The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Read online

  Extraordinary praise for

  The People of Forever Are Not Afraid

  A Wall Street Journal Best Fiction Pick of 2012

  “Stunning … [a] beautifully rendered account of the absurdities and pathos inherent to everyday life in Israel.”

  —Los Angeles Review of Books

  “Remarkable … Part of this impressive book’s power is that it manages to re-create and rupture that numbness, war’s tedium and the damage it does to memory, intimacy, thought, and affection…. It’s a tribute to Boianjiu’s artistry and humanity that she portrays those on both sides of the barbed wire as loved and feared. The People of Forever Are Not Afraid is a fierce and beautiful portrait of the damage done by war.”

  —Washington Post

  “Boianjiu is clearly a gifted stylist, and her first novel easily establishes her as a writer to watch.”

  —Christian Science Monitor

  “A dark, riveting window into the mind-state of Israel’s younger generation, The People of Forever Are Not Afraid marks the arrival of a brilliant writer.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “A riveting debut novel.”

  —Marie Claire

  “The corrosive effects of existing on [the] continual knife-edge of boredom and horror are charted in a prose style that is, by turns, sharply comic, lyrically beautiful, and chillingly flat…. The People of Forever is a modern anthem for doomed youth, a brilliant anatomization of the yearning for normality in a situation that renders it impossible…. If you still need convincing, read this book.”

  —Financial Times

  “In this Bildungsroman, life in the army initiates a metamorphosis from girl to woman…. The prose [reads] alternately like a nightmare and a dream, but this feverish indecision is what gives it its power.”

  —The Economist

  “That one debut novel to get excited about.”

  —New York Magazine

  “[A] powerful novel.”

  —O, The Oprah Magazine

  “Boianjiu’s searing debut … draws from the author’s own experiences to render the absurdities of life and love on the precipice of violence.”

  —Vogue

  “Must-read.”

  —Harper’s Bazaar

  “The novel resonates with considerable power…. This isn’t the constantly detonating Israel of American newspaper headlines. Actually, the country portrayed is a much more interesting and harrowing place. Its citizens and soldiers, we see, live in quiet expectation of calamity.”

  —Minneapolis Star Tribune

  “Shani Boianjiu brings a spectrum of coming-of-age themes to her impressive first novel…. In a humorous, restrained, and beguiling deadpan, she here captures the anxieties of contemporary twenty-something women, while delivering a rare insight into the boredom, fear, and thrills of young Israelis being minced through military service.”

  —Sunday Times (UK)

  “Shani Boianjiu’s is an extravagant talent … Somewhere between the sardonic humor of Etgar Keret and the epic storytelling of David Grossman, Boianjiu has created a brave, beautiful, political literature that is entirely her own.”

  —Telegraph (UK)

  “This narrative’s power lies in its revelation of hidden histories, the way it opens up the inner emotional worlds of its characters beyond news headlines…. The girls are often lost for words, but the author successfully finds a voice to express the dehumanizing horror of warfare in this fragmented plot held together with a passionate, poetic eloquence.”

  —Guardian (UK)

  “An elegantly written debut novel … [Boianjiu] has written the story of a people’s resignation to living in a world that’s been strange for so long, they can no longer remember how strange it is.”

  —The Jewish Daily Forward

  “The extraordinarily gifted Shani Boianjiu has published a first novel that is tense and taut as a thriller yet romantic and psychologically astute…. Boianjiu writes with clarity about atrocity and the absurdity of endless war, but it’s her tender acceptance of human frailty that ultimately makes this novel so engrossing.”

  —More magazine

  “Boianjiu builds a deeply engaging narrative … and shows considerable range, creating surreal, absurd dilemmas for her characters…. A promising start to Boianjiu’s career.”

  —Jewish Book Council

  “An impressive debut.”

  —New York Post

  “[A] tour de force…. Powerfully direct … wonderfully vivid … more than just another promising debut from a talented young writer, [The People of Forever Are Not Afraid] warrants our full attention.”

  —Malibu Magazine

  “The People of Forever Are Not Afraid provides a fine flavor of what Israeli military life is like for young women—no mean feat—and many of the episodes are engaging and revealing. Read it for that flavor and those stories.”

  —Washington Independent Review of Books

  “It is incredibly rare and spectacular to find an author who possesses the literary talent to transport us so completely and persuasively to an utterly foreign realm…. Disturbing and provocative.”

  —The Jewish Journal

  “Boianjiu is a writer who should be talked about for literary reasons, not the least of which is that her stories refuse to submit to moral clichés.”

  —The Times of Israel

  “Carefully wrought, consciously structured, creatively imagined.”

  —The New Republic

  “The term ‘a distinct new voice in literature’ had become a cliché long before Shani Boianjiu was born, but there is no better way to describe her unique, piercing tone. Reading it feels like having your heart sawn in two by a very dull knife. The People of Forever Are Not Afraid is one of those rare books that truly make you want to cry but at the same time doesn’t allow you to.”

  —ETGAR KERET, author of The Nimrod Flipout

  “This is big literature—the realism that nests inside the word surrealism.”

  —RIVKA GALCHEN, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

  “Shani Boianjiu is an enormous new talent. This is one of the boldest debuts I can think of—it reads like it was written in bullets, tear gas, road flares, and love.”

  —ALEXANDER CHEE, author of Edinburgh

  “I was hooked on Shani Boianjiu’s remarkable voice from the first sentence of this book. It’s urgent, funny, horrifying, fresh; the kind of thing I’ve been dying to read for ages.”

  —MIRIAM TOEWS, author of Irma Voth and A Complicated Kindness

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012, 2013 by Shani Boianjiu

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2013 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  “Extra Libris” and the accompanying colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2012.

  Portions of this work were previously published in The New Yorker, Vice magazine, and Zoetrope.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Boianjiu, Shani, 1987�
�

  The people of forever are not afraid : a novel / Shani Boianjiu.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Military education—Israel—Fiction. 2. Women soldiers—Israel—Fiction. 3. Coming of age—Fiction. 4. Female friendship—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR9510.9.B66P46 2012

  823′.92—dc23 2012008962

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95596-8

  COVER DESIGN BY ELENA GIAVALDI

  COVER PHOTOGRAPHY: RACHEL PAPO

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part I

  Other People’s Children

  The Sound of All Girls Screaming

  Boys

  Checkpoint

  People That Don’t Exist

  A Machine Automatic Gun That Shoots Grenades

  Part II

  The Diplomatic Incident

  The Opposite of Memory

  Means of Suppressing Demonstrations

  Once We Could Pretend We Were Something Very Else

  And Then the People of Forever Are Not Afraid

  1.5 Bedrooms in Tel Aviv

  Part III

  The After War

  Operation Evening Light

  About the Author

  Extra Libris

  I

  Other

  People’s

  Children

  History Is Almost Over

  There is dust in this caravan of a classroom, and Mira the teacher’s hair is fake orange and scorched at the tips. We are seniors now, seventeen, and we have almost finished all of Israeli history. We finished the history of the world in tenth grade. In our textbook, the pages already speak to us of 1982, just a few years before we were born, just a year before this town was built, when there were only pine trees and garbage hills here by the Lebanese border. The words of Mira the teacher, who is also Avishag’s mother, almost touch the secret ones of all our parents in their drunken evenings.

  History is almost over.

  “There are going to be eight definitions in the Peace of the Galilee War quiz next Friday, and there is nothing we haven’t covered. PLO, SAM, IAF, RPG children,” Mira says. I am pretty sure I know all the terms, except for maybe RPG children. I am not as good with definitions that have real words in them. They scare me a little.

  But I don’t care about this quiz. I will almost swear; I don’t care one bit.

  I still have my sandwich waiting for me in my backpack. It has tomatoes and mayo and mustard and salt and nothing more. The best part is that my mother puts it inside a plastic bag and then she wraps it in blue napkins and it takes about two minutes to unwrap it. That way even if it is a day when I am not hungry I can wait for something. That’s something, and I can keep from screaming.

  It has been eight years since I discovered mustard-mayo-tomato.

  I snap my fingers under my jaw. I roll my eyes. I grind my teeth. I have been doing these things since I was little, sitting in class. I can’t do this for much longer. My teeth hurt.

  Forty minutes till recess, but I can’t keep sitting here, and I can’t and I won’t and I—

  How They Make Airplanes

  “PLO, SAM, IAF, RPG children,” Mira the teacher says. “Who wants to practice reading some definitions out loud before the quiz?”

  SAM is some sort of Syrian submarine. And IAF is the Israeli Air Force. I know what children are, and that RPG children were children who tried to shoot RPGs at our soldiers and ended up burning each other because they were uninformed, and children. But that might be a repetitive definition. Last time the bitch took off five points because she said I used the word “very” seven times in the same definition and that I used it in places where you can’t really use “very.”

  She is looking at me, or at Avishag, who is sitting next to me, or at Lea, who is sitting next to her. She sighs. I think she needs to have very corrective eye surgery. Lea shoots a look right back, as if she is convinced Mira was looking at her. She always thinks everyone must be looking at her.

  “Can you at least pretend to be writing this down, Yael?” Mira asks me and sits down behind her desk.

  I pull my eyes away from Lea. I pick up the pen and write:

  when are we going to stop thinking about things that don’t matter and start thinking about things that do matter? fuck me raw

  I have to go to the bathroom. Outside the classroom caravan there is the bathroom caravan. When I stand on top of the closed toilet and press my nose against the tiny window, I can see the end of the village and breathe the bleach they use to clean this forsaken window till I am dizzy. I can see houses and gardens and mothers of babies on benches, all scattered like Lego parts abandoned by a giant child at the side of the cement road leading to the brown mountains sleeping ahead. Right outside the gates of the school, I see a young man. He is wearing a brown shirt and his skin is light brown and he could almost disappear on this mountain if it weren’t for his green eyes, two leaves in the middle of this nothing.

  It’s Dan. My Dan. Avishag’s brother.

  I am almost sure.

  When I come back to class from the bathroom, I see that someone has written in the old, fat notebook, right below my question. Avishag and I have been writing in notebooks to each other since second grade. For a while we kept the stories we wrote with Lea when we all played Exquisite Corpse in a notebook too, but by seventh grade Lea had stopped playing with us, or with any of her old friends. She started collecting girls, pets, instead, to do as she said. Avishag said the two of us should still write in a notebook, even though two people can’t play Exquisite Corpse. She said the notebooks are something we can keep around longer than notes on loose leaf and that this way, when we’re eighteen, we’ll be able to look back and remember all the people who loved us back then, back when we were young. And that way she’d also have a place for her sketches, and she could make sure I saw each of them. Also, she said when we were fourteen, we could have the word “fuck” in each sentence if we wanted to and not get caught, and we do want to, and we should, and we must. It is a rule.

  fuck me rawer

  Recently, it is like Avishag doesn’t even exist. Everything I say she says a little louder. Then she grows quiet. She plays with the golden necklace on her dark chest. She fine-tunes her bra strap. She watches her hair grow longer and she grows silent. I guess I am growing in the same ways.

  But the thing is, for the first time in the history of the world, someone other than Avishag wrote in the notebook while I was gone.

  I am almost sure. There is another odd line, and no “fuck.”

  i am alone all the time. even right now,

  i am alone

  I close the notebook.

  I want to ask Avishag if her brother Dan came into the classroom when I was gone, but I don’t. Avishag and Dan’s mother, Mira, is special among mothers because she is a teacher. She is a teacher because she had to come and be a teacher in a village instead of in Jerusalem. Avishag’s dad left them, so they didn’t have enough money to stay in Jerusalem. My mother works in the company in the village that makes parts that go into machines that help make machines that can make airplanes. Lea’s mother works in the company in the village that makes parts that go into machines that help make machines that can make airplanes. I am alone all the time.

  I have this idea.

  I am going to have a party even if it kills me, and I still don’t know where the party is going to be, and I can’t know, and I won’t know anything more in the next twenty minutes because I am in class, but so help me God, Dan is going to come to this party. He will if I call to invite him, that’s just manners, and it is this brilliant idea I just thought of, out of nowhere, a party, and if one more person tells me that sometimes it is Ok to be alone, I will scream and it is going to be awkward.

  “Peace,” I say and get up from my desk. I pick up my backpack. When Avishag gets up, her chair scratches the linoleum floor and makes Mira’s lips puc
ker as if she just ate a whole lemon from the tree of the Levy family.

  “There are still twenty minutes left in this class,” she says. She might think we’ll stay, but we leave.

  “Fuck it. Peace,” Avishag says. This is rare. Avishag hates it when swear words are said out loud. She only loves them written, so this is rare. Four boys get up as well. In fourth grade one of them ate a whole lemon from the Levy family’s tree on a dare, but nothing happened after that.

  You Can’t Talk to Anyone

  Avishag and I are walking up on the main dirt road leading up from the school. When I open my mouth, I can taste specks of the footsteps of our classmates before us and our own from the day before. I can barely speak there is so much in my mouth.

  “I’m, like, dying. We have to have a party tonight. We have to make some calls,” I say.

  “Noam and Emuna told me that Yochai told them that his brother heard from Lea’s sister Sarit where to get reception,” Avishag says. Her black eyes squint.

  All the cellular phones in the town don’t work right now. At first there was no reception only at school. Then last Wednesday we didn’t have reception even after we jumped behind the wooden gate and cut math. Avishag got two bars for, like, ten seconds, but it wasn’t enough to call anyone. Then it became one bar and didn’t change back.

  We already walked to the grocery store, but there was no reception there, so we bought a pack of Marlboros and some gummy bears and walked to the ATM, but there was no reception there, so we walked to the small park, but there was no reception there, and someone had puked on the only swing big enough for two, so we didn’t even stay, and then there was no other place in town we could go.