The People of Forever Are Not Afraid Read Online Free PDF

almost.
    After I change my uniform, I have to see the commander of the base. I enter the room, salute with my gun, and stare at him.
    For a second, I think he is reaching for his gun. That the commander of the base is going to kill me. Sometimes I think things I know are not true. But he is just reaching for his cigarettes. His nostrils flare when he drags in the smoke. He gestures for me to sit across from him, and when I drop onto the office chair I can see that the hairs inside his nose are gray, like lifelines of spiders. He crushes his cigarette in an ashtray made of a green grenade shell and then reaches for another one.
    It seems he is only interested in killing himself, and slowly. He doesn’t care about killing me. It makes me sad that he cares about himself more than about me. Say I am just not being realistic, but it still makes me sad when people are like that. Most people are like that. Dan was like that, in the end. Only interested in killing himself.
    The commander of the base says I need to get my act together. That don’t I know people are dying? He hopes I will take some time to think of ways I can become a better soldier.
    “And just a general point. Your commander says you keepon speaking when you are not spoken to. Why do you do that?” he asks.
    “I don’t know. I guess I have all these thoughts,” I say.
    “One day soon you need to wake up and realize that your thoughts are interrupting everyone else.”
    My punishment is to sleep that night with my gas mask on. Creative and humiliating all at once. I am sort of impressed.
    I wish I were a better soldier. At night, I think about everything except how to become a better soldier, no matter how hard I try. Dan, Mom, Yael. People who are not me and not soldiers. Even my dad; thoughts from when I was little and not a soldier.
    All night long, I stare at the ceiling of the tent through the sheer plastic; it frames the thick green cloth, all this green, like an impressionist painting. The knobs at the back of the mask pierce into my scalp.
    If I cry, it is not because I hope that one of the girls in the tent will hear me and wake up. We only get five hours of sleep each night. And we are not friends.
    I cannot sleep, so I imagine one of two things could happen.
    I could wake up after a night with my gas mask on and find out that Iran had bombed Israel and that I was the last living person in the whole country, that the mask had saved me. The other girls in the tent would be dead and blue faced, and I would march out of the gates of the base and into the Negev desert, where dehydration could kill me, or chemicals poisoning the skin of my body could kill me, but those things don’t kill me. What kills me is that I have no one to talk to.
    Another thing that could happen is that Iran doesn’t bomb Israel, at least not on that day, and that I reach the place Yael says is the end of the world. I finish boot camp. I finish the army. I go to Panama and Guatemala and Argentina. There are Israelis, of course, swarms of them everywhere. But finally they all leave, and I am the last Israeli tourist left in Ushuaia, Argentina, the closest city to Antarctica, the end of the world. The bookstores are all in Spanish. The lakes are too cold for a swim. At the bars, all the clients are middle-aged Frenchmen, and I am alone.
    My earliest memory. I open my eyes and see the small room through plastic. My father is wearing his mask, and my baby sister is on the carpet inside a gas-protective incubator, because she is too small for a mask of her own. Dan keeps on taking his mask off, and Dad slaps him. Dad takes off his own mask to take sips from his Araq bottle. It is 1991 and missiles are falling from Iraq. On the radio they say not to go into the underground shelters. They say to seal one room of the house with duct tape, wear the masks, drink a lot of water, and hope for the best. On the radio they say missiles are falling in region M, our region. We live in some town