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| The Mirror |  | |  | |
by Jessamyn Hope | |
Gilad, who only a few hours ago was practicing Beethoven in the kibbutz dining hall, now sweltered in the back of an army truck that was careening down a hill to avoid getting hit by Coke bottles filled with gasoline. In the movies, American GIs took ocean liners and stopped at half a dozen foreign cities on the way to the front, but for Gilad only an hour on a public bus came between eating scrambled eggs at his mother’s kitchen table and gripping an M-16 and heading down to stifle a West Bank riot.
The other guys of Unit Almond were quiet, too. Postings were only supposed to last four months in the Occupied Territories—or what Manny, the yarmulke of their unit, loved to call Judaea and Samaria. As for the rest of them, they really didn’t care that this was the actual location of the biblical Kingdom of Israel, and just wanted to hurt someone when every time they started to pack their duffels, their commander Dan came in and said, “Sorry, boys. Two more weeks.” Sighing, Gilad joined his friend Nir in peeking through a hole in the truck’s dark green canvas.
Black antennas ran along the flat roofs of unfinished houses like barbed wire, piercing the sky, bringing in the TV news and soap operas of Damascus, Cairo, Beirut and Amman. A sole woman stood in front of a gate, blocking the sunlight from her eyes, her blue dress and long black hair blowing in the wind. Gilad wondered what the woman should sound like in a composition: a sad, minor note or a neutral note held just a little longer than expected? He decided sustained neutral note because there was something even more heartbreaking about things just being what they are and that’s that.
“I did her,” Nir joked.
Gilad turned back around and reached for the smokes in his pocket. It wasn’t like he was a diehard peacenik or anything. He got the stakes. When he was just a small mass of cells in his mother’s belly (an empty belly because it was Yom Kippur), his father took a Russian bullet from a Syrian gunman on a hill in the Golan. But that didn’t mean Gilad wanted to be in the back of a stinking army truck. No, he was no more a hawk than a dove. He was just a guy who wanted to practice his damn piano. He held the pack out to the other boys, and even though they were cheapo Noblesse, they all helped themselves and soon the truck filled with smoke.
Leaning back and taking a drag, Gilad wasn’t a particularly handsome guy, except that he was eighteen, which may not have meant much to anyone else who was also eighteen in the spring of 1994, but to the rest of the world, there was beauty just in his age. The clear blue eyes picked up somewhere in the two thousand years of exile in Eastern Europe contrasted with the tanned skin of a kid who grew up playing hide-and-seek on dry hills in the Middle East. His already pointy chin, long-limbed height and slouching shoulders were made all the more awkward by the six kilos he dropped since becoming a paratrooper. Sharp knee bones pushed against his worn-out khakis.
Gilad glanced over at Nir, short, delicate Nir, who not only didn’t do the Arab girl, but probably had never done any girl. At the end of every weekend leave, the two of them rode the bus together from Haifa to the base, Gilad barely able to keep his eyes open after playing the piano all night, and Nir going on about some “crazy” experience around a beach bonfire or in a desert cave or at a trance party where he almost—always almost—did it with some pretty girl. But it wasn’t just the anticlimactic stories; even the way he smoked betrayed the soldier was a virgin, holding the cigarette between his pale, feminine fingers like it was a joint, looking too intent when taking a drag, trying too hard.
“Alright, listen up,” said Dan, looking back at them from the front passenger seat. “No escalation. Just containment. No shouting, no threatening, no rubber bullets, nothing. Just keep things contained. Beseder?” Dan was only a year or two older and sometimes Gilad amused himself with the idea that this whole show was being carried out by kids who in America were hardly old enough to be on MTV’s The Real World. Gilad often compared his life Beverly Hills 90210, Guns N’ Roses videos and Levis ads.
As they got closer to the town square and the sounds of the riot began to make their way into the truck like the muffled dissonance of an orchestra warming up, Gilad tried to eke some calmness out of the remainder of his cigarette. Drawing in the nicotine, he told himself, yes, his American alter-ego might get to practice all the time, having no responsibilities except to his music, but Gilad might actually end up being a better artist, for whatever he lost in technical proficiency during the long days and nights on the West Bank when his fingers were busy with binoculars and helmet straps instead of ivory and ebony keys, he gained in poetic urgency. Music made it all worthwhile for Gilad. Even the worst experience could be transformed into something of meaning and beauty if you were an artist.
The truck stopped. They all scrambled out the back and it was if the orchestra that had been warming up suddenly broke into a jarring opus: noxious fumes of burning rubber tires competed with the beating heat of the Middle Eastern sun; a sea of the suicide bomber’s photograph, held high by chanting supporters, rose and fell in waves; a thimbel’s crash of glass; a car alarm; men swarmed, shouted, stood on top of car roofs, brandishing their fists; some even dared to run up to the line of Israeli soldiers spanning the town square and hiss refrains like, “Your sisters, Jewish whores, take it up the ass.” Always their mothers and sisters and their sexual promiscuity. Their women were indoors. The elderly were inside, too. Yes, it was purely a young male concerto, this riot.
Dan led his unit along the chain of Israeli soldiers until he found a weak link, and ordered, “Henai! Here!”
Gilad took his place, legs shoulder-width apart, M-16 in front of his abdomen, ready to swing it into position, even though it was only loaded with rubber bullets that he wasn’t allowed to shoot anyway. There were infinitely more Palestinians than Israeli soldiers. What if, despite the guns, they got up the gumption to all charge at once? What was the sound of fear? A soprano c? Yes, that was it, a soprano c sustained above the melody like the siren suspended above a summer day after a terrorist attack, making children stop jumping rope, drivers turn down their car stereos and mothers scramble to the phone. Across the chaos of the square was the last dark alleyway into the kasbah.
A young boy, not older than twelve, ran up to Gilad and Nir, and lips curled, baring his teeth, baring his hatred, taunted, “Kelev yehudi masriach.” Stinking Jewish Dog. That was the extent of their Hebrew: one liners about the sisters of Israel’s easy-access cunts and jibes about how the whole world despised Jews. Sometimes just the word “Jew” was enough, since there was nothing viler than that. Gilad’s Arabic was also comprised of one-liners: Hurry. Show me your ID. No. Yes. Go. Stop. Hands in the air. That was all either of them knew despite so many words being nearly the same in their brotherly languages: Abba, ab, father; shemesh, shams, sun; shalom aleichem, salaam aleikum, peace onto you.
“I don’t get it,” said Shlomi, a skinny, dark Sephardic kid, shaking his head and pointing with his chin at the ground strewn with stones. Iraqi-descent, large black eyes, take off the green IDF uniform and Shlomi could easily have been mistaken for someone on the other side. “They must be dismantling their own houses to get up all these rocks.”
Over the clamor of car alarms and chanting arose the hallowing adhan, the Muslim call to prayer. It was noon. The sublime bidding coupled with the summit of the sun fanned the riot’s fire. The toxic fumes thickened as more plastic bottles and cardboard boxes were thrown into the flames. The chanting swelled until it drowned out the muezzin. Emboldened, more boys and young men pitched stones. The stones, themselves so indifferent, as indifferent as they were when the same people battled one another in the Book of Kings, cut through the midday air with the matchless force of hatred.
Gilad realized he had to weave the siren of fear into the beginning of the composition that had been germinating in his mind over the last couple of months. Otherwise, how would the listener appreciate the sweet sound of it being silenced? Principles of Peace or Declaration of Principles, Gilad wasn’t sure yet about the title, but he had high hopes for the piece. The last generation remembered where they were when JFK was shot, and the generation before them, the morning Little Boy fell on Hiroshima. But how many generations come of age when—just as sudden and swift as a gun shot—peace suddenly falls upon a land? Gilad had given himself the ambitious task of capturing the music of that moment—
A sunny September day told through delicate nimble notes, a blue sky over the White House and its green lawn…although seven hours ahead in the Middle East, it’s already dark beyond the kitchen window as his mother washes the dishes, lips pressed together (could she really be thinking always of his stepdad’s transgression from over ten years ago? or was it still sometimes the loss of Gilad’s young father?), sad steady ostinato…the water runs into the polite clapping of the press and politicians coming from the small kitchen TV as Clinton shakes hands with Rabin and then Arafat…when all of a sudden—semibreve rest—a pause like a catching of the breath, like the sound of his mom turning off the faucet and his stepdad putting down his fork, the leader of the PLO extends his arm out to the Prime Minister of Israel and the Prime Minister of Israel apprehensively gives him his hand…the initial shakes are tentative, measured, up and down…but a slow build soon has Rabin shaking the bassline out of Arafat’s hand and the polite clapping of the press and politicians erupts into a crescendo of uncharacteristically genuine hoots and cheers…while Gilad’s mother, equally uncharacteristically, gives Gilad’s stepfather an almost imperceptible smile, a high minor note hardly played, but a high note all the same, and Gilad’s stepfather, eyes shining, shakes his head and says under his breath, “Look at that.” That’s what half a century of war and four thousand years of hostility coming to an end looks like.
Smack! Just below the groin. Inner thigh. Fuck! Can’t cry out. Can’t give them that. No. Don’t contort face. Gilad clenched his teeth. Clenched his whole body, muscles gripping the bones. Tears escaped. He couldn’t help it. Also a little urine.
When his breath returned to him and the world seemed to emerge once more from behind a pane of water, Gilad scanned the plaza and immediately caught eyes with an Arab boy, about his age, seventeen or eighteen, not ten meters away. There was no doubt: he had thrown the stone. They stared at each other. The kid had those extraordinary gold eyes that Arabs sometimes have, large and darkly-rimmed. His lanky arms hung out from a fake American t-shirt. They all wore these China-made fake American t-shirts with fake American expressions; his read, “I’m a hot dog, man!” Clenched in the fist at the bottom of one of those skinny arms was another stone. The boy smiled at his opponent, a close-lipped smile, which taken out of context could’ve almost seemed good-natured. Gilad pretended not to notice and continued coolly looking over the square.
Behind the boy and to the left was that dark lane burrowing into the kasbah. A dark hole like a perforation in the thin veneer of the universe. How still and cool it looked in there! Gilad had seen pictures, the same pictures his American alter-ego would’ve seen: National Geographic type shots of women in headdresses milling down dark alleyways lined with piles of vivid spices; butchers’ stands with raw carcasses dangling from hooks; and silversmiths’ hovels glistening in the shadows like polished buttons on a dark coat. So near, but so foreign. So near, but it might as well have been on the other side of the world. Only a Jew with a death wish would go for a stroll in an Arab souk. Rooftop snipers couldn’t even protect special servicemen who had to go in there, making the densely populated warren a haven for bomb builders and terrorist masterminds. It was strange living next door to the other side of the world.
The boy ran forward, testing. Gilad lowered his head and stared at him. The boy stopped. Now he was only eight meters away.
Gilad glanced at his commander, but Dan was squinting elsewhere, looking tired.
“Yalla,” Gilad shouted at the kid. “Go back!”
But the kid stood his ground.
“Yalla, back! Back!”
Instead, the kid pitched the stone so hard and fast, Gilad barely managed to skip-dance to the side. The stone (and the sound of fear) whistled only an inch from his ear.
Gilad took a deep breath and taking up his position again, widened his stance. He had to reestablish his dignity because there was something so humiliating about holding an M-16 and wearing a helmet and combat boots, ten kilos of ammunition across the chest and a vest of grenades and tear gas, and dancing around a stone like a frightened little girl. It was buffoonish. And the kid saw the joke in it, because he laughed. He laughed the way Gilad might’ve laughed at one of his friends if they tripped and fell on their way to the blackboard in front of a row of pretty girls. But this boy and Gilad weren’t friends.
Gilad wanted to run over and grab the kid by the neck, throw him down on the dusty ground and fight it out. Punch him, punch him, punch out the frustration at having to be there, punch out the hate, the hate he had for them for making him hate them—
No, he doesn’t hate them, Gilad was quick to remind himself. We’re all just human. Only human. It’s just the forces of history. We’re all just pawns of history. Aren’t we? Are we?
Well, at least he wanted to shout something, something about the kid’s mother taking off her burka and opening her legs for every Israeli paratrooper with a big gun. But he couldn’t. He was a soldier. His duty today was to contain. And anyway, therein lay a revenge on the kid: that he was containing him and not the other way around. Jews had been contained in slavery and shtetles and ghettos and camps and fuck it—it felt good to do the containing for once.
Gilad went back to pretending to survey the square, looking slowly to the left, and then the right, as if there weren’t just him and the other kid now, two teenagers locked in a game, a game that might be photographed by a French journalist and put on the front page of the New York Times. The paper and the picture would sit on the kitchen table of his American counterpart, next to a tall glass of orange juice and a box of Kellogg’s Cornflakes, Gilad looking like the bad guy. It wouldn’t say in the byline that all the teenager with the M-16 really wanted to be doing at that moment was playing the piano.
The kid, not taking his eyes off of Gilad, slowly bent down and picked up another stone. He took a step forward, slow enough to make Gilad hesitate shouting at him.
All right, Gilad tightened his grip on his rifle, bent his knees and braced himself to dance around like a soldier-clown again.
Concentrating, narrowing his gold eyes, the kid hurled the stone with everything he had. Everything, and apparently that was a lot. Who knew? Maybe his dad was also killed on a hill in the Golan during the fall of ’73? Maybe this was Gilad’s mirror image, and not some lucky Jewish kid in New Jersey.
The stone was coming too fast, Gilad couldn’t even see it. He jerked to the left, and then right, but in the end just jumped back and took it right in the chin.
Gilad buckled forward, nauseous—there was no pretending it didn’t hurt this time. Dark drops of blood dripped onto the ancient dirt. Bringing his hand up to his chin, Gilad could feel he was going to need stitches.
Nir shouted, “Gili, atah beseder? Are you alright?
But Gilad didn’t hear his friend.
When he looked up this time, the kid came into sharp focus as the rest of the world, the bonfires, the wailing alarms, the chanting of the rioters, even the sun itself, receded, disappeared. Now there really was just the Arab kid and him and nothing else. The kid was everything. He killed his father, stood between him and the piano, fucked up his chin. He even put his grandmother in Treblinka. Because the kid standing there with the thick black hair, the faded jeans, and the skinny brown arms coming out of the “I’m a hot dog, man!” t-shirt had become the face of the eternal hatred of the Jews. No, it was even more than that. He was the face of everything that was ever wrong and will ever be wrong with the world. And that pretty much was exactly what Gilad was to the Arab kid.
Dan placed his hand on Gilad’s shoulder, “Okay, Gili, go to the police station and sit it out.”
Gilad couldn’t take his eyes off the kid. And the kid stared back with a face that said, come on, I’m waiting for you to return the volley. The kid could do that because he knew Gilad was talking to his commander, and basically had his hands tied by orders to merely contain, by classic Jewish cowardice, by the UN and world opinion.
“Nu, Gil,” Dan said, “Yalla, let’s go.”
Running. Suddenly Gilad was running. Running like water after a dam breaks. Running like blood through the veins. And it felt so good. Free. It felt like playing the piano.
The kid was so surprised, it took him a good three or four seconds before he realized what was happening and made a break for it.
If Gilad was going to get the kid, it had to be before the kasbah. That wasn’t going to be easy, weighed down by the helmet and heavy boots and all the weaponry. In the score for a cartoon chase, Gilad would be the heavy bass, the bass again of the bad guy, and the kid would be the tripping light notes of a t-shirt and tennis shoes.
The kid stumbled on a rusty carburetor. As he scrambled to his feet, Gilad gained some distance.
Gilad just about had him when the kid ran into the hole in the veneer of the universe. Gilad, heart pounding, stopped and watched the boy run down the cobbled-stones and into the bluish shade of the narrow alleyway.
How are decisions made in those instances when it feels like one didn’t actually make a decision? Was Gilad more desperate and curious than he knew to see the other side of the world that was just next door? Was he gripped by the need to fight the boy? Was he just overtired? But Gilad obviously did make a decision—somehow, somewhy—because suddenly he was flipping out the rubber cartridges, chambering in a live round and running into the kasbah.
The shouts and sirens of the riot were muffled and the cool air of the lane smelled of cumin and wet stone. Gilad dodged a woman covered like a black sheet draped over a hat rack. Otherwise the street was empty. All the men were at the riot and the women were waiting indoors. Gilad didn’t glance behind to see if anyone was following him; he didn’t want to know.
Since he no longer saw the kid, Gilad surmised he must have taken the first turn off the alleyway and did the same.
The following lane was even narrower and cooler, covered in a blue tarpaulin that glowed from holding back the sunlight. The ancient stone walls and steel grids pulled down over the store entrances were scrawled with graffiti. Gilad caught a glimpse of the boy disappearing somewhere to the left.
Hearing commotion behind him, Gilad was forced to duck into a partly opened door.
Scared, he closed the door, leaving just a sliver of light, and backed into a dark corner. No windows, no lamps, it was too dark to see.
No way he was going to catch the boy now. The best he could do was wait until the footsteps passed and pray he makes it out of the kasbah alive.
When Gilad’s eyes adjusted, he saw that the room was full of Middle Eastern mirrors: tall mirrors framed by iron rod vines, square mirrors surrounded by shiny, patterned tiles, and round mirrors set in dark, intricately carved wood. Piled against the wall and hanging from the ceiling, each mirror reflected the muted splinter of grey light coming from the door.
Looking around, wondering if maybe he could take a small mirror as a memento of having been in this magical, forbidden place, Gilad’s eyes fell upon the kid.
He, too, was backed into a dark corner. His large eyes, like the mirrors, reflected the door’s sliver of light, the door that stood dead center between them.
The kid didn’t move. He kept perfectly still, as did Gilad. The kid couldn’t believe Gilad was there anymore than Gilad himself could believe he was there. They stared at each other—the kid afraid Gilad would shoot, and Gilad afraid the kid would scream and in moments he’d be surrounded by Arabs.
Gilad tightened his grip on his rifle. He could shoot the kid—a gun shot would make for a violent, staccato end to their game—and if he got out of the kasbah in time, no one would know. After all, what if it were the other way around, and the Arab had the gun and the Jew was unarmed in the corner? Gilad felt like he should want to shoot the kid—shoot him for making him have a gun in the first place, shoot him for keeping him away from the kibbutz piano. But the truth was he didn’t want to shoot him. He didn’t even want to fight the kid anymore. The fever had passed. He just wanted to take a small mirror and get the hell out.
Gilad wondered if the kid’s fever had passed, too, because he just watched with his large, dark eyes, seemingly without much anger or fear, only a strange tentative sad curiosity, as Gilad slowly stepped away from the wall, placed two twenty shekel bills on the counter and picked up a small mirror. Gilad actually gave the kid an absurd little wave before slipping out the door.
Out on the street, Gilad saw the soldiers of Unit Almond holding back a small crowd. They’d risked their lives coming into the kasbah after him. Gilad felt so bad about it he was tempted to run the other way, but that would only draw them further into the labyrinth.
“Ma? Ata dafouk?” Dan screamed when he saw Gilad. “What? Are you fucked in the head?”
Gilad had never seen Dan so angry. And little Nir’s comic bravado was nowhere to be seen. When his diminutive friend glanced up at Gilad, it was with petrified eyes.
Dan ordered the soldiers to push through the crowd and bolt out of the kasbah.
The angry throng didn't immediately break apart for them. One of men shouted in Hebrew with a thick Arabic accent, “Where’s the boy?!”
Dan’s face turned red when he barked again to make way. The crowd sensing he was at the end of his rope, let the soldiers through. People tend to not mess with a twenty-year-old boy nearing the end of his rope with an M-16 in his hands.
As the soldiers ran down the shaded alleyway toward the sunlight of the square and the riot, Gilad felt bad about endangering his friends, and he knew that as soon as he got his chin stitched, he’d be spending a few weeks in army jail, but still he couldn’t stifle the excitement blooming in his chest and actually had to fight not to laugh.
These were the final days! Just as the Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan sat behind closed doors with Shimon Peres, so he, a young Israeli soldier, and a Palestinian boy had a wordless negotiation of sorts. And with Rabin, Israel’s all-time greatest general, calling himself a soldier of peace… Maybe he wouldn’t even have to serve a whole three years! Already next month they were scheduled to pack up and pull out of Gaza City and Jericho.
But how, how, how when he does get to sit down in front of that piano was he going distill into notes this feeling of running toward the sunlight of the square, toward a new century, his generation’s century, which was obviously going to be worlds better than the last one.
Gilad didn’t know that in fact much of the excitement filling his chest would’ve felt familiar to the young people of past generations, as well as his American alter-ego the day he set off for college or the Palestinian kid that first twilight his big brother took him along to smoke with the men at the café. For the brightness at the end of the winding alley wasn’t just the square of Nablus, or Israel proper, or the next century, it was life itself. It was life glowing like sunlight and Gilad was running headlong into it, wishing life would hurry up already, the way only an eighteen-year-old would. At the turn of the millennium, he would be twenty-five, a nice age, done with the military, off the kibbutz, immersed in his music, hopefully living with a smart, beautiful girl in Tel-Aviv.
Running as fast as he could with his little mirror, Gilad certainly had no idea that one day, and every other day after that day, he would want time to slow down, that for most of his life he would desperately try to hold onto a given moment, a certain afternoon, a particularly happy few years, while it all rushed away from him like a stone hurled into the air. All Gilad knew was that it felt like if he just kept on running and breathing in the good feeling, he’d soon outrun gravity and take leave of the cobblestones.
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Jessamyn Hope is a writer in New York City. Born in Montreal, she lived in Israel for a few years before completing her MFA in Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College. The Mirror is a chapter excerpted from her novel in progress.
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