The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (22 page)

I
LIED
about my mom being sick, and I have no problem standing here without my uniform shirt, particularly since I am all alone. I stuff the shirt and the beret and the green commanding lace inside my JanSport backpack without folding anything.

I sit on the sand and lower my head; close my eyes and wait for the wait to be over. I feel a respite from the sun and the boom boom boom of the day, as if an invisible tree, or more likely a cloud, had relaxed itself right above me.

But when I raise my head, I see that it is not a cloud but a person—a military police officer—looming above me. He is wearing the military police blue beret and holding an open
pocketbook. He is not resting. He is busy looking at me, without blinking, so that I know I am in trouble.

I lower my head, close my eyes, and wait for the wait to be over.

I remember moments that are the worst but also moments that happen all the time.

I
N SEVENTH
grade, my mother drove my sister and me to school, and our car was right behind Emuna’s car. Behind us stood Avishag’s mom’s car. I looked back and saw Dan sitting up front. I remember waking up that morning and thinking that my dream had hurt me, but I wanted to go back to it and say something more. My eyes were drained and angry. I put on my Dr. Martens and bell-bottomed jeans. We all wore Dr. Martens and bell-bottoms that year. My shoes were blue; Emuna’s were also.

I could see Emuna’s mother’s blonde hair in its bun and Emuna, chewing the sleeve of her red sweater. I could still taste the hot chocolate I had drunk minutes before. Outside, drops of rain fell on the banana fields and I could see the bananas and the dirt through my partially open window. The radio was scratchy; it played an old song, a song about a girl with hair that looks like black gold.

“It’s raining,” my mother said. “Close the window.” Even though our village is in the middle of nowhere, there were always traffic jams on the road leading to the school at this time of day. This was before they started the pickup vans. I liked it then. I liked looking at the cars ahead, particularly if I knew
the people in them, and thinking of myself as a part of this chain, a note in this rhythm.

“Close the window,” my mother said. She turned her neck and looked at me in the backseat. “It’s raining.”

At school, Emuna and I walked through the broken gate together, right into the fluorescence and chatter and linoleum floors. The girls all swooped down on my chair as we sat down, and I took out my Bible homework from my JanSport bag. We all had JanSport bags that year. Mine was black; Emuna’s was purple and yellow plaid. She was the one girl who agreed to sit next to me that year, when Avishag and I weren’t talking because of the fight we had had about my crush on Dan.

We were studying Jonah for the second year in a row. There was a new teacher, and she didn’t know that we had already studied Jonah the year before.

The homework was even more insulting the second time around. I had a dream that night that Jonah told me, “You thought you were moving somewhere? You stupid girl.” He was saying that to me while he himself was trapped inside a whale, trying to escape God like some dumbass who didn’t know the rules of the Bible and how all the stories end.

We had to complete sentences by drawing lines from a column of questions—
Jonah went to the city of … God told the whale to eat Jonah because … God killed Jonah’s tree because …
—to a column of answers.

“She’ll let everyone copy, but I am first, so don’t push,” Emuna told the girls.

“I thought about you all weekend long,” I told her then. “I thought about you all the time. I missed you.”

Later that day, as we were eating our sandwiches (mustard-tomato-mayo
for me, butter and cucumbers for Emuna), the new Bible teacher did not talk about Jonah but said that during the weekend her boyfriend had asked her to marry him when they were on top of the Azrieli mall in Tel Aviv. Under them, cars were buzzing, chasing each other, and the whole world hammered on and ahead. But not for our teacher, who said the world stopped.

Then Noam said that when she grows up she will be proposed to on top of the Azrieli mall, and we all agreed that was a good idea, except for Lea, who rolled her eyes. Lea always rolled her eyes.

The problem was that we didn’t realize it wouldn’t be our choice where we would be proposed to, or if at all. Noam’s boyfriend proposed to her on the bus. They had just gotten a call from their realtor, and then he asked her if she’d marry him.

But she wanted us all to meet in Azrieli to celebrate. To honor a time when we were children.

W
HEN
I twist my neck and see the military police officer, I laugh. Sometimes you have to laugh. Sitting on the sand, I have to. I have spent two years in the army, walking in and out of the busy shops of the Azrieli mall with my hair down during breaks, riding trains with blue eye shadow on my face. Once I even wore my nose piercing, the one Hagar convinced me to get, while in uniform when I was taking a bus from Tel Aviv Central, where it is always swarming with blue berets, eager to write you up.

And here, in this nowhere, two weeks before I am done with my service, this is where I get written up. Now is when they find me.

“Your ID number, soldier,” the officer says without looking at me. He is looking deep into the lines of his pocketbook, clutching the pen. Where the hell did he come from?

I lower my head again. I close my eyes.

“Your ID number, soldier,” the officer says.

I don’t answer. I raise my head and look at him, calm. He moves a bit, so that the sun again explodes on me. I squint and stare. He can’t make me talk. He can’t put his hands on my mouth, make it move and make air and sound come out of my throat. No force in the world can do that.

“Your ID number, soldier,” the officer says. “I am going to ask one more time, and then you’ll be in trouble.”

I know I won’t be in that much trouble. It will take a few days for the complaint to trickle from the military police down to my base. By then I will have only a few days of service left. The most they could do is make me clean bathrooms, but they won’t even do that. My commanders love me. I am the oldest trainer left in the base. Hagar and the other two are already doing Europe. The base has been quiet since the war a year ago. No one will go after me now. I even think my new officer, Shai, is in love with me. After all, I have been a good soldier. I taught a lot of boys how to shoot.

“I am not a soldier,” I say.

“You are wearing uniform pants and military boots. You are a soldier, and you have the chutzpah to walk around with half a uniform on?” the officer says.

“I am not a soldier,” I say. “I am not.”

Imagine that you know someone is something, you know
it for certain, but that person keeps on saying that they are not that thing—they deny it and deny it to no end. Is there anything you could do? There is nothing you could do. If I am a civilian, he has no authority over me. There is no rule that says civilians even have to carry an ID.

The officer crosses his arms, and I smile. There is nothing more I need to say, but I speak.

“These are my sister’s pants,” I say. “I am just a middle-school girl. And you are a big armed man who is harassing me. I should actually cry.”

“Is your sister a soldier? What is her name? She can get in big trouble for giving you this uniform.”

“She is ten,” I say. “She is a very tall ten-year-old. I don’t know where she got these pants.”

“And the boots?”

“I bought them at Zara.”

“You did not.”

“Zara London, I swear. I am a well-traveled middle-school girl.”

“Come on,” the military police officer says. He is thumping his boots on the ground a little like a woman, even though he is a hairy man. He looks like he might throw a tantrum.

“I am not a soldier,” I say. “I am not a soldier.”

I keep denying who I am for a few more minutes. Then the bus arrives.

Sometimes I think of things and wonder why I never thought of them before. Sometimes I remember things and beg for mercy.

I
CLIMB
into the bus and pretend to be looking for money in my purse. It is only when the door closes that I take out my uniform shirt and put it on without buttoning it and show the driver my military ID, the one that lets me ride public transportation for free whenever I am wearing my uniform.

The driver doesn’t care about the shirt or the buttons or even the road. He is on his cell and signals me with his hand to step inside. As we drive away, I try to wave to the officer, but he is nowhere to be seen.

I sit by the window, two seats behind the driver. The red linoleum of the bus is bursting at the seams with foam and the window is covered in dust. I lower my head and close my eyes and I wait for the bus to get to Azrieli. I wait for the wait to be over.

All the time I fight. Why? It would have made no difference for me to get a citation for inappropriate public attire, or whatever it’s called. No difference at all. Everything—Emuna, me, life, the bus, Jonah—would have hammered on and forward just the same.

On the next stop, a suicide bomber comes and sits right next to me. I have no proof he is one, but I have convinced myself that it is true, so I try to make sure. The last thing I want is to build an elephant made of fear. He looks in his fifties, and his step shows he is tired of the worldliness of the bus and this new land.

As he sits down he is rocking back and forth. His rhythm is that of a man who has given up on this world yet for some reason is still nervous. His seconds are loaded enough so that even in his weariness he finds a reason to worry. He is waiting
for something big to happen, something that will change everything forever.

He puts two large black plastic bags under his seat. I can see a plastic container with brown cookies in it bulging out of the bag next to me, but that could be a diversion. A man like that carrying homemade cookies?

If I didn’t suspect that he was a suicide bomber, I would guess that he is Russian. Something about how close his eyes are to each other, and his strange gray hat, a hat that does not belong to this country. But I am almost certain he is Arab: the accent of his grunt to me as he sits down, the way his eyes are sunken inside his face, his yellowing skin. And he looks like a suicide bomber.

Even though it is summer, he is wearing a nice jacket and slacks, a puffy sweater underneath. His clothes were nice once, but now they’re worn out.

I quickly stand up. I look around but there are no empty seats on the bus and none of the other passengers seem alarmed. They are all leaning their heads on dusty windows, texting, or staring ahead in unison.

As the bus rolls us into a tunnel, the man begins to chant. I know what will happen. I have heard the stories on the news many times before. The woman who knew but didn’t say anything and then lost her ear. The boy who texted his mother he was scared and then was dead. The bus driver who knew all along but thought he could pull over and call the police before anything happened; the bus driver who was afraid that doing anything would only make matters worse.