“How soon?” Shoshana asked.
“At least forty-eight hours. They’re still moving battle-damaged tanks to the rear and there’s not much movement of fresh troops — yet.”
“I could use some sleep and a shower,” Shoshana said.
“And a chance to wash our clothes,” Hanni added. They both smelled very ripe.
Shoshana pushed the sleeves of Matt’s flight suit up above her elbows. “We got to get you one of these,” she said. “It’s much more comfortable than fatigues and dries a lot faster when you wash it.”
“I don’t think I’d look quite as good as you do in one,” Hanni allowed.
An MP came up leading four Syrian POWs who were carrying two litter patients. “You get the bunch,” he said. After the litters were strapped into their backs, he made the four POWs sit on the floor and chained them together. “Got a weapon?” he asked. Hanni showed him the Galil assault carbine they carried and cocked it, setting the safety. They had hauled POWs before and the guard couldn’t be spared to escort them.
The trip back was uneventful and they deposited the POWs at a large barbed-wire compound. Then they drove the APC to a service point for fuel and maintenance. A technician inspected the APC and told them to clean it out while he checked the V-6 diesel engine. “Look at all that crap,” he said. Hanni explained that the Syrian POWs had left the trash behind: mostly empty food containers and wrappers. The technician kicked a Syrian newspaper aside with his foot. “Why do they let them keep all this?”
“Well, those are personal belongings,” Shoshana explained, “and they were just captured.” She picked up the Syrian newspaper and glanced at it. The picture on the front page drove her to her knees. She knelt there, unable to move.
“Shoshana,” Hanni said rushing over to her, “what’s the matter?”
Shoshana handed her the paper. “I knew that man,” she said. It was the same picture of Gad Habish that the Ganef had seen.
The grisly sight of the man hanging by his neck stunned Hanni as she translated. “It’s a story about Egyptians hanging an Israeli spy in Cairo. They hung him in public.”
“His name is Gad Habish,” Shoshana said. “He worked for Mossad.”
“A family member?” the technician asked. It was a common question.
She shook her head. “Somebody I used to know.” Shoshana knelt there, trying to understand her feelings. She had driven Habish from her memory, refusing to think about the man who had been her control. If anything, she had always blamed Habish for the Mana affair and what she had become, a murderer and whore. But why didn’t she feel relief at his death? There was no sense of justification, revenge, or even sympathy. Nothing. Had she become so hardened to death that she felt nothing?
Now the floodgate of memory opened and she could no longer control it. It washed over her, threatening to drown her. And kneeling in the crew compartment of that battle-scarred APC, surrounded by the quiet of a lull in a war that seemed to have no end, the tears came. Through her anguish, Habish’s voice came to her out of the mist of memory. “You must put your personal feelings away… Always remember where you hid them … that is the way you remain a human being… There is no choice.”
Slowly, the emotions wracking her quieted. “Do we ever have a choice?”
Hanni knelt beside her and wrapped her arms around her, comforting the woman. “No, child. We don’t have a choice.”
The technician looked away, not wanting to intrude. He kicked a small green round tube out of a corner. “Now what the hell is that?” he asked, kicking it again, toward the two women.
Shoshana recognized it immediately and picked it up. “I thought those were Syrian POWs,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper.
“They were,” Hanni answered.
“Then why did they have this?” she asked, holding the combo pen, the antidote to Iraq’s newest and most deadly nerve gas.
22
Thirty-five kilometers aren’t very much, Shoshana thought, but they make all the difference. She was standing with Hanni in the shower room of a vocational school thirty-five kilometers south of the border, letting the warm water wash over her, filling her with pleasure. They had been pulled out of the front line fourteen hours before, loaded on a truck with twelve other women, and sent south for rest and recuperation. Shoshana could not believe what a hot meal, twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep, and now a shower could do for her morale. Or how the simple things could revive her and feel so good. She felt alive.
“Here, catch,” Hanni said, throwing her a tube of shampoo. Shoshana quickly unbraided her heavy plait of hair and scrubbed vigorously, feeling it come clean.
“My hair’s too long,” she admitted. For the first time in weeks, she felt clean. She stepped out of the shower, wrapped her only towel around her hair, and found a spot at a large washbasin with three other women and scrubbed at her clothes. Matt’s flight suit was easy to wash but she doubted that her underwear would ever come clean.
Hanni handed her a large towel that was still damp from its earlier user. Shoshana wrapped it around her and die two women went outside to a soccer field, spread their clothesout to dry and collapsed onto the grass. The warm sun lulled them to sleep.
A hand was shaking Shoshana. “We need to find some shade or we’ll get sunburnt.” It was Hanni. They gathered up their clothes and kit bags and moved under a lanai. All the chairs and sun lounges were occupied by other women so they sat on the cement deck. Shoshana found her hairbrush and ran it through her hair. “I need to do something with this,” she said.
“Why don’t you tie it back instead of braiding it,” Hanni suggested, “at least for now.”
Shoshana rummaged in her kit bag and pulled out a pair of scissors. “I know just the thing,” she said. She grabbed Matt’s flight suit and examined the long zipper that ran down the front. “The flap behind the zipper really chafes at my skin. I don’t know why it’s even there.” She pointed to the red rash between her breasts and then went to work, snipping away at the flap. Finally, she had a long strip of cloth two inches wide and two and a half feet long. Hanni took the makeshift ribbon from her and pulled Shoshana’s hair back, using the green strip to hold her hair in a loose plait.
When she was finished, the two women dressed. Shoshana felt the cool metal of the zipper against her skin and the chafing was gone. She laughed and played the model for Hanni. “Please note the color-coordinated head band and Nomex jumpsuit, the latest in fashion wear for your properly attired soldier.” She stopped, sat down, and pulled on her boots, now serious. “How silly. I remember when clothes and how I looked was everything.”
You are glowing, Hanni thought. It’s more than just the rest and chance to shower. Something happened when you finally broke down and cried, perhaps a cleansing, I don’t know. But you are beautiful. “Come on, let’s get something to eat.”
“Again?” Shoshana laughed. “We’ll get fat as cows.”
“I doubt it.”
A loudspeaker squawked and rasped, announcing they would be picked up by a bus in ten minutes. A heavy silence came down over all the women.
Shoshana guided the APC under the camouflage netting, barely able to follow the man’s directions in the dark. Whenhe gave her the kill sign, she shut the engine off and stuck her head out the hatch, surprised how quiet it was. She glanced over at Hanni who was standing in the center hatch. “Where do you think we are?” Shoshana asked.
“Near the front, I’m sure,” the older woman replied. “I know we crossed the border into Lebanon.”