A true story about Gemini

The Israeli army’s lingo has a habit of appropriating English words and subtly, or not-so-subtly, changing their meaning to fit the distorted vocabulary of a military base. When said in a cutting Hebrew accent the English word becomes something new and refined, with explicit applications and connotations. For example, the word “fuck” is used in basic training exclusively in noun form and means only one thing; a soldier’s mistake, one he will pay for. My basic training nights would end in what was known as a “fuck formation”, where the sergeant would pace around us and read out our accumulated fucks and their corresponding punishments. It was on this night that we each found out if we were headed home on leave or staying behind for our fucks.

Another appropriated English word is “distance”. Distance is used to describe the invisible wall, the unbridgeable gap that separates soldiers from their commanding staff during basic training and the professional courses that sometimes follow. It’s an almost poetic use of the word, packing so much meaning into it that it almost seems new. Military “distance” is a palpable beast, one that could only thrive in a world of ranks sown onto uniforms and teenage power-trips.

The flipside of “distance” was described by the phrase “breaking the distance”. After months of strict adherence to the unwritten rules of distance, wherein commanders treated their soldiers like scum, spoke to them in sharp tones not unlike the ones used to train dogs, had them stand stiff at attention and address them formally at all times, all in order to uphold the clear division between themselves as staff and the soldiers as sub-humans, graduation days offered the chance for mutual relief. Suddenly the charade was done with, the distance shattered and hopefully forgotten by both sides.

The stricter of commanders, those who lived off of belonging to the powerful side of the army equation, never allowed for any respite from their façade and kept up the distance until after the final moments, even as their now-former soldiers were being loaded onto buses to be scattered amongst the many bases. One of my commanders during the six-week professional course that followed my basic training nightmare was immediately recognizable as such a girl.

Her name was Talya. She was a redhead, and even though her features made her freakishly resemble a human skull stripped of its skin I still found her to be beautiful. My professional training course was by far not one of the strictest, and by the third week I had seen every one of our commanders slip up with his or her game-face and reveal the human lurking beneath. In Talya’s case the human beneath was still at a distance, and the difference between the two distances was negligible.

Other than being at distance from everyone, her fellow staff included, Talya seemed to particularly dislike me. She would only gaze at me in contempt, and began every sentence she’d said to me with a scornful sigh. At night I was asked by my bunkmates if Talya and I had had a history on “the outside”, if there was any reason I could think of for why she hated me so much. I had none. All I could do was be extra careful around her.

Finally our day of breaking the distance had come. Our commanders would see us one by one, tables had been set out on the grass in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by the typical ugliness of an army base, and there we would be assigned our posts for the next three years of our life and address our commanders as equals for the first time. I wasn’t the first to sit across Talya, and those who had come back from her table shook their heads with a smile and shared what we all could have guessed; she was no different now than she was before.

That was the last of our concerns, as the fate of our service lay in her and the other commanders’ hands. Some soldiers had high hopes for the most challenging of posts, others wished to be reunited with friends who were already serving here and there. Tears of disappointment and shrieks of joy were heard all around, euphoria mixed with tragedy. All I wanted was to stay as close to home as possible and be free to leave my base at night.

I sat across from Talya in the somewhat dreamlike arrangement of a single table in the middle of a field and pursed my lips in what I hoped was a friendly yet respectful manner. She looked up at me from my paperwork, nothing but businesslike, and opened by saying “Well. We were born on the same day.”
“We were?” I was surprised.
“Yes. Same day, one year apart.” She said dryly.
She was a Gemini too. Not that I’d ever believed in the astrological signs, but still I couldn’t help but wonder how she of all people was a Gemini. Weren’t they, weren’t we, supposed to display an inherent duality to our natures? Why then was she the only commander to maintain distance even after it was no longer called for? Why would she be the only one to refuse to take part in what could be the perfect display of duality? Or was she breaking the distance right then and there, only I wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up on it?
“So where do you want to go?” She caught me off guard. I wasn’t expecting to be asked, simply told.
“Close to home.” I said.
“That’s it?” She was clearly disappointed. “Close to home?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you got it. You’re going back to the Air Force.”
A weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I let out the air I’d had locked in my chest.
I smiled.
She didn’t.
I got up and left, thinking I might have been in love with her. Or at least a part of me was in love with a part of her. It was hard to be sure, what with all that distance.