My first paid writing gig was reviewing films for a local Jerusalem newspaper. Every week, I wrote about one of the movies that the paper’s regular critic refused to watch, and in return I got $25 and my movie ticket reimbursed. Since the regular critic had very high-brow tastes, I was almost always forced to review B action flicks staring Steven Seagal, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, and other musclemen-philosophers. One thing most of these fight movies had in common was their extreme male chauvinism, which was perfectly in synch with the misogynistic zeitgeist of the early nineties. My exposure to all these intense outbursts of on-screen testosterone eventually led to this story, written from the perspective of a female character in the clichéd, objectifying movies like the ones I reviewed. It was a strange experience to record an audio version of this story thirty-two years after it was written. The world has definitely changed since then, but the violence and reductive thought that pervade the story are still disturbingly relevant.
They shot him like a dog, and me they slapped. That’s how it always is—they shoot the men like dogs, and the women get slapped. “I don’t have the heart to kill you even though you deserve it,” said their leader, who, oddly enough, was the shortest one. “We won’t even rape you,” he added, and from the look in his eyes, I could tell that he considered himself a prince, but instead of thanking him for his courtesy, I started to cry. It’s tough being a woman, what with all those slaps and all the men you lose. When you’re a man, they take you out of bed in the middle of the night once, drag you into the street, and bam, it’s over. But when you’re a woman, it never ends. “It’s natural to cry,” he said, stroking my head, “it’s the shock.” And then he said again, “We won’t even rape you. Even though you deserve it.” Then they went away. It wasn’t because they were afraid, men aren’t afraid of anything. Maybe I wasn’t grateful enough. I took the shovel out of the tool chest and dug a hole where the ground was soft. It took me three hours, and I got calluses on my hands. It’s hard to dig a hole big enough for a person, especially a huge one like my man. I lugged his body to the hole, but I didn’t have the strength left to cover him with sand, so I covered him with our flowered quilt and put the espresso machine we got from the kids for our last anniversary on top so the quilt wouldn’t blow away. It’s an old trick; my mother did the same when my father died. Then I went into the kitchen and took a carton of myth milk out of the refrigerator, drank two glasses, and gave a little hiccup, a woman’s hiccup. When he hiccuped, the whole house used to shake. “Don’t be a pig,” I’d tell him, and he’d laugh. I went to bed, but it was hard to fall asleep without a man, even harder without the quilt on such a cold night. When I finally did, I dreamed they dragged us out of the house in the middle of the night and shot me like a dog, and for once, he was the one who got stuck with the slap and the “we won’t rape you” and the grave and the myth milk, and it got me so excited that I woke up all wet, the way only a woman can.
