The Best Place on Earth (11 page)

Around our third shot of tequila,
I know I’m going to have sex with the cute paratrooper who’s been flirting with me all night. I raise my glass—the golden liquid ripples, seductive and warm—and I knock it back, twist my face and suck on a lime wedge. I’m glad my roommate, Vicky, stayed in tonight. If she were here, she would give me a hard time, not because of Oren, but because she thinks I should know better. It’s an unhealthy pattern; I’m using sex to blah blah blah. She’s been reading a lot of self-help books since finishing the army.

By the fifth round, the space between us is charged like the air before a thunderstorm. I’m stroking beer bottles and he keeps staring at my lips. The rest of the bar has been reduced to a blur, the people transformed into cut-outs. He starts touching my hand when he talks, removes a hair that’s stuck to my lip. He’s twenty-one, a
pazamnik, got two years under his belt, so his uniform is worn out and fits him just right, and his red paratrooper’s boots are faded and caked with dried mud. His wrists are thick, and his forehead is large—a sign of a trustworthy man, my grandmother Fortuna used to say. As I walk to the washroom, the music and chatter and clinking of glasses blend into a soft, pleasant hum, the dimmed lights colour the room amber, making everyone more beautiful, and my high heels bounce as if I’m walking on a cushy playroom floor. I don’t have to look back; I can feel him watching me.

In the washroom, I stand by the scratched-up mirror and reapply my eyeliner. The door swings open, letting in music and laughter, and he walks in and turns the lock behind him. He grabs me by the waist and kisses me between the mirror and the hand drier, which turns on automatically, blowing hot air. We laugh. “You’re beautiful,” he says. He smells of sweat and dust and cheap Noblesse cigarettes. I shimmy my panties down, undo his zipper; he pulls out a condom from his back pocket, rips the wrapper with his teeth and spits it to the side. He lifts me up easily, like I weigh nothing, his biceps bulging from underneath his folded khaki sleeves, and my skirt rides up to my waist. We fuck against the wall, sweat against sweat. Our rhythms sync, our bodies fit, our tongues interlace. The sounds from the outside are muffled, but I can feel the bass reverberating through the wall, pulsating against my spine. It’s just what I need: eyes closed, mind shut, no strings attached. Then he says, “I’m coming,” and I say, “Wait,” but it’s too late. He freezes, disengages, lets my legs down and leans against me, heavy. “Sorry,” he says into my nape. “It’s okay,” I say, even though my body is buzzing like a power line on a hot day. He traces my mouth with his finger, then gently pushes against it until I part my lips, let his finger in. I suck on it, twirling my tongue around the rough
skin, the ashy taste of cigarettes. He pulls it out and brings it down to my clit. When I come, I forget to be quiet and go, “Oh God oh God oh God,” until he laughs and puts his hand over my mouth.

Someone knocks on the door and the paratrooper yells, “Go away.” He zips up his pants and I pull down my skirt, pick up my underwear from the floor and stuff it in my purse. We stand side by side, fixing our hair, rearranging our clothes, washing our hands. He looks at me in the mirror as I retouch my lipstick and shakes his head. “This was so unbelievably hot.”

I smile, lean forward and smack my lips together.

He wipes off a lipstick stain on his neck, straining to see in the mirror. “I wish I didn’t have to go back to the base tomorrow.” He puffs out his cheeks and sighs. “I’m so sick of the army.”

For some reason—maybe it’s the alcohol, maybe it’s the way he looks at me, maybe it’s that post-orgasm high—I reach into my purse and hand him a gimel form, already signed and stamped by the clinic, for two days off.

He stares at the paper and starts laughing. “Where did you get this?”

“Shhh.” I put my finger on his lips.

“You’re amazing,” he says, kissing me one more time before walking out.

I lean against the wall and stare at the graffiti: girls’ telephone numbers, lines from bad poems, lipstick kisses. I can’t believe I just handed a stranger a forged gimel form. Stupid. I’m usually a lot more careful.

I wake up to the phone ringing.
The shutters are closed but the window vibrates with the drone of rush hour traffic. I’ve dreamt
of swimming again. The water tequila golden. I glance at the clock and gasp, jump out of bed, still in my black miniskirt and push-up bra, a dangly earring caught in my hair. I grab my uniform from the floor, a khaki pile I’d kicked off last night before I went out. The house is empty, Vicky already gone to work. In the bathroom I pop two ibuprofens and wash my face with cold water. My olive skin looks yellow this morning, and my straightened hair is starting to curl. I quickly apply some mascara, eyeliner and lipstick. I pick through the heap of clothes on the floor, looking for my cap. Finally, I find it in the laundry basket, all squished, and stuff it in the loop on the shoulder of my uniform.

Outside, Tel Aviv slaps me across the face. It’s hot, summer hot, too hot for May. The city breathes with the fixed rhythm of traffic lights: pause, anticipate, resume; pause, anticipate, resume. Across the street, cars wedged in traffic blow their horns at a minivan that is parked on the curb, blinking yellow. I squint and rifle through my purse for my sunglasses, when I remember the call from this morning and dig out my cellphone. I listen to the message. It’s Oren. I haven’t spoken to him since he was posted to Gaza about a week ago. His voice is shaking. “I really have to talk to you. Can you call me as soon as you get this?”

A bus heavy with commuters waddles to the stop and I squeeze on, grateful for the air conditioning. I dial Oren’s number but it goes straight to voice mail. I’m almost relieved. Our relationship—if you can even call it that, considering how rarely we see each other—has been dying slowly for weeks now. Oren must know it too, but then whenever we talk, he tells me I’m the one thing that keeps him going. I can’t possibly break up with him now.

Oren and I met the summer between high school and the army in my hometown in the south. Oren was visiting family who lived
in the new townhouses by the dunes. He was from Haifa, and I liked that about him. Everyone else I’d ever been with had known me since childhood. To Oren I was new; he didn’t know what had happened with Tomer and Lital, hadn’t heard the rumours that were going around about me. I didn’t even mind the long-distance thing. It was romantic: the longing, the anticipation, the reunions. Every Friday afternoon, I picked him up from the central bus station on my bike. Once, I took the bus to visit him in Haifa. He lived with his mother and brother in a big house on Mount Carmel with panoramic views of Haifa Bay. It was beautiful there, the air fresh and cool, the colours brighter—back home everything seemed to be tinted yellow, covered in a layer of sand, marked by the desert—but his mother was cold and asked too many questions, so I never went back. In my house, my mom was working two jobs and didn’t care what I was doing or who I was hanging out with.

Oren treated me like a princess, which was a nice change: where I come from most guys are pricks who know nothing about how to treat a woman. He listened to me—really listened—and after sex he would stroke me in bed for hours, or bring me coffee in the morning, dark and sweet, the way I like it, or surprise me with a pair of earrings for no reason. He made me want to be different, the kind of girl who would date someone like him.

I make it to the clinic just in time.
Buzaglo, Lieutenant-Colonel Mizrahi’s driver, is smoking his Marlboro Reds on the front steps. He slides his sunglasses up to his forehead, looks me up and down, and releases a sound like a deflating balloon. “Damn, Yael,” he says. “What do you say I take you out tonight? Somewhere nice?”

Buzaglo has that rough quality I’ve been missing lately. Oren is so fragile that sometimes I almost don’t feel his weight. I used to like how gentle he was, but once on the seawall some creep was trying to pick me up right in front of him and Oren just kept walking. Buzaglo would have kicked the shit out of that guy.

“I have a boyfriend.” I wave a finger at Buzaglo. “You know that.”

“That Ashkenazi boy? He can’t handle a Moroccan firecracker like you. You need a good Moroccan man.”

I laugh. “He can handle me just fine.”

“Where is he, anyway?” Buzaglo looks around. “I don’t see him anywhere.”

“He’s in Gaza, watching over your lazy ass.” I shove his shoulder when I pass by.

“Hey, I was injured in Gaza,” Buzaglo yells after me. “I’ve done my part.”

When I walk laughing into the clinic, Officer Sagit glares at me. “Yael, do you think you could iron your uniform from time to time? You look like you just fell out of bed.” She flips back her blonde ponytail and walks into her office.

Sagit hates me. Jealous, Vicky says. My grandmother, who had one glass eye, used to warn me of jealous girls. She always said beauty was a curse, not a blessing. I used to love hanging out in her front yard, watching her crushing chilies, grinding spices or threading her eyebrows, and listening to her stories: how beautiful she used to be, how many suitors she’d had back in Casablanca, how the envy of other women had caused her to lose her eye. Sagit and I are both nineteen, but she thinks she’s better than me because she has a stupid rank on her shoulder and her father is some big-shot Tel Aviv lawyer, who gave her a brand new car for
her eighteenth birthday. So it drives her crazy that the cute lieutenant from the intelligence unit next door—whom she’s totally obsessed with—has been hitting on me for weeks.

I put a white coat over my uniform and sit at a table, stacking papers, uncoiling and re-coiling the blood pressure belt, filling a glass with hot water and placing a thermometer in it. I smile at Shuli, the new girl. Her uniform is stiff and too green.

Within minutes I fall in sync with the rhythm of the clinic. This is an administrative base, so I mostly have to deal with soldiers who feign flu symptoms to get sick leave. No battle injuries, no training accidents. Soldiers come and go, I ask routine questions, check for temperature, heart rate and blood pressure.

I always wanted to be a medic. When I started the medic course, I hoped I’d be posted somewhere exciting, serve in a combat unit and see some action. Oren and I had talked a lot about the army in the months before we were called up. He wanted to do something meaningful, he said. I thought I did too. I figured I’d be a good medic. I’ve seen some nasty stuff in my life. When I was thirteen, a rocket fell in my neighbourhood and a girl I went to school with got hit. She was playing outside, listening to her Walkman and didn’t hear the siren. Her parents were both at work. When I came out of the shelter, she was walking down the street covered in blood, like someone in a zombie movie, and there were pieces of glass stuck in her arm and lodged in her forehead. People screamed when they saw her, but I just went to her and talked to her, calming her down until the ambulance came. And then there was the way my parents used to fight before they split up. My mom would punch my dad in the face or scratch him until she drew blood, and my dad once threw a glass at her and she needed stitches in her shoulder. I was good at giving first aid.

I was beaten up pretty bad myself after Lital found out I was sleeping with her boyfriend Tomer the summer before twelfth grade. One night, three older girls I had never met waited for me after my shift at the shish-kebab restaurant and grabbed me by the hair, knocked me off my bike and roughed me up. When I came home that night with two black eyes, my mother—absorbed in her telenovela reruns—didn’t even notice.

After that, I started hanging out with the guys in front of the pizzeria, drinking too much and sleeping around. By the end of twelfth grade, I hated our town so much that I wished for rockets to fall and wipe everything out, and then a sandstorm to come and cover the ruins with fresh dunes.

I was ecstatic when I was finally called up to the army—anything to get me out of that shithole. On the first day of the medic course I opened my locker and saw that inside some girl had written in marker, “Welcome to the medic course! This is going to be the best part of your service. P.S. Don’t forget to clean underneath the locker. The sergeant always looks there.” Somehow, that note made me hopeful.

But during my first week there, I recognized a girl from my high school, a good friend of Lital’s, and she went and told all the other girls that I was a slut who slept with other girls’ boyfriends. That had only happened with Tomer, and he and I had a real connection. He’d been there for me through my parents’ divorce, having experienced the same thing the year before. I didn’t know how else to show my gratitude. After the girls found out, the course was like high school all over again. Once, when we practised inserting IVs, Lital’s friend jabbed my vein so many times that I still have scars. Another time I lost my hat, which meant staying extra hours on Friday. Usually, if a girl couldn’t find her hat, all the other girls
helped look for it, but this time, only two girls helped me, and I’m pretty sure Lital’s friend hid it, because she smirked at me while I was searching. I watched the entire class leave for the weekend, laughing and talking on their way to the bus stop. Then the base was empty and quiet, and all I could hear was the wind in the eucalyptus trees. I sat outside my room, and for the first time in months, I broke down and cried.

One good thing that came out of this course was Vicky. I’ve never really had a girlfriend before. She worked in the canteen and was two years older, almost done her service. On her way to the bus stop that Friday, she saw me sitting alone in the yard, and she came over and sat beside me. “You can’t let those bitches get to you,” she said. “I know the army seems like everything right now, but these two years will pass in a flash. Just don’t think too much. Follow orders, keep your head down. It will be over before you know it.”

I check my messages
over lunch outside the canteen. Another one from Oren. His voice has a nervous edge to it. “This place is hell. I need to get out of here. I feel like I’m going crazy.” He sounds like he’s been crying. I sigh and press delete. I worry about him, sure, but a part of me just wants to tell him to suck it up. I mean, I know things are hard in Gaza, but the army isn’t supposed to be fun. Things are hard for everybody. I snap my phone shut. The irony isn’t lost on me: I have just the thing to help him out, but he’s there and I’m here.