The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (11 page)

Yaniv thumped to the ground and ceased moving. There was chatter all around me, but I did not catch the words. The voices of the Palestinian construction workers. The voices of the Israeli contractors. The voices of soldiers. They sounded different from one another but also like they were screaming the same words, words that I did not grab. I looked to the ground and saw my blue beret falling, plummeting, hitting the sand, and I did not know why but my hand reached for it
and then froze. I was stuck in that pose, like a child trying to break her fall from a swing forever.

A shot was fired. I did not see who fired it, or where it hit; I only heard it, growing bigger as it passed through the sand and the line and the cement barricade where I was still trying to almost break a fall I was not having.

T
HE MAN
who stabbed Yaniv was Fadi. The shot that was fired at Fadi missed him entirely, and even though he was paler than usual when the officers yanked him out of the car, I knew it was him because I knew him so well. He had seen me through three nights of better sleep.

He did not look at me, not with his chin or his eyes, when they took him. He didn’t know I existed, that I existed in the world and saw things.

His eyes were those of a man nuisance had died in.

I
FORGOT
about Fadi. I did. And Yaniv. I forgot for a while. I only remembered two days ago. I remembered the ride to the checkpoint, the morning after Yaniv’s neck. My head. I remembered my head. The metal skin of the bulletproof van would not give up on it the whole ride to the checkpoint. Boom and boom and boom. I kept on slamming my head on metal with each spin of the wheels, not learning. I kept on not learning and letting my head approach rest on my right shoulder, only to be banged again.

I only remembered, because of the van, when I came to
Tel Aviv two days ago and started looking for an apartment. I had some money saved to start out from the nine months I served as an officer and got paid. I filled out the forms to go to officers’ school the day after Yaniv died. I didn’t want to be just a retarded checkpoint girl anymore. I couldn’t.

At any rate, I finished being an officer a few months ago, and now I am starting life. I obviously looked at the younger Tel Aviv neighborhoods first, the ones that are serviced by those big cabs, you know? The cabs that are actually vans, because the cab driver can take up to ten people and drop them off wherever they want along his route. Anyway, when I was looking for a place I took one of those Tel Aviv service cabs, the number 5, and the ride—I guess it was smooth. Honestly, I didn’t even bang an elbow.

But just an hour ago I leased an apartment near Rabin Square. I won’t be offensive and talk money, but let’s just say that with how much I will need to work to pay the rent, the metal vans can’t be too far from memory. And Fadi. I am paying for this neighborhood because the cabs here are the same as they are everywhere in the world. They are yellow, and cars. There aren’t any of those bizarre van cabs.

And also, I know I remember Fadi because even though my sleep has been a blessing since the day of Yaniv’s neck, lately, somehow, I have had a night, maybe two, when I had to watch TV until I fell asleep. I needed the colors radiating from the box into my eyes for them to shut.

T
HAT NIGHT
. That night, I could hear the chatter of the Ethiopian and Moroccan girls on the pergola outside the caravans.

I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I took my gun and put it under the handle of the door so that no one could enter it, though I knew the girls were all smoking, that they would smoke for hours, and that I would be left alone.

I took off my boots and then peeled off my socks. They were white, and I remember being most horrified when I realized that I had been wearing white socks that whole day, because we were only allowed to wear dark socks when we were at the checkpoints. And even though I was a military police soldier in the transitions unit, I was still a military police soldier, representing the blue beret and all.

Those white socks. I remember that this was the thing that had horrified me that night.

My belt, green pants, green shirt, green undershirt, bra, the underwear I had flipped inside out because I had run out of clean ones. I took it all off and I looked at myself naked in that stained mirror. The breasts that were too big, the new lines that had formed at the edges of my mouth.

I saw that I was a soldier then, and I looked and looked and looked, and I was not afraid. It was a few weeks before I turned nineteen. It was the night before I filled out the forms volunteering to go to officers’ school. I saw that I was a soldier then and knew that I would be an officer, and I was not afraid.

I never showered that night. I thought of Nur; I thought that she must have showered and that she was already working on getting Fadi out of the Israeli jail, and that she was a strong woman, and then I remembered that I had created her, had invented her, and that I was a soldier and she was not real.

That night. That night I could hear the chatter of the Ethiopian and Moroccan girls on the pergola outside the caravans.

When I was in bed, unwashed, I heard them say that Yaniv’s neck was cut almost in two by the knife the Palestinian in the car used to kill him, and I would have thought of Yaniv’s face, his pointed, furry eyebrows. And I would have wondered what the girls meant by “
almost
in two,” but I fell asleep before I could. I fell asleep without thinking of any single thing. It was easy. Anything is possible when you insist.

The Sudanese’s body is still skewered on the barbed-wire fence. Nadav says the Egyptian soldiers and we, the Israeli soldiers, are like two children on a dock, waiting for the other kid to plunge in and claim the body. One arm of the Sudanese man reaches in a stroke over his head, and his tongue dangles. He looks like a frozen swimmer. Nadav says I am a special girl. He says, “Avishag, the only person you think about is yourself.” It was not my shift when the Egyptians shot the man. When it is my shift, I stare at the fence through the green monitor for twelve hours and think about people that don’t exist. We know each other well, the made-up people and I. But Nadav says that is the opposite of thinking about another person. We drive in the Humvee along the fence because
Nadav is an officer and he has to check on the older girls, the ones at the guarding towers and checkpoints. The base’s gatekeeper asks for my soldier pass and I show her I have signed off a vacation day. It was a little hard to do, because the base never has enough new girls, girls who have to be watch girls for four months after they finish boot camp and do nothing but stare at monitors. Before we reach the bus station, I ask if it is bad I only think about myself. Nadav has forgotten he told me that once. He says everyone is sold on the idea that if this person or that person is different than they are, then
they
are not who they are, and that I am the only person in the world who is not sold on that idea because I only think about myself. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if that means bad or good. I want a burger. Two.

After it is all over, after I am safe, I open my eyes and everyone can see that I am alive. I am the only girl in a hospital room full of injured men who are also from my country. They are silent but I scream, because I can, because I want water. The doctor woman from the little country comes over and asks a question in the language of the little country and the translator translates. The doctor wants to know how I escaped Sudan. She wants to know what I was thinking. She gives me some water in a cup. She means, the translator explains, what was I thinking of when I threw my body on the fence that was made from little knives. I didn’t think, I want to tell the doctor. It was not my decision. I felt her. She was there. Mom. Mom. Mom. A million times and again and another time and more. She was a giant and a young girl and a grape and the
wind all at once. She was there and then she was not. The guide who took us out of Egypt said, in Israel, in the little country, they don’t believe in magic. They believe in people. In the little country, believe what they believe, do as they do.

At the bus station, Nadav gets himself two burgers but says I should only get one. He says I never finish two burgers. I say that’s not true, but it is. I say this time I’ll finish. I joke. I ask, “What if I am eating for two?” He lifts his eyebrows and surprises me. He says, “Avishag, let’s keep it. Let’s raise it on a pepper farm in the Negev desert and be happy.” He is finishing his service in a year anyway. It is going to be awesome. It is awesome. It is the solution, to anything and everything. Nadav gets to say a lot of things to me, and I let him, because he is my first boyfriend, or because he is an officer. But then I laugh and I say I was joking, as if I would ever tell him such a thing in line at McDonald’s. I say I am eating only for myself but I still want two burgers. And fries. I am eating only for myself, but it is true that I am pregnant. I don’t tell him because I can’t really feel it. My body still feels like it’s just me. Even my body betrays me nowadays, and I betray it. The point is that it is just me in the world. I get hungry, sick, hungrier, sicker. And I don’t talk too much anyway. I haven’t tried doing something that stupid since boot camp. I still have half a burger left, and Nadav says I should man up. He is not leaving until I finish. I tear what’s left of the burger in two and I stuff one piece down my throat. The pickle gets jammed sliding down and the ketchupy acid flows up, then the meat. After I puke on the floor of the bus station’s McDonald’s, Nadav says that’s
the perfect example of how I think only about myself. I want to tell him he is right, but I have to catch the 72 bus.

You’d want to think I don’t exist, but I do. This happened. This is what happened. He drove a three-wheeled bike with a carry-on like a cub, and that’s how he made money in the camps. He was my mother’s husband but not my father, and in months he had made enough money for the three of us to pay for the guide to take us first to Egypt, and from there to the little country. We were not allowed to say “Israel,” but people called it the little country. Everyone everywhere in Sudan whispered about it, about how to get to the little country, how that was the solution. When they came and started killing people at the camp, my mother’s husband hid me under a blanket in his bike’s carry-on and no one touched me and no one hurt me and I was safe, but only in a way and only for a while. The three of us were safe, and we all survived the first day. That was a problem. The guide said he was leaving the next morning and he wanted more money per head, so much money, if he was going to take anyone at all. That’s when I knew I would have to kill him. My mother’s husband. And from that it was very easy to know that I would have to kill her too. Everyone at the camp was saving to go to the little country, and now everyone needed more money and in every tent sons were killing their parents for money and fathers were killing their children and wives—depending on who was stronger. But they, my mother and her husband, went to sleep. They loved each other. They loved me. They went to sleep but really they were waiting to die, because once the people hit a camp, they don’t leave,
they come back the next morning and the next, and morning always comes, that is just a fact, until soon the last person in the camp is no more and so it ends in days. The story ends in days. I wanted the money we already had, but they said no, that they are going to hope and hope, and the money was barely enough for one person and if we go, we all go. There is hope; they thought there is always hope. They believed in magic. They didn’t fear me because I was not a son. I was a daughter, and short, very short. That’s why I had to use fire and not a rock; that’s why I had to be fast, and I was. I got the money; it worked. Soon I started believing in magic, too.