Chains of Sand

by Jemma Wayne

  He hates that this is what he has reduced their relationship to. He can still remember what it felt like to be smaller than her, encased in her arms. But he cannot help prickling and he doesn’t thank her enough when she parks the car at the base where he has to register, nor grants her more than a fleeting wave goodbye.

  Tomer is standing at the entrance to the base in front of them. Tomer lives in Neve Tzedek, perhaps the most sought-after sector of Tel Aviv. His father is a politician, his mother a doctor, he is studying for his own doctorate. They are not natural friends. But in the army trifling matters like wealth or ethnicity are unimportant. Character, that’s the thing. When there is blood on the floor and bullets in your ears. Character. When he spots Udi, he grins. It has been many months and they leap into each other’s open arms before smacking hands and squeezing shoulders as they make their way to the registration room. Udi doesn’t look back for his mother, but as he walks away he imagines that she might be there still, lingering next to the car, also holding her arms open for him.

  They are assigned to the Nurit base at the Lebanese border. Udi tries to mask his relief that they are not returning to Gaza, but Tomer too seems pleased with the result. They room together along with Shimon and Yoni and five of the other men in their unit who they like in varying degrees and love absolutely. Their room is at the far end of the underground base, a coveted location because it is further from the noise of the canteen, and they sleep in bunks, each tower of three less than a foot away from the next. The room stinks. This is better than it can be. There are camps where nobody has their own bed because there aren’t enough to go around and sleep is grabbed in a rota fashion on any mattress vacant, so nobody complains, not even Tomer. Udi still jibes Tomer about his comfortable, Ashky upbringing and Tomer calls him a stinking Arab in return.

  They are issued with their guns, assigned duties, and within hours it is as though he has never been away. Already his back aches as if in anticipation of discomfort from heavy guns and long patrols and too hard bunks. Already he craves music to sustain him during lone watches. He has eaten just one army meal consisting of something that pretends to be rice and something else that professes to be chicken and already he misses his mother’s sambousak. But routine kicks in and numbs him, quietens his mind. Their unit is responsible for 5km of border. If they do not watch, if they are not vigilant, then somebody could cross over. Carrying what? Planning what? They do not know so they must anticipate. Each morning begins at the barbed fence. Udi has to check that no one has crossed during the night, that it hasn’t been cut, that there are no footsteps in the raked sand. He talks to the soldiers who have been on guard behind the sandbag lookouts and those finishing their eight hour stint driving up and down in a Humvee, then he inspects the area carefully, trying to give nothing away to the Hezbollah men who from the other side observe things just as keenly. After that he boards a Humvee himself or takes up a post, and that’s what he does hour after hour, watching, watching, watching. At least once a day he is interrupted and called to a specific point along the fence. There has been a disturbance. A sensor has gone off. Now he must be alert, and sharp, and not dreaming of other things. Sometimes he is called two or three times and on each occasion goes through the long process of meticulous checks. More often than not it is a rock thrown, or another small incident, barely worth mentioning. But as he works through his checklist he is aware that his reaction is the purpose, not the offending rock. He feels the men on the other side watching him – to see what he will do, what they will do, which parts of the fence are faulty, which cameras are broken, where their weaknesses lie. Watching. He remembers this feeling: when he was a new soldier in uniform stopping in an Arab neighbourhood for a schwarma; and later out of uniform in Mexico but speaking Hebrew; and always when watching international news. A lab gorilla may feel the same. Observed. Scrutinised. He works with one eye on the border.

  At the end of his shift he is free, but now there are chores to be done: the laundry, the weapons checks, the cleaning. He has spent an unknown but significant amount of his time in the army cleaning. Sometimes the smell of disinfectant takes him back here, to these corridors, these bunkers. He has only eight hours before his next shift begins and he must sleep, and shower, and eat, but occasionally there is time for a round of cards, there are bets and banter, and then it is almost like boy scouts. Occasionally, Udi even manages not to think. Days pass. More days pass. Udi ticks them off, grateful for the relative quiet. Hopeful that it will stay so. Counting down time. Tomer however grows restless and is therefore the first to volunteer when three men are needed for a surveillance mission on the other side of the border. Shimon is the second – he is still eager for a cross on his gun. But Udi goes only because of Tomer, and because they all expect it of him.

  They leave at night and crawl through the sand until they reach the dense shrubbery they have aimed for. There is a smell of darkness, a soil-sodden, mountain-tipped coldness that creeps up their nostrils and under their skin. They know now that they have left the comfort of their thin, hard bunks. Now it is time for truth and reality, for the reason that any of them are here and not flying to London, or at least safe at home with wives and girlfriends, parents and children, lives they are here to protect but not to think about; for now only this, only each other. Udi signals to the others that it is okay to stand and, still hunched, they climb into the bush.

  This is every soldier’s nightmare. Turning into a rock or a bush and just laying there, laying still for days on end, trying to grab your tuna sandwich from your bag and peeing into a bottle and just waiting, waiting. But there has been intelligence that Hezbollah are about to do something. Something is going to happen. And eyes are needed. Eyes only, they are not to shoot. They are never to shoot without higher authority to do so. Udi wishes Hezbollah were tied by such a restraint, slowed in a similar way.

  As though filled with falafel, his stomach churns unhelpfully.

  This didn’t happen when he was first a soldier, not even here in 2006, during the conflict. Lebanon was his first war and he remembers the solemnity with which he packed his bag for that mission, carried his gun, marched forwards. His neighbour had nodded at him as he’d left the house at the crack of dawn in his fatigues. He was a friend of his parents, another Baghdad immigrant, and that nod, that unspoken recognition, appreciation, it was something he carried with him. Tomer tied an Israeli flag to the antenna of their vehicle. And as they had walked, Udi remembers telling himself calmly that this is what he always knew his training was for – war, conflict – that if something happens, it happens, if he is killed, or if he loses a leg…it could happen in a car crash. He was so philosophical, he thought. And justified in being so because nothing did happen. Not to them. Not that time. He saw things of course – a Lebanese man with a hole in his neck, a small child standing atop a house reduced to rubble, a Humvee on fire – but by the end of the war, that war, Udi still retained a sense of the unassailable. He was young. Yet Tomer has this even now. Tomer remains interminably idealistic about everything, unfathomably unconcerned with the ‘ifs’ of life. He will worry when the worst happens and not beforehand. Besides, he as well as Shimon is after a cross.

  A cross is an honour. A cross shows bravery, proof of contribution made.

  It is tough to remember ever believing this. But he did. Back then he was invincible and they, the Arabs, the enemy. They were the reason that recovery centres in Haifa were filled with children with missing limbs, and he was the protector of those same children. It was an honour to kill one of them, and he was honoured to commemorate it. He marked his gun carefully, as though carving in stone. Once. Twice. His third and fourth crosses were heralded by his entire unit: a group of Hezbollah fighters had crossed the border and attacked a Northern kibbutz. It happened at night. They’d found a hole, and footsteps. Udi had tracked them with a Bedouin named Ishmael and after seven hours they had finally spotted the men, lying in the night, blending in with other raised lumps of
sand. Ishmael had been sure and Bedouin are never wrong, so Udi had radioed in and secured authority to shoot. They had shot. And they had killed. The unit had cheered when they returned, cheered the deaths of two men who will never again break through the border, never kill another Jew, and Udi had felt proud as he marked two new crosses onto his gun. The pride stayed with him as he received his certificate for courage and placed it carefully in the box of treasures he still stores under his bed. Even when he slept he felt no sadness, no guilt. But that was almost a decade ago. That was before Gaza, before he earned his fifth cross, before Mordechai was blown to pieces trying to prove that there is a God.

  The churning comes again.

  Udi wishes he had kissed his mother.

  He thinks of Ella, imagines her flower-flourished bedroom, the peach-tangled smell of her wet hair.

  They sit in the bush for five hours before anything happens. Udi has curled himself as far as he can into the hollow crevice of a tree whose feet their bush adorns, its wooden surface marginally more comfortable than the sharp edges of the hostile shrubbery. They dare not speak since they cannot see who they might be speaking to. They have night vision goggles but these outdated versions rely on starlight to work and in this undergrowth there is none. Udi feels the occasional tap on his boot from Shimon who thinks he has spotted something, then a double tap to indicate it is nothing. Probably just another creature of the night. Tomer’s breath is warm on his forearm, but the rest of his body is cold, frozen into numbness by the dark and the activity of staying still. Eventually a dull light creeps through the undergrowth, painting shapes that once were black a ghostly, unsettling grey and transforming masses of mysterious matter into objects still indiscernible before suddenly flooding everything around them with glaring, oppressive colour. Now they can see the terrain before them and they let their eyes adjust to the hub of forest activity. They are hot now and this is worse than the cold. Tomer’s breath smells and Shimon’s tap is harder to distinguish because other creatures are tapping at his boots, and his legs, crawling all over him. His legs itch. Sometimes it feels as though they are burning again.

  Suddenly a group of Hezbollah fighters appear in front of them.

  Udi says nothing, but without conferring all three are alert, and listening, with fingers on their triggers, oblivious now to the heat. Tomer and Shimon look repeatedly to Udi because, despite his father’s insistence to be rid of it, he is the one who understands the most Arabic. Tomer speaks it also – he has studied and is more proficient than Udi when it comes to business or grammar or proper conversation – but Udi has a knack for the slang and the colloquialisms Israeli professors are unlikely to teach but they are likely to hear. There is, however, nothing much to report. Only four men brandishing guns, speaking of people they do not name and a meeting they do not place. The three of them stay quiet until the men pass, then Udi radios the non-news in. Slowly he feels his muscles un-tense, his shoulders un-stiffen. He feels Shimon and Tomer do the same. He imagines Ella digging her palms into his aching neck.

  Now that it is light, they are able to talk, though only in whispers and without moving their eyes from the areas for which they each are responsible.

  “When do you think the fuckers will be back?” Shimon asks quietly.

  “That’s probably not even them,” Udi answers to calm him. Shimon has been a liability before; a good soldier but too easily riled.

  “Damn. I want my cross,” says Shimon.

  Neither Udi nor Tomer respond. They both know Shimon too well, know where this passion for blood is coming from. It is almost 15 years since he lost his brother Isaac to a bomb in Jaffa. This is how Shimon describes the perpetrator – a bomb. But it is merely a way for him to depersonalise the individual who strapped on a vest and crossed the border and, because back then there wasn’t a fence, strolled unchecked towards a café where Isaac was sitting, just reading the paper and sipping a coffee and maybe thinking about a game of basketball with his kid brother who was on his way to meet him, and exploded Isaac’s body so completely that he died right there, on hot Jaffa concrete, and not even in a hospital, on a clean bed, where 11-year-old Shimon who wasn’t allowed through the police line might have said goodbye. The ordinary man who did this, this is a perpetrator Shimon will never know, but a bomb… The semantics allow him to hold a whole people to blame and salvage at least some opportunity to put things right: a tooth for a tooth. But Shimon has never killed a man.

  “You’ll get your cross,” Tomer appeases. “Be patient, Shimon. These were not our men.”

  It is only possible to talk with such gravity when hiding in a bush.

  Hours pass. They see nothing but this is where they have been instructed to wait. Occasionally a voice in the distance disturbs their conversation and silences them all until they are sure they are alone again. Sometimes the silence lasts into the minutes and hours that follow. Sometimes it is only an uninvited interlude to a debate that continues unabated as soon as the voice has gone. Eventually it is dark again and now they must be more careful. They take it in turns to sleep, though none of them are able to do so in a restful way; it is always with the thorns of the bush catching an arm or a leg, reminding them how fast pain can come, how vigilant they must be. Shimon is the one to wake them. The glare of the new day is beginning to break through and again four Hezbollah fighters are in front of them, the same men as yesterday, hazy in the dim light but speaking as before in conspiratorial tones that are of no help to listening ears. Udi thinks that he hears the words ‘fence’ and ‘guns’. Tomer thinks they have said ‘tomorrow’. Shimon does not speak Arabic beyond a few swear words so cannot know but repeats in a barely audible whisper the words he has heard. One of the men turns and stares directly at the bush the three of them are occupying. Udi freezes, smells falafel. But the man looks away. There is no indication that he has seen them, yet there is that feeling again, that sense of being watched. Then the four men disappear. Again Udi radios in the news and they are told to remain in position. Shimon is excited. He wants to discuss what they have heard and Tomer humours him, but Udi wants only to sleep. He thinks of Ella and how comfortable he is when lying with her, how she squeezes his palm and absent-mindedly prods at his cuticles, how she called him to tell him to be safe during his miluim, though they hadn’t spoken in weeks.

  “What do you say, Udi?” Shimon demands, kicking his boot. “Is it proof?”

  “Huh?” He hasn’t been listening. “Proof?”

  “That there isn’t a God,” Tomer explains. “He’s talking about Mordechai.”

  It was inevitable that Mordechai would be brought up at some point, he always is, though Udi has never mentioned him in his civilian life, not even to Ella, and even amongst his unit, amongst these brothers, for almost a week they have been afraid to say his name. It has taken two days of meditation in enemy shrubbery before any of them have been bold enough to brave it.

  “Mordechai is proof that the Gazans hate us,” Udi says. “That’s it.”

  “He is proof that there is no such thing as God. Or if there ever was that He abandoned us a long time ago,” Shimon rebuts. He is one of a growing new tribe of Jews: fierce Zionists, adamant defenders of the Jewish people, and absolute atheists.

  “You cannot prove that God exists,” Tomer sighs, as if this is something he has spent much time working out for himself and is now weary of explaining. “Haven’t you read any Rambam, you heathen? Look, you can’t prove the positive, you have to disprove the negative. You have to show what God isn’t to see the converse, what He is.”

  “God isn’t letting His most loyal servant be blown to bits,” Shimon says, spitting on the ground in punctuation, a fly quickly descending onto the welcome, unexpected fluid.

  “Exactly,” Tomer answers. “That wasn’t God. That was Hamas.”

  “You’re so damn blind,” Shimon argues a little too loudly. “So where was He? Taking a fucking day off?”

  Tomer looks to Udi for support, but Ud
i cannot offer it.

  “We have free will, Shimon,” Tomer says finally. “We have the ability to choose, to choose our actions, and our actions have consequences. So do the actions of Hamas. It was them who set the bomb, Shimon, not God. And it wasn’t God who killed your brother.”

  “I’m not talking about my brother!” Shimon explodes. He kicks the tree Udi is still sitting in. Udi doesn’t take offence. “I’m talking about Mordechai, okay? Remember him? The kid who wore a yamaka and grew his hair into those stupid curls? The kid who could have stayed in yeshiva like everyone else he knew, but didn’t. The kid who hated nobody and prayed for everybody? The kid they sent to fight because he was a brilliant shot, our best, better even than you, Udi, and didn’t care that every battle was eating away at his soul that he still kept clean from pork and fucking prawns? Do you remember him? Yes? So where was his God? Where is your God now?”

  “Shimon, Moredechai stopped in the middle of a back yard, in the middle of Gaza, in the middle of a war.” Udi finally contributes. “We should never have been unloading the explosives there. I wanted to go to the wall.”

  “He was a believer. He thought God would protect him. Isn’t that what he said, Udi?”

  “He was stupid,” Tomer says. “He thought his faith made him invincible. But you can’t test God like that. And Mordechai above all people should have known this.”

  They fall again into silence. Udi stares through the leaves of the bush and tries not to think, not to remember. But Tomer speaks.

  “You know, Shimon, God was there that day.”

  “Yeah? Well he didn’t do much good.”

  “But maybe he did.” He pauses. “Udi is here. Alive. He had a miracle.”

  “Not a miracle, Tomer,” rushes Udi, unable now not to remember, not to speak. “You can’t tell me I had a miracle when right next to me, on top of me, Mordechai was killed. Was that also a miracle? Was it the same one?”