Those Were the Days

1 January 2023 · Athens

The year opened like a heavy breath after a nightmare. Distant fireworks burst above the Acropolis and only made the broken pieces stand out more.

Just after midnight Alex stood behind the bar at Apollon, his hands sliding between cheap champagne flutes, a tired smile on his face. Greek music thundered, strangers laughed and danced, and he felt empty. He hadn't flown home in December. Instead there had been phone calls full of silences: Irina in one flat, Vitaly in another, in Florentin, and Natalie, who had buried herself in the army so as not to think.

He poured a drink for a woman with wavy brown hair and eyes as green as a sea in a storm. Emily. Hungarian, twenty-four, who had moved to Greece a few weeks earlier, after a painful break-up in Budapest.

"To a new year. No old demons," she said in English, in a soft accent, and raised her glass.

Alex laughed. "Demons, I know all about."

They talked until morning – about missing home, about dreams that had broken, about the sea that heals wounds. When the bar closed she kissed him. A salty kiss, like the Aegean. And for the first time in years he felt real warmth, something that made him forget the scars, for a moment.

January 2023 · Israel

In Israel the year opened with a different kind of storm. Netanyahu's new government, the most right-wing the country had ever known, had been sworn in at the end of December. On 4 January Justice Minister Yariv Levin unveiled his plan to overhaul the judicial system, and within days tens of thousands were in the streets. Every Saturday night Kaplan Street filled with flags, drums and shouts of "Democracy!"

Irina went almost every week. She sent Alex photos: a sea of blue-and-white flags, a hand-lettered sign, her own face tired and determined. "Like Balfour," she wrote, "only ten times bigger."

Alex looked at the photos on his phone between shifts and felt the old crack open. He had been there, at Balfour, in 2020. Now he was far away. And the country, which he was no longer sure was his, was tearing itself apart without him.

January–February 2023 · Athens

In January the thing with Emily blossomed. She had a small scar on her arm from a trek in the Carpathians, and an engineer father who had walked out when she was ten. Now she was rebuilding herself as a photographer, with an old camera and rolls of film that cost her more than the rent.

Alex told her about the army, about the protests against Netanyahu, about Natalie. They drove out to Cape Sounion and slept on the beach below Poseidon's temple, and every night another piece of him came back.

In February, as the fighting for Bakhmut turned into a meat grinder, Emily cried for Ukrainian friends who weren't answering her messages. Alex held her, and saw Irina's pain in her eyes.

"We'll get through this together," he whispered.

They planned a trip to Hungary for the summer. A small dream of a shared life. In the end they didn't go: summer at Apollon was too busy, and they put it off until the autumn.

On 26 February, after two brothers from Har Bracha, Hallel and Yagel Yaniv, were shot dead in Huwara, hundreds of settlers stormed the town and set houses and cars on fire. Alex watched the videos – flames in the night, families on the rooftops – and wrote to Irina: "That isn't us." She replied: "It's us too. That's why I'm in the street."

Winter–Summer 2023 · A base in the north, Nahal Oz

Natalie was nineteen, and the officers' course, postponed after the family came apart, finally opened that winter at a cold, sterile base in the north. Her body hardened. Her soul was tested.

"I'm going to be an officer, Mum," she told Irina on the phone, her voice shaking and steady at the same time. "To protect what's left."

The course was hard: night exercises in the rain, lectures on tactics, and lonely moments when she thought of Alex far away and of Vitaly, shut up inside himself. On the night of 26 March, after Netanyahu fired Defence Minister Gallant, the cadets sat in the dining hall in front of their phones and watched the Ayalon highway burning with bonfires. Nobody spoke. One of the instructors said only: "Remember that we're here for everyone." Natalie remembered.

In June she got her bars, and at the start of the summer she was posted to the Nahal Oz outpost, a few hundred metres from the Gaza fence: a young officer in the war room, between the lookouts' screens and the radio.

On her first day she was met by Roni, an eighteen-year-old lookout with a dark ponytail and a smile that lit up a room.

"Welcome to our long shift," she said lightly.

Natalie smiled, for the first time in months. "I'm here to hold on. After everything that broke at home."

They clicked at once. Nights of talking about men, about dreams, about mothers who cry at night. Roni told her about the moshav where she grew up, about music, about dancing, and about her plan: after her discharge, fly to England and study cooking.

"I'll make you the best dish you've ever eaten," she laughed. "And then a restaurant in New York. And you're the first guest."

They shared a tiny room and laughed at the army food, and when Natalie woke from nightmares Roni sang to her quietly until she fell asleep.

"You're not alone, sister," she said, a hand on her shoulder. And Natalie knew she had found a real friend.

On 24 July the Knesset passed the law cancelling the reasonableness standard, and hundreds of reserve pilots announced they would not report for duty. At the outpost they talked about it quietly, between shifts. The lookouts talked about something else: unusual movement beyond the fence. Training. Pick-up trucks. They wrote it down, reported it, and reported it again.

Through the screens they watched small figures on the other side. "They're people like us," Roni whispered once. "Just scared."

Sometimes, on quiet nights, Natalie opened her phone and went into Mehran's channel. She told no one. She only wanted to see that he was still there, beyond the fence, teaching children equations. Between her screen and his lay a few kilometres of sand, fence and cameras. And still a thin red thread ran between them that no camera at the outpost could see.

2023 · Shati camp

In Gaza, Mehran built his digital world like a fortress inside the siege. In January Math Gaza had fifteen thousand subscribers: algebra with examples from everyday life, short videos about Israeli football he watched on pirate apps. On 23 March, his nineteenth birthday, the channel passed twenty thousand.

He enrolled to study mathematics at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City, and at the same time taught himself to code from online courses, his fingers dancing over an old keyboard.

"This is my freedom," he told Fatma when she found him working in the middle of the night.

"You're a genius," people wrote in the comments. From Israel, too. And he smiled, and thought of Alex.

They messaged each other after Hapoel matches. "Red win!" Alex wrote in the spring, after three points in the relegation round. Mehran answered with a voice note, in Hebrew with a heavy Arabic accent: "Brother, that's life. Hapoel always gets up."

One day he sent Alex a link. "This is my channel. Don't laugh."

Alex didn't understand a word of the equations in Arabic, but he watched the derby analysis to the end, twice. "Bro, you're a professor," he wrote. "The Hapoel professor." Something about it reminded him of a story Natalie had once told him, and he couldn't remember what.

It was a private bond. A small secret Mehran kept in a drawer of his heart.

In May he finished his first app: a simple program for practising maths. He shared it on the channel, and a girl from Khan Younis wrote to him: "You changed my life." He read it ten times.

The nights were hard. In May the bombs fell on the Strip again, in another round against Islamic Jihad, and the memories of 2021 and 2022 came back. He took comfort in Alex's messages: "Red brother, keep burning."

And he dreamed of a day when he would meet him in the stands. Side by side. Red on red.

Life flowed on, deep and quiet, small connections that gave hope. Until the dawn of 7 October tore everything apart.