Free The Pale of Settlement by Margot Singer Page A

hairdresser, the mining engineer. She should have been born a Hindu, she said. An arranged marriage wouldn’t be so bad.
    Clipboard in hand, the group leader circled around, inspecting their duffel bags and gear. He checked off the essential items, fingered their mummy bags, their water bottles, their stashes ofgranola bars. When it was Susan’s turn, he shook his head. He told her to go rent some fleece pants and a warmer jacket in the Kathmandu bazaar.
    Susan skipped the bus tour of Patan and Bhaktapur and headed out to Durbar Square alone. She felt sealed inside her body, her limbs unnaturally light. It might have been the jet lag, although she’d never felt more wide-awake. It was festival time, and the city streets were hung with strings of flowers and prayer flags and tiny lights. Groups of children passed playing flutes and drums, chanting Tihar songs. A girl who could be no more than eleven or twelve carried an infant in a sling across her back, her eyes rimmed in black, her mouth and cheeks smeared red with rouge. Shop windows were stacked with Nikes and Nintendo cartridges, bootleg Chinese CDS and videotapes. In front of the Kathmandu Tours and Travel Agency stood a ribby, sway-backed cow.
    In the maze of stalls in the bazaar, Susan found a pair of Russian army-issue fleece pants and a puffy blue down parka that looked as if it had survived its share of Everest expeditions. Feathers flew out of the seams when she pressed on it; it would certainly be warm. She hoped she’d have time to wash the pants before they left for the mountains in the morning. She didn’t even want to think about some soldier’s unwashed groin.
    She was on her way back to the hotel when she noticed him, crouching in the shadow of a courtyard, pointing a video camera at a balcony above. There could be no mistaking those Bedouin pants, that close-cropped hair. Three young monks were leaning over the rail, shiny-headed and bare-shouldered in their saffron robes, jostling each other and waving down to passersby. Susan wondered if this was the Temple of the Living Goddess, the Kumari Devi, the little girl selected by augury, whose feet must never touchthe ground. She’d read that the girl sometimes came out onto her balcony, but if this was in fact her home, there was no sign of her now. Susan watched the monks, wondering if they knew they were being videotaped. Didn’t they care? She turned around, but the Israeli guy had disappeared.
    The army was what everybody did. After high school, you went to the army, and when you got out you did your
miluim
for a couple of weeks a year until you got too old. The army was the melting pot. The army was where you made your closest friends. The army was there for you, for life.
    As a child, the only thing Dubi could really imagine about being a soldier was the uniform. He pictured himself in the lace-up boots, the olive-green fatigues, an Uzi underneath his arm. He saw himself hitchhiking at the bus stops, his arm held out, his index finger pointing down. Later, he imagined himself carrying out daring raids on the arms-smuggling tunnels in Rafah, or Syrian positions in the Golan. He’d leap through the gun turret of a tank, crawl on his belly through the burning Negev sand. The army made you strong.
    Dubi wasn’t even born until the mid-1970s, was just a kid during the Lebanon campaign. He remembered the Gulf War, though. He’d never forget waiting with his mother in their apartment building’s basement shelter, their gas masks on. They sat on the edge of a cot, listening for the whistle of an approaching SCUD , the tremor of explosion, the wail of ambulances speeding to the scene. He remembered the metallic taste of adrenaline, the expansion inside his chest as he put his arm around his mother, cupped her shoulder in his hand.
    Dubi’s father had slipped in his military service—a desk job inTel Aviv, on account of his bad back—between ’68 and