Pumpkinflowers by Matti Friedman Read Free Book Online

remembered him as a child constantly in trouble, exiled from classrooms into hallways, asking questions of teachers that occasionally won him esteem exceeding their exasperation.
    Even when she and Avi had grown up he took nothing for granted. Their friends would always meet at the same place when they returned from the army on weekends, and he wanted to know why. Why not somewhere else? When they were about to go out one evening Avi saw Smadar putting on makeup and asked her why. It was dark outside, and did she think anyone would notice?
    Everything here is a kind of illusion. Opposite the place where I am sitting, on a hill, is a beautiful villa with a large garden and red shingles. It’s a pastoral scene. But if you look closely, you see the bullet holes all over the house, and you see that the garden is neglected because no one dares live there, in such dangerous proximity to the outpost.
    It’s very hard for me to put my finger precisely on the feeling I have when I’m here. It’s a kind of sadness mixed with longing so deep that sometimes it’s painful. And fear, of course. It’s strange, but the fear doesn’t bother me at all. It’s part of the sadness and the longing. It’s with me all the time, but not directly, kind of sneaking up on me. That’s how it appears when you’re alone. I mean not when you’re literally alone, but when I step away for a second and think about home, about my friends, or about a love story I haven’t started yet.
    This was around the time that a copy of
Reality Bites
reached the outpost, when for a while one of the voices heard in the bunker belonged to Winona Ryder. It was also not long after the company commander—Yohai, the fighter who stormed the house with Avi the year before—was on his way up to the trench during a barrage when shrapnel sheared off his nose and cut an artery in his neck. He got himself to one of the bunkers. There was a soldier at the doorway who just stared at him and froze, because Yohai was like their father, he was supposed to be taking care of them, but here he was scorched and stunned with his nose hanging by a piece of skin. Yohai walked past the soldier into the bunker and lay on one of the beds. He called for a medic and blacked out. The medics say he was flailing around so much they had to drug him just to get a tube in his mouth and keep him breathing until a helicopter could land. They did a good job, so he’s alive today. He sends his regards.

14
    U NTIL THIS TIME, no one from Avi’s company had yet been killed or badly wounded. The bad luck, the soldiers believed, belonged to the second unit that alternated on the hill, the one where Eran served, the one humiliated by the flag. This second unit, returned to the line in the spring of 1995, lost a rifleman and two trackers in an ambush among nearby olive trees. The Fighting Pioneer Youth, on the other hand, started to think they were protected, at least until their commander was hit—that was when the truth began to dawn on them, though of course no one knew the extent of it.
    Before returning to Avi it would be useful to devote a few more words to Eran, whom we left in the trench after the flag incident, watching a soldier lying very still. The way Eran’s time at the Pumpkin ended is worth describing.
    Five months after the Pumpkin Incident, the rotation of the two units sent Avi’s company down to Israel for training and brought Eran back to the hill. At around this time Eran was trying to arrive at a view of the world that would help him make sense of everything and allow him to function in light of what he had seen. He had come to the crisis John Prine sings about in “Angel from Montgomery”: “Just give me one thing that I can hold on to / To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”
    What Eran had in his brain up to that point—loyalty to his friends, the moderate religion of his parents, a