The Drive

by Yair Assulin

  I also remember how the guy who had to stay on base that weekend instead of me, who had presented himself as my friend, responded when he found out: he cursed me. I remember his black face and buggy eyes. I remember him coming to my room and letting out a stream of curses about how I was an asshole, and he’d get back at me, and I’d regret “shafting him,” and I was ruining his life. “How am I ruining your life?” I asked. “Because,” he said, “you’re a son of a bitch.”

  I think about how that soldier came to our platoon from the infantry battalions because he dreamed of becoming an officer, but no one would let him be an officer in a combat unit. Now I remember that in the end they refused to make him an officer in Intelligence too, and I feel sorry for him. I feel sorry that his greatest dream was to control other people, to get respect from eighteen-year-old soldiers who were legally required to respect him because if they didn’t they’d go to prison, and to walk around with his ranks on his shoulders and flash that grin of his, which exposed his big white teeth, and to tell anyone who would listen that he was an officer.

  And no, I don’t think I’m exaggerating at all, because I have no doubt that he didn’t have a single good intention or ideal behind that dream of being an officer in the Israel Defense Forces, and it’s a good thing for everyone who might have become his soldier that they wouldn’t let him be an officer.

  I don’t know why I decided to stay on the base that weekend in the end, even though I had sick leave. I suppose my soul was so weak that I couldn’t withstand the words and the looks and the curses. I think that Thursday was when my disgust with the army and with people in general, especially when they are people in the army, was at its height. I think that on that Thursday I understood, yet again, that all the talk about comradeship and friendship and trust in the army is meaningless nonsense.

  VI.

  After more than half an hour, he arrived. He looked the same as usual. The same walk, the same grin, the same disgust that comes up in me every time I remember him. Despite the rain and the freezing wind, his sleeves were rolled up above his elbows. He was holding a map I’d laminated earlier.

  “Eli,” I called out softly behind him, but he didn’t hear. “Eli,” I called again, and this time he turned to me with a cold, dry look. I expected him to know why I was addressing him, and that he would smile. But there was no smile.

  “Um . . . ” I stammered. “My mom talked with you and . . . ” I scrutinized his face, hoping he’d remember his conversation with Mom that afternoon. “She said you told her I should come see you and we’d talk.”

  “I’m busy now,” he said with an incisive, supremely confident voice, without a drop of courtesy.

  “It’s . . . It’s important for me that I talk to you this evening,” I said. I tried to say it confidently, but to my own ears it sounded like a whispered stutter. I remember his look of aversion, of unwillingness. A tired, derisive look. I remember his lips stretching into an expression that meant one thing: “I don’t see what you and I could possibly have to talk about.”

  Playing innocent again. That is the verbal translation of what I felt when I heard that line come out of his mouth. I wanted to tell him that Mom had already talked to him, that she’d explained to him that I was . . . that I was having a hard time. And that I’d waited my whole shift to talk to him, hoping he could help me. Save me. Now in my room, I think what an idiot I was. How could he have helped me, that officer who seemed like God to me that day? Two stripes on his shoulder. A lieutenant colonel. He was also a junior officer, I realize now. He roamed the base like a stray dog looking for an ass to lick so that maybe he’d get a promotion, or just a kind word—an ego-stroke.

  I remember one time when we were on that operation near Nablus, and the regimental commander needed a map urgently but it wasn’t ready. I remember how Eli got annoyed and upset and raced back and forth, trying to please the commander on one end and yell at us on the other. I think about the madness I felt at that moment, which any normal person would have felt. I think about that grown man, whom some people even addressed as “General,” racing back and forth across a span of twenty feet at most, one moment shouting furiously, threatening, sulking, and the next laughing, making jokes, putting his hand on the commander’s shoulder, asking obsequious questions, then walking back again to shout and prod and threaten, then back again, twenty feet, laughing then turning serious and listening and flattering, and over and over again for several minutes.

  I remember his sycophancy, the way he stuck to the regimental commander like a mollusk with his fleshy, droopy lips, wearing a tiny yarmulke that attested to nothing related to morality or truth, certainly not to God, with his gut— his potbelly—spilling over, and his small blue eyes. Then he punished us and we had to laminate all the maps, including the ones we’d already done. “I don’t care,” he said, “get all the plastic off and redo them.”

  VII.

  “Wait for me in my office in half an hour,” he said after he realized he wouldn’t be able to get rid of me. I went to my room to have dinner. I preferred eating instant noodles in my room to sitting in the dining room, where I had to see the hypocrisy and stupidity of the other soldiers, the ones whom any ordinary, “normative,” patriotic Israeli would call “my brothers,” but who were, to me, mere rivals for furloughs and weekends off, for a better bed, for more rest, for holidays off, for making a better impression.

  After a little less than half an hour I was back at his door. I remember the building where his office was housed. Our whole platoon was there. Three doors. The first was the lieutenant colonel’s room, the second was a little room that contained both the second lieutenant Gali’s office and a kitchenette where I drank coffee every morning. Or rather, at first I drank coffee there every morning with the other soldiers, but later I would sit in the synagogue and read Psalms and pray for everything to work out. And the third room was the workroom. That’s where I went after prayers, and I’d wait quietly on an office chair for someone to tell me what to do.

  How difficult that silence was for me. The compulsion to be quiet, the inability to put together a precise or witty sentence. In my “ordinary” life—my life from Thursday or Friday to Sunday, apart from once every four weeks—my primary skill was my ability to make people laugh, or to embarrass them. Without that, I was simply helpless.

  I escaped into phone calls a lot. I would call Ayala or Michal or Dror. Sometimes I think I loved Ayala in that period only so that I could call her, so that I could feel that I was “someone.” When she answered—or Michal, when I called her—I became different. I was funny and trenchant, although it didn’t really matter what I was, as long as I could talk. It was only on those phone calls that I really talked. I remember Michal trying to encourage me the way she always did, in her ordinary, banal way, by saying “you have to,” and “everyone gets through it,” and “think about the future.” When I asked who said I had to destroy myself because “everyone gets through it,” and who said that everyone who “gets through it” feels the way I do, she would repeat the same things in different words, and the whole thing would start over again. To be honest, even today, when I’m no longer in touch with her, I remember those conversations fondly, because no matter what was said in them, no matter if they were smart things or terribly dumb things—and to me they were terribly dumb— the important thing was that I talked, that I made a voice and someone listened, and I felt as if I still existed, the way I wanted to exist: sharp, piercing, smart, funny.

  Ayala kept telling me I should leave the army. I replay the conversation we had in my mom’s car, when Ayala said she would always be with me, and that I didn’t have to be afraid that no woman would want me if I got out of the army for mental health reasons, because she would be with me whatever happened. Now in my room, I think about her. About her high-pitched voice, her white skin, her ugly smile that was sometimes so beautiful, like that time she came back after a week in Eilat and I went to see her, and when she opened the
door she smiled at me and I knew she’d missed me.

  I think about her crying too. She told me that after the first time she cried because of me, her mother said that if she was crying that meant she’d lost. “Lost what?” I asked her, and maybe I felt good about what her mother had said. “I don’t know,” she said with a laugh and made a helpless motion with her hands, “The woman is nuts.”

  Then I remember her crazy streaks. I remember that once she was driving and she tried to kill us both, zigzagging like a madwoman and not letting me touch the wheel. “Get your hands off!” she screamed, and her eyes almost popped out. “This is my car!” Then she said, “Don’t touch the wheel! That’s the last time you’re touching the wheel!” Eventually she came around and started crying. “I can’t take it anymore,” she said, “I feel like we’re slowly dying.”

  VIII.

  When I got to Eli’s office, he was just walking out. “Wait here,” he said and marched away arrogantly, self-importantly. I went in and sat down on one of the chairs scattered around the long conference table. Sometimes, I remember now, we would sit around that table listening to a lesson on the weekly Torah portion from the military rabbi whose office was nearby.

  I was anxious. My feet tapped nervously on the floor and my palms were clammy. I felt that my future depended on what happened in that room. I silently recited verses from Psalms, which I knew by heart because I made a point of saying them every day after prayers. Then I looked around. I looked at the Israeli flag and the platoon flag that faced each other. I looked at the desk; it was full of papers, and among them was an empty paper cup with brown liquid residue stuck to its bottom. I looked at the little shelf above his desk chair. There were four books: a biography of some general who later became a government minister, two mass market novels, and one book of poetry. Every officer must have at least one poetry collection displayed over his head, I thought scathingly. Then I remembered that the first time I’d seen that book, it had made me happy, because I thought how wonderful it was that I had an officer who read poetry, and that he must be a man with a tender soul.

  What an idiot I was back then, I thought to myself. I remembered one Tuesday when Eli said we would get the evening off as long as we completed a job he gave us, but when we finished he said he’d changed his mind and we weren’t getting off. Apart from his nasty behavior, what I remember most from that evening was one of the soldiers. He had a large forehead and his red hair was combed up in something attempting to be a forelock but which looked like a crest. He fumed and cursed the lieutenant colonel, and said we should rebel or something, and we should boycott him and stop letting him pretend to be our friend and then screw us over. Even though we weren’t friends, I felt close to that soldier at that moment, because I thought he was right, and also because I was very disappointed that we weren’t going home. Later, after I showered and went back to the platoon room, I saw the same soldier joking around with the lieutenant colonel as if they were great pals, as if he hadn’t acted like a louse by leaving us on the base for no reason. I remember him, that goddamn redhead, prancing around Eli and telling him more and more jokes and kissing his baboon ass.

  Scum, I thought to myself when I saw that. Miserable scum. What happened to all those things you said, which I believed you were saying honestly? What happened to the rebellion and the boycott, which I carried out? I really did boycott him: when I went to take a shower I walked past him without saying hello. I felt disgusted. And while I waited for him anxiously in his office that evening, bolting at every rustle I heard outside because I thought it might be him, I felt that same disgust. Then the disgust gave way to fear that perhaps I was the pathetic one in this scenario. Perhaps it was me who was the inferior one, because I didn’t know how to act in these places and how to handle people like him. Maybe I was the stupid one. Maybe I was too innocent. Even though I didn’t usually consider myself naive.

  He turned up after more than an hour and a half. When he walked in and I glared at him, I could feel my eyes exuding fear. He perfunctorily apologized for being late. Then he stretched his arms out, sank into the chair, and said, “Right, so how can I help you?”

  Before I went to see him, when I was still on my shift in the war room, I’d promised myself I would be as honest with him as I could. I wouldn’t hold back from crying or telling him exactly how I felt. I thought about that decision in that moment.

  “Um . . . ” I started awkwardly. His impatient face did not make things easier. Remember what you decided, I told myself over and over again. Remember those moments on the side of the road, standing there waiting for a car to pass so you can jump in front of it. Then I reminded myself of that night with Dror when I asked him to break my hand.

  “I can’t,” Dror had said. “You have to,” I told him, practically sobbing. “Hold the car door and slam it on my hand. As hard as you can.” Dror said nothing. He couldn’t understand how a person could ask someone to break his hand just to get a few days off.

  “More than a month of sick leave!” I yelled at him. “Do you know what more than a month of sick leave means?” We were on the beach, and other than a few people sitting at one of the wooden tables, there was no one else there. “You promised me you’d do it!” I shouted. I remembered my own words, and him being quiet. I wanted to force him to do it, to make him injure me, to make him break my hand.

  At first I’d asked him to break my foot. We were in the car, and I told him I thought the best thing to do was break a limb, because then you got a long leave. He sat there silently. The idea had been kicking around my mind for a long time, but the minute I said it, like a stubborn decision to hit on a girl, come what may, I got carried away and decided that whatever happened, I wanted him to break my foot. “We’ll go to the beach,” I said, “then you call my parents and tell them I fell or I accidentally shut the door on my foot and I can’t drive, and I might have broken something and someone has to take me to the hospital.” Then I added that I’d heard it was easier to get sick leave at the hospital in Nahariya than in Haifa, “So if I’m dying of pain and I can’t talk, tell them I said to take me to Nahariya.”

  In the end he refused to break anything. “My blood is on your hands,” I shouted at him furiously, like a madman. “You’re a coward. You’re just a miserable, stinking, self-righteous coward. Don’t you see how self-righteous you are? How can you study Torah with that self-righteousness? You’re like all the other scum. Like all the other self-righteous scum.”

  Then I drove him home silently. He looked kind of sorry for himself, and I wanted to vomit on him. Then I wanted to cry. When he got out of the car I stayed outside his home, sitting in the car, staring at a spot on the road, and I didn’t know what to do. It was a Saturday night, and I had to go back to the base the next day.

  IX.

  “This place is bad for me,” I blurted after reminding myself about that day with Dror.

  “What do you mean, bad for you?” he asked and squinted at me. “Are you being mistreated? Can you point to something or someone specific?”

  “That’s not it,” I said, “I’m just unhappy here. I don’t know, maybe it’s the job, maybe it’s . . . ”

  “Do you want to switch jobs?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I mean . . . ”

  Then the conversation evolved into a dialogue between two deaf people, with me trying to scream out everything that was hurting and him screaming so he wouldn’t have to hear. He told me I was spoiled, that he had bigger things to worry about, that “this is the army” and he wasn’t supposed to “deal with kindergarten problems.”

  “It’s not kindergarten problems,” I said and almost burst into tears. “I’m really unhappy. I really can’t be here. I feel like I’m going crazy. Once I even wanted to jump in front of a moving car so I could get sick leave . . . ”

  “What do you mean jump?”

  I could see how he suddenly perked up and peered at me, as if the phrase “his eyes lit up” had been invent
ed right then about him. But although I understood the meaning of his question and his newly alert gaze, I quickly downplayed the significance of the words I’d only just uttered, and said it was nothing, that I thought about it but I didn’t do anything, but that he needed to understand what state I was in and what thoughts I was having, so that he’d help me. Like an idiot, I thought he could help me. I am overcome again by the heavy realization of how naive I was about the destructive system that is the army: How could I have thought that such a pathetic officer, a petty officer with no power over the system, could help me?

  “I’d appreciate if you could give me furlough,” I said finally, a moment before he stood up and said he had a lot of work, and practically kicked me out of the office, completely shattered.

  “I don’t know if I can give you furlough now,” he said, and other than kicking me in the butt he did everything he could to make me leave his office so he could forget about me.

  I remember the night that awaited me outside. I remember the stifling closeness of the black air, the sensation of missed chances, of defeat, of failure. In the end I walked out of that office just as lost as I’d been when I went in, without even a shred of hope to help me get through the next day and go home for Shabbat. I’d been anticipating some sort of salvation, but again there was nothing. Again I’d have to get up the next morning with the same people, again I’d have to sit in that rotten war room, laminating and cutting, over and over again.

  I could feel the suffocation filling me completely and I didn’t know what to do. I knew I had no chance, that I was completely powerless in the face of the system and the people who populated it, people who weren’t interested in anything except their own asses and who didn’t even have the most basic human capacity: the capacity to listen and try to help. I walked along the muddy paths, and at some point, next to a storeroom, I leaned against a big green trash can and started to cry. I ran images of the next morning through my mind, and of the next week, and the days that had passed and would yet pass, and the long prayers and the stomachaches and the meals alone in my room, and the miserable, tedious work, and the mornings in the bunk bed when my eyes opened to the niggling ring of the alarm clock that always penetrated my dreams and didn’t stop ringing until the terrible understanding that there was no choice, I had to jump out of bed and quickly put on my filthy, baggy uniform, polish my boots, and stand for morning roll call full of dread because my boots might not be properly polished, or my beard, which I was allowed to keep because I was religious, might not have grown long enough since I’d shaved it on my weekend at home, and then to thank God that the master sergeant had run his eyes over my boots and my face without saying a word, and then the loneliness again.