Her hand slams across the side of the gun, pushing the muzzle away from her face and twisting it from my hand. At the same instant, her hips flick upward and send me sprawling to the side. Within half a second from the time it began, it’s over. Just like yesterday with the knife, I’m on my back and she has the weapon.
We reverse positions with me on the floor, and Yael explains how it’s done, breaking down the move part by part, and putting it back together. Once I get the hang of it, it’s surprisingly straightforward. Slam, twist, flick. Slam, twist, flick. Do it again and again and again and again and your muscles remember it without bothering to ask your brain. It becomes a reflex. It becomes automatic. And that’s the point, I realize. That’s what Yael wants to build in me. She wants to replace my instincts to scream, or to shit myself with terror, or to lash out stupidly, with something better and more useful.
Slam, twist, flick.
By the time we’ve gone through every permutation of the drill again and again and again, I’m covered in sweat, mine and Yael’s. I’m used to my own smell after a workout, but now I wear hers, too.
With the pistol in my hand, I stand over Yael, triumphant, swollen with adrenaline and pride.
But she senses my self-satisfaction. “You think you’ve won?” she asks.
I shrug, and she replies by sweeping out her leg and catching my bad ankle. My body twists to the ground, and suddenly the gun’s in her hand again and the muzzle pressed to my temple.
“You’re dead,” she says without emotion. “Dead because you didn’t finish what you started. You want your enemy to win?”
“No. Of course not.”
“So don’t just take the pistol. Use it. If you don’t need to kill your enemy, you can wound him,” she says. “Shoot him in the leg, or if you take his knife, cut his Achilles tendon.”
She turns the pistol around and hands it back to me. Then we practice another thousand times.
*
We train from the time I wake up to the time I collapse on the cot, already asleep before my head hits the pillow. For three weeks, I learn how to punch, the force comes from the body, not the arm. Where to punch, balls, throat, stomach, kidney. Pressure points, between upper lip and nose, between thumb and forefinger. All of this—along with knee strikes, kicks, locks, holds—Yael squeezes into me with the force of countless repetitions so that it’s in my muscle memory, deep as my own DNA.
The decade of gymnastics has kept me limber and on balance, and I have little trouble with the endurance Yael requires of me. By the time we near the end of the third week, I can tap into the radio frequency of Yael’s mind, predict what she’ll do next. She says it’s all physical, that a trained fighter can see her enemy’s pupils dilate one-fiftieth of a second before they strike, but to me it feels more mystical than that, like an ability to see a moment into the future.
My muscles ring with exhaustion, and one night I count fourteen bruises on my body. Eight on my shins, two on each arm, one on my jaw, and one, mysteriously—I have no idea how it got there—on the top of my left foot. The skin on my knuckles bleeds every day and heals up every night, leaving brown scabs to be torn open again in the morning. In the mirror, after I shower, I hardly recognize my own body. It’s becoming taut, angry, bulging at the shoulders, along my arms, across my back. Like a boxer.
Yael ends every day’s training by defeating me. Brutally. Mercilessly. She begins the next day’s training by teaching me to counter the previous night’s beatdown. Curiously, I don’t dread the defeats. The fear has been bled out of me. Yael’s words from day one—that learning how to get hit and get up again is the first lesson of Krav Maga—stay with me always.
But as the fear bleeds away, it’s replaced by something else. A head-spinning narcotic rush that awakens the thing I’d discovered inside me back in Queens. It seems to feed on what Yael is teaching me. It seems, in fact, to be starved for it. I believe, or would like to believe, that sometimes this thing truly scares Yael. Sometimes she beats me down so hard that I wonder whether she’s teaching me to fight, or teaching that thing who, exactly, is still boss.
And so it goes until an afternoon at the end of the third week when, covered in sweat and with every muscle on fire, I turn to Yael just in time to catch a shopping bag she throws my way.
Inside is a chic leather motorcycle jacket along with a pair of dark jeans. “What’s this?” I ask.
“We’re going out,” she says.
“To do what?” I ask.
She downs a bottle of water, wipes her mouth on her forearm. “The boys in Tel Aviv called,” she says calmly. “They found Feras.”
Ten
We ride the packed Metro for a long time, heading north toward the Gare du Nord train station and the areas beyond. African men in puffy down jackets and baggy pants, speaking a patois of French and their own native languages. Arab women in full burkas, pushing baby carriages weighed down by grocery bags hanging from the handles.
When I moved to Paris with my father, I’d been eleven, too young to do much exploring on my own. I stayed mainly in the western suburbs, venturing away from our neighborhood in Boulogne-Billancourt mainly to head to my school, which was farther west still. The Paris my dad and I would explore together on the weekends was mostly confined to the tonier parts, the 7th and 8th arrondissements, and only sometimes beyond.
Yael and I get off at the Pigalle station. A hundred years ago, artists slummed here, drank absinthe. But today it’s a touristy neighborhood of sex shops and rip-off cafés. Six or seven girls about my age stand out front of a neon-lit strip club in fishnets and spangled lingerie, shoving coupons into the hands of every man who passes by, cooing at them to come in for a drink, only ten euros. They’re speaking French and English, but their accents come from far to the east of here. Tall and fine-boned, bare skin pink from the cold. I see hate in their eyes. This, I’m pretty sure, is not the Paris they thought they’d end up in. Certainly it’s different from any Paris I knew. As Yael and I pass, a man with a buzz cut and wearing an alligator-skin jacket eyes us, sucks on a cigarette, and barks to the girls in Russian to show more enthusiasm.