The Drive

by Yair Assulin

  I wanted to die. If there was ever a moment in my life when I genuinely wanted to die, when I honestly could have cocked my weapon and shot myself, it was then. I leaned against the big green trash can and stared at the storehouse and the road next to it. That’s where I was when Dad called and asked how the talk went. “It sucked,” I told him, and tears started streaming from my eyes again. “I don’t know,” I mumbled into the phone, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” I felt completely lost. What was there to be done at that point? What? Mom, throughout the whole story, with the whole disgusting mess of talks with the lieutenant colonel and the first lieutenant—and I keep having to write this over and over again—was as determined as a ball of fire. She was a lioness. She said she was calling him right then and that I should hang tight and not do anything.

  “I want to die,” I told them for the first time. “I want to die. I just want to die,” I said, like a man who has lost his last remaining hope. I was no longer afraid to worry or sadden them. I realized I had no choice. That if I didn’t tell them how I was really feeling, they would understand only after it happened.

  X.

  Mom told me later that she’d called the commander and told him she wanted to come and take me home; she didn’t want to get me back in a body bag and then have them tell her how sorry they were and how they didn’t know how such a thing could have happened. I don’t know what else she told him. I only know that after a while a soldier turned up, a guy I hated and who hated me, and he said that Eli had woken him up and told him to take away my weapon so I wouldn’t put a bullet through my head.

  How despicable can a person be? I thought to myself as I took my rifle off and handed it to the soldier. How despicable, to wake a soldier up in the middle of the night so he could take away my weapon just to humiliate me. That’s what I thought and that’s what I still think. Because why couldn’t Eli himself—the lieutenant colonel, with his two stripes, that fat slob who reeked of self-importance—why couldn’t he have come to find me by the green trash can and taken my weapon himself, instead of going to wake up that soldier? He wasn’t even capable of doing that bare minimum.

  “They took my weapon away,” I told Dror on the phone when I was on the way to the synagogue to pick up my tefillin, which I kept under the prayer shawls in the cabinet beneath the holy ark. “Those dogs want to humiliate me. They think this is how they’re going to humiliate me.”

  I shouted those words at Dror, and then I cried. I told him what had happened with Eli. He was the only one I called. I couldn’t take Michal’s encouraging words, or that loving, disgusting, stupid, tender voice of Ayala’s. In the synagogue I read Psalms for an hour, maybe more, until Mom and Dad called and said they were at the gate.

  Mom hugged me and I couldn’t stop crying. After a while I calmed down and looked out the car window. I pictured myself as a little boy, and I remembered how I used to like driving at night when we came back from a trip or a family event. Then I remembered that once I was coming back from a wedding with Dad and we listened to an old Israeli folk song called “The Lady in Brown.” I sang that song quietly to myself.

  Dad was wearing a blue tracksuit and Mom was in house clothes. Dad drove with a sort of determination and hardly spoke. I knew he was disappointed. I didn’t know how to placate him except to try to explain what I was feeling.

  “But I can’t understand it,” he said when I tried once again to explain what I was going through.

  “What can’t you understand?” I screamed. “What can’t you understand? It’s a fact, I want to die, I want to die now, today, if you hadn’t come I’d be dead. I’d be dead! Can you understand that?”

  My whole body was shaking and I couldn’t steady my breath. We were close to home by then and I felt as if I were suffocating. Mom kept saying, “Stop, enough. Calm down. Enough. Here, see, we’re going home.” When Dad repeated that he couldn’t understand and he didn’t know why I felt that way or how he could help, and that all he knew was that everyone got though it and even if it was a little rough then you got over it, Mom told him to stop already and be quiet and that this wasn’t the time for all those lines.

  We walked inside silently. When I lay on the bed I didn’t feel anything. For the first time in ages, I was calm. “I’m not going back there,” I’d said when we got out of the car and went inside, and that statement had calmed me. For one single moment I believed I could avoid going back to the army, that I could be saved from the decree I was committed to by law, from that thing that was dragging me into the abyss.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I.

  The journey to the mental health clinic grew slower and slower. As we got closer to the center of the country and the morning wore on, there were more and more vehicles on the road, and the air filled with dirt and a stifling sensation. Dad sipped the coffee he’d bought half an hour earlier at a gas station and looked at me.

  “These drives,” he said, “they remind me of our trip in the U.S.”

  “Yes,” I answered, “except the circumstances were different.”

  “True,” he answered hesitantly, and I knew he was bringing up that trip just to somehow break the tension. Then he said nothing, just crawled along in the line of cars moving heavily, each to its own destination.

  “Look at all these people,” he said and gestured at the cars around us in the traffic jam. “Look at them. Ninety percent of them were in the army.”

  “I know that, Dad,” I said, “but what does that have to do with me?”

  “I’m just saying,” he said, playing innocent. “It just drives me crazy to see you suffering, and I can’t understand it.”

  “I hope they help me at this MHO,” I said.

  Dad said nothing for a while, and then he said, “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure how they can help you. Even if they do, let’s say they move you to a different base, maybe even to one nearby where you can come home every day, I still don’t know how much that’s really helping.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure that the loss won’t outweigh the gain, you see?” He was talking about his fear that they’d give me a low mental health profile and I’d be considered mentally ill.

  “I don’t think there’s another solution,” I said. “I mean, I know there’s no other solution.”

  Then he repeated that maybe I needed to try harder, and I got angry again and said this had nothing to do with trying and that I was sick of saying the same things over and over again. He offered to talk to someone he knew, who might be able to help me without going through this whole MHO thing, and I knew how hard it was for him to ask for help, especially when he’d have to tell someone that his son had mental health issues, and worse—that his son couldn’t cope with the army, which every loser gets through without any trouble.

  “But Dad,” I said wearily, looking at the face of the driver sitting in the car next to us, “we’ve already tried talking to someone you know, haven’t we? It doesn’t work, all those talks.”

  “Yes, but maybe this time . . . ” he started to say, but he realized I was right, so he stopped talking.

  II.

  I remembered the last time he tried to get help, from a member of our synagogue whose son was friendly with the commander of the base where I was serving. That was after the furlough I got as a result of that night when I talked with the lieutenant colonel and said I was thinking about dying, and he woke up that pathetic soldier to come and take my gun, and Mom and Dad came to pick me up, and Dad told me again that he couldn’t understand it, and that I had to try harder and not give in so easily.

  I almost had a nervous breakdown then, and when Sunday came around and I had to go back, I told Mom and Dad that I wasn’t going, and I just stayed in bed and cried endlessly. In the end they broke down, called the commander and convinced him to extend my furlough. But after it ended, after I kept telling myself that I wasn’t going back to the army anymore, and I stupidly tho
ught I could get out of it, I found myself on the base again, and this time I was almost alone there, because everyone else was on the other base for some operation. They arranged for me to stay on the base without doing much of anything, just hand out maps from the “map warehouse” to anyone who came to ask for one.

  It was horrible. I felt trapped inside myself, wandering around an abandoned base all day. In the daytime I watched Channel One, the only channel the antenna picked up on the TV in the workroom, and I slept a lot. After being in that state for a week, then going home for the weekend and having to go back to the base yet again on Sunday, Dad told me he’d talked to someone from our synagogue who would arrange for me to get help from the base commander within a few days. But meanwhile, he said, I shouldn’t cause problems, because otherwise everything would fall apart and the commander wouldn’t help me.

  And indeed, after two days during which I did nothing except give one map to someone who’d come especially from the other base, and another time when the first lieutenant, Dan, suddenly turned up and didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t doing anything so he told me to clean the map warehouse, the son of the man from our synagogue called me.

  I remember his saccharine voice when he told me that my base commander had talked to him, and that starting tomorrow I’d be an “HQ soldier.” He said I should wait for the commander the next morning outside his office, and that he would see what he could do with me. I think about that sentence: “what he could do with me.” As if I was a thorn that had to be pulled out of someone’s foot. Or an infected wound that had to be lanced so the pus would come out.

  The next morning I waited for the commander by his office, but he went in and then came out without looking at me. Around midday I plucked up the courage, and when he walked out of the office again I explained who I was and asked when I could come in. He barely looked at me, just said I had to wait outside until he called me. I waited until evening, when he sent a soldier out to tell me I could go to sleep and come back the next day. That’s what happened the next day too. On the third day, he suddenly called me in and asked how he could help.

  I remember that he used the same puffed-up, self-important tone I already knew from the other commanders. The same weariness and impatience, as if he couldn’t care less about me. The same feigned innocence that characterized everyone who’d interviewed me up till then, the same revulsion at this broken vessel sitting before him, the person who’d waited for three days to talk to him, to this base commander who couldn’t even speak correct Hebrew, who’d never read a book or listened to classical music, who had nothing new to tell me about life or emotions or truth, who had nothing except the loathsome and unjust capacity to determine my future. To decide whether I would live or die.

  “You’re not getting a day job with me,” he said decisively when I asked if I could go home every day. “This isn’t a base for cunts,” he explained, “and if you don’t have a reason why you need to leave every day, you stay here like everyone else. And you do guard duty like everyone else and you do kitchen duty like everyone else. Got it?”

  “But I do have a reason!” I suddenly said with a confidence I hadn’t been aware of.

  “What’s the reason?” he asked, and a smile of contempt spread over his face. He lit a cigarette.

  “The reason is the same reason why I’m here. The reason is that I just can’t do it, mentally. That I’m unhappy.”

  “You’re unhappy?” he said derisively. “You’re unhappy? Do you have some sort of confirmation from a doctor or an MHO or a shrink that you’re . . . unhappy?”

  I wished I could tell him that if I’d wanted to go to the MHO and get an authorization, I wouldn’t have waited for him outside for three days, and that if I had an MHO’s authorization I’d have shown it to him straight away and gone home. Then I wanted to ask why he was being sanctimonious, why he was conveniently forgetting that he’d talked to the son of the guy from my synagogue, who’d told him the whole story, and that he’d promised to help me, and that was why he’d moved me to the HQ that he was in charge of. But instead of all those confident, solid words, the only thing that came out was a weak, muffled, “Do you want me to get authorization from the MHO?”

  I hoped he’d tell me to go to the MHO. I hoped he’d say he couldn’t help me, that only the MHO could. I hoped he’d say that so that I could tell Dad that even this violent man with the green eyes, the commander of the base, who acted as if he were omnipotent, who had the mediocre Hebrew of someone off the street, who in three years would be completely bald—that even he’d told me to see the MHO. I wanted to be done with this saga of asking people for help. I already knew that nothing was going to come of this commander either, and that without going to the MHO and getting a binding, official letter, it was all just a show of power and respect that each one of these people, these adults with their stripes, was doing on my back.

  “I don’t recommend seeing the MHO,” he answered drily. “I don’t recommend that anyone do that. But if you say you’re unhappy and you think you must be at home every day”—he mimicked my voice when he said that—“if that’s the case, then yes, you need to go to the MHO so he can give you an authorization that says you need to sleep every night in your own bed in your own room with your teddy bear or your whatever. Either way, I can’t help you.”

  III.

  After that talk, I told Dad what the commander had said and he simply refused to believe it. He asked me to repeat his precise words several times. Because Dad was fighting the idea of me going to the MHO since he was terrified of the repercussions of a mental health exemption.

  “You have to understand,” he kept saying, “you have to understand that in any case going to the MHO is not such a simple matter. I know you can’t see it now, but I know enough cases of people who had some problem in the army, and they thought the simplest thing would be to go to the MHO and ask for a mental health allowance, or a complete exemption, and after they did that and got what they wanted, they really were happy for a while, but now, in all sorts of respects, their lives are much more difficult. I’m telling you, I know these stories firsthand.”

  “What do you mean, in all sorts of respects?” I asked him.

  “In all sorts of respect means, first of all, in terms of work. You know that any potential employer, the first thing he’ll do, before anything else, is have you sign a confidentiality waiver and pull your medical records? Just imagine—what employer is going to hire a person with a mental health exemption to work for him?” Then he said, “Also, in terms of finding a wife, it’s not that simple. Let’s say that the woman herself won’t have a problem with it, because she’ll know you and she’ll know you’re totally fine. But think for a moment about her parents. What parents would want their daughter to marry someone who has mental health issues? Think about it: What are you going to tell them when you spend Shabbat at their house and the father asks you what you did in the army?”

  I sat silently for a few moments. The things Dad said frightened me. I didn’t want to ruin my life. But did I have a choice? I wondered. And I realized I didn’t. I couldn’t see any other option.

  “It’s better to live with difficulties than to die, isn’t it?” I said slowly.

  “Right now you want to die and not cope with the difficulties,” he answered quickly, using his ability to turn things upside down.

  “It’s not that,” I said, “there’s a solution here. Why should a person suffer this much, suffer so much that he wants to die, if there’s a solution to his problem?”

  “It’s not a solution. Don’t you understand?” he said, and I realized again how hard it was for him to accept that I would go to the MHO and have a mental health record. I remembered all the times he used to drive me to the base, more than an hour each way, and sometimes he’d wait there for whole days so I’d feel safe. Just like a parent who takes his child to kindergarten and doesn’t leave until the child stops crying, I think now. He used to call me a few times
a day to ask if everything was all right, and when I had to stay for Shabbat he would bring me food.

  There’s no doubt that Dad tried every solution he could think of, until that night, the night when I banged my head against the wall more than fifty times, the night when the three of us cried, him and Mom and I. He must have been filled with despair or a sense that there was nothing left to do. I remember him coming to my room at quarter to five in the morning to see if I’d fallen asleep, and finding me lying awake in bed, humming to myself.

  “Why aren’t you asleep?” he asked.

  “I can’t sleep. I can’t stop thinking.”

  “But you have to sleep.”

  I didn’t answer. He didn’t say anything either. I stared at the ceiling.