A Dog For a Dog
Illustration by Beenee SaridFor Fida
Yoaz marches several feet ahead of us. He’s walking really fast, and Alex and I are half-running to keep up with him. Yoaz always walks fast, and even faster when he’s angry, but I’ve never seen him like this. In one hand he holds a rusty iron rod we found on the way, and in the other a plastic Sprite bottle that he filled up at the gas station. Alex, out of breath, whispers to me, “He’s crazy, your brother. He’s seriously crazy.”
Yoaz, who must have heard, stops and turns around. “What did you say?” he asks Alex.
“He said we should go to the police,” I cut in. “He said let’s not get in trouble.”
“What’s the matter, dork?” Yoaz says and starts walking toward Alex. “You scared to go into the Arabs’ ‘hood with us?”
I try to think of something to say. Something that’ll make this stop.
* * *
When I got home from school, Smadja was already dead. He was lying on the road next to the cemetery, right where our street turns off. At first I thought it was a different dog because its fur looked brown, not white like Smadja’s, but when I got closer I realized the brown was dried blood. Alex, who was standing right next to the corpse, ran over and told me the whole thing: how a silver Renault pickup came speeding over from the railroad neighborhood and tossed Smadja up in the air, and how the pickup stopped a few yards down the road and a man with a beard got out. Alex said the man was really tall, with a big white skullcap, the kind Arabs wear, and that instead of running away, he, Alex, ran at the pickup yelling, “You killed him! You killed him!” and the Arab, even though he was twice as big as Alex, got scared and quickly hopped back in his truck and drove away.
Me and Alex aren’t exactly friends, even though we’re the same age and we live on the same block. He’s probably the only kid in the neighborhood who goes to a different school, and Akiva once told me it’s a school for weird kids, where they don’t get any homework and everyone has to learn how to knit, even the boys. In the mornings, when Yoaz and I walk to school, we always see Alex waiting for his bus, and he doesn’t get home until it’s almost dark. Luckily, he threw up that morning, and his thin mom with the raspy voice and hair like a loofah decided to keep him home, otherwise he’d never have seen Smadja get run over. “When he drove away, I got my phone out fast and took a picture,” Alex said and proudly showed me a blurry image of a license plate. “See? When the police have this number, they’ll catch him in a second.”
Yoaz and I dug a grave for Smadja on the hill next to the cemetery. Yoaz said it was okay according to Jewish law, and that it was the best thing for Smadja because he wouldn’t be buried alone. Alex wanted to help dig, but Yoaz hogged the shovel and said digging calmed him down and he wouldn’t let anyone else do it except me. After we lowered Smadja into the pit, Yoaz said I could say a few words – like, not exactly a prayer, because he’s a dog, but just something about him. So I said that he was a good dog, and that when I got him for my ninth birthday, when he was a puppy, there was a story on TV about Oren Smadja who won a bronze medal at the Olympics and they showed him on the mat doing judo rolls, and he looked exactly like a puppy rolling, and that’s when I named him Smadja, and Yoaz and Dad didn’t think it was a great name for a dog, but Mom said it was my decision—here Yoaz cut me off and said I didn’t have to bring up every single thing that happened since he was born, but just say something about him from my heart, like how even when I’m a hundred-and-something years old I’ll still remember him. Or, he said, I could swear an oath over his grave.
“An oath?” Alex intervened. “Like what kind of oath?” Yoaz said I could swear that if I ever had another dog, I’d name him Smadja, in the first Smadja’s memory, or I could swear to avenge his death. And when Yoaz said that, Alex took his phone out and said, “Telling the police isn’t taking revenge…”
Yoav snorted. “Who said anything about the police?” He started covering up the grave. “Me and Nadav’ll take care of it ourselves.”
“I’m telling you,” Alex continued, “with my picture of the plates, they’ll get him in no time…”
“They’ll get him in no time…” Yoaz mimicked Alex’s squeaky voice. “Who? Who’s gonna get him, you dork? Your knitting teacher at the girls’ school?”
“It’s not a girls’ school, it’s a Waldorf school! And if Nadav files a complaint, then the Israel Police—”
“The Israel Police?” Yoaz interrupted. “The Israel Police can’t even arrest people-murderers. You really think they give a shit about a dog-murderer?”
“But if we don’t go to the police, what exactly are we supposed to do?” Alex sounded frightened now.
Yoaz kept piling dirt over the grave, and when he’d finished, he tossed the shovel aside, looked at me, and said, “Come on, dude, we’re going to the Arabs’ ‘hood.”
Yoaz and I start walking. Alex joins in but stays a few steps behind us, so as not to irritate Yoaz. “Hey,” I say to Yoaz, mostly to try and calm him down, “what did you put in the bottle? Kerosene?”
“Gasoline,” says Yoaz, and pulls a plastic orange lighter out of his pocket. “Let’s do this.” He flicks the lighter on and holds it close to me. “Bonfire night! Who’s coming with me to burn an Arab’s dog?”
“Wait!” Alex says, grabbing my arm with his freckled hands. “Wait! Think for a second! It doesn’t make any sense to go kill some dog we don’t even know, who has nothing to do with—”
“It doesn’t make sense?” Yoaz puts his angry face right in Alex’s. “It’s what the Bible says. Are you telling me the Bible doesn’t make sense either?”
“It doesn’t say anywhere in the Bible that if someone runs over your—”
But Yoaz won’t let him finish. “An eye for an eye!” he yells. “A tooth for a tooth! That’s in Exodus. Don’t they teach you anything at your lousy school?”
“Come on, Yoaz, there’s no comparison. That pickup driver—”
“The Arab,” Yoaz snaps. “Say ‘Arab.’”
“Okay,” Alex says. “Okay, the Arab. I saw it happen. He really did bail and that was an asshole thing to do. But he didn’t do it on purpose.”
“No shit?” Yoaz winks at me and looks at Alex. “Trust me, when we burn one of their dogs today, it also won’t be on purpose.”
Alex takes his phone out and waves it around in Yoaz’s face. “You’re messed up!” he yells. “If you and Nadav don’t throw away that bottle and lighter right now and go back home, I’m calling the police and telling them everything.”
Yoaz slaps Alex with the hand that’s not holding the Sprite bottle. It’s his weak hand, but it’s enough to knock Alex’s phone to the ground, and Alex starts crying. Yoaz picks up the phone and puts it in his own pocket. “You’re not hearing what I’m saying: No police. Just us. Now go home, and I swear, if you even say one word…”
“My phone…” Alex whimpers, holding his hand out. “My phone…”
“Later,” Yoaz hisses. “If you watch your mouth, Nadav’ll give it to you later, when we get back.” He turns around and keeps marching toward the train tracks, and I have to practically run to keep up.
“Nadav!” Alex shouts behind me. “Don’t go with him! He’s a psycho!” But Yoaz doesn’t even turn around to see if I’m coming. He knows I’m behind him.
There’s hardly a single street lamp in the Arabs’ neighborhood. Yoaz knows it well. He and his friends sometimes go there after school to eat hummus. We have hummus in our neighborhood, too, but Yoaz says the Arabs’ hummus tastes better and costs half the price. He leads us through a narrow, half-hidden walkway into an empty lot covered with trash, and next to it is some kind of storage building with a fence. Even before we get near it, I can hear a dog barking, and a second later we see a giant, angry-looking Doberman. Yoaz says it’s a shoe warehouse, and once the Arabs who work there threatened a kid from his class who pissed on the fence and said they’d sic the dog on him. “We’re gonna have ourselves a BBQ tonight,” he says, and takes out a piece of salami he’d been keeping in his pocket. “Tonight we’re gonna teach them that a Jewish dog’s blood is not cheap.”
Yoaz has a simple plan. All I have to do is take the salami, hold it up to a gap in the fence, and call the dog over. When the dog smells the meat and comes closer, Yoaz will douse him with gas from the bottle and light it up.
“I don’t want to,” I tell him.
Yoav sighs. “What do you mean you don’t want to? Then what did we come all the way here for? Go on, take it!” He shoves the salami wrapped in paper into my hand.
“Look at him.” I point at the dog, who’s playing with a shoebox on the other side of the fence. “He’s just a poor dog.”
“A poor dog?” Yoaz snaps. “What’s so poor about him? You think he’s like Smadja? You think you can throw him a ball and he’ll fetch? If this fence wasn’t here he’d have ripped you to shreds by now.” I stand silently holding the salami, and Yoaz comes closer and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Come on, Nadav,” he says softly, “let’s get it over with.” Then he whispers, “Do it for Smadja.”
“I don’t want to burn him.”
“I don’t either. Believe me, I don’t. But if we don’t do it, if we don’t teach them a lesson, once and for all, it’ll never end. Smadja was only your first dog. Do you want them to run over the next one, too?” When I don’t answer, he goes on, “Come on, it’s on me. You don’t have to do anything. Just give him the salami. I’d do it myself, but I need both hands to pour the gas and light it.” I shake my head. “I don’t understand you,” Yoaz says, putting his face right up in mine. “I don’t understand. Do you have any idea what it’s like when your dog dies? Every night you’re going to dream about him. Every night he’s going to come to you in your dreams, run over, with tire marks on his belly, and he’s going to look at you with the saddest eyes and howl. And when he does, what then? Are you also going to shake your head like a little baby? Gimme that!” He grabs the salami. “Never mind, you spoiled brat. I’ll do it on my own.”
Yoaz twists the cap off the bottle and flicks it onto the ground. He unwraps the salami, holds it in his teeth, and walks over to the fence. He tries to call the dog, but with the salami in his mouth you can’t understand what he’s saying. About twenty feet away, the Arabs’ dog keeps playing with the shoebox, which is in shreds by now, and completely ignores Yoaz’s calls. After a minute, Yoaz comes back to me. “Nadav,” he says in the most pleading voice I’ve ever heard him use, “I can’t do it alone, I need you. Help me!” I try to say something but my words get mixed up, and when I start crying, Yoaz hugs me, and his hug smells like gasoline and meat. In the middle of the hug, Alex’s phone rings. Yoaz lets go, puts the lighter back in his pocket, pulls the phone out and looks at the screen. “It’s his kooky mom,” he hisses.
“That narc,” I say. “I bet he told her everything.”
Before we go home, we chuck the lighter and the bottle of gasoline in a dumpster. That way, if Alex’s mom calls our dad and tells him what we were doing, there won’t be any evidence. I feed the salami to the Arabs’ dog through the fence, and he chows down on it. It’s good salami. Mom always puts it in my sandwiches with mayonnaise and pickles. It would be a pity to throw that away.
Translated by Jessica Cohen
