Menashe and Shimshon find the way to the apartment door by themselves, without asking for directions like Aaron had to. They don’t even say anything about the fridge blocking the entrance. They get in, hug Aaron, smack him on the shoulder. 

Aaron met Menashe at university, studying engineering. He impressed Aaron with his pleasant manner, and the simple tranquility with which he did everything. Back then he was chubby with long hair, but has since trimmed both the hair and the fat. He has very blue eyes and a strong jawline that’s only accented by his stubble—a traditional Russian handsomeness that he waters down with a sort of boyish hesitation. Like many people in the modern era, he has great talents that don’t fit in the STEM world, hard though he may try to push through that narrow keyhole. He has a way with nuance that most engineers lack, and can recapture a work of standup comedy not just word for word by also in intonation and style, extrapolating without effort to places the original never reached. An impersonation of Joe Rogan complaining about the university’s black coffee, or Dave Chappelle explaining the problem with hitting on comp-sci chicks that make double your salary in Google—bits that make Aaron laugh while speaking to his heart. Menashe is a talented writer, but has a hard time finding the motivation to sit down and do it.  

When he hugs Aaron, there is only sincere joy in him, no manners. “Listen, my brother, I know you must have had more fun out there, but in the most selfish way, it’s so good to have you here.”

Aaron agrees. 

Shimshon puts a confident hand on the back of Aaron’s neck. “Back in the shit, huh? We missed you.”

Shimshon is the CEO of a tiny hi-tech company. He drives a Tesla and lives in a settlement, and seems to always be walking on a very narrow bridge – if he arrives at its other side, he’ll be a millionaire, but if he loses balance he’ll fall into bankruptcy, or lower still. He is of Indian ancestry, with very dark eyes and slick black hair, remarkably thin, but there is in him the vigor of a young lion and the intense attention of a guru. He got Aaron in big trouble last time they were abroad, an adventure that reached its climax when they pretended Shimshon doesn’t know English to confuse the Portuguese police officers that searched them for drugs (that they actually had on them, of course) – a technique Shimshon learned from Palestinians when he was a soldier working a military checkpoint. Shimshon says it’s better to try and lose than live in fear, and Aaron agrees, though he doesn’t know if Shimshon has vanquished his fear, or simply suppressed it, at a great, everyday cost. 

Shimshon and Menashe look at the peeling paint, the crooked shelves, the piles of construction debris stacked in the corners. “Listen, my brother,” Shimshon says. “You’re straight up a whiner. This apartment is sababa¹ as hell.”

Aaron sighs in relief. Where in Canada would anyone call him a whiner? Or ‘my brother’ for that matter. “Second opinion, Doctor Menashe?”

Menashe nods in sympathy. “Sorry, brother, it’s a bombshell of an apartment, in a good way. If you still want to leave tonight I won’t convince you otherwise, but I will recommend that we start drinking early.”

And so they do. 

They sit in the Malabi²-Place in Florentin, and Aaron thanks them for coming for him, for rescuing him from this loneliness, in one of the only ways he knows: paying for their beers and malabi. The Israeli-ness of the place strikes him. The tables and chairs invade the sidewalk, much further than the area designated by the municipality. The ficus trees above their heads drop poop-like fruit, as they have for years over years onto the crooked cobblestone, covering it with a sticky layer of purple-black grime. He sips from his beer and feels embarrassed to admit, even to himself, that he really did miss the taste of Goldstar³. He checks out the clientele around them – former combat soldiers with Hindu tattoos laughing loudly, girls with expressions like the entire world can suck their dicks, ordering beers with the same intonation they used as bootcamp instructors. 

“Infuriating, isn’t it?” Menashe says, following Aaron’s gaze. “I mean, you’re already hot. Why do you also need to be super charismatic? Isn’t being a hottie enough?”

“Bless your heart, Nashe,” Shimshon says. “One day you’re going to climb out of this shit you’re in.”

“What shit is that?”

“The fear,” Aaron says at the end of a sip. “You really do miss a hundred percent of the shots you don’t take.”

“Listen, being afraid isn’t the problem. I’ve done way scarier things than talking to a girl with a shitty attitude. It’s just that nobody talks about what percent of these shots jump off the board and smack you right on the balls. Look at her, the one with the side-cut. You just know that if I even open my mouth she’ll tell me she has a boyfriend.”

Shimshon laughs, and turns to Aaron. “And he’s not wrong, with that attitude. You see, that’s the beauty of Nashe. He’s sitting here, doing this cute face, and you don’t understand we’re talking about a Russian mob assassin. Did we ever tell you what happened in Protective Edge⁴?”

Aaron takes a long sip from his beer in preparation. “No?”

“So. When we were in the reserves for Operation Protective Edge they got us into armored cars. I don’t think I can even explain to you how cramped those things are. Understand that you’re sitting in one row, and the people in the row in front of you are so close that there are two knees, each one belonging to someone else, between your two knees. Like a zipper and there’s no air conditioning in this shit so we’re sitting and sweating, and after a couple of hours inside this box, the moisture from the evaporated sweat condenses on the ceiling, and it starts dripping down and you just wanna die, and that’s even before they start bombing you. And it’s not like it is here, where the rockets are thrown in your general direction—someone’s looking at the vehicle you’re in and tries to hit it specifically. And I’m sitting there cussing my heart out, and everybody’s cursing and praying to live through this, and Nashe’s sitting across from me, his knee between my knees, and he just looks forward, like some psychopath.”

Menashe shrugs. “Look—when you have insurgents in front of you and all that, you’re stressed. When somebody’s going to shoot you and you need to shoot them first, you’re stressed. But when you’re sitting in a car and somebody’s shooting at you, there’s nothing you can do about it. So what do you have to be stressed about? If you die, you won’t even know.”

Shimshon takes a sip from his beer and pats Menashe on the back. “That’s Nashe for you. Our commander goes on comm, says that he wants to go through the intersection, asks if they made sure there’s no ambush there. And on comm they tell him ‘go ahead, it will be alright’. And the commander says ‘Sababa, let’s go.’” Shimshon laughs. Not a nervous laugh—this really is funny to him. “And I’m screaming, What do you mean it will be alright, are we driving into an ambush or not? and Nashe doesn’t even wipe the sweat from his eyes. That’s how deep into psycho mode he is.” 

Aaron looks at Menashe, whose blue gaze is on one of the other tables, and wonders if there’s a better word than psychosis to describe that mental state. 

Menashe says, “That’s the stuff that’s hard to explain when you’re here, downing beers with your buds, looking at girls so hot that fucking fuck you, why don’t you go be hot somewhere else? But when you’re there, even in an empty house, after everyone’s got the call to evacuate…there are things about that that you simply can’t explain. We arrive at a house, and it’s empty, sababa? Aside from the dog. They ran, and they left their dog tied up, to get bombed. 

“She was a cutie,” Shimshon recalls between sips. “Followed us the rest of the operation.” 

Aaron doesn’t ask what happened to her afterwards. “There was a camel, right?” He isn’t sure that the camel he’s remembering was from that operation. Maybe it was another camel from another one.

Shimshon runs his fingers through his shiny black hair. “Ah yeah, and those whoresons broke its legs.”

“In the same house?” Aaron asks.

“No, it was at a different house,” Menashe replies. “We heard a large animal from the backyard. I know what a camel sounds like but I’d never heard one make those kinds of sounds. We go around and see the camel’s on the ground. Listen, brother, that was a horrid sight. I get they didn’t want us to ride it, but… What? They cheaped out on a bullet?”

“We didn’t cheap out, though,” Shimshon says, not telling Aaron which of them it was that shot the camel. Maybe it just doesn’t matter to them. “Even that was after a long argument. Those Nahalists from the nucleus didn’t agree at first. Right, I always forget that you didn’t serve.”

They explain to Aaron that Nahal is an acronym for Fighting Pioneer Youth, which just happens to form the Hebrew word for ‘river’. A ‘nucleus’, as they call their groups, volunteer together for a year before enlisting together. That specific nucleus, according to his friends, was a very tight group, and very open, talking about everything.

“Oh, those faggots?” Menashe sighs. “Listen, they drove me nuts.”

Aaron pricks up an ear, waves his hand as if to say, “How so?”

Menashe sucks on a tooth, puts his hands in front of him as if to grasp the idea with them. “Ok, so we’re in the living room of some house, and in the morning, after we slept our three fucking hours -”

“Which is also funny,” Shimshon says. “That you sleep better during bombardments. When you hear our side dropping bombs you know everything’s good, and you sleep sababa. It’s only when it stops that you know someone could be making their way towards you, and you can’t sleep because of how ready you are, even if you try not to be.”

Menashe starts talking as soon as Shimshon stops, as if they were taking turns shooting cover-fire. “So the night before we found the usual pile of mattresses stacked on one side of the room—because I guess that’s how the children sleep, I don’t know—and we put them on the floor and slept, and in the morning the Nahalists didn’t let us leave until we put the mattresses back in their place.”

Aaron knows not to express opinions on subjects he knows nothing about, but he raises an eyebrow to communicate that he doesn’t see what the problem is.

“We all knew that after we got out of there the D9⁵s were going to come and flatten the whole place,” Shimshon says. “But they couldn’t make a mess in these people’s home. These people that we forced to evacuate—the nucleus wouldn’t make a mess in the house that was about to be destroyed the next day anyway. Do you get it now?”

“No,” Aaron responds. “I think it’ll take me a long time to get it.”

“Listen,” Shimshon says soothingly, drawing the word out longer than Menashe did. “It’s shit for everybody there. Every single person, even the insurgents waiting for Israeli soldiers to surprise them. And if somebody stays in those houses it’s to kill soldiers. Nashe and I almost died there.”

“You’re exaggerating.” Menashe has put down his beer and now digs into his malabi with a teaspoon. “We were nowhere close to death. Worst case we would have lost our legs or something.”

Shimshon sees the confusion and alarm in Aaron’s eyes and smacks him on both shoulders to center him. “You’re gonna love this one. Before we go into a house to sleep, we have to make sure there are no terrorists there. So we clean it one room at a time, sababa? Me and Nashe, going room to room, counting to four and then poking our heads and guns around the door and spray away. We’re sprawled on the floor, of course—makes it harder for the other guy to shoot you. We have a grenade with us, which could make it even safer, but we don’t want to waste it; you never know when you’re going to need one. So we go one room at a time, and of course there’s no one there. And then we get to a room that’s particularly dark, and we don’t know why, you really can’t see anything. So I signal to Nashe, ‘Yalla⁶, let’s not overcomplicate, throw the grenade, and until whoever it is inside recuperates we’ll spray him out of shape.’ So Nashe pulls out the grenade and tries to take the pin out, but he can’t. I mime to him, ‘come on, what’s taking so long,’ because when you’re outside the door of a room where someone is waiting to kill you, you really, really want to make the first move. Nashe makes a face that means that it’s not working. So I whisper ‘yalla, three four’ and we charge, point our M16s into the darkness and fire. Immediately wood splinters fly into my face, right into my eyebrows. And I understand that the room wasn’t dark: there was just a closet or something blocking the doorway from the inside. No way could you have thrown a grenade in there.”

Menashe laughs. “And if the pin hadn’t gotten stuck, we’d both be sitting here now, as you see us, in wheelchairs, and I couldn’t have done this.” He pushes his chair back and gracefully rises to his feet. “Anyone else want another beer?”

“Yalla,” Aaron answers, still shocked.

The evening goes on. They drink, try talking to girls, eat pizza, laugh. Florentin is more beautiful the drunker Aaron gets. He sneezes from the pizza spice and the street tells him “bless you.” Aaron thanks the street, and thinks that it’s referencing some Yehu Yaron song, but doesn’t remember which one. 

Back at the apartment, they sit in the living room and drink lots of water, waiting out their inebriation. The German roommate (you must be wondering where she’d been until now. Well, during our brief shared accommodation she was such an asshole that I decided to avenge by wiping her memory and name⁷ from this story as much as possible without provoking causality issues) returns to the apartment and brings with her a twenty-year-old Yeshiva student, with Peyot⁸ and tzitzit and a knit yarmulka and everything⁹. 

He introduces himself to them, and they to him, and he goes to take a piss. While he’s in the bathroom the German tells them that the Yeshiva student, whom she names ‘The Fish,’ has a crush on her, but they can’t do anything because of his strict moral code. Menashe, Shimson and Aaron say they understand, of course, while trading glances whose meaning is clear: The Fish is waiting for an opportunity to break his moral code, which he’ll regret later, and the German’s thoroughly enjoying torturing this poor Jewish boy. Cruel, but none of their business. 

The Fish returns, and Aaron takes the opportunity to pester him with both Biblical and Talmudic questions. Shimshon, who was also raised in a Yeshiva (which he left at the age of sixteen after finally getting his rabbi to admit that he didn’t know for sure that there was a god), joins the discussion. The Fish gets points in Aaron’s ledger for laughing when Aaron calls the act of prayer “swaying back and forth”, and says that after going through combat training, he doesn’t take things to heart. The Fish tells them of the combat unit in which he’s currently serving, and Menashe and Shimshon’s demeanor changes when they realize it’s the same unit they served in, the same one they’d return to if they were called back as reservists. To them, he stops being a stranger they humor out of politeness, and becomes a sort of distant relative, one they may not know but feel very much obligated to. Something similar happens to Aaron when he talks abouts his adventures in creative writing. He and The Fish agree to send each other some of their work –  The Fish his poetry, and Aaron a story he wrote that takes place in the time of the Biblical Book of Judges¹⁰, in which an Israelite warlord struggles to cope with the trauma he experienced during the war¹¹. 

The effects of the alcohol wane. They say goodbye to the German and The Fish and put Aaron’s suitcases into Shimshon’s Tesla. He drives Menashe to the train station and Aaron to the new apartment. They park illegally in front of it and stay inside the car and talk. Oh, how Aaron has missed these 3am conversations.

“There was a time,” Shimshon says at some point, “After my first startup went bankrupt, that I just couldn’t do anything. I didn’t answer the phone for anyone. Don’t know if I ate. I didn’t leave the living room, and all that living room had was piles of weed. Piles, my brother.” He gestures with his hands, and it really does seem like a lot. “And a bottle of whiskey, without a glass. Why waste effort on pouring? I crashed like that for a month and a half. You, too, will collapse like that. It’s ok. You’ll fall and then you’ll get up and return to your life.”

They get out of the car and hug, and Aaron thinks again how great it is to come back home. He takes his four bags, throws them into the dirty apartment. (He sort of regrets getting that glimpse into Shammai’s life—the life of a talented scientist in the field of artificial intelligence, who’s under such pressure to beat Chinese scientists in the race to develop the next step that he doesn’t have time to wipe the floor, or notice that the stove doesn’t work. The drawers are packed with packets of ketchup and mayonnaise past their expiration date, disposable soy sauce containers, chopsticks, piles and piles of food delivery leftovers.) He takes a shower, makes his bed and lies in it. For the past few months, he’s gone to sleep with his e-reader in his hand, lest he be dragged into the familiar thought spiral that would keep him awake until morning. Now he doesn’t even search his bag for it—he just lies there, him and that feeling. What is that? It takes him a moment to realize—he doesn’t feel alone anymore. God, is he glad he came back to Tel Aviv. He holds on to that feeling, closes his eyes and –

NEXT: War

1. Arabic. Used in Hebrew as “fine”. ↩︎
2. Traditional Arabic pudding. ↩︎
3. Israeli beer. The name is not translated. ↩︎
4.  (Edited from Wikipedia:)The 2014 Gaza War, also known as Operation Protective Edge, was a military operation launched by Israel on 8 July 2014 in the Gaza Strip. Following the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank by Hamas-affiliated Palestinian militants, the Israel Defense Forces initiated Operation Brother’s Keeper, in which some 350 Palestinians, including nearly all of the active Hamas militants in the West Bank, were arrested. Hamas subsequently fired a greater number of rockets into Israel from the Gaza Strip, triggering a seven-week-long conflict between the two sides. It was one of the deadliest outbreaks of open conflict between Israel and the Palestinians in decades. The combination of Palestinian rocket attacks and Israeli airstrikes resulted in over two thousand deaths, the vast majority of which were Gazan Palestinians. ↩︎
5. A bulldozer model, weighing almost 49 tons, used in both construction and military operations. ↩︎
6. Arabic. Used similarly to “Let’s go” in English. ↩︎
7. “May their memory and name be wiped [from the world]” is a formal Hebrew curse, usually used when mentioning the Nazis and their accomplices. ↩︎
8. The Hebrew term for sidelocks or sideburns, literally meaning “corner, side, edge”. Peyot are worn by Orthodox Jewish men because on an interpretation of the Tanakh’s injunction against shaving the “sides” of one’s head. ↩︎
9. In order not to overburden the non-Israeli reader, suffice it to say that we are talking about a man very learned in Jewish tradition and customs, but of a sect that also works, pays taxes and participates in army service. That is not the default. ↩︎
10. The seventh book of the Old Testament. It covers the time between the conquest of the land of Canaan and the establishment of a monarchy, during which judges served as warlords, governors and – you guessed it – judicial authorities. ↩︎
11. You can read it here. ↩︎