Buffalo jump

CHAPTER 30

Toronto: Thursday, June 29

We were heading back to town on the DVP, the traffic only marginally lighter than it had been going north.

“Admit it,” Ryan said. “You’re dying to tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“Where you learned to shoot like that. One minute you’re the all-Canadian virgin scared shitless of a gun, the next you’re drilling the target like the Rawhide Kid.”

My shots had been every bit as well placed as his, all bunched within a fist-sized area near the heart. “I was in the army,” I said.

“Get out,” he said. “I thought the army was strictly for jugheads who flunk out of shop.”

“I didn’t say the Canadian army.”

“American?”

“IDF.”

“What?”

“Israel Defense Forces.”

Ryan whistled. “Ah.”

“Ah what?”

“They got a rep, don’t they? Being tough. Take-no-shit types. So what, you volunteered?”

“Yes.”

“Why there?”

“It’s a long story.”

“So give me the condensed version.”

I closed my eyes for a moment, wondering how much I could tell him. Wondering why I felt like I could tell him things I had never told my own brother.

“I was living in Banff,” I began, “teaching skiing in the winter and working construction in the summer. I was seeing a Jewish girl from Winnipeg. She wanted to go to Israel for the summer and work on a kibbutz.”

“A what?”

“A collective farm. Kind of a Marxist model the early Zionists brought from the old country.”

“Jewish Commies? Talk about two strikes against you.”

“I went with her but things between us didn’t work out. She left. I stayed.”

“Let me guess. You met another woman.”

“No, I met the woman. Dalia Schaeffer.”

“Israeli?”

“Nope. You believe in coincidence?”

“No. I have no use for it.”

“She was from Toronto. Grew up maybe ten blocks from me in Bathurst Manor. We even went to the same elementary school, except she was two years behind me and who pays attention to younger kids at that age. So we meet in Israel. She has this wild hair-jet black, piles of it, totally untamed-and the most amazing blue eyes. First time I look in them I’m gone. I am pinned to the mat. And her mouth, Ryan, you couldn’t be in the same room as it and not want to kiss it. And stay kissing it.”

“Jesus, you had it bad.”

“No, I had it good. I had it so good. This was the woman I was going to be with for the rest of my life. Make babies with. Curly-headed babies.”

“Like Pacino in Godfather I, ” he said. “He meets Apollonia and everyone says he’s been hit by lightning.”

“That’s exactly what it was like. I was so dazed, so in love. Like never before. And never since.”

“What happened?” Ryan asked.

“Israel happened.”

Our kibbutz was called Har Milah. It was in the far north of Israel, on a finger of land that jutted up like a peninsula, surrounded by occupied southern Lebanon on one side and Syria on the other. We grew oranges, olives and avocadoes. Pressed our own olive oil. Grew grapes for a neighbouring kibbutz that made wine: surprisingly rich Chardonnay, grassy Sauvignon Blanc and a deep, spicy Shiraz that could have come from Australia.

The sabras, the native-born kibbutzniks, were cool to outsiders; they knew most of us weren’t there for the long haul. But if you worked hard enough and stayed long enough you could gain a certain measure of acceptance. After a while they stopped calling me G’veret — Hebrew for Missus-and settled on Yoni, short for my Hebrew name, Yonah. It was tough work, up at four in the morning to get a full day in before the heat became too oppressive.

“One morning,” I told Ryan, “I’m gathering up fallen oranges in our grove when a fat one drops on my head. I look up in the tree and there’s Dalia with the sun behind her, this wild hair in silhouette. She says sorry to me. Sleecha. Okay. I go to pick up the orange and she says to a friend in Hebrew that ‘the new American has a nice ass.’ Little did she know Mama Geller had paid for years of Hebrew school. I look up and tell her I’m Canadian, not American, but that’s okay because she has a nice ass too. She threw another orange at me, lost her balance and just about fell into my arms.”

I stayed long past my planned departure date-almost two years longer. Dalia and I became inseparable. Stuck on a waiting list for a private room at the kibbutz-unmarrieds slept dorm-style-we made love every chance we had, sneaking into the orchards at night to find privacy, lying in fragrant grass amid the smell of citrus blossoms. I was so smitten I kept dreaming about eggs: eggs frying on the hood of my car, hard-boiled eggs spilling out of my pockets, a street busker juggling half a dozen. I would tell Dalia about these dreams and she’d laugh and say I wanted to make babies with her.

Then came the rockets.

Hezbollah fighters operating in southern Lebanon launched a barrage of Katyushas against civilian targets in northern Israel, in retaliation for an Israeli helicopter strike that killed six Lebanese civilians. More than six hundred Katyushas fell over three days, mostly in and around Kiryat Shmona. Hundreds of homes were burned or destroyed. Thousands more sustained some degree of damage. Schools and daycare centres were hit. So were factories and other industries. One housing development was hit eight separate times.

Two hundred thousand people were evacuated from Kiryat Shmona and the surrounding area. Dozens were injured, mostly by shrapnel and flying glass, and many more were treated for shock. They said it was a miracle only one person was killed.

The rockets that fell on Har Milah came on the second day of bombardment as people were setting out for work and for school. One rocket hit the shed where we packed avoca-does, sending thousands of dark green chunks into the air. I remember Zvi Dalphen, a skinny New Yorker, saying, “Guacamole, anyone?” and getting a good laugh.

Another one hit our chicken coop. Hundreds of birds blew into a fountain of red and white flesh, blood and feathers. No one had anything funny to say about that.

Late that afternoon, a Katyusha hit an electricity pole on the road outside our quarters. It blew chunks of concrete the size of bowling balls in every direction, smashing windows, breaking through walls, damaging furniture. One piece of concrete tore into Dalia’s right leg, just above the knee, as she stood just outside the door, trying to get a signal on her cellphone so she could tell our families in Toronto we were fine.

She started to bleed. And bleed. They told us afterwards her femoral artery had been severed. Even if we had had phone service, even if we had had electricity, even if the roads had not been blocked by damaged cars, even if most of the people who could have helped had not already been evacuated, she never would have made it to a transfusion site. She would have bled out no matter what.

We should have left, but Dalia had not wanted to leave the animals, the chickens, the crops. They were our livelihood.

So only one person died during the bombardment. Some fucking miracle.

About five weeks later, I reported to the IDF recruitment centre in Jerusalem and volunteered for the army as part of a program called Mahal, under which non-Israeli Jews could sign up for a fourteen-month tour as long as they had not yet turned twenty-four. I made it by just a few months and began training for the Bar Kochba Infantry.

And that’s as much as I told Ryan on the drive back.

The rest is between me and my dreams.