Translated by Max Nemtsov
About the author: David Dektor is a photographer and author born in Moscow. At 14, he emigrated to Israel with his parents. He served in the army and took part in the Lebanese War of 1982. He graduated from the Oriental studies department of the Jerusalem University. He traveled in Asia and Africa. He resides in Jerusalem, is married, and has three children.
We were sitting in a pita, a round fortification behind a sand earthwork at the outskirts of Beirut. It was summer, and it meant heat and flies in daytime, and mosquitoes at night. Corpses laid about nearby, gnawed at by dogs yet smelling bad anyway. Everything around us was mined, the mines remained there after the previous owners of the territory. Avivi told us how he had fallen asleep at night while on duty, and when he came to, he saw about a dozen armed Palestinians nearby. They waved at him, letting him know that everything was ok, dug out their mines, and left. Being there alone, he was afraid to shoot them pointblank. We had strange relations with the locals. One day, a woman decided to cross the minefield for it seemed to her a shortcut. I screamed at her from above, Where are you going, turn back! But she went on pretending not to understand me. I shot in the air, and only then she turned back, disgruntled. Once, a boy climbed into our pita, of undetermined age, and started showing us scars on his belly claiming that he was tortured by Palestinian foot-soldiers. Those scars were old and already healed, and it wasn’t clear why the boy came to us in the first place. It was too risky just to give him some tinned goods and let go, for he might’ve turned out to be a spotter. Our fortification was not much to look at from inside, and the enemy was not supposed to know about it. So we informed the HQ about that boy, the counter-intelligence came after him or fuck knows who, and they started beating him right in front of us. Then they threw him into their jeep, and drove away. And there was a day when an explosion was heard outside when a Mercedes was unlucky to hit an anti-tank mine. We all went up the earthwork, and a man came out of the Mercedes in shock, and started to walk around the car. We watched as he showed us with his gestures that there was someone alive in the car. Then I told my guys to bring the sandalei mokshim, the platforms for walking through minefields. I was a paramedic, and I decided to evacuate the victim. It was forbidden for us to stick our heads out but there were no bosses around at that time. While I fumbled with that, the locals took the wounded man out of the car themselves, and we told them to bring him to us. They ascended the earthworks, and gave us the stunned man with his leg torn. I knew what to do from that point on, to put the tourniquet on the artery, bandages and a dripper. While I was doing all this, guys called the army ambulance. It came and took my patient away. Only splotches of blood remained, and some torn clothes that I cut away from his body with scissors. It came to my head to look for his documents, and in his trousers I found some money, a stack of Lebanese liras. We drove away the people who brought him almost immediately, so now I held that money in my hands, and the guys watched me. I tore the whole stack apart but I shouldn’t have done that. I had better given the money to any local woman but it didn’t occur to me to do that at the time.
He was a volunteer, and they took thirty people by lorry, and only ten survived who managed to climb out before the drone struck, their commanding officers went away in their jeep, and they walked sixty kilometers to Goris, five of them reached the destination, and five fell behind on their way. His friend took him and brought to Yerevan. In a day he was ordered to return to the war, and he had one ear deaf, he brought some shoes from a bombed-out store for his son and daughter. She agreed to only have sex with him, and they spent the day in a hotel room, it was a happy day, and the next day she started to have problems in her nether parts, and it was impossible to call a gynecologist, what with the war and the coronavirus, and that lover of hers never called, too, and only wrote that he was busy.
In the 1980s, in the army, when we already were in miluim, the reserve training, we three company paramedics were sitting just passing the time. One of us, a young guy, a moshavnik, or a farmer to put it plainly, told us how some Palestinian women worked for him. “As I looked there was one bitch who just sat there not doing fuck. So I crept up on her and kicked her in the ass real good! She just flew across all those vegetable rows but after that, she was working just fine, as she should have from the very beginning.” The other guy, a doctor of biology in his civilian life, was silent but I said, “If I were there, I’d kick your ass.” And the moshavnik, a simple strong dude with his own sort of charisma, told me, “Don’t be so sure.”