The Dream Only Fell Asleep

July 2025 · Athens

Little by little Alex became a robot. Get up, class, coffee, shift, home. He tried not to be seen, not to be Israeli. It was impossible. His identity was written on his face like a tattoo.

Only one thing he didn't let the robot forget. On 14 July, at midnight exactly, he wrote to Natalie: "Twenty-two. This time I didn't forget." She answered a minute later: "I noticed." And a minute after that: "Thanks, bro."

In the middle of July, in Bogotá, representatives of thirty-two states met for an emergency conference on Gaza. Twelve of them committed to six measures: no weapons for Israel, no docking in their ports for ships carrying military cargo, a review of contracts, investigations, prosecutions. He read it on his phone, in his room, and the words "international accountability", "war crimes", "punishment" rang around him like black bells.

Sophie, the French girl from Apollon, had stayed on in Athens after the season and become his closest friend in the city. A friend, nothing more. They were both careful about the "more", each for reasons of their own. At a dinner with her Greek friends, he felt he was on trial.

"Are you Israeli?" someone asked, and the question hung in the air like a drone over open ground.

He swallowed. "Yes."

"And what do you think of Palestine?"

He heard that question almost every day, and every time his heart shouted: what do you want from me? Who am I, Bibi? The chief of staff? I'm a kid who was born in Israel and did what he was told.

All the eyes waited. His answer would decide whether he was a person or a monster.

"They have rights too," he said at last, quietly.

They looked at him as if he had said the sun was blue. As if it were too little, and too late. Sophie squeezed his hand under the table. He put the other hand in his pocket and found Niko's page there, folded down to the size of a stamp.

July 2025 · Tel Aviv

Summer in Tel Aviv was an oven that cooked anger.

For the first time in months, Natalie went out to a rally. She didn't quite know why. Something inside told her she had to move, to stop being a victim.

There were placards saying "Stop the war" and "A deal now", and at the edge of the square there were others saying "Total victory". And Natalie stood in the middle, and didn't know which way to go.

On the stage, a girl with an Israeli flag over her shoulders read the names of hostages into the microphone, one by one. After her, an older woman went up and read the names of children from Gaza. One by one. Part of the crowd applauded. Part of it booed. Someone shouted "Traitor!"

Natalie felt confusion run down her spine like lightning. How could anyone read the names of both sides in the same breath, when all she saw when she closed her eyes was smoke?

She came home more confused than when she left.

August 2025 · Athens

August in Athens was an oven that never went out. The sun pressed down on the streets like a magnifying glass, and Alex felt like the ant beneath it.

On 3 August he saw the pictures from Sydney: tens of thousands crossing the Harbour Bridge in pouring rain, umbrellas, flags, raincoats. The police said ninety thousand. The organisers said three hundred. "Stop genocide," they shouted, and the word echoed in his room like a curse.

The feeds filled with videos. Children in Gaza with big, thirsty eyes. Houses turned into layers of concrete. People running towards aid lorries. He knew some of it was real, some exaggerated, some fabricated. And he could no longer tell the difference. And that, more than anything, frightened him: that he was beginning not to want to.

August 2025 · Tel Aviv

The end of summer in Tel Aviv was a time of despair. The air was thick with sweat and fear.

Natalie's flat became a laboratory for experiments on herself. The cannabis was no longer enough, so she added alcohol. And when that wasn't enough either, another pill. Something to sleep, something for the anxiety, something to stop thinking.

The mirror in the bedroom had been cracked since an evening she didn't remember. In it she saw a face she hardly recognised. Sunken eyes, pale skin, cracked lips. Like a draft of herself that had been half rubbed out.

"Who are you?" she asked the reflection.

The answer frightened her more than the question.

That night, at three, she opened the Math Gaza channel. The last video had gone up two months earlier. Mehran, in front of a whiteboard, solving an equation with two unknowns. At the end of the video he smiled at the camera and said, in English: "Two unknowns. One solution. Don't give up on it."

She wrote a comment. Deleted it. Wrote it again. Deleted it.

22 August 2025 · Gaza City

August in Gaza was a month of waiting. Waiting for food that didn't come, for a quiet that didn't arrive, for answers to questions that maybe had none.

On 22 August the experts of the IPC, the body that measures hunger around the world, declared famine in Gaza City. The first ever confirmed in the Middle East. Israel rejected the findings, saying they rested on partial data and that aid was getting in. Mehran didn't need a report. He saw Reem, whose belt got a new hole every week.

That evening a message came from a cousin who lived in the south of the Strip: "They're ready to take us."

Who? Where? Why? The message hung in the air like smoke. Hope or threat? He didn't know. People talked about "voluntary" emigration, about faraway countries, about flights. Others said it was just a pretty word for expulsion.

He went into his father's room and sat on the old bed, which still smelled of tobacco and broken hopes. On the little table lay his father's old notebook, the one Mehran had been writing in for a year now, from the back pages, because the front ones were his father's. He had never dared read them.

Now he opened it. Ahmed had written poems in it, it turned out. Mehran hadn't known. He turned the pages, and on one of them found a line in shaky handwriting:

"The dream didn't die. It only fell asleep."

He didn't answer his cousin.