Two Wolves

April 2025 · Athens

April arrived with a sun that pretended everything was fine. Alex knew better.

The streets warmed up, people went out more, and the protests became part of the landscape, like trees or benches. In Exarchia, the district that had been his home, he felt like an animal in a zoo: everyone looking, nobody coming close.

In the mornings he went to a Greek course for foreigners at the university, to do something with the hours before his shift at Apollon. In the cafeteria he sat alone in a corner and tried to be invisible. At the next table, students were talking about the marches, about flags, about a red line the world had to draw in front of Israel.

"Red line," one of them said, and it sounded like a sentence being passed.

A girl with a "Free Palestine" pin on her lapel sat down opposite him. She gave him a long look. Blue eyes, and cold. She didn't say a word. Her look shouted everything that needed shouting.

He got up and left. Outside the wind was warm, and didn't warm him. Nothing warmed him any more.

28 April 2025 · Gaza City, Bloomfield

And yet, in April, something good happened.

Reem had been right. A year earlier, when Hapoel went down, she had sat beside Mehran and held his hand: "Next year they'll go up, and you'll see it."

On Monday evening, 28 April, it was settled. 1–0 against Hapoel Ramat Gan at Bloomfield, a header from Roi Alkokin in the 39th minute, and Hapoel Tel Aviv were going back to the Premier League after a single season in the Leumit. At the end of the season they finished top as well, ahead of Hapoel Petah Tikva on goal difference alone.

Mehran watched the promotion game on his phone, on an Egyptian SIM that barely held a signal, with Reem pressed against him on the mattress. When the referee blew, she jumped up, and he put a hand over her mouth so the neighbours wouldn't hear. She bit his finger, and laughed. He couldn't remember when he had last heard her laugh like that.

"I told you," she whispered.

"You did."

He wrote to Alex: "We're back." And Alex, when he got home from his shift that night, sent back a picture of his red scarf, hanging on the wall of the room on Alexandras.

For one moment, a small one, three people who were never meant to know each other were happy about the same thing. Natalie too. She saw the result on her shift, on the sports screen, and smiled to herself without noticing.

4 May 2025, 3:17 · Exarchia

The streets of Exarchia looked like a stage set abandoned after the play. Alex came out of Revolver, the little bar on Kolleti Street that had become his refuge these past months, and the world turned around him at a lazy pace.

In three days, on 7 May, he would be twenty-seven. And he still didn't know what he was doing with his life.

The streets were almost empty. A thin cat crossed the pavement and vanished. And then he saw him.

An old man was sitting on the pavement opposite an abandoned building, trying to catch pages that blew about in the wind like wounded butterflies. Beside him, an empty can, a book whose cover the sun had cracked, a plastic bag. Every time he caught one page, two more flew off.

"Gamóto," the man muttered. Seventy or so, thin white hair, a face beaten by sun and time, and eyes that had stayed sharp.

Alex stopped. Maybe it was the resemblance to his own state. Maybe just the alcohol. He went over.

"Need help?" he asked, in broken Greek.

The old man looked up at him in surprise, and a thin smile stretched across his cracked lips. "English?"

"English is good."

"Then catch me that page," the old man said, pointing. "It's all I have left of the University of Athens."

Alex ran after the page, wrestled a little with the wind, and caught it. A printed sheet, old, with handwriting over it: "A History of Modern Conflicts – Lecture 7".

"You teach history?"

"I did. A professor. Thirty years I taught about wars. About the ways human beings kill each other, and then try to build peace on the graves." He studied Alex. "And you?"

"Alex. From Israel."

Something changed in the old man's eyes. Not hostility. Interest. "Israel," he repeated slowly. "Sit down, Alex from Israel. Let's talk."

Alex sat on the pavement. The cold concrete seeped through his trousers.

"Every war begins when people stop seeing each other as human beings," said the professor. "When you turn the other into a symbol. So tell me, what is it like to be a symbol?"

"What do you mean?"

"When they look at you, they see 'Israeli'. They don't see Alex. Not the drunk boy helping an old man catch pages in the wind. They see 'occupation', or 'victim', depending on which side they're on." He sipped from a small bottle of water. "It's tiring, isn't it?"

Yes. It was tiring.

Without being asked, the professor told him how he had ended up on the pavement. At fifty-five, after twenty-five years with Maria, he found out she had spent three years living with the idea of someone else. The divorce took the house, then the respect, then who he had been. "I didn't know who I was without 'professor' and 'married'. And then I found heroin."

The word hung in the cold air like smoke.

"It solved nothing. But it taught me something about pain. Pain doesn't leave. It only changes shape. You can push it down with drugs, drown it in alcohol, hide it behind anger or politics or religion. And it's still there. And when you hit bottom, you stop being a symbol. You go back to being a human being who suffers."

"And that's good?"

"It's real. And that's where you begin."

Silence. The city breathed around them in the middle of its sleep.

"Tell me about your conflict," said the professor.

Alex felt his head grow heavy. "I don't know what to think any more. I was on the left. I believed in peace, in two states. And then the seventh of October. And my sister…" His voice cracked. "She was in an outpost that fell, for hours. She's still hiding there, in her head. And afterwards I was in Gaza. Part of me wants revenge. Another part still wants to believe."

The professor laid a hand on his shoulder. "When you turn the other into a demon, you give him power over your soul. You're no longer Alex who loves football and music. You're 'the man who hates them', or 'the man who loves them'. You're a reaction."

"So how do you stop it deciding for you?"

The old man looked at the sky, which was beginning to turn grey. "Do you know the story of the two wolves? A grandfather tells his grandson: inside every person two wolves are fighting. One is anger, envy, revenge. The other is love, hope, compassion. The grandson asks: which one wins? And the grandfather answers: the one you feed."

"And what about justice?"

"Justice isn't revenge. Justice is making sure that what happened doesn't happen to anyone else. Revenge is making the one who hurt you suffer. There's a difference."

The sky grew lighter. A distant ambulance. The guitar of a street musician, getting ready for the day.

"Every war ends," said the professor. "All of them. The only question is how much blood is spilled before it does. Your generation can decide how this one ends. In blood, or in sense."

"And how in sense?"

"When people like you, and young Palestinians your age, stop seeing monsters and start seeing people who are suffering. You begin with small things. Like now. You don't see 'a homeless Greek addict' in front of you. You see a human being who needs help."

Alex felt something melt in him, like snow in the sun.

"When's your birthday?" the professor asked suddenly.

"In three days. Twenty-seven."

"A good age to start again."

The sun rose over the rooftops and painted the sky pink and orange. For a moment, the world looked like a place you could live in.

"After everything you've been through," Alex asked, "do you still believe in people?"

The old man thought. "At four in the morning, when I'm sitting on a cold pavement trying to catch pages in the wind, a drunk Israeli boy comes along and helps me. Because he saw a human being." He smiled a torn, beautiful smile. "So, yes."

When Alex stood up, the old man held out the page. "Take it."

"It's yours."

"Take it. Maybe you'll find something in it."

At the bottom of the page, in soft handwriting, it said: "The only way to defeat your enemy is to make him your friend."

A few steps on, Alex turned round. "What's your name?"

"Nikolaos. My friends call me Niko."

"Goodbye, Niko."

"Goodbye, Alex. And happy birthday, in advance."

He walked home with the sun warming his back, and the page in his pocket felt like a seed.

Three days later, on 7 May, at 6:29 in the morning, a message came from Natalie: "Twenty-seven, old man. Don't you die on me." He laughed alone in bed. She had remembered. Last year he hadn't remembered hers.

And at noon, after half a year of silence, a message from Neta: "Happy birthday. Look after yourself over there." He read it three times, wrote "Thanks", and deleted everything he had wanted to write after it.

18 May 2025 · The Hague

Two weeks after the night with Niko he saw it on his phone: a hundred thousand people in The Hague, most of them dressed in red, forming a human chain five kilometres long around the city centre. "Red Line". The biggest protest in the Netherlands in twenty years.

Alex looked at the colour. His red. The red of Hapoel, of the shirts in the stand, of the thread that tied together everything he loved. Now it was the line someone was drawing in front of him.

He took Niko's page out of his pocket and read the line again.

13 June 2025 · Tel Aviv

At three in the morning, on the desk, the big screen turned red.

Israel had struck Iran. Nuclear sites, commanders, scientists. Natalie edited the headlines at a speed she didn't know she had, her fingers finding the way on their own. And in the evening, when the answer came, she was already sitting in the building's shelter with a laptop on her knees, editing from there.

Twelve days. Sirens almost every night. Ballistic missiles that hit buildings in Bat Yam, the Weizmann Institute, the hospital in Beersheba. Twenty-eight dead in Israel. In Iran, according to the health ministry there, more than six hundred. On 22 June the United States bombed Fordow. On 24 June, a ceasefire.

The strange thing was that in the shelter, among neighbours in pyjamas, Natalie calmed down. Here was a danger with a name, with a siren, with an iron door. A danger you could shut a door on.

In Gaza, Mehran went up to the roof at night and watched the streaks crossing the sky, far above him, in both directions. For the first time in almost two years, the sky above him wasn't about him.

"You see?" he said to Azzam. "Over there they hide too."

"And over there they come out in the morning," said Azzam, "and find the world still exists."

Israel's skies closed, and at Athens airport Israelis slept on their bags, waiting for a flight that didn't come. Alex brought them coffee and sandwiches from Apollon, and it turned out that broken Greek and the Hebrew of someone bringing you food in the middle of the night are the same language.