The Drive

by Yair Assulin

  I remember that once I cried in front of her. She encouraged me to cry. She stroked my head and talked about how good it was to cry. I remember her face before we said goodbye that night. It felt as though after she’d seen me broken, after she’d seen me weak, a layer of distance had formed in her, as if I repulsed her. I remember now that one of the first times we went out, when we sat close together on an almost completely vacant floor of a shopping mall and our hands linked for the first time, she looked at me with that look of hers and asked me to promise never to hurt her. At the time I was the strong one, the one who had the power to hurt. Now it seems to me that my crash in the damn army, more than a year later, simply disappointed her. Perhaps more than that. Perhaps she felt that I’d betrayed her. I’d promised to be strong and I turned out to be weak and helpless. Suddenly I was crying in front of her and she was the one stroking my head.

  When Dad and I drove to the MHO, I didn’t tell anyone I was going. Even after returning, it took me awhile to say that I’d been to the mental health services. I don’t know why, but my shame over that trip, over the pain I felt, which was genuine, prevented me from telling people. Or perhaps it was not the shame but the fear that they wouldn’t understand the way things really were and would think I was lying or being spoiled. The fear that someone at synagogue who heard about it would come up to me and say, in a very understanding tone of voice, that “even though it was hard for all of us, we all got through it.” And then he’d give me a pitiful look and say, “It’s for your future, see? In Israel these days, people who don’t do the army can’t get by on the outside.” And then he’d stick his fat face in mine, right into my eyes that were still puffy from crying at home a few hours or days earlier, and he’d put his hand on my shoulder.

  I would keep thinking about that line, “It’s for your future,” and about all the lofty talk of ideals and values and every person’s obligation to serve the homeland and all those slogans, and about how in fact the army had nothing to do with values. About how everyone who does their military service does it only because if they don’t, they can’t get by “on the outside,” and that’s how the world works. And if people who didn’t serve in the army could get along “on the outside” then it would be okay not to want to serve in the army. Lots of people wouldn’t want to. And then I would remember the pitiful look from the man at synagogue, and I’d feel the disgust, and I’d think about how everyone thought I was lying.

  And to be honest, why shouldn’t they think I was lying? After all, everyone lies. They lie about everything, including the army. Everyone’s lying—even the ones who go to the MHO and make up hallucinations and visions and then tell their friends how they pulled one over on the MHO and how the idiot gave them exactly what they wanted. And the ones who go home after a week of dreary guard duty and tell everyone heroic tales as if they’re carrying the whole State of Israel on their shoulders, the whole Zionist dream. So why wouldn’t they think I was lying? Why wouldn’t they think I was a liar just like everyone else? I kept wondering that. Over and over and over again. Even though I was actually not lying.

  II.

  Now I remember a conversation, which I recalled that day on the way to the MHO too with my platoon commander, who was a lieutenant colonel. But I also remember the first time I saw him. It was my first day in the platoon. He’d arrived that evening from a different base, and we were sitting on a bench by the square. I remember he had a small yarmulke perched on the side of his head, and he was fat, with fleshy but dry lips that threatened to spill out, and he was spewing curses and talking about sex. I recognized him as soon as I saw him. He was one of those types you meet for only a minute but they get lodged in your memory forever, for no reason, or at least not a conscious one.

  He’d been a substitute teacher when I was in elementary school, but he’d taught us only one class. He had celiac disease, and I remember how he explained to us what celiac was and what gluten was, and what could happen if he ate bread or cake or anything else with that stuff in it. I remember that he spread his arms alongside his fat body and acted as if he were exploding. Because, he said, with a simplicity that I found frightening, if he ate bread he would simply explode. I remember how I imagined all the classroom walls stained with his blood and pieces of his skin. Then he told us he wanted to join the army but the army wouldn’t let him because it couldn’t provide him with the kind of bread he was allowed to eat. He said he was going to fight until they broke down and let him serve.

  I remember that I felt sorry for him that day, in class, when he stood there with his arms to the sides, pretending he was going to explode. I remembered him fondly. He was nice in that one single class he taught us, and I was happy when I realized he was going to be my commander. It never occurred to me what a filthy, destructive, power-hungry man he really was. Sometimes I suffer from naiveté: I see human beings’ pitiful aspects before anything else, and I feel sorry for them, and my pity for their lousy fates makes me perceive them as good people. The next day, on the way to dinner, with the innocence of a new soldier who thinks the army is one more place in reality where you can act the way you do anywhere else, I knocked on his office door and told him that I remembered him from that one class, and I remembered him explaining about the celiac and the gluten and how the army wouldn’t let him enlist. He just laughed, with his disgusting mouth and the goiter on his neck, and said we were stupid kids and we’d driven him crazy.

  I didn’t think that was true, and when I left his office I was sad. I went to dinner alone, because no one was waiting for me, and I felt like a kid whose childhood hero had been destroyed. Like a little boy who goes backstage after a show and meets the actors who play his childhood heroes, and finds that they are repulsive, crass people who are nothing like the characters they portray. He bore no resemblance to the character I’d seen in my mind. He was a repulsive human being—something I came to understand increasingly over time.

  III.

  The evening when I had to go and talk with him followed a long and unsuccessful effort to overcome my emotional pain and restlessness, and a difficult night when I actually burst into tears. It happened after we came back to our regular base from the base near Nablus. I remember that evening almost entirely. It might have been the most significant evening of my service, one that arguably led to me and Dad eventually taking that early morning drive, after a long and sleepless night, to see the MHO at Tel Hashomer.

  I remember that I was working in the war room they’d set up on our base because of some operation that had already started or was about to start, which we had to prepare for. I remember the oppressive feeling I’d had that day, a feeling that carried on its back all the harsh feelings of the preceding days.

  It was my shift, and I was laminating maps of cities in the West Bank. I wanted to get out of there. A female petty officer who was connected to the Intelligence platoon was sitting in the war room with me and another soldier—I can’t remember who, or even whether it was a man or a woman. I do remember the officer’s ugly face, her black hair that made me think of pubic hair, and her faint moustache. I remember her eyes and her crushed nose. But more than any of those features, I remember with disgust the self-importance that dripped from her, just like the sweat that covered her armpits and dripped down her arms while she sat on a plastic chair that was about to break. I remember that she leaned back and played with her frizzy hair, and gave us a condescending, self-important look. And just like with the lieutenant colonel, I thought back to the first time I’d seen her.

  It was when I joined the platoon after they transferred me from the combat unit because they discovered I had asthma. I’d always had it, but when I told the doctor at the recruiting office that I was asthmatic, he sent me to get my lungs tested, and afterward I saw a doctor who just smiled and said I had “the lungs of a lion.” But when the asthma was finally diagnosed, the placement officer sent me to Intelligence. “Ask for Gali,” she told me, “she’ll be your officer.” When I
heard that name, Gali, I pictured a beautiful woman. I imagined how I would join the platoon and make her fall in love with me, and we’d walk around the base, which looked like a pretty nice place when I first got there, and we’d talk and laugh, and I’d hold her close to me and she’d whisper in my ear how lucky it was that I’d ended up in her platoon because . . .

  But when I saw her, the real Gali, the one whom the placement officer had said would be my officer, sitting on a bench outside the office writing something in a notebook, all my fantasies vanished and I was filled with revulsion. And that day in the war room, while I laminated maps, I thought back to that first time I’d seen her after picturing her as someone completely different.

  IV.

  A few hours before I went into the war room, I talked to Mom on the phone. I told her I couldn’t take it anymore. I told her, again, that I was unhappy, that I felt as if I were suffocating, that I had to get out of that place. She said she would talk to my commander, the lieutenant colonel, and we’d see what could be done. I know it sounds like I was just whining, because nothing that bad had happened to me, but I write these words now, and I intend to write them again and again: I really could not tolerate it. My soul was genuinely threatening to explode at any moment. I really wanted to die. Every morning I wanted to die when I woke up and saw that miserable, gray room with its four bunk beds, and the other soldiers getting dressed and polishing their boots, and I realized that another horribly normal day was about to begin. During the lousy week before I talked to my mom and she talked to the lieutenant colonel and she told me to go see him because he said he’d talk to me and would try to help me however he could, I stood on the side of the road several times, right near the passing cars, and planned to jump. I swore I would jump. But over and over again, the image of Mom and Dad stopped me and paralyzed my legs.

  In fact, I will now write something even harsher: since my time in the army, I am no longer afraid of death. I was suffering so much that death became a presence in my life, a logical option for escape, a solution. Death became my second shadow. Like a comrade in arms who could betray me at any moment and dig his sword into my back, but as long as he hadn’t done that, he was my friend.

  Anyway, when I was kneeling on the floor in the war room, laminating another map of some village that Gali told me to laminate, my cell phone rang, and Mom told me she’d talked to my commander and he’d said I should go see him after my shift and he’d have a talk with me and see what was going on and how to help.

  “What was he like?” I asked her. There were tears in my eyes, as there were every time I talked to her back then.

  “He was fine,” she said, “he was very nice. He immediately said he’d try to help however he could.”

  “Are you sure?” I thought about that stupid statement, ‘however he could.’

  “He sounded very nice to me,” she repeated. “I hope it’ll work out, I hope he can help you.”

  She herself was skeptical about talks with commanders by then. She’d already talked at least three times with Dan, the first lieutenant, who was the officer more directly responsible for the soldiers and was also the lieutenant colonel’s deputy. Dan had called me in for a few talks but nothing had come of it. Generally speaking, Mom found my whole situation in the army unfamiliar. I remember that she once told me, on the first Shabbat when I came home after crying on the phone, when I was on that base full of tents surrounded by fucking concrete walls, that when her friends were in the army there was no such thing as not wanting to go back to the base, and anyone who wanted to be transferred had to submit a request and would get a response only after a few months, and it was usually negative.

  “Did you know there were a lot more soldiers who committed suicide back then?” I asked her. “And there were soldiers who defected and went AWOL, weren’t there?”

  She looked at me worriedly. “Are you thinking about suicide?”

  “I’m not thinking about anything,” I answered, and she said that things weren’t as they used to be anyway, and these days anyone who doesn’t want to do the army doesn’t do it, and the most important thing is for me to feel well.

  I don’t remember what I told her on the phone after she said the lieutenant colonel had sounded nice and she hoped he could help me, or how the conversation ended. I remember only the feeling I had—perhaps relief, or hope, that maybe the solution lay in this meeting. What the solution would be, I did not know. I didn’t know if I just wanted to leave that goddamn base, or if I wanted to serve close to home, or leave the whole rotten army altogether.

  “Maybe I should put my head out the window and scream that I hate the whole army?” I said to Dad as we drove to the MHO.

  “Stop your nonsense already,” he said, “because you do understand. You understand that without the IDF this country could not exist.”

  “But how does it exist now?” I retorted. “It has laws requiring eighteen-year-olds to enlist, it takes their best years, all their dreams, it destroys their souls, teaches them that what matters is cheating and stealing and trampling and cutting corners and occupying and winning. Is that what a state should teach people at this age? Does that strike you as normal?”

  “You’re exaggerating,” Dad said.

  “I’m not,” I answered, with a vehemence that suddenly spilled out of me after a sleepless night. “That’s exactly how it is. That’s what they teach, don’t you see that?”

  We drove on in silence, and my thoughts returned to that conversation with the lieutenant colonel who disgusts me every time I think of him. I remembered again the good feeling I had after talking with Mom, a feeling that was completely washed out of me when I went back into the war room and Gali told me I was talking on the phone too much, and that maybe I should stop disappearing and start helping out a little.

  I wanted to shout at her, really scream at the top of my lungs, but the only thing that came out was a whimper. Then I sat down on a chair and stared into space, holding back the tears.

  “Will you stop with the drama?” she said, and I wanted to yell again. I wanted to ask her who she thought she was, to tell her to shut her stinking mouth already and go wash the sweat stains off her armpits and shave off her disgusting moustache. To go fuck herself.

  But I didn’t say anything. Throughout that whole period, my entire military service, I had a fear of people who could judge me and punish me and leave me on the base for a weekend or even put me in prison. I felt powerless against them. My soul, sometimes fully coercing my brain, would not allow me to yell at them or reproach them, and so my most important capacity was severed—my capacity to express myself. My genuine ability to speak. And that’s how it was at my meeting with the lieutenant colonel, which I’d looked forward to so desperately after my phone call with Mom.

  V.

  I counted the minutes until my shift ended so that I could go and see him, and I was already imagining how after his friendly talk with Mom, he would greet me with a smile and invite me to sit down and ask how he could help. He would tell me that he understood and that he’d do everything he could to make things better for me. But that’s not what happened.

  That evening it started raining, the kind of hard rain you get only on military bases. I ran from the war room to the HQ and looked for him in his office, but he wasn’t there. Two soldiers told me there’d been a terrorist attack and he’d gone to a meeting called by the brigade commander.

  I have to honestly admit that I couldn’t have cared less about any terrorist attack at the time. I—who since roughly the age of five had watched the news on TV almost every night, who was familiar with every economic plan, leader, state, war, and terrorist, who knew of every event that happened anywhere in the world, but particularly in Israel, who during attacks would sit for hours watching TV and listening to all the analyses and the interviews and the pundits predicting how Israel would react and discussing who had carried out the attack—I no longer took an interest in the reality occurring outside my p
athetic, painful existence.

  I sat down on a bench outside his office and waited. The rain falling on my head and face had no effect on me, nor did I care how ridiculous I looked to the soldiers walking by. I’d looked ridiculous in their eyes a long time before that, and the last thing I cared about that evening was repairing that image. When I first got to the base, I was the religious soldier who was always going to prayers. Then I was the one who kept crying to the commander, the one who kept asking questions, the one who cared about honesty and truth and made a point of correcting people’s grammar, the one who read biographies of Heine and Yonatan Ratosh and asked anyone who said they liked music whether they liked Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and if they said yes, something lit up in my eyes.

  Yes, that’s how I appeared to the people on that base. They also thought I was a shirker, because I tried to get out of things just as they did. They assumed I was “shafting” the other guys, because once I got sick leave when I was sick and I was supposed to stay for Shabbat, and even though in the end I did stay on the base, I got the reputation of someone who “shafts” everyone else.

  I remember that Thursday. I really was sick. I had a fever and I was very congested. After a night without sleep, I went to the clinic adjacent to our barracks, and the doctor immediately gave me three days of sick leave and told me to rest at home. I remember the way the sergeant responded. There were so many lousy titles in that pathetic platoon, which had no more than ten soldiers but somehow needed a high-ranking lieutenant colonel to command it. So I guess it also needed a sergeant. And the sergeant said to me quietly, in a tone of voice that sounded like a Mafia threat, that in her opinion I should give up those sick leave days and not show them to Dan, because then he would have to let me go home, and that meant that someone else would have to give up their weekend instead of me.