The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (37 page)

“Geez, Yael,” Shai said, after all the highly small talk. He himself had nothing to tell. “Is there anything you don’t do?” he asked.

“Nope,” Lea said, and she tapped Yael on the back. Yael felt her nails on her skin like moans. “Our little Yael is quite the renaissance-cunt-woman.”

“All right,” Yael said.

“Lea, please. We are in a war,” Avishag said.

“I asked for the plan for tomorrow,” Yael said. And she looked at Shai. Her stare was like a fisherman’s string. She would not let him go.

S
HAI EMPTIED
the war room so the two of them could talk. The room was covered with maps on the wall, cereal on the floor, and rainbow hair ties and radios all over the desks.

Yael asked Shai not to go.

This was after he showed her the sketches of the school they were taking down, the location of each sniper, every window.

“You’ll die. We cannot enter Syria by land,” Yael said.

“I have to go,” Shai said. “I am an officer.”

“I’ll do whatever,” Yael said. She scratched his nose and got down, like a cat, on her knees. The floor was covered in dust and cereal; dead cells she could feel through her pant legs.

“Yael. You are paranoid.”

“I’d walk around the base, the world, forever, on all fours, with your dick in my mouth.”

“Marry me?” Shai asked. He looked down at her. He was joking, but they both knew that jokes are what’s most precise when death feels intimate.

“I need to travel. But maybe one day.”

“One day is not enough. Whatever is whatever.” Yael knew better than to say no, so she said die and gave up. In truth she knew there was no real solution in her words. Not for Shai. On her way back to the caravan, grasshoppers were catching their reflections in the gasoline pools that had formed from all the weapon cleanings, and plunging into them.

S
HE ENTERED
the caravan smiling. She figured she had to. The lights were off again.

“You are home!” Avishag said. She was braiding her thin hair after a shower, wearing a summer pajama set decorated with pies.

“Let’s play story,” Lea said. She pulled a soul candle from her bottomless pocket and lit it.

The girls got out their pens and paper and each of them wrote a sentence. It was a game they had not played since they were in seventh grade. Their enhanced version of Exquisite
Corpse. Lea got to see Yael’s sentences but not Avishag’s. She continued the sentence she saw. Yael’s continued Avishag’s; she never saw Lea’s.

The stories they wrote were mainly about dead dogs making love in a place almost like Antarctica, modified song lyrics from
American Idol
, and stepmothers so fat they emptied the kibbutz pools they jumped into headfirst. The three pages went on in a circle, each girl folding the sentence she saw and leaving hers to be seen by the girl on her right, like a fan of the words that were in all of them, drowned in ink.

They did not set up a clock. They whispered across the beds the night before that they would wake up by themselves. “Natural awakening”—it was an army phrase no one used anymore, meant for those rare clockless dawns when you have nothing to wake up for in the morning.

T
HE BOYS
were away, in a rolling bus or in another land, when the girls woke; only the younger girls were left. It was past noon already by the time the women felt that urge to step out and roam the base.

The hotter clique of younger girls were covering each other in ice and sunbathing naked by the flag. There was no one left to train in the base, no shooting range or open gate to watch on a monitor. One of the girls, a gorgeous one with a thin plume of blonde hair covering her neck, was jumping between the girls who were splayed on the floor. “Bim bam bap, I ate a rat,” she sang as she jumped, and the girls had to roll over and increase the space between them, because she
kept on succeeding to jump into the spaces no matter how far apart they got. “We are a rare breed, an odd bleed,” the girl’s chant rattled on as the three women walked away.

“So are we going to raid the guys’ caravans or what?” Lea asked. “You know you always wanted to.”

Lea stopped walking and approached Yael. She kissed Yael on the forehead. There was something softer about her. Her lips were shaky on Yael’s skin. Perhaps it was the baby inside her, but Yael thought it was the mere unruffledness of aging.

They walked through the base and encountered the less popular younger girls in their red and leopard-print bathing suits. They were holding hands in a circle so firmly that their knuckles turned white. It pleased Avishag that the girls were playing a game she knew. A birthday game. The special girl of the day got to stand inside the circle and be the cat. Outside stood the girl who was the designated mouse. The goal was for the circle of girls to never let the cat break free of the circle. The girls were chanting an ancient army girls’ song: “What a mess, what a mess. Whores get screwed for money; we do it for free.”

“It’s nostalgia day,” a tall redhead, the mouse outside the circle, said to Avishag. She looked right through Avishag. “So you can join us, even though you are old. Later we can play teachers and schoolgirls, and you’d get to beat us with the L-beat laser-calibration sticks.”

“That’s thirty-four hundred shekels for each stick. You must be joking. Who here is a weaponry instructor?” Yael asked. Since she had first seen the young girls, she had been looking for her younger self. The shortest girl, the thin one. But she was nowhere to be found. The girls’ bodies all reminded her of Amazons.

“There is no use for them no more,” said a girl with dark circles around her eyes that were large enough to penetrate her cheeks. She was a weaponry instructor, and it showed. “The boys are entering Syria by foot. We are all kaput now. I wonder what will happen!”

“Ignore, ignore,” Lea said, and brushed an imaginary spider off her shoulder. “I never liked children. Let’s go to the boys’ castle and have some grown-up fun.”

The three could hear that the cat girl broke free as they approached the boys’ caravan area. She broke the circle with the groan of a muffled robot. None of the women looked back to see her catch the mouse.

T
HE BOYS’
caravan area was structurally identical to the one Avishag had slept in during her service days near Egypt. The rooms looked as if the boys had been asked to leave in the middle of dinner. The dark mud of a coffee cistern was spilled on a mattress. Yellow underwear stained brown was left on a threshold. Uniforms, razors, pretzels, even money, were scattered on the floors.

Yael heard a voice talking. It was the voice of a woman, but it sounded more like that metallic groan of the cat girl breaking free. The boys must have left a TV on, she thought. At the end of the long two rows of caravans, the “recreation room” stood open. She had always hated it, that because there were more boys in every training base, they were the only ones who got to have recreation at night. The girls could watch TV if they walked in accompanied during the day, but she was always guarding or training during the day. Unless you were
fucking someone important, it was “No TV for you after supper, young lady!”

Lea was stuck inside one of the caravans. Avishag and Yael stood outside and watched her sniff mattresses and crusty socks.

“Is this the type of thing that gets you off nowadays?” Yael asked. “I thought you were a married lady.”

“Oh dear,” Avishag said. She rarely spoke for Lea, but obscenity made her eyes buzz.

“Kinda. It kinda gets me off,” Lea shouted, still sniffing. “But really I am trying to detect Russian sweat.… Wait!” Lea looked under a field bed with a mattress covered in hot red sheets she had just breathed in. “Got it!”

She found three bottles that were part of a four-pack of peach schnapps, bound together by white plastic. Avishag hoped the Russian boy had not taken the fourth bottle with him to Syria. Russian boys tended to handle the automatic weapons.

“He must be a homo. What kind of guy drinks this shit? It’s our favorite, Yael! This is too good to be true.”

T
HE GIRLS
stretched themselves out on the velvety broken sofas in the recreation room. Yael took a long swig and felt the ticking of her body slowing down. Lea was already a quarter of the way through her own bottle. Yael did not understand what the TV was showing. It was a video game, set up so that the player was the eyes. A woman with a machine’s voice was reciting insults: “The results of the test from the
previous level of the game conclude that you are a terrible human being. We weren’t even testing for that,” the voice said. The setting seemed like some kind of deranged physics lab. Cement and orange lava. Robots were shooting and speaking with the voices of children: “Where did you go? I don’t hate you.”

Yael passed Avishag the bottle. “I can’t,” Avishag said. “The medicine.”

“Oh yeah, the super cool medicine,” Lea said, and pinched Avishag on the cheek. “Tell me, little Avi, does Dr. Zhivago-bumble-bee up your dosage before or after he fucks you?”

Right as she said it Lea regretted it. Avishag looked down at one of her fingernails as if it were a war room monitor. Lea, oddly, was nicer drunk than sober, and she wondered if the cruelty bleeding into her words was the baby’s way of telling her he did not very much care for peach schnapps.