The People of Forever Are Not Afraid: A Novel Read online

  “ARE YOU SURE?” We are shouting into our cell phones.

  Yes, Tali Feldman is sure. Her mother doesn’t want to let her have a party when the house is empty because she is worried about her daughter’s friends breaking more of her Romanian tea set, and Noam’s mom doesn’t want her daughter to have a party when the house is empty because she is worried about her daughter breaking her trust, and Nina’s mom doesn’t want her daughter to have a party when the house is empty because she is worried about her daughter’s friends breaking her daughter’s hymen, because she is a little on the religious side.

  We also find out that Lea is having a party, that she has an empty house because her mom and dad are going to get a massage at the hostel in the next town over, but that her mother says I am not invited because last time I broke a chestnut pot and Lea told her it was me. The real reason is because Avishag and I are the only ones who are not super afraid of Lea, because we played with her before she was super popular, when she still played with people instead of just playing people.

  I told Dan on the bench that day all my secrets. One of them was that Avishag and I still played with dolls. This is something we kept a secret even from Lea, ever since we were in fifth grade. It was actually better to play with dolls when we were in seventh grade, since we could think of things we couldn’t when we were younger. The dolls could puke yellow Popsicles and then cover another doll in it, before burning it. They could invent a cure for cancer or pick up smoking or go to law school. It was a lot of fun.

  When Avishag found out I had told her brother about us playing, she walked into class right at eight in the morning and opened my backpack and threw my sandwich on the floor, right there for everyone to see, and she stepped on it, and she was screaming. The tomatoes oozed yellow and red liquid on the floor when she jumped on them.

  “Gross,” she shouted. “He is my brother you sick, sick bitch. You have a boyfriend! Who do you think you are? I don’t even know you.” It was rare then too, that she cursed.

  We acted for a while like we really didn’t know each other, because really we didn’t, I would agree on that, but I didn’t know anymore if there was anyone I did know. Emuna took Avishag’s seat next to me in class. Avishag switched to sitting next to Noam.

  Then Dan went into the army. It was regular that he did, because he was eighteen, and it was regular that Avishag and I forgot about the words she said about him. But I know she thinks she doesn’t even know me. I’ll always know that.

  “Are RPG children like those tiny RPGs that don’t need a launcher?” she asks before we leave the cellular tower.

  “No,” I say. “You are thinking about the Soviet hand grenades that were also called RPGs, but no one used them by the time it was the Peace of the Galilee War. You are thinking about the past. I’ll let you copy all the definitions later.”

  Inside My Room

  We leave the hill with the cellular tower at around four in the afternoon and go home, unsuccessful at finding a place for a party. My mom usually gets in from work at five. I watch the national children’s channel until she comes. Chiquititas and Wonder Shoes and The Surprise Garden. Shows even Avishag would think I am too old for. When I hear my mom’s car outside I run into my room and lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling. She doesn’t knock to ask how I am, and I am glad, because all I want is some quiet.

  I can hear her whispering on the phone. I stare at the ceiling for about an hour, maybe two, trying to imagine what it would be like if I were forced to stare at this ceiling for my entire life. What type of details would I notice? I ask myself, and the voice in my head sounds suddenly like that of Mira the history teacher, Avishag’s mom, and then it is my mom, and she is in my room. Her teeth are stained with nicotine and her back is hunched forward.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” she says. “I need some help.”

  I don’t answer. I need some help. If she wanted to, she could know that I want an empty house to have a party I can invite Dan to tonight. But she only wants to know what she wants to know.

  Last Monday she asked me if I was sure I didn’t want to try adding turkey to my sandwich.

  “I have been screaming at you to pick up the phone for five minutes,” she says, and hands me the phone. “I can’t live in this house and be treated like a maid anymore.”

  “Are you there?” Avishag asks through the phone.

  “Did Nina’s mom finally give permission for a party?” I ask.

  “Listen,” she says. “Dan fell down and hit his head.”

  And They Say Russian Roulette

  I was on the landline the whole night talking to Avishag. All of the other girls stayed at Lea’s party. She made people stay, even after they heard something was up with Dan. I didn’t care about that. And I didn’t care that my mom could hear me or that my sister could hear me or that my dad could hear me. At first the thing that was up was that Dan hit his head so Avishag was worried, and then the thing was that he was badly injured in the head and in the hospital but Avishag’s mom told her not to go, and then the thing was that he was accidentally shot in the head, and then the final thing was that he and a couple classmates went to the cellular tower hill and they called this girl, or that, but then they played Russian roulette because no one answered. I mean, no one but those in the town had cell reception and almost everyone was at Lea’s party, and that was the thing. At six in the morning the thing was that Dan had died.

  But I don’t believe any of these rumors. I think he just went up that hill and blew his fucking brains out all by himself.

  Mothers Disappeared

  At seven in the morning I walk over to Avishag’s. She lives in Jerusalem Street 3 and I live in 12, and that’s why we became friends. I pass by one nearly identical house after another. I pass Lea’s house, the olive grove, then the house of the British Miller family. The houses look exactly alike except Avishag’s house has a red roof and the rest are green. Also, when you walk into her house there are seven bookshelves, because her mom, Mira, is an intellectual, because she is a teacher or because she is originally from Jerusalem the city, not the street.

  Avishag’s eyes are closed, so I hold her nose to make her wake up. That’s how I always used to wake her up when we were little, but when I do it now I realize I can’t wake her up like that anymore. Not now. Not ever. She doesn’t shout at me when she wakes up; she doesn’t say a word.

  I remove the pillow from under her black, damp hair. I put it on the floor and I put my head on it and I close my eyes.

  But after about an hour I wake up. I go downstairs to the kitchen expecting to find the chocolate milk and cereal waiting on the table, but there is nothing on the table at all. Even the chocolate milk and chocolate-spread sandwich Mira has out on the table for her youngest girl every morning are not there.

  I expected them. I swear, of all things, this is the most shocking.

  In my house my mother organizes a tomato and tea for me and tomato and bread and tea for my sister in the morning. When we wake up she is always gone because her work starts at seven. Work used to start at eight, so she used to be able to drive us to school, but in tenth grade the town started a bus service to ease morning traffic and make it so that moms can come to work an hour early. Now there is always just that same note. Do your dishes after lunch. She leaves lunch in the fridge, two plates covered by other plates, rice and lamb from Sunday to Tuesday and rice and okra the rest of the week. They taste fresh even though we have to microwave them.

  I go back to Avishag’s room.

  “Avishag,” I say, shaking her hard, “where’s your mom?”

  Avishag keeps her eyes closed. Still half sleeping, she arches her back and fine-tunes her bra. She passes her long fingers on her golden necklace, and she is so dark in between these white sheets, it is as if she is too present, and then she opens her eyes suddenly.

  “I think she decided to go back home,” she says. “She said she would before we even heard that Dan … before we knew
everything.”

  “Go back home?” I ask. “But she is your mom.”

  “She said she is moving back in with her mom in Jerusalem. She said she is not going to raise kids all by herself if they are just going to go shoot themselves, and she said I never offer to do the dishes, and that I am a grown woman now and she—”

  “She can’t be gone,” I say. “Wake up.”

  But Avishag closes her eyes and turns her back to me, pulling the white blanket above her head as if it were a cave.

  Jewdifying the Galilee

  I go to school alone. I don’t know where else to go and I can’t stare at Avishag sleeping any longer. The classroom has only three boys in it, sitting on their desks and looking at a magazine about Japanese cars. One of the chairs is flipped on its side, and someone has knocked over the trash can so there are orange peels and notebook pages on the floor.

  “Lea’s mom is gone too,” one of the boys says. “She told Lea she decided she was just going to stay in that town that has the massages forever,” he adds and bites one of his fingers. “But I don’t think she can actually do that. And Mira the teacher will come back soon too.”

  “This is a whole town of crazy bitches,” another boy adds. Then they turn their backs to me and huddle over the magazine.

  I step outside and try to catch my breath, so I look down, but above me there are ravens and sycamores and the birds circle below the sun so there are dots on the asphalt underneath my feet, winking at me first here, then there, and I open my mouth and puke, until I am able to raise my head up again, and I keep it up.

  I can’t see a single person out in the streets. When they built this town less than thirty years ago, it was because people had this brilliant idea that they should Jewdify the Galilee, and in particular the Lebanese border. There is one empty brown hill after another in that region, the government said, and if we are a country, we can’t all live in just one part of it. So they gave plots of land for barely any money to couples who promised to work in the factory they built in the village, and that way the couples had money and a home and then they had children.

  The only thing they didn’t think of is that money and houses create children and that children need buses, among other things. The only way to get out now is through hitchhiking.

  I stand by the old pay phone at the outskirts of town and stick out my thumb. I first think about calling someone, but I don’t have any coins to use the pay phone.

  When a red Subaru stops, I lean over and smell the aftershave of the bearded driver. He is listening to “Macarena,” really, he is.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  On the ground, a snail is slowly making its way toward me, leaving a trail of saliva behind it. Soon, there will be the first rain of the year. Soon, Avishag and I will graduate. Join the army. Everything. Even princess Lea will have to join the army. Everyone does.

  And I realize I have no one I know outside the thousand houses of the town and that I am standing here on the lukewarm asphalt all alone.

  I tell the driver I might as well stay where I am.

  I Don’t Go Up the Hill

  And it is because I don’t want to climb anymore just to get reception by the cellular tower, just to talk to someone. I go down the brick path and through the bike racks and the dump yard to the video machine, and I use a twenty-shekel bill to buy Mean Girls, since it is the only movie left in the machine that I have only seen once.

  Now I have change, and I go back to the very end of town. The pay phone’s receiver is so dusty it glistens, and when I pick it up I am almost surprised to hear a dial tone. This might be the very last pay phone in all of Israel. A few years ago the government uprooted them, one by one, and took them all away in a big truck.

  I want to hear my mom’s voice to make sure she didn’t also leave.

  But she is not the one I call.

  Avishag only answers the third time I call. My mom is not the first one I call, not because I chose to call Avishag first but because almost sure is better than risking knowing something you don’t want to know.

  “Your mom is going to come back, you know,” I say.

  When I say it I know that she may not. When I say it I know already that it was Avishag who wrote in the notebook that morning, not Dan.

  “I am alone all the time, Yael,” Avishag replies, and her voice is soupy. “Even right now.”

  Don’t Call Us

  I wait for a long time for Avishag to come get me. I sit on the sand by the pay phone and wait. I can taste sweat and salt and makeup trickling down from my nose to my lips. She said she’ll come.

  And she does. She comes, but she doesn’t come and get me. We don’t go home. We don’t say anything. She walks right up to me and then changes direction. She knows that I will follow her wherever she goes today.

  We walk up and up the hill. I hope we never get there, but I know we will.

  There is no blood on the ground by the cellular tower. Not even a piece of clothing. Not even a boot.

  Avishag takes a while to believe there is nothing there. She wants to see, at least something. Her neck is moving here then there frantically. She stands looking and looking in the shade of the tower, like she did when we were little, trying to find the last word on a word-search puzzle.

  Then it is as if the tower is that word. Like she just notices that it is there, after staring right at it for minutes. She puts both her hands on it and pushes it and kicks it.

  I join her, digging the dirt around the metal rods stuck in the ground with my shoes and shoving my entire weight on the tower.

  We try to collapse the tower until it is dark. We try and we try and we try.

  We don’t talk. We won’t talk. We’ve talked enough.

  We don’t need a cellular tower here.

  RPG Children

  RPG children were usually around nine or ten, so they were very small, and children. And the RPG launcher is this weapon that is very, very heavy, so you can’t have just one child holding it, you have to have two, and the children took the weapons and they held them, two together, one from the front and one from the back. When you shoot an RPG, the front launches a missile so powerful it could even get through an Israeli tank, but the back releases fire, not a lot of fire, not fire that is necessary; it is just a part of how the weapon works, that there is fire at the back. So one RPG child held the launcher on his shoulder, and behind him stood another RPG child, on his toes, holding it from the back. And so when the RPG was launched, the child from the back’s head caught fire, and then his shoulders, and soon his sandals too, if he had them. No one told the RPG children any better.

  No one talked to them, no one told them anything, not the children who held it from the front and not the children who held it from the back, but one thing that is very, very interesting is that many times the child from the front would jump on his burning friend and hug him, and this increased the casualties in a very significant way, that one child didn’t burn alone.

  The

  Sound

  of All

  Girls

  Screaming

  We, the boot-camp girls, stand in a perfect square that lacks one of its four sides. Our commander stands in front of us, facing the noon sun. She squints. She screams.

  “Raise your hand if you are wearing contact lenses.”

  Two girls raise their hands. The commander folds her arm to look at her watch. The two girls do the same.

  “In two minutes and thirty seconds, I want to see you back here from the tents. Without your contact lenses. Understood?” the commander shouts.

  “Yes, commander,” the girls shout, and their watches beep. They run. Dusts of sand trail the quick steps of their boots.

  “Raise your hand if you are asthmatic,” the boot-camp commander shouts.

  None of the girls raise their hands.

  “Are you asthmatic?” the boot camp commander shouts.

  “No, commander,” all the girls shout.
r />   I don’t shout. I didn’t get it that I was supposed to; I already didn’t raise my hand.

  “Are you asthmatic, Avishag?” the commander yells, looking at me.

  “No, commander,” I shout.

  “Then answer next time,” the commander says. “Speak up so I can hear you, just like everyone else.”

  In my IDF boot camp, the only combat-infantry boot camp for females, we can’t tell what will become of us next based on what questions we raise our hands for. I know the least because I was the first of the girls in my class to be drafted, so I didn’t have any friends to get info from, and my brother Dan never told me anything about the army, even when he was alive. I got so annoyed when people asked me if I was still planning to go into the army after he died, I decided to volunteer for combat just to make people stop assuming. I wanted to do something that would make people never assume, ever.

  One can never assume in my boot camp. A week ago, we were asked to raise our hands if we weighed below fifty kilos. Then we were asked to raise our hands if we had ever shared needles or had unprotected sex shortly before we were drafted. It was hard to know what to assume from that. The army wanted our blood. Two liters, but you got strawberry Kool-Aid and white bread while the needle was inside you. The self-proclaimed sluts and druggies served it to the girls who were pumping their fists, trying to make the blood gush out quicker.

  “Faster,” the commander screamed.

  “My hand feels like there is ice on it,” one of the other soldiers said. “It feels frozen.” She was lying on the field bed across from mine. I wanted to reach over and grab her hand, so that she would be less cold, so that I would be less alone. I couldn’t. Because of the needle in my arm, because it would have been a mistake. Mom said that if I want to get a good posting after boot camp, I have to learn how to control my mouth. Mom was once an officer, and now she is a history teacher, and all. She left for Jerusalem a few weeks after Dan died, but in the end she had to come back and help me get ready for the army. Single moms have to come back always.

  The girl on the field bed next to mine freaked out. She extended the arm with the needle away from her body, like it was cursed. Her face turned red. “I think it is taking too much blood. Can someone check? Can someone see if it is taking too much blood?”