She walks east that day, hitching a ride for most of the way, wanting to wander around the Shokeda Forest. The summer heat is as brutal as ever, and she already knew, on her way over, that she’d missed the flowing fields of red anemone by months.
It’s a nice ramble anyway. There are some handsome pines growing in the park and a lot of eucalyptus and an ancient-looking tamarisk here and there.
In the past, she’d driven down south at the far edge of winter, when everything in these parts blooms. Shira had once been lucky enough to be in the Negev after a good rain. She’d caught the desert in full blossom. All those flowers hiding in the sand.
When the sirens sound, she decides they are coming from a distance. It is only as they scream on that Shira understands the noise isn’t reaching her from one of the big cities but coming from the kibbutzim and moshavim nearby.
She understands she and those trees are quite possibly under fire. She lies down where she stands, and she puts her trusty daypack over her head for a bit of useless protection. She presses her face into the ground.
She can feel it, the pressure, a salvo striking close, those drunken, screwy missiles headed her way.
It would serve her right, this fate. She’s so far off course from what she’d imagined her life would be, it would make sense for her to be killed by a random missile meant to miss everything and everyone and bury itself in the dirt.
It is incredibly forbidding, the strike and boom. Shira wonders if she will survive the assault as she waits for the last siren’s wail. She stays motionless, the bag atop her head, the earth gritty in her teeth. Even with her mouth closed it makes its way in. So great is the strength of impact.
How often had they whispered on the phone, talking deep into the night, she, with her head buried under the pillows, feeling somehow swaddled, while wishing the mapmaker were actually at her side.
She’d say things like “Could you come by boat?” “Can you paraglide?” “What about a scuba tank?” “What if I walked across the Sinai Desert?” “What if I stole a helicopter, like they do in the movies?” “What if I get the president of the United States involved?”
To this game, the mapmaker never played along. If there were a way to get out, he’d have found it.
Yet, despite all the challenges, their dual and exhausting obsessions with their peoples’ plights, and the endless pressures the distance put upon them, their devotion only grew. “And why shouldn’t it?” she’d ask him. Of all the outrageous things in which anyone had ever believed, the undoable dreams of oceans crossed, and mountains climbed, of men put on the moon, why couldn’t the triumph of their relationship be one?
“Yes,” he’d say. “They’ve cloned sheep.”
“And transplanted a human face!”
“I saw a dog on the Internet that sounds like it’s saying ‘Hello.’ It’s very clear.”
“Miracles abound,” she’d say. “Why can’t us together be another?”
Then they’d tick through the great and legendary loves, separated by history and reunited against all odds.
For so long it had gone on like that, the calls always closing with the mapmaker mum and Shira asking, “If you can’t get out, and I can’t get in, what do we do?”
There was no answer to give. There was no more love to be claimed than the great love they shared, no more missing to privately suffer or, between them, to lament. Then one day, he called early while she sat reading at a café in Florentin. Before she’d uttered “Hello,” he’d said to her, “I would die to see you. I would.”
“That’s romantic,” was her response.
“I would literally die to see you, is what I mean.”
“I would too,” she’d said.
“Would you?”
“I would,” she’d said.
“I couldn’t handle that.”
“It’s my right, as it is yours. If you respect me.”
“Then ask me your question,” he’d said. “The same one as always.”
She did. She knew just which question he meant.
“If you can’t get out and I can’t get in?”
And he’d answered.
“We meet in the middle,” is what the mapmaker said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means the tunnels. It means meeting underground. A rendezvous.”
Shira stepped outside. She’d smiled and tossed back her hair, making the face she would make if he were sitting across from her, gazing.
“Okay,” she says. “Sure.”
“I’m serious.”
“For one, that’s insane. And for two, the tunnels are closed. The tunnels to Egypt are done.”
“I said, ‘meet in the middle.’ Egypt is not in between us. Egypt is on the other side.”
“So what’s the middle?”
“There are other tunnels.”
“To where?”
“Tunnels between Gaza and Israel. Military tunnels. Tunnels that run from your door to mine.”
Shira remembered how she’d looked around then. She’d made a full spin, to see who might be near.
“Are you serious?”
“You prepare for the next war, as do we. You must know they are there.”
“I don’t think we do.”
“Let’s meet.”
“In a tunnel?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t I have to tell someone? They need to know.”
“They do not need to know.”
“People could die. They will die.”
“Honestly, if something happens, whose people will be the ones dying? You think our tunnels will turn the tide? That they’ll open like a giant mouth and swallow Israel whole? What they’ll do is make martyrs to inspire new martyrs. Do you think Jerusalem will fall from a hole in the dirt?”
“What if they grab another soldier? What if they make it to the nearest kibbutz?”
“I didn’t ask you about what happens in war. I’m asking if you want to have dinner with me.”
“In a tunnel? Underground?”
“You don’t have to make it sound so dreary.”
“What other way is there?”
“Candlelight. A white tablecloth. For you, a bottle of wine.”
“That does sound better.”
“Yes, it does. Just picture it, the two of us in no-man’s-land, on the blurry line beneath neither country. Me and you, eating together between worlds. A dinner at the center of the earth.”
2014, Gaza Border (Palestinian side)
The mapmaker sits in an office that is not an office, but the living room of this very hulking man’s house. His host, bald-headed and jowled, looks to be strong as an ox, broad in the chest, big in the belly, with a forearm the size of the mapmaker’s leg.
His host keeps excusing himself to step out into the alley, where he has coals heating up on the grill. When he comes back, he barely sits down before he’s off to the kitchen. Each time he goes he says, “Marinating,” in place of “Excuse me,” and then returns licking the same finger, which he must be using to test the taste of something good.