Along the way, one of the old men, familiar already from the kibbutz, passes her as she trudges off on her outing, backpack slung over a shoulder, a scarf tied around her hair. He tells her, these are dangerous times to be so far from shelter.
She tells him she wants to stretch her legs and get some fresh air. He tells her right back that they have fresh air at the kibbutz, and, if she wants exercise, why not swim some laps in the pool?
Shira, unsure of why she’s explaining herself, tells him she is a hiker more than a swimmer. And also, he is clearly coming back from a walk himself.
“I am old,” he says. “If I die, it’s sad. If you die, it’s tragic.”
“I’ll take my chances,” she says. “If a missile will find me, a missile will find me. I’d rather get blown up in nature than hiding under the bed.”
He sniffles at that and takes on a wizened, salt-of-the-earth tone. “Brave talk always sounds sound,” he says, “but the logic doesn’t generally hold. You could also step into one of our nice fortified rooms at the sound of the sirens and not have a missile find you at all.”
“I understand,” she says.
“It is safer inside the gates than out. We worry over our guests.”
“All right,” she says. “Thanks.”
Shira plugs in her earbuds and puts on the old Israeli hip-hop of the 1990s, her preferred soundtrack, a fact over which she is endlessly teased. She will concede that it’s an acquired taste.
When she reaches that sad little forest, she chooses herself a lovely spot of ground, nestled between a pair of the taller trees. She takes out a water bottle, and, careful not to squish her sandwiches, she uses her backpack as a pillow, hoping to sleep for a bit. She thinks of a biblical Jacob, piling together stones. She cannot help it. Entertaining these allusions in the Holy Land, it’s a condition that infects them all. She could not not-think such things if she tried.
Making her way back, feeling renewed, Shira is hardly through the front gates when she sees the man from her walk standing by the kibbutz store. She throws up her arms, as if to present herself to him, still alive—do you see, I did not get myself killed. She is proud.
But he has lost his happy demeanor. Shira, as with everyone who grew up in that country, is familiar with the look on his face.
“It is the General,” he tells her, as soon as she approaches. “He’s finally passed.”
It shocks Shira to hear it. As much for the fact that the General was finally dead as that he was, until then, somehow still alive. Could it be that in all those years, she’d not already received that same news? Had he been with them the whole time?
She was going to say, a reflex, “I knew him personally.” But it is Israel, and such claims are taken for granted. She will say that, and this venerable frontiersman will tell her that he fought in a hundred wars at the General’s side. That they are brothers, or cousins, that he has given or received a kidney, that the two are childhood best friends.
She excuses herself and stumbles off from him, literally missing a step and righting herself on her way. She looks over her shoulder and, again, raises up those arms.
Is this what the world wants from her? Shira thinks. To buckle at the knees? To keen and wail?
If she does, it will be misread as grief for the General, for whom she does not mourn. She heads toward her cottage, fighting off what has already hit her, the wave and the crash, the disoriented tumbling, as Shira is awash again in Prisoner Z.
She is stronger than this, she tells herself. She is different from other people. Let everyone judge her—as those who know her often do—but she, she will not be broken by him any more than she’d already been.
She’d seen to it that Prisoner Z was brought back on the General’s orders, a traitor. What she had not seen, nor heard, was what happened to him when he’d arrived.
If the General had hung on all these years, what about the prisoner?
She had often prayed, actually prayed, that he was no longer living. For he’d never made it into the papers or surfaced on the nightly news. There was no talk in intelligence circles. There was no file that she could find, no name attached to him, no number. Her own inquiries had gone unanswered, until it was made clear she should not press anymore. And still she pressed, until it had put her on the other side of everyone’s good graces. Pushed until she felt the institution pushing back, pushing her out.
She walks toward her cottage, doing the math. Twelve years. God help him. He couldn’t be in limbo for so long.
And here, on the kibbutz, with the mapmaker in her heart, her diplomatic lover, who’d gotten himself trapped in Gaza for making an undiplomatic choice, she returns to her mantra for the one she’d betrayed.
Here are the things she prayed for in the weeks and months after she and the waiter zipped off in their Sea-Rider, leaving Prisoner Z sailing off toward his fate. She prayed for an accident early in the questioning. She prayed for the overzealous interrogator, and Prisoner Z’s broken neck. She hoped he’d been drowned in a bucket, or that his heart had given out from the stress. She wished upon wishing that Prisoner Z had attempted escape, tasting some dream of false freedom, never feeling the bullet to the back of the head.
2014, Lifta
Change. It fixes Ruthi with a mix of wonder and dread. She has taken her son’s advice—a first. She’d watered her plants and put on her comfortable shoes. She’d headed down into her neighborhood, not to shop or run errands, but, simply, to be.
The old city is what she misses, on her walk. Not the one of Turkish rampart and holy site, of Wailing Wall and golden dome. She means the old-new Jerusalem, the plain, dusty, wonderful hamlet of her childhood, where a person could live simply. Dignified and poor.
Everywhere she goes, she passes towering new buildings, and Ruthi knows when she happens on a gap and the vistas open up, she’ll see hilltop after hilltop covered with houses where once there were terraces, the thin-trunked forests of the valleys filled with villas and ribbons of newly paved road. All covering the places Ruthi and her friends used to hike when she was a girl. They’d go off hunting treasure that, on rare days, they’d actually find. Ancient coins and bits of pearled glass, picked like seashells from between the flagstones of Roman byways. Often, they’d tumble down the path into Lifta, and, if no boys were lurking, they’d jump into the spring in their underwear and then dry out in the sun. They’d play hide-and-seek in the abandoned houses in that husk of an Arab village at the city’s mouth.
Why not? is what Ruthi thinks. How long has it been?
Ruthi turns herself toward the entrance to the city. She walks slowly, twisting down toward the trampiada where the soldiers point fingers to the ground hitchhiking rides, and the Hassidim do the same, each in the uniform of his tribe.