The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (21 page)

I
T TOOK
Tariq two minutes to collect himself and straighten up his beret and get on the radio with the commander of the base. It took the commander of the base five minutes to understand Tariq and two minutes to contact Abou Kir, the commander of the northern military region’s headquarters. It took Abou Kir seven minutes to understand and thirteen minutes until the secretary of the Egyptian army chief of staff believed him that his matter was urgent enough to justify an urgent call to the highest-ranking officer in the entire Egyptian army.

Forty-two minutes after Tariq saw the naked Jewish girls with his own eyes through the binoculars, somewhere in the heart of Tel Aviv, a particular red phone rang for the first time in six years, and it was Oleg the Russian who picked it up.

It would take two months for the Israeli press to get a hold of the story, two and a half months for the Egyptian press, seven years for the BBC. But when the press did get a hold
of it, they would title the whole situation “A Diplomatic Incident.”

Right after the commander of the base found Nadav in the junior officers’ office, where Nadav was spending time with corporal Rona Mizrahi, Nadav finally made the fifteen-minute walk in the sands to check on the girls in tower seven, to scream at them, to let them know the extent of the damage that they had caused. Nadav’s pace was quick through the sands, eager, but by the time he climbed up the ladder of the tower, all he could find there were the girls covering the shift after Gali and Avishag’s. Ilana Rotem and little Shonit Miller were standing there in the tower, biting their nails, fully clothed, and armed.

I
T WAS
Tuesday, and it would take two weeks for legal to get down and sentence both Gali and Avishag to seven weeks in military prison, the harshest punishment a female in active combat service had ever received by the lenient military courts to date. When Avishag’s friend Yael heard about it, she thought it was hysterical that of the two of them it was Avishag who had ended up in jail. Everyone was surprised, but the girls were delighted to get a short break from the base. They would spend the seven weeks sleeping in their cell and playing cards with former on-base pot dealers.

But until then, there were still twenty-four hours in each day, and during eight of them the girls were back in the tower, their left hands on the handles of their guns, their eyes rotating through the binoculars, waiting for the variety of junior
officers who came up every hour to check on them under the new orders of the commander of the base.

A
ND THAT
night, Tom was already starting to feel it hurting. And we do know, or at least we think we do, how impossible it is to do nothing but stare at a phone for eleven hours, so we cannot really blame Tom for coming back to Allenby 52.

This time when the girl looked at him, she kept her eyes locked on him and didn’t look down. It was he who turned off the light. They both knew he was going to get what he paid for, and if he was going to look into her eyes, that would only be after. He kept his eyes shut the whole time.

F
OR SIX
hours of the day the girls were still manning the border checkpoint.

It was Tuesday, and night had come, late and warm. In the back of a red truck, four blonde women were staring at Gali and Avishag; waiting, breathing, looking, not crying.

“Come on, dude.” The driver got out of the car and pleaded with Avishag, putting his hand on her shoulder. “This is all approved and authorized. I got places to be,” the driver said.

Avishag looked into his blue eyes. They were so large they took up half his face. Gali looked into the eyes of the women, and she did not remove her gaze, even though she had to blink. The truck was so small, one of the women, one with short freshly cut blonde hair, was sitting on her knees in a
pretzel-like manner so painful it seemed as though the bones would pierce through her skin if she sat like that for even one more minute.

“I am not a dude,” Avishag said to the driver, and she took off her helmet, and her dark hair fell down all the way below her shoulders. “I am not,” she said. As she said it, she thought of the baby she didn’t have and realized that no one could deny that it was true.

Nadav got up from his chair with a slow pace and stood between the girls and the open back of the truck. “Avishag,” he said, “how about you put your helmet back on before we all get in trouble?”

“I won’t let you do this to me,” Avishag said, and she grabbed Nadav by the arm. “You don’t know who I am. I am nothing like this.”

“You,” Nadav said, and he laughed. “All you do is complain. You, you, you …” He said it again and again. He pushed Avishag aside by the shoulder. He laughed. He repeated the word until it lost all meaning, until his speech was a growl, a foreign tongue.

T
HE DOORS
of the truck are open, and outside the man who took Masha’s passport in France is standing and talking with three soldiers with guns. One of the soldiers is chanting a sound, and in Masha’s ears the chant becomes a song like the ones the elementary-school children sing at the end of each year in the small recital hall of her town. And soon the song is without a human voice; it is a mere melody, and then it is
a battle cry, a faint one, and it is enough for Masha, and she leaps out of the truck and she begins running south, as far as her feet can carry her.

When her feet pound on the sand they send a shock that passes through her stomach and echoes in her lungs. Masha’s thin legs coil underneath her stained skirt, and when they uncurl she can hear her bones cracking, laughing. She feels as though her legs are running faster than her heart can pump life into them, fast enough so that the wind is a soft curtain she keeps piercing through.

N
OW, THERE
are a lot of things we know. Masha is running south toward the fence on the Egyptian side, and there are land mines sleeping deep below where she is heading. We know that although Samir is already in jail, Hamody’s uncle got him off easy, and he is already back in the tower, and the figure running toward his gate in the dark is close enough so he can see it without the binoculars. He already has a bullet in the barrel, and twenty-eight more in his magazine, and from a distance like this, we know that he can do just fine even without a magnifying aim.

And we know that no red phone is going to ring in order to ask for details about this figure coming from the Israeli side. We know that Tom is going to stare at the silent red phone, as always. And we know that Gali is going to shout, “Nadav,” but it will do no good, and that Avishag is not going to shout his name, because she knows better, and we know that Nadav is not going to look right below Avishag’s eyebrows and do
what she wants, because we know Nadav has no complaints to anyone but God.

Hamody closes his left eye and looks at the figure through gunpoint. She is four hundred meters from the land mines, now three hundred. She is running fast. Hamody releases his safety and takes a deep breath. His fingers are a bit jittery from the coffee, but he knows how to calm his nerves. There will be no surprises.

And yet as we watch Masha’s hair panting up and down in the wind, illuminating her from above like a gentle lamp, we cannot help but say:

Run, girl, run.

Faster.

I
wait for the bus to come get me.

I take off my uniform shirt but stay in a tank top. I let my hair down, let all the bobby pins plummet to the sand, let my curls drop to my shoulders; and then I hide my eyes with them. Because of the sun—it is so hot, my neck can’t hold my head up.

I wait on the side of the highway. The sun is boom boom boom on my head. There is no bench, only a bus sign and the asphalt. No people in cars buzzing by, no one to be seen but me.

They let me leave the training base for the weekend because I said my mother was very sick. It was easy to let them let me leave. Dana, Amit, Neta, and Hagar were already discharged, and I enjoyed a special status as the last weaponry
trainer who was there during the war, who was there when things were truly crazy and stayed after. Maybe they were scared I’d go crazy if they didn’t let me do what I wanted. I said I had to check my weapon in at the base, because I’d be sleeping at the hospital.

The truth is I need to take the bus to get to the mall to celebrate Noam’s engagement. She’s the first of the girls in our class to get engaged. Avishag called; she’d just been in jail, she begged me to come. She said even Emuna would be there, she convinced her and everyone, so who am I not to come also? And who am I? During our weekly phone call last weekend, I said to her, “Emuna, I want to see you.” She said, “Yael, you want a lot of things.” But she told me she’d come. I usually see her every month on my break, and I said we were coming up to almost one month and a week.