First Trip: Get Up and Walk the Land 8
Apologies for the delay with this chapter. I couldn’t access Substack on Thursday for technical reasons. The issue has been fixed. Thank you for your patience and for not sending ninjas masqueraded as penguins to assassinate me.
A young girl lay in a fetal position on the ground. She wore a green shirt and colorful tights, both dirty and torn. Her soot-black hair was woven into a messy braid that reached the small of her back, which was exposed and slightly hairy. Her full lips and aquiline nose suggested Arab blood. There was a tattoo on her lower lip that reminded Eran of elderly Ethiopian women.
Even a cursory examination of the girl proved Tamar’s prognosis was premature. This could be deduced from the rhythmic rising and falling of the girl’s sides as well as the crumpled coat she used as a pillow. The girl’s condition became even more apparent when she lurched to her feet, banged her head against the ceiling and commenced wailing like two cats having a fight inside a blender. Dead girls usually don’t do this.
“What’s wrong with her?” Dor looked dismayed, almost embarrassed. Girls scared him. Crying girls were positively Kryptonian.
“Well,” Yaniv said with the cool detachment of a nature documentary narrator. “She just smashed her head against the ceiling. I imagine that hurts. Also, you’re threatening her with a gun. This also hurts, but in a different way.”
Dor stared at his hand, as if only now realizing that he was pointing a gun at someone. His hand fell to dangle limply to his side.
Tamar crouched in front of the girl and reached out to comfort her. The girl pushed her hand away. Tamar fell on her butt and said, “Oof.” The girl gingerly pressed one hand to the back of her head. She raised the other in front of her in the universal gesture of “don’t shoot”.
After a few seconds of not being shot, she relaxed and started speaking in Arabic.
“What’s she saying?” Tamar asked, crossing her legs as if she meant to sit there.
“No idea,” Eran said. “I picked French.”
“Same here,” Dor said. “Vous vous vous!”
Yaniv made like a stalactite and said nothing, even though he was the only member of the party who elected to study Arabic instead of French. Everyone else was scared by the need to learn a new alphabet, especially one so squiggly.
“Do you speak Hebrew?” Tamar asked the girl.
The girl considered the question. Finally, she said “little” in an accent so throaty it sounded like a cough. Next she scrambled to her feet, still holding a protective arm in front of her. She was tiny, a full head shorter than Eran and with a twig physique.
“Don’t be afraid.” Tamar placed a reassuring hand on the girl’s knee. After receiving no reply, Tamar spoke one of the few Arabic words every Israeli knows (that could be spoken in polite company). “Salam,” which meant, “peace.”
“Salam,” the girl mumbled. She removed her hand from her head. Her palm was sleek with blood.
“Ask her what she’s doing here,” Dor demanded, waving his gun around.
“I think I have a plaster in my medicine bag,” Eran said. He noticed everyone staring at him and added, “Umm… my mother made me take it.”
Dor snorted. “Should I hold her while you shave her head?”
The girl shifted her apprehensive gaze to the boys.
Eran frowned, wondering how to reassure her. “Um… Salam?”
“If anyone says ‘salam’ one more time,” Dor grumbled, “I’ll make salami out of him!” He then burped angrily.
“It sounded like a frog falling into Mount Doom.” Yaniv said.
The girl covered her mouth and giggled. It seemed that while her terror was expansive, it wasn’t deep.
Yaniv said something in Arabic. The girl nodded.
“What did you say?” Tamar asked.
“I have no idea.”
Tamar frowned. “You are not making any sense.”
“He rarely does.” Eran opened his medicine bag. A pack of condoms and some hard candy rolled out. Eran blushed and quickly shoved them back. Mother! Really?!
“Tent... gone!” The girl’s guttural accent sounded as if she was exhaling the words. She looked more excited than scared.
“Her tent is gone,” Yaniv said.
“No shit, Sherlock!” Dor growled. “Maybe translate what we don’t understand? Allah yostor, you really suck under pressure.”
The girl sat back down and tapped on the floor. Eran took it as an invitation to join her. Yaniv squatted beside him but Dor remained standing, dividing his attention between the entrance and the girl.
The girl said something in Arabic. Seeing Yaniv cock his head like a confused puppy, she held her hands in the air to imitate someone holding a rifle and made triggering motions with her index finger and a “ratatata!” noise with her mouth.
“These assholes shot at you too?” Eras asked.
In response, the girl launched into a tirade, illustrating her narrative with dramatic finger play using one hand as a stage and the other as a performer. She depicted people running and people shooting. She poked Yaniv in the chest. Then she placed a hand over her brow and pretended to look left and right. Finally she spread her hands and shrugged in the universal “welp, guess I’ll die” gesture.
“What did she say?” Eran asked.
Yaniv squirmed. “I recognized only a few words. Night, run, play, blood and something that can mean either king or angel or some kind of pastry.”
Dor rolled his eyes. “You’re a credit to the Israeli education system…”
“Ooh!” Tamar said and quickly stole a sandwich from Eran’s backpack. She handed it to the girl, who eagerly snatched it and tore into it with big, messy chomps.
“Thank you for being so charitable with my food.” Eran muttered, looking wistfully at his beautiful sandwich, forever gone.
“Oh, bite me!” Tamar said, safe in her knowledge that Eran would never actually bite her. Nevertheless, revenge will come, one way or the other.
The girl finished the giant sandwich and said, “Shukran!” which was one of the few other Arabic words Eran knew that could be spoken in the presence of a lady. It meant “thank you.”
The girl touched the back of her head and winced. There was fresh blood on her fingertips. She went on talking, spraying bits of food as she spoke.
Yaniv listened with furrowed brows and his tongue sticking out like a cat distracted from licking his balls. Finally, he nodded sagely. “I have no idea what she just said.”
Dor grunted. “Seriously?! You didn’t understand a single word?!”
“I think she warned us of something,” Yaniv speculated. “And also asked us for something.”
“Oh, is it dangerous outside? Wallah, I didn’t notice! God, you’re useless!” Dor punched the wall, but not too hard. The girl recoiled, not knowing that this was one dog that barked but never bit… girls.
Yaniv offered a rare scowl. “Look, I only know a few phrases and the alphabet. It’s not like you’re writing novels in French.”
Tamar turned to the boys. “Well, what now?”
Dor sighed. “Yaniv, try again as if your life depends on it. Ask her if she knows anything about a monster in the hills. Oh, and ask her where we can find reception in the area.”
“Ask her if she wants to come with us!” Tamar added hastily while Yaniv’s lips worked soundlessly, forming the questions.
After a while, the boy stammered some Arabic-sounding gibberish. The girl squinted at him as if bemused not just by his words, but by his very existence. “I asked her if the guy we met this morning was looking for her,” Yaniv explained to his friends. “She matches the description perfectly. Also, I don’t know how to ask any of the stuff you want.”
The girl nodded. This was followed by a stream of Arabic which included at least two words that were definitely not suitable for polite company. She looked more angry than scared.
Yaniv followed her intently, his head bobbing as if following a tennis game. “I think she wants us to go to town, um, not sure if she means her town or our town... and, eh, she mentioned a brother… or a cousin? Oh, and something about being butchered?” Yaniv shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Probably better,” Eran said. “I actually have empathy.”
“Meh,” Yaniv waved a dismissive hand. “Overrated.”
Dor narrowed his eyes. “She’s hiding something. There’s a town half an hour from here. The road is even closer.”
Tamar looked at him darkly. “Of course when a girl is attacked it’s suspicious…”
Eran considered his friend’s suspicion for a while. Dor wasn’t very diplomatic, but he was smart. “Maybe she got lost in the hills?”
Dor shook his head. “I’m not buying it. She’s what. Fifteen? Sixteen? She comes from one of those shitholes where for your ninth birthday you get to decide if you want to be raped or murdered. Maybe she’s waiting for her lover to take her away or has killed her husband and hides from the police? There’s something she’s not telling us… and I bet her Hebrew is better than she pretends.”
Everyone stared at Dor, but he was unrepentant. “Don’t look at me like this, you know I’m right!”
“All the more reason we should help her!” Tamar cried.
“Whatever. I’m going to check if I can get reception.” Dor disappeared into the thorny tangle.
The girl nodded at seemingly random points during the exchange. Maybe she wanted to look like she was taking part in the conversation. Maybe she wanted to hide her helplessness. Maybe she really spoke better Hebrew than she pretended. Maybe she just liked to nod.
Eran was about to ask her if she spoke English or Spanish when Dor returned, all covered in dust and brambles. “No luck with the reception, but it’s totally dark outside, I think it’s safe to sneak out. No one will find us.”
Yaniv sighed. “So the wind will blow over our bones forever…”
“Yeah...” Eran said, choosing to interpret this as a call to caution rather than a celebration of the futility of all human endeavor. “Let’s wait a while longer. Just in case.”
He turned to Tamar, who was still illuminating the cave with her phone. “Stop burning batteries. We need to start preserving energy.”
Tamar aimed her flashlight straight into Eran’s face. “I’m not spending an hour without light in this scary cave.”
Eran snatched the phone away and turned off the flashlight, plunging the cave into total darkness. Tamar muttered something in Russian and literally snarled. “Give me back my phone. Now!”
“Only if you promise to turn off the flashlight.” Eran kept the phone out of her reach.
“Phone! Now!” He heard her stomping the dusty floor.
After some strained negotiations, Tamar agreed to limit the illumination to the light coming off her screen, a compromise between the Jewish tradition of sitting in the dark and the horror movie tradition of running out of batteries.
As soon as she got her phone back, she forced the girl into a selfie. This was inevitable.
Though the girl made it very clear she didn’t want her face anywhere online, Tamar nevertheless managed to learn the girl’s name. It was Wafaa bint this or that, al-something or other. I.e., Waffle.
Ninja penguins, from NZ 2019 https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kqPx8aAiMH8