by Yair Assulin
“Do you want to go to the MHO?” he asked suddenly, and I could see the despair in his eyes mingling with tiredness and puffiness from crying. “Do you really feel that’s the solution?”
I didn’t answer. I kept looking up at the ceiling. Then I said I thought we’d tried everything else.
“If you want to, then let’s go. Get up and we’ll leave. You have to get there before eight, don’t you?”
IV.
I’m a lefty. I have to be a lefty. When that thought got stuck in my head, I asked myself: Have you ever been a soldier in the Occupied Territories? Do you even know what it means to stand in the sun for eight hours checking people who are trying to get from one place to another? Do you know what it means to feel the sweat dripping down your whole body? And to smell their sweat? And every single day to see those faces that hate you? And to be afraid that at any minute someone might blow your head off? You know they want to destroy us, don’t you?
No. I’ve never been a soldier in the territories. I haven’t stood in the sun for eight hours, except on school trips. And I know everyone wants to destroy us. Ever since I was a kid I’ve known everyone wants to destroy us. But I have to be a lefty.
“Why?” Dad asked when I told him.
“Why?” I laughed bitterly, “Why? Because I’m under military rule myself, don’t you see? Just like the Palestinians. I too get told when to go and when to come and what to eat and how I’m allowed to talk. I too get punished on a whim and screamed at on a whim and treated nicely on a whim, and on agendas and on questions of honor. And sometimes they let me suffer and they treat me indifferently, cruelly, just to teach me what military discipline is and what being a soldier is. And if that’s what they’re capable of doing to me, when I’m supposedly ‘one of them,’ their own soldier, someone who doesn’t want to destroy anyone, certainly not them, a soldier who only wanted to contribute what he could and get through his three years, then just think what they’re capable of doing to the Palestinians, whom they define as their enemy. Think!”
“You keep saying ‘them, theirs,’” Dad said, evading the political issue, “as if it’s not you, not us. As if you don’t belong to it.”
“I say ‘them, theirs,’ precisely because it’s me, us,” I said. “I say that because these people who are supposed to treat me like one of their own treat me like I’m their enemy, don’t you understand? Because they hate me too. I say ‘them’ because I just can’t stand this feeling that the entity that represents me, that is supposed to be my operational branch as a citizen of this country, as a human being, is exactly that entity— the army. And even worse, that this entity, which can legally demand that I be willing to die for it, is the entity that’s causing me all this suffering. Don’t you understand?”
V.
I remember the day I went to ask the first lieutenant for an authorization to see the MHO. He had to complete a form called “Commander’s Affidavit,” which stated that I was depressed, not useful, crazy. Without that form, no soldier can see the MHO.
It was on the base near Nablus. They were there again on some operation that occurred after a terrorist attack. In those days there was an attack almost every day, but I had no connection with that reality of terrorism. It was the first time in my life when I didn’t follow the news and didn’t know what was going on in the country, and to be honest it didn’t interest me. My pain removed me from the overall reality. I was no longer part of it, of that “us.”
I remember Dan, the first lieutenant, walking out of the tent that served as a mess hall. It was a hot day, and Dad had driven me to the base just to get the form, so that if I eventually wanted to go to the MHO we’d be able to go. That was after my talk with the base commander, who told me that if I wanted to get any kind of exemption I had to get authorization from the MHO. Dan—who was only a first lieutenant—walked out of the big tent, and for a moment he looked like Napoleon. His epaulettes looked as if they were raised up off his shoulders, as if he had shoulder pads. His hair was brown and dense and it was getting long. He had slightly slanted eyes. Light-colored. I couldn’t deal with him. I remember the look in his eyes when he saw me waiting for him: he looked as if he were cursing me.
When I saw him walking out and looking at me like that, I remembered the first time I’d seen him. It was when I got to the platoon and he interviewed me. I remembered his confident talk, as if we were at a debriefing for a military operation or about to conquer a house or a city.
“We’re looking for serious soldiers here,” he said, “soldiers who work and don’t mess around. Do you understand? I’m not interested in sob stories about your girlfriend who dumped you last week, or your dog who put a bullet through his head. What I need is work, period. Sunday through Thursday or Friday. Plus one weekend a month. Do you think you’re that kind of soldier? Can you handle that?”
“Yes, sure,” I answered immediately, to impress him, and then I added that I’d come to this platoon because it was where soldiers could make the greatest contribution, and if I couldn’t be in combat because of the asthma, at least I would be in a home front unit that made the biggest contribution.
When I think back to his disdain in that intake interview, I don’t think he believed all my lofty talk. And not because it was me, but because he already knew that all those words don’t last more than two weeks in that defective system called the army.
I also remembered the talk he had with me after Mom called him a few days after I broke down on the phone. It was at the end of the operation, the first one I took part in, after we’d come back to our home base. He was nice, maybe even more than that. He spoke to me candidly. We were in his room, and we each sat on a bunk bed.
“Look,” he said, “I don’t really know how I can help you. I mean, you know how it works in the army, you have to get authorizations for everything, and . . . ” It wasn’t his words that gave me a good feeling when I left his room, and made me call Mom and tell her I thought things were going to be all right. It was the way he said them, the honesty, without any talk of ideals. He lay on his bed with his shirt unbuttoned, smoking a cigarette. I also remember fondly how he offered me some Coke from the half-empty bottle next to his bed. Not that Coke was such a rare commodity or that I particularly like it, it’s just that since then, in all the talks I’ve had with people, no one has ever offered me a Coke or anything else to drink.
VI.
“I came for the MHO authorization,” I said.
“Did you bring the form?” he asked impatiently.
“Yes,” I answered, and I remembered all the times I’d felt affection toward him, when he was in a good mood and he would come into the workroom or sit down on the bench and talk with the other soldiers and me. I remembered that once I found a note he’d written to his girlfriend. He wrote that he loved her, that he wanted her to love him, that he was scared of being without her. He was scared of being alone and he felt things weren’t going as well as they used to.
Then I remembered that time when he told me he’d rather be in Intelligence than in army radio or somewhere were you did nothing, and that if he could he would continue to be a combatant. I couldn’t understand his admiration of the army, and I asked him a few times whether he was serious, and he looked at me and said he couldn’t understand why I was so surprised. Now I think that maybe in his case the admiration of the army was genuine. Maybe at the end of the day he really was a naive kibbutznik who thinks the army is everything. And maybe that’s why he didn’t go on about ideals. Because for him it was real, not just empty words.
“Okay,” he said when I handed him the paper, “wait here. I’ll fill it out.” He went back into the tent he’d just left. After a few minutes he came out and asked if I had a pen.
“Yes,” I said and tossed him a pen, and he went back in.
I leaned against the concrete wall opposite the mess hall tent. It was on the second base, the one where I’d broken down on the phone with Mom and Dad for the first time, a
nd cried the way I hadn’t cried for years when Mom asked how I felt and I could no longer say that everything was okay. I looked around at the base. I looked at the ice-cream machine next to me, outside the war room, rattling like a refrigerator. I remembered how every night when I was on shift I would buy a strawberry ice cream, and I would sit down on the cement wall I was leaning on now, and I would lick it slowly, to kill time.
Sometimes Ayala would call me on those nights. I remembered one time when she called after we hadn’t been in touch for a long time. She sounded sleepy and said she just wanted to tell me she loved me. I wanted to tell her that she kept disappearing and then she’d suddenly call and say she loved me or ask if I’d marry her, and that it was nuts and she had to decide if we were together or not, because sometimes it really drove me crazy and I couldn’t make sense of it in my mind. But instead I kept quiet and let her words, her hoarse voice, hoarse from tiredness and maybe from pain, fill me up, and I shut my eyes and felt the rhythm of my heartbeat, which sped up every time she said those words to me. To be honest, in those times, there, near Nablus, within the great loneliness I felt, those phone calls were my salvation. Them—and the synagogue.
Afterward I watched the soldiers walking in and out of the war room. Some of them I knew, others I didn’t. I hadn’t been with the unit for more than a month. After I crashed, and the lieutenant colonel took my gun and agreed that my parents could come and take me home and then agreed to give me furlough, I went back to my regular base, which as far as my platoon was concerned had been completely abandoned. That was thanks to intervention by the son of the guy from synagogue, and once I was there I kept getting more and more sick leave. I spent most of my sick leave days in bed, afraid to think about the day when I would have to go back. Sometimes I managed to suppress the pain for a few hours, but most of the time it was with me.
Some of the people I knew looked at me like I was a nutcase. Apparently after that night, when Lieutenant Colonel Eli woke up that dirty soldier and told him to take my gun away, he told everyone that I’d lost my mind. “Chin up,” one soldier said as he walked by and slapped my shoulder. I wanted to throw up in his face. I wanted to shout at him that I was fine. Completely fine. I wanted to ask him if the fact that I couldn’t get along in the army meant that there was something wrong with me. If the fact that I couldn’t get along in a system whose entire essence was honor and power and authority, and more honor and more power and more authority, meant that I was crazy. But I didn’t say anything. I just nodded like I knew things would be okay.
I looked at how pathetic they were, those soldiers who, unlike me, were supposedly “fine.” It was a kingdom of slaves, I thought. They walked around hunched, wearing uniforms like prisoners’ outfits. Their noses looked long and their eyes were red. Like ants. I swear. So pathetic, repressed, lacking selfhood, lacking the true ease felt by a man who sits in a cafe looking at a woman, or a man who laughs wholeheartedly at a good joke, out of happiness.
Then I remembered all the times they used to send me to the master sergeant, to be his gofer. I remembered mornings after roll call, when I’d turn up at the shipping container where all his equipment was, and he’d wave a roll of trash bags at me, which meant I had to go around the base picking up everyone’s trash. It was horrible. I remember the humiliation of walking among the soldiers, bending over to pick up Popsicle wrappers or cigarette butts or soda cans. It’s a lousy feeling that stays forever, I think now, right inside a person’s bones. I remembered myself walking among the laughing soldiers and asking them to move aside so I could pick up the trash they threw on the floor. So pathetic, wearing a ripped uniform with a fleece jacket that the platoon gave out when winter came, dragging an orange trash bag behind me. I remembered how sometimes, when it rained, I would slip and my pants would get muddy, and I couldn’t even shower properly to get the dirt off because there were so many of us sharing one shower, and by the time I got there it was all filthy from hair and mud.
Then I turned to look back at the synagogue. A small, messy room with a holy ark by the wall. I got up and walked in that direction. For a few moments I stood in the doorway. I looked at the prayer books piled in a cabinet that looked like it might topple over any minute. Then I looked at an unbound pair of tefillin sitting on the ark. The leather straps dangled out of the box like two nooses. I felt a calmness begin to fill me, the way it did back then, when I used to go there to pray and sit for hours, thinking and fantasizing and imagining. Sometimes I would just go in for no reason, sometimes even in the middle of the night when I was on guard duty or couldn’t fall asleep. I would turn on the light and look at the walls. Sometimes I would lean my head on one of the tables and cry. Silently. People who walked in thought I was asleep. Some would leave quietly, so as not to wake me, and others would curse me and all the religious soldiers and say that instead of helping other soldiers I always made up some nonsense about how I had to pray when in fact I was going to sleep and “shafting” everyone.
VII.
I remember that once someone came into the synagogue, the one on our regular base, and when he saw me there he let out a curse. I can’t remember whether he cursed me or all religious people. I looked up and he saw that my eyes were red and puffy from crying, and he just walked out silently. Throughout that awful period in Intelligence, the synagogue was my hiding place, my refuge, my fortress. The place where I could escape or return to. The place where I could sit quietly and look at the wall, or sing to myself, or talk to myself, because who else did I have to talk to? For me the synagogue was like a terminal, a neutral place where no one could touch me no matter what happened. Outside they could destroy me. They could judge me for no good reason, they could throw me into prison just like that, they could ground me on the base for more than a month, they could laugh at me and curse me and scorn me. But all that was only on the outside. Inside the synagogue, I felt protected. Inside that terminal between the worlds I felt as if I could resume being an ordinary person. The way I did on weekends, from Thursday night or Friday through Sunday, when I went to synagogue with Dad and we talked about the situation in the territories and the corruption and about how something fundamental had to change in this country, otherwise the whole thing would go to hell and all the people who dreamed of a Greater Israel could keep on dreaming while they begged for a visa to get into some other country. We talked about other things too and after we came home the whole family would eat dinner together, and Mom’s food was delicious and it wasn’t swimming in oil and it didn’t give me indigestion or heartburn. Then I would meet Dror and we’d walk around for hours, talking, or I’d go out for a drink with Ayala. At first, when I’d only arrived on the base after leaving the combat boot camp because of the asthma that no one believed I had, I could lose myself in fantasies about my “ordinary” life at night too without anyone disturbing me. But that didn’t last long because of all the operations and guard duties and missions, and then all I had left was three daily prayers in the synagogue. A creaky chair in the corner of a little room crowded with prayer books arranged on the shelf like a heap of bodies, and various other moth-eaten books that people had donated and that were lying around the synagogue gathering dust.
VIII.
It was in the army that I found God. I write “found” because I can’t say that I discovered Him there: I was religious before joining the army, I went to religious schools, I was part of Israel’s religious life, I was in a religious youth movement and I wore a yarmulke and I put on tefillin every morning, and there were even times when I was part of “the religious dream,” the one that speaks of a Greater Israel and flattens out all the other values that Judaism offers. But despite everything my upbringing had instilled in me, one could say that I only found God in the army. There, of all places, among the dirt and the hypocrisy and the human foulness He created, I found Him. I found Him putting His hand on my shoulder when I cried, or playing music for me or singing me a lullaby when my soul was shattered. Those were the
moments when I would shut my eyes and float off to other places, other lives, sometimes my own life on the outside, my “ordinary” life, and sometimes completely different ones. Sometimes I would stand on high stages or mountains. Sometimes I would sit on a chair while a pianist sat opposite me, playing only for me. Sometimes I would laugh while I floated. Sometimes I would cry. I had someone to talk to. I could talk to Him. Simply to Him.
Once, when Dror and I sat on a park bench near my house talking about God and what God was, I told him I had no idea what God was or where He existed, and that all I knew was that I loved Him, that I felt love for Him. When I write love I mean real love, in its purest sense, the way a man sees a tree and knows that it’s a tree, and even though countless philosophers can prove to him that he can’t really know it’s a tree, he will still eventually hold out his arms and say that it is a tree. That is how I love God. I remember standing in the middle of the park, tired because it was late, yelling at the top of my lungs: “God, I love you! I love you!” And there was nothing in it beyond the simple emotion of love that filled me.
I know it sounds strange to feel love for something you can’t see or hold in your hands, but that’s how I felt. That’s how I still feel. I remember that night again, when they took my gun away and I went to the synagogue to wait for Mom and Dad. I remember the tranquility I felt there, among the pews in front of the holy ark. I remember feeling as if someone were putting his hand on my shoulder and telling me everything would be okay. “But how will it be okay?” I shouted silently, wordlessly. I felt the hand on my shoulder again. I felt the tranquility again.
IX.
I sat there lost in thought about that army base, which had treated me kindly—with or without double quotes—and then broken me down once and for all, and after a few minutes he came out of the tent: a bushy-haired, slant-eyed Napoleon, a first lieutenant in the Israel Defense Forces, carrying two coffins on each of his shoulders.
