The People of Forever Are Not Afraid (5 page)

I
N THE
middle of night, back in the caravan, after eight hours of laughter alone and staring, I call my boyfriend, Moshe, back in the village. He finished his service a year ago. I call him from under cover of a military blanket.

“We are breaking up,” I say.

“Is it me?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say. “It is you.”

“But I just got a job in the next town over. It’s not great, but by the time you’re out of the army we’ll have something to start with,” he says. “How can it be me?”

“For sure you,” I say.

T
HE VILLAGES
around Hebron and even the youth in Hebron itself have grown restless and begun rioting. The entire unit of infantry boys we trained the week before has been called up. They could only spare four or five boys to help us guard the training base. The burden of guarding the base fell on our shoulders, the weaponry instructors, the girls. We had to do eight-eight. Eight hours of standing alone in the dark with nothing but your thoughts and full gear, your weapon loaded. Waiting for the minutes to crawl by like crippled snakes, waiting, waiting, waiting. Then eight hours of haunted sleep in the caravan, where I’d wonder what I had been waiting for all those hours. And again.

“One of the Hidna boys stole my helmet last night,” I tell Dana in the morning. She sleeps in the bed across from mine.

“I don’t get why we even have to guard,” Dana says. She gets ready for her shift, sticking her thumb inside the five magazines in her vest to make sure there are exactly twenty-nine bullets in each. “These boys are like rats,” she says. “I swear they’d steal the entire base if they could.”

“I know,” I say. “And it’s like, they’re kids. What are we going to do, arrest them?”

Dana rattles a water canteen by her ear, making sure it is filled all the way and makes no noise. “You’re in trouble now,” she says after listening to the silence. “That’s for sure.”

The door of the caravan of the more popular girls is open, and they have a clear view into our open door. Their leader, Hagar, the blonde, is looking right in at us. Her European face reminds me of Lea’s. She is as mean as her, too.

“Aww,” she says. “What did the new girl do?” she asks, smiling.

The other two girls burst out laughing, and I wish the joke wasn’t on me, so that I could laugh too. The girls in my caravan never laugh.

M
Y TROUBLE
has a name. It’s Boris. And he’s great, he’s great. Well, not great at everything. His unit chose to leave him behind at the training base because he can’t shoot, really can’t shoot. When I told my officer my helmet fell off the hill and I couldn’t find it, he asked why it wasn’t on my head. Then I said it fell off my head. Then he asked why it wasn’t properly fastened. I wanted to scream at him that it wasn’t properly fastened because there is nothing to be afraid of, because our only assailants are kids who would steal lollipop wrappers just so they can lick them, but instead I looked at the ground and waited to hear my punishment.

My punishment is to make Boris a better shooter. Boris’s buzz cut is so blond it’s almost white. He is exactly my height, a very short dude, but he is also bulky and firm and real. His blue eyes hide behind long lashes. He can’t bear to look at me. “This is so humiliating, commander,” he says as we walk on the sands leading to the shooting range. He is carrying a giant army radio on his back, a metal container of bullets in his right hand, and ten liters of water in his left. I have my
weapon on my back, and a coat. Also, the carton of targets and wooden sticks. Chips of wood scratch my palms, like thrill. The cold pinches my nose, and walking by Boris’s side I feel light. Lighter. Elated.

“You can call me Yael,” I say. “I mean, we are the same age.”

“I am eighteen,” he says.

I am nineteen and two months. I was drafted late. It occurs to me that in a few years it will never again be accepted for me to even dream about the body of an eighteen-year-old boy. Then of any boy, really. I will only be allowed to dream of a man. There are nineteen-year-olds who are still boys. Twenty-year-olds too. I think it was after he turned twenty-one that I started noticing that Moshe was not a boy anymore.

We reach the shooting range that I booked with operations for us. The range is a small roof and a surface of cement. Boris lays down the equipment. He turns his shoulders in their sockets, and for a second it is as if the relief from the weight he was carrying has made him into a child, despite his embarrassment. I talk with operations on the radio, letting them know shots will be fired on range 11. When I turn back to face Boris, I see him lying down on the cement, holding his gun. His body is all wrong. I mean, his body is all right, but it is all wrong for shooting a weapon. The buttstock is not even in the dent between his shoulder and chest. It is resting, flying, somewhere above.

“Boris,” I say. “Do I look like an ocean to you?”

He puts his gun down and sits on the cement. “No,” he says.

“Then why are you getting carried away?” I ask. “There
is no need to start on the cement. I am sure you are not that bad.”

Boris laughs. He laughs for a long time, his teeth showing and his nose twitching. “I really am that bad, though,” he says.

We step ahead nonetheless, away from the cement and into the rocky sand of the shooting range. “I don’t like practicing on cement,” I say. “It is not realistic. Wars are not fought on cement.”

I tell Boris to first show me what he can do on his own. I plant a stick in the ground and hang a fresh carton target, shaped like a green soldier, fifty meters ahead. Then I show him something small. I stand facing him, then take his hand in mine and place it at the dent between his shoulder and chest.

“Press around here,” I say, “and pretend like you are swimming in strokes.”

He doesn’t argue. He does as he is told. My fingers are a little wet from the sweat of his body. I keep my hand on his, touching. “Now stop when you feel a dent or a hole,” I say.

We move together until he says, “I can feel it! I can!”

“That’s where you should put the buttstock when you shoot. It’s is the best place for your body to absorb the recoil.”

We spend a minute kicking away the copper bullet shells that litter the ground.

He lies down on the ground. Excited. “I’m gonna give it all I got, commander,” he says in a voice nothing like the one he used before. That’s how quickly, how physically, boys can flip.

“How about you give five bullets to the heart for now?” I say, and stick in my earplugs.

Boom, boom, boom. Boom. Boom.

I tell him to stay behind as I go and check his target. I run fast, aware that he is watching me, waiting, waiting but also watching me run.

There are no hits on the heart. I check the entire central mass area, but there are no hits there either. Nothing on the head. Nothing on the legs.

I run back, trying to hide the look of surprise on my face.

“Your weapon is just really not calibrated,” I say.

Boris is sitting on the sand, holding his cheek in his big hand. “Oh, it’s calibrated,” he says, confident, gloriously confident, yet cheerless.

I bend over and lift his weapon off his back. I don’t lie down. I put the weapon in the dent of my shoulder, standing. I tell Boris to step back and put his earplugs back in.

Boom​boom​boom​boom​boom.

I run ahead to check the target. Even though it is hard to be accurate with an M-16 while standing, I hit all the bullets right at the heart. They are less than ten centimeters apart. I contemplate calling Boris to see what I’ve done, to impress him, but then think better of it. This is not what he needs.

I run back to him and he looks at me, knowing, yet still somewhat hopeful.

“You are much smarter than me, actually,” I say. “I changed my mind. Any good trainer knows that in order to achieve perfection, you have to start from the beginning.”

“Cement?” he says.

“Cement and no bullets. We are gonna dry hump for a bit.”

It’s what practicing shooting a gun without bullets is commonly called, but I also said it to embarrass him, yet he is
not embarrassed. He is not looking at me. The boy’s eyes are on the goal, and he sees nothing but. As I unload his weapon, I notice that he is practicing his swim stroke, his eyes ahead, finding that dent again, making a mental note of it in his mind. He doesn’t even see me or the sand or the hills in this moment, and his focused eyes are fantastic, unreal, not for me.

A
T NIGHT
, back in the caravan before another eight-hour shift, I call Moshe again. I call him upon waking, from under cover of a military blanket.

“We are back together now,” I say.

“Is it me?” he asks.

“No,” I say. “It’s us again. Aren’t you listening?”

“Good,” he says. “Because I’ve already started looking for an apartment for us. The market these days. It takes years.”

Once, he was fourteen and I was twelve. Once, I was afraid. He was not. Now we both are.

I
SPEND
two hours out of my next eight-hour shift thinking about Moshe, about how he is a man now, and how that is what nature is, or time, nature and time, and soon my thoughts loop.