Guns and Curls

14 July 2024 · A base in the south

July almost brought the world down.

At one in the morning, Israel time, at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a twenty-year-old fired from a nearby roof at Donald Trump. The bullet clipped the top of his ear. The picture of Trump with blood on his cheek, fist raised to the sky and the flag behind him, became an icon within minutes. A symbol of courage to some. Theatre to others.

Alex sat in the battalion operations room, which smelled of cold coffee and electricity. The videos ran on the screens again and again, in slow motion, with red arrows and commentators crashing into one another.

"It doesn't look real," he said to David, at the next computer. "Let's be honest. A bullet hits exactly the edge of the ear? What are the odds? One in a million?"

David looked at him with tired eyes. "Bro, a man died there. A volunteer firefighter, father of two girls. He covered them with his body."

Alex fell silent. He knew David was right. But something in him wanted it to be staged, because then at least someone would be in control of something.

And the rift opened in him again, like an old wound. Because if Trump was elected, it would be good for Israel – everyone said so. The man who moved the embassy to Jerusalem, who recognised sovereignty over the Golan, who signed the Abraham Accords. For Israel, Trump meant security. For Alex, Trump was the worst version of America. And both things were true at the same time, and that was what was unbearable.

He took out his phone. "You OK? Did you hear about Trump? Thinking of you," he wrote to Natalie.

14 July 2024 · Tel Aviv

The message reached the flat that had turned into a bunker. Natalie read it twice and didn't answer. Not because she didn't want to. Because she didn't know how.

She had gone back to active service two weeks earlier. A medical clearance, stamps, and a post in a room with no windows, where they analysed information and looked for patterns before they turned into disasters. The room smelled of strong cleaning fluids that couldn't hide the smell of fear.

"The aim is to identify threats before they materialise," Uri, her new commander, had explained on the first day. Sharp eyes behind thick glasses, a sandpaper voice. Patterns. As if terror were mathematics. As if you could calculate pain in advance.

Above her computer hung a poster: the face of a twenty-one-year-old taken from the party near Re'im. "Bring him home." Every morning she saw his smile, frozen halfway, and felt the rage grow in her like a tumour.

When she saw the picture of Trump, the first thought that crossed her mind was not "how awful". It was: "Why didn't he die?" Not because of Trump. Because she already wanted someone to die, all the time, and it didn't matter who. That thought frightened her more than every image she saw at the office.

Today was her twenty-first birthday. Nobody remembered. Not Irina, not Vitaly, each of them in front of the news from America, in a different flat. Not her friends from the army, who had stopped calling. Not even Alex, who had written to her about Trump.

She sat with a cold coffee that tasted of dust and felt older than any woman she had ever met. Twenty-one. An age when the world is supposed to open like a flower. How do you celebrate in a world that is falling apart?

At night, at last, she wrote back: "Sad birthday."

Alex saw the message late, on the narrow bed at the base, and his stomach turned over. How had he forgotten? The date that had once been the most important in the world. He wanted to call. He knew she wouldn't answer. The distance between them was no longer measured in kilometres.

July 2024 · Gaza City

Mehran heard the news on a little radio running on dying batteries. The newsreader's voice came through static: "…shooting at a Donald Trump rally… wounded in the ear… his condition is stable…" The words mixed with the wind coming through the broken window, and with the voices of children playing among the ruins.

He put the radio on the rickety table and leaned against the wall, pitted with shrapnel. There was no joy in him. Something more complicated. Maybe, he thought, when violence reaches America too, everyone will stop for a moment and understand how fragile everyone's life is.

In the evening Azzam came by. A friend from university, whose university no longer existed. He sat on the broken chair, with eyes in which something danced that might have been hope or despair.

"Trump supported Israel," he said. "Maybe now politicians will come who understand us too."

Mehran looked out at the empty street. Mornings in grey and brown, evenings in orange and red, and in between something hard to name.

"You know what's hardest?" he asked, and his voice sounded like an old man's, though he was twenty. "Not the bombs. Not the hunger. It's that every morning I wake up and think I'll never make it to Bloomfield."

Azzam smiled. He loved football too. Barcelona, not Hapoel, but still.

"It's crazy," Mehran went on. "Children here are starving, houses are destroyed every day, and I'm thinking about a match. Maybe my head's broken."

"Maybe that's what's holding you together," Azzam answered. "Maybe when you stop dreaming about football, that's when you really start to die."

Then, like every evening at about the same hour, came the buzz. The drones. The low sound that goes away and comes back, the sound that says someone, somewhere else, is deciding now who will live. They fell silent.

The explosions began on the other side of the city. Far enough not to be afraid. Close enough to feel the walls shake.

Mehran closed his eyes and wondered what Alex was thinking now. Whether he still dreamed of peace. Whether you could love the same club and be enemies.

"Maybe he's scared now too," he whispered, after Azzam had gone.

In his father's old notebook, on the back pages, as Ahmed had asked, between two lessons that would never be filmed, he wrote: "July 2024. Today I understood that we're all the same. We're all afraid, we're all angry, none of us knows how to go on. Maybe that's what being a person means, in this time."

1 September 2024 · Tel Aviv

On Sunday morning the IDF announced that the bodies of six hostages had been found in a tunnel in Rafah, murdered shortly before the forces reached them. One of them was Hersh Goldberg-Polin, the young man from the shelter at Re'im, who threw grenades back out until he lost his arm.

Natalie saw the name and closed the computer.

That night hundreds of thousands came out into the streets. The Ayalon was blocked. The Histadrut called a general strike. Irina stood at Kaplan with a hand-lettered sign, and Natalie, for the first time in months, went with her. She didn't shout. She just stood next to her mother and held her hand.

September–October 2024 · The north, Iran, Rafah

Autumn came all at once.

On 17 September thousands of Hezbollah pagers exploded across Lebanon, and the next day, walkie-talkies. On 27 September Hassan Nasrallah was killed in a bunker under the Dahiyeh. On 1 October Israeli forces went into southern Lebanon, and that evening Iran fired some two hundred ballistic missiles at Israel. Millions went down to the shelters. A missile fragment killed one man, a Palestinian, in Jericho.

On 7 October, a year had passed.

Natalie woke at 06:29, without an alarm. Her body remembered on its own. She didn't go to the ceremony and didn't turn on the television. She lit a memorial candle on the windowsill and sang, quietly, in a voice she hadn't heard from herself for a year, the song Roni used to sing to her at night. She didn't remember all the words. Roni would have.

And on 16 October, in Tel al-Sultan in Rafah, an IDF unit ran into three gunmen without knowing who they were. One of them fled into a ruined building. A drone flew inside and found him sitting in a dusty armchair, wounded, his face covered by a keffiyeh. He threw a stick at the drone. Then the building was shelled.

Only the next day did it become clear: Yahya Sinwar. The man who had planned the seventh of October.

In Gaza the news burned. The drone image came round again and again – a sooty building, an armchair, a hand throwing a stick. In the streets of Gaza City men sat by shuttered shops and whispered. Some saw a hero's death. Some quietly cursed the man who had brought all this down on them. Most simply asked whether now it would end.

It didn't end.

Mehran felt for the first time that his life was tied by a direct thread to decisions made far away, in the shadows. And he thought of what Hisham had once said to him, on the roof, with the radio: "Do you really think you'll be able to leave one day?"

Until May, anyone with money had paid an Egyptian company thousands of dollars a head to get out through the Rafah crossing. Since the IDF took the crossing, it had been closed. There was no way out. Not even as a refugee. Especially not as a refugee.

Late October 2024 · Jaffa

Alex got word that he was released from reserve duty. Almost a year in uniform. The battalion was moving north, and they sent him home.

Home, now, was the flat in Jaffa. The friend from the stand who had held the lease since 2021 had moved out that very month, and left him an empty fridge, a key with the neighbour and a note: "Look after her. She's more yours than mine."

He was supposed to be happy. Instead he felt a vast emptiness. What would he do now? How would he live with what he had seen? How would he go back to Greece and pretend everything was fine?

The message came in the middle of the night. The screen flashed blue in the dark room.

"Heard you got released. You OK?" – Neta.

He stared at it for a few seconds. His fingers trembled, not from excitement. From exhaustion. "I'm alive. That's enough for now."

She answered almost at once. "Can I see you tomorrow?"

He smiled bitterly. Neta hadn't changed and never would. Direct, cutting. Part of him wanted to delete it. Another part, old and almost forgotten – the part that would always be hers – pressed "yes".

The next evening she turned up. The flat in Jaffa looked as tired as he was: half-broken shutters, an open bottle of arak on the table, dust and clothes thrown about. She came in without asking, as if the years in between hadn't really happened, and hugged him. Too short a hug. The smell of her hair, the curls that refused to be tied back, took him back to moments he had forgotten on purpose.

They sat down. She with green tea, he with neat arak. She looked at him the way you try to work out whether the man in front of you is the same one, or someone new, born of these months.

He told her almost without feeling. About the nights in Gaza. About images that don't leave your head. About the anger that had burned in him at the start, the urge for revenge, and how it had burned all the way down and left only a hollow.

Neta listened and rolled cigarettes, her eyes full of compassion. She recognised the break, and the break passed into her too.

After an hour of words that fell between them like grenades, she leaned forward. "Alex, you can't disappear now. Not after what you've seen. There are protests, people in the street every Saturday night, for the hostages, so that this ends. This is your time to be there. Find the energy in bringing a little justice to the world."

He lifted tired eyes to her. "Justice? I don't believe in it any more. Not in revenge, not in justice, not in protests. Once it felt like keeping my head above water. Now it's slow drowning. I want to go back to Greece. To breathe."

She pushed her hair back, a movement far too familiar, and something in his heart trembled.

"You think running away will save you? There you'll be a tourist in your own life. Here at least you can fight. Not on the battlefield. In the street."

"More wars," he whispered. "I want freedom. No flag, no leader, no shouting. Just me. For the first time in my life, fuck this whole country."

She looked at him in a long silence. The tension between them was physical, like before. There had been love between them, probably too extreme, the kind that harmed them both. But there had also been something in it that is hard to find in normal places. Now everything was wrapped in pain, in disappointment, in a world that had broken between them and outside.

Neta got up, went round behind the sofa and put a hand on his shoulder. A gentle touch, almost shy, full of hidden longing.

"I don't want you to run away," she said quietly. "Not from me. Not from here."

Alex closed his eyes. He didn't move her hand, and he didn't return the touch. Inside, everything burned: old longing, the wish to touch, and a bigger wish to run.

The room filled with a thick silence. Two people, facing each other, with a past that refuses to die, a future that may not come, and a present that gave up long ago.