Drunken Angel (9781936740062) (11 page)

We were not trained for such tasks. My reserve unit consisted of armored infantry attached to a tank battalion: of urban counterinsurgency we knew nothing whatsoever. Trained for the battlefield, we found ourselves conducting operations among populations seething with hatred, and we felt that hatred deep down in our very bellies, where it sickened us and sometimes made us want to get good and drunk.

I recall one operation where I and two others drove alone on patrol in a jeep to a far-distant Arab village on the frontier of the West Bank, at the very edge of Jordan, through a menacing marketplace crowd in an area where several terrorist cells were known to be operating.

We had orders to make our presence felt, show ourselves publicly, with weapons held at the ready as we parted the crowd like surf, yet not to fire unless first fired upon. I remember the fear in my comrades' faces, the hypertense alertness as we scanned every eye, every wall crack, every changing rivulet of space appearing and disappearing between the amassed bodies of the marketgoers,
knowing that in that shimmering interstice a handgun might appear, or a Kalashnikov, or a grenade. It felt unreal.

Experiencing a form of terror so brand-new changed the quality of fear, for me, into something like a hallucinogen. Moving through so much barely suppressed fury, hate condensed into a sea of staring, was akin to a religious experience. Felt myself transported out of my skin into a realm far beyond the reach of human enmity. There were constant house-to-house searches. Manhunts for infiltrators. But the worst of it was up in the West Bank, in Hebron, to which my unit was sent because, with the war in Lebanon going full-tilt, elements of the routed PLO had infiltrated the West Bank and were launching new operations there.

Locals were going at it nose to nose with the settlers, with the Israeli Army caught in the middle. It was here that we picked up two prisoners, infiltrators, whom we were told to escort to prison headquarters in the back of a truck. The men lay on the floor blindfolded, and as I looked at them I sensed the terror that they must have felt. Though they were potential killers sent on a mission of mass murder into an Israeli civilian population center, the sight of their captivity sickened me, made me want to puke.

I knew that were I in their place I could expect no mercy from their side. But it didn't help. They were killers, fanatics, prepared to slaughter us all. And yet, I could not bear to see them in restraints. There is a kind of blindfolding and binding—Edna's kind—that is erotic; another kind, this sort, that felt dehumanizing. Was there a link? We handed them over to their jailers and as I watched them led away, stumbling and falling, something inside of me fissured, a hairline crack.

From then on, I saw many blindfolded and wrist-bound men stumble down corridors into interrogation rooms, and each time, the crack widened. Realized that our foes had found the perfect
way to destroy us: by placing us in the hopeless, impossible position of choosing between survival and moral disintegration, depriving us of any choice that would preserve both our bodies and souls. It would have to be one or the other, and of course I, like my fellow Israelis, chose life—what else could one do? But from that day on I lost the power of sleep.

Lay insomniac in my sleeping bag, fixated on one thing: Anna. Thought of her pale white feet with pink-nailed toes, the gummy-bear rubber sandals she bought in the Yehuda market, the dirty beige high heels she wore with a short black skirt, her slender legs, warm thighs, coltish knees.

I thought of her shoulders, how they tapered seamlessly into her arms, her arms into her electrifying hands, whose fingers, like spiders, seemed so effortlessly to spin solid matter into art. Thought of how she drew all the time, book in her lap, reddish-gold hair falling over her pale, aristocratic face, eyes full of longing. How she concealed disappointments. I had seen that there.

Stopped removing my uniform, slept alongside my weapon and ammo vest, head pillowed on my helmet, and when a mission needed someone, was the first up and on the armored car or jeep, face wrapped in a black kaffiyeh and goggles, gunstock wedged into my thigh, at the ready, a round chambered and didn't care who knew it—performing my tasks robotically.

Plunged down any hole ordered into, any darkness, berserking through hideouts, searching for weapon caches, gasoline bombs, rags, detonators, explosives, flags, propaganda tapes, uniforms, grenades, photographs, flyers, suspects—a writer without a book to my name, married to a woman for her money, dope, and apartment, in love with someone else's spouse, lonely, disgusted, badly needing a double.

Slowly, in the recesses of my ignored consciousness, my entombed
emotions, a plan took shape, ill conceived, which acquired the momentum of a visionary religious conversion, until I felt almost as if I had been called upon by some god to execute it.

I HAD DECIDED THAT I MUST TELL ANNA THAT I loved her. If there was a God, or orbiting mother-ship aliens, ruling the earth, something greater-seeming than my little fears had commanded that on my next return home I must attempt, no matter how hopelessly, to persuade Anna to engage with me in adultery.

I would tell her how I felt, the whole painful truth, knowing that to do so would bring an end to everything that was my world. I didn't care. Craved Armageddon, despised myself, my lies: how the world paraded its wants and hopes but my shameful truths hid away in shadows.

For the first time in my life I was going to be nakedly honest about my feelings. Anna, I would say, I know that we are both married, but I love you and want to possess you, sexually, socially, intellectually, and in every way that one can possess another. Possess you and declare my feelings to the world.

Once I chose this course, it was as though I had been transported
to another realm, a different dimension, where I saw life through eyes made fresh with regained innocence.

What was I doing in the Gaza Strip, a hellish place of incurable Jew-haters, religious and nationalist fanatics with guns? Far from home—Anna was home. Lay on the ground near a fire in an oil drum, the dark, muttering silhouettes of other troops milling around. In uniform, ammo vest, hugging my weapon, helmet beside me, body stinking, filthy, face smudged with black camouflage stick, sweating, flies buzzing my face, tightroping on my earlobes, nibbling on bits of food and my peeling flesh. Dung beetles and scorpions scuttling over my abraded, scabby, black-knuckled hands, I had visions of walking with Anna through a town in Spain, wearing rope sandals, squirting endless wine down each other's throat from bloated goatskins, staining her blouse, soaking through to the shape and hue of her satin breasts, how clearly they stood out, high and pert—and she and I dancing wistful drunken steps for smiling peasants in Basque berets, arms around each other's waist, shameless, wistful, intellectual, soulful, like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, two hoboes slumming in exile, gypsy moth bohemians far removed from internecine combat, hopeless battles, raging wars.

Soft music sadnesses and warm nights of gentle candlelit poverty, poetic simplicity would be ours, Anna. We'd have new friends, expatriates exiled from other exiles to pure white sand beaches, removed from clamorous ambitions, gossipy cultural scenes, the grubby lower depths of those struggling in the arts.

No more struggle. Love, sun, sex, writing, drawing, painting, food, wine, sleep, good conversation, chalk-white walls and doors painted red and blue, guitars strumming over little fishing harbors, the night tides twinkling with reflected stars. She yearned for it too. Could tell. Even as I knew that I was deluded.

When my leave came up I hitched a ride in the back of a police
dog truck, curled up in the canine-reeking cage, still wearing fireproof mud-caked combat overalls, half dead, sleepless, after days and nights of continuous operations, yet feeling more alive than I ever had. About to eject my false life, live a brand-new one of uncompromising personal truth, I drifted happily in and out of sleep, head rolling, dreaming of white flares pulsing through a pitch-black sky, camouflaged faces peering out over landscapes filled with wild field rats driven from their holes by the thunder of artillery duels, in the clap and flash of which I saw a terrorist I'd bound and blindfolded led away to interrogation, and I went outside, upset, to smoke—and woke, sweating, with a start, head bouncing on the jeep floor, tufts of dog hair stuck in my lips.

THREE P.M., WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON. AT THIS hour, she's at work. But Barry, her employer, told me that she took the day off to catch up in her studio.

Found her at her workbench in the bomb shelter, fashioning a little wire man with pliers. When she saw me she laid the pliers down, still holding the wire man, and said: “What are you doing here? Debbie and Laura are both at your place, keeping Edna company while she waits for you to come home. She's out of her mind with worry. We heard about some trouble down there. We were—are you all right?”

I descended to the base of the stairs, paused to look around. It was all in shadow but for Anna, who sat on the high stool at the worktable, an architect's lamp pooling light over her fidgeting hands.

“It was crazy,” I said, leaning against the metal handrail.

“Itamar's in the north, getting shelled by the Syrians.”

“At least he can still call himself a soldier. I'm just a morally debased policeman.”

“Why don't you request a transfer?”

“Do you know why I'm here?”

“No,” she said.

Could slip through a dark dank maze of suspects' rooms on a predawn search without so much as a flutter, but to tell this woman what I felt about her was…The room began to swim, frozen tears thawing at the corner of my eyes. “What if I told you that I love you?”

Without hesitation, she replied: “And what if I told you that I love you?”

Then we came to each other, breathless words tumbling out as we held each other close.

She: “When did you know?”

I: “The moment I saw you.”

“The same for me. The night before your wedding I sewed mourning beads to my dress, the way Arab women do. That's when Itamar first suspected that I love you. Oh, my darling, I love you!” she said, wiping away tears.

We kissed every bare spot of warm skin. Crushed against each other, lips prayed to flesh with cardinal sincerity.

En route to her place, we stopped off at the grocer to pick up Rishon LeZion brandy, a few cartons of Time cigarettes, all on her nickel. “To unwind,” I said. “I'm covered with bruises, inside and out.” It was understood: I was broke. Bye-bye Edna's father's money.

“Darling.”

At her place, we stripped, embraced. I wanted her. Was drowning. And no blindfolds, no spread-eagled binding to bedposts, but new saplings wanting only spring.

“All that shit that went down in Gaza, it's hard to make sense of. But it's making me insane. I think a lot of soldiers, secretly,
are going nuts down there. It's like a spreading mental illness, you know? The other side wants to kill us, but the things we do to stop them are killing us inside. I feel like a dirtbag. You don't remember the danger, just the looks in people's faces. It makes you suicidally incautious. As if that will make up for the sight of an old woman curled up on her filthy pallet in a hovel we broke into, looking for guns. The way she tossed and cried in the beams of our searchlights. The sound of her voice. Or these kids I came across on a house-to-house, lying there on a row of cots, eyes locked on the ceiling, afraid to see me standing there. With my gun. Goddammit.”

I couldn't tell her about the blindfolded suspect who haunted my nights.

“My beautiful man,” she said. “Do you know how happy I am right now, just to have you here with me? I want to know everything about you.”

Reached over for a bottle of brandy, screwed off the cap, took a long pull. Then another. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Gasped. Couldn't tell her about the blindfolds—I don't know why that detail. Pulled some more on the booze and once again felt the warm spread and my insides calm. My medicine. I don't know why blindfolds got to me. We passed a cigarette back and forth.

Then we reached to make love.

“We don't have to now…if you don't…want…to…now,” she said.

I rolled off, curled up into a fetal position, my back to her. “I'm with the woman I've waited my whole life for and I can't get it up.”

Anna clasped the back of my neck with her hand, pulled my head forward, kissed me. “My poor darling. This is a lot, what we're doing. It must be unreal for you. It is for me. But we have the rest of our lives to get used to it.”

The worst thing, I thought, was not the shot soldier with a bullet
in the chest and blood all over, or the guy we picked out of the razor wire who'd been diced to ribbons trying to get himself out. It was the guy I'd blindfolded and tied with hands behind his back. Standard military procedure.

“I once blindfolded this guy. Tied his hands behind his back.”

She looked at me, said nothing.

“You understand?”

“Well, who was he?”

“A suspect, maybe a terrorist. We had a photograph. This was a bad guy. And I caught him. The damned police came on the raid. Me and a police colonel went through the roof door. But when I looked around, the cop was back inside. I was out there alone, ducked with my gun behind a vent, and when I saw the suspect, crazily, I stood up, pointed my gun straight at his head, shouting ‘DON'T MOVE! DON'T MOVE! I WILL KILL YOU IF YOU MOVE,' aware that on some adjoining roof or even on this one another crony of his might be waiting in a cross-fire ambush, but I went right up on him. Recognized him from the picture passed around by officers of military intelligence. He could have killed me. I didn't care. In fact, I think I hoped he'd open up on me. Just to kill him. But he was unarmed. I got him to come out. Threw him down, tied him up. And before I led him down, blindfolded him. Standard procedure. Then rode with him back to Gaza City, knee to knee, in back of a jeep, to the military barracks, and the whole time I watched his blindfolded face, thinking: What if that were me? And feeling sick.”