Dedication

To my parents

The Geriatric Platoon

1.

GRANDPA ENLISTED IN the Golani infantry brigade at the age of eighty. This was six months ago, a little after Grandma Miriam had suffered a stroke in the shower and died on the spot. A month and a half later, he packed a bag, stuffing it with four undershirts, five pairs of underwear, a flashlight, two cans of sardines, a biography of Moshe Sharett, and anti-chafing cream. He also added a sweater. Not because he thought he might be cold, but because he continued to fear the woman he had loved even after she had passed away. Then he canceled his subscription to the Lev Cinema, paid his debt to the butcher and called Frankel to tell him he was quitting the Friday morning gang, and they should invite Yoske Cohen to take his place.

Dad thought Grandpa had lost his marbles, told him that’s not how normal people cope. “Go on a cruise to the Caribbean or something,” he grumbled at him the night before the draft. “You don’t have to help death along.”

Grandpa said it was the other way ’round, that he was trying to outrun death, but Dad wouldn’t listen. He took a black notebook and pen out of his pocket, and started jotting down numbers. “Eighty-year-old soldier. One thousand ninety-five days in the military. A monthly salary of 893 shekels.” Then he mumbled to himself a series of convoluted formulas only he understood. Dad had worked his whole life as a life insurance actuary, or as he once explained to me, “someone who determines how much a person’s life is worth.” It wasn’t merely a profession to him. It was a worldview, almost a religion. Every component of his life was configured into charts and numbers. Alma always joked that he probably had an equation that determined the value of their love.

Dad finished scribbling in his illegible handwriting and looked at Grandpa. “According to the average life span, your hereditary background and health, you have another four years to live, maybe a little less,” he determined with stifling indifference. “Wasting those years cleaning toilets and on guard duty is simply flawed logic, there’s no other way to put it.”

Grandpa didn’t have the tools to counter his son’s complex formulas. He owned a grocery store, and even then Grandma Miriam was the one who handled the money. He tried explaining that many his age were reenlisting, that the situation down south was more precarious than ever, that someone had to defend this country instead of all those deadbeat dodgers crowding the cafés in Tel Aviv. He also said we had absolutely nothing to worry about. That he’d go to general boot camp like Yehuda from the doctor’s office and then pursue a desk job at the army headquarters.