Blast | December 15, 2021

BLAST, TMR’s online-only prose anthology, features fiction and nonfiction too lively to be confined between the covers of a print journal. In her short essay “Genesis,” Yael Hacohen writes about her experience as a woman soldier in the Israeli army and challenging “the mechanisms of power.”

 

Genesis

By Yael Hacohen

 

In June, the desert became even more of a desert. The dust settled on everything: between my toes, in my socks, in my cotton underwear, in my ponytail, inside every single fold of my olive-colored fatigues. Like how my mother used to tuck me into bed, the training base coated me with the thick layer of heat and sand. And I loved it.

Commander’s course was a no-bullshit environment. I shared a small corner room with five other women. We were the first women ever to be integrated into Bahad 1, the commander training base, and we were offered the best room on the floor. I was lucky; my cot was cool in the morning and warm at night. And don’t even get me started on the showers. The army had to build a whole new bathroom designated for just women, and we were the first to use the showers in it.

Every soldier I know can always remember a base by its showers, and the women’s showers at Bahad 1 were exceptional. Each stall had a blunt copper pipe and a single knob to turn the water on and off. There was no way to control the temperature, and the pipe gushed hot water. It may not sound like much, but let me tell you, after a long day of training, there was nothing like it. The pipe gave improbable pressure, Moses beating water from the stone. I would take an extra ten minutes just mulling the day over; the hot water beat down on my head, spilling over the daily occurrences, washing out the dust.

I would go over the everyday ant-like rolling aggressions. I would clean those away—as if they could be cleaned. In Israel, we have a particular word for making a woman feel like a girl: hamuda, roughly translated as “cutie,” “darling,” “sweetheart,” whatever. Hamuda was my commanding officer’s usual nickname for any woman he saw around the base, including our forty-three-year-old lieutenant colonel (even though he gritted that one out between his teeth). For me, it was the way he said it. Not as an insult, no. For him, it was almost deeper than that. Crueler.

Training started at 5 am, immediately followed by the morning 5k run, and my CO was a really, really, really great guy to run behind, if you know what I mean. He had one green eye and one blue. His ears pointed straight up toward the sky, like a puma’s. And like a puma, he had this goddamn beautiful run. His teeth sneered when he said my name, Yael, and I could see his slight, cat-like tongue curling inward. The mechanisms of power are complicated.

My CO always singled me out. During Krav Maga training, he explained to the group, “Always pick off the easiest target first,” and then he would point at me and polish it off by adding, “You’re up, hamuda.” Taking that step forward was the longest step I’d ever had to take. The whole group staring, nodding their heads in perfect acknowledgment.

I stood there, maybe twenty inches away from him, while my CO went on and on with his drawn-out intonations. And all this time, I was standing there in the middle of the training arena. It was quiet, and it was getting dark. He was going to demonstrate the most effective way to body-slam. He said it involved the element of surprise. Then he whipped around, grabbed the lapels of my uniform, and brought me so close to his body I could smell his lilac shampoo. He kicked my right shin and simultaneously knocked my shoulder to the ground. It was over so quickly I didn’t even get a chance to blink.

They tell me fight-or-flight takes only three seconds to initiate. But I didn’t fight. Instead, I dusted myself off and returned to my line. My shin was sore, my hair out of place. Like tangled seaweed, my hair stuck to my face in all the wrong places. Through the shock of it, sweat covered my eyes, my ears, the backs of my knees. But the worst was the way my group had looked at me: two parts pity, one part superiority.

Hamuda became my nickname throughout the base, and I started taking even longer in the shower— the lizards of my mind going over the event. I must have fallen a thousand times before that and a thousand times since, but I can still taste the specific dust from that one fall.

Till one Tuesday, my commanding officer was going to teach us how to pull the weakling out of an army line. He walked straight up to me and yanked my shield forward.

Don’t ask me what adrenaline tastes like—you’ll know it when it when you taste it in your mouth. There I was, standing right in the middle of the training arena. Again. He came close till I smelled lilac. I looked my commander right in the eyes, and  I punched him in the face.

He fell like a plate falling off its shelf. It was regal. The look in his eyes shifted when he finally stood back up. And I remembered that I’d seen that look once before, in the Ramat Gan Zoo. A female gorilla had watched a khaki-clad worker shovel her shit to the far south corner of her pen. Her pen was jungle-themed, with large banana and monstera leaves painted crudely across the backing, an absurd painting of an overly large boa constrictor coiling itself around the painted branch. The zoo speakers continuously broadcast the deafening caws of rainbow-colored parrots, cassowaries, and cotingas. And the zoo worker had earphones in. He was just dancing to himself, out of sync with the music, shoveling. I watched the gorilla flare her nostrils. She stood up on her two back legs. Standing like that for a moment, Godlike. The gorilla didn’t even make the softest sound before she charged him. And as if on a swivel, the zoo worker twisted his head around to face her. He too had that look.

My CO stood up and straightened his uniform. He turned to the group and said, “If you are mistaken about the weakest link, just grab the next one.” He didn’t say anything more. And I returned to my place in the line.

The bible says that on the second day, God created a space between the waters to separate the waters of the heavens from the waters of the earth. And while I wish I could say my CO never again called me hamuda, the truth of that one punch was this: I was never again singled out in training. Never. And that evening, that shower, the water was cleaner than it had ever been. The cool night air whispered in blue. And God called the waters of the heaven “sky.” And there was evening, and there was morning of the second day.

 

****

 

Yael Hacohen is a PhD student at the University of California, Berkeley. She has an MFA in poetry from New York University, where she was an ‎NYU Veterans Writing Workshop fellow, international editor at Washington Square Literary ‎Review, and editor-in-chief at Nine Lines Literary Review. Her poems appear in Praire Schooner, the Poetry Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Every Day ‎Poets magazine, Nine Lines, and many more. She was a finalist in the  Glimmer Train Very Short Story Competition, the Consequence Prize in Poetry, and the MSLexia Poetry Prize for Women.‎

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