Haunted, and Hunting
The first time I went shooting in America, I missed. At the time, it was the style for educated, privileged urbanites to try rural hobbies “ironically,” and my male friends wanted to go to a shooting range. The guys giggled as they upgraded to higher and higher caliber rifles and assault weapons and shot at paper targets, some with graphics: deer, muggers, Osama Bin Laden.
I chose a .22 (a small gun for a small girl) and fired one shot. The bullet didn’t hit the bullseye. It didn’t hit any of the circles around the bullseye. I returned my pistol. Fuck this macho fantasy, I thought. Small Jewish women who live in New York City don’t need to know.
But what if I had been born in Israel instead of New York? My parents, who met while working in Be’er Sheva in the seventies, talked about staying. I would have been required to serve in the army, to go through basic training. And I would have learned to shoot. Many Jewish women do. The narrator of the debut novel by Israeli poet Tehila Hakimi, Hunting in America (Penguin Books, $18.) Translated from Hebrew by Joanna Chen.) is one of these women. Her military experience, which she mentions only in passing, haunts this stark, unsettling novel.
We don’t know much about the narrator. The company she works for has transferred her from Israel to an unnamed town in the U.S., where she lives in a house decorated by someone else. At some point, she drives two and a half hours to the nearest Ikea to buy a few things, eats Ikea food, then realizes she left her shopping cart in the entrance to the store’s restaurant. “It was filled with bedding, a towel or two, and some kitchenware I thought I might need. I didn’t go looking for it. Instead I went out to the parking lot and drove home.” This is dissociation in sentence form, a woman who abandons her choices in a shopping cart in a big box store, without explanation.
I happen to like a refusal to explain. In Hunting in America, the depressing details keep coming. The narrator goes to work. She takes up hunting. She shoots deer. It snows. She shoots more deer. Even as the novel’s stakes get higher— there’s layoff drama in the office, a possible affair with her hunting partner David—Hakimi’s writing stays deadpan, withholding. There seem to be no real people in her America, just deer bleeding into the snow and the hunters who let them bleed. At some point the narrator wakes up “to the sound of screaming… At first I thought it was David or perhaps the wind had hurled something at one of the windows. When I asked him what happened, he said I’d been screaming.”
The narrator doesn’t know why she’s screaming. I have some guesses.
“It had been twenty years, maybe more,” she says the first time she goes shooting in America, “since I’d shot a gun. Until that moment I preferred to put behind me the fact that I’d once handled firearms, but suddenly it came back. It just slipped out, I barely noticed.”
The word “slipped,” which appears in chapter one, is a clue. Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, writes about how what we repress manifests in verbal slips and in “repetition compulsions”—the traumatized individual can’t help but reenact past traumas. What is the narrator reenacting? The second time she goes shooting in America, she learns that David and his friends have received an email from the local Fish and Wildlife Authority, “inviting them to help reduce the number of deer. The idea was to shoot to kill, but also to scare them off, to move them away from the most densely populated areas. ‘Like warning shots,’ I told David, who didn’t seem to get it and threw me a suspicious look.”
She’s talking about Israeli soldiers firing what they call warning shots to scare Palestinians, to move them, to control their population. She’s talking about what the army taught her when it taught her to shoot. The fourteenth time she goes hunting in America, she describes her hunting party as walking “at exactly the same pace, like a platoon of soldiers.” And in one of the novel’s only flashbacks to the narrator’s life in Israel, the cab driver taking her to the airport is on the phone with his son, trying to convince him not to drop out of the army. The driver says he too went through hell during his service and reserve duty, but “One day all this will be over…” Then he tells his son to call anytime, because he’s stuck in a taxi anyway.
The narrator flies all the way to America but she’s stuck, too. We never find out if she saw combat or killed anyone, but I don’t think we need to know. Even if, like many Israeli women, she spent her service behind a desk in an IDF branch office, the army and its dehumanizing logic are inside her. She knows how to kill, she knows people who have killed, and her own screams sound like someone else.
Rebecca Schiff is the author of the story collection The Bed Moved. She lives in Kingston, NY.
