Fracture Point Read online

  As we entered my apartment, she disappeared in a second. I had five minutes to myself and decided to take out “Yemima” and sit on the bed. I played four chords, five or six times. Libby named my guitar “Yemima” because it was manufactured by Yamaha, and Yemima was her kindergarten teacher. She gave me the guitar as a gift in junior high when she bought herself an electric guitar from money she made babysitting.

  The evening before the military operation in the village, we assembled at the preparation point. I played quiet songs on the guitar. We were allowed to talk or sing quietly. Everyone was tense and I felt like they wanted soft songs to help them relax. I played songs by Arik Einstein because everyone here knew his songs. I don’t remember whether I played Donna’s favorite song by him.

  Buchnik was sorting ammunition next to me. During the second chorus of one of the songs I was playing, he threw an ammunition box and it hit Yemima. There was the sound of cracking wood accompanied by the sound of suffering guitar strings.

  “What the fuck, Buchnik?” I screamed at him, but one of the commanders cut me off.

  “Buchnik, you asshole! You almost killed Evron,” someone shouted towards him as if Yemima didn’t matter. The guitar was ruined, with a small crack in the sound box that affected every sound the guitar made, most noticeably the bass strings. It was no longer as deep as it used to be, but I loved Yemima, and her new sound reminded me of the metallic sound the electric guitars made at the rock concerts Libby loved so much. Since that terrible day in the village, the crack in the sound box has widened a bit, probably because the wood vibrates when I play it.

  “It has a strange sound,” Donna told me as she came out of the bathroom. I wondered if and how I should tell her the story of this beloved cracked guitar.

  “My favorite song is ‘Atur Mitzchech,’” she said.

  “Sorry. Too complicated for me,” I told her.

  “Won’t you make the effort for me?”

  “Sure,” I said − and sang the song without touching the strings.

  She laughed and wrapped her arms around me while kissing me on the cheek.

  Yemima made a jarring sound as I slammed it on the floor. I used to be gentle with it, but Donna threw me down with unexpected force. She sucked my neck and took off my shirt.

  “I knew,” she said, running delicate purple-painted nails over the muscle lines in my abdomen, as if trying to mark them in her memory. I took off her shirt, crazy with curiosity. She wasted no time and her hand plunged into my underpants. Her body was soft as silk, with a narrow waist above a pleasant, soft pelvis. She kissed my chest and went down to my stomach while her hands were already pulling off my pants. She was fast and efficient. It reminded me of the doctor who undressed me in the field emergency room. I tried not to think about Adva’s disappointed face when we tried to go all the way for the first time after the battle. Also the second time, and actually every time ever since . . .

  “Ah,” I said to Donna, who raised her head to me and her curls caressed my dick.

  “Wait a minute.” I pulled her back. I took off her bra and thanked God for the breasts that brought me back to reality. We hugged and kissed. Her black curls and the scent of her neck blew my mind.

  “We’ll go all the way, right?” she asked me with a mischievous smile.

  “Yeah, sure,” I told her.

  She positioned herself above me, and let me in with a slow sigh.

  She was wetter than I knew a woman could be. As she slowly rose, I tried to slip myself back into her. I remembered the feeling of enveloping silk, but also I didn’t forget the rolling thunder that followed. Hell, I thought it would be over after a year of abstinence.

  “What happened?” she asked me, but I didn’t have time to answer. I screamed, “Get off! Get off!” and pushed her off me.

  Chapter 7

  I arrived for the sixth week of the course perfectly shaved and with a short haircut. When Eitan saw me, he said, “Good morning, Mr. Evron. You finally look like a pro.”

  As the ten members of the course were putting on their Krav Maga gear, the only sound in the hall was the thin sound of the huge rotating ceiling fans.

  The fighting ring has its own rules, Eitan told us. “There are not many rules, so we’re strict about keeping the rules we do have.”

  He elaborated. You do not hit your opponent in the balls. If your opponent falls, the fight is over. The fight continues as long as the instructor decides it should continue. You fight every second as if it’s the last second of your life.

  “Someone here is obsessed with Fight Club,” Bitton murmured under his beard.

  My first fight in the course was terrible. Eitan shouted, “Fight!” and after taking five punches to my ribs and two low kicks I ended up on the ground without hitting my opponent even once.

  “I’m glad that happened,” Eitan said as I stood up, “so that the course will know what a fight is not supposed to look like.” I stood at the starting position − left foot forward, most of my weight on it, fists tight, protecting my jaw and ready to attack.

  I felt the tears rising up in my throat.

  “Evron,” Eitan said to me, holding my helmet as I bit down on my mouthpiece “you’re overthinking it. This is not the Hebrew University here. In a fight you beat the shit out of your opponent. You get it?”

  I nodded, just make him stop. I felt humiliated. Let me fight, let me beat him up.

  “Go back to your places,” he ordered and I let out a soft, “What?”

  “Next!” he shouted and two fighters ran to the middle of the ring, ignoring my presence. I couldn’t even identify who it was but his shoulder knocked me out of the ring, as if it I didn’t even deserve to be there.

  On the bus ride from The Academy to the hotel, half of the guys fell asleep and the other half were busy on their phones.

  “Are you all right?” Leroy asked me.

  “Yeah, yeah. I have allergies,” was how I explained my tears as I wiped them with my hand.

  “Tell your allergies to keep things in proportion,” Leroy smiled at me. “You changed your mindset today. Everything else will fall into place with time,” he said. “What mindset? What will fall into place with time?” I asked him.

  “The key is to go from a defensive mindset to an attacking mindset,” Leroy continued slowly, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Then it’s just technique, and that’ll come with time and diligence.”

  “Sure,” I said. Easier said than done, especially when you’re a silver medalist.

  “What diligence are you talking about?” I was almost whispering. “One more day like today and I’ll be a gold member of the National Insurance Institute.”

  Leroy was being genuinely nice, but he was too good at fighting to be able to comfort me.

  “Don’t be hard on yourself. Look at how much you’ve improved. You lasted a whole fight today,” he said, offering the only consolation possible for the worst fighter in the course.

  A week later he was proud of my so-called success. I had Arik Goldstein beat me up for two whole minutes, and in the last half minute of the fight I managed to punch him twice and kick him once. I kicked him so weakly that I highly doubt my feet could even turn a page in a book. Success is relative.

  On the ninth weekend of the course I came home so quickly that I didn’t even shower before leaving the facility. I lay down on the couch in my apartment with dry sweat on my body and clothes that smelled like a trash can. Donna cooked a festive meal for me: sea bass with sweet potato pureé. When she opened the wine, she said that we were drinking to my still being on my feet for a full round.

  “When will you be finished with this?” she asked from the kitchen.

  “At the end of October, when the semester starts,” I shouted from the couch. I was lying with an ice pack on my bruised shoulder. Drops of water were dripping onto my bare chest and on
to the shabby old couch.

  “What happens after the course?”

  “After the course?”

  “Are you going to continue fighting with people?” She walked into the living room with two plates of fish and a busy look.

  “You mean getting beaten up.”

  “It’s the same thing,” Donna said beneath curls that fell on her shoulders as she poured the red wine into the round wine glasses. “Look what happened to you in two months. How much weight have you gained?”

  “I don’t know, maybe 13 pounds?”

  “By the end of October you’ll look like The Incredible Hulk.”

  “You should see the other guys. People with black belts in jiu-jitsu, Thai boxing, naval commandos. Without Leroy, I wouldn’t have lasted a week.”

  I didn’t tell her what would happen after the course, mainly because I had no idea. I tried to change the topic, but Donna was persistent. She wanted to hear that this was temporary. I told her so, but I told myself that everything is temporary.

  Thirteen weeks had passed in The Academy. I was counting because I was suffering. Even so, the private training with Leroy was the best part of it. When everyone went to eat dinner at the end of the day, Leroy and I would make ourselves sandwiches and return to the ring. My job was to turn off the florescent lights and leave only the yellow light above the ring spilling over it. Leroy’s job was to select a playlist.

  He liked kick-ass heavy metal rock, especially live concerts. The sound of the guitar cut through the air as Leroy finished putting on his Krav Maga gear and waited for me in the middle of the ring in his fighting position. We would focus on the things that we had practiced the day before. We practiced low kicks, seizing a weapon, and violent cuffing, while Pantera, Rage, or Marilyn Manson rocked the room. With every week that passed, it seemed like the concerts Leroy picked were louder, the audience more ecstatic.

  During the last week of the course, just when we were hoping that “the magic circle” was no more than a rumor, we discovered that shit got real.

  Each of us was quiet, praying not to get injured right before the end of the course. Tension and uncertainty made the rumors spread faster. I heard of this guy who broke his rib in a boxing fight, or the trainee who tore his meniscus from a too-precise low kick. We also heard of two trainees whose head-to-head bout was literally what had happened – they had a head-on collision and were whisked away to the emergency room.

  As we got off the bus, Eitan was waiting for us at The Academy entrance. “Don’t go to the fighting ring,” he said. “I’ll wait for you in the Almaliakh classroom.”

  “Now Eitan will walk in and say there’s no such thing as the magic circle,” said Arik, and let out a booming laugh. He and Leroy were the only ones who weren’t nervous about this circle thing. Leroy has been a professional fighter since elementary school, and Arik simply weighed 230 pounds.

  A man walked into the room. He looked to be around 45, but with the posture of a 25-year-old athlete. Leroy told me that he recognized this man because he served with his older brother in the Jenin area. The man said that his name was Lev, but he was also quick to say that his nickname in the ISA is “Captain Billal” and we should call him that.

  “You.” the captain pointed at me. “Do you know what a handler is?”

  “Sure. It’s the agents’ operator,” I answered him.

  “Is something funny, Totti’s brother?” The man turned to Leroy, who apologized and forcibly rubbed his bristles into his cheeks.

  “Soon you’ll all be joining our Jerusalem unit as field security guards. Next week you’ll have an orientation day in the unit. Just an introduction to the facility and the managers. Not a big deal,” he said and took a deep breath. “There’s no easy way to describe this. We’re very close to the exploding buses of the early 2000s.” The silence between his sentences was filled with great distress, which only the creaking of the chair dared violate. I remember this period as a little kid. Not a week would go by without TV headlines about a restaurant or bus that exploded with 15 casualties.

  “Long-story-short: Gazan movement infiltrated into the West Bank. Their people are well trained at a very high operational level. At the moment we don’t know what their big plan is, and the reason to be worried is their communications encryption capabilities. These are the capabilities of a state intelligence agency, not just a terrorist organization, and that’s what disturbs us.”

  Billal stopped for a moment and we looked at him as though he had just descended from Mount Sinai. Everything he was telling us sounded like it had been taken from a “Homeland” script.

  “I was in your position once, securing field operations. I was in the same course you just went through. I thought I would be going to guard some facility for 8 hours a day and then I would go home to sleep with my girlfriend.” He came close to Leroy and his muscles stood out as he leaned down on the table. His facial wrinkles were deep, as opposed to his full hair. He seemed tired after a long day of work, maybe even from a long career. “Boy, was I wrong.”

  I would have been happy to continue to ask myself existential questions such as “What the fuck was that?” but everyone else was already hurrying to the Krav Maga hall because you should never be late to Eitan’s fight training.

  Eitan was waiting for us. “Get on your full fighting gear. We’re starting the magic circle in 10 minutes,” he explained.

  Throughout the course, I was terrified of the magic circle. During the day I was afraid of it and during the night it haunted me.

  Eitan’s quick steps were the only sound in the hall. We stood in two circles facing each other, an inner circle and outer circle. Eitan explained the rules of the magic circle. When he shouts, “Fight!” everyone goes wild on their opponent, beating them as if they’re protecting their mother, or, in my case, my father. When Eitan shouts, “Stop!” everyone has to stop immediately and move on to the opponent to their right. Eitan will then shout, “Fight!” again a few seconds later.

  Arik was the king of the firing range, but here he was a huge, slow, sweaty, 230-pound mass.

  “Fight!” Eitan shouted, and I went for Arik with everything I had. Two strong punches threw me back. I sent a low kick that hit him in the thigh, causing him to lose his balance. I kicked him again and punched him in the chest to knock him down, but he regained his balance and punched me in the liver, causing terrible pain in my stomach. I saw his boxing glove heading for my face and I managed to duck and it missed. Damn, I thought to myself. Just one blast from him to my head and I’m done. After the second punch missed, I hit him with a knee strike to the lungs. Arik let out a heavy cough just as Eitan yelled, “Stop!” and the fighting stopped for a moment.

  Arik caught his breath and stuck out his glove in a boxer’s handshake and I moved to face Bitton.

  Then Luvaton.

  By the time I had to fight Yotam, even I couldn’t see straight but we were both in the same state. Outside there was a thunderstorm. My shirt was dripping with sweat again. Before every fight, I gathered all the strength I had left and did my best to stay on my feet. After every fight, I hoped for it to end. But then there was another round and I had no choice but to fight because the principle that dominates the Middle East is the same as the one that applies in the Krav Maga hall: If you don’t attack, you’ll be attacked.

  There was a break for a few seconds before the final round. Heavy rain was coming down on the roof and the pounding was disrupted by the heavy breathing and sharp groans. I saw Bitton limping. Arik’s breathing sounded like a pig snorting. My final fight was against an opponent I had never fought: Leroy.

  While I repositioned the thin leg guards that came loose, Leroy was already standing in the starting position, focused on me as if this were his first fight. At other times, you couldn’t find any trace of hostility in his calm light eyes. But not when he’s on the mat. When he’s in fight
ing mode, there’s no hint of a smile on his face or a twinkle in his eye. He was completely serious and all business.

  Outside the thunderstorm continued. “Fight!” Eitan shouted.

  Leroy didn’t wait even a second and I was immediately taking blows from all over.

  “Fight, Evron, fight!” Eitan shouted, as if reminding me what I was supposed to be doing. Leroy wasn’t taller or heavier than me, but every punch he deals is a work of art. Within a split second he identified the exposed area and he dealt a precise, painful blow.

  I took a direct punch to the chest, a hook to the spleen, a knee to the stomach, and another shot to the chest. I was thrown and folded uncontrollably until I was nearly thrown off the mat. The air was knocked out of my lungs with every blow, and no new air entered to take its place. I took shot after shot, but I refused to let myself fall. Even though it was Leroy, I wasn’t going down.

  Eitan continued to scream at me. I couldn’t understand what he was shouting because just then I took a punch to the head. In boxing, when you’re punched in the face, you black out. It is like a computer rebooting until it starts again. I thought I protected my face well, but Leroy showed me that I didn’t.

  “Fight, Evron!” Eitan yelled. That would probably be a good idea. When I opened my eyes, I saw Leroy raise his leg in the air, about to hit me with a low kick that would end my part in this fight. I jumped back and his kick missed. I sent back a kick of my own and two punches to the ribs. Leroy didn’t move; he just let out a little “hmm” when the second punch landed. He got over this quickly and sent two punches and an especially strong knee that hit my chest. My lungs shrank against my will. I couldn’t inhale, but I punched him back twice. The first was a soft one that touched his stomach and the second was to his head that completely missed because he was moving too fast for me. He had the perfect angle; I knew what was about to happen. His glove went flying towards me but he barely touched my ear because I hit him with my knee in his stomach and this injury would disqualify him for the course.