“Don't Call Me Naomi”

Copyright 2012 André Klein, learnoutlive.com

cover art: Sanja Klein

All characters, places and names appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely

coincidental.

[ “DON 'T CALL ME NAOMI ! ” ]

For three months Naomi hadn’t been allowed past the wire. The doctors called it “vacation”. But she had seen her medical records where it said “danger to self and others” and as far as she was concerned, one word was as good as the next. Something had to be written down. And they were always more generous with explanations after the fact. Scraping the dishes from their mustard skid-marks she looked out of the window and watched the sun set between the mountains and bushes of rusty barbed wire in the distance, her hands on autopilot, as if belonging to someone else: wipe, rinse, repeat. The window above the sink her husband had installed a few days after she got suspended. Another fancy word. He said it would make her think of other things. But some prisons are defined only by the absence of walls. Having finished the dishes, she took the trash and headed for the door. In the living-room Amir followed her steps with black eyes and grabbed for legs with chocolate-stained fingers. She scooped him up from the marble floor, wiping his hands on her shirt, all without breaking her step. With a faint “click”, the door behind her fell into its lock. The air outside was dry and carried the scent of pine trees from up the mountain. The streets were silent, except for the constant hum of crickets punctuated by dog barks and car alarms. As she hurled the trash into the container with one arm, balancing Amir on her hip with the other, a dirty ginger cat looked up at her and vanished when Naomi’s sneakers scraped over gravel. Back in the house she stood at the window again, her hands on standby, watching the last streaks of sunlight wring a faint glow from the crooked branches of an olive tree just beyond the wire. The army had abandoned this neighbourhood the day the southern border was torn open like a knife-wound by the nameless but multitudinous militia. After the so-called crackdown (if you’d been in one, the word seemed like a bad joke) nothing was settled. The border had become a fuzzy zone of random skirmishes, each day moving a few meters to either side, the people never at peace, never fully at war, either. Just when they had secured a perimeter, another one would break and spill the enemy, hurling him closer to their schools and backyards. Even now, nothing had changed. Thinking about it made her gut clench. But there was no fear or anger. A medic had

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[ “DON 'T CALL ME NAOMI ! ” ]

once told her how some patients still felt the pain of their arms and legs, months and even years after they’d been amputated. But Naomi still had all her limbs. What she lost was worse, the phantom-pain of the soul reminding her of the gaping void where feelings should have been. The doctors said that the daily drudge work of housekeeping would curb her edge. What they didn’t know was that this so-called edge was nothing but the jagged outline of that missing part of her, a silhouette drawn in the gasoline of longing and set on fire by a desperate forgetfulness. In the beginning the pills had seemed to help. But eventually it became impossible to cover up something as obvious as the absence of any genuine feeling. She had learned to live on autopilot. It’s what she’d been trained to do. It worked. And that was it. Naomi slid the window aside and let the white noise of crickets enter her kitchen. The sun had set but the sky was still illuminated by an afterglow the color of pale roses drowning in a black sea. She knew that in only a few minutes the barbed wire would be invisible against the blackness of sky. And a few minutes more, she would hear her husband’s key turning in the lock, his aftershave preceding his steps, shielded from her thoughts by his own tiredness. And he would talk and she would listen. He would ask about her day and her mouth would move. And then he would fall asleep beside her, walled off in his own dreams

-

This land is immaculate as the moon, its people as foreign there as everywhere, the umbilical cord of rocks and dirt - cut, in a time before time. And yet, what appears as a void of traces is only an overabundance of them, for the land is worn smooth with use up to a point where the ancient becomes new, and its people - without roots - are firmly planted in the shifting tides of their ancestors’ memory. Instead of fisher villages there is only the sea, in place of unbroken settlements: high-rises out of nowhere. The gravel of old roads long ago crushed into desert sand by hooves, feet and tanks: invisible scars under sun burnt tar and the tires of automobiles. The Eucalyptus tree an expatriate granted the land’s last reserves now sends it roots downward where once sturdy oaks sacrificed for cheap coal lined the horizons.

-

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Binoculars slung over her shoulder she sat cross-legged in an outpost tower. In the distance the crackling of gunfire sounded like a giant muffled popcorn machine. Her sleeping bag was thick, but not warm enough against the desert night. Naomi still shivered, although the sun was already nauseatingly at work. To her left were the endless eroded planes of the rocky desert. To her right the ocean was steaming into the dark blue sky, rising a faint murmur of green waves. “Migdal Gimel Tzadik, this is Kiryat David, over,” the radio crackled. “Kiryat David, this is Migdal Gimel Tzadik, over,” she responded. “Have reinforcements arrived, yet? Over.” “Negative,” Naomi said. There was a delay. Then there was a different voice. “Naomi, is that you?” It was a woman’s voice. “Affirmative,” Naomi answered. “Come on, don’t give me that crap,” the woman said. “This is Channah. Don’t you remember me?” “Nega…No,” Naomi said. “We had grenade classes together.” She still didn’t remember. “And you’re in communication now?” Naomi asked, just to say something. “Yes, I had me a kid three months ago. Boring here, but safe, they say.” Naomi had had Amir one year ago. After 12 months you could return to the field if you didn’t object. And she hadn’t. “Listen, Naomi,” the radio crackled. “I’m supposed to tell you that if reinforcements haven’t arrived until now, they won’t come till Tuesday.” It was Sunday. “Ok,” Naomi answered. She would miss the company, but apart from the gossip factory working overtime, nothing ever happened in her perimeter, anyway. It was easy pay. Sit and watch, write reports, eat out of cans, drink bottled water. A bit like camping, if you ignored the automatic machine gun you had to carry around all the time. “Ok, Channah, I’ll wait…” “Thanks, sweety!” Channah said before handing her over to someone else more committed to the mindless conventions of radio communication. “Migdal Gimel Tzadik, this is Kiryat David, over,” the radio crackled again. “Kiryat David, this is Migdal Gimel Tzadik, over,” she answered. “You are to report any and all movements in your perimeter until reinforcements have arrived. Over and out.”

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She rubbed her eyes and took a sip of water out of her field bottle. The first sip in the morning was always the best. She’d been in this tower for three days and three nights. In the first 48 hours she’d been with two other soldiers, but they’d been called off to another outpost. And it wasn’t that bad to be alone. The biggest danger was boredom, not getting shot. On that day, when she first called base (she had seen a man in the distance - or was it a goat? - crossing and leaving her field of vision left to right) they ordered her to sit tight and await further orders which never came. On the second call (another, the same man - or goat? - crossed the empty landscape from right to left) they told her not to waste their time. “I received direct orders to report all and any movements in my perimeter,” she protested. “You haven’t been in the army for long, have you? Take some responsibility. Over and out.” Just as she put the radio mic down she saw something strange, a dark blur in the distance, contrasted clearly against the canvas of bright sand. She rubbed her eyes. How long had it been there? A shiver slid down her back when she realized that it might have sat there for hours, unnoticed, while she had been following the movements of goats in the other direction. Through the shimmering haze of the morning heat it looked like a brown cloud with a black heart. She adjusted the focus. It was not moving horizontally. Instead, it was moving towards the tower, towards her. How long had it been moving? Using the digital zoom she counted one, two, three horses accompanied by three to five people on foot. Her mouth went dry. But she didn’t open the bottle again. Instead, she called base. “Kiryat David, this is Migdal Gimel Tzadik, over.” The enemy was coming closer. “Kiryat David, this is Migdal Gimel Tzadik, do you copy?” This time there was no answer. When she looked through her binoculars again she saw that the horses were covered with thick carpet-like blankets and the people both on foot and in their saddles were tightly swathed in dark sheets that touched the ground and thrashed in the wind. Even their faces were covered. She could see them clearly now, even without the magnification. How fast were they moving? When they were so close that she could almost see the patterns on the horses’ saddle cloth she heard the first shot. It was followed by a shout:”God Is Great!” Crouched low she tried to call base again. She whispered, “This is Migdal Gimel

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Tzadik, we have enemy contact, over. - Repeat: This is is Migdal Gimel Tzadik, we have contact, over.” Still no answer. The second shot hit the metal planks of the tower’s hull and set it ringing like the inside of a bell tower. Her skull echoed the tremor. These were the side-effects of heavily armored metal. The bullets didn’t penetrate. But they made a lot of noise. After the third shot rang the metal armor of the tower, she carefully peered over the edge. The attackers had spread into an uneven semicircle, with only one of the riders aiming his rifle at the tower and the others slowly moving towards her. So far she hadn’t responded. Maybe they thought the tower was deserted. Strategically, her post was a minor one. There were many of these towers scattered all over the region, a lot of them empty now. Maybe they would just continue on their way. She saw the man on the horse sling the rifle over his shoulder and pick up the reins. Naomi sighed and pressed herself against the inner wall of the tower. Counting one white elephant, two white elephants, three white elephants (her grandmother had taught her to count this way. “Patience,” she had always said, “solves most problems.”) But when Naomi reached sixty-four white elephants, she heard a loud metallic bang. This time, it was not from above. Instead, it came from below. The door. The tower was equipped with everything from instant coffee to rifles and grenades. She had heard stories of towers being looted and dismantled to their last scrap of metal. Of soldiers being killed for a six-pack of water. This is what happens when you take a meticulously trained and generously supplied army to defend your borders against poverty-stricken neighbors, she thought. Their leaders proclaimed total annihilation on grounds of whatever ideology was most supported by the public at any given time (religion was always a popular cause, but by far not the only one). This public, however, was ultimately more interested in their enemy’s freeze dried military food and weapons that they could display in their trophy museums or sell on the black-market. It was this hunger for novelty which made for a never-ending stream of untrained, disorganized but zealous militia. They recruited themselves and paid themselves. For many of them it was the only way to make a living. Muffled voices reached Naomi’s ears. They were discussing something at the tower’s base, at the door. Then there was a second bang. Too afraid to look now, she understood they were using a hammer or crowbar to force open the lock. She picked up the radio mic, then decided against it. Time was running out. She crawled towards the storage crates the people downstairs were after, opened a

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box labeled ammunition and took out one of the grenades. It still felt heavier than it looked, although she had handled thousands of them in training. And for a moment she remembered Channah’s face. Then there was a loud crack and a bang. They had smashed the lock and slammed open the door. Soon after she heard boots clanking up the metal staircase. Naomi carefully opened the roof hatch and spotted the heads of her attackers trudging up the stairs. Without a second thought she pulled the safety lever, threw the grenade through the hatch and slammed it shut.

-

The room was the color of expensive teeth. Perfect square tiles covered the floor, walls and ceiling. Squinting she could make out their dark seams like an ocean of crosses illuminated by the aluminum cased overhead lamps. Her head was in some kind of casing, too. She couldn’t move anything, except her eyelids. And they were heavy. They’d told her she was lucky. If it hadn’t been for the reinforced steel, she’d be dead. But all she remembered was a flash, and then nothing, like taking innocent holiday snapshots: painless and ultimately meaningless. “PTSD,” the doctor with the gray hair had said. “Post traumatic stress disorder. You will feel like this for a while.” But she didn’t feel anything, at all. She did remember the tower, the horse-riders and the flash. But it was as if remembering something she’d seen on television, or overheard in a cafe: The memory (or was it imagination?) was there. And although she could see herself sitting in the tower, talking to Channah and drinking that first sip of water in the morning, the whole fabric of it was foreign, remote, someone else’s half remembered dream. For weeks she had to stay in bed. Days went by like flies. The charges were only brought against her when she was sitting in a wheel chair. A little man in a brown uniform entered her ward with a nod, put on his glasses, stooped over a paper and read them out to her: “Disobeying Orders. Misconduct on Operations. Damage of Army Property.” She knew that misconduct alone had put people into prison for life. “But they didn’t…,” she thought. Not a muscle twitched in the man’s face. He was motionless, expressionless when he said: “On discharge from this medical facility you are to report directly to your former

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officer.” “But…,” she thought again, not a single word leaving her lips. “I’m sorry,” the man said after removing his glasses. With this he turned on his heel and receded through a corridor of white tiles, the ward doors flapping.

-

Her husband still hadn’t arrived. It happened sometimes. The dishes were done. The trash was out. It was dark inside, except for the yellow lights of the street lamps that seeped through the shutters. The wire was invisible now. And she could still see it. The olive tree, sitting there, so close and yet out of reach. Amir was sleeping in front of the television. She picked him up and carried him to bed. Pulling the blanket over him and switching off the light. Actions hands alone could do. No need for conscious movement. Mothering, an automatic act, programmed on schedule. The television was still running when she came back into the living room. A news section was showing a group of people lifting their rifles in the air and screaming:“God is Great!”, among them children not older than twelve or thirteen. The news anchor said something inaudible. She turned up the volume. They went on to the next item. On screen there was a photograph of a young woman in an olive drab green uniform, smiling. But her eyes weren’t smiling. It was like staring into a mirror. Correction: She was staring into a mirror, into her own eyes. The news anchor mentioned her name, rank and order. They showed archive footage of an outpost tower. He mentioned the kills and charges and said:“According to latest government intelligence, the attackers were identified as part of an assassination squad targeted at MPs and high ranking officers. This information was unearthed by a commando unit after having gained access to secret files in an operation on an enemy base, last Friday.” The television screen showed a picture of a general, next to him letters appeared as the anchor said: “The General said in a newspaper interview this morning that ‘this soldier’s courage and conduct is an example to all the nation’ and that ‘the charges brought against her were based on grave misjudgment for which I can only offer my sincerest apologies.’” Naomi stared at the screen, a faint glow in the dark living room and listened. This was not about her. It couldn’t be. According to calendar time, it was only months ago. But she was light-years away. “The general went on to say that instead of being charged for misconduct, this

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soldier would be honored for heroic effort. He also claimed that the individuals responsible for drawing up the false charges had been discharged, already.” Somewhere in a different universe, this was big news, there were life-changing consequences attached, advantages to be taken, favors to be cashed in. But for Naomi, as she stood in the dark of her living room, like a visitor from far away, these were just words, one like the other. Charges. Honor. Charges. Honor. Say them often enough and they were worn smooth like pebbles, indistinguishable like grains of sand in the desert. When they mentioned her name the second time, she switched off the TV.

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“Don't Call Me Naomi”, an indepently published short story by André Klein. This story is the first in a series about a fictional Middle East, inspired by the author's sojourn and travels in a region steeped in

ancient culture, contradiction and conflict.

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