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  “I hope you don’t think I’m crazy,” I said. “I just …liked you.”

  “Have you changed your mind?” he asked, worried.

  “No.”

  “Maybe you should call your base, tell them at least that you’re sick.”

  “No, I can’t, they’d never believe me. I’d have to bring a letter from a doctor saying I was in a coma or something before they’d believe me.”

  “You’re going to get into huge trouble.”

  “It can’t get any worse.”

  “It can always get worse. What’s going on there?”

  “Oh, I’m not getting on too well. I’ll tell you about it another time.”

  “More mysteries. Another time as in …?”

  “As in, after …”

  “After you know me better?”

  “Yes.” I rose from the table, opened the door that led to his room. Daniel’s bed took up nearly all the available space in the converted balcony. The upper third of the walls consisted of sliding glass panels; the sky was visible through the glass and I was reminded of a medieval triptych, except that here the scene changed all the time. Now, against a black background tinged with the yellow glow of city lights, a single white star or satellite shone like a jeweled belly button. The only decoration in the room was a movie poster for Stranger Than Paradise.

  “I loved that movie!” I said. “I saw it a million times. You’re the only person I know who also saw it.”

  Daniel made a noncommittal sound, something between “mmm” and “huh.”

  “‘I am the winner,’” I said, in English with a Hungarian accent.

  “‘He is my main man,’” Daniel said, also in English.

  “‘Poor guy, can you imagine working in a factory?’”

  I pulled off my uniform, then my underwear, and lay down on the bed.

  Odelia always looked neat and delicate. She was wearing a beige knee-length skirt and she’d tied her hair back with an elastic band. She was the only one who came to these demonstrations wearing a skirt; it was a disguise. “The soldiers have a different attitude if they think you’re religious,” she would tell people.

  There were no traffic jams on the highway because it was the weekend. “What’s happening today, do you know?” I asked her.

  “I’m not sure. I heard three towns were put under curfew, Mejwan and the two towns next to it.”

  “Three towns? Last I heard it was two.”

  “I heard three. Some people went down there to stay the night, in case they don’t let us in. Better than nothing.”

  “I forgot to bring an onion.”

  “The organizers are bringing a whole crate. Don’t worry!” She smiled at me. She was a calm person, though her permanently wrinkled brow made her look like a high school student trying to work out a complicated math problem she’d been assigned for homework.

  “How are you, Dana?” she asked.

  “I’m okay. I’m fine.”

  “How’s your father?” When my father comes to visit, he stays with Odelia, in her guest room.

  “Happy. He sends his regards, by the way. How are things with you?”

  “Another lay-off at work, someone we really liked. We’ve been depressed about it all week. I think I’m next …How’s Vronsky?”

  “Same as always.” Odelia was convinced that my friend Vronsky, a bone specialist with whom I had dinner every Wednesday, was in love with me and that we should get married.

  We drove for an hour. As we approached the capital, the landscape widened into mute green hills and incongruous sprinklings of small, distant neighborhoods, sterile and symmetrical, which had sprouted on the hills in recent years. We entered the city and headed for Liberty Bell Park, our usual meeting place. Odelia tried to remember the way and her wrinkled brow became slightly more furrowed than usual. The streets were full of Hassidic families, the men brisk and determined in their long black coats, the women strolling leisurely amidst broods of children. I tried to repress my hostility toward them; I knew it was wrong and irrational. Our problems were not their fault.

  After a few uncertain turns and a phone call to a friend who lived nearby, we found the park. We were a little late, but these activities always started later than planned. Odelia parked her car on the street and we walked to the graveled parking lot. Five sturdy-looking tour buses stood side by side at one end of the parking lot and two minimalist army Jeeps were stationed on the other. Between them, a large crowd of demonstrators mulled around, waiting for instructions: they all looked scrubbed and relaxed, as if they’d just stepped out of a shower and discovered that while they were soaping themselves the conflict had nearly resolved itself, and only needed this one last push.

  The soldiers had deserted their Jeeps and were talking to the organizers, trying to persuade them to cancel the demonstration: the towns were under curfew, the entire area was sealed off. It was the usual ritual, the army on one side, the demonstrators on the other. No one expected a new and startling outcome:—Yes, you’re right, we’ll cancel the demonstration, we’ll change our plans and go home, because you’ve asked us to.—Yes, go ahead, we’ll lift the curfew and let you through, good for you that you’re making these efforts. We boarded the buses and set off.

  The army Jeeps followed the buses as we drove through the city. We didn’t take the main road to Mejwan; we knew it would be blocked. The hired bus drivers were instructed to drive instead to a barren field on the outskirts of Ein Mazra’a, the town adjacent to Mejwan. Everyone got off the buses and pulled out signs from the baggage compartment, which slid open at the side of the bus like the belly of a whale. Arise, go to Nineveh.

  We walked single file along a path that cut through the field; trudging with our signs through this landscape that we loved, pale beige stones, pale beige earth, a thousand shades of pale beige and a thousand patterns of stone and earth, motionless under the pale sky. Up ahead, the houses of Ein Mazra’a, with their tiny black square windows, looked like dice scattered on the earth, and the pink-flowered thorns that grew close to the ground seemed to be breathing softly around our ankles.

  On one side of the path a solitary donkey strolled amidst a car graveyard: twenty or thirty cars and trucks and vans, all of them white except for one red station wagon and the remains of a yellow school bus. They were in varying stages of disuse and ruin; some were nothing but rusty metal shells crushed into the ground, while others were perhaps still salvageable, missing only doors or wheels.

  I stopped to take a photograph of the donkey wandering among the car carcasses, and another one of the remains of a house, now a heap of broken blocks and cement fragments with wires coming out of them like twisted insect legs. The house must have been demolished some time ago, since nothing remained apart from the broken blocks and shapeless cement fragments with the wires poking out. Golden grass covered the spaces between the house fragments and even the fragments themselves. In the distance we heard the explosion of a stun grenade. Tear gas was sure to follow.

  I had never so much as kissed a man before Daniel. The boys I knew in high school didn’t appeal to me, or maybe I was too preoccupied with staying afloat to notice them. Shortly after my mother died my father moved to Belgium to marry his childhood sweetheart, taking with him only a single suitcase of clothing and his chess set, leaving me the rest. He asked me to come along, but I refused: what would I do in Belgium? I didn’t even speak the language—what did they speak in Belgium, anyhow? French? German? I persuaded him to go without me. He didn’t need much persuasion; he trusted me. Scandalized neighbors and relatives and family friends competed with each other to feed me and worry about me, and I drifted from sofa bed to sofa bed. I enjoyed the endless attention and eased myself into the role of orphaned and deserted daughter, at first with a slight sense of disorientation and then with total submission to hedonism.

  But my life was disorganized, and I never knew where I’d be from one day to the next. It is possible that boys who might have been inte
rested in me gave up and went after girls who were easier to locate. My friends and I often planned overnight hikes, and on the last summer before our induction almost everyone paired up. I’d hear soft sounds of pleasure coming from the sleeping bags next to me and sometimes I watched the swaying hills and bumps formed by my friends’ movements; it all looked very charming, but I wasn’t envious. Now and then a boy tentatively slid an arm around my shoulder and I tried not to hurt his feelings as I gently moved away. I told him I was too confused to date; the real reason was that he was too bony or too confident or too talkative. And so I was still a virgin when I entered the army, one of only four in our barracks. I was well informed about sex, though, because the more experienced girls in high school were very forthcoming with details and advice, and in the army a few conscripts gave some memorable demonstrations of various erotic options.

  I didn’t tell Daniel I was a virgin, but he guessed at once. I still don’t know how he guessed, and neither did he. “I just had a feeling,” he said later. Maybe the look on my face gave me away: I was self-conscious but also defiant, and I probably looked pleased with myself, as though I’d just won a prize for public speaking or for coming in first in the sixty-meter dash.

  “Is this your first time?” Daniel said, standing in the doorway and looking at me lying there on the bed, waiting for him.

  “Sort of,” I said.

  He laughed. “Sort of?”

  “I know a lot,” I said proudly.

  “That’s a relief,” he teased. He was very amused.

  “What about you, do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Fine time to ask!”

  “Well?”

  “I’m between girlfriends at the moment.”

  “Do you like me?”

  “What a question. You’re very strange, Dana. It is Dana, isn’t it? Here, get under the blankets.” He joined me fully clothed on the bed and covered us with the sheet and bedspread. He was careful not to touch me.

  “My mother never let me get into bed with my clothes on,” I said, stupidly.

  “That was a rule in our house too, but we ignored it.”

  “No one ignored my mother. She wasn’t the sort of person you could ignore.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She died in a car accident—she got stuck in a traffic jam and a truck behind her was speeding and couldn’t stop fast enough. He smashed into her car. My father’s in Belgium. I’ve been living with neighbors and relatives for the past five years—that’s why I don’t really have a permanent home. I grew up in the south, in the desert, but we moved when I was twelve, two years before my mother died, for my father’s work. And I hate my sergeant, but not as much as she hates me. That’s the story of my life, so far. Not very mysterious, as you see.”

  “What’s going on now? Why me?”

  “I don’t know. I liked the way you sang Seer, go flee. Your voice is like a blanket—a pale blue cotton blanket with bright red diamonds. I guess I love you.”

  “Love at first sight?”

  “Not really. I had the whole evening to look at you.”

  He laughed so hard he began to cough, and he had to sit up.

  Finally he calmed down. “Are you always this impulsive?”

  “I’m not impulsive. But you know, there are only three other virgins in my barracks, one because she’s religious and two because they’re terrified of their fathers. So, don’t you think it’s about time?”

  “You’re just lucky. You’re very lucky, because I could be a total jerk. A total jerk who didn’t have any feelings for you at all.”

  “No, I can tell you aren’t a jerk. And I can tell you like me, too.”

  “You can’t really tell these things, Dana. Trust me.”

  “I can. Maybe some people can’t but I can.”

  “You can’t assume you know a person just because you like his voice and you have some chance association with it.”

  “It’s not a chance association. Voices have colors and shapes for me, and textures. Not always, but a lot of the time. I used to think everyone was like that, but now I know I’m just weird.”

  “How about we just talk for now?”

  “Well, all right. But can’t we at least kiss? I want to try at least one new thing.”

  “Surely you’ve kissed before?”

  “Not really.”

  “God help us.”

  I fell behind because I was taking photographs, and I was one of the last to enter Ein Mazra’a, an orderly town with green trees and small apartment buildings, many of them unfinished, surrounded by scaffolding or simply left as they were, dark compartments gaping at the street from cement shells. The army ordered us to turn back. Military vehicles zoomed past us, their sirens howling through the streets. That’s what the army did, it created crises before any existed; it created a military emergency out of the void, the way God created the heavens and the earth.

  The organizers dropped onions on the ground, smashed them open with their shoes, and handed out the pieces, in anticipation of tear gas: onions helped a little if you held them to your nose. We slid the shiny white crescents into our pockets. Then the organizers instructed us to sit on the ground while they negotiated with the army. We placed our hopeful signs against the wall, where they acquired a life of their own, like sentries from toyland.

  At first the streets were empty because of the curfew, though we saw Palestinians watching us from their balconies, women and children mostly, women and teenage girls, watching from their balconies and roofs, happy to see us but still unsure, waiting for events to unfold. Then all at once the men began streaming out of the houses and their children followed them. The women stayed indoors for the most part, or stood in doorways, but the men and children came out: boys of all ages and very young girls wearing pretty dresses: purple velvet or bright cotton prints. The men and boys had short trimmed hair and tanned arms, and wore light-colored jeans or white cotton slacks with polo shirts that were open at the collar, eight or nine buttons running down from the collar, the small lapels folded to the sides. The shirts were striped or else solid colors with American cartoon figures and meaningless messages in English. All their clothes were carefully laundered and ironed; I’d never seen a Palestinian in grimy or stained clothing, unless they were working and wearing their work overalls.

  Everyone was chatting and laughing, the children and the men. They greeted us happily and took the signs from our hands and waved them in the air. The children posed for me, smiling broadly into the camera. Their smiles made me dizzy, as if I were walking on a narrow, tilting ledge, or in space. So easy, to get along. And instead this endless fighting, hundreds upon hundreds of dead and mutilated bodies, year after year.

  Finally the army allowed us to proceed a little further in the direction of Mejwan. Three months ago a peace worker we all knew, Idris, had run out of his house in Mejwan to look for his child. He was shot first in the leg from a distance and then at close range in the back by a lone red-haired soldier. I wanted to take a few photos of Idris and his family, and I hoped we’d be allowed into Mejwan. He was paralyzed now from the waist down.

  We walked with the Palestinians. Then another barricade was set up, and this time the army was not going to move. We stood on one side, they stood on the other. A soldier and a Palestinian man got into an argument. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, only a few isolated words: no right, stop, move back, freedom. The man’s rage grew, his frustration grew, and he kicked the soldier with his soft, dusty shoe, a sad black shoe, and the soldier pushed him with the butt of his rifle so that he fell backward. A child, possibly his son, picked up a stone and threw it at the soldier. A soldier who a few days earlier may have been someone I had photographed on the beach, stretched out on a towel, asleep, and whose trembling lips may have filled me with pity.

  Panic and disorder tend to break out without warning, and the first moment is always terrifying, because we react instinctively with fear when we see or hear a large cr
owd running. Everyone was trying to escape the tear gas. Across the street a man carrying a young woman in his arms was looking frantically for a car: the woman was having some sort of seizure. I took a photo of the two of them, even though I couldn’t see very well because my eyes were burning. I needed to find shelter as well. I was standing near a half-built warehouse, and I saw that people were running up a wooden ramp that led to the upper story of the building. I ran up the ramp with them, hoping it wasn’t a mistake, hoping it wouldn’t be worse up there: what if we were trapped inside with the tear gas? Luckily, there were two open sides on the upper story, one facing the sidewalk and the other facing the army barricade. There were also two window openings in back. Every few seconds I took a break from taking photographs to hold an onion crescent to my nose; it seemed to help. A boy in his mother’s arms was shrieking with terror. He wore shorts covered with tiny yellow and red and navy blue hearts. His small hand lay on his mother’s black hair, which fell in waves against her white blouse. The walls were made of rough cement blocks, and here too there were bits of wire coming out of the cement; a strand of the mother’s hair was caught on one of them.

  A stun grenade exploded and there was more crying, not only the boy now but also two other children, a girl of about seven and her older sister. I huddled with them in the corner. I knew the stun grenades weren’t real grenades, but the sound was frightening all the same and it made you cower. The Palestinians were more afraid than I was, because they weren’t entirely certain the army would hold back even if we were there, and they feared for their lives.

  From below a soldier began to shout. He pointed his weapon at us and ordered us to come down. I saw the soldier’s face. He was young and he was the sort who didn’t want to be there, I could tell. Some soldiers were keen, they liked what they were doing and believed in it. Others wanted to be with their girlfriend on the beach, or surfing with a friend.