The UnAmericans: Stories (5 page)

I started running. By the time I made it over, my mother and Yael were already trying to pull him out. His eyes were closed, his face was scrunched and I wondered if the pain was knocking the breath out of him. There was blood on the tractor, on the grass, on my brother. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” my mother murmured, to Asaaf, or to herself.

But he wasn’t moving. The wheels were still spinning, spitting out dirt and weeds. I looked out at the empty hills and screamed for help. But I knew no one could hear me, so I ran to the work truck parked outside the dairy, keys dangling from the ignition as always, and started it up. I grabbed a chain from the back of the truck and hitched one side to the bumper and the other to the tractor’s chassis, inching forward until my mother and Yael dragged Asaaf out and wrapped a work shirt around his leg. His right one looked okay but the left one was destroyed—his jeans were ripped off and the skin of his calf was slashed wide open, all the way down to the muscle and bone.

“Call an ambulance, Oren,” my mother yelled, and when I didn’t move she yelled it again. But I knew it would take the paramedics at least twenty minutes to wind up the mountain—and anyway, why had the army made me memorize every shortcut in this country, every side street and alley, if not for a moment like this, so I grabbed Asaaf under his arms. I must have looked more determined than crazy, because my mother and Yael helped me lay him across the seat of the truck. I slid into the driver’s side and they climbed into the flatbed among the chains and spades and tarps, and then I was speeding down the dirt road, past the vines and rows of sunflowers, out the moshav gates and down the hill into town.

Asaaf’s head was in my lap, and I kept one hand on the wheel and the other on his waist to keep him from sliding off. His yells were starting to sound like sobs, and he was shaking, and the blood was soaking through the shirt so quickly that at the first stoplight I reached for a towel on the floor to cover it. But I thought about the dirt and gasoline and who knew what else was on that towel so I threw it off, then wondered how I could possibly be waiting for the light to change now anyway. When I looked through the rearview, my mother was mouthing for me to
go, go
, and I knew how terrified she must be that I’d blank under pressure: the whole reason I’d wound up with such a crappy army assignment in the first place.

But then something happened, and it’s like a map overtook my vision and I knew I could speed through that light without getting hit. I knew to gun the engine, weaving past a delivery truck, then back into my lane before the light changed. I’d done practice drives like this on the base, but never when it mattered—and here I was, with only one free hand to steer, zipping down Dekel Boulevard and making a left onto Sapir Street without ever slowing down. I knew to avoid the highway, bottlenecked with Haifa commuters even this early in the day. I knew to zigzag past the bus depot, where traffic always clogged, and onto Arlozorov Road. Then down a side street, and another. Past the open-air market on Hanassi where people threw up their hands as I sped through a crosswalk, and down an alley to the back of the ER, where the two medics outside took one look at my brother and wheeled him straight into the operating room.

F
IVE HOURS
later Asaaf was out of surgery and knocked out on painkillers. Visiting hours were over. I waved to the receptionist as my mother checked in with the doctor once more, and when we stepped back into the parking lot, it stunned me that it was still light out. I was exhausted, but it felt important to drive home, and my mother and Yael crawled into the passenger side of the pickup without a word, as if they barely registered the blood splattering the floor and the vinyl seats. As I turned down Hanassi, shopkeepers closed up their stalls, wheeling out barrels of unsold strawberries, folding card tables back into vans. It seemed impossible that I’d sped down this road only earlier today. I rolled down the window, hoping the air might slap me awake, but it was hotter outside than in the truck.

As I steered onto the highway, my mother and Yael pulled out their cells and began a phone tree to spread the news. “They had to amputate below the shin,” my mother announced before even saying hello. “But, for an accident like this, it’s the best-case scenario.” Those were the surgeon’s exact words, and by her clipped tone I knew the situation wasn’t real to her yet. I didn’t think it was for me, either. I’d almost passed out when I saw Asaaf after surgery, lying on that narrow hospital bed with his left leg bandaged and half-gone. He was attached to all sorts of bleating monitors and a pain pump he kept pushing, and every couple minutes a religious guy would peek inside, trying to get us to pray. Normally my brother wouldn’t have waited a second before telling that guy off, but he was too drugged to notice—and still, I knew this
was
the best we could hope for. That’s what I’d heard all day: if I hadn’t gotten my brother to the ER so quickly he would have lost too much blood and probably would have died. Everyone had said it—the doctor, the nurses, the surgeon, even the receptionist—and each time, my mother gathered me into a hug and thanked me, over and over.

And now she thanked me again as she scrolled through every one of her contacts, and by the time I parked outside our bungalow, the entire moshav was waiting on the porch, along with guys from Asaaf’s unit and even his best friend Dedy, who still had three days left of service and must have finagled time off and driven up from Gaza. My mother still sounded composed as she led everyone into the kitchen, but when she got to the part about the amputation, her voice got stuck in her throat.

“Anybody thirsty?” I said, to say something, and all at once everyone—there must have been thirty people—sprang into action. Uri from the dairy turned on the kettle while his wife Hadas sifted through our cupboards for tea. Dedy uncorked a bottle of Arak and passed glasses around. “To Oren,” he said, lifting his drink, and when everyone turned to face me, I caught my breath. The last time I saw Dedy, at a barbeque Asaaf had dragged me to in Rosh Pina, he’d spent the whole night hassling me for pouring beer in the bonfire. All of Asaaf’s friends treated me that way: like the group’s collective little brother, knocking me around but still letting me tag along, though at twenty-one I was only a year younger than they were. “It was nothing,” I said, clinking my glass to his, then quickly setting it down, suddenly afraid I was showing off.

“Bullshit,” he said. “You were going what, one-fifty?”

My mother came behind me and rested her hands on my shoulders. “It’s not just the speed, it’s knowing all the side roads.”

I could have stayed in that conversation all day but knew to shrug sheepishly, though really I’d gone one-sixty, one-sixty-five in the valley—and it was only then that I remembered my commander had no idea about the accident, and was expecting me at the base in the morning. I took the cordless to my bedroom. As I dialed his cell while everyone in the kitchen carried on without me, I suddenly felt too large for my twin bed, with its striped comforter and solar system decals above, too important to be calling a commander I couldn’t stand, even though his voice softened when I told him what happened.

“Take two weeks of emergency leave,” he said. “Two and a half if you need it.” I knew just where he was: outside the dining hall, hocking watermelon seeds into a bucket while his soldiers filed out from dish duty. “Yigal or Stas will cover for you, no problem.”

“I appreciate it,” I said, though really I’d have been happier if he told me I’d never spend another day in the army sedan, carting Lieutenant HaLevi to his meetings. We always went to the same places, down to headquarters in Tel Aviv or up to the air force base in Haifa. Sometimes he’d even have the gall to order me to pull over and get him a Fanta at one of the stands along the highway, and I’d wait in line at some roadside hummus place, picturing my brother doing real work in the territories.

Before he was discharged, Asaaf had commanded a unit guarding a settlement in Hebron, and was away a month at a time—so different from how I had it: home every evening, weekends working in the crops or feeding the chickens. Sometimes I’d be cleaning the coop and think about Asaaf setting up roadblocks with an M16 across his shoulder, his uniform matted with dirt and sweat—then feel like an idiot for glamorizing work I knew he hated. There was nothing worse than guarding land he just wanted to give back, Asaaf was always saying, nothing worse than having one of those Americans stop by his station to tell him, in English, that he was doing holy work. But he didn’t want to be jailed for refusing to serve and also didn’t have it in him to lie to the army, pleading insanity, the way many others got out of duty—and even signed on for an extra year at his commander’s urging. Asaaf was like that: he’d spend the whole weekend back home cursing the war, but right when he had to return to it, he’d snap back into soldier mode, standing up a little straighter as he buttoned the uniform my mother had just ironed, pulling his gun from underneath his bed without a word. I think there was a part of him that liked to hate what he did, to have something to bump up against.

Asaaf was forever telling me I should be grateful I hadn’t been placed in combat, and that what he really wanted was to get out of the country and be someplace quiet. Lately all he’d been talking about was his post-army trip to the U.S. with Yael: spending four months on an organic yoga farm in California and then another two driving down the coast and into Mexico with Dedy; they were supposed to leave in a week. When I asked why he’d take a sixteen-hour flight to spend more of his life picking fruit and mucking cow shit, where he’d be forced to do
yoga
, for God’s sake, my brother smiled—not the wide white grin he walked through the world with but a smaller one, more with his eyes, and said, “Yael’s been obsessed with this farm for months,” and that’s when I knew he really loved her.

And then, last week, Asaaf sauntered through our front door in his civilian clothes for the first time in four years. The entire time he was in the army, my mother and I ate dinner in silence while the radio played, waiting for news of clashes or casualties. When it came on she’d put down her fork and wait, taking off her glasses and working a finger into the corner of her eye, letting out a long slow breath when the broadcast was over. But that night with Asaaf back home, she flicked the dial to the classical station instead. She prepared his favorite meal, schnitzel and fries, salad and rice, and they quickly fell into their private discussion about the prime minister and the upcoming U.N. negotiations, the sort of things she probably spoke about with our father before he died, back when I was still an infant, long before Asaaf assumed his place at the table—and by the time I came up with something to contribute, they were two or three conversations beyond me.

Asaaf slept late and spent afternoons tooling around on the tractor or strolling through the citrus groves. As he and Yael walked through the property, moshavniks popped up from the crops and congratulated him on his medal of valor. Asaaf had told my mother she was being ridiculous when she made a show of hanging it from the living room shelf, but out there he nodded humbly, thanking the workers, though later he told me they were fools if they believed medals meant anything. They’d never have known; he had a way of talking to people that made them feel both witty and important, and sometimes I wondered if I was the only one on earth who knew his other, judgmental side: repeating their words under his breath as we walked away, twisting their compliments into something crass and idiotic. I watched him and Yael zigzag through the squash and tomatoes and down to the dairy, and when he leaned in to kiss her, I felt my heart cave.

He’d always had girlfriends, but before Yael they’d been the kind who lounged inside on their cell phones rather than working in the fields. I’d known her for years—back in high school we used to ride the bus home together while Asaaf stayed after for track practice, sharing vending machine junk, playing cards and road games I knew were childish but liked because I usually won. It would be inaccurate to say I enjoyed those rides together, when I always felt both terrified and thrilled sitting beside her as the bus bumped through the valley. She was more serious than almost anyone I knew back then, as if she were constantly looking beyond school, our neighborhood, even the country. That she believed she deserved a different, better life than the people around her hadn’t even struck me as snobbish, simply because she made whomever she was talking to, myself included, feel as though we deserved it too. Still, whenever I was with her I felt as if I were on uneven ground, that I could say one stupid thing and she’d find someplace else to sit.

But that never happened, and those rides carried through to graduation, which was right around the time Asaaf noticed her. She’d never seemed his type—not just that she was always in sweats and flip-flops; more that she didn’t even seem to exist within the same orbit as the other girls he usually dated, the ones who threw as much of themselves into getting his attention as he did into winning the hundred-meter dash. But then he went for her, without a thought that I might be interested myself, and she surprised me by falling for him as quickly and gushingly as all the others. And just like that, our time together seemed blotted-out and forgotten, as she lay beside Asaaf on our sofa, watching TV at night, or scrambling eggs in the morning while he leaned against the counter in his boxers, swigging juice straight from the carton. But that wasn’t the worst part. It was that they actually made sense together. She made him nicer, he made her more relaxed, and together they were like some strong, unstoppable force, breezing through life on a sleek and glorious ship while the rest of us watched from the shore.