The Crack in the Mirror

19 January 2020 · Tel Aviv

Alex Ben-Gurion, twenty-one, walked down Bograshov Street as if the ground itself were unrolling to meet him after years of standing to attention. Six weeks had passed since he left the Golani Brigade behind, and his body still remembered the exact weight of the vest and the cold of a northern dawn. Now, without uniform and without orders, he carried his new freedom with the curiosity of someone who doesn't yet know how much it weighs: light, and just as dangerous.

The January air was clear. Between the buildings the sea flashed a wild blue, glittering in the winter sun. The wind carried the smell of a bakery and a little falafel, mixed with the faint scent of old rain – the kind that lingers after a stormy night. He stopped at the twenty-four-hour bourekas counter and watched the baker pull out a scorching tray and set it down as if it were molten gold. Potato bourekas, as a sandwich, with egg, pickles and tahini. A real delicacy.

Beside him stood Amit and Ofir, his friends from the Hapoel terrace. Ofir, as usual, was clutching a bottle of beer.

"So, have you heard what the FA has in store for us?" Alex asked, and his smile pricked the seriousness in the air. It was half a smile – the smile of someone who would rather laugh than explain, again and again, what really happened in the stands. The stadium ban ended with tonight's game, but the songs, the flares and the small incidents logged in the match observers' reports might still bring new punishments.

"Every punishment I take with love," said Ofir, tugging at his shirt. "Three wins in a row, bro. Three! Tonight makes four. Let them send us to play in Eilat, I'll be there."

And soon, in February, the game at Teddy. Beitar Jerusalem – the club whose terrace had become a symbol of the far right in Israeli politics. Hapoel against Beitar had always been more than football. It was the Israeli struggle itself, in ninety minutes.

Alex paid, wrapped the bourekas in paper that soaked through with warm oil, and called to his friends: "Right, five o'clock at mine. Omer's picking us up from there for Netanya." Tonight, Ra'anana. He carried on towards the sea, a paper bag in one hand, the other jammed in his pocket as if it were holding a secret.

He took out his phone, photographed the keys to the new flat he had rented, placed a small bag of weed beside them, and sent it to Natasha, his sister: "Free at last." And a moment later: "No commanders, no five a.m. wake-ups, no patrols on the Lebanese border. Time to live."

The buzz of the phone cut through his thoughts. Neta's name appeared on the screen.

Three months since she had said she couldn't love someone who might disappear on her in uniform. Three months since she left, leaving a thunderous silence behind her. He could still see her on the balcony, her curls refusing to stay in a hair tie, rolling a thin cigarette and licking the edge of the paper with a surgeon's concentration. And still, on nights when wine mixed with loneliness, she called.

"Don't answer," he whispered to himself, but his body moved before his mind did.

"Alex, I made a mistake." Her voice broke between wine and tears. "Can we talk?"

"Enough, Neta."

He hung up. The same call, the same scene, repeating ever since she left. He had chosen freedom and stuck to his decision, even while his heart whispered an a cappella of longing in his ear. He stood there a moment longer, his eyes fixed on the waves peeking between the buildings of HaYarkon Street. His love for her had been the first kind, the kind that rewrites your DNA, and losing it had left a crack in him he didn't know how to mend. In its place something harder had grown – the character of someone who would rather fight for his own truth, even if it meant being alone.

To be free is, sometimes, also to be lonely.

Gaza · The same day

In the Shati camp in Gaza City, a thin blade of light cut through the torn curtain and woke Mehran al-Ghazi. Fifteen, skinny, with an exceptional mathematical mind and curious eyes that were always looking for new skies. A little introverted, a little unsure of himself.

Voices drifted from the main room: his father, Ahmed, humming to himself as he arranged chairs around the study table, and his mother, Fatma, laughing as she boiled water for tea. His two little sisters, Jana and Reem, were squabbling over something in the corner. The home was a three-room flat on a dark floor, its walls long bruised, but the atmosphere inside was warmer than any stone. For a refugee camp, the al-Ghazi family lived well. Despite the siege, the poverty and the pressure, the family found a way to breathe – to be happy, to argue, to dream.

This was one of the best times of Mehran's life. The relative calm with Israel let the city grow a little, and new stalls and small businesses kept opening in the neighbourhoods, like corn kernels popping in the heat.

"Mehran, habibi, help your father with the algebra," Fatma called, and her voice had a musical quality that was enough to comfort neighbours. Then she added, in a whisper full of light: "And don't forget, it's match day today, ya habibi."

She was the only one who knew his secret. At night, behind a closed door, Mehran followed Hapoel Tel Aviv – a club he had learned to love through pirate streams and secret Arabic forums, where Palestinians talked about Israeli football as if it were a love story you could not admit to out loud. To him, Hapoel Tel Aviv was the club of coexistence: many Arab players had worn the red, and there were Muslim fans in the stands too. That made it easier for him to feel at peace with this love.

His father was sure he was watching English lessons. His friends, had they known, would have reacted very differently. In Gaza people recoiled from any Israeli symbol at all. But for Mehran, every Hapoel win was like a small, private victory over Bibi Netanyahu and the entire Israeli government.

Fatma, a nurse at al-Shifa Hospital, was the kind of person who always knew how to improvise medicine when the medicine ran out, find an internet connection during a power cut, and smile when reality tried to make her despair. She set a glass of sweet tea in front of him.

"Did you see that Stefan, the Macedonian? He's making a really good impression," she said, and in that sly remark she showed her support.

From the other room Ahmed called out: "Have you heard about some virus in China? They're showing people in masks like it's a world war! Another headline to bore us."

Fatma raised an eyebrow. She had heard rumours in the hospital corridors, but preferred to keep quiet in front of her son. Something in her already suspected this virus would not simply pass.

Netanya · That evening

Omer Hermesh drove up from Kfar Aza straight to Alex's flat, with a small speaker and an Eviatar Banai playlist. It was his ritual, and it had quickly become everyone's: on every away trip – and tonight too, with home itself exiled to Netanya – Eviatar Banai from the first mile to the exit ramp, even when Ofir yelled from the back seat that these weren't terrace songs. Omer was the kid from the kibbutz by the fence, the one whose family home had a record player as its most important piece of furniture. "Laugh all you like," he said, turning it up, "but Alex, the music will protect us." On the coastal road, between one song and the next, nobody argued.

The stadium in Netanya was on fire, in every sense. The stadium ban had sent Hapoel far from Bloomfield, but the ultras had brought Bloomfield with them. Among the columns of red smoke stood Alex, squeezed into the crowd, his whole body moving to the beat of the drums. It was tribal, like the army, except here the choice was his, and the madness was joyful.

"Hapoel forever, wherever you play, I'm there!" thousands of throats roared as one body.

Alex shouted with them until his throat burned, and all the heartache melted into the ecstasy. A stadium is a bubble. Fans like Alex forget what's outside, and their private walls dissolve for ninety minutes. "Corona to Maccabi!" someone joked in the stand, at the hated city rival.

Stefan Spirovski opened the scoring with a left-footed volley from nineteen metres. Ra'anana equalised before half-time, and Nuni – a seventeen-year-old kid from the row below, his scarf wound twice round his neck – turned to them with the grin of someone who had seen it all: "If it doesn't hurt, it isn't Hapoel." After the break Altman restored the lead, and near the end the Macedonian added another with a header. Three–one. A fourth straight win.

The television camera drifted across the crowd. For three or four seconds the frame rested on Alex in the red shirt, his eyes burning, his voice rising like a prayer looking for its place in the world. In that second you could see his love, entirely pure.

Alex didn't know that a hundred kilometres to the south, a Palestinian boy in a crowded camp was whispering the same songs in a soft Arabic accent, drawn to the same magic he was forbidden to love. Mehran pressed his eyes to the small screen where the broadcast was running. A young guy in a red shirt, mouth open in song, red smoke behind him. Three seconds, four, and the camera moved on. He didn't know who it was, and he had no reason to remember. And yet, in that moment, something stretched between the dark room in Shati and the burning stand in Netanya – a red line, thin as a thread, that neither of them had seen yet.

Then a player in red ran to celebrate with raised fists, and for a split second every political border broke, and Mehran's heart filled with a warmth that was forbidden, and sweet.

Tel Aviv · The Ben-Gurion flat, later that evening

"Call me Natalie," said sixteen-year-old Natasha, in a voice that hoped to sound older than she was, as the family sat down around the small dinner table. She rolled the old name around her tongue like something too sour, and set it aside. "Natasha is stuck in the Russia of the past. Natalie sounds… like I belong. Global."

Vitaly looked up from his bowl of borscht. Pink steam rose from it. Even after almost thirty years in the country he still cooked food that smelled of a Leningrad winter – the city he was born in, long since called St Petersburg again – and insisted it was "completely Israeli now". He was the one who had chosen to change the family name from Kozlov to Ben-Gurion – a tribute to the state's founder, and above all an attempt to be accepted here not as a foreigner but as a Jew like any other.

"Ben-Gurion was a great Zionist," he had explained to Alex years earlier, when Alex asked why the name on their ID cards was so different from the one on his birth certificate. "It's an honour. And fewer questions at the airport."

But in recent months the bureaucracy had once again put its foot in the door. Rabbinate officials sent letters and rummaged through the names of grandmothers in Ukraine. Jewish identity, it turned out, could evaporate as easily as it had been written into a form.

Irina, Alex's mother, born in Odessa, listened to these discussions with the silence of someone who had been through both Soviet programming courses and Israeli start-up culture. To her, identity was a line of code: you could change it, sometimes even debug it, but it was always a means, never the essence. Vitaly and Irina had each immigrated with their families after the Soviet Union fell apart, and met here, in Bat Yam.

"Whatever suits you," Irina smiled at her daughter. "Names are just variables in the system."

The door opened with a bang. Alex came in, bringing with him the smell of smoke, beer and the high pulse of the terrace. He threw his coat on a chair and sat down in the red shirt, still sweating slightly, his eyes still shining.

"Three–one!" he announced. "Insane game. You should have seen the stand, a river of flags. The Macedonian, Spirovski – a brace. A genius!"

Vitaly raised an eyebrow and, in a Hebrew that Russian still clung to, asked: "Since when exactly are you interested in football?"

"Since I found out I'm allowed to be interested in things other than how to stay alive," said Alex, and pulled a small pill from his pocket – a reminder of the habits he had brought back from his service.

Natalie looked at her brother. Something in him had changed since he handed back his rifle. He had become sharper and harder, and at the same time as fragile as someone who hasn't yet learned to sleep without a rifle beside the bed. There was a hunger in him for anything that would shake his heart and silence the memories: loud music, a crowd, and maybe a little controlled chemistry too.