It was quiet in that new cell. He’d sat there, hands tied behind his back, suffocating blind in his sack. He’d tried to control his breathing, deafening as it had become. He’d struggled to pick up any ambient sound.
Time went by. Great swaths of it, he was fairly sure. He’d decided that, whatever came next, he must have, at least, reached some sort of end. This is when he’d meet his lawyer. This is when he’d get to call his worrying mom. He’d face his public shame. Then the clock would start on the gigantical debt to society that they’d deem he owed.
When nothing changed. When he thought he might die of thirst, or starve to death. When he thought, maybe it was not a cell he was in, and that—an alternate, cruel judgment already passed—he’d been buried alive, that’s when he heard a door open. That’s when the guard first came in.
This memory, Prisoner Z accepts, may be fully colored by his disordered retrospect, but he believes deeply that he immediately knew. Just from the sound of those heavy shoes on the floor, from the way that cell gave off its first echo, from the pace of the man, and the lag between entrance and action. There was something about it that already contained all the hopelessness of Prisoner Z’s plight.
He had understood that what he’d imagined as some sort of finish was only the beginning, the unfading start.
He could feel the guard standing there. He could feel it exactly as if the guard were standing over him right now. There was no talking. No touching. Not even a good, loving kick to the ribs.
Then, like that, came a sudden, simple shift in realities. The falconer reaching down and pulling the hood from his hawk’s head.
Prisoner Z cannot shake that agonizing image. That first moment in the cell when he shifted from one darkness to the next.
2014, Gaza Border (Israeli side)
Oh, how she misses him on the other side of that fence. Somewhere there, trapped among the two million, is her mapmaker, the unanticipated love of her life. If Shira knew when she first saw him what that waiting would be like, she’d not have let herself dream of seeing him again.
Then she laughs. Fuck that first sighting, Shira thinks, remembering instead their first fucking. And she knows that it’s not true.
She still can’t believe it. Adventure had always been her thing, but spontaneity, that was a different animal. Yet there she’d found herself, wooed and wooing, wrestling with her sexy adversary in a hotel bed.
They’d taken a shower after and ended up having sex again, steaming up the bathroom until they thought the wallpaper might come loose. She’d sent him back to the bedroom and came out to meet him, a towel wrapped around her hair. Her mapmaker was atop the sheets, grinning ear to ear.
“This is why those who don’t want peace don’t want it,” he’d said, in his perfect Hebrew. “The minute we get to know each other—”
He didn’t get to finish as Shira lay down on top of him and bit the end of his nose.
“Yes,” she said. “Let us loose and the mutually assured ravishing begins.”
She tossed the towel to the floor and rested her head on his chest, her wet curls cold, she could tell, from his shiver. He closed his arms around her, and together they stared up at the complicated glass fixture on their ceiling, fit for a museum. He had not skimped on their rendezvous room.
Cuddled up like that, the mapmaker stated, with a getting-to-know-you tone, “I’m assuming,” he said, “that you are a spy.”
She reached up to grab, and then hit him with, a pillow.
“You waited until after the sex to say that?”
“Just because I believe in peace with the Jews doesn’t mean I’m a total fool.”
“Is it because I’m with the Israeli delegation and sleep with the enemy? You’re aware that you’re sleeping with me too?”
“That’s not an answer,” the mapmaker said, taking her hand and giving an affectionate squeeze.
“You didn’t ask a question. It was phrased as an accusation.”
“I’m sure you can repeat it verbatim. I bet you could also recite the license plates of every car parked outside.”
“The trick is finding the cars that stand out,” she said. “It’s too much to keep straight if you don’t narrow them down.”
“Is that an admission?”
“That’s me being silly instead of upset. And, spy or no, I don’t believe you’re asking because of my keen eye.”
“How about because you’re on the National Security team, advising? Every one of you in that group has the same hazy background in foreign service. You’re the most suspect lot at the table.”
“And how did you start drawing up borders and negotiating boundaries? Did you get a degree from mapmaker school? Have you formed a lot of countries before this?” She presses her toes against his. “Everyone at these negotiations has a past.”
“I am, and always have been, an advocate for my people. To get anything done for them invariably means first doing something for yours. That’s how I earned my seat. I’m good at wrangling Jews.”
“Why did you want it—that seat?”
“Because of my deep belief that if the Palestinians are talented enough to have built your country, we can probably manage to build our own.”
“Trust me, I want to see you do it. It’s high time we had our country to ourselves.”
“And so it begins!” he said, and started to fake tussle, which Shira was more than happy to do.
They rolled about and settled, with her straddling him, her hands pressing his shoulders to the mattress.
“So?” he said. “Are you a spy?”
“Do you think if I were that I’d be here, having sex with you? Do you honestly think I’d do that as part of my job?”
The mapmaker didn’t say a word.
“Be honest,” she said. “Or don’t. Feel free to lie, because there is a right answer to give.”
He stayed silent some more. It seemed a good way to be.
“I’m about to get very insulted,” Shira said. “You really can’t guess?”
She took a good grab of his carpet of chest hair and gave it an angry pull.
The mapmaker didn’t say “That hurt,” as they both knew it was meant to. He just gave a little yowl.
“I’d never,” she said, full of a fury, the size of which he couldn’t have begun to understand. Angry, and already loving him madly, she’d dropped back to his side and hugged her mapmaker tight. “Over my dead body,” she’d said, for special emphasis. “That’s not who I am.” But she knew, as much as what she said came from the heart and felt to her as true as any truth she’d ever shared, that the woman she’d become now, she’d become solely because of what she’d done then.
If retribution was needed, on Prisoner Z’s part, he finally had it. For Shira knew she was at the start of something she’d never abandon, and she knew too the impossible challenges that she and the mapmaker would face. And if anyone was to blame for this unexpected and calamitous dose of good fortune, it was undoubtedly Prisoner Z. He had set her off on a course as inevitable as the one on which she’d sent him.