by Eshkol Nevo
She looked at her watch. Then at the side mirror. And then she took a deep breath and said: We’ll wait another two or three minutes. I don’t want him to come back and not find us here.
Of course, I said. I looked at her face in the rearview mirror. Nothing I saw indicated that she was worried or upset. She was only very pale. But I didn’t know her well enough to decide whether that was unusual.
You’re probably dying to get to the hotel already, she said, looking at me matter-of-factly. I’m really sorry we’re holding you up…Effi is going through a sensitive period now because of the business with Benjy—
It’s okay, I said. I’m in no hurry. But I have to say that something here…is not clear to me. If Effi…I mean, if that’s the experience he had in the army, then why—
The door opened suddenly and Effi stepped into the car, soaked to the bone. Snowflakes stuck to his greasy hair. His teeth chattered.
She shifted gears and began to drive.
Slowly, at first, as if she wanted to be sure he wouldn’t leap out again, and then at normal speed.
* * *
—
We were silent all the way to the hotel.
He looked too embarrassed to speak.
She looked like someone whose major concern was that everything would at least look normal again.
And I was afraid that anything I might say would stir up trouble again. At some point, I remember, she turned on the radio to make the silence less awkward, and of all the songs in the world, the Dolly Parton–Kenny Rogers duet filled the air.
Islands in the stream, that is what we are…Sail away with me to another world—
The third time Parton and Rogers sang the chorus, he reached out, pressed a button, and turned them off.
I really understood how he felt.
* * *
—
We reached the hotel parking bay. She turned half her body to me and said: Effi and I will pick you up at a quarter to seven. Is that okay with you? Wait for us at the entrance?
Her tone was forced. American. Dolly Parton–ish.
Thank you, that would be just great, I said with the same contagious inflection.
* * *
—
Effi didn’t come with her to pick me up at a quarter to seven. Instead, their Benjy was sitting in the backseat.
I looked at him through the mirror. Children are usually a fascinating combination of their parents, but that boy looked like he wasn’t part of them or of this place. I realized why he felt at home in Israel.
Effi sends his apologies for not joining us, she said. I think he’s caught a cold. What a winter we’re having this year, right Benjy?
Oh my God, totally. What’s it like in Israel now? Benjy asked.
Sunny, I admitted.
It’s never really cold in Israel, right?
* * *
—
Someone has to tell him, I said to myself. Someone has to tell him something, at least—so, unlike me, he’ll go into the army a bit more prepared.
I’d actually tried to prepare then. A week in Gadna, the pre-army field course. Lectures in school by army officers. Long talks with my father, who fought in the Six-Day War, and with Uncle Albert, a veteran of the Yom Kippur War. But I think that all the people in charge of smoothing my entry into army life had conspired together. None of them told me how difficult, how impossible it was to turn someone into a soldier overnight. None of them put a hand on my shoulder and warned me simply: For the next three years, your soul, not only your body, will be in danger.
* * *
—
On the way to the Jewish Community Center, we talked about the weather, Benjy and I. A little about the nightclubs in Tel Aviv. But every time I was about to break my silence, I pictured him screaming in response: Stop the car. And leaping out alone into the storm, which, through the window, looked even wilder now than it had in the afternoon. More dangerous.
His mother didn’t intervene in our idle conversation, only stole a quick, almost pleading glance at me every now and then. Her jaw was clenched.
* * *
—
The lecture itself was as embarrassing as all its predecessors on this Jewish American tour. I mean, the hall wasn’t completely empty. The amplifier worked. I read passages from my books. They asked questions. They even laughed once—except for Benjy’s mother, whose face remained impassive. But, as always in America, I had the feeling that there was some basic misunderstanding between me and the audience. A bottomless pit of expectations I could never meet. As if I didn’t conform to the image of an Israeli they had in their minds—or even worse, the Israel I described in my books didn’t resemble the one they wanted to see in their mind’s eye: the Israel of oranges, folk dancing, and Operation Entebbe. The only one who listened to me with yearning eyes, and even nodded occasionally in solidarity, was Benjy.
I’ve lost the audience anyway, I thought, so at least I can do something for the boy—
There was a copy of one of my books on the podium. I opened it, riffled through it for a few moments, and stopped on a random page.
It was in Nablus—I read straight from memory because I had never managed to write about that night—and they woke us up at two in the morning to clean slogans off the walls. There was this policy at the time of the first intifada: During the day, Palestinian kids sprayed anti-Israeli slogans on the walls of the Palestinian camp, and at night, Israeli soldiers went into the houses, pulled people out of their beds, and made them wipe away the slogans with their own hands.
We knocked on the door—or more accurately, banged on it—and an unshaven grandfather leaning on a cane opened it. We could see the trappings of an entire life behind him: couches, a TV, a sideboard, mattresses on which the family members slept. Alon, the commander of our platoon, ordered the grandfather, in Hebrew, to go out of the house. The grandfather said something, maybe he asked if he could change his clothes. But Alon said no, grabbed him by the arm, and frog-marched him a few dozen meters to the wall sprayed with slogans.
We watched them as we secured the periphery, and when we reached the wall, Alon asked the old man: Who did this? The old man replied, La’aerif. I don’t know. From the way he spoke, it was clear that he really didn’t know.
This was repeated four or five times. Alon asked more loudly each time, and the old man replied more weakly each time, close to tears.
Meanwhile, someone else came out of the house with a pail and a rag. A younger man. And stood beside the old man. Leave my father alone, please, he said to Alon in solid Hebrew. I’ll clean it off. Alon ignored him and asked the old man again: Who did this? Don’t lie to me that you don’t know! And the old man said, more accurately sobbed, La’aerif. And then, to our great shock, Alon slapped him. Hard. Almost punched him.
The old man, who, until that moment, had been leaning on his cane, lost his balance and collapsed onto the sidewalk. The cane fell out of his hand and rolled away, and his body, which had folded into itself, looked suddenly very small, like a child’s. His son yelled in Hebrew, What are you doing? What do you want from him? And moved a step forward. But Alon promptly aimed his rifle at him and shouted that he’d better start cleaning, or he’d get a bullet in the head. The son gave him a defiant look, but bit his lips, picked up the pail, and dipped the rag in it. A minute or two later, the father stood up, with great effort, and joined his son. Moving swiftly, they washed off the slogan, and when the last letter had disappeared, Alon signaled with a movement of his rifle barrel that they could go back inside. The father obeyed the order immediately, but the son stayed a moment longer, put his hand on the wall where the slogan had been, and only then joined his father. Alon followed them with his loaded rifle until they disappeared into the house.
We watched them and secured the periphery.
* * *
—
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At the end of every week of the officer training course, we had a summarizing discussion with the platoon commander. Before the discussion following the incident with the old man, we spoke among ourselves in the tent and decided that if Alon didn’t bring it up, we would.
Toward the end of the discussion, when we realized that he planned to ignore what had happened, we signaled each other with our eyes. Dror, the huge navy guy, spoke first, followed by Amit, from the medical corps, and then me. We all said more or less the same thing: that we didn’t understand why he had to slap the old man. We chose our words carefully. We said we really wanted to understand. To have it explained to us. We were all new at this business in the territories. And he, Alon, had a lot of experience.
In response, his face turned redder than his beret, and it seemed that, in another minute, he’d aim his rifle at us.
He said: You want an explanation?
He said: Should I tell you about Rudner from my platoon who had a refrigerator dropped on his head from a roof in Jenin and has been in rehabilitation for a year already? Or do you prefer to hear about Samama, whose face was burned by a Molotov cocktail they threw into his jeep?
He said: This is war here, in case you didn’t realize it. We’re at war.
He said all that—but didn’t dare to touch any other Palestinian during our patrols in the alleyways of the camps. As soon as he realized that he wasn’t getting any support from us—that we wouldn’t secure the periphery for incidents like that—he took a step back.
And began to abuse us.
Until the end of the course, he took every opportunity to make our lives a misery. There was no mistaking the look in his eyes when he sent us running all over the base for no good reason, confined us to quarters on Saturdays, and looked for excuses to throw us out of the course: He despised us.
My army service can be divided into two parts: before that night in Nablus, and after it.
Something inside me broke that night, but something began to grow as well.
I closed the book and gestured to the audience that that was it, I had finished reading and the meeting was over. I thanked them in English. Then in Hebrew.
There was a light sprinkling of applause.
People put on their coats and spoke together in hushed voices as they made their way out.
Of my dozens of books, only two copies were bought at the improvised table-stand.
One by Benjy.
He asked if I would write a dedication to him in Hebrew.
His mother approached, put a gentle hand on his shoulder, offered me a pen, and said quietly, and quite genuinely, “Thank you.” Her face remained frozen. Expressionless. But it seemed to me that I could see the thin trail of a tear running down her cheek. Or maybe it was just a wrinkle.
I took the pen—and it remained in the air for several long seconds. I couldn’t decide between a few seemingly personal but actually generic dedications I use in such cases, but then a Meir Ariel song began to play in my head, “It’s Been a Rough Night on Our Forces at the Suez.” Go figure how our minds work. In retrospect, I think it was because the first words are, “I’m reading Islands in the Stream by Ernest Hemingway, in a beautiful translation by Aharon Amir”—and “Islands in the Stream” by Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers was still stuck in my inner music player. In any case, at the end of Meir Ariel’s song, there are a few lines in English:
Hey nice Jewish boy
What are you doing here?
Hey nice Jewish boy
Nothing for you here, go home.
Hey nice Jewish boy
You go see some nice Jewish girl.
Hey nice Jewish boy
Go home.
It had never been clear to me who Meir Ariel was singing those lines to. An American soldier, a new immigrant come to relieve him on watch? Himself?
And when I wrote them in the dedication, in Hebrew letters, I wasn’t sure who I was writing to: Benjy? Myself? Both?
* * *
—
I saw him a week ago, the boy. At the Binyamina train station. There’s that moment when the doors open, and the people on the platform wait until the flow of disembarking passengers stops.
He was the last one off, wearing a uniform and red paratrooper boots and carrying a rifle, holding his cell to his ear and speaking.
He looked like he belonged.
Did you ever do anything you’re ashamed of?
The first intifada broke out when I was in the officer training course. They sent my company to the territories and returned us to base, then sent us to the territories again and returned us again. That went on for thirty-five days, during which we never saw home. Even worse, I never saw Tali Leshem. I’d pursued her for the entire last two years of high school, and she’d finally let me catch her only a few months before I went into the army.
Which is what caused the first year of my army service to consist mainly of finding ways to go home so I could see her.
The moment when this story takes place, I felt—as I do now, with Dikla—that Tali was going to leave me.
Something in her voice was clouded over (we spoke on pay phones, there was no WhatsApp or texting).
Her letters kept getting shorter.
When I asked her if she was tired of waiting, she said no, but her tone said, Yes, I am.
In short, I felt that I had to see her, or else I would lose her.
But we had no leaves. For thirty-five days. And I felt I would go crazy. Go fucking AWOL. Nothing else mattered.
And then, on a Thursday, the platoon commander issued an order. Three members of the platoon, chosen by a lottery run by his current aide, could go home.
The aide was Dror, a career soldier from the navy who slept in the bunk above me. He was a few years older than us. Someone you could trust.
He waited until we were in the personnel carrier that would take us to field training, sat down in the seat closest to the driver, facing us, and asked each of us to write his name on a slip of paper and hand it to him. Then he put all the slips of paper in a hat and mixed them up.
I’ve never won a lottery. For years, my sister used to buy me scratch cards, and the only time I won—I won a free scratch card.
I had no expectations from that lottery. If anything, I had a feeling of defeat foretold.
And then Dror chose the first slip of paper and read out my name.
I was so happy. I could have jumped with happiness. I hadn’t felt such a sense of freedom and relief very often in my life.
The minute we got out of the van, Dror started walking toward me, and then took advantage of a moment when we were far away from the others and said: So, are you happy?
You bet I am, I said.
Great, he said. Thanks to me.
I turned pale. What do you mean, thanks to you?
When I folded the pieces of paper, I folded yours so it would be larger than the others. That way I could find it more easily.
But why?
I heard you talking to Sabo the other day about your girlfriend. I thought you needed this leave more than anyone else.
Thanks, I said. But I felt a heaviness in my heart. Because in terms of the officer training course, he had committed an offense, and had made me, against my will, an accomplice.
In the officer training course, only three things are important to your commanders: Trustworthiness. Trustworthiness. Trustworthiness.
Not only in the course. My father—I had never heard him lie or scheme.
The whole business ran counter to who I am.
What should I do?
During the night between Thursday and Friday, the guys from the platoon teased me about my good luck. After lights-out, Sabo came to my bunk and asked if I could take a letter he wrote to his mother, who was hospitalized. His brother would c
ome to pick it up. I said, Yes, bro, sure. And I couldn’t fall asleep all night. Should I expose the deceit and get Dror into trouble, or should I go home at the expense of one of my friends? That is, go along with the deceit?
Friday morning I got up, dressed, and went home.
I wanted so much to go home.
But then, when I reached Haifa, the pressure apparently got the better of me and I just broke down. All that Saturday, I got out of bed only to eat. I ate very little and hurried back to bed. My parents understood that something had happened, but didn’t dare ask me. Tali Leshem came to visit me. I told her about the lottery and she didn’t understand what the big deal was. At her post in the administrative office, dirty pool was par for the course, she said. Later we had sex, but she didn’t come and got up quickly to shower. Then she hurried back to her parents’ house. And didn’t kiss me goodbye. She called Saturday night, sounding distant, and didn’t suggest we meet.
On Sunday, I went back to the base. Dror was the only one in our room. Wearing his navy whites.
I was drinking a can of orange soda and I felt like spilling the entire contents on that uniform.
So how was your Saturday? he asked, and patted my shoulder.
Just another Saturday, I replied.
What do you mean? Did you see your girlfriend? Did you calm down?
Sure, I said.
And no thanks for Dror, who set it up for you? He gave me a small punch on the shoulder.
Thanks, bro—I raised my hand to my temple and saluted him—I’ll never forget it.
Do you ever dream about your characters?
I’ll get to that in a minute. It’s just that…I’m still thinking about the previous question. I keep remembering more and more things I’m ashamed of, and all of a sudden, I think that the story about Dror and the lottery was actually meant to conceal other stories, darker ones—
