The Snake Sheds Its Skin

February 2022

The year opened like a long exhalation of relief, as if the world had let out the air it had been holding in its lungs for two years. The Omicron wave was still sweeping through Israel in January, but for most people it passed faster and lighter than they had feared, and at the beginning of February the Bennett–Lapid government scrapped the Green Pass, which had been the key to all cultural life since February 2021. The masks, the tests, the restrictions – wiped away like footprints on the shore after the tide. Country after country, at the end of winter and into spring, lifted the last of its rules.

Online, mostly on Twitter and Telegram, people began to talk – first in whispers, then out loud – about "the bluff". Studies showed that the vaccines protected less well against infection with the new variants, and in circles like Alex's that was enough to feel cheated. Others pointed out that the vaccines still prevented serious illness and death. The argument didn't end; it only moved somewhere else. In Israel the cafés filled with laughter again, and with the spring the beaches too, and life slowly came back – with hope, and with heavy questions.

Athens

The little bar in Psiri didn't survive the Omicron winter. From the end of December music was banned in Greek nightspots, everything closed at midnight, and nobody was allowed to stand at the bar. "A bar you can't stand at," said the owner, "is just a room with bottles in it." At the end of January he pulled down the shutter, and Alex was left with a week's tips and a lot of free time.

In February he found a new job as a barman at Apollon, a bar in Plaka, in the heart of the tourist quarter, below the Acropolis. His hands slid between bottles of ouzo and tsipouro, and every night his smile won over a different woman – a blonde tourist from Sweden on Monday, a dark-haired Greek on Wednesday. Each one a new story of temporary freedom.

Lena was gone by then. In January she had moved to Thessaloniki, to a new band and a room above a rehearsal studio. They parted without drama, with a long hug on the platform at Larissa Station. "Stop searching, Alex," she told him from the train window. He didn't yet know how that was done.

Anyone in Greece who worked without being vaccinated had to show a negative test twice a week. So twice a week he queued at the pharmacy, paid out of his own pocket, cursed the "health dictatorship" every time the swab went up his nose – and paid again. That was the price of trusting no one.

"This is my life now," he told himself in the mirror behind the bar. His dark curly hair fell over his grey-green eyes. He was a very good-looking young man, and the alcohol kept a smile on his face at work. But in his heart the cracks remained: the patrols with Golani, the dust and the glass in Rina's flat in Holon in May 2021, his love for Neta, which had dissolved like smoke, and a great many philosophical thoughts about what we are doing in this world as human beings.

That winter he stopped with the pills too. In December a student who had bought Xanax from him mixed it with tsipouro and was taken away by ambulance from Monastiraki Square. The boy survived. Alex went home, tipped everything he had left down the toilet and flushed twice. The next thing, the one that had been waiting for him around the corner, stayed there. He had no wish to find out what a Greek prison looked like from the inside, or what another ambulance looked like either.

His finances were nothing to write home about. Without the money from the pills he got by on a little help from his parents: a bank transfer at the start of every month, and a red heart from Irina in a message. He watched Hapoel's games on pirate apps – just like Mehran, had he only known. On 12 February he watched the derby that way, on the phone propped against the till: Kobi Refua's Hapoel – Refua had replaced Nir Klinger in December – lost 3–2 to Maccabi at Bloomfield. Alex spent ten minutes drying the same glass.

One night, after closing, he sat on a stool by the bar and counted his tips. There wasn't much to count: a ten-euro note, two fives, a few coins. Everything else was a pile of slips from the card machine. Most customers no longer opened a wallet. They held a phone to the terminal, heard a little beep, said "efcharistó" and left.

He held the crumpled tenner up to the light, and suddenly, two years late, something dropped into place.

He remembered the spring of 2020 in an empty Tel Aviv, riding between the buildings with the blue Wolt bag on his back. "Contactless delivery," the app said. "Leave it by the door." Nobody ever paid him in cash. At the supermarket, signs went up on the tills asking people to pay by card, and someone on the radio explained that the virus survives on banknotes. That November, in the middle of the second lockdown, the Bank of Israel made the big retailers switch every till to "smart" terminals. And at the start of May 2021, a few days before the sky opened over Tel Aviv, Apple Pay landed in Israel. Nobody raised an eyebrow. Everyone just held up their phone.

"It wasn't just a virus," he whispered to the bottles. "It was training."

Cash leaves no trace. A note goes from hand to hand and tells no one who bought what, where or when. A credit card tells everything. Every coffee, every delivery, every night at the bar is logged on someone's server: name, time, place, amount. Data.

And black money – the money the state can't see and can't tax, the money that kept him going in the year of the pills, that changed hands in the back room at The One, that held up everyone without a payslip – was the first thing to be choked. Israel had capped cash payments by law back in 2019, and now there was talk of cutting the ceiling almost in half. But the pandemic, he thought, had done the job faster than any law: it changed a habit. And whoever gets used to ordering on Wolt and paying with Apple Pay doesn't go back to a wallet.

He knew how it sounded. Another Telegram thread, another guy with a red arrow on a screenshot. There were duller explanations too: convenience, fees, banks fed up with driving notes around in armoured vans. But he remembered Irina on the screen the January before, whispering: "All the apps, all the tracking – they're building a system of control." Back then he'd given her half a smile. Now the smile stuck in his throat.

He didn't know who "they" were, and that was what frightened him. Maybe there was no single room where someone had planned all this. Maybe it was enough for everyone to want the same thing at the same time – governments wanting tax, companies wanting data, people wanting not to leave the house – and it already behaved exactly like a conspiracy.

He folded the tenner in four and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket, like a souvenir from a world that had ended.

In the morning, half asleep, he ordered a coffee on Wolt. And paid with his phone.

On the wall of the flat in Psiri hung the red shirt with the small crest, Hapoel's hammer and sickle, and beside it the scarf, the basketball vest and the "Ussishkin" sign, which had travelled with him from Jaffa in his suitcase. They reminded him of home. They reminded him of values.

But Athens was release. Streets lit up in colour, insane street art, Greek music – back in the bars since the end of January, a week too late for the place in Psiri – mixing with the laughter of strangers. A normal life, which he tried to drown himself in. Life in Tel Aviv is closed like a ring, he thought: Israel surrounded by enemies, and you can't just get in a car and drive to another country. Here he was enchanted by the idea that you could simply take a car and drive from Greece into Bulgaria, and from there anywhere in Europe. His dream was to buy a big van, do it up and travel the whole continent. But city life always won, and the need to earn a living and get ahead prevailed over the dreams he had left in the drawers of his heart.

Tel Aviv

Natalie advanced through the army like an arrow. She had specialised in social media analysis, hours in front of screens, and the Arabic she had studied as a high-school major improved month by month, until she began to dream in it. Her commanders had marked her out as a candidate for the officers' course opening in July. Her body had been hardened by training, her mind sharpened.

"I'm rebuilding myself," she told Lihi, a friend from school, as they sat over coffee at Dizengoff Center on a Thursday home from base, surrounded by the laughter of girls who had come back to life. There were parties again, dancing till morning. But beneath the surface she felt something heavy. She wanted to be part of defending Israel, of the future she had dreamed of – even if a deep fear hovered in her heart.

Something heavy hovered at home as well. Since the winter Russian troops had been massing on the Ukrainian border, and in the evenings Vitaly listened to the news in Russian in the living room while Irina had Ukrainian radio on in the kitchen, each in a different room, the voices meeting in the hallway.

Gaza

In Shati camp, Mehran was building himself a world. An old keyboard stood before him like a digital weapon. The Math Gaza channel, which he had opened in the summer, after the war, kept growing: the fifteen hundred subscribers of the autumn were now several thousand. Video lessons on equations, short clips about life under the blockade, children playing football in dirt streets.

It was also his Tawjihi year – the matriculation exams that, in Gaza, decide your whole future. Electricity came in rations, a few hours a day, and every family in the camp knew the schedule by heart. When the power went, he went on studying by torchlight.

"The world's going back to normal," he told his mother. Her eyes were tired, but full of pride. "Maybe we'll find a way too."

He wrote to people all over the world and dreamed of freedom beyond the concrete walls. But poverty and the power cuts reminded him that reality still bit.

24 February 2022

And then everything exploded. Before dawn Vladimir Putin announced on television a "special military operation", claiming he was protecting the Russians of the Donbas. Missiles fell on cities across Ukraine, and armoured columns crossed the border from the north, the east and the south. The world saw an invasion. Within two weeks more than two million people had fled Ukraine – the greatest river of refugees in Europe since the Second World War. Mariupol was being erased under siege, and energy prices in Europe soared.

All around, the West closed in on Russia: Russian banks cut off from SWIFT, oligarchs' assets frozen, one package of sanctions after another. And off to one side, China. Three weeks before the invasion Xi and Putin had declared a partnership with "no limits", and now Beijing refused to condemn. The world split: a West burning with rage, an East growing stronger in the shadows.

That evening · The Ben-Gurion home

In the Ben-Gurion family's flat, the war exploded in the living room too. It was a Thursday, and Natalie had come home from base still in uniform.

Vitaly, born in Leningrad – today's St Petersburg – sat in front of the television, his eyes red. He was watching the Russian broadcasts about the "liberation of the Donbas", and the memories came back to him: the cold, the revolutionary songs from school, the days when the Russians were a power.

"Putin is protecting our people!" he roared, and banged on the table. A glass of vodka shattered on the floor. "This is a war for honour, not a crime!"

Irina, born in Odesa, rose like a storm. Her face was pale, and the tears ran without her trying to stop them. Pictures raced through her head: her sister in Kyiv – the one who had lit candles with them over Zoom at Hanukkah 2020 – now hiding in a cellar; her cousin, at the front.

"Honour? You call this honour?" she screamed. "They're destroying my home! Ukraine is me, Vitaly! How can you support this?"

She hurled an old plate at the wall, one of the set her mother had brought from Odesa, and the china smashed into shards.

Vitaly tried to reach out a trembling hand. "Irina, I can see your pain…" But his patriotism won. "We have to defend our culture!"

"Please," she begged, "look at the children who are dying." Then she turned, her back to him, and wept.

Natalie stood between them. The green uniform suddenly looked on her like broken armour. "Dad, Mum, stop it!" she shouted. "You're tearing us apart!"

Vitaly turned a furious look on her. "This is none of your business, Natasha. It's a man's war!"

Natasha. The name she had left behind two years earlier, at this very dinner table. He had hardly called her that since.

"No!" Irina burst out. "It's the business of every broken family!"

Two people who had lived together for twenty-five years, who had met in Bat Yam as two young immigrants without a word of Hebrew between them, were torn apart in the middle of the living room. Vitaly defending his Russian heritage, Irina weeping for the wounded land of Ukraine. The room filled with shouting, with tears, with memories of a life that had been.

Natalie didn't know which way to turn. "I can't choose!" she wailed, leaning against the wall until she slid down to the floor. Her tears pooled on the cold tiles. She thought about the officers' course, about her dream of defending Israel, and now it all looked like ash. She thought too about the pictures that had flooded the screens at the base all day – refugees, crying children – and felt the crack in the family gape open.

"Who am I?" she whispered.

That night · Athens

In Athens, the clink of glasses at Apollon fell silent for a moment as convoys of refugees and tanks on snowbound roads appeared on the television above the bar. Alex's heart was pounding. The memories of the army came back: the smell of dust and gun oil, friends shouting over the radio. The fear was far away, and yet it was real.

"What's going on there? Are Mum and Dad all right?" he wrote to Natalie.

The answer came only after midnight. "Mum and Dad are fighting. I'm falling apart."

He froze, his hand on the vodka bottle. "I'm so far away," he muttered, and wiped away a tear no one saw. He tried to call. Natalie didn't answer, and Irina hung up after one ring. He was left with an empty glass, wondering whether his freedom in Athens was anything more than an illusion.

In Gaza, Mehran saw the same pictures on his phone. The Ukrainian refugees, with their suitcases and their children in their arms, reminded him of the story Ahmed told about his own grandfather, who had left Jaffa in 1948 with a key in his pocket, sure he would be back in a fortnight. Now the world was opening its borders to refugees. Mehran wondered whether anyone still remembered that his people, too, had once had keys.

He wrote a post: "Wars break us, but football connects," and added a video of children kicking a ball in a dirt street. A desperate attempt to hold on to hope.

March 2022

The days dragged on, and the cracks in the Ben-Gurion home widened until they could no longer be mended. A month of verbal battles: Vitaly with the Russian channels at full volume, Irina with the phone pressed to her ear, waiting for her sister to answer from the cellar. In the middle of March Vitaly and Irina reached the decision that had always been inevitable.

Vitaly, red-eyed and broken-voiced, gathered his things – old photographs, a half-empty bottle of vodka, books of Russian poetry – into an old, torn bag. "I can't do this any more," he muttered, and moved into a small flat in Florentin. There he shut himself away, isolated, like Russia in the Western world.

Irina stayed with Natalie. She sat on the sofa and stared at a family photograph from the beach at Bat Yam, four people smiling into the sun.

Natalie sat on the floor by the window. "Mum, how do you carry on after this?"

Irina held her, and cried too. The hug was warm, but without hope. "I've lost my home, your father, and my faith."

That night, in her room, Natalie wrote to Alex: "We're finished." And didn't send it. She was afraid he would break too.

A few days later she wrote only: "Mum and Dad have split up. I don't know how to go on."

At Apollon, Alex read the message behind the bar. "I have to go back," he whispered. But the fear – of the family, of home, of what would be waiting for him there – kept him tied to the spot.

25 April 2022 · Athens

On Monday evening Apollon was half empty, and Alex stood his phone against the till. A derby in the championship play-off, Maccabi at home, at Bloomfield – his stadium, filled with a sea of yellow.

Hapoel held on for a whole half. Then, in the long stoppage time at the end of the first half, Shai Elias – the same Shai Elias who had scored against Maccabi Haifa on the night Alex stood outside the stadium without a Green Pass – spat at a Maccabi player and was sent off. In the second half Hapoel simply fell apart: 5–0.

Alex threw his cloth down on the bar. A German tourist asked whether that was his team.

"It's not a team," said Alex. "It's a religion. And tonight God's on reserve duty."

For a few minutes no one in the stand's WhatsApp group wrote anything. Then Omer Hermesh, from Kfar Aza, sent a recording of Evyatar Banai, without a word. And under it someone wrote: "If it doesn't hurt, it isn't Hapoel." Alex didn't need to check who. It was Nuni. He laughed alone behind the bar, like a madman, until his eyes were wet.

That evening · Shati camp

Mehran watched the same game on the roof, with Hisham and the antenna they had built in the autumn, on a pirate stream that froze with every attack. A month earlier he had turned eighteen, and Fatma had baked basbousa on a little gas ring, because the power had gone that very evening.

When the fifth goal went in, he laid the phone face down on the concrete.

"I told you," he said to Hisham. "I'm a jinx."

Hisham laughed. "So stop watching."

"I can't. It's like stopping breathing."

That night, before he went to sleep, he went down to the stairwell and checked that the bag was still there, behind the gas cylinders. The flare was waiting for Gate 5. It could wait a little longer.

7 May 2022 · Athens

On his twenty-fourth birthday, Alex worked. A week earlier Greece had scrapped its vaccination certificates, and for the first time since he had landed he could sit in a bar as a customer, not just stand behind one. He didn't sit. The Apollon staff sang him "Chronia polla" with a candle stuck in a piece of baklava, and the tourists clapped without knowing why.

Natalie sent a video from the base: she and Shiran singing "Happy birthday" deliberately off-key, with a biscuit from the canteen standing in for a cake. Irina sent an old photo – Alex aged six on the beach at Bat Yam, with a red ball bigger than he was – and under it: "Come home already."

At two in the morning, as he was cashing up, Vitaly called.

"Happy birthday, son," he said in Russian. His voice was heavy, with the vodka in it. A television blared in the background. The Russian channel again.

"Thanks, Dad."

Silence. "Victory Day in two days," said Vitaly. "My grandfather died in Leningrad, in the siege. You know that?"

"I know, Dad."

"Then you understand me. You're my son. You were a soldier. You know what it means to stand your ground."

Alex looked out at the sea of lights below the Acropolis. "I know Mum cries every night. And that her sister sleeps in a cellar."

"Your mother…" Vitaly began, and didn't finish.

"Goodnight, Dad."

On the way home, instead of going straight down to Psiri, he climbed the Areopagus rock. The city breathed below him, yellow and warm. On the smooth stone, beside a crack, lay a snake's slough: a transparent, empty skin, the exact shape of a body that had already gone.

He crouched beside it for a long time. The bar in Psiri, Lena, the pills, the home in Tel Aviv that had come apart without him – all the skins he had shed in a single year. Whatever was growing underneath was still too tender to touch. Twenty-four, he thought. And nobody knows where the snake crawled off to.