The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (25 page)

“We’ll see what we can do,” she said.

She sat on the asphalt and opened the wooden box. There were printed instructions inside, tucked inside a sheer nylon sleeve. Tomer signaled the man to step back and wait. He sat by her and they both read.

Grenade 30, the shock grenade, was designed to stun and scare by creating a loud noise. The instructions said that if exploded within a two-meter radius of people, it could cause problems in the eardrums and light injuries from the plastic, so Lea told the demonstrators to step back a bit. They walked back while still facing the sun umbrella, and after a while, the boy took his fingers from his mouth and gave her a hesitant thumbs-up. She didn’t quite know how to respond to that, so she gave him a thumbs-up as well—he was far enough. Then she quickly put her hand back on her weapon.

The shock grenade was orange and cone shaped. It had a red stripe encircling it. She held it in her hand and then bent to the ground to lift a rock. Her fingers were stiff around the rock’s dry surface. She dropped it from the air into Tomer’s hand.

“You are the soldier,” she said. “And besides, it’s been longer since I last learned about this stuff. Let’s practice.”

They pretended the rock was a grenade. She gave him the instructions as if she knew them by heart, though she had just read them moments earlier. She reminded him to keep the grenade in the palm of his hand and to secure the lever with his index finger. She explained to him how to thread the middle finger of his left hand inside the safety as if it were a ring and to pull the safety with a spin of his wrist, as he would if someone were to ask him what time it was. She raised her voice at him a bit, because he pulled his arm back for the practice throw without accompanying it with a constant look.

“The instructions say after you take the safety out you have to look at the grenade at all times, because you only have three and a half seconds until it explodes. What if you took your hand back and hit a wall?”

“But I know there is no wall behind me,” he said.

“What if there were suddenly? What if a bird came? It is not nice to have something explode in your hand, even a shock grenade.”

After a couple of dry runs, it was time for the real thing. The boy had his hand in his mouth again, and one of the men was wiping his brow with his forearm. The heat radiated from the asphalt between them.

“Ok?” she shouted at them. Then she and Tomer put their earplugs in their ears.

She thought that anything in this world that one could guard against with pieces of foam in the ears could not be so powerful, but every time a grenade exploded, she felt the noise in her hip bones like a jolt and in her mouth like a hint of metal.

She thought that the three of them would stay longer, but after four grenades the demonstration was dispersed. Everything went according to plan, just as she and anyone who was standing in her position would have anticipated.

During her school years, she had felt like every minute was part of a race. Get that grade. That boy. Buy that shirt. Be the most popular girl. Don’t let any other girl disobey you. Throw the best parties. Go. Go. Go, before someone else gets there before you. But the army was a numbing respite from that eighteen-year-long, breathless race. The army—it began and it ended, and she knew that. All of it was owned by the predetermined dates of its start and finish, dates within which none of what she had done would matter. Whatever it was she did, the army would end when it would. She would arrive at the same spot, that same station near the base where soldiers returned their uniforms at long last. It was difficult to feel
anything, knowing this. Most of her days were procedures and orders, going from one dot to the next in what appeared to be the one and only possible straight line.

She tried, a bit, still, sometimes, to jut out of the line, the way a drawn line jutted during her school years when her thumb on a ruler forced the pencil off course. She tried with sex, with hurt, and shocking newspaper articles, sometimes, but she did not try too hard.

The newspaper page Tomer brought to the barricade that night was about a girl who had been killed by her mother. The girl was an Israeli Arab from a northern village, and she had become pregnant by one of her brothers, who had both raped her and were expected to receive a harsh sentence. The picture showed the girl on the day of her high school graduation, smiling and wearing jeans. She had a generous, good-girl smile, the smile of that schoolgirl you couldn’t even gossip with about the actions of soap opera characters. The mother was expected to receive a light sentence, because the killing had been done in the name of honor, and with passion, and one has to respect another’s culture. The mother had used knives and a cane and a plastic bag, and she swore that she had first urged the girl to take her own life. The article ended with a quote by a butcher from the girl’s village, who explained how a woman shamed is always like rotting meat, and sometimes there is no choice. If you don’t cut it off immediately, the shame will fester its way into the whole family.

The officer let the boys keep the newspaper that the delivery truck brought every morning, with the promise that Tomer would save her the most shocking parts to read at
night. She didn’t want to waste time reading the things that would make her feel less than what was most.

“I thought that little boy was going to cry,” Tomer said. He was wearing his undershirt and uniform pants, even though she had told him she didn’t like it when he stepped out of the residential section not in full uniform.

“No, he wasn’t,” she said. “It was just some noise. I didn’t even think that would disperse them, but maybe they just wanted something symbolic.” She could hear a radio from a house singing in a language not her own.

“It was like, boom!” Tomer said. Then they didn’t talk anymore.

She hadn’t told him she couldn’t feel parts of her body that night, but on the cement they had acted as though she could not feel anything at all and everything was fair and necessary as long as the other soldiers could not hear their noises. The tents were only half a kilometer away from the antisniper barricade, and sometimes she screamed loud enough she thought she should worry.

Her hours, the sands. She passed through them like a ghost she had read about in a teenage book she had once bought at the supermarket. The ghost was in a house but could not open drawers or pick up a coffee cup. She could not move a thing and her existence did not matter, was not felt. Lea lived encircled by a fog made of cotton balls.

The demonstrators came back the next afternoon. She spent the first part of the day wondering if they would. She made mistakes on one of the practice tests she took, even on one math question that was little more than algebra and common sense.

The demonstrators came back, this time with earplugs.

She didn’t need to carry the wooden box to the checkpoint this time because she had told the early-morning shift soldier to take it there just in case.

“What is it we can do for you now?” she asked the man as he carefully approached. He was wearing the same T-shirt as yesterday. The boy was the one holding the sign this time, but he still had his fingers in his mouth.

“The thing is, no one is going to write a story about a few noise crackers,” the man said. “That’s the thing, officer.” He was cautious, like a customer who had bought a shirt and demanded a refund even though he had already worn the shirt more than once. But he stood strong, like he was determined to insist as much as he could.

“The boy could get hurt,” she said. Tomer stood behind her, drumming on his collarbone with his fingernails.

“He is thirteen,” the man said. “That’s a man for you. That’s bar mitzvah.”

He looked younger. She remembered the instructions said that no matter what, means of suppressing demonstrations should not be used against children. She also remembered a long discussion in her officers’ training school about children being anyone whom you could not possibly imagine already having had his bar mitzvah, wearing a suit and reading at the temple and all that. These demonstrators really knew their stuff—informed consumers or whatnot.

The Federal, the gun used for shooting gas grenades, looked more like a toy gun than any actual toy gun she had ever seen. It was essentially a brown tube with two silver handles, one in front and one in back. It looked like it had been spray-painted. The instructions for it were long, and besides,
she didn’t want the man to think he had the power to make her move faster, and so she shooed him away without a word of promise and sat on the plastic chair under the sun umbrella to read.

For some reason, the instructions were half history. By the end of a few minutes she knew that the Federal gun was invented by the Federal Police in New York, America, by a company called Federal, hence the name! In the army, sometimes, she had to wonder who wrote certain instructions for certain procedures and who supervised that writing. It seemed like each document was allowed to have its own life. Sometimes there were still surprises and a bit of life in the army. Small times.

The grenade used as the Federal’s ammunition had a diameter of thirty-seven millimeters, and its gas was of the CS type. It was silver with a blue stripe and looked very pretty and technological. The Federal had aims, and this worried her because both she and Tomer were terrible marksmen, which is what had landed them on Route 433 in the first place. But the instructions said that the aims were not to be used, because the shooter doesn’t aim directly at an individual target, since gas disperses, duh. She felt stupid when she read that, but probably not as stupid as the person who had designed the weapon. The instructions actually warned against shooting through aims, because gas could seep out into the eyes of the shooter. When she put her hand to her nose, she could smell a bit of the gas already, cutting into her lungs like grain.

The instructions said that the effective range was up to eighty meters, but it didn’t say which range was close to being dangerous, and so she positioned the demonstrators at
a distance that appeared to her to be about fifty meters, then thought better of it and told them to take a few steps farther back.

She licked her finger to check the direction of the wind but could not feel a thing. She loaded the gun with the grenade, pointing the barrel to the ground and then snapping it shut. She hoped for the best wind and aimed at a forty-five-degree angle from the ground.

All this time, she had not said a word to Tomer and he had not said a word to her. But then she signaled him to take her place holding the gun and said, “Literally, all you have to do now is press the trigger, but press it hard because the gun has no safety, so the designers compensated by giving it a stubborn trigger.”

Then she waved to the demonstrators, and even though Tomer had not counted, had not warned, there was the slightest sound of a thing coming undone, and then the demonstrators’ faces were red and wet and screaming and then they ran and were gone.

There were not enough stars that night, and on the barricade Lea looked like she was crying. The lights of the homes around her went out one after the other. The picture in the newspaper page Tomer brought was that of a bird that in two years was said to be going extinct. The bird was an eagle with a gray tail, but the newspaper said it was called the white-tailed eagle, which had made her think the picture and story could have been lies. But the bird looked angry through its eyes in a way she had not known birds could be, even ones who knew they were going extinct.

“This is the worst you could find today?” she asked.

“There was no mention of the demonstrators,” Tomer said. They had reported the incidents to the Route 433 headquarters over the phone by the end of the first day, but no one seemed to care too much about them.

Tomer was on his back too that night, looking at the paper and then over at her. He crushed her shoulder with his. “You are crying, though,” he said. He had not seen her cry before. “Or is it the tear gas? You’re the one who told
me
to wash my hands twice before touching my face,” he said.

“I am not that stupid,” she said. “I am going to go to TAU for accounting, you know.” She had never talked to him about when she would leave before, and she did not know if he knew it would be soon.

“Then what?”

“My shoulder. You are hurting it.”

She had known they would come the next morning, and so she could study without being distracted. She only made four mistakes on the practice exam, all of them in the English section. All of them she had known were wrong before she checked, but she could not have guessed what the answers would have been on her own.

She had known they would come back, and so she went with Tomer to the checkpoint at the start of his shift. What she did not know was that the demonstrators would come with lab goggles and surgical masks. They looked like mad scientists, and she wondered where they had gotten those costumes, in their pathetic town in the West Bank and all. The boy wore cheap plastic sunglasses over his goggles, and she smiled when she saw them, and so he smiled back.

But when the man with the Guns N’ Roses T-shirt shouted,
“It’s rubber day!” her face hardened. She used only her chin to signal him. She let him come closer than she had the days before.

“No,” she said. “A rubber bullet could kill you guys. This has gone on long enough.”

“But, but—” the man said. He thought better of the tone of his voice. He realized that he was not a customer, that he had every reason to be afraid of upsetting her. “That’s the point, though. They are going to report rubber for sure. They always report rubber.”

Lea shook her head.

“We won’t ask for anything ever again, we swear.”