Free The People of Forever Are Not Afraid by Shani Boianjiu Page B

the night after Fadi came to the checkpoint with no pitas, Fadi came to visit my head without me even trying.
    “I won’t go,” Fadi said. “Don’t make me go to work again.” He was on the floor of his kitchen, sobbing.
    “You are not a teenage girl,” Nur said. “You mustn’t cry like that. Grown men don’t cry like that.”
    Fadi stood up. He watched Nur chop onions for the weekend casserole. “I won’t go,” he said. He was choking on his words. “My life should be more than this. Avi the contractor said he bought his son a new bike this week. He has a bike, and he is a quarter my age. I never had a bike. This isn’t fair.”
    “Who do you think you are? Do you think you are some spoiled Israeli boy? You are a Palestinian man and this is your life. This is what we have to do,” Nur said. She wiped her neck with the dishcloth, and this disgusted Fadi. He had noticed wrinkles around her neck, hanging, useless skin that was not there when he agreed to marry her, and this disgusted him more.
    “Who is ‘we’?” he asked. “There is only me. And I know who I am. I won’t go.”
    “Oh, but you will go,” Nur said, so knowing and old and chopping onions.
    And when she smirked he could feel his fist clenching and he threw it for the blow—he felt his knuckles grazing the blade of the knife and tearing as his fist was in the air. Nur held up the knife, but Fadi didn’t stop, and he punched her, just once, one punch to the jawline.

    “I CAN ’ T throw a dick at you,” I told Yaniv the next morning. The sun was not yet seen, and I had woken up less tired. I had woken up with enough energy to look at myself in the discolored mirror in the bathroom caravan. I hadn’t looked at myself in months. I had grown accustomed to washing my hands with my eyes planted at my feet.
    “What?” Yaniv asked. He had his arm around one of the Ethiopian girls who was also assigned to check cars. They were pouring packets of sugar down their throats and singing Mizrahi music into the defenseless sands ahead.
    “I don’t have a dick, so I can’t throw one,” I said. I was so not tired I decided to mess with him for pleasure. I knew this would drive him crazy. It amused me that he would actually believe there is anything in this world he could understand that I didn’t.
    “It’s an expression,” Yaniv said. “It’s like, not for real. It means showing that you don’t care, you understand?”
    “No, what do you mean? Do you not know that I don’t have a dick?”
    “Gosh,” Yaniv said. He breathed in. “It’s … it’s an
expression
. Don’t you understand?” he stretched out his arms, imploring. He was clearly goaded because he didn’t even notice that he shoved the Ethiopian girl a little.
    “I don’t understand,” I said. “You are stupid to say something that makes no sense.”
    “But … it’s an expression,” Yaniv said. It was clear by his pouting and rapid chewing that he was searching for words that had never been his. Words like “literal” or“representative” or even “figure of speech.” I let him search for what was not at all there until it was time for the gates to open.
    Fadi didn’t try not to get me as his checker this time. He didn’t try anything. I didn’t even notice him in line, and there he was, placing his ID and papers on the cement in front of me like he didn’t even know me. I made him wait before I took them. I pretended to look at Yaniv, who was hunched down and deep in chatter with a Palestinian inside a car. Cars began to honk; he was holding up the entire line.
    Then I looked and then I saw and then I was afraid, but only for a second.
    I expected it, but it still truly scared me for a minute when I saw it. Scared like someone had just convinced me I was God, or already dead, or on fire.
    Fadi’s knuckles were wounded. Cut. Blood had crusted on them.
    “Did you hurt yourself?” I asked.
    “Yes,” Fadi said. “I hurt myself.”

    T HE SORTING