Shira nods and points Z to a chair that, like a magic trick, has suddenly appeared. He sits atop it, wondering what would happen if he dared move, how far he would get. He tries to picture what it would look like to flip that chair and dive over the side with a splash.
“Even if I give you Paris,” the waitress says, “even if making the waiter that first time was a good catch. What about missing everything else that got you to here?”
“Unfortunately, with espionage, there’s a lot of gut feel to it,” he says. “It is, of all things, an inexact science.”
The waitress seems to accept that, and Z, though he’d like to talk more about it, says, “And the restaurant on the beach?”
“Oh, it’s there. It’s honestly excellent. A gem.”
“And Prince Charles?”
“He really favors it. It’s true.”
Z looks at the men, who are looking at him, and he looks to the waitress, who has slipped behind him, and then out at the water behind her. “The Mediterranean,” he says, “it’s beautiful even like this.”
“This part,” she says, “is called the Tyrrhenian Sea.”
Z takes a long, deep breath of that open-water air and turns to face forward. He looks up at the useless sliver of moon lighting nothing, and out into the night, which one would generally call pitch-black. But, of course, that kind of gloom is nothing. Nothing compared to what it’s like as his beloved lowers that sack, nothing like the darkness as the hood comes down.
2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)
In the mornings Shira walks the kibbutz. Out past the cafeteria and the infirmary and the laundry, to the greenhouses where the Thai workers toil. She strolls by a graveyard for giant tires and old tractor parts and hurries past the plastics factory spitting out the packing foam and bubble wrap that keep this farming collective afloat.
Circling back toward her rented cottage, she admires a sturdy desert rosebush climbing the side of a sun-dulled house. Across from it is the kindergarten, and Shira lingers outside, enamored by the perfect incompatible-compatibility of the place. It’s a reinforced, bunker-like, cement building, ready to take a direct hit. Its doors are wide open, and inside a pair of teachers lead the little ones through a song.
Many of the families with relatives up north have gone north. She knows that these children who remain belong to the stalwarts and stubborn, to those whose jobs—skilled and unskilled—demand that they stay, and also to those with no other options from which to choose.
Shira also knows that one or two or three of these beautiful moppets belong to parents who are simply and amazingly unaware. Parents who suffer from an advanced sort of Israeliness. No matter the seriousness of a threat, they are constitutionally incapable of processing menace. Their lives, every day, continue as if nothing out of the ordinary is going on.
Her thought is interrupted by the ring of a bicycle’s bell. Shira is blocking the path.
She steps aside, and no sooner has the young woman riding gone past than she brakes and hops from her seat. A trailer, with what looks like hot pepper plants, is hitched to the bicycle’s frame.
Shira already knows what’s coming. It is the thanks she will be offered for coming down to stay, when so many from there had understandably left.
“We appreciate your coming to support us,” the woman says.
Then she rolls a pedal to the top of its arc, ready to push on.
“How about you? You’re still here.” Shira speaks with a kind of urgency, trying to trap this woman in conversation. She can hear a tone of great loneliness in her own voice.
“This is my home. I can’t very well be showing support for myself.”
“Still, it seems brave to me, your cruising around with those peppers—are they peppers?—with all this going on.” Shira makes a motion meant to include the missiles whistling, and the Israeli boys who are missing, and the war that is brewing, the tanks parked in the fields along the border. But, as she signals the overall atmosphere with a wave of her hand, embraced in it are the children at play, and the house with the roses, and this striking and welcoming girl on a bicycle conversing with her in the dry morning breeze.
The girl is all warmth, and infers what she likes, and answers the more direct of the questions posed. “Chilcostles,” she says, of her chilies. “They’re not native to here, but they grow very well.”
The girl pulls at the arms of her T-shirt, making more room for her muscles. She dials the pedal back around, a full rotation, preparing her getaway once more.
She is, Shira thinks, in a great rush to raise those peppers up.
“It doesn’t scare you, what’s coming?” Shira says. “Not an invasion? Not the rockets that already fall?”
“What’s to be scared of? It’s a gorgeous day. We have the best army in the world, right here to protect us. And there is also God’s will.”
“It’s a lot to ask of the army . . . and of God. You could ask a lot less from farther away.”
“If this kibbutz wasn’t here, there’d be another barrier, closer in, and someone else’s home would be on the line. It’s a duty and a privilege to live here—”
“At the front?” Shira says.
“In paradise.”
The girl then heaves her weight down on the pedal and rides off.
Shira watches her go and knows she’d forgotten to add this type of person to her list. The vibrant young altruist happily putting her body in harm’s way.
She thinks about this as she walks in the direction the girl and her bicycle have gone. The path leads her out to the western edge of the kibbutz, and Shira follows it right up to the security fence. She stares through to its twin, across a dirt track, and beyond that into Gaza.
Between those fences—between her and her mapmaker—an Israeli army jeep rumbles along, driving the perimeter road. Caged in as they are, the soldiers look to Shira more like prisoners than border patrol.
The boys in the back wave as they tick by, or more, Shira thinks, they lift up, in a friendly manner, the guns in their grips. Shira waves in return, wishing she could tell them what a fine job they’re doing. She wishes too that she could whisper a secret in their ears. She wants to tell them they’re missing the point.
They tool around, tough, vigilant, keeping careful eye on both sides of their dusty route.
And underneath them, Shira knows, run the tunnels.
2002, Black Site (Negev Desert)
It was after his capture, and transport. After being shipped across the Mediterranean, like the human cargo that he was. After days chained standing until he’d have given his life just to sit, and then days forced into seated positions that made him yearn for the chains. After being interrogated until he took credit for what he’d done, and further interrogated until he took credit for things of which he’d never dreamed, Prisoner Z was allowed to sleep for a stretch. Then he was moved once more.