The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (26 page)

She didn’t move.

“We just want this one thing, and you can give it to us. I mean—” he said. “Think about that.”

She thought about that and she knew then that she was done for, and that her face showed it. The man stepped away on his own, raising his arms slightly to signify that he was giving her all the time there was in the world.

“The boy has to move away because you have to be eighteen for rubber,” she said. She wasn’t sure if that was a rule but thought it might be.

The boy sat by the side of the road for half an hour and waited with his fingers in his mouth, and they wrinkled. That’s how long it took her to read the instructions. Longer. Tomer was standing above her as she read.

The instructions warned that the rubber bullets could kill. Aside from that, everything about them seemed designed to entertain and complicate a soldier’s life. It occurred to her to wonder how many soldiers had read those instructions recently.

The Romay was a metal barrel that you screwed onto the barrel of an unloaded rifle. Then you stuffed four steel bullets covered in rubber inside it from the top and blasted them out with a single demibullet you loaded in your magazine. If you blasted out fewer than four rubber bullets at a time, the demibullet would expel too forcefully, and the effect would be like that of real live fire. The bullets spread in a ten-degree angle from top to bottom, and you had to make sure you hit only the target’s legs, because if you hit other parts of the body, the effect would be like that of real live fire. If the target was farther than fifty meters, then it was out of the range of the rubber bullets. If it was closer than thirty meters away, then it was too close, because the rubber bullets would have the effect of real live fire.

The instructions were written so that if the rubber bullets killed a man, it was the finger that pressed the trigger that was to blame. It must have been the finger that was to blame because the instructions had cautioned against every other thing. She wondered how this would work in most cases, when the demonstrators were not three cooperative individuals with an A4 sign but an actual angry mob. But she did not wonder too much because her demonstrators were three cooperative individuals, and so what she did next was measure.

She told them to go very far and then walked toward them, counting her steps, like she had learned in boot camp’s measurement lesson. According to her calculations, they were a little less than fifty meters away from the sun umbrella. She signaled for them to take a few steps forward and then walked all the way back to Tomer.

The two men stood quiet, positioned in the exact measured spot where she told them to wait to be shot. They stood
patiently, like tame children waiting for permission to go play in the park.

The kit had only a few demibullets, and so she put two inside Tomer’s magazine. The bullets were the same as regular bullets except they had no copper arrowheads.

“Below the knees,” she told Tomer. “Get on the ground and aim below the knees.”

It was the other man, the one she had never conversed with, who took the hit. He held his leg on the ground like a soccer player who had sustained an injury on the field. But before it was dark he limped away. His limping looked worse because he was supported by the other man on his left, and by the boy on his right, and the boy was shorter; he was small.

The one thing that is not a means of suppressing demonstrations is live fire, and Lea knew that the cooperative demonstrators knew this—they knew all the rules—and so she knew they would not come back. That night Tomer brought the entire newspaper to her out of laziness, and he was so rough that she spent moments on the cement imagining her spine as a string, and then that it had knotted, and then that it had snapped.

But they came back. The two men came back with bits of mattresses tied around their legs with pieces of cloth. They looked like they were half sumo wrestlers. And the boy with wet fingers just came back as a boy.

“We won’t shoot you with live fire,” she said. That was the only option left.

“Please,” the man said. He stepped closer. He stepped
closer without invitation, and so did the boy and the other man. “Shoot and miss, just shoot and miss.”

“You have to have means and intent to kill for us to shoot,” she said. “That’s IDF Guidebook 101.”

“Please,” the man said. “We need to be in the newspaper. Page five, even.”

But she said means. Then she said intent. Then she said means.

“Means?” the boy asked.

“A gun,” Tomer said.

“Or a knife,” she said.

“Or a rock,” Tomer said.

He didn’t know what he was saying, because with that, the boy slowly bent to pick up a rock from the asphalt. It could not have been there, but it was, because it was the rock Tomer had used to practice throwing a shock grenade.

She raised her gun to her shoulder and charged the weapon and aimed at the boy. Tomer raised his gun to his shoulder and charged the weapon and aimed at the boy.

It was before the boy heard the man whisper in Arabic that he dropped the rock to the ground, as if he had been caught shoplifting it.

Then the boy put his fingers in his mouth and the guns were lowered and she thought the day and summer and place were almost over, but Tomer spoke up behind her.

“We could technically arrest him for that,” Tomer said. “We could, technically,” he repeated, and shrugged his shoulders.

“Please?” the boy said. He wasn’t asking her. He was asking the man. An arrest of a child was always at least page five, she knew. He’d be out in days; probably he’d be out in days.

The man shook his head, but then the boy said that the
thing is, they just wanted this one thing, and now they could give it to themselves, and then he told the man to think about that and the man knew that he was done for.

“Whore,” the man said to Lea as Tomer took the boy by the arm. It was what he needed to say to her. After all, she was a female checkpoint officer, and he played the role of the poor Palestinian, but the word felt forced and she was embarrassed for him.

After the men left, she and Tomer walked behind the boy toward the base to make the calls about the arrest. It took the men some time to leave, so night was falling by the time they walked back toward the barricade, but the orange road lamps were not yet on.

She quickened her step, because she wanted to walk in line with the boy. She quickened her step suddenly and then grew afraid that she had startled him. Her hand jumped and grazed his.

It was the boy who could have been afraid, but instead it was she who was afraid, and more, because she could feel it then and too much—the drying wetness of his hand now on her hand, and bits of dust from the rock he had held, and the wind. She could feel it all at once. She thought of how Tomer would later that night slam the entirety of his weight onto her bones, pressing them into the cement barricade. For a passing moment, she wondered if during that time he would call out her real name, rather than “officer.” She wondered if she should ask him, then remembered it was not an important detail to ponder. Those dates, the dates on both ends of her service. Whatever happened inside of them was decoration and air and would not change the place where she would end up.

She decided she would go ask to see the army psychiatrist
the next day and ask to get released early, even though she had so little time left to serve.

A
FEW
years later they opened Route 433 again, but it only lasted a few months. There are still soldiers who spend three years doing little but saying, “Sorry, road is blocked,” to anyone stupid enough to try. When she heard the route was open, and then when she heard it was closed again, she could feel it: her own hand, the boy’s spit, almost as much as she felt it then and there.

Sometimes, at dark parties in Tel Aviv and on street walks and in rooms, she felt the spit on her hand, even when she was not forced to hear about Route 433. She felt it at dark parties and on walks and in rooms where she was never alone, where she was always with a person other than herself, and it was when those persons called her name that she felt it.
What do you say, Lea. Thanks a lot, Lea. I agree with you, Lea
. Every time she heard her name in the dark, she felt the boy’s spit on her hand that night on the walk.

That night, Tomer had trailed only one step behind her and the boy. They had walked, kicking stones, humming, staring at the stars before the lamps took some of them. She thought about all that had yet to happen but that she knew for certain would happen soon. The cement. The paper. The plea for shock.

“Lea,” Tomer said right before they reached the base. “Let’s remember to take bets on which page in the news this arrest will be. What do you say, Lea?”

And there was that silly question again, the one she had
just chased. It came back. She wondered what he might call her that night, though she knew whatever word of the words of this world he chose would not matter. It would not shift the pace of the steps of the days, or even the pace of the steps of that night.

As they walked, the boy put his hand in his mouth again, the hand hers had just grazed.

That night, Lea was twenty-one, Tomer nineteen, the boy thirteen. They passed by the cement barricade in silence and with synchronized steps. Through the eyes of a villager looking out from within the light of a very distant home, they could have been a family.

T
hree days before I left the village, something almost good happened: Lea once again started caring about something that wasn’t exactly true.

“Listen, Yael. Miller killed an olive tree,” Lea said.

“Yes,” I said.

“It is the hardest thing in the world, to die. If you’re an olive tree.”

“Yes.”

“This was intentional. Premeditated.”

Lea turned her head away from the olive grove by her house and really looked at me, for the first time in weeks. She rested her cigarette in the ashtray. Night was falling around her backyard, purple, orange, huge. The shadow of the amputee lawn dwarf was lengthening, and the wind chimes rattled.
Lea squinted, suggesting. She wanted me to say her new wild thought out loud, the one that was still growing, the first one she’d had in a long time.

And of course, I did.

“I believe we have a murderer in our village,” I said.

We were twenty-one years old. We had finished our military service, and I was about to leave the village for a job at the airport. I had been stuck in my parents’ home doing nothing for almost a year, but Lea’s extra time as an officer had only ended a few months ago. I’d lost touch with pretty much everyone except Lea and Avishag. It happened that way, that after all these years I ended up with the same best friends I made when I was in elementary school. I never spoke with Hagar or any of the girls I served with. Avishag was living with her mother at her grandmother’s in Jerusalem. She worked in an office, filing papers. Sometimes I still called Emuna, but she was in college already, in America. Lea planned to go to school, even took some entrance exams, but then realized that she didn’t know what she wanted from the future, and she didn’t know how to study for the future either. I didn’t know how to study for the future either, but I wanted it to come. I was thinking about a job.

It’s been years since Lea and I pretended together. But it’s also been weeks since we talked, since she told me anything that was true, even something true that wasn’t.

The olive tree was very dead. It was just a stem, a short stem. Its branches had turned dark one by one and then fallen to the ground. We weren’t there to see it all happen. We were in the army. When we came back, there was nothing left for us to do.

Miller’s wife began screaming, as she did every night after dinner. We could hear every word, traveling across the olive grove to Lea’s backyard. A drawer was slammed shut. Chinaware broke.

“Keep it down, you hooligans,” I shouted. After Lea grew silent, it was up to me to shout at her neighbors whenever they got loud.

“Meshuganas,” Miller’s scream came back to us.

“Hooligan,” Lea shouted. I pretended I wasn’t excited to hear her voice loud again, although my mouth dropped open without my noticing.

“Monkey girls,” Miller shouted. He called us monkey girls because our grandparents weren’t from Europe. We liked it, though. At least I still did. We once really liked thinking we were animals.