to watch you.”
Dan was only four years older than the rest of them, and Ofir often amused himself with the idea that this whole show was being carried out by kids barely old enough for The Real World. Ofir regularly compared his life to an alternative version of himself living in the United States, a doppelgänger based partly on TV and movies, but mostly on the photos in the booklets he ordered from Julliard and the Yale School of Music. Ofir nagged his mother until she signed the forms allowing him to start his army service a year early. Her tears left wrinkled spots on the papers. But he didn’t want to be so much older than his doppelgänger when he started music school. Still, it was hard to do it to his mom. When he was still a lump in her belly, his father was shot and killed on a hill in the Golan.
As the truck neared the town square, the dissonance of the riot grew louder, like an orchestra warming up. Remaining cigarettes were crushed in the sand-bucket ashtray. It’s okay, Ofir told himself as he rolled up his sleeves. Today his American alter ego was at the piano while he was at a riot, but he could still end up being the better artist, for whatever he lost in technical proficiency during these long days and nights when his fingers busied with binoculars and firearms instead of ivory and ebony keys, he gained in poetic urgency. That was the salvation of being an artist. The worst experiences could be transformed into meaning and beauty.
The truck stopped. The soldiers scrambled out the back. Smoldering tires poisoned the air. Chanting supporters brandished portraits of the suicide bomber who blew up a bus last week in Jerusalem. Glass crashed. Car alarms whined. Men swarmed, shouted, climbed on top of cars and shook their fists. Dan led his unit along the chain of soldiers bordering the square until he found a weak link. “Here!”
Ofir took his place, legs shoulder-width apart, M-16 in front of his abdomen, ready to swing it into position, even though it was only loaded with rubber bullets that he wasn’t allowed to shoot. There were a hundred Palestinians to every soldier. More. What if, despite their guns, they all charged at once? It wasn’t clear who was more afraid of whom. What was the sound of fear? Its pitch? Did it have breaks, like a pounding heart, or was it more like the whistle of an approaching Katyusha rocket, getting louder and higher and louder and higher? No, that was too easy. He had to think of something else.
A boy ran up to the soldiers and shouted, “Jewish whores take it up the ass.” Shai snorted: “I wish.” That was the extent of their Hebrew, one-liners about the promiscuity of Israeli sisters or mothers and slurs about the ugliness or evilness of Jews. Sometimes just the word Jew was yelled, as if something so vile required no adjective. Ofir’s Arabic was also made of one-liners: hurry; show me your ID; go; halt; hands in the air.
“I don’t get it.” Yaron, the soldier next to Ofir, a skinny kid of Iraqi Jewish descent, pointed his chin at the ground strewn with stones. “They must be dismantling their own homes to round up all these rocks.”
Soon, Ofir thought. Soon this would all be over. A few months ago Arafat and Rabin shook hands in front of the White House, shook hands in front of the world, in front of his mother, who collapsed on the sofa in front of the television with her hand over her chest, while his stepfather, eyes shining, whispered, “Would you look at that? That’s what three thousand years of fighting coming to an end looks like.” Soon the army might be pulling out of Gaza City and Jericho. Maybe he wouldn’t have to serve a whole three years?
Over the clamor of the square floated the adhan. The hallowed call to prayer fanned the riot’s fire. More plastic bottles and cardboard boxes were thrown into the flames, and the noxious fumes thickened. Young men began pitching stones at the soldiers. Maybe that’s what was missing from his composition: the sound of fear. Could that be it? It wasn’t only about taking flight, but taking flight from something . . . Ofir rolled his head to release the tension in his neck. If it was the sound of fear, he had a lot more work to do. But he would do it. He wasn’t aiming for good enough. Now every muscle ached to be at the piano. While he scanned the square, he hummed the melody, listening for where he could balance the—
Smack! Stone, just below the groin. Inner thigh. Ofir struggled to withhold a cry. God damn it. Fuck. He clenched his teeth. His whole body clenched, muscles gripping the bones. Tears escaped. He couldn’t help it. Also, a little urine.
When his breath returned, and the world reemerged from behind a sheet of tears, his eyes picked out a Palestinian boy about his age, sixteen or seventeen, not thirty yards away. The boy stood still and looked right at him. His China-made fake American T-shirt read: I’M A HOT DOG, MAN! At the end of one of his long skinny arms was another stone. The boy smiled at Ofir, a smile that out of context might have seemed good-natured. Ofir, pretending not to notice, scanned the square without letting the boy slip from his vision.
Behind the boy, to his left, was the last entryway into the kasbah. He had only seen pictures of the kasbah’s narrow, cobblestoned alleyways, the same National Geographic–type shots his American doppelgänger would have seen: women in headdresses milling past barrels of vivid spices; butchers’ stands with raw carcasses dangling from hooks; silversmiths’ workshops glistening in the shadows like polished buttons on a dark coat. It was so near, but so foreign. So near, but that entrance into the kasbah might as well have been on the other side of the world. It was strange living next door to the other side of the world.
The boy ran at Ofir, testing. Ofir lowered his head, leveled his eyes on him. The boy stopped. Now he was only twenty or so yards away. Ofir looked to his commander, but Dan squinted elsewhere.
“Yalla!” Ofir waved at the boy to move back. “Go back!”
The boy stood his ground.
“Yalla! Back! Back!”
The boy raised his arm and pitched the stone so hard and fast, Ofir barely managed to skip-dance out of the way. The stone whooshed an inch past his ear.
“Fucking asshole.” Yaron shook his head.
Gadi, standing on the other side of Ofir, appearing even shorter in a lineup, said, “That was close, Ofi.”
Ofir straightened his ammunition belt and took up his position again, widening his stance. The Arab boy laughed at him. Of course. He must have looked hilarious, loaded down with an M-16, a helmet, combat boots, pockets full of grenades, and dancing around a stone.
The frustration Ofir had suppressed all morning rose inside him, a tingling, angry upswell. It surged through every cell in his body and gathered in his head. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to fucking be here. Fuck this kid! If it weren’t for fuckers like him and all this fucking bullshit, he could be in the dining hall right now working on his music, or, better yet, he could be packing for fucking university. Like his doppelgänger. He hated the Arab boy. He hated them for making him hate them—
No. Stop. He took a deep inhale. We are all human. An artist can’t lose sight of that. An artist has to hold on to the humanity. We are all pawns of history. Aren’t we? Are we? He couldn’t think straight.
He pretended to survey the square, looking left and right, as if he could see anything other than the boy. They were two teenagers locked in a game, a game that might be photographed by an ambitious journalist and put on the front page of the New York Times. The paper would sit on his doppelgänger’s kitchen table, next to a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, him looking like the bad guy. It wouldn’t say underneath it that the only thing the teenager with the M-16 wanted to be doing at that moment was playing the piano. Ofir tried to remember: Arafat and Rabin shook hands. In front of the world. Peace was here. This was the last bang of thunder before the sky cleared. Six months in Nablus, though. He was so tired.
The
