We Came to Drive Out the Dark

6 November 2024 · Athens

November brought an election that changed America and the world. Trump returned to the White House like a snake that had shed its skin, and everything that had been known became uncertain.

Alex was already in Greece. Four days after the evening with Neta he had got on a flight to Athens, with one backpack, without saying goodbye to anyone except Irina. Now, in the morning, in an empty Apollon, among upturned chairs and crates of ice, he read the results on his phone and understood that the war could go on for years. Or end tomorrow. He didn't know which frightened him more.

Emily came from Budapest in the middle of the month, to collect the cameras and the film she had left in the flat. Three days. They walked up to the Acropolis in the rain, ate souvlaki on the steps at Monastiraki, and laughed twice. But she saw the fear in his eyes, the things he couldn't tell. When he slept, he talked. In Hebrew. She didn't understand the words, and she understood everything.

"I love you," she told him on the last morning, the suitcase by the door. "But I can't be with a ghost."

He didn't argue. He just carried her suitcase down the stairs.

He left the flat they had shared, where every corner still held the sour smell of her film, at the end of the month. He found a smaller, cheaper place on Alexandras Avenue, at the edge of Exarchia: the neighbourhood where he had been drinking after shifts since 2022, among sprayed walls and people who didn't ask questions.

One of those evenings, after his shift, he sat at the bar with Sophie, a girl from Lyon who had come to work at Apollon for the season and stayed on after the tourists had gone. "People with values are poor at the bank and rich in the heart," he told her, and drained his glass. "And me? I ended up poor, and my values cracked too. I don't know what to believe in any more."

Sophie didn't answer. She poured him another, and poured one for herself.

November 2024 · Tel Aviv

Natalie was given a new job. More secret. All they told her was that she would be working on "the north and the east", and that few people knew the room she would sit in.

She was glad. At last a real purpose, something that could save lives. She didn't think about Alex. She didn't think about the peace he wanted. At night, when the cannabis didn't help, she thought about Roni. And about how someone had to pay.

On 27 November a ceasefire came into force in Lebanon. Residents of the north heard the news in hotel rooms in Tiberias and at the Dead Sea, and didn't know whether to go home. In Gaza there was no ceasefire.

November 2024 · Gaza City

Mehran got a voice message from Hisham's brother. Ten seconds. A broken voice, and then silence.

Hisham had been killed in a strike in Jabalia, near the school where his family had found shelter.

One more. They were starting to run out, the friends. The family. The hope.

Mehran opened the gallery on his phone and looked at their last picture: the two of them on the roof, next to the antenna they built in 2021, holding up the little radio like a trophy. He remembered how they used to play football in the street, with a ball held together by tape, and how Hisham always shouted "Goal!" even when the ball sailed over the crossbar.

Now the street didn't exist. And neither did Hisham.

According to the health ministry in Gaza, by the end of the year more than forty-five thousand people had been killed in the Strip. The figure doesn't distinguish between fighters and civilians. Israel said some seventeen thousand of them were militants. The UN said almost every resident of the Strip had been displaced. Mehran didn't read numbers any more. He counted people.

8 December 2024 · Three screens

Then, one night in December, Assad fell.

After thirteen years of civil war, in eleven days, the rebels came out of Idlib, took Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and entered Damascus almost without a fight. The president fled to Moscow in the middle of the night. The prisons were opened. People walked out of Sednaya, blinded by light, after years in the cellars.

Mehran saw the pictures and thought: regimes fall in a single night. So can sieges.

Natalie was briefed that same morning. Israeli forces had gone up onto the Syrian side of Mount Hermon and into the buffer zone. The fear was that someone would use the chaos to get close to the border. She volunteered for a double shift, and then another. She didn't want to be at home. She didn't want to think. Only to act.

Alex saw it from the bar in Athens, on a screen that usually showed football. Assad, who had seemed eternal, vanished in one night. Everything that seems stable can collapse in the blink of an eye, he thought. Him too.

25 December 2024 · The first night of Hanukkah

It happened on the first night of Hanukkah. The night the world is supposed to be lit by candles, and it was sunk in darkness.

One dropped call. Three numbers connected by mistake, through a fault at an exchange, on a line that passed through several countries and nobody knew how. Three voices in the dark. One thin thread, suddenly stretched between Athens, Tel Aviv and Gaza.

"Khalas?" That was Mehran, thinking the neighbour had called him back.

"Who's this?" That was Alex, who recognised the Arabic accent and didn't understand how.

"I can't do this any more." That was Natalie, who had called her mother and fallen onto the wrong line.

Silence.

"Mehran?" Alex almost shouted. "Brother, is that you? How?"

"Alex?" Mehran's voice broke. After all the voice notes, and after a year of silence, for the first time they heard each other in real time.

"Natalie, is that you?" Alex asked.

"Alex?" she almost whispered. "What's going on? Who is this?"

"It's Mehran. From Gaza. The guy from Math Gaza."

She was silent for a long moment. "I know you," she said at last. "I've seen you. At night. At the outpost." And she said nothing more.

And Alex finally understood what he had only half suspected when Mehran sent him the channel. The boy from Gaza who talked about football as if it were philosophy, the one Natalie had told him about in the autumn of 2021, the one he had promised they'd be friends with in a second – it was Mehran. All this time.

They talked for an hour.

Mehran told them about the hunger. The fear. Hisham. Fatma, working in a tent. The dreams that had died.

Alex told them about the sleepless nights. The wall he had sprayed. Emily, whom he had lost.

When he told them about the wall, Mehran was silent for so long that Alex thought the line had dropped again.

"You were here," Mehran said at last. It wasn't a question.

"I was."

"Then maybe you passed our house." Another silence. "I don't know whether to hate you or be glad you're alive."

"I don't know either," Alex answered.

Natalie told them about the hatred gnawing at her. About Roni. About the need for revenge that wouldn't let her breathe.

"I see you in my dreams," Mehran said. "You, the Israelis. I see you, and I hate you. But now, hearing you… you're just people."

"So are we," Alex answered. "We're also just people trying to survive."

Natalie cried. Not like in June, in front of the picture of Noa Argamani, with a little air in it. This time it came from her whole body, without stopping.

"I don't want to hate," she whispered. "But I don't know how to stop."

No one answered her. There was no answer. Only three people breathing on one line.

Then the line went dead. The fault was fixed. Alex tried calling again, and again, and fell into voicemail. Mehran's number didn't work. And Natalie sat in front of the silent phone until morning.

But something had changed. In the middle of the darkest night of the year, one small candle had been lit.

We came to drive out the dark.