On our way back to school, Joel’s cheek grew a welt that was purple and raised.
Joel said, ‘She’s not allowed to do that. I’m telling my dad.’
I felt weird, I felt guilty. I’d thought the word cunt was not evil. But I felt like Miriam now hated me, too.
§
It was the second week of August. Time was moving too fast. I kept texting her, Come up. I’m awake. I’m awake! I kept supplying her wine, leaving bottles on the bottom basement step. I kept trying to lure her back to me again. The night it worked, she was drunker than I’d ever seen her before.
‘You know I’m the first Beta Israel refusenik,’ she slurred. ‘I told ’em to let me out of there.’
Beta Israel refusenik sounded heroic. I mean, I knew that the Israeli army was a really big deal.
Barbra plopped down on my bed. And all of a sudden, everything fell into place. This was the reason that her uncle said that she had one more chance. Barbra consciously objected and it was either prison or here.
‘But how did you do it?’ I asked breathlessly.
Barbra laughed. ‘Bruh, I just told them what I really thought. I told ’em that I was a recipient of their fucking violent tactics. I told ’em I don’t support bulldozing Arabs from their homes. They don’t know what it’s like to have no more home.’
I was holding my breath. I don’t know what I was expecting. Jews knew what it was like to have no more home. My father had told me about the Kishinev pogrom, the original pogrom. Two of my grandparents’ sisters died in the Holocaust.
‘The Jews have always been under threat,’ my father said. ‘The Israeli army is our first, most successful self-defence.’
Purple-teethed and loose-legged, Barbra slid off my bed to the floor. Did she believe that the Jews had always been under threat?
‘Put on your boots,’ Barbra said. ‘You be my soldier.’
She was totally slurring. I was trying to make all the connections. The violent army, the first Beta Israel refusenik; demolitions and pogroms, Arabs and Sabbatians. My dad said, ‘Moral army. The only democracy in the Middle East.’
‘Come on, your army boots, bruh, right over there.’
I had Doc Martens under my bed. She wanted me to be the soldier, the soldier who took her from Ethiopia? Was this a part of her healing? Not being set out on the streets?
I felt sweat pouring out of my body from every tiny fucking follicle.
Barbra pulled off her T-shirt and rolled into the fetal position. ‘Ask me where I’m from,’ she said.
I put on my boots. It took time to lace them up.
‘C’mon, put your boo
t on my back,’ Barbra said.
I looked down at her half-naked shell shape, in those green satin shorts.
‘Where’s it? Wanna feel the boot!’
I put my boot in the middle of her polka-dot back.
‘Ask me where I’m from,’ Barbra said again.
I obeyed her directive. I stepped down a bit harder. Then I half-kicked and made her roll right onto her front. ‘Where do you live, little girl?’
Barbra started laughing. She liked being booted. She liked little girl. She said, ‘Tell me you’re going to take me out of here.’
‘Did you lose your mother, little girl?’ I croaked.
Barbra rolled away from me. She rolled back to her belly, she rolled into my carpet. I put my boot back on her spine. I think she moaned. I had been thinking about her every single night since she’d appeared at our house with my father six weeks ago.