10. Security Guard

But he knew he would miss that tiny planet, because there it
was possible to watch sunrise and sunset 144 times in 24 hours.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The Little Prince

Anka and I locked all doors on The Flying Dutchman, went down to the pier, and walked towards the hotels quarter. At that time I worked at night and slept through mornings, so we could spend most afternoons together, either on the yacht or on the Platform, a huge puck-shaped buoy one kilometer from shore. We stopped at Ataman of Sardines, our favorite Turk restaurant, for some lula kebab with hot chocolate, and had to part our ways. Anka went home to do her homework; I was about to be picked up by a car from my work.

Gin-Tonic got me a job at the Auto Terminal, a colossal parking lot at the southern edge of the city. Israel had very high import tariffs, so people preferred cheap Japanese cars to expensive European ones. The most popular models were Subaru and Mazda. They were unloaded from freighters and parked at the Terminal before being carried by trucks further north.

I had to guard it every night, ten to eight, with one of the three other "Russians". We all shared a tiny apartment, owned by the Terminal security, with leaking sink and walls covered with many layers of porno pictures. It was late January - the only time of the year when nights got cold in Eilat. That particular winter was relatively warm. Usually you can't swim in the sea in February, but that year the water temperature was above 20 degrees Centigrade. Still, we were freezing even in raincoats. During the day the Terminal was guarded by locals. In summer, when it's hot, everything is the other way around: "Russians" work from dawn till sunset, Israelis at night. I didn't mind, but I felt sorry for old Michael.

Michael came to Israel five years earlier from Saint Petersburg, where he used to be an ichthyologist at Fisheries Institute. He'd been working at the Terminal ever since, trying to make enough money for a flight back to Russia. But once every six months he'd spend all his savings in one week, drinking. The administration tolerated it because he was the only employee who never broke any rules, and was almost never late.

My two other colleagues were Peter and his son Alex from Estonia. They were just overwintering in Eilat, trying to make some money. They were experienced and funny. They lived on food fished out from supermarket garbage dumps, and called that method "absorption."

"I absorbed a kilo of tomatoes today," would say Alex.

"Good job, son! I absorbed a porno magazine from a bookstore garbage bin. Now we have something to read on duty."

"You're the best, Dad."

It was low class, but not the lowest level of the society. Any employment with free housing was a luxury for an immigrant. The job was harder than it seemed, so people from the true bottom didn't last long there. The guy nicknamed Cycladol who'd worked there before me had survived for only a week because of his poor health. That was hardly surprising - cycladol is a serious stuff, not some mildly unhealthy household drug like meth or dexedrine.

Walking the streets with my friends from Nature Conservation Department, I often shocked them by greeting some creepy characters, while my colleagues from the Terminal were sometimes amazed to see me talking to city officials from the visitor center.

Usually I worked with Michael. One of us would sit in the entrance booth near the barrier (his job was to raise the barrier if someone had to drive in or out), while the other was patrolling the territory. It took an hour to walk the entire perimeter, then we would switch. Once every thirty minutes we were supposed to contact our headquarters on the radio and tell them everything was OK. Walking between the endless rows of cars, I came up with my first poem in Hebrew: Esrim - esrim ve tesha, Vladimir bdikat kesher (Post 20 to Post 25, Vladimir reporting).

Sometimes we had surprise inspections by Zari, a fat guy with Negro lips and hairline one inch from eyebrows. Our way of having fun was to drive one of the brand-new cars around the lot without being caught by Zari. In the beginning we used to warn each other of his proximity by clicking the radios, but soon he figured it out. Now our radios could only be used for transmission. We could catch naps in the booth, but a good sleep was impossible: we had to stay more or less alert all the time. If you didn't hear Zari's jeep approaching, you could get fired.

I was bored to death there, and could hardly wait for sunrise. The Terminal was located on a plateau high above the sea, and the sunsets were so beautiful that I never got tired of watching them. Then we were taken back to our apartment, and tried to get some sleep before going to town. Michael spent afternoons playing domino with his friends, Peter and Alex absorbed whatever they could, and I went to swim in the sea or walk in the canyons before meeting with Anka.

One day I met Moni from the Department at the beach, and we went swimming together. We got all the way to the Platform and were on our way back when I looked down and saw something strange. Instead of the flat sandy bottom, there was a moving blue surface in small white spots. We dove to get a better look, and surfaced a second later, shouting "Whale shark!" People around us rushed to shore in panic, while we kept diving, trying to get closer to the giant fish. It was so slow that we could easily follow. Eventually we managed to hitch a ride on its back for a few seconds. But the shark didn't like it, and increased its speed so that we were instantly washed off by the current.

"Do you have a phone?" asked Moni when we got out of the water.

"No, but you can find me through Beni. Why?"

"If my friends ask you, please confirm that I'm not making this up."

"Is it so hard to believe?"

"They are very rare here. There've only been two sightings that close to the beach. All our divers dream of seeing one, but there's not much plankton here, so they almost never go that far North."

At two o'clock I would open our cabin, make some coffee at the galley, and wait for Anka to come from school. We had seven hours to spend together.

I couldn't get her free jewelry any longer: the magic door was forever closed. Now I can share the secret: in one of my first visits to Eilat, searching the roofs for falcon nests, I found a crack in a wall, leading to a second floor of a jewelry store. The crack was blocked by metal bars. Someone from inside regularly put various silver objects into a small niche in the concrete. I took some of them, and their disappearance didn't cause police arrival or any attempts to close the crack, so I concluded that one of the store employees was stealing them and hiding in the niche to pick up from the outside later. Unfortunately, by the time I got back from the cruise, the crack was filled by concrete.

But our relations with Anka didn't require any more artificial stimulation. She developed such love for sex that she would often drag me to the bunk without even finishing her coffee. In very hot days we swam to the Platform. Nobody else would swim so far from shore, so we were all alone there, our overheated bodies cooled by the waves rolling over the buoy. We suspected that Israeli and Jordanian border guards had binoculars good enough to watch us making love there, but we didn't care.

I'll never forget the first time we got to the Platform. We were lying naked on hot metal. Anka sat up and started to look over certain parts of my body with great curiosity.

Her father had a good job, so they had a video player, and she told me that she'd used to watch all kinds of tapes with her friends. But I sometimes had a feeling that the physical differences between sexes were hard for her to comprehend.

She cautiously touched my penis with her fingertips. I almost stopped breathing, trying not to scare her away. I never talked to her about doing a Lewinsky on me. If she'd want to do it, she'd figure it out. If she wouldn't want to do it, there won't be much fun in it anyway. Only a girl who really enjoys performing it can be taught to do it perfectly. But my penis couldn't remain indifferent for long. Soon I saw childish excitement on Anka's face. I waited, slightly caressing her most sensitive places - nipples, sides of neck, tender skin between her thighs and pubic mound.

She leaned forward, touched it with her lips, and moved back sharply, as if she was doing something forbidden. I moved my fingers along her groin, all the way to her little clitoris - which, as Beni had correctly predicted, had a magic ability to instantly turn my girl into a purring kitten. A minute later she was freely using her lips and tongue to tickle my penis, while I positioned her in a 69 and kept playing with her vishenka, making Anka moan, tremble, bend her back, and squeeze my ears with her warm thighs. I could only guess what effect it all had on the border guards.

Anka liked 69 so much that from that day on she often preferred it to conventional sex. May be her vagina wasn't sensitive enough yet, or may be it was a bit too small, or she'd read somewhere that swallowing was good for her health, or may be she simply enjoyed having her clitoris licked more than anything else. Sometimes it took me a while to talk her into something non-oral.

At the end of the week we went to Hai Bar and spent two days in a bed in Beni's house (he had a king size bed in each of three rooms). When we finally managed to separate our bodies and get dressed, it was time to walk to the bus station for a trip back to Eilat. Beni knocked, looked inside, and saw a huge pile of empty condom packs.

"Wow, Graduate," he said, "you're now to be called Doctor."

My roommates were dying with envy. Throughout its 40-year history, Eilat had been suffering from a shortage of females. Poor immigrants had no chance of finding one. Unable to see my happy face any longer, Peter and Alex finally decided to sacrifice a huge part of their budget, and phoned for a call girl.

A young redhead Israeli dashed in our apartment like a skipper butterfly, and said quickly:

"Sex 120 shekels per round, blow job 70, without a condom extra charge 90%, for others watching extra charge 20%."

We (Michael, I and five guys from the docks who had come over to see what will happen) went to the kitchen. The docks guys had peeping holes prepared a long time ago. Peter decided to save money by paying only for a blow job. But the girl was a professional: it took her thirty seconds to serve him. Alex had no team spirit at all: he positioned her in such a way that the guys couldn't see them through the peeping holes.

"You are both jerks," told them the docks guys before leaving. "You invited us to watch sex, and didn't show us anything."

Deeply disappointed, Peter and Alex went back to Estonia. Michael started drinking. I told him it wasn't good for his heart to drink in the heat of the day, but he continued to pump himself full of Keglevich vodka on the beach.

So I got two new colleagues: a lad named Nick, formerly Penza Province ballroom dance champion, and Jimmy "Gin-Tonic" Tonkin, who got fired from his job as a hotel receptionist for seducing patrons.

Working with Jimmy was like going to a theater every night. He was so good at fooling everybody, pretending to be an American, an Indian, a Muslim, and so on, that nobody knew who he really was. His wife was sure that he was a sex maniac, cheated on her with all females in Eilat, and was ready to sacrifice his life for any whore. His friends considered him just a cool guy next door, good at telling dirty jokes. His most permanent girlfriend thought that he was a nice boy from a good family. His boss was convinced that he was a millionaire who took the job to gather material for a book. I didn't know who he really was, either. I managed to peel off a few layers, but probably never got to the core. The last Jimmy I discovered was dreaming of going to a university for Arab studies, and secretly collected modern English poetry. I always loved translating poetry, and found a lot of good stuff in his library to work with.

Anyway, we were really glad to find each other. Intelligent socializing is what you miss the most abroad. Emigration always results in a huge loss of social status. Besides, Eilat was just a resort, not a university town.

We had so many things to talk about during those endless cold nights at the Terminal! Agricultural history of Ephtalite Empire and grammatical diversity of Q-celtic languages, thin structure of occlusion fronts and dynamics of ultraliquid helium in high-frequency magnetic field, physiological predisposition to low-amplitude multiply orgasms and the Great Cambrian Explosion, paradigmatic algorithm of Okkam's Razor and thesaurical rotation of subjective positivism... The results of all that fun were a bit dangerous. Now we felt very happy most of time, and, being healthy young males, developed an uncontrollable desire to do something illegal and violent. We test-drove all makes of cars at The Terminal. Zari was rapidly approaching a nervous breakdown. He could hear the roar of engines even from his office, but couldn't catch us. Eventually we crashed a few SUVs while driving off-road, but it would be almost impossible to find damaged cars in the endless parking field.

Soon Jimmy fell in love with a pretty girl named Shimi, who happened to be Zari's secretary. At first I didn't pay attention to their flirting, in part because Shimi could only communicate in Hebrew, which I was barely beginning to understand. She described Zari as a high-grade jerk, who harassed her at work and threatened to fire her if she refused to have sex with him. One day she came with bruises on her arm.

"Can you tell me where he lives?" asked her Jimmy, and said to me in Russian: "I'll kill him."

"I'll help you," I said, "but don't hurry. You Americans are such cowboys. It's not like chasing buffalo in the prairie. Killing is an intellectual exercise."

"Oh, come on, he's just a security director. Nobody would even notice if I chop his head off. Well, he's also a co-owner of the Terminal, but..."

"He is?" I asked quietly, feeling like a werewolf who suddenly saw full moon rising. I realized that Zari was Miriam's husband, the guy I've been dreaming of squashing with an oak tree.

"Yes, he's a co-owner of the Terminal, why?"

"Ask Shimi if he is married."

Shimi said that he was about to divorce his pregnant wife, but hired a lawyer to prove that she'd been unfaithful to him, so that he wouldn't have to pay child support.

"Jimmy," I said, "can you not kill him for a day or two? Tomorrow is Saturday; I'll come up with some plan by the end of the weekend. Something better than breaking into his house with an ax."

We had a big adventure planned for that weekend. Toni Ring went on vacation, and Beni got unlimited use of the jeep. He allowed me to take it for one day. I didn't have a license, but local police almost never checked government vehicles.

I took Jimmy, Anka and Shimi, and drove along the Egyptian border to Nizzana. The town had nothing interesting except for a juvenile jail, but it was surrounded by an area of beautiful sand dunes. I found a secluded little valley between dunes and spent a few hours there with Anka, while Jimmy and Shimi were presumably doing something similar elsewhere. By the time we got back to the jeep it was getting dark. We completely forgot that both main roads from Nizzana were blocked by barriers every evening.

There was one more road, but it was leading to Gaza. No normal person would attempt going there in a car with yellow license plates (West Bank cars had green plates, Gaza vehicles had red ones.) But we had no choice but to wait for total darkness and try to break through.

I walked around the jeep for a while. A tiny snake moved by - dwarf horned viper, the one that had helped Little Prince get back to his planet. Then I found a female sand gecko - finally, a mate for Moshe. But nobody shared my excitement.

We drove the entire length of the Sector and entered Gaza City, an endless sea of dirty dilapidated shacks. It was late, but there were lots of children in the streets (an average Gaza family has six). We began to understand why did Egypt refuse to take control of Gaza when Israel offered to cede it. We also passed a few adults, their jaws dropping as if they saw an ifrit.

Then at some empty plot of land we rolled over a piece of barbed wire hidden in the sand, and got a flat.

We were lucky. The nearest house was at least thirty meters away. Nobody noticed us during the next half an hour. When the streets finally got empty, I left Jimmy armed with meat-chopping ax we'd borrowed from Hai Bar freezer, took a wrench, and went searching for a spare tire, trying to lurk in shadows. Only two blocks away I found a green jeep with a sign "Police of Palestine" on the side.

I opened my pocket knife, made a hole in one of the front tires, the jeep sank a bit, and I took off a rear wheel on the opposite side. One hour later we passed a sleeping checkpoint, drove to Beer Sheva and then towards Eilat.

"I'm never going anywhere with you again," said Anka, but I already knew her well enough and was sure that I'd always be able to talk her into anything. We stopped at Hai Bar, had a quick lunch, picked up Beni and drove on. The girls fell asleep, and somehow our conversation turned to Scandinavian mythology. Just before the city I suddenly slowed down.

"Something wrong?" asked Jimmy.

"Thor's Hammer!" I said. "I got an idea. Thor's Hammer."

"You look OK," said Jimmy, "but apparently you are too tired to drive."

"Be careful, Jimmy," said Anka, waking up. "His ideas always get him in trouble."

"Oh yes," I smiled, "there will be trouble. You'll see."

As soon as I got to work next evening, I called Zari on the radio.

"The barrier is broken," I said. "Could you send someone from the maintenance to have a look at it?"

For two nights I kept calling everybody in the administration, first on the radio, then on the phone, reminding them to fix the barrier, which hadn't been working properly for at least a week.

"It can fall and damage a passing car," I told them.

We were in Israel. Everybody said, "Sure, we'll take care of it," but nobody was going to do anything anytime soon.

"Let me have him," said Jimmy. "She's my girlfriend, why should you take risk?"

"Duty of honor. A man who beats women will never pass by me unpunished."

And then, one of the times Zari had to drive into the lot, I raised the barrier, it malfunctioned and fell on his head.

I called an ambulance, then the police arrived, followed by Zari's lawyer Zeev and Miriam. We had to pretend not to know each other, but exchanged a few smiles. The lawyer noticed it, suddenly became worried, and soon disappeared.

Later Shimi told us that Zari's divorce hearing didn't go well. He was in a hospital and had to do everything through Zeev. But the lawyer suspected that Zari's trauma was not an accident, that Miriam had hired Russian mafia to get rid of her husband. He realized that he could be the next target, and screwed up the case so badly that Miriam got even more than she'd been asking for.

If some day somebody will ask me if I did anything good in my life, I'll remember Miriam's shining eyes and answer:

"Yes I did! I smashed one jerk's head with a steel barrier."

Next night Nick the ex-dancer got drunk and drove an Isuzu Trooper into a row of Mazdas, totally destroying seven of them. So Zari's accident was forgotten. But I had more trouble coming.

As usual, I kept working and living peacefully, dined with Anka at Ataman of Sardines, where the owner, old Ali, was always glad to see us as if we were his own children. We now worked from midnight till ten. Michael stopped drinking, and even took me squid fishing on his friend's speedboat a few times. I visited the Store for the Poor again, and got a blue tie and white shorts. It was early February, so the spring was just about to arrive.

Then one night we were sent to maintain order at a Russian dance party at Emperor Hotel.

I knew all people and all audiotapes there since the time I'd tried to conquer Anka using traditional methods. So I took off my uniform (it consisted of a raincoat and the radio) and went dancing. Jimmy managed to sneak in two bottles of whiskey and used them successfully as bait to get some nice chick to his table. It was much better than patrolling the parking field.

Well past midnight, Jimmy and I decided to take Anka and his girl outside for some fresh air. Just as we were exiting the basement, someone hit me in the stomach with a crowbar.

It was so sudden and painful that I almost fell. Two criminally-looking men were blocking the door. One of them said to the other in Russian underworld lingo:

"Where's your razor? Kill the guy and cut the chick's face."

I didn't like either suggestion. I hated physical confrontations, but it was too late to talk to them. I had an advantage: a month spent swimming, sailing, hiking, mountain biking, eating at Ataman, and having sex no less than ten times a day. The bad guys looked pumped up, but not very healthy. Besides, I didn't expect to be sent to the party, so I was wearing my size 46 working boots. And, best of all, I was a security guard and didn't have to worry about legal consequences.

On the other hand, I was of Jewish origin after all, so I preferred to use my head in difficult situations. And use it I did. I was still leaning forward on bent knees after the hit to the stomach, so I simply jumped up and hit one of them in his chin with my forehead. It hurt even more than the crowbar, but his jaw got fractured in two places. His friend tried to run away. I followed him outside and saw that I was chasing two people - the bad guy and Levi.

So it was Levi who'd hired them. If they were his father's men, I'd probably never get out of there alive. I caught up with Levi and pushed him to the ground. Before I could do much damage, a police jeep with the siren on appeared from behind a corner. I was glad to see Yosef, the captain of downtown police unit and a good friend of mine. Apparently Jimmy didn't waste time and pressed the alarm button on his radio. The bad guy stopped in his tracks, and it cost him most of his teeth. I knocked out a few, holding a closed pocket knife in my fist, and Yosef completed the job with his baton.

Next day we held a council at Ataman of Sardines. It was attended by Beni, Jimmy, Ali, and Shlomi, who knew everybody in Eilat.

"Well," he said, "the law is on your side. Yosef testified that you acted in self-defense, and there were many other witnesses. But Levi has serious larynx trauma, so his father is very angry. If I were you, I'd get out of town for about a week. He will calm down eventually. He's not a monster. He'll understand that it was all Levi's fault."

"How about Kfar Harash?" said Beni.

"Kfar? Is it an Arab village?"

"Not exactly. You'll like it, I'm sure." He looked as if attempting a practical joke.

"What about Anka? I don't want to leave her here."

"Take her with you,"

"I would rather go alone," smiled Shlomi.

"Take her for five days, then stay there alone for five more," suggested Beni.

"That's ten. You said a week would be enough."

"Oh, come on. You'll enjoy it, believe me. And the work isn't too hard."

"What am I supposed to do?"

"What do you care?" asked Jimmy. "Didn't you once tell me that a professional traveler should be able to adapt to anything?"

"Don't worry, Vovi," said old Ali. "It's a good place."

He was right.

                                  Ataman of Sardines

                      Hey, friend, what happened? You look sad. Come, join us, have a talk.
                      We have just ordered roasted lamb; we're working at the dock.

                      Do you speak Turk? Speak English? Great! And where are you from?
                      Oh, wow! That's very far away - long sailing to your home!

                      You see this sleeping guy? His ship was in Odessa twice.
                      Don't wake him up, Akhmed, he's drunk, and drunk, he isn't nice.

                      What brought you here - sea and beach? Oh, work - yeh, that sounds good.
                      My father used to say: "Man's life is work for fun and food".

                      Well, now I'll have to leave and lay under the deck to think.
                      The floor is rocking - feels like storm, and I don't want to sink.

                      Feel free to finish lamb and rum - no need for you to fast.
                      Good sailing, friend, calm seas to you, and never break your mast!

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