“Not opponent. Enemy.” She turns, a yellow rubber training knife in her hand. “This isn’t sport. You won’t be breaking boards with your forehead. What you learn here is exactly what we use in Israel to turn the soft dentist’s daughter into an operative who can kill a man with her thumbs.”
She hands me the knife, handle first. My hand grips it tentatively. I know it’s just rubber, non-lethal, but it feels strange. I’ve never used any sort of weapon, never even held one. Yael steps back and says, “Now stab me.”
I blink at her. “Stab you?”
“That’s what knives are for,” she barks. “Stab me!”
I push the blade at her halfheartedly.
Yael flicks it away with her forearm. “Again.”
Another thrust, more forceful this time, but she flicks it away with her other wrist. “Again!”
A third thrust, deeper than the others, my muscles into it this time. But instead of deflecting it, Yael seizes my wrist and wrenches my arm into a coil so the tip of the blade points to my own chest. I gasp at the pain in my shoulder and wrist but keep struggling against her. Then Yael’s foot lashes out and sweeps my legs out from under me. Within a fraction of a second, I’m on the floor, staring up at her, while she looks down at me. The knife I’d held just a moment before is now in her hand.
I grip my right shoulder and try to massage away the radiating pain. “That really hurt,” I say.
“I meant it to.”
I expect Yael to help me up or say something positive. Good try or You’ll do better next time. But instead, she’s circling me, her dancer’s feet silent on the floor. “Are you going to lie there like a child, or stand up and learn?”
I struggle to my feet. “I’m ready. Teach me.”
“Sure? Because to my eyes you are a lazy American kid,” she says as she moves left, then right, a graceful buildup to the next violent something she has in mind. “I give you a knife, and in five seconds, you’re on the floor, whining.”
“I’m ready,” I say.
“What?” she barks.
“Teach me!” I shout.
I see her fist fly at me, high and to my left. But my gymnast’s reflexes have awakened, and I lift my arm to block it. It’s at that moment that her other fist crashes into my right side, and the world becomes a bright, quiet place. All that exists is the blunt pain in my kidney just below my rib cage.
When I open my eyes, Yael is standing at the edge of the mat, her face reflecting the blue light from her phone’s screen as she checks her e-mail. “Fucking pathetic,” she says as she turns her back to me, her attention on whatever she’s reading. “But then, from you—pathetic was what I expected.”
The pain in my kidney is being pressed aside by a flare of anger so gleaming it nearly blinds me. Regardez la alpha bitch—back toward me like I’m too small a threat to even look at. I gauge the distance between us, gauge the height of the ceiling, then spring forward, two strides, three. A clean hurdle, nice long lunge. My palms hit the mat exactly where I want them to, and my shoulders shrug with all the power I have left, launching me into the air. Legs snap together, and this may really, truly be the tightest handspring I’ve ever done.
I feel one of Yael’s legs slice through the air where my body will be in another tenth of a second. But she’s too early. I twist to the side like a spinning javelin, and my feet find Yael’s chest. We both crumple to the ground with me on top of her.
It’s an obnoxious, show-offy attack, but goddamn if it doesn’t work. I knocked the breath out of her and just maybe her arrogance, too.
It takes Yael a few seconds to get her wind back and pull herself out from beneath me. She stands and cradles the side of her head with her hand. I pick myself up and face her. She’s steaming with anger, cheeks the color of fruit punch.
Everything on me hurts from my little stunt, but I’m not going to show it. “Still pathetic?” I say.
“You’re subtle as a truck,” she seethes as she glares at me.
It’s the first thing I’ve heard from her that sounds like a compliment, and now, in her glare, I see that she’s assessing me a second time. Reevaluating the girl she thought she’d been saddled with, substituting a new one.
“You’re welcome,” she says.
I look at her with an angry little smile. “For what?”
“For teaching you the first lesson of Krav Maga,” she says. “How to get hit and get up again. It wasn’t as bad as you thought, was it?”
She’s right, in a way. The pain from Yael’s blows hurt, but that’s all it did. In a few minutes, I’ve recovered and the sting has faded. It hurt a hell of a lot less than the shame I would have felt from giving up. I think about Astrid Foogle in the hallway of Danton and her slap to my cheek. It hadn’t been nearly as hard nor as skillfully delivered as Yael’s blows, and yet it seemed to hurt a lot more. The pain of Astrid’s slap, I realize, wasn’t in the slap itself, but in what it meant—that she was powerful and I was not. Whatever pain remains from Yael’s strikes feels somehow different, somehow less significant, because my getting up again and fighting back has removed the toxin of humiliation.
“Proud of yourself?” Yael says, tossing me a water bottle.
I take a swallow between exhausted breaths and nod.
There’s a flare of something nasty in her eyes. “I’ll lend you some shoes, and we can go for a run. Ten kilometers to start.”
*
We dash through the wet streets, weaving between crawling traffic, pushing past pedestrians who stop and stare at the two crazy bitches running in the rain, soaked to the skin. She’s always ahead of me. Always. I can never quite catch her. There’s no kindly coaching with Yael, no words of encouragement, just shouted orders to keep up and foul-sounding, slangy curses I don’t understand.
Her strides are long and even, and though she’s twice my age, I’m now at least a good ten paces behind her. Two businessmen in suits walk side by side down the sidewalk. Yael never pauses, never breaks her stride as she shoulders her way between them.
“Putain!” one of the men shouts as the other spits a huge yellow-and-white phlegmy gob that narrowly misses her.
“J’t’emmerde!” Yael calls back.
I take the path of least resistance and bound past the two men along the edge of the curb, snagging my hip on the side mirror of a parked Toyota.
Yael turns so that she’s jogging backward and searches for me behind her. “C’est inacceptable!” she barks. “Allez bouge-toi!”
I grunt and dig deeply into whatever store of energy I have left. The real thing ran out long ago, and I’m now operating on pure, acidic determination.
She veers left into a park, using a bench to launch over the waist-high iron fence. I follow, but my sneaker slips as it hits the wet wooden slats of the seat, and my leap over the fence isn’t clean. My foot strikes the ground on the other side at an angle, and I land hard on the pavement. I start to push myself up but there’s a stabbing pain from my ankle and it won’t take my weight. Somehow I hoist myself to one foot, hop to a spindly sapling, and grab hold of its trunk for support.
Yael appears next to me. “Ankle?” she says.
I nod, and she kneels on the ground to examine it. Her fingers are like ice as they push down my sock and gingerly probe the skin.