The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu doc

[...]... and blaze My mother drowns her chin in my hair We watch, and if I am alone I do not yet know it I stare at the ceiling of the tent through the sheer plastic into the night The knobs at the back of the mask pierce into my scalp, still I am crying, and not because I hope that one of the girls in the tent will wake up But then one does wake up The blood one, the one who thought too much of her blood was... finish boot camp I finish the army I go to Panama and Guatemala and Argentina There are Israelis, of course, swarms of them everywhere But finally they all leave, and I am the last Israeli tourist left in Ushuaia, Argentina, the closest city to Antarctica, the end of the world The bookstores are all in Spanish The lakes are too cold for a swim At the bars, all the clients are middle-​­ aged Frenchmen,... into the underground shelters They say to seal one room of the house with duct tape, wear the masks, drink a lot of water, and hope for the best On the radio they say missiles are falling in region M, our region We live in some town other than the village then I don’t know where My parents are arguing “Duct tape?” my mother asks “This is silly.” I do not know all the details of this—​­ hear about it later,... for the words of another person The mask protects me They cannot see my face They cannot see my mouth They do not know that it was me who made the sound If I scream, if I scream right now, a deafening and smashing and muted scream, there is a chance, there is always a small chance that no one will ever know it was me It will be the sound of all girls screaming And so I scream I scream as if this is the. .. People who are not me and not soldiers Even my dad; thoughts from when I was little and not a soldier All night long, I stare at the ceiling of the tent through the sheer plastic; it frames the thick green cloth, all this green, like an impressionist painting The knobs at the back of the mask pierce into my scalp If I cry, it is not because I hope that one of the girls in the tent will hear me and... hours of sleep each night And we are not friends I cannot sleep, so I imagine one of two things could happen I could wake up after a night with my gas mask on and find out that Iran had bombed Israel and that I was the last living person in the whole country, that the mask had saved me The other girls in the tent would be dead and blue faced, and I would march out of the gates of the base and into the. .. commander of the base I enter the room, salute with my gun, and stare at him For a second, I think he is reaching for his gun That the commander of the base is going to kill me Sometimes I think things I know are not true But he is just reaching for his cigarettes His nostrils flare when he drags in the smoke He gestures for me to sit across from him, and when I drop onto the office chair I can see that the. .. nose are gray, like lifelines of spiders He crushes his cigarette in an ashtray made of a green grenade shell and then reaches for another one It seems he is only interested in killing himself, and slowly He doesn’t care about killing me It makes me sad that he cares about himself more than about me Say I am just not being realistic, but it still makes me sad when people are like that Most people are. .. right now I scream the fear of blood, and ember, and blaze I scream the terror of the beeping watches and boots treading the sand, and the panic brought upon by a reek that thinks it is ba- Boia_9780307955951_5p_all_r1.indd 34 7/16/12 3:15 PM T H E P E O P L E O F F O R E V E R A R E N O T A F R A I D  35 nanas The sound of the words I scream is the groan of my shame, my shame that is not a boulder, my... That night, I do not yet have enough words to make a sentence All I remember is my mother, her dark face bare, collecting me in her arms and running up the wooden steps onto the roof Rain falls on the palm trees below, but my mother removes my mask and pulls my chin up, high up in the air A ball of light rips through the Boia_9780307955951_5p_all_r1.indd 33 7/16/12 3:15 PM 34  SHANI BOIANJIU night sky . 7/16/12 3:15 PM THE PEOPLE OF FOREVER ARE NOT AFRAID 35 nanas. The sound of the words I scream is the groan of my shame, my shame that is not a boulder,. 7/16/12 3:15 PM THE PEOPLE OF FOREVER ARE NOT AFRAID 25 “Faster,” the commander screamed. “My hand feels like there is ice on it,” one of the other soldiers