Pumpkinflowers (7 page)

19

T
H
AT FALL AVI
mentally discharged himself, though his body still had a few months to go in uniform and continued to report for duty. Time at the end of your service slows down. It becomes torture to wake up, sometimes after dreaming that you're free, and to see green—that dreadful color—and to remember that you aren't after all.

Avi decided to spend his brief leaves in Tel Aviv and answered an ad looking for a third roommate to rent an apartment in the city. The others were girls from the university. It was unusual for someone still in uniform to move out of his parents' home. In the accepted order of things this is a stage reached only later, but Avi couldn't wait. (“When I get out I intend to devour life,” he wrote to Smadar after the Falcon Incident, “to do and try everything, to live fast and know as much as I can. Because you can't know when it will end.”) The three roommates hung pictures together and fixed a few health hazards, and then they moved in with hand-me-down chairs, pans, and posters.

Avi still spent most of his time in the army. But when he was given furloughs that winter he split the time between his parents' home, where he took part in the raucous and argumentative Sabbath dinners that he didn't like to miss, and the apartment in the city, where he celebrated his unilateral emancipation. He had philosophical discussions with his roommates over dinner. They sat playing guitar and singing the hits of the early nineties, the ones they remembered from high school. They went to the Tel Aviv clubs; the scene wasn't what it is now, but it was warming up. They made
jahnoun.
Avi's two older brothers were university students, and they stopped by. He was happy.

What happens is that you're a high-school student and the child of your parents, and then you're a member of a unit in the army, and these aren't identities you choose, and then you get out and start trying new ones. You travel and test a few different versions of yourself, maybe a bit wilder or more considerate. If you were brought up religious you can try not to be, or you can replace your old friends with new ones in a new part of the country, or leave the country altogether, as one of Avi's friends did—Amos, who moved to Paris and stayed, and today lives near the Canal Saint-Martin, and whose Hebrew sometimes has the sound of French in it. You could jump off the battered ocean liner of Jewish history altogether and swim for a different shore. You usually find out that who you are is not quite as malleable as you thought, but for a while you're intoxicated by the fluidity of things.

Avi's life in Tel Aviv was the first new version of himself that he had chosen but not the last. He was only twenty-one and still a soldier. Ireland was waiting. There were thousands of people still to talk to on buses, in bars, on the street, all over the world. When he bought a motorcycle the girls were surprised. They thought it was too dangerous, too dramatic a step for someone who was not even a civilian yet. “The world is spread out at my feet,” he replied. He was restless. Every moment off the hill had to be exploited. “I'm bored,” he would say, so the three of them would go out to a club or a restaurant, and after a while Avi would look at them and say, “I'm bored.” Sometimes the girls arrived home to find that Avi had been there, released by some military whim, that he had showered and eaten and disappeared again, leaving behind oddly punctuated notes:

Girls: I was here, I enjoyed myself as usual (?) etc. etc. . . .

They left him notes of their own:

Avi

Please—don't touch the books. I mean I need them just as they are.

Books weren't safe around him.

After these visits he pulled on his green pants and shirt, shouldered his rifle, and boarded a northbound bus out of the metropolis, toward the border and away from his new realm of freedom and clubs and girls, past the power station at Hadera, its three smokestacks perpendicular to the steely sheet of the winter sea, past the Arab town called the Mother of Coal, through the old kibbutz country of the Jezreel Valley to the Finger of Galilee. Then up the Hula Valley, past the Canaanite ruins of Hatzor, to the military airstrip serving the outposts of the security zone.

20

T
H
E BOMBS ON
the roads inside Lebanon were becoming more lethal in those days. Hezbollah technicians were starting to use cell phone triggers and laser triggers and eventually introduced a new kind of apparatus, a “hollow-charge” bomb, which propelled a molten mass of copper with enough force to penetrate an armored vehicle. These were hidden inside plastic rocks that Israeli soldiers attributed to diabolically clever camouflage experts but which were, according to one of the Hezbollah leaders, bought for fifteen dollars at stores selling garden ornaments. In order to avoid the roads the army decided to fly the Lebanon garrisons in on helicopters.

Avi arrived at the air base with one of the paperbacks his mother bought him every time he came home and with a bag of hamburgers from a nearby fast-food restaurant for his friends at the Pumpkin. This was a tradition. A giant helicopter waited on the tarmac with rotors drooping, the fuselage the size of a bus, its viability as an aircraft impossible to conceive when it was static. Before dusk the people in charge made lists of the soldiers, the helicopter lowered its ramp, and the men walked up in two straight lines like the convent-school girls from
Madeline
. They sat down on benches bolted to the sides and faced each other over crates.

After dark the engines barked, growled, and thundered to life. The men's nostrils filled with petrol fumes. The helicopter shook and lurched into the air, the passengers' stomachs dropped, and through the open ramp in the rear they saw the airfield and control tower fall away. The pilot flew north and kept the aircraft low, the dark hills walling the valley moving past on either side. The faces of the soldiers were barely illuminated by the weak cabin lights.

The pilot hugged the Lebanese hills and valleys and when he arrived under the Ali Taher ridge sent the aircraft rocketing upward until it was nearly level with the outpost. The behemoth touched down. The soldiers looked through the opening in the rear and saw a wild cloud of dust, soldiers with guns and fluorescent light sticks securing the landing pad and others with backpacks waiting in two rows to be taken home. The engine was so loud you couldn't make yourself heard even if you screamed. Avi ran out into the rotor blast and then up to the outpost, and a minute or two later the helicopter was thumping away into the darkness toward Israel and the hill was quiet. He was back.

With their service drawing to a close, the men who had been thrown together with Avi in that yard in the desert nearly three years before were no longer functioning as a platoon but had been scattered. Some were doing safe jobs inside Israel. One was an officer and had his own platoon. A few, including Avi, were in charge of running the Pumpkin's war room, keeping in touch with the detachment at Beaufort Castle, with headquarters down in Israel and with the teams that ventured out of the outpost into the countryside. When the Buttercup radar warned of an incoming shell it was the guys in the war room who got the message and intoned “Launch, launch” into the loudspeaker, always with the laconic tone of the unimpressed, and it was like touching a live wire to the outpost—everyone jumped and scrambled for cover. Where else would your words ever have such an effect?

Avi's old friend Gal, the Angel, manned the radios with him. By this time Avi was so broken-dicked that sometimes he put his head on Gal's shoulder and just left it there, eyes closed, and Gal embraced him until Avi found the strength to move again. It was his fourth tour at the Pumpkin. Each time was harder. Life was happening somewhere else without him. This was before many people were questioning the war in the security zone, but Avi didn't understand what the army was doing in Lebanon or what he was doing in the army. And yet a few months earlier a doctor had found a medical problem, a spinal cord defect, that could have been Avi's ticket to a desk job. The rebel A. wouldn't take it. He returned to the line.

He played chess with the outpost's Russian-born doctor. It was the first time, Avi announced, that he had met someone who was both an officer and intelligent. He argued with another soldier about the meaning of beauty, and told him: Take a silver cup, fill it with pomegranate seeds, and place it between the sunlight and the shade—that's beauty. It was a quote from the Talmud. He was kind to people he liked. When a tank officer, Mordechai, got stuck on the hill and ran out of clean underwear, Avi lent him a pair and never got them back. Mordechai, who will appear here again, had them for years.

With Gal he discussed Romain Gary's
Th
e Kites
. One part that Avi loved was when the hero's old French teacher admits that he once dreamed of being a writer but that only one of his creative projects had ever succeeded—his wife. He had spent the fifty years of their marriage inventing and reinventing her, and she him. This was the secret of their long happiness. The teacher thought anything not chiefly the product of your imagination wasn't worth living with.

The carnal energies at the Pumpkin were highly concentrated; the mere sound of a girl's voice coming over the radio at night from Israel would cause a collective clenching of male throats across the security zone. If the army had contrived a way to harness frustrated sex drives to power the outpost, the soldiers would have been spared the racket of the petrol generator, and if Hezbollah's technicians had devised a scope that could somehow render visible what the guards were seeing when they looked out into the darkness, the guerrillas peering from the bushes would have been presented with an outpost surrounded by ghostly breasts, floating nudes extending hands with fingers folded inward to stroke a cheek. Avi was thinking about love and reached a conclusion that wasn't original but brought him some satisfaction: love was the best you could hope to achieve, and if you found that the rest would work out. He wrote this in a letter to Smadar and said the same thing to his mother in one of the conversations he and Raya had begun having in a cafe when he visited. He wanted to fall in love, to lose control, to stop thinking so much for a while.

21

W
HEN AVI ARRIVED
at the airstrip for his last flight up, the north of Israel was covered with rain clouds. The fields were turning to mud, and the outposts on some of the higher Lebanese peaks reported snow. The air force wouldn't fly. Avi went to his parents' home to spend the night. It was the beginning of February 1997. In less than a month the army would release him and his three-year trial would be over.

The next day he set out again into the storm. On the way he met one of his friends from the old platoon—Gil, who was now an officer. They stopped to buy hamburgers to take up to the hill and arrived late at the airstrip. The officer in charge was furious and said they wouldn't be allowed to board. But when that decision was communicated to the Pumpkin the outpost commander protested because he was short of men and no one could be spared. The officer at the airstrip relented and added them to the handwritten passenger list.

It was still raining, and the outposts in Lebanon were reporting strong winds and fog. There was talk of another postponement. Avi waited. When the air force finally approved the flight he took his gear and followed the others into a helicopter with the number 903 stenciled in yellow on the olive skin of the hull. His backpack rested on the floor near his boots. Inside the pack he had clean socks, fatigues, and a few books, including something by Gary:
Th
e Life Before Us
, about the devotion of an Arab orphan to the retired Jewish prostitute who raised him.

In the cockpit the two pilots ran through their final checks. The same was happening inside a second
helicopter parked nearby and headed to Beaufort Castle. On board the Beaufort helicopter was a team from a sister company of the Fighting Pioneer Youth, the brigade's antitank unit.
Th
e antitank unit isn't yet at the center of this story, but you should know that this team was missing one soldier, a stocky, bespectacled, and stubborn kid named Harel, which means “mountain of God.” He had volunteered to become an officer and had recently departed for the army's command school in the desert. Also on this helicopter were tank crewmen, lookouts, and two trackers, Kamel and Hussein, cousins from the el-Heib Bedouin of Galilee.

In the dim light of Avi's helicopter were two faces he had known since the first day at the training base: Gil, the officer, and Shiloh, a quiet kid from one of the settlements in Samaria, who never quite fit in because he refused to become a cynic. Nearby was Avner, known by his family name, Alter, a star basketball player from a Jordan Valley kibbutz, who had been part of the rescue team at the Falcon Bend and was so seized by grief upon encountering the body of a friend that he flicked open his safety catch and fired at nothing at all until one of the officers calmed him down;
Tom, raised in an experimental community built by Jews and Arabs who wanted to live together; a popular lieutenant whose family had brought the Arabic name Abukassis with them from the Jewish quarters of North Africa; Vitaly, a cook from Baku; Mulatu, whose family lost nine members in the trek to Israel from Ethiopia five years earlier. A former Red Army medic from Kiev, Vadim, who came to Israel with the Soviet collapse and was now a reservist doctor, was seated on one of the benches.
Th
ere were seventy-three men on board the two helicopters, and I realize while writing this that when I think of my country I'm thinking of them.

Th
ey lifted off at 6:48 p.m. On the radio Avi's helicopter was called Courier, and the other Chisel.

“Courier and Chisel are heading north,” one of the pilots told the control tower.

One minute later, Avi's pilot requested permission to enter Lebanon.
Th
e code word for crossing the border was
omelet
, because the Hebrew word for “omelet,”
havita
, is similar to the word for “crossing,”
hatziya
.

“Courier and Chisel, omelet,” the pilot of Avi's helicopter said into the receiver.

“Roger, omelet,” said the air traffic controller.

“Permission for omelet,” said the pilot again.

“Hold on,” said the controller. In the back with the infantry the thunder of the engines drowned out anything but your thoughts, and no one heard any of this. Avi and the others knew only that they were airborne. As they waited for the controller, the pilots set off on a wide clockwise circle over the dark fields in the valley.

At 6:52 p.m. the pilot of Avi's helicopter radioed Gal, the Angel, who was in the war room up on the hill. Gal confirmed that the garrison was ready.
Th
e soldiers who were supposed to fly home were packed up and waiting.

Four minutes later the controller was on the frequency again. “Do you have contact with the land forces?” he asked the pilots.
Th
ey did. Two minutes after that, the controller finally cleared them to enter the security zone.

One of the pilots said, “We're crossing over.”

Th
e helicopters were still above Israel. A night watchman at a cluster of fish ponds heard them coming. He was near the little cemetery of Kibbutz Dafna, an enclosure of old cypress and eucalyptus trees populated by founding pioneers, babies who didn't survive infancy, a pilot killed when his trainer plane crashed into the Sea of Galilee in 1962, a refugee who made it from Europe to the kibbutz in 1948 and died defending it a few months later.

Th
e watchman looked up and saw the two black shapes pass overhead under the pale cloud ceiling. One was flying to the left and ahead of the other, but he saw them moving closer.

Th
e rotors of the Beaufort-bound helicopter sliced into the bottom of Avi's helicopter, shearing off the ramp in the rear and sending it spinning into the night. Avi's backpack flew out and landed far below in one of the tributaries of the river Dan, where
Th
e Life Before Us
was later recovered, muddy but legible.
Th
e second helicopter, without rotors, was now a metal box full of human beings six hundred feet in the air. It dropped next to the cemetery and exploded.

Avi's helicopter was damaged but still flying.

Th
e pilot found himself over one of the villages in the valley. He switched on the landing lights, looking for a place to set down. But then the back of the helicopter broke off. Without its rear rotor the stricken aircraft began to spin as it fell, still hundreds of feet above the ground—once, twice, three times, the force of the rotation so powerful it tore benches from the cabin and threw Avi into the sky.