ME AND MOHAMMED
Estimated Read Time: 9 minutes
My dad is leaning on the front of a scuffed, camouflage jeep, talking to our tour guide, the head of the defensive force at the border fence we’ve been cruising alongside. They’re mumbling something I can’t hear, I’m too busy struggling to unbuckle the calcified seat belt that trapped me at that current moment. Our tour guide, whose name I simply cannot conjure, so for clarity’s sake, I’ll call him David. Our tour guide, David, slaps his hands on his knees in some joyous motion. I look over and my dad is turned, pointing at me with his pinky finger. Following my father’s hand, David saunters toward me.
For context, this is my second trip to Israel, halfway through the six weeks we would spend in the country. I’m still twelve years old and right in the thick of my edgiest era. I’m full of hatred and scorn and premature teenage angst. My family, six members at this point, had spent the night at an outdoor activities kibbutz, one of those kibbutzim where unsuspecting tourists act as the main source of income. Going on bad hikes, lounging in a truly foul lazy river, that sort of thing. We spent our evening tracing Israel’s northern edge to deliver low-quality pizza to the soldiers working at the Israeli-Syrian border. They appreciated our efforts, so this commander or captain or whatever his rank was, David, decides to take us around in his scuffed, camouflage jeep in order to return the favor for our generous act of pizza delivery.
David comes up to my seat in the car, unbuckles me, a task I easily could’ve done myself, and pulls an old plastic milk jug from under my younger sister’s seat. The jug is dark blue, crushed flat by the weight of the seat, and incredibly dusty. David brushes it off right over my lap. Gag-worthy. He looks me in the eye, and in a frighteningly Americanized Israeli accent, he says “Your dad says you’re the little artist of the family?” with the slight tilt of his head. In retrospect, I’m sure this gruff man made of solid steel carrying at least three guns was doing his best to seem approachable and amicable to this clearly out-of-their-element, iPod-Touch-obsessed preteen, but at the moment, I felt both patronized and incredibly sheepish.
I was, in fact, the artist. I spent most of my time failing to recreate the faces of beautiful women I found on Pinterest, not drawing for strange IDF men taking us around the Israeli-Syrian border. The fact that my father would pimp out my artistic ability like that was a tad insulting, but, either way, my status as the artist was already compromised. There was no use denying it. I nod silently. David hands me a black sharpie, thick nibbed. “You know what a terrorist looks like?” he asks. “The beard, the turban, that kind of terrorist, can you draw me one of those?” He shakes the milk jug in his hand, grains of dust still spilling off of it, illuminated by the summer sun.
I weigh my options. I already admitted to being the artist in my family. I can’t go back on that now. I had never drawn on a milk jug before, but that canvas wasn’t too far off from the iPad Pro I was used to. I was overly confident in my ability to capture a human face looking back on it, but I was by far the best portraitist in the family. And despite my lack of geopolitical awareness, I knew that in the hands of my father, likely the next in line to create this portrait, the drawing would become a racist caricature in no time. I take the jug from David’s hand, hop out of the jeep, and sit on the dusty ground.
I slave away at my masterpiece, the face of a man with a beard in a turban, brows furrowed, grimacing, begins to appear on the milk jug before me. Due to my focus, I fail to notice David’s preparations. On the other side of that scuffed, camouflage jeep, David places headphones over my parents’ and siblings’ ears and begins taking my mom through the motions of shooting his pistol that he took from the sling at his waist. She stands, facing forward. Firmly. She wraps her fingers around the trigger.
A few minutes later, he comes back over to me, still crouching in the dirt, adding a few final wrinkles to the face of a supposedly Syrian man now staring back at me. “You almost done there?” I nod and hand the work to him. A smile tears into his face, “This will be perfect!” He pats me on the shoulder and hands me red plastic headphones, shuffling me to the rest of my family.
As I walk over to the circle amongst the trees that my siblings and father have formed, I watch as David affixes this milk jug masterpiece to the chain link fence we all face. My mother, standing away from us, focuses on the dusty blue milk jug. After putting on the headphones, the quiet rumbling of the car disappears into white noise.
David returns to us, now shouting over headphone-induced silence, but he’s directing his speech towards my mother. “This is Mohammed. Thank you, Eden, for creating him, and he’s a violent terrorist from across the border.” My mom asserts her position, arms straight ahead, vision-focused. “Now shoot!”
My mom winces from anticipated recoil and shoots twice. I watch the recoil shake her despite that anticipation. Mohammed. Two bullet holes rip through the plastic frame that his face is traced upon. One in the cheek, one in the neck. “You killed him,” David proudly exclaims. My dad adds, “No way he’s surviving that shot to the neck.” David laughs, “Now who’s next?” My ears start ringing.
Beyond that, my memory is blurred. I can’t remember the exact order, but based on how things generally go in my household, I’d assume my dad shoots next, then my older brother, then my younger sister, then me. I can’t remember if I even hit the target, the target I had created, soothed beneath the artist’s loving hand. First killed by the artist’s loving mother. And then finally killed by its creator.
After I finish my two gunshots, David congratulates us. He tasks my family with picking up the chipped pieces of blue plastic that were strewn across the ground in our firing session, now dustier than ever after their time in the dirt. I grab a few chunks and place them in a white plastic bag that David holds open for us. Now all that remains of Mohammad are a few chips of plastic that will soon be discarded. I climb back in the back seat of the scuffed, camouflage jeep, struggle to reaffirm my seatbelted position, and soon, we are back cruising alongside the Israeli-Syrian border and on our way to the rest of our trip in Israel.
This story hasn’t come up much since. I forgot it for most of my life. I never thought it was that significant, just a weird experience making art, the only time I’ve ever drawn on a plastic milk jug, the only time I’ve ever held a gun. This anecdote got brought up when a friend and I were going back and forth with crazy stories from our childhood, honestly, when I brought Mohammed up, I was just trying to show off. I barely even remembered him outside of that exact context, but in a moment, it came flooding back to me, and we both agreed it was perfect fodder for a personal narrative.
But, after I showed a draft of this story to my father, he… apologized. He apologized to me. That was not the reaction I expected nor desired, but he apologized for traumatizing me. He apologized, talking of how much it must’ve destroyed me as an artist to watch my creation be shot through the neck, how much it must’ve hurt to become not only a part of but a propagandist in a conflict so much larger than myself. I could barely understand where he was coming from.
This memory wasn’t traumatic for me, I never heard ringing gunshots in my ears, I never saw the outline of Mohammad’s face on the dark inner sides of my eyelids as I drifted off to sleep, never shuddered at the repetition of his name, I barely even remembered the story of his brief existence. It meant nothing to me. But my dad kept telling me, that the fact that I remembered it all, the fact that I remembered the gruesome details, must mean something about how much it impacted me. And to him, how much it traumatized me.
Only recently did other people start dissecting and labeling my childhood. For all of my life, I’ve just lived, and only recently I’ve had the time to look back and label my experiences. And thinking about it, maybe the tragedy of Mohammad’s destruction was traumatic. After all, I still think about it. Art created to be destroyed, artists as pawns in the greater game of war, but that’s not the part that really sticks with me, it was the fact that my father unquestioningly labeled it as traumatic.
How much of my life isn’t normal? Where is the line between the normal level of abnormality and an abnormal level of abnormality? The glassware thrown at my head? The long hours sitting in an FBI investigation room with child-sized plastic chairs? If other people experienced my life, how much of it would they call growing up and how much of it would they call trauma? Because I never thought Mohammad traumatized me. And I never thought anyone could think that. I thought it was all childhood. But I guess it’s not.
After being told of how traumatic this story apparently is, I now think of Mohammad, brought into the world for us to destroy him, not as just an odd but charming memory from my childhood, but perhaps something more. And perhaps something worse.