Gasmask (standard:other, 1511 words)
Author: mr shaw	Added: Mar 12 2002	Views/Reads: 3269/2063	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Israel, 1990. A simple piece about how we are all affected.

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

older man. -  may be I fight. Who knows? One day I will go back to 
Bristol, and then come back to Reshafim. Perhaps it will still be the 
same then. - He stopped and shrugged, paused a second to look at the 
sights of his gun. Then he pushed himself to standing, and raised one 
hand to me. 

- I must go. Shalom. He turned and went back into the kitchen, taking
the milk and melon skin with him. 

- Shalom. I said to his back, and I turned also. 

It was the only time I saw the soldier Moshe. 

* 

That night I went with a couple of the other volunteers into Beit Shean
for some beers, along the West Bank road. The town lights over the 
border in Jordan reflected the stars through the palm groves. 

The road was unusually deserted so we started to walk the three miles
into town. Just before an army helicopter swooped overhead, nearly 
frightening us half to death, we found the shed skin of a snake on the 
road. I got a stick and held up the skin, almost see through, even in 
the dim moonlight. 

When the helicopter passed over us, shattering the night with noise, its
searchlight panning across the open fields that lay between us and the 
border, we just stood and watched as it disappeared over the mountains 
behind Reshafim. It was heading towards the West Bank proper. For a 
minute it was silent, then the night insects came back, louder than 
before. Funny, it was only when the insects were not there that you 
noticed them. 

Then a white Mercedes appeared on the road, the Arabic numbers and white
plate marking it out as a Palestinian car. It stopped by the side of 
the road, and the window wound down, it's old mechanism creaking 
loudly. A face that seemed to be covered in bark peered out at us. 

- Good evening fine gentlemen. It is late to be on this road with no
car. I can take you to Beit Shean. If you would like, please, please, 
climb in. 

After a quick glance at each other to see if we were going to ignore the
advice not to get in a Palestinian car, we clambered into the back 
seat, and he pulled back onto the tarmac. 

- Thanks a lot for this. It's too hot to walk. 

- It's no problem. I see you crazy people on this road all the time. I
like to speak English so I stop. 

- That's cool. Did you learn it in England? I asked, thinking of Moshe. 

- Oh no, my brother, he has a market shop in Jerusalem. I have worked
there from being a small boy. I see all the fine ladies and fine 
gentlemen who visit and speak English to them. 

- Did you see the helicopter. What was that all about? 

- I saw it, but I do not know. I hope nothing, but I saw also three army
cars with soldiers travelling down towards Ramalla. 

As we drove into Beit Shean, he turned to us, smiling widely, and said
that we should enjoy our night, not drink too much beer, or the pretty 
girls would not talk to us. We smiled and asked him if he wanted to 
join us for a drink. He looked over, through the dusty windscreen, at 
the families sat in the square, lively and happy in the balmy heat, at 
the bar where Europeans and Antipodeans were drinking from large 
glasses, at the gaudy sign "Volunteers Bar" to one side of the Hebrew 
equivalent. 

- No, I think not, he said, shaking his head slightly, and waving to us
as we climbed out of the car. - Salaam, my friends, salaam. 

As we climbed out and headed to the bar, waving to our friends, I turned
and watched the white Mercedes turn around and head back towards the 
main road out of town. 

* 

The next day Pascal, a French volunteer rushed into the dining room in
with the Jerusalem Post, showing us the headline "Saddam Invades 
Kuwait". Breakfast went on a while longer that day, Kibbutzniks and 
Volunteers in no hurry to get back to their work. At first we could not 
comprehend what it all meant, and there were anguished discussions 
about whether we should leave the country, or whether there was any 
threat to us there in the idyllic surroundings of Reshafim. None of us 
had grasped it before, but we Volunteers had a bomb shelter set aside 
for us. 

It seems odd now, but we sort of forgot about Saddam and Kuwait, and
life went on as serenely as it had before. 

Three weeks later the Knesset decided that no gas masks were necessary
for Kibbutz volunteers and I left Israel shortly after. Six months 
after that, when I was back in England, CNN bounced pictures into my 
television of the carnage caused by an Iraqi scud missile to an army 
barracks near the border with Lebanon. Still, life went on serenely as 
it did before. 


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