She can’t remember the word for ugly.
I have told her again. And again. Some words she gets the first time around. She repeats them in her thick American accent. She sounds ridiculous. I tell her forget it, just speak English, but she insists on trying.
We lie in bed and she talks. Slowly. Stopping halfway through the sentence to ask “was that right?” or stopping to ask for a word. I smoke cigarettes. I listen.
Sometimes she tries to pull me out. She asks about my army service. I served in Hebron. I got fat on the greasy army food. What else is there to tell?
Did you do anything . . . ? She begins. But her voice has that upward slide and I know she’s searching for a word.
Nu, I say, Go on.
How do you say ugly?
I repeat it for what must be the thousandth time. Write it down, Sarah, I tell her.
She groans. We’re naked except for the sheet, orange, lying over our legs. I don’t want to get up, she says.
I drag on my cigarette.
She tries her newest sentence out again, choking on the chet and ruining the resh, mangling the word, but getting it almost right.
I answer her like this: I repeat her question back to her. Did you do anything mechoar?
That’s it.
Why bother trying to explain to this olah, this immigrant, that in Hebron all the lines get blurred? Asking me if I did something ugly is the same as asking me if I did something beautiful there. There’s no difference and even if there is, you don’t think about things like that. You just do. You go into these people’s houses, you arrest this guy. Then you eat your army food. You don’t even explain it to yourself.
But she pushes.
I don’t know, I tell her. I did things. I slide my hand over her stomach, up to her breast. And then I give her a cheesy line, I whisper it in her ear to shut her up: And I’m going to do something to you now.
After we fuck, we slap on some clothes and go out to get some food. It’s late. We walk block after block—dark streets named for Zionists—looking for something, a light streaming out of a restaurant. But there’s nothing.
So we go into a drugstore. She tells me that the name is hilarious because back home, in the States, a drugstore is a pharmacy and here, what we call drugstores are actually grocery stores.
I don’t quite follow what she’s saying or why she’s telling me this, but I like her voice and I like her smell and I smile.
But, she says in Hebrew, pulling out the vowels long and slow, maybe food is another kind of drug. You know?
I tell her she thinks too much.
Sarah drifts through the aisles and I walk behind her, watching. Her hair is long and straight and brown and it drops to her waist. She’s wearing tight jeans, a black tank top, and black high heels—the same outfit she was wearing the night I picked her up at the bar.
We’ve spent three days now wrapped around each other, skipping our classes and sweating all day in bed and walking around the dead city at night when the air has cooled off a bit. I want her to leave, but I can’t let her go.
She stops in front of the cooler with the fruit. She squeezes plums. They look like bruises. I think of the girl in Hebron. I saw her on the street the next day and the marks were ripening. Her whole face was swelling and round, pushing on the edges of her hijab, like fruit that was too full, too sweet, that would burst from its skin. I wondered if her sweat would taste like sugar if I licked her cheek. I wanted to. I wanted to put my tongue on her. I didn’t. I stared instead, wondering if she recognized me from the night before.
Omer, Sarah says, but she pronounces my name wrong. The way she says it, it sounds like the word for say.
What do you think about having fruit for dinner?
I shrug.
Sarah pulls up her tank top, just a bit, and holds the edge away from her body. She piles plums, peaches, and apples onto her shirt, using it like it was an apron. I imagine her in a flowery dress, her hair tucked under a scarf, a field of wheat behind her. Like one of those old Zionist posters that says Come to Palestine.
You know, my dad was from a kibbutz, I say to her.
Which one?
Yesod HaMaala, in the north. They grow plums there.
Sarah shakes her head. I don’t know that one.
Maybe I’ll take you sometime, I say, not sure I mean it, but wanting to.
Sarah smiles and heads towards the cash register, wiggling her ass just a little bit as she walks, her hair swaying.
We sit on a bench outside and she pulls a plum from the plastic bag. She hands it to me, then takes one for herself.
You said your dad was from a kibbutz, she says.
Yeah.
What did you mean by was?
Juice from the plum drips down my fingers and chin. I stop eating and wipe my face with my hand, wipe my hand on my jeans. I don’t want to talk about this so I don’t answer.
Did something happen? Sarah asks. She rubs my head, running her hand over my hair, which is bristly short like it was when I was in the army.
I still don’t say anything, but I close my eyes and let her touch me. I sink into it, leaning back onto the bench. Sarah wraps her arm around my head and pulls it to her chest. Her perfume smells like jasmine.
And I hear myself, like it’s someone else talking, telling her what happened to my dad. This voice tells her about the car accident that happened when I was 20. My dad was on a road. I hold it in my head—his car, gray, slicing the north of the country from Yesod HaMaala, where my grandma still lives, to our house in Haifa. There was a streetlight out, his headlight out, a missed turn, and that car glinted off the road, like a stray bullet.
I tell her about that. And I tell her about how it was my second year in the army. About standing there in Hebron, hot and bright, and having an officer come get me early the next morning. When the officer told me what had happened, my gun felt heavy, my helmet absurd. I sat down right there on the sidewalk and I took them off.
In Haifa, I sat shiva for seven days with my mom and sister. They both wore black, my mom covered the mirrors in the house. People came, people went. Then I went back to the West Bank.
That’s when I stop talking to Sarah. I pull my head away from her chest and I sit up straight. I take my crumpled pack of Noblesse cigarettes out of my pocket and I shake one out. I smoke. Sarah holds her plum in her lap; her hair hangs straight down towards her knees. I know she’s sad. So I put my hand on her thigh.
As I smoke I think about what I would have told Sarah if I’d kept talking: I was happy to go back to Hebron. It’s easier to look at other people’s pain than your own.
Sarah asks me then, what do you miss the most about your dad?
When I was a kid, I say, when he would drop me off at school, he would wipe the sleep from my eyes before I got out of the car.
Sarah’s quiet for a moment and then she reaches over and runs her fingers over my eyebrows.
She wants to make me feel better. But she doesn’t know me and she doesn’t know my dad. And she doesn’t know shit about what’s going on in this country and she could never understand what happened in Hebron. I jerk my hand from her leg and I push her arm away from my face.
Sorry, she says. She sits very still. I can tell that she doesn’t want to piss me off.
I smoke my cigarette. When I finish, I throw the butt down and stand up.
Come on, I say.
Where are we going? she asks.
I don’t answer, I head towards my apartment.
I’m tall and I’ve got long legs and Sarah is little and I’m walking too fast. She can’t keep up. Her heels click on the sidewalk, faster and faster.
Omer, she says, getting my name wrong again. Can you slow down please?
Omer, she calls, I don’t understand. Can you wait for a minute?
I stop.
When she catches up, she comes and stands in front of me. I look down at her face and I see that she’s crying.
Her tears, the choking noises her throat makes, piss me off.
What do you want from me? I ask her.
I just want to talk.
About what? About my service, about my dad? You’re driving me crazy, digging all the time. And your Hebrew. You keep asking about this word, that word. Write them down. Remember them. It’s a fucking nightmare talking to you.
Really? she wails. She looks so sad, like she might collapse right there on the sidewalk, like I did in Hebron.
I realize what’s happened here, that it’s my sadness I’m seeing. This beautiful, gentle girl standing there, weeping my tears for me. I feel guilty, I feel like shit.
Sarah, stop, I say. Please stop. I’m sorry, I’ll make it better.
But she doesn’t, she just keeps going and the weight of it all, it’s too much.
I shout at her to stop, to be quiet. Just shut the fuck up, will you?
She gets louder.
That’s when I snap, like Nir did that night when we were on patrol and this Palestinian girl got mouthy with him. Only this time I’m not watching, I’m the one doing it.
I slap her once and she screams and then I hit her again and again and again. She drops the bag of fruit, the plums and peaches and apples spilling out onto the sidewalk.
She crumbles.
I stand there, hovering over the heap of her. I don’t know what to do. That night, people came. They didn’t say anything. They picked the girl up and ran away with her. We walked off with Nir, smoked cigarettes, acted like nothing happened.
Every night after that, I heard Nir crying in his bed. He made these whimpering noises, like Sarah’s making now. Every night, Nir made my stomach hurt so I pretended not to hear it. I do the same thing now. I just leave.
When I get back to my place, I go to the bathroom and I wash my hands. Sarah’s blood mixes with the water, falls down the drain. I wipe my hands on the blue towel and then I drape it over the mirror. I don’t want to see my face now, maybe not for a while. I think that it’s probably ugly.