And five days later everything was almost calm.
Tape / -
She took off her clothes and put them on the cot. Outside reigned the impermeable desert dark. In the next bed he lay, she couldn't imagine how he looked. She played a game of imagining him from his breathing, from the smell of shoes and socks. She strained her eyes and saw shadows. Outside voices sawed. Her skin shuddered and she rolled herself up in damp army blankets smelling faintly of Lysol. She lay down, her eyes gazing at the ceiling of the tent. He said: Wonder what you look like in the light. She said: I also want to know what you look like. Every night you're here and not seen. In the morning you disappear before I open my eyes. By the time I come back at night, you're in bed.
My name's Boaz, he told her. I'm a grown-up child who survived the wars. Killing and not killed. On the Richter scale of my metaphysical biology, I'm a nine. Your wonderful youth can be smelled. All I know about you is that you've got a lover, that you have difficult dreams I can hear, you're somebody one can definitely fall in love with, if one forgets the inconceivable and unbearable problems of love. For years now I haven't managed to die in just wars, and in unjust wars I don't die either. Maybe justice has nothing to do with death in war? Now that the war is ending soon, I'm still here. During the day I shoot the routed enemy. You've got a female rustle among your clothes. When you undress in the dark, there are tears in my eyes.
She said: That's nice of you. My stupid officer pushes me around all day. He's got clean fingernails, smells like perfume. You sound like a person who flourishes in wars.
I make no demands on you. It's true, I love another man. But you come back with a smell of death and dark. Last night I smelled blood. You sound like a professional soldier. You bring weapons in your hands, you kill and sleep, sleep and kill. In that shelling you slept like a baby. I don't know why they put us in the same tent. My officer tried to start with me again today. I erupted. He has soft, warm hands. He talked to me about twilight in a distant city, said I remind him of that. It was cold and the sergeant on duty yelled: I'll put all of them under arrest, and all of them cleaned the mud and the mud kept coming in. As far as I'm concerned, you should go to jail for mud. I'll smoke a cigarette now. And you?
I'm trying to think if you're pretty. That drives me nuts. Do you have breasts? Big ones? Small ones? And your face, terrific, I'm not terrific either, few people like me. I don't believe in marriage. And I don't believe in love, either, but I'm starting to doubt my ability not to love. Why do people want so much to be loved? All the fools and dummies ultimately find somebody who loves them. And the worst bastards also have friends and women. You can see that from the funerals. The dumber the man the bigger his funeral.
Today I got out of the half-track. I went to search for a land mine. In the distance I saw people in the desert. Men in coats and suits and tunics and women in pants and head kerchiefs. They were straying, aimlessly, their eyes burning from the desert wind. Hundreds of men and women. One of them had a red scarf. I yelled at them to watch out. There are land mines, I said, and they didn't hear and weren't scared. They showed me pictures of their sons. Every one had a picture of his son, you know the high school graduation pictures they make with the faces of stranglers of old women? Those are their sweeties, and they were searching for their sweeties in the desert. Everybody asks if I know his son. Missing, they say. One woman told me: You surely know him. Surely, why should I know him, but I said: Maybe, maybe I knew him. She said, search for him for me. I've got to find him. "Surely," that's the compelling word, don't you think? You with your small or big breasts. After the woman with the red scarf disappeared I smoked a cigarette. Some of the sons in the pictures had scared faces. Do you think those with scared faces die more than those whose faces aren't scared? I'd like you to have my picture… with an erect cock. Like now. You'll take the picture with the erect cock, walk in the sands and ask if somebody knows me. Maybe some poor girl I once inserted a souvenir into. She'll say: The shmuck's buried not far from here. And you, will you weep?
And what do you do in civilian life?
Grave digger, prepare my financial future.
You're trying to be cynical.
Trying, that's right. Not living in the right man. A girl came to me, she's got long chestnut-colored hair and bright eyes. Not especially pretty, but belonging to somebody so temptingly. She said to me: I'm searching for a man. I asked if I could be the man. She looked at me contemptuously and I saw how she belonged to her somebody and I was jealous. And then she repeated: I'm searching for a man. I told her: What about his picture? She didn't have one. And she blushed because she didn't have a picture. She said: Listen, I'm searching for a man I love, and she didn't add anything more. Will you also ask somebody about my cock, will you say then: I'm searching for a man I love?
Yes, she said, and she smoked a cigarette silently and her breath was fast, almost loud. You understand, he said, the girl put a semicolon after the man, because maybe he's dead. She didn't know his last name. She met him in a tent like this in Bir-Gafgafa in the dark. When there were still a lot more planes ripping the sky. She didn't know the declension: "I loved," everything was fresh and still in the present tense. Like the grammatical judgment of a language teacher. I turn over for a moment, the blanket stabs what's-his-name. Like this. She can't draw me the face of the lover. He had no geographical bearings or characteristics, normal or otherwise. No special signs. Only certain things, she said, swallowed those words. And then she said again with surprising speed: Things that can't be defined, she meant what happened to them together in the tent. Maybe she loved him because he died? How do I know? And if he died, maybe she'd love him forever. Isn't that safer?
She crushes the cigarette. Rustling is heard outside. Three half-tracks rumble up and brake. Music from the radio mixed with a roaring motor. The flash of pale blue light in the tent flap. A wind strikes the tarp. She sinks her head deep into the small hard pillow. I recall going out with my lover, she said.
He laughed.
And he's alive, she said.
Ah, but for how long?
A long time. Once he took me to the movies. That was soon after we met. He'd sit in cafes, go to matinees, waste time, sit next to me in the movies and even though he looked like a letch, he was afraid to stroke my back. I thought: Why doesn't he understand I've got breasts? Why doesn't he put a hand on my breasts, he thought I was a dangerous girl.
In the morning she sits at the teleprinter. Third shift. All the time she receives messages. Words appear-missing, missing, fell, fell, wounded. Names, numbers, identity tags. She drinks hot coffee from a cardboard cup and writes the dead. Suddenly she shrieks: Joseph Gimmeleon. Just yesterday he came into the teleprinter room and saw three girls and didn't know which one of us to desire more. So perplexed and lost he stood there. And I was the oldest. The officer with the soft sweaty hands didn't let him take us to the movies. He said: I'm from Haifa, and Talya made him a red paper flower. He stuck it in his shirt lapel and disappeared with Zelda. She phones the battalion. A field phone hums. A commander yells at Talya, come down from the line, she comes to a third in command who sleeps with her every third night. From the distance, from the war, a voice rising and falling like a roar answers her: What, what, Joseph, Joseph Gimmeleon, the body wasn't intact, they found a red paper flower. I'm coming tomorrow, and he hung up.