BEAUFORT

Chapter One

A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE LOST A LOT of people since we lost Yonatan.
We’ve lost others since then, too, because another war broke
out and everything got more savage. But more indifferent, too. And
who’s got enough time on his hands to deal with what happened
back then? When it broke out we lost Barnoy. Then another eleven
guys. And when the numbers stabilized at nine hundred and twenty
and it looked like it was over, we lost Koka’s brother,
who’d followed in his footsteps and enlisted with us.
We’ve made love a thousand times since then, it’s not
like we haven’t, and we’ve laughed a thousand times. We
went on to other places, we escaped and came back, we remembered.
But quietly. We imagined how we’ll return to the fortress, to
our mountain. There’ll be a hotel there, maybe. Or a place
for lovers to park. Or maybe it will be deserted. There’ll be
peace. And I will lead her along the paths, we’ll walk hand
in hand. "Here, baby, this is exactly where it happened." And stone
by stone I’ll show her. She might even ask if that’s
the whole story. "How can that be the whole story? What made you
cry so much, it’s actually really beautiful and peaceful
here, everything’ green with trees, and quiet. This is the
place where you broke down?"

Try to imagine that they stick you high up on a mountain cliff,
higher than the roof of the Azrieli Building. How could you not
have a breathtaking view? Here it’s wide expanses of green
countryside checkered with patches of brown and red, snowy
mountains, frothing rivers, narrow, winding, deserted European
roads, and the sweetest wind there is.

Zitlawi used to say that air like this should be bottled and sold
to rich people on the north side of Tel Aviv. Christ, what quality.
So fucking pastoral you could cut the calm with a knife. Our
sunsets, too, they’re the most beautiful on the planet, and
the sunrises are even more beautiful, glimmering serenity from the
roof of the world. Bring a girl or two here when the sky is orange
and you’ve got it made. And dawn, an amazing cocktail of deep
blue and turquoise and wine red and thin strips of pink, like an
oil painting on canvas. And the deep wadi that twists away from the
big rock we’re sitting on. Try to explain how this could be
the place where you broke down.

But from that night I remember the lights of Kiryat Shmona, on the
Israeli side of the border, as they recede on the horizon, and
everyone’s beating hearts—I swear it, I can hear them
as we make our way up to the top that very first time. And from
minute to minute it’s getting colder. There’s not a
living soul around except for us, practically not a single village
in our zone, either. The convoy crawls along, gets swallowed up in
a thick fog, there’s no seeing more than a  hundred
yards ahead. Tanks are spread along the road to provide cover for
us. From a slit near the roof of the Safari I try to figure out how
far along we’ve come, silently poring over the map of danger
spots and racing through an abbreviated battle history, muttering
because no talking is allowed.

Where will the evil flare out from? I suddenly have the urge 
to shout to the commanding officer that we’ve gone too far,
but I bite my lip and remain silent. >From this moment on nobody
can tell me anymore "You haven’t got a clue what Lebanon is,
wait’ll you get there." I’m there, finally,
that’s what’s important. Along line, heavy traffic: a
supply Safari, a GI Safari, a diesel Safari, behind these an
ordnance truck with a big crane, an Abir truck carrying a doctor
and a medic, another GI Safari, the commander’s Hummer, the
lieutenant’s Hummer, and an Electronic Warfare Hummer. Oshri
asks if I’ve brought my lucky underwear with me. I gesture to
him that I’m wearing them. After all, our good fortune
depends on my lucky underwear. I’m wearing them, even if that
means thirty-two days without washing them.

And I remember how the gate of the outpost opens to let us in, how
the Safari comes to a halt inside a cloud. Everyone grabs hold of
whatever’s lying around—bags, equipment, your own or
someone else’s—and runs like hell inside. The
commanders curse under their breath—"Out of the vehicles,
run, get a move on!"—and people go down, people come up,
you’re not allowed to stand in place, you have to grab some
shelter. When the parking area fills up with dozens of soldiers the
enemy fires salvoes of mortar shells. And I try, but I can’t
see anything, don’t recognize anyone around me, grab old of
the shirt of some soldier I don’t know and get pulled along
after him. I’m thrown into a crowded maze, surrounded by
thick concrete on all sides, long passageways with no entrance or
exit, rooms leading to steep dead-end stairways, cul-de-sacs, and a
collection of larger rooms lit up in red, with low ceilings and
stretchers. Thirty seconds later I’m already in one of the
bomb shelters, a long and narrow alcove, a kind of underground
cavern with concave walls covered in rusting metal and cramped
three-layer bunk beds hanging by heavy iron chains from the
ceiling.

WELCOME TO DOWNTOWN someone has carved over the doorway, and inside
the air is stuffy, suffocating, a stench of sweat overwhelms you
again and again, in waves. This pit, called "the submarine," is
where my entire life will be taking place from now on. I consider a
quick trip to the toilet. Aseasoned sergeant tells me to follow the
blue light to the end of the hall and take a right, but he informs
me I’ll need a battle vest and a helmet. I decide to hold it
in. What’s the matter, is there a war on or something?
I’m really not in the mood to go up in smoke here right now.
Back then it seemed like it was light-years away when all it was
was thirty, forty feet, three green toilets with a graffiti
welcome—I CAME, I SAW, I CONQUERED.

JULIUS CAESAR—and an official military sign commanding users
DO NOT LEAVE PIECES OF SHIT ON THE TOILET SEAT so there is never
any chance of forgetting where you are living. And in the morning,
with the first sunrise, as the view of Lebanon spreads out before
us like an endless green ocean, our commanding officer makes his
opening statement, which he has undoubtedly been rehearsing for
weeks, maybe months, or maybe it has been handed down through the
generations: "Welcome. If there is a heaven, this is what it looks
like, and if there is a hell, this is how it feels. The Beaufort
outpost."

Once, Lila asked me what exactly Beaufort is and I thought how
difficult it is to explain in words. You have to be there to
understand, and even that’s not enough. Because Beaufort is a
lot of things. Like any military outpost, Beaufort is backgammon,
Turkish coffee, and cheese toasts. You play backgammon for cheese
toasts, whoever loses makes them for everyone—killer cheese
toasts with pesto. When things are really boring, you play poker
for cigarettes. Beaufort is living without a single second of
privacy, long weeks with the squad, one bed pushed up against the
next, the ability to pick out the smell from every guy’s
boots in your sleep. With your eyes closed and at any given moment
being able to name the guy who farted by the smell alone. This is
how true friendship is measured. Beaufort is lying to your mother
on the phone so she won’t worry. You always say,
"Everything’s  great, I just finished showering and
I’m off to bed," when in fact you haven’t showered for
twenty-one days, the water in the tanks has been used up, and in
another minute you’re going up for guard duty. And not just
any guard duty but the scariest position there is. When she asks
when you’re coming home you answer in code. "Mom, you know
the name of the neighbor’s dog? I’m out of here on the
day that begins with the same letter." What’s most important
is to keep Hezbollah from listening in and figuring out when to
bomb your convoy.

You really want to tell her you love her, that you miss her, but
you can’t, because your entire squad is there. If you say it
you’ll be giving them ammunition for months, they’ll
tear you apart with humiliation. And then there’s the worst
situation of all: in the middle of a conversation with your mother
the mortar shells start blowing up around you. She hears an
explosion and then the line goes dead. She’s over there
shaking, certain her kid’s been killed, waiting on the
balcony for a visit from the army bereavement team. You can’t
stop thinking about her, feeling sorry for her, but it might be
days before the phone line to the command post can be reconnected.
Worry. That’s the reason I preferred not to call at all. I
told my mother I’d been transferred to a base right on the
border, near the fence, Lebanon lite, not at all deep in—not
way deep in Lebanon—so that she’d sleep at night. Gut
feeling, you ask? She knew the truth the whole time, even if she
won’t admit it to this day.

Beaufort is the Southern Lebanese Army, local Christians, a crazy
bunch of Phalangists. Cigarettes in their mouths all day long.
Smelly, wild, funny. They come in every morning at eight
o’clock and we put a guard on them. They build, renovate
whatever’s been destroyed by the air raids, do what
they’re told. They’re not allowed inside the secure
area, not even permitted near the dining room.

Beaufort is guard duty. Sixteen hours a day. How do you stay sane
after thousands of dead hours? We’re all fucked up in
different ways, just do me a favor and don’t choke it during
guard duty. "Choke it" is our way of saying "jack off." It’s
not that there aren’t guys who choke it; they choke it big
time. You won’t believe this but a lot of people get super
horny from our green jungle atmosphere. I’m not kidding.
Nature is totally romantic, sensual. You would lose control, too.
And it’s not only nature that makes us horny. The Sayas
network at 67 MHz, used for open transmissions between the
outposts, can also give you a hard-on sometimes. It’s not an
official network—it got its underground nickname from a radio
broadcaster who specializes in melancholy late-night
chats—but everyone knows it because everyone, at one stage of
boredom or another, tunes the dial to Sayas, the guys’
favorite, where they can talk bullshit all night long and melt from
the female voices. That’s because girls from the command post
are on the other end, in the war room, hot as fire, no AC, no boys,
no reason not to unbutton their shirts a little, let off some
steam. They sprawl across their chairs—I’ll bet on
it—stretching their muscles, spreading their legs, dripping
hormones, dying for someone to make them laugh and slowly flirt
with them and in the end make a little date with them back in
Israel. Why not? Give them what they really need. Sure, baby, I got
lots of weapons. I got my short-barrel M16 flat top, a real beauty.
And my Glock, a fantastic pistol. And I also have . . . my personal
weapon. Measure it? You want me to? No problem, sure, I’m
happy to measure it for you, actually forgot how long it is,
apologies, baby. That’s the way you talk, making it up as you
go along, turning yourself on, and they giggle, toying and teasing
on that very thin border, one step over the line, one step back,
and you’re dying to believe that maybe at the end of the
night, when all the other guys drop out, the girls are left alone,
poor things, to satisfy one another. What, you don’t think
so? A few strokes, great stuff, nobody’s ever died of it.
Just don’t build any major expectations: the nicer her voice
is over the airwaves, the more of a dog she is. I take full
responsibility for that statement, I’ve been disappointed
often enough in my life. A high squeaky voice, on the other hand,
means you might want to invest a little time, because she’s
got mile-long tits. It’s a fact,

I’m not jerking you around.

Beaufort is going out on seventy-two-hour ambushes with a huge
supply of beef jerky in your knapsack. You can’t believe how
much of that stuff you can eat in three days. Beef jerky with
chocolate and beef jerky with strawberry jam. And how much you can
talk and talk without really saying anything. Pretty soon you reach
the stage where you know everything about everyone. Who did what,
when, with who, why, in what position, and what he was thinking
about while he was doing it. I can tell you about their parents,
their brothers and sisters, their not-so-close friends, their
darkest perversions. There’s a lot of alone time, too, when
you’re fed up with all that talking. You think about
yourself, your home. You wonder if your mother is hanging laundry
just now, or maybe she’s watching Dudu Topaz on television.
Lila’s probably showering now, too. Or maybe she’s
cheating on me.

Freezing cold—we call it "cold enough for foxes" up here,
ice-cube cold, the nose is frozen and the extremities neutralized.
The feet have been numb for ages. Fingers, too. That’s
Beaufort. You have cold burns all over but your belly is burning
hot, dripping sweat even. At these times everyone starts thinking
about some asshole drinking coffee on Sheinkin Street in Tel Aviv.
And here’s fucking me, smelling like diesel oil, sweating
from fear, lying in the middle of nowhere and nobody’s going
to help me if I die. Not the guy in that café on Sheinkin
Street, that’s for sure. When I’m blown to pieces a few
minutes from now he’ll keep drinking from his mug, probably
at the very moment it happens he’ll tell some joke and
everyone will fake a laugh and then he’ll go screw his
girlfriend, he won’t even turn on the news, and as far as he
is concerned, nothing will have happened this evening. Because
it’s business as usual for him. He drives to his desk job at
army headquarters every morning in the car that Daddy bought him,
finishes the army every afternoon at four o’clock, and drinks
coffee with whipped cream all the time. Blond hair, five
o’clock shadow, sort of ugly. Hate him? You bet, it helps
sometimes. Hatred is an excellent solution to boredom.

Beaufort is Oshri. He rolls over in my direction, lies next to me,
chews my ear off in whispers. Every time. "Tell me, Erez, please,
man: how did I wind up here?" he asks. "What am I doing here
dressed up like a bush? Why do I paint my face? What am I, a kid?
What am I, in some Crusader fortress, you fucking little prick?
What is this, are we living in the Bible? Am I some sort of retard,
pissing in bottles? What am I doing here in subzero weather, in the
snow, waiting to take down some Arab who decides to climb out of
bed at three o’clock in the morning? Does this make sense to
you? And then going back to that stinking trash can I sleep in up
at the outpost? Does that seem logical? Tell me, have you seen
where I sleep? It isn’t good for me here, really not good.
Grown-ups shouldn’t have to live like this, sinking in black
mud mixed with snow at night. It’s a bad fucking trip is what
it is. Open your eyes. People have been dying on this mountain for
a thousand years, isn’t it about time to close shop? I swear,
it doesn’t make sense that there’s such a place as
Beaufort. I’m telling you, there’s no such place and
we’re all stuck in this nightmare for no good reason.
It’s a mistake."

He goads me, tries every time to shoot the matter to new heights on
the scale of absurdity, astonishing himself, while I bust up
laughing, out of control, but it’s all inside so they
won’t see. I take care to hold it in. I know in a minute or
two the guy will sober up. I know him. Everything will look normal
again, logical. He chose to be here, and he has a good reason for
it, the best, and he’ll remember it. He loves the mountain,
it’s good for him. And I’m good for him, too.
He’s my soul mate, my good luck charm, my best friend since
the first cigarette at the induction center. Friend? No way:
brother! My brother, who knows what’s best for me better than
I ever will. He says, "Erez, draw a black sheep for me," and I draw
him a whole flock. He says, "Erez, give me a hug, you pussy," and I
climb into bed with him, squash his little body into the wall, fall
asleep holding him. He says, "Erez," and I know it’s for
life.

And sometimes Beaufort is a one-night ambush. Even then we bring
the beef jerky. Of course we do! One night, simple, like the one in
December ’97. I’m the squad sergeant, lying in a thorny
bush just as dawn is breaking, lost in thought. Calm. Like
I’m drugged. That calm. And my whole being is dying to run
down that steep, rocky slope covered with undergrowth, run to the
edge of the cliff and leap off. An incredible dive from the peak of
the mountain to the sweetwater runoff in the deep valley below, a
long, whistling plunge that thunders in my ears. I am dying to dip
into those waters, to float on my back, get swept away by the
current into the blue streams, lie in the shade of the soft, bold,
wild vegetation that crowds around the water and snakes after it
like a dream jungle. To warm up lying like barefoot nature children
on rocks: naked, horny, carefree. Dying to smoke a joint, get high,
laze around, snuggle. Oshri says you can hear the splash of the
water from below if you really try, but the closer you are the more
forbidden and dangerous it is. Beaufort is a cage of ugliness right
at the center of heaven. You hardly move one hesitant camouflaged
foot to the outskirts of our iron gate, groping, sniffing, then you
come back and close yourself inside our little enclave again. If
only I could fly along the rivers and by way of the mountains I
would be home already.

"Cheetah to Deputy One. Testing transmission."

"Roger, affirmative," I respond into the two-way radio.

"Functioning." I return to my long silence.

Bleary eyes, mountain air, a brown and green desert, orchards and
gardens, small stone buildings in turquoise and orange, olive
groves. Everything is spread out before us. Are you dozing off?
Dozing off? No way! Hey, you see that? You catch that? Is it what I
think it is? Yeah, yeah. Are they armed? Yes, absolutely.
Armed.

"Cheetah, this is Deputy One," I report. "We’ve got three
scumbags north of the Virlist road." Oshri’s got one in his
sights, Chaki another, and Bendori the third. They’ve entered
killing range, they’ve got packs on their backs, it
can’t be anything else. "Deputy One to Cheetah, marksmen on
targets. Do I have confirmation?" I wait.

"Deputy One, this is Cheetah. Negative, repeat: negative.

No confirmation, Deputy One."

"Cheetah, this is Deputy One, we’ve got them covered.

Scumbags. Awaiting confirmation."

"No confirmation, Deputy One. Negative, repeat: no confirmation for
action."

"But they’re moving forward. Fast. We shouldn’t lost
them. We’ve got them in our sights."

"Negative, Deputy One."

Negative? Why negative, you fucking assholes! Does it make sense to
you that I should lie here like some goddamn faggot missing an
opportunity like this? Does it really? No way. "Squad, on my count.
Four, three, two, one, fire. Twenty-one, twenty-two, fire. Prepare
to attack."

"Commander Cheetah to Deputy One, do not fire your weapons! No
confirmation, stay in position."

"Squad, prepare to attack."

"Erez, you psycho! Stay where you are. That’s an order! Erez,
you’re in violation of an order!"

"Squad, attack!"

Chapter Two

But anyway, my name is really Liraz. In basic training, at the very
first roll call, the platoon commander ran down the names and when
he got to mine he stopped. He didn’t like it, my name.
“Wait, wait. What’s that?” he asked.

“What kind of a name is that? Liraz? That’s a
chick’s name. From now on you’re Erez, like the cedars
of Lebanon. Congratulations.” Erez. That’s who I am to
this day.

Was there ever anything I wanted more than to lead --- on my own,
as commander --- a squad of fighters to the top of the 
Beaufort? You can be sure there wasn’t. But when I came back
from officers’ academy I discovered that nobody had any
intention of making my dream come true. My company commander said I
was too testy, hot-tempered, aggressive, impulsive. That maybe on
paper I was an excellent fighter who always looked for
opportunities to engage the enemy and always demonstrated courage,
but that I was a shithead of a person. Testy people, he told me,
can’t lead fighting squads. True, one time, I attacked a
military policeman. The little pussy caught me with mud on my
boots. I told him, “You piece of shit, I’m on my way
back from thirty-five days in Lebanon, I haven’t showered for
weeks, and at six this morning we suddenly got clearance and my
commanding officer shouted, ‘Run, Erez, get out of here now
or you’re stuck here another week.’ So what’s the
deal here, you going to fuck me up over a pair of muddy
boots?” But this guy, he didn’t give a shit. He wrote
out a complaint. But that’s not the whole story. That ass
wipe knows me from the neighborhood, in Afula. I said to him,
“Gonen, you’re pretty full of yourself, aren’t
you? You put a uniform on and became a big shot, eh? You know what?
I’m going to be generous with you.

Take your report, rip it up, and get out of here now. We’ll
forget about the whole thing.” He didn’t understand the
hint and fucked me over. I gave him forty-eight hours to let the
earth swallow him up and then I beat the living daylights out of
him. To this day, to tell the truth, I haven’t gotten over
the disgrace of it: a guy from Afula writing a complaint on a
fellow Afulan.

Okay, it’s also true that I was tried for willful desecration
of military property when I was a platoon sergeant. I threw a
two-way radio at somebody along with a few other small objects. And
when someone accidentally mentioned my sister, Vicky, I would lose
it. Lots of things would make me lose it. I even got sent to jail
for insubordination in that ambush business, when they shouted,
“Do not fire your weapons! No confirmation, you
psycho!” Sure, it was a long time ago, but turn me into a
training officer instead of a commander? No way I was going to deal
with paper targets, no way I would train soldiers to shoot without
first learning, through my own experience, what it felt like to
lead them at the front.

For weeks I stuck to the company commander like a leech. I begged,
went crazy, shouted, cried, refused jobs. I even asked to be
discharged from the brigade. They’d never seen anyone so
fired up before. But it didn’t impress them. Until the hand
of fate intervened and one of the officers left unexpectedly when
his father died. The position of squadron leader opened up and I
filled it. In actual fact I became squadron leader on probation and
under a magnifying glass. At the time, the kids were on a survival
navigation course at the brigade’s training base. I showed up
there one morning without insignias on my uniform and observed them
from the side, the thirteen of them. I didn’t introduce
myself, I didn’t approach them. They didn’t have the
slightest clue that I was their new commanding officer. For several
weeks I spied on them, eavesdropped, heard things. Heard things and
grew alarmed. For example, I heard Emilio shouting at Bayliss,
“What were you touching my bag for?” Just like that,
word for word. This is a squad here, you loser. Everyone touches
everyone’s bags, that’s the whole idea. Being a squad
means stealing Zitlawi’s potato chips, taking underwear from
River’s bag, lifting socks from Spitzer --- because his are
cleanest, everyone knows his mother uses fabric softener.

Being a squad means that you run to the shower, take off your
towel, and get swatted on your butt. The weather’s cold
enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey and you’re
dying to get under the nice hot water of the shower, but everyone
pushes you out, slapping you around from every direction, and you
just thank God you have friends like these.

But not these guys. I’d been handed a frigid bunch, not a
drop of group spirit in them. They weren’t connected to one
another, they didn’t put their all into what they were doing,
they looked sloppy. I got rid of their sergeant on the very first
day, a thickset asshole, too Ashkenazi. I replaced him with Oshri.
In my opening talk I recommended they forget the rulebook. Six
hours of sleep, an hour each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and
an hour of rest after every three in the sun don’t make a
fighter ready for Lebanon. That’s barely training for company
clerks, a bunch of girls. I brought them down to three hours of
light sleep a day, made them pull allnighters more often than not.
When I found a mess in one of the rooms I moved them out to sleep
in tents. When I overheard Itamar shouting at his mother over the
phone --- “All right already, shut your mouth!” --- I
informed them that there would be no more phone calls. Anyone
caught with a cell phone would be kicked out. To put it simply, I
was on their tails day and night. They did push-ups on their fists
on hot gravel until they bled.

“Like in jail,” I told them. “Like prisoners of
war. You can shout about it but nobody’s going to rescue you.
On the other hand, you can just open your legs and enjoy
yourselves.” After a few days you could see a spark in their
eyes, first signs of a common denominator. Not just any common
denominator but the most toxic of them all: hatred. They hated my
guts, all of them, to the very last man.

Well, maybe there was one exception. River, the medic. It started
during a complicated week of field exercises. The soldiers crawled,
trampled thorns, moved boulders, took out their aggressions on
nature. The usual stuff. When they were scratched up from head to
toe and Bayliss was dripping blood from his mouth I gave one last
and final order: At nine o’clock from where I’m
standing, two hundred and fifty feet from here, see that green
tree? Bring it down! Within seconds they had scaled it, stormed it,
were jumping on it, tearing at it, ripping away, a battalion of
elephants assisted by a rodent commando unit. Look at this, I said
to Oshri, they’re actually taking the thing down. But before
I could wipe the smile off my face I caught sight of River off to
the left, leaning on a rock and glaring at me. While I was still
contemplating what kind of punishment this unexplained loitering
called for, River approached me --- River, the quietest, most
disciplined soldier of all of them --- and said without hesitation,
“This wasn’t necessary. You should stop them.” I
swallowed. I felt so stupid. What had I turned into? A few seconds
passed before I muttered that he was right. From that day on I made
River work harder than all of them. I tore his ass, I shredded his
soul, I wanted to turn him into a fighting machine. Under me he
became a stallion, every vein in his body throbbing. At night, when
the squad would tuck into junk food and Coke and then a deep sleep,
I would leave him outside for medic training and physical fitness
sessions that sometimes lasted hours. At two in the morning he
would join me for a run around the base with Itamar slung over his
back, playing the wounded soldier. Itamar, who’s built like a
tank, like a D9 bulldozer. Even in hailstorms we went out. I turned
River into a two-way radio and made him run from commander to
commander for wake-up calls or to deliver messages. In the end,
when he nearly broke, I gave him five minutes to recharge his
batteries by leaning on an electricity pole. It’s not easy
being the soldier the squad commander likes best. River
didn’t bat an eye, didn’t complain. One day, when I let
him go back to his tent, I allowed myself to tell him I was happy
with him. I think I said something stupid like “It would be
my honor to be a wounded soldier in your care.” He said
nothing. Gave me that famous penetrating glare of his and I knew
--- don’t ask me how, it can’t be explained --- that he
was happy with me, too. There’s no making sense of
that.

My big brother Guy once told me that to be a squad commander is to
love. Thirteen fragile soldiers are placed in your hands, you
called them “the kids,” you drag them in their diapers
on a long, long journey through a dense forest of breaking points,
and the whole time you just pray that nothing bad will happen to
them. You worry about them, he told me, not about yourself, and
when one of your soldiers tells you that his uncle died of a heart
attack and you see the pain in the whites of his eyes, suddenly you
hurt, too, way deep down inside. The truth is, I wanted to suffer
from that kind of sick love. I swear it, I really tried. But it
didn’t work for me.

Sometimes I felt disrespect for them, sometimes even revulsion.
Sometimes anger, and every once in a great while a little
satisfaction. But most of the time I simply didn’t feel
anything at all. For a long time River was the only
exception.

I wanted to love Emilio, for instance. He’s a guy who came to
Israel from Argentina without his parents, only with his twin
sister, left all his friends and family on another planet just to
enlist in the IDF. Wasn’t he worthy of respect? Of course he
was. But how can you not go crazy from a soldier who pukes nonstop,
like some coffee machine gone berserk? On treks, during runs, when
he gets shouted at. And how about Tom? The guy’s on a jag:
red eyes, sees snails flying in the air, people zoning, drifting,
Muslims tripping out in Mecca, has no idea where he is, just goes
with the flow, floats. And Spitzer? Too relaxed. Itamar: too fat.
Bayliss, too religious and self-righteous. Boaz is too
enthusiastic, Eldad too vain, certain that all the girls are hot
for him. He’s disgusting, a spoiled Tel Aviv rich kid, an
intellectual pretending he’s down-to-earth, one of the guys.
And Pinchuk? Juvenile. Sleeps curled up with a teddy bear he calls
Yaron, thinks that’s really cool. Gets offended at nothing.
And Barnoy’s a bleeding heart and Zion’s dense as a log
and Koka’s just plain boring. And we’re actually on our
way to war --- as pompous as that sounds --- and how am I, as
commanding officer, supposed to love this squadron of weaklings and
whiners who aren’t capable of taking in what’s about to
happen to them? Two months at the training base seemed like an
eternity.

Chapter 3

And most especially, I wanted to love Zitlawi. How could you not
love the guy? Zitlawi is warm and funny and happy. He can charm the
pants off you. You’ll never hear him complaining.
Zitlawi’s a good friend --- the best --- and that’s
something I admire. I had a lot of reasons to love Zitlawi, I know,
but with all the will and effort it just didn’t work, because
Zitlawi doesn’t have an iota of discipline, no respect for
his commanding officers, too scatterbrained, spacey, the kind who
leaves his gun in the most irresponsible places possible. If you
don’t tie his hands and feet to his body he’ll lose
them in a matter of seconds. That drives me crazy. Truth is,
Zitlawi is a real arse, a small-time punk with a cigarette behind
his ear and a way of talking that makes everything sound like a
string of curses, even when it isn’t (it usually is). A whole
new language took root with us thanks to him, expressions and
pearls of wisdom that spread through the entire northern zone in a
matter of days. Back then, the IDF dictionary was putting out new
volumes every month, thanks to him.

To “ram,” for example. In our language it means sleep
deeply. The full term is “to pillow-ram.” It can be
conjugated, too: pillow-rammer, pillow-ramming, pillow-rammed. A
“rusher” is a quick make-out with a girl. A
“double-rusher” is a small rusher. A double can happen
between two guys, but not a rusher. An “owl” is a guy
who walks around with his cock in his hand, jacking off all the
time. A“terror dick” is one that gets nonstop hard-ons,
morning, noon, and night. During kitchen duty, watching
Schindler’s List on video. “Scud five”
is a huge dick.

A “ticket-taker” is a guy who sleeps with all the
girls. “Tevye the Milkman” also sleeps with all the
girls, but he’s a nerd with glasses. A
“fortune-teller” is a girl who puts out (when
you’re with her you’re “fortunate” because
she “tells you to screw her. See also: “ear-hole
virgin,” “boiler heater”). Then there’s a
“mezuzah,” a girl that everyone kisses, and a
“Pringle”: once she’s open, everyone wants a
taste. A“Magic Marker” is a girl that gives blow jobs.
“Hook up with a suckbaby” means go fuck yourself. A
sexy tourist is called a “foreign fuck,” “ironing
board” is flat-chested, “mosquito-bitten” is a
girl cursed with small breasts.

A “hummus” is a dumb soldier. A “flip-flop”
is someone thickheaded, a “schnitzel” is even more
thickheaded, and an “eggplant” is as thick as you get.
Athickheaded girl is called a “booma.” A brown-noser is
a “tangerine-peeler,” a soldier with no friends. A
“Herzl” is a fighter who talks too much about the
future, which comes from the guy who envisioned the founding of the
State of Israel. “Zionist” is another nickname for a
blabberer, or someone who sticks his nose into everyone’s
business. “Kapod” is a pet name for Sephardim,
“hardor” for Ashkenazim, and
“journalist” for Ashkenazim who tell lies. Zitlawi
calls everyone a fox, a shark, a hammer, a sleaze.
A“panther” is a fox that Zitlawi particularly likes. A
“pink panther” is a gay fox.

A“flamer” is a homo. A“momo” is a homo,
too. There are lots of ways to call someone gay: ass-checker, for
example, and zipper-reader, and doorpost-wiggler. Bed-shaker,
wallscratcher, umbrella-opener, pot-opener, soap-dropper.
Sheetripper, faucet-stealer, tile-chewer, tree-hugger,
sink-gripper, ball-grabber, pickle-dicer, shoe-tier, tea-stirrer,
thing-sucker, banana-straightener, horse-whisperer, pillow-biter,
feathercougher. Ahomo’s a guy who cries at movies,
disappoints his parents, rides a bike without a seat. He’s a
suckler, a limper, a bend-overer, an excavator, a nailer. A
champagne-boy is a homo, too, and so’s a sharpener, a
flutist, a Scout leader, a thong-wearer, a closet-lover, a
sit-pisser, an exhaust pipe, a bugler. “Omo” is homo.
“Sensitive” is homo. In fact, say anything but
“homo,” because it’s not nice to swear. And
lesbian? Don’t say that, either. “Carpet-nibbler”
is okay, you can use that.

“Strawberry-pisser” is someone who’s scared. An
“orange soda” is someone scared shitless.
“Toast” is a burnt-out soldier. A “draft dodger
in uniform” is a soldier with a desk job somewhere near his
home. “Fox-brained” is a code name for someone fucked
up by drugs and “rabbit” for a light user.
“Enchanted garden” is a hash den.

A “potato-chip-wetter” is a miser, someone who
doesn’t want you to hear him crunching. A
“marble-shitter” is a monster, a weird soldier, a
loner, so ugly he looks like he hasn’t really evolved. A
“sprinkler” is a bragger; the female version’s a
“Nile perch.” A “futt” is a fat slut. A
fox-scarer. A mud pie. A “kebab” is a fat guy.
So’s a “sumo,” someone so big he blocks the view.
Amale soldier who sits around doing nothing is called a
“semen-squanderer” while the female version is
“wasting labor pains.” A “yam-peeler” is
someone lazy. A “rivet-pisser” is someone who gets too
excited about things. “Siamese cat” is a spoiled brat.
“Chakhna” means stinky and
“karkhana,” a drugged-out mess. A
“chocolate situation” is one where nobody’s happy
and a “honey situation” is where they are. And to
Zitlawi I’m a “pinscher,” someone who barks all
the time but isn’t really dangerous, just a moaner.
That’s what he thought of me. Sometimes he also called me
“gremlin” behind my back, meaning someone with a nice
face but whose soul is dark and evil. Zitlawi himself was known as
“Psalms,” someone with a saying for everything.

“Jakha” is a personal favor. Do a
jakha for me, will you?

Jakha me. He’s jakhad and so forth, ad
infinitum. To “drum” is to stir coffee. Turkish coffee,
or Beaufort instant, with halva and walnut oil. Zitlawi would spend
hours, days, with the finjan and the thermos. If he had
his way he would pummel all the guys with blows and pummel all the
girls in bed. There wasn’t a single girl he wasn’t
prepared to mince, fry, spear, or devour, the horny bastard. No
holds barred, no pickiness, if you could believe the words that
came out of his mouth along with the drooling saliva.

And then there’s the worst curse of all: May your
prayeron-paper be nicked from the crack in the Wailing Wall where
you stuffed it.

Zitlawi’s most frequent saying: “Are you making fun of
the way I talk?” That’s what he would ask, with a
killer look, whenever one of the guys pointed out some mistake to
him, corrected his Hebrew, or, worst of all, dared to smile, which
naturally happened all the time. He was violent, but sometimes
good-hearted, too, like when he forbade guys in the company from
squashing the monsterlike grasshoppers that hung around near the
lights of the outpost. And Zitlawi had this little box of tapes he
would listen to, the collected songs of Hana Harman. Once I asked
him where she was from, that singer, and he was really offended.
“Hana Harman is not a she,” he told me,
“he’s a he.” And not just any old singer but an
Arab singer. One of the good Arabs.

I had a head-on collision with him when I took over command of the
squad, on the afternoon of the hottest day in history. The boys
stood facing me in rows of three on the roll-call field,
frightened, dripping sweat, waiting to hear the first new decrees.
They were wearing sunglasses on the order of the brigade medical
officer --- all of them except Zitlawi, who observed me with
smiling eyes. When I asked him why, he said, “What do I need
sunglasses for? My mother told me I shouldn’t hide my
beautiful eyes.” On the spot he got the first punishment, and
then again that night in the tent camp, when he was caught after
lights-out organizing “The Prettiest Goober Contest,” a
phlegm-spitting competition. From then on he never stopped getting
punished. In my first personal interview with him he spoke briefly
and dodged direct questions. He was a smart-mouth. The only thing I
learned about him was that he came from Tiberias, had three
brothers, and liked to listen to Yehuda Poliker’s music while
getting a blow job. There was nothing particular in his files from
the Adjutant General HQ or his army social worker to raise my
suspicions. Three weeks of insubordination passed before I
discovered the tip of the iceberg.

It happened when Oshri took the initiative, pulling Zitlawi out of
bed at three in the morning and dragging him without permission,
without prior coordination, for a walking tour of the cypress
forest just south of the eucalyptus grove near us, with a canteen
filled with hot tea. For the first ten minutes, as they walked
outside the base, Oshri didn’t utter a word, which caused
Zitlawi to fill the void with bullshit chatter. He tried to guess
the meaning of this hike, he cursed, talked a little about squad
matters and mostly about himself in an effort to hide the fact that
--- simply put --- he was terrified of the situation. When they
came to a clearing in the forest, Oshri sat at one of the three
rickety picnic tables that had been placed on the dirt there. He
waited a few seconds, then he asked, “Zitlawi, what’s
your story?” Yeah, what was his fucking story, what
was happening with the guy, what was the source of all this damage
he was doing to himself along the way? The kid played dumb, claimed
this was what made him happy, he was used to entertaining people
and if someone had a problem with it they should toss him out of
the military framework. He said he wouldn’t appeal to the IDF
chief of staff if he were kicked out, he wouldn’t rat to the
radio about abuse or hazing or breaching central command orders,
they had nothing to worry about, he would keep quiet, he said.
Oshri pulled two thin Indian cigarettes out of a wrinkled pink
paper bag, little ones made of dry rolled eucalyptus leaves. He lit
them both. Zitlawi sniffed the cloud of sweet, spicy scent that
filled the air --- or maybe the smell was bitter, kind of hard to
define, the odor of a campfire. “Why not?” he said.
“But isn’t there any boof, as long as
we’re at it?”

Oshri didn’t even know what boof was. Alittle cube of hash,
Zitlawi explained. Everyone has a pothead friend who keeps some
boof in the little condom pocket of his jeans for emergencies,
don’t they? Something nice for the guys at the right moment.
Oshri kept silent, lay back on the damp wooden bench of the picnic
table, and let the stars mesmerize him. And he smoked. He has this
kind of face that always looks mesmerized, narrow and dark and
closed, with especially tiny ears, only his lips big and thick, and
he’s all peace and serenity, a rascal who seems to know that
everything’s going to work out soon so there’s no need
to panic. Zitlawi remained standing, watching him from above.
“What do you want to hear?” he asked. “That the
crazy boy has unique qualities of his own? That he’s special,
different, like the kids in special needs classes?” Oshri
didn’t answer. “And what about you?” Zitlawi
asked. “What’s your story, Mr. Sergeant?”

Oshri was preoccupied with the halo around the moon and
didn’t even bother turning to look at him. Zitlawi lay down
on the table, too. They smoked three cigarettes one after the
other. It wasn’t until the third that they exchanged another
word, and then Oshri took the initiative again, kind of faking it.
“You got anybody to fix me up with?” he asked. He told
him he didn’t have a girlfriend --- here, something about
himself --- and in fact had never had one, because before he ever
had the chance to fall in love they always, every time, let him
know there was no chance, and now, in the army, the situation was
even worse, there wasn’t even anybody to look at and it had
been bothering him for some time now that everyone around him was
screwing right and left and he wasn’t.

Oshri finished talking and prepared his defenses for attack,
expecting a nasty comment. Zitlawi took a Snickers bar out of the
pocket of his uniform and broke it in two. “Sir!” he
said as he offered Oshri the bigger of the two pieces. “Now
that’s actually a matter I know something about. We’ll
work something out for you, you can count on me.” He said
this in a completely serious tone of voice, with compassion even.
And this really was a matter Zitlawi knew something about, because
girls of every kind threw themselves at him, insisting that
he’s sexy if not particularly good-looking. His face was
coarse and his body massive, the manliest guy in the company. And
he was funny. Girls love funny guys, especially during sex when
you’re getting turned on and talking, it gives them a
mega-orgasm. Then Oshri let his head drop backward over the edge of
the bench and said, “What’s gonna be?” Bingo.
That turned out to be an excellent question, even if it had been
asked unintentionally. Zitlawi grabbed on to it and used it to open
a peephole into himself. His mother was a fortune-teller, he told
Oshri, surprising him. A real one, though, a member of the union,
with diplomas and certificates and everything. The kind who knew
how to answer questions like “What’s gonna be?”
quite accurately. She studied Kabala and read coffee grounds, did
palm readings and tea leaves and oil, read tarot cards. She could
interpret dreams and do someone’s astrology chart and reverse
curses. She could make a former lover come back, get rid of the
evil eye, help with fertility and family matters and fears and
anxieties and low self-confidence, too, and lead couples to better
communication. She handed out charms for good luck and for failing
businesses, she was an expert in numerology and astrology, she
solved marital and financial troubles. She gave courses, appeared
at bachelorette parties and at events in private homes. In short,
she brought happiness to people. The only thing she didn’t do
was crystal-ball gazing. When people asked “What’s
gonna be?” she answered, in detail, and she was never wrong.
And ever since she accurately predicted the results of the
elections in Tiberias she’d become famous all over the north,
and visits to her were scheduled two months in advance at the very
least. Her name was Aliza, but people called her Solange and that
was also her professional name, and at home you weren’t
allowed to use the term “fortune teller.” Instead she
was a spiritual advisor, that’s what it was being called in
those last few seconds before the new millennium.