SHAY K. AZOULAY

Listen, I know that I’m guilty, of course I’m guilty, I’ve admitted this, I never attempted to deny it, and logic dictates that if I am guilty then there must also be a punishment, because a crime had been committed – though I wouldn’t call it a crime, maybe an offense, or a violation, though the most accurate term for it would probably be negligence, an act of carelessness rather than any sort of act brought about by malicious intent or aimed at some sort of personal gain, because I certainly didn’t gain anything from it and I certainly didn’t mean to harm anyone or anything, and in fact did not harm anyone or anything – my negligent actions have had no negative impact whatsoever on anyone or anything, unless of course you consider the fact that as a direct result of this negligence I myself have been punished, severely punished, and so in fact the only negative outcome of my actions was the harm done to me, but again I will readily admit that there is no doubt that I am guilty, that a law, or at least a rule, had been violated, and even if I was unaware of this rule, or didn’t believe that I was violating it, and even if this rule was never stated clearly, or in fact never stated at all unless you consider it to be implied by the general rules that dictate our daily conduct, nevertheless I am guilty of this violation and my only objection concerns the severity of the punishment, which I consider to be disproportional to the punishable act, but maybe I’m getting ahead of myself and should go back and try to retrace the whole thing from the start to see if I can figure out just when and where I took this wrong turn, and how I came to be in this place, which probably means that I should also take a moment to consider what this place actually is. Of course, these two relatively simple questions – Where am I and how did I get here? – can be given two straightforward answers – Where am I? In military prison; How did I get here? I joined the army – but of course these answers are both somewhat misleading, certainly reductionist, and generally insufficient since they fail to draw meaningful connections between cause and effect – because not everyone who joins the army ends up in military prison, and a lot of other things must have happened between joining the army and ending up in prison to lead me down this path, and even the terms employed in these short, unsatisfactory answers are imprecise because first of all I did not really join the army, that makes it sound like I had made some sort of conscious decision, as if I had made some sort of deliberate choice, but no one asked me if I wanted to join the army, I was enlisted, I was conscripted, I was forced to join the Israel Defense Forces as every healthy young Jew in this country is supposed to, I was told what to do and I was told where to go and I simply obeyed, and second of all I am not really in prison, not technically, not a real prison with bars and cells and striped or orange uniforms like you see in the movies, just a tent that I share with all the other prisoners, who are also just soldiers who committed some minor offenses, or pissed off the wrong people, which amounts to the same thing, and there are no walls, just a tall fence surrounding our tent and another tent like it, though currently empty, and there are no guards just a single soldier acting as warden, not even an officer, just a sergeant like me, and this whole complex is positioned inside of a standard military base where all the other soldiers can come and go as they please, or as their commanders please, while I have to stay here until my time is up, so it’s not the kind of prison you read about in those overlong novels where the writer has all the time in the world to sit around in his neat or dirty little cell undisturbed and philosophize and moralize and protest his innocence and condemn society, there’s no such luxury here, no one placed me in front of a typewriter and asked me to tell my life story, I was not even given a pen and paper to write, which must be in violation of some basic right, but even if I had been given the means to write, I simply don’t have the time to sit down and write, because my day is filled with endless chores, from the moment I wake up to half an hour before I go to sleep, with only short breaks for eating, the rest of the day is filled with tedious chores that I have to do all over this base, forbidden from communicating with the other soldiers, I walk around the base with my gaze fixed to the ground, looking for a random piece of trash to pick up, or heading from one dirty toilet stall to another, a bucket of cleaning supplies in one hand, a mop in the other, with a misshapen olive-green bucket hat over my head, obscuring my eyes, with yellow bands over my shoulder straps to identify me as a prisoner, a non-entity, while all the soldiers around me, most of them jobbers working from nine to five, or eight to four, can just walk out of the base when their work is done, but I have to stay here day and night until my term is up – fourteen days, two whole weeks – and then go back to my battalion, to serve under the same commanders that sent me here, and try to figure out how I’m going to survive the time I have left until I complete my 3 years of mandatory service, these 1,095 days that I am obligated to give to my country, or actually these 1,096 days that I am obligated to give, due to the unfortunate fact that my three years of service also happen to include a leap year, the year 2000, which will begin in less than two months if the millennium bug doesn’t kill us all and which will have 29 days in February, but I can proudly state that as of the day that I entered this prison I had already completed 723 days of my mandatory service, yes, the bulk of my military service is already behind me, and in just a week I was supposed to celebrate my 730th day in the army, which is to say my two year anniversary, which is to say that I would have had only one year left to serve, but unfortunately this two-week sentence has mucked up my celebration, not only because it seems foolish to celebrate such a thing while serving time in prison, but mostly because the time I spend in this prison is not counted as part of my military service, so for 14 whole days the countdown towards my eventual release is halted, they’ve managed to subvert the very laws of physics and stretch my 723rd day in the army to last two whole weeks, and this might be the most cruel aspect of my punishment, beyond the humiliation of being sent to prison, beyond the menial chores, beyond the lack of freedom, but the fact that when I entered this base my count was 723 days and when I leave it two weeks later my count will still be 723 days, with a full year and a week ahead of me before I am allowed to leave the army for good, and of course that count would only remain valid as long as I don’t somehow find myself in prison yet again at some point in the future, for committing some minor offence or for pissing off the wrong people, so in fact the most significant thing that they’ve taken away from me is two weeks out of my life as a civilian – it’s not enough that they demand three whole years of my young life, a full 7th of my life so far, now they’re cutting into my life after the army, which I really think should not be theirs to take, it’s not as if I was sent on vacation for a fortnight, I’m still in the army, still wearing the uniform, still doing thankless chores, as if I were back in basic training and not a sergeant, not a commander, or a former commander I guess, because there’s little chance I would be returning to my battalion as a commander after serving time in prison, but the truth is I never wanted to be a commander, I never set out to become a commander, throughout my whole military service I just went where I was told to go and did what I was told to do to the best of my ability, just like a good soldier is expected to do, though I wouldn’t consider myself an especially good soldier, though not such a bad soldier that I ever thought I would end up in prison. Of course, back when I was in high school, I never thought I’d be an infantry soldier, and when I became an infantry soldier I never thought I’d become a commander, and when I became a commander I never thought I would end up in jail, but all of those things happened one after another, as if this was the natural progression, as if one grew out of the other like those diagrams we had in school of the lifecycle of a frog or the metamorphosis of a butterfly, as inevitable as our march towards death, and through it all it seemed as if I was just standing there, like a porcelain figure in a roughly shaken snow globe watching the fake snow swirl all around me, like a casual spectator observing a process that had nothing to do with me, a process which I could not affect or alter in any way, because from the very start no one asked me what I wanted to do, no one considered what might suit me, they simply decided, without bothering to collect too much evidence, that I was healthy enough to be a soldier, that I was physically and mentally capable of being an infantry soldier and even a commander, maybe even an officer, and from that point on my path was decided and my fate was sealed. Of course it’s possible that I should have seen it all coming, that this was all predestined and predetermined all the way back in my very first encounter with the army, inscribed in all of those graphs and tables and charts that are fed into the great bureaucratic leviathan which breaks every man down into facts and numbers, then builds him back up again as an olive-green cog to fit neatly inside the constantly whirring machine, my destiny inscribed in those inscrutable figures just as ancient civilizations believed that our future was inscribed in the stars, or in the palms of our hands, or in the entrails of sacrificial lambs, and perhaps if I were to look back to that fateful day that I was called up to appear before the draft board and undergo all of those tests and evaluations, I might be able to find the root or the seed of everything that came after, like an ominous prophecy, like a dark foreshadowing, as in one of those movies where you realize in retrospect that the first scene secretly revealed the whole story to come, I remember that sunless fall morning when I was still in high school, not yet seventeen, with a little more than a year to go before I was enlisted, I remember the day started with all sorts of computerized tests, most of them quite simple, and I remember that I wanted to do well in those tests, because I was sure that I would wind up at some sort of office job, or doing something technical, maybe even creative, something that would require me to use my mind rather than my legs, because I was never an athlete, never a big fan of sports, chubby as a kid and unfit as a teen, in gym class I would always get winded when we were forced to run a couple of kilometers and switched to walking after three or four minutes, ignoring the teacher’s demands and rebukes, while all of the other boys around me always seemed far more suited for military life, with their love of group sports, their physical fitness, their easy camaraderie and natural crassness, cracking jokes as they jogged far ahead of me, barely breaking a sweat, but I was never the type and hoped this would also be reflected in my examination, I hoped they would see that I was intelligent and capable, but lacking in physical fitness and with zero motivation to storm up the hill and conquer the enemy, or march in lockstep and chant in unison, and so I completed the tests diligently and was then directed to the room where the medical examinations were conducted, where I was forced to strip to my underwear and it was all pretty straightforward – height, weight, blood pressure, pulse, reflexes, color blindness, eye exam, hearing exam, a cold stethoscope here and a cough and turn your head there, a bit of general poking and prodding, open wide this and lift up that, and after it was all done and I was getting dressed one of the doctors’ assistants came up to me, and she whispered in my ear, do you want to know what your profile is? and I thought, how could she possibly know already? How could they tell from this very basic exam what my body is or isn’t capable of doing? Did they find something so obviously wrong with me that no further tests were needed? And what does the profile even mean? I knew a profile of 21 was the lowest and meant that there was something seriously wrong with you, either mentally or physically, and you couldn’t serve at all, and that a profile of 97 was the highest you could get and it meant you were perfectly fit and healthy and could therefore serve in all of the frontline infantry units and even special ops units, but I didn’t really know what any of the numbers between them meant, and what should I tell this young woman, this girl of 18 or possibly 19, whose face I can no longer recall but whose voice I can still remember, her soft sweet voice with a tinge of exhilaration, who didn’t wait for me to respond whether I wanted to hear her secret or not and simply said, it’s 97, as if delivering the most wonderful news, as if we’d both shared in a singular moment of joy, and I felt my heart sink, but still I nodded thankfully, I think I even smiled in gratitude, and finished putting on my shoes, and then I was given a plastic cup and was told that I had to provide a urine sample before I went on to the final interview. Of course by then it was all decided, there was nothing I could say in the interview that would change it, nothing much left to do except fill that little plastic cup, pass that interview and go home, to perhaps enjoy the rest of my day off from school, but when I went into the restrooms to pee I found that the urine refused to come, though I didn’t think much of it at first since I have always had a shy bladder and could limit myself to three or even two daily visits to the restroom, and so I went to the nearby cooler and took a long drink, then waited for about five or ten minutes and headed back into the restroom, to make a more serious attempt at peeing, and I stood there in the stall, in front of the unclean bowl with the plastic cup in one hand and my dick in the other and tried to coax myself to urinate – I reasoned, I nudged, I wiggled, I feigned disinterest, but nothing worked, as if my body had decided to rebel against me, once it had realized that I wasn’t going to do anything to prevent myself from being enlisted in the army, and in a last-ditch act of defiance refused to give up this precious bodily fluid which was apparently necessary for the completion of the process, not caring if I was forced to spend the rest of my days stationed like a sentinel in front of that porcelain throne, and so I decided to forfeit the battle so that I may win the war and I zipped up my jeans and returned to the cooler and drank more and more, forcing myself to swallow the cold water until my teeth hurt, until my stomach felt full, and then I paused for a moment and bent down once again and drank even more, greedily and fervently as if I had just walked through the desert, and finally I sat down and waited, I watched the clock and waited, I watched the others come and go, entering the restroom with empty plastic cups and coming out no more than two minutes later with cups filled to the brim with that pungent golden liquid, by now it was more than an hour since I had finished the medical exam and began my quest for the holy urine-filled grail, and with determination I stood up, swallowed a final mouthful of water from the cooler, and entered the restroom, selecting a different stall in an attempt to change my luck, and assumed the position, closing my eyes in silent prayer, attempting to empty my mind and simply allow my body to do what comes naturally, but after five minutes or so I could no longer sustain this calmness and I once again resorted to wordless reasoning and creative maneuvering, I tried to accomplish the impossible through a sheer act of willpower, but my body persisted, as if it knew that it was the only thing standing between me and certain disaster, but I was equally determined and continued to stand there and strive, ignoring the occasional knocks on the locked door behind me and the repeated attempts to open it, I focused on my singular task with my eyes closed, and after what must have been at least fifteen minutes of silent concentration it finally came, a preliminary squirt and then… and then nothing more… my concentration must have been broken by that squirt, by that false hope of pending relief, and I attempted to recapture the moment, the feeling, but it was gone, and after five more minutes of pointless waiting I zipped up once more and stepped outside with my unsatisfactory emission, but was it really unsatisfactory? I wondered and looked at the cup, the fluid within was pale yellow and barely covered the bottom but still it was there, a small triumph of mind over body, and suddenly I got the idea that this tiny victory, this miniscule breach in the body’s defenses might just be the opening I needed to enable my mind to outsmart and defeat my rebellious body, and that all I needed to do was simply go over to the sink and dilute this little urine sample with some more water, a process which in essence should not be very different from what I’ve been attempting to do by drinking all of that water for the past two hours, and so I carefully placed the plastic cup under the faucet and tried to open it ever so slightly to add just a few more drops of water to make the urine sample just a bit more acceptable in volume, but the water came spurting out violently and knocked most of my hard-earned urine right out of the cup and when I withdrew the cup it was about a quarter full with what I generously assessed to be 90% tap water and only 10% urine, and so I headed back into the stall with the hope of perhaps contributing another drop or two of pure urine to this watered down sample, but after fifteen more minutes of blind straining I realized it wasn’t going to happen and so I put the cap on my plastic cup full of slightly tainted tap water, handed it in and waited for my interview. Of course when I went into the interview I spoke plainly and truthfully, thinking that there’s nothing much to hide, or no reason to hide it, yes, I come from a good home, a nice house, good parents with good jobs, an older brother and a younger sister, two cars and a back yard, nobody’s sick, nobody’s dead, I never got in any trouble, I read books, I don’t drink or smoke, I don’t recall ever wetting the bed, and when I was asked where I might like to serve I admitted that I hadn’t really thought about it, that I wasn’t too enthusiastic about serving, and I made my case unenthusiastically, and then once the interview was over I took a bus back to my good home, my nice house, and I stood in front of the toilet and peed and peed for a long time, and the urine rose and rose in the bowl, flowing like a torrent, like a great cascading waterfall which seemed to fill every depth, flood every shore. Of course I wasn’t a soldier yet when I had that first encounter with the army, as a short-term visitor I was far more concerned at the time with school and my grades and my insecure social standing and my pimples and girls and masturbation and my favorite TV shows so I didn’t really dwell on the experience too much, and the truth is that in the course of that brief encounter I didn’t really get to experience very much of the stupidity, the monotony, the absurdity, the deceitfulness, or the nastiness that was to come once I actually entered into service and became a soldier, and all I could sense back then was my own vague incompatibility with this system, and even that was based on scant evidence, and in general I believe that I came away with the feeling that things would work out in the end, as they tended to work out for me up to that point in my life, not spectacularly, not enviably, but certainly not disastrously, not miserably, not in prison.