The Drive Read online

  V.

  In fact I never shared the preoccupation with these things called “army” and “values,” or with the dubious glory of “defending the homeland.” It is true that when I was a boy I liked to picture myself as a magnificent warrior with a hefty body, and I even imagined recounting to everyone at Friday night dinners what we’d done that week, or not recounting but sitting there proudly silent so that everyone would understand that “there are things best left unsaid.” When I forecasted my own death and how the army notification officer would come knock on the door, I enjoyed watching the sorrow fill Mom’s eyes and fill me with stupid conceit until she yelled at me to stop. But when I got older it simply passed, the way all kinds of childish thoughts you don’t fully understand pass. That was before I really knew what the army was and what the whole story was. I understood all the clichés people used to explain it, but I no longer believed in them. And because I was no longer part of the military story by the time I got to high school, when everyone talked about commando units and how they were working out so they’d be ready for service—some kids didn’t just talk but went running on the beach or did all kinds of treks with weights strapped to their legs “to improve endurance”—I looked down on it, and I said I was positive the army knew how to prepare its soldiers and there was nothing stupider than starting military service before it really started. But even though I’d always known that the whole business with the army and values and defending your homeland was a big show, it was only in the car that day, when the two of us were driving to the MHO, while Dad searched for a pen in the ashtray next to the gearshift to write something down about a postponed meeting, did it suddenly become very clear to me, clearer than all the times I had considered it previously, that no one really believed in those lofty concepts, and that all the talk about protecting the homeland and giving back to the country was the empty rhetoric of people seeking respect.

  I remember my enlistment day. I think it was the saddest day of my life, at least up until that point, because afterward my life began to sink and rapidly lost color. We went to a concert the night before, and even then I could already feel the contractions in my belly, which were pretty similar to what I used to feel every year in the last few days of summer vacation. The feeling that what little time was left was already lost, because it was entirely devoted to the bad things lurking around the corner. The music was wonderful and Ayala and I held hands throughout the show. There was a sense of grace, and I did not understand—or perhaps I understood but did not translate the understanding into thought—that the grace would be followed by a heavy toll. When I woke up the next morning I did not want to get out of bed. My hair was cut short and my face shaved, and my gear was arranged in a backpack that sat next to the mirror. I looked at the books on the shelf, then at the CDs in a metal rack next to the stereo system, and I felt terrible. Dad, who woke me up, was also hesitant. He said the big day had arrived, then he quipped that I should remember that the really hard part was the thirty years of reserve duty after my regular service.

  I washed my face and looked at myself in the mirror. I remembered how Nir had told me that the day before he enlisted he went into the bathroom at the Haifa mall and burst into tears. He just sat there on the filthy floor and sobbed. “For at least half an hour,” he told me. I wanted to cry too. Horrible pressure filled my windpipe. Then Mom, Dad, Tal, Galia and I left the house, and we drove to the central bus station in Haifa.

  I remember now, as I remembered then, on that drive to the MHO with Dad, how the Egged buses were all lined up. I also remember Ayala and Dror and Michal and some other people who came to see me off. Some of the girls there were very beautiful, and there were lots of boys playing at being real men because they were joining the army, so they hugged their girlfriends with one arm that was muscular and puffed up from training. There were parents who had only to give those boys a single look to remind them that they were still children. And there were friends looking forward to the day they enlisted, or dreading it but turning the fear into fake happiness for the sake of whoever was joining up. There were some who were already in the army and knew all the time what was going to happen, including a few who plainly evinced suffering in almost every move they made, and others who’d already turned into part of the machine called “the army” and talked about it admiringly.

  VI.

  First we waited downstairs, on the same floor as the restaurants, all of which except one bakery were closed because it was so early. Dad asked me if I wanted something to eat. “Maybe bourekas or a croissant? I’ll bring you something with coffee.” But I couldn’t eat and I said I wasn’t hungry: “What I had at home was fine.” Dad said that was okay, he was pretty sure they’d give us lunch after we got to the induction center: “You never go hungry in the army,” he promised. When I think about those words now, I try to recall a single meal throughout my military service where I left feeling full. It is true that some people would eat anything, even chicken drumsticks with bread or tasteless spaghetti with bread, and they left full. But I’d always been a picky eater and I was never able to eat the way they did, and I always left hungry. After particularly greasy lunches, I also had heartburn.

  After standing around for about half an hour in the food court where everything except the bakery was shuttered, trying to chatter like everyone else, as if everything was the same as usual and all of us boys standing around with our buzz cuts and close shaves were going on a school trip, and people kept offering advice or asking if I’d taken this thing and if I hadn’t forgotten the other thing, we went upstairs into a big room where a soldier was reading out the names of all the draftees. On the way to the MHO, the memory of that scene suddenly shocked me. I remembered that soldier, who was roughly my age and was sending me off to three years of slow death. In those moments, while I waited for my name to be called, everything mingled inside me. On the one hand I wanted that damn soldier to call my name already, and for the waiting to be over so that the cursed three-year clock could start ticking. I was tired of all the looks I kept encountering, from my parents and the other people who were smiling at me as if they were silently reciting stupid platitudes like “what a great nation we are,” or “such sacrifice,” or “where else do young people serve their country before going to university?” I wanted the lie to end and the smiles to be wiped away and the army to begin. But on the other hand, with every moment that passed without my name being called, I breathed a sigh of relief, because perhaps in some unconscious way I thought that each moment when my name was not called was another moment in which I could escape, another moment in which I could stand up on one of the metal benches and scream that I didn’t want to go anywhere, that I didn’t want to be a soldier.

  Every few minutes I glanced at Ayala. Sometimes she looked beautiful and sometimes horribly ugly. She stood there with a knowing look, as if to say, “I told you so” before anything had even happened. As though she could already see the future that I could not yet see, with the pain that would come, the phone calls late into the night, the crying, the end of our relationship.

  After a few minutes they called my name. Like all the other names, mine was called by that soldier, who I only now understand was around my age, wearily doing his job and waiting for the day to be over without paying attention to the repercussions of what came out of his mouth. Everyone hugged me quickly, and Ayala, who was wearing jeans and the cutoff shirt she’d worn the first time we met, gave me an especially close hug. I loved her very much at that moment. I remember that Michal cried. She’s the kind of person who always does what you’re supposed to do exactly when you’re supposed to do it. Dror hugged me, and I think Michael did too. Then my dad came over and told me it wasn’t easy, but everyone did it and he’d done it too, and he believed I could do it. Mom and Tal and Galia wished me luck. Mom cried when she hugged me.

  VII.

  When I was a boy, and sometimes it still happens today, I used to reconstruct situations I’d been in tha
t had led to bad things, and I’d think about what I should have done differently. I particularly remember doing that after I got into fights with kids who were stronger than me and made me surrender, and then, in bed before falling asleep, I would reconsider where and when I should have given them a kick or a punch that would have finished them off. I would imagine them lying on the floor, begging for mercy, while the other kids, who in reality had made fun of me, stood there marveling at my strength. That’s how I would imagine myself to sleep. That’s also what happened with that enlistment scene, when they called my name and I said good-bye and walked to the bus with my backpack on my shoulder; the evening before, I’d crammed it full of all the items on the list they’d sent me in a brown envelope with a red stamp from the State of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces.

  I ran that scene through my mind many times, and tried to imagine what I should have done differently. I imagined that I pretended to get on the bus but at the last minute I went around the back and disappeared, then ran to the sea, which was walking distance from the station, and hid under a big rock just like Dad did when he was a little boy and they tried to shave his head and douse him with disinfectant. Even though I knew there was no chance of getting away from that monster, the army, in my imagination I succeeded. I imagined how I ran away, and how I hid on the beach and went home after a few hours, and Mom, in the kitchen, was surprised to see me back and asked what had happened, and I told her that in the end they didn’t need me, they’d let me go, and that I was tired and going to sleep, and she smiled and accepted what I told her as if it made sense, and went back to cooking.

  VIII.

  Dad stopped the car on the side of the road and got out to wash his face. When we’d left home it was still dark, too early to say the dawn prayers, so Dad said we would pray “when we get this business over with.” He took a bottle out of the trunk and splashed his face with water. There was a cool breeze and I zipped up my army fleece jacket. My feet hurt and I saw flocks of birds flying over the moshav we’d stopped outside. I was wearing an army shirt, untucked, and army pants that covered the red boots because I hadn’t secured them with elastic bands. I looked at Dad. He saw my look and put his hand on mine. I told him I was sorry, and he said there was nothing to be sorry about, that he knew I was telling the truth, but all he was saying, again, was that he could not understand what was so bad for me there, and that he thought or feared I wasn’t telling him everything, because if I was then he simply could not understand why it was so bad.

  “Are you getting three meals a day?” he asked. “Are you sleeping? Are you showering? Because if so, then I really cannot understand what’s so bad there.” He paused for a few moments and then asked if I was being abused, “because if you are, tell me, and then I can understand, then we can take care of it. Answer me, are you being abused?”

  I remember his eyes narrowing and widening as he talked, and I remember thinking about how I must have inherited my oratorical skills from him, those methods for getting your listeners’ attention and riveting them to what you’re saying, like narrowing and widening your eyes. I had the same exact thought the night before the drive, when he came up to my room after I’d banged my head against the wall repeatedly, and Tal, whose room shared a wall with mine, had asked me what was going on, and when I couldn’t stop crying she’d run to call him and Mom. I remember his slippers gently flapping up the stairs and Mom behind him. I didn’t know what to tell them but I knew they had to see me in that state because it was the only way they would understand that I was really crashing. I remember that he hugged me, and Mom sat down on the edge of the bed.

  “First of all, calm down,” he said. Then he asked me what I wanted to do, and all I could say, over and over again, was that I didn’t want to go back. Then he asked, or perhaps it was Mom who asked, if I was being abused.

  IX.

  No, I wasn’t being abused, and I honestly did not know how to explain my condition. What I did tell them was only because I had to say something that would sound like a reasonable explanation for my mental state. I repeated that the army was suffocating me. I said that all around the world, this was the age when a person should be flourishing, and I felt as if I were dying in the army. Why did we Israelis have to do that? I said I was dying, that I couldn’t breathe in that place.

  “But why?” Dad kept asking, over and over again. He could not understand, or rather, he refused to understand, this thing that had been present in me all those years but had now become impossible to ignore: that I was, apparently, not like everyone else. Not like all the people who just decide to do the army and then do it, and no matter how bad things are, they still get up every morning and go. Some even turn their suffering into a principle and milk it for the respect that stupid people give them and the stories they can tell their friends on weekends and at family gatherings. Many of them even come to believe that the army is a “formative experience,” that it’s “wonderful,” that it “builds character.” What stupidity.

  I have never understood how people can make a principle out of suffering, especially in the army, where I felt that nobody really cared about me and whether or not I was making a contribution, as long as they could climb over my back and suck my blood for their glory or their rank or even a few words of praise. Dad said I had to learn to be more flexible, not to demand perfection from everything and everyone. But the truth is that I don’t demand perfection. Not even close. I simply ask that every person be what he demands from others. Just that.

  I remember one soldier from my intelligence unit, who would always—especially on operations that were notorious for lousy conditions—exploit a back problem he once had and complain about pain, so that he could get sick leave and stay home. Everyone would get mad at him and curse “that asshole who always shafts us,” and I would just sit quietly to the side, because I knew that every one of them would do the exact same thing if given the chance. And how infuriating and disappointing that the one time I got sick leave and had to go home—and it was a justified sick leave—it was that guy, of all people, who came over to me with his big nose and his blue eyes and told me I was “shafting everyone and he was sick as fuck of it.” I didn’t say anything, but that night in bed I thought I should have screamed at him and told him he was the last person who could say something like that and that he was a big fuck himself.

  X.

  Dad finished washing his face and got back into the car. I sat down a few minutes later, after standing outside a while longer looking out at the moshav, with chicken coops stretching all the way from the highway to the houses, and thin, bare trees in the middle. I hated that landscape. I hated the stench that was already rising from it in this early morning hour, filling the air. I looked at a house where a light was on, and I thought about Ayala. She’d called me a few times the night before but I hadn’t answered. Every so often she calls me and talks about how hard it is for her that we’re together but not together, and yesterday I was tired and did not have the strength to get into all that again. Then Dad gave a little honk and jerked his head at me to get in. He signaled left and merged into traffic, which was picking up now.

  I put a Leonard Cohen CD on and listened quietly to the first song. I remembered a conversation Ayala and I had about a month before, when I was trying to decide whether or not to see the MHO. I told her I was afraid of the asinine way people looked at anyone who’d been to the MHO, as if they were crazy or a menace to society, or at best a despicable shirker who refused to give back to the country that had raised him and protected him and cared for him. Then I told her that in our religious community, where everyone knew everything about one another, the whole business of stigmatizing people who get mental health exemptions was especially bad, and that she couldn’t do anything about it because that was the society I’d been born into, and the fact that I wanted to live a religious lifestyle forced me to stay in contact with it to some degree, and to tolerate its negative aspects.

  I remembered
that we sat in the car while we talked. We were on the coast. I did not look at her but at the empty, black beach. I don’t remember if it was raining that evening, but I remember the strong winds that rocked the palm trees they’d just planted along the beach. I talked more and more about my pain; I’d never talked about my pain that much. Once in a while I stopped the flow of speech and sat silently for several moments. I remembered saying, “I’m scared that I won’t be able to get married,” and that sentence echoed in my mind. I remembered that I looked at her, at her black hair and white skin. We probably kissed after that, I’m not sure. I remembered that she stroked my face and said the problem was solved because “I’ll always be there for you.”

  How pathetic words are, I thought in the car on the way to the MHO, while Dad hummed “Suzanne” along with Leonard Cohen. A year ago, I called Ayala and she wouldn’t talk to me. “I want to erase you,” she told me, and awhile later I saw her with a guy I used to know a little, and they were kissing. “I’ll always be there for you.” I play that sentence over and over in my mind. I don’t love her anymore, and if I’m being honest, it’s doubtful I ever did. But that betrayal of words, the capacity of people to say things without really meaning them, or to say things and take them back, or even to say them and deny they’d ever said them—that betrayal drives me mad. I think, sadly, that I might need to let go of my naiveté about words, which makes me believe what people say.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I.

  Now in my room, the times commingle. Only that drive to the MHO with Dad remains, like a spine running down the whole time period. I remember one night when Ayala and I stood in a big parking lot and she yelled at me that I didn’t understand her. That she couldn’t talk to me. That there was no point in talking with me. I remember that I threw up all night afterward. Ayala was a very commanding figure throughout that whole era of “my army.” I don’t know if that’s where our decline began, or if there were a few little stones thrown in our path even before I enlisted. But it’s clear that the whole period of joining the army, the depression, the madness of banging my head against the wall, standing on the side of the road thinking about jumping in front of a car, and my strong desire for absolute silence—all that was a very significant blow to our relationship.