Edeet Ravel: Look for Me

The army Jeeps fol owed the buses as we drove through the city. We didn’t take the main road to Mejwan; we knew it would be blocked.

The hired bus drivers were instructed to drive instead to a barren eld on the outskirts of Ein Mazra’a, the town adjacent to Mejwan.

Everyone got o the buses and pul ed out signs from the baggage compartment, which slid open at the side of the bus like the bel y of a whale. Arise, go to Nineveh.

We walked single le along a path that cut through the eld; trudging with our signs through this landscape that we loved, pale beige stones, pale beige earth, a thousand shades of pale beige and a thousand pat erns of stone and earth, motionless under the pale sky. Up ahead, the houses of Ein Mazra’a, with their tiny black square windows, looked like dice scat ered on the earth, and the pink- owered thorns that grew close to the ground seemed to be breathing softly around our ankles.

On one side of the path a solitary donkey strol ed amidst a car graveyard: twenty or thirty cars and trucks and vans, al of them white except for one red station wagon and the remains of a yel ow school bus. They were in varying stages of disuse and ruin; some were nothing but rusty metal shel s crushed into the ground, while others were perhaps stil salvageable, missing only doors or wheels.

I stopped to take a photograph of the donkey wandering among the car carcasses, and another one of the remains of a house, now a heap of broken blocks and cement fragments with wires coming out of them like twisted insect legs. The house must have been demolished some time ago, since nothing remained apart from the broken blocks and shapeless cement fragments with the wires poking out. Golden grass covered the spaces between the house fragments and even the fragments themselves. In the distance we heard the explosion of a stun grenade. Tear gas was sure to fol ow.

I had never so much as kissed a man before Daniel. The boys I knew in high school didn’t appeal to me, or maybe I was too preoccupied with staying a oat to notice them. Shortly after my mother died my father moved to Belgium to marry his childhood sweetheart, taking with him only a single suitcase of clothing and his chess set, leaving me the rest. He asked me to come along, but I refused: what would I do in Belgium? I didn’t even speak the language—what did they speak in Belgium, anyhow? French? German? I persuaded him to go without me.

He didn’t need much persuasion; he trusted me. Scandalized neighbors and relatives and family friends competed with each other to feed me and worry about me, and I drifted from sofa bed to sofa bed. I enjoyed the endless at ention and eased myself into the role of orphaned and deserted daughter, at first with a slight sense of disorientation and then with total submission to hedonism.

But my life was disorganized, and I never knew where I’d be from one day to the next. It is possible that boys who might have been interested in me gave up and went after girls who were easier to locate. My friends and I often planned overnight hikes, and on the last summer before our induction almost everyone paired up. I’d hear soft sounds of pleasure coming from the sleeping bags next to me and sometimes I watched the swaying hil s and bumps formed by my friends’ movements; it al looked very charming, but I wasn’t envious. Now and then a boy tentatively slid an arm around my shoulder and I tried not to hurt his feelings as I gently moved away. I told him I was too confused to date; the real reason was that he was too bony or too con dent or too talkative. And so I was stil a virgin when I entered the army, one of only four in our barracks. I was wel informed about sex, though, because the more experienced girls in high school were very forthcoming with details and advice, and in the army a few conscripts gave some memorable demonstrations of various erotic options.

I didn’t tel Daniel I was a virgin, but he guessed at once. I stil don’t know how he guessed, and neither did he. “I just had a feeling,” he said later. Maybe the look on my face gave me away: I was self-conscious but also de ant, and I probably looked pleased with myself, as though I’d just won a prize for public speaking or for coming in first in the sixty-meter dash.

“Is this your first time?” Daniel said, standing in the doorway and looking at me lying there on the bed, waiting for him.

“Sort of,” I said.

He laughed. “Sort of?”

“I know a lot,” I said proudly.

“That’s a relief,” he teased. He was very amused.

“What about you, do you have a girlfriend?”

“Fine time to ask!”

“Wel ?”

“I’m between girlfriends at the moment.”

“Do you like me?”

“What a question. You’re very strange, Dana. It is Dana, isn’t it? Here, get under the blankets.” He joined me ful y clothed on the bed and covered us with the sheet and bedspread. He was careful not to touch me.

“My mother never let me get into bed with my clothes on,” I said, stupidly.

“That was a rule in our house too, but we ignored it.”

“No one ignored my mother. She wasn’t the sort of person you could ignore.”

“Where is she?”

“She died in a car accident—she got stuck in a tra c jam and a truck behind her was speeding and couldn’t stop fast enough. He smashed into her car. My father’s in Belgium. I’ve been living with neighbors and relatives for the past ve years—that’s why I don’t real y have a permanent home. I grew up in the south, in the desert, but we moved when I was twelve, two years before my mother died, for my father’s work. And I hate my sergeant, but not as much as she hates me. That’s the story of my life, so far. Not very mysterious, as you see.”

“What’s going on now? Why me?”

“I don’t know. I liked the way you sang Seer, go flee. Your voice is like a blanket—a pale blue cot on blanket with bright red diamonds. I guess I love you.”

“Love at first sight?”

“Not real y. I had the whole evening to look at you.”

He laughed so hard he began to cough, and he had to sit up.

Final y he calmed down. “Are you always this impulsive?”

“I’m not impulsive. But you know, there are only three other virgins in my barracks, one because she’s religious and two because they’re terrified of their fathers. So, don’t you think it’s about time?”

“You’re just lucky. You’re very lucky, because I could be a total jerk. A total jerk who didn’t have any feelings for you at al .”

“No, I can tel you aren’t a jerk. And I can tel you like me, too.”

“You can’t real y tel these things, Dana. Trust me.”

“I can. Maybe some people can’t but I can.”

“You can’t assume you know a person just because you like his voice and you have some chance association with it.”

“It’s not a chance association. Voices have colors and shapes for me, and textures. Not always, but a lot of the time. I used to think everyone was like that, but now I know I’m just weird.”

“How about we just talk for now?”

“Wel , al right. But can’t we at least kiss? I want to try at least one new thing.”

“Surely you’ve kissed before?”

“Not real y.”

“God help us.”

I fel behind because I was taking photographs, and I was one of the last to enter Ein Mazra’a, an orderly town with green trees and smal apartment buildings, many of them un nished, surrounded by sca olding or simply left as they were, dark compartments gaping at the street from cement shel s. The army ordered us to turn back. Military vehicles zoomed past us, their sirens howling through the streets. That’s what the army did, it created crises before any existed; it created a military emergency out of the void, the way God created the heavens and the earth.