I am alone I do not yet know it.

I stare at the ceiling of the tent through the sheer plastic into the night. The knobs at the back of the mask pierce into my scalp, still. I am crying, and not because I hope that one of the girls in the tent will wake up.

But then one does wake up. The blood one, the one who thought too much of her blood was being taken. She is awake, but she does not realize that I am a person, her fellow soldier, and in my field bed and crying inside a gas mask. My suffocated whines sound to her like the words of an animal.

“Is that a cat?” she whispers, a sound as spiky as a blade that pierces through the air and tent and ears. “Girls! There is a cat in the tent.”

“A cat?” Gali asks. She does not bother whispering.

“Help me. I am allergic. I may die.” The blood girl waits for the words of another person.

The mask protects me. They cannot see my face. They cannot see my mouth. They do not know that it was me who made the sound. If I scream, if I scream right now, a deafening and smashing and muted scream, there is a chance, there is always a small chance that no one will ever know it was me. It will be the sound of all girls screaming.

And so.

I scream. I scream as if this is the last time in my life I’ll ever speak my voice, and maybe it is. It is as if no one hears me, hears me right now.

I scream the fear of blood, and ember, and blaze. I scream the terror of the beeping watches and boots treading the sand, and the panic brought upon by a reek that thinks it is bananas.
The sound of the words I scream is the groan of my shame, my shame that is not a boulder, my shame that I never agreed to bury.

If you really want me to, I will tell you the words I scream, I will tell you all the sounds and words and letters. But first you have to, you have to swear that you really want to hear it from me.

I
stretch my arms out, as if I am trying to push the darkness beyond the cement barricade. I braid my hair and then braid it tighter, even though I know no one will be able to see me for hours.

Eventually I allow myself to yawn and look down at the ammunition bunker hidden below the small hill where I stand. The eight-hour shift and the night broaden and spiral before me like my whole life ahead. When the wait is almost too much, I write my name on the ground in stones.

Yael
.

I hate even my name when I am waiting, at least after I look at it and it looks at me for a while, at least when I see it written in stones. So I kick the stones.

I have been doing this since they stationed me in this
training base near Hidna after boot camp. At first I wrote other words, but then I felt bad about kicking them, even though I hated them, and I hated that I grew to hate each name and word.

After I am done kicking stones, I bend over and reach for the helmet, where I placed a plastic jar filled with chocolate spread. I jammed a plastic knife in it for me to lick when the night starts crowding in on me. I put it a few meters outside of the barricade so that I have to step out of it into the yellow weeds and dust of the hill. This makes time pass.

But the helmet and the chocolate are gone. The weeds where I dropped them are imprinted by the shape of the helmet, holding its absence. The night hums with silence and cold. I place my hand on the handle of my M-16 and click the safety once, then twice, then again.

The helmet should have been on my head, but none of the girls ever put theirs on. I had rested it outside the barricade, because the open chocolate spread has to be outside to make life interesting, and the helmet would make it harder for bugs to climb in.

I take out a flashlight from my ammunition vest. The light stretches in a giant triangle, exposing green shrubbery and fruit flies. I think I see movement on the mountain ahead, a movement methodical and curvy, like that of a giant mouse.

I close my eyes and hear giggles, or maybe it’s just the radio coming from the houses of the Palestinian village nearby, or a car driving along Route 433.

I open my eyes. I take my hand off my gun. I turn off the flashlight. Then I see a flash of white, glistening on the ground straight ahead.

Whoever stole my helmet and chocolate crawled in silence all the way up the hill and right outside the guarding barricade. Then, before crawling away with the goods, he paused for a second, low on the ground and silent, took out the plastic knife from the jar, licked it clean, and left it right outside the barricade for me to find. That knife. Like a wink—I got you!

I know I’ll get in trouble for losing the helmet, but I cannot help it. I can feel laughter growing in my stomach, then in my lungs, and then I am laughing so hard my eyes get wet and it is hard to breathe.

There is no doubt about it. This theft was the genius work of a boy. One of the boys from the Hidna village. And boys, well. I love everything about them.

I walk back crazed, confused, and knowing. I think I know something new after every shift. The thin metal fence around the base engulfs my body. The signs glued to the fence, reading
CLOSED MILITARY AREA
, blur. They’ve hung them up so that one glows in red, and the next is black, red, black, red. But with every step I take they become nothing more than letters in all the colors that there are.