I couldn't communicate with Daniel's grandmother because in recent years she'd forgotten all her languages apart from Russian. Daniel, who had taken a few courses in Russian so he'd be able to talk to her, did his best to translate. He had also found a young Russian woman, Elena, who was willing to come over every evening and read to his grandmother. Elena was formal and prim, like a governess in a Victorian novel; according to Granny she was well educated and had a wonderful reading voice. They were now halfway through The Possessed, which Daniel was reading as well, out of curiosity.

I phoned the base to say I was sick, but I didn't have a doctor's note, I had not followed correct procedure, and I was afraid to go back.

Things were not working out for me in the army. My life after my father left had been easy; I was coddled and indulged. Flash floods of distress came over me only at night, as I lay stretched out on the temporary sofa beds of various surrogate parents, feeling slightly sick from too many homemade french fries dipped in hummus-my favorite food, and therefore always included in either the afternoon or late-evening meal. My mother would have been appalled by this diet, and I was slowly expanding out of all my clothes; they were ripping at the seams and I held them together with safety pins.

The army jolted me out of this epicurean reverie. No more french fries, for one thing, and the mashed potatoes in the mess hall were watery. All the same, I was hopeful at first. This would be a good chance to get back into shape. I was also excited by the prospect of living in close quarters with the other conscripts. When I was little, an only child in a seven-room flat that offered a view of the vast, theophanic desert from every window, I slept with a copy of the children's book Madeline under my pillow. I'd imagine the two rows of beds in which the lucky girls at Miss Pavel's convent school were safely tucked, and I'd transport myself to Paris, to Madeline's dormitory. I often fell asleep clinging to this fantasy. I would not be Madeline herself; she was too extroverted for me. But I would be her best friend, and I would tell her my secrets. In school I had many friends, but no one became my true bosom friend, as they were called in the novels I read. No one knew more about me than I was willing to disclose.

Now Madeline was coming to life, more or less: girls in rows of bunk beds above me and on both sides, putting away combs and makeup in the little compartments assigned to us, chattering, laughing hysterically at nothing. One girl laughed so hard she began to snort and the snorts made us laugh even harder. Then a male officer came into the barracks to say a few words. We couldn't stop giggling, and he was embarrassed and confused and suddenly self-conscious, though he tried not to show it, and he would probably have succeeded if you weren't looking hard, but I was. He told us to settle down, we weren't in nursery school. When he left we all began to sing spontaneously. One of our sappy nationalist songs; I suppose we did it in order to calm down. Our homeland, O our homeland. Everyone in my barracks was nice. Maybe I was lucky, or maybe we had to be nice to each other because otherwise the whole experience would have been unbearable.

But the pleasures of getting proper exercise and living with girls my age were eclipsed by the difficulties that beset me almost immediately. I didn't like getting up early, and I didn't like obeying orders, especially orders that felt like bullying, though I was told that my attitude was the problem, and I agreed: my attitude was indeed the problem. I lacked enthusiasm, I lacked patriotism, I was selfish and failed to see the larger picture, which was that you couldn't have a good army if everyone slept in and the sergeant was a pleasant person- and if we didn't have a good army, where would we be? One time my sergeant told me it was a good thing my mother had died so she wouldn't have to see what a loser her daughter was, and I cried. My friends tried to console me, and one of them, Sheera, gave me a gold locket and told me to keep a photograph of my mother inside and wear it around my neck. I tried to reform, partly because I wanted to and partly to avoid cleaning more toilets, but I didn't succeed. My heart wasn't in it. Somewhere, it seemed, my parents had failed to instill in me the right values. Or so it was suggested. I was very hurt by the accusation, especially since my mother wasn't around to defend herself, but they were right, of course. My parents were skeptics.

So Daniel and I left his grandmother's flat, finally, in order to set a date for our wedding. Armed with proof of an impending marriage, I returned to the base to clean some more toilets and collect my things. "You're lucky," the officer who released me said. "You're lucky you found someone to take you off our hands. And maybe we're lucky too ... Well, congratulations."

I handed in my uniform and left the base. I was free again.

I sat with my back against a storefront, next to two young Palestinian men. One of them spoke to me. "I can't go anywhere," he said. "I can't move, I can't work." He was still hopeful, he thought things might improve, but his friend had given up entirely. His friend stared into space, his eyes set; he didn't believe anything would ever change. I asked for permission to photograph them. They were an interesting pair: one of them energetic, ready to try new things, the other convinced that they were all doomed forever and amazed at the naivete of anyone with faith in the future. I knelt on the sidewalk to get a good angle and took several photographs of the two friends. The angry man's face was closed and still, but his friend smiled for the camera. I had rarely met a Palestinian who was uncomfortable in front of a camera. Palestinian men and children liked being photographed no matter where they were; the men stared straight into the lens, and the children lined up in front of me with smiles as soon as they saw my camera. Women preferred to be photographed indoors, though some women were shy even then, and would urge me to take pictures of their children instead.

"What are your names?" I asked.

"I'm Ismail. This is Fayez."

Ella, a journalist who wrote about Palestinian affairs, sat down beside us and handed out nectarines. Ella had won several international awards for her writing, though none here. She was a passionate person, but her articles were controlled and professional; she could have been reporting on fluctuations in stock prices. After all, the facts spoke for themselves. There was no need to do anything other than record them.

"What's happening?" I asked her.

"I guess we'll be going home," she sighed, biting into her nectarine.

"You've cut your hair." She'd had shoulder-length hair for as long as I'd known her, but it was cropped now. Her new haircut made her look a little like Ingrid Bergman.

Ella smiled. "Lice. It was driving me crazy, the shampoos didn't work, so I got up in the middle of the night and chopped it all off."

Ismail heard us and said, "Stay away from me!" and the three of us laughed. His friend, Fayez, wanted to know what we were laughing about, and Ella repeated what she'd said in Arabic. Fayez nodded, and though he didn't smile, his eyes relented a little. He was amused in spite of himself.

The organizers announced that the demonstration was over and we would be going home. Ismail cried out, "Why, why!" He wanted us to stay, try harder. After all, we were citizens, immune from danger; surely there was something we could do: throw ourselves on the soldiers, maybe, or sit on the road and refuse to move, even if it took days and weeks, until something was done.

I looked at him helplessly. He saw my distress and tried to console me. "At least we have no dead this time, thanks to you."

His friend grumbled something in Arabic.

"What's he saying?" I asked.

Ismail was embarrassed. "He's asking me what I expect you to do. Don't listen to him. He's in a bad mood."

"The girl who had the seizure, is she all right?" I asked. Rafi had vanished; I didn't know whether he was still in the ambulance or merely lost in the crowd.

"Yes, she made it."

Ella said something in Arabic, and we all shook hands good-bye. Ella's words seemed to have had an uplifting effect on the two friends. "What did you say?" I asked her as we walked away.

"Just wished them well."

Ella and I walked with the group through Ein Mazra'a to the stone field. We took a longer route this time, and the Palestinians gave us cold water to drink. When we reached the borders of the town they said, Well, that's it, we can't go further, our IDs are orange. Thank you for coming, they said. God will bless you. Thank you for your courage. We want to be your brothers, and to protect you.

We crossed the field to the road, where our large solid buses were waiting for us. They looked like alien spaceships in their incongruous complacency.

Ella and I were on separate buses. "Take care, Dana," she said.

Everyone climbed onto the buses and sank down on the cushioned seats, sweaty and satisfied. This was the way it was: we left the Palestinians behind, we left them in hell, but people were laughing and talking, because you had to survive and you did it by contracting into your own narrow life, your own personal life, distinct from the conflict and the deaths and the suffering. And besides, the event had been a success, within the confines of goals that were also narrowed and thinned down: there had been a demonstration, even if we had not reached Mejwan or seen Idris. We had walked side by side with the Palestinians, we had shown that it was possible. And at least the activists who'd stayed overnight had visited Idris. He was in constant pain, they said, and money had to be raised for a stay at a rehabilitation facility in England. He'd been a sports instructor and youth leader before he was shot. The army had promised an investigation, but nothing ever came of such promises.

Through the streaked bulletproof window of the bus I watched the last demonstrators put away their signs. I was keeping an eye out for Odelia. Rafi sat down next to me.

"I'm saving this seat for my friend," I said.

"Odelia? She's on the bus behind us."

"Oh. okay, then. How's the girl?"

"She's fine. Now let's see what the orders are for today." He took a sheet of paper out of his pocket. It was covered with notes, handwritten in green pen.

"Things I have to do," he said, smiling. "My wife makes lists for me."

I looked out the window again; I tried to ignore him.

But he said, "I've wanted to talk to you for a long time."

I turned toward him. "I have seen you, come to think of it. You had shorter hair. You had no hair at all."

"Yes, my hair grows fast, I'm due for another haircut. Where do you live?"

"Opposite the City Beach Hotel."

"Really? The manager there is a good friend of mine. We were in the same unit. Coby, do you know him? Tall, dark hair, glasses?"

"Yes, I've seen him around. I use their fax machine sometimes."

"Give him my regards."

"Okay," I said.

"Did you take a lot of photos?"

"Four rolls."

"Am I in any of them?"

"Yes, one." I didn't want to look at him, I didn't want to think about him. He gave up and didn't speak to me again.

The buses arrived at the park and by then everyone had to pee. We found bushes and trees. Rafi was using a tree not far from mine. And when I rose and pulled up my underwear I saw that he was looking at me, and not smiling, and not turning away.

My father met Gitte when they were both sixteen; Gitte's parents owned a jewelry company with interests in South Africa and the family moved there for a few months. Gitte and my father took violin lessons at the local music academy on the same afternoon, and my father began waiting until Gitte's lesson was over so he could walk her home. They fell in love, and after she left they exchanged passionate and frequent love letters, until Gitte stopped writing and finally confessed that she had met someone else. In fact, so had my father, and he was relieved. He'd met my mother. The two of them tried to escape apartheid by moving to Israel, which later made them laugh at themselves. "From the frying pan into the falafel," my father used to say.

My father was an engineer, and he loved to sing classical choral music. He dreamed of joining a choir, but had to content himself with singing in the shower or providing vigorous vocal accompaniment to the Munich Bach Choir in our living room. He seemed particularly inspired when he washed the dishes. Denn alles Fleisch es ist wei Gras, und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen wie des Grases Blumen. This was fine when I was very little, but he soon became a social liability and I gave him strict instructions to restrain himself when my friends were over. My father was not a demonstrative person; he was shy when he wasn't singing, and he let my mother run the household and make all the decisions. But we read the newspaper together. From as far back as I can remember he would sit beside me on the carpet, spread the newspaper in front of us, and comment on the stories: "Unabashed corruption," he'd say. "Shortsightedness, insanity." He explained things in simple terms so I could understand them, and by first grade I probably knew more about our parliamentary system (and its many defects) than any other seven-year-old in the country.

His brother was a doctor, and the two of them, my father and his brother, took me to refugee camps when they went to do volunteer work there. My uncle, an energetic man with a good sense of humor, would do the driving. He liked to sing too, though his specialty was drinking songs or folk classics like "Waltzing Matilda." I would sit in the back and watch the view change from city to town to village and finally to refugee camp.

No one I knew visited the camps, and I didn't tell anyone at school that we went, because the one time I mentioned it, there was a big scandal. In third grade we had to write a composition on the topic "How My Family and I Contribute to the State." My father suggested I write about our visits to the camps, and I took his advice, though I knew we were both being deviant: he in his suggestion and I in my compliance. I described the poverty, the living conditions, and what we did. My uncle saw patients and distributed medicine (which he stole from the State, but I didn't mention that), and my father fixed things that were broken. I played with the local children, who competed to have me visit their homes-a dizzying assortment of structures crammed together and piled up like boxes one on top of the other. In these neat little rooms I would stuff myself with sweet baklava and empty my bag of toys on the floor. The Palestinian children spoke Arabic and I spoke Hebrew, but at that age language is malleable. We spent hours exploring the possibilities of the treasures I'd brought: marbles, dolls, trucks, airplanes, cards, Pick Up sticks, dominoes. I gave a detailed account of these visits in my essay, and concluded, In this way we contribute to people who are under occupation, we show them that we are not all horrible, and we help the State see what it's doing wrong.

My parents were called in, and my mother, who was not in the habit of keeping her thoughts to herself, had a huge fight with the principal. She called him an impotent, narrow-minded pimp, a poor excuse for an educator, a limp, spineless State puppet. She said she felt sorry for him and sorry that her daughter had to be exposed to his stupidity. Then she swept out of his office like a diva and slammed the door. I was sitting in the hallway outside, and I felt both proud and dismayed. I admired my mother but I took after my father, who was averse to conflict.

I was happy about our move to the city; I had just reached the age at which small towns become irredeemably boring. My mother's death two years later left my father literally speechless: for several weeks he walked around in a daze, confused and unable to concentrate on anything. When he finally began speaking he was mostly incoherent, and he sat and stared into space for hours, a puzzled look on his face. I think he contacted Gitte because the only life he could make sense of was one that had not included my mother. Gitte was divorced, lonely, and excited to hear from him. Letters with foreign stamps began arriving at our place; shortly afterward my father flew to Belgium for a week, and when he returned he announced that he was going to marry Gitte, and that I would be happy in Belgium. I didn't believe him.

He became convinced, later, that his anachronistic flight into the arms of love was irresponsible and that, like Anna Karenina, he had made a drastic choice. For as a result of the disorder in my life after he left, I did not graduate from high school. I failed all my subjects apart from English, which didn't require any exertion on my part. I was bilingual, not only because my parents spoke English at home, but also because I loved to read novels about the mystifying world of adults and the best ones came from my parents' bookshelves: I was particularly fond of Iris Murdoch and George Eliot, but I was also a Miss Reed addict.

He blamed himself, but I felt he'd made the right decision and I was happy for him. His letters suggested an ideal life: a two-hundred-year-old house with sweeping staircases and secret panels; a place in the local men's choir; close friends who came over for dinner and chess. He often spent his evenings reading by the fireplace or, when it was warm, on a patio facing the tulip garden; his French was improving and he'd picked up some Flemish as well. As for Gitte, she had not disappointed him. He said she spoiled him, and his letters were full of cassoulet and souffle a l'orange: his tone when he described these dishes was reverent. It was obvious that he and Gitte were generally compatible. They both liked theater and books and conversation and, oddly, knitting; my eccentric father had taken up knitting, which he found "relaxing, touching, and spiritually satisfying." This late romance was the inspiration for one of my novels, though of course I had to change most of the details. My father was transformed from a slightly overweight, myopic engineer to a young, dashing horse breeder (who obviously did not knit). My mother became delicate and innocent, a flower taken in her youth. As for Gitte, I had never met her, and so was free to invent her both in fiction and in life. My father sent me a photo of the two of them next to their large house, but the photo was taken from a distance, and Gitte is wearing a wide-brimmed hat which throws a concealing shadow over most of her face.

Benny was sitting at my kitchen table when I came home from Ein Mazra'a. He lived upstairs from me and had a key to my flat, in case I lost mine; sometimes when I wasn't home he went inside and waited for me. I was on friendly terms with everyone in my building: my legless and maddening neighbor Volvo, who had moved into the small one-room flat adjacent to ours shortly after Daniel left; Jacky, former rock star and prince of the city; Tanya, former prostitute, now a successful fortune-teller; and Tanya's mother. Benny lived on the top floor, next to two large flats that had remained empty for as long as anyone could remember because of some dispute that had been tied up in the courts for decades.

Benny was a restless, impatient person. He drove a taxi, and lately he'd been struggling to make ends meet; the tourist industry had nearly vanished and the collapsing economy affected everyone. On the other hand more people were taking taxis because they were afraid of being blown up on a bus. That helped a little, but not enough.

Benny had other worries, too. He had a very emotional relationship with his ex-wife Miriam. The two of them still fought and still had sex, behind her boyfriend's back. He hated her and loved her and couldn't rid himself of his desire for her. He vowed to quit smoking and he vowed to stop seeing Miriam, but he hadn't had much success with either plan.

He was burly and hairy, though in recent years he'd started balding, much to his dismay. His real age was forty-one, but he liked to tell people he was thirty-five. He did repairs in my flat, bought me small practical gifts like coat hooks, and worried about my safety. Often he gave me long, mournful lectures about my political views, trying to explain, patiently and hopelessly, why I was wrong to help and trust the enemy. He pitied the Palestinians too-but their miserable situation wasn't our fault. It was their fault, because they had terrible leaders and because they hated us and would never accept us and because they would always want all the land, including our State. And for the past seventy years they'd been trying to kill us; even before the State was founded they'd already started with their wild attacks, plunging knives into women and children, slicing off their heads.

At other times he spoke just as mournfully and hopelessly about Miriam. He worried that she was neglecting their children; he didn't trust her new boyfriend. A self-centered pig, he said, who was drawing Miriam away from the children, and she was too blind to grasp what was going on. What she saw in that poor excuse for a human being, that petty crook who was born with his brain in his arse and his nose in other people's arses, he would never know. Benny was a devoted father, and sometimes when I walked along the seashore with my jeans rolled up to my knees I'd see him sitting Buddha-style on a blanket, surrounded by his four small children. One would ride on his broad shoulders while the others poured sand over his crossed legs or tried to impress him with their acrobatics. He'd grin at me from the midst of his clan, but he'd never invite me to join him.

"Benny, I'm too tired for a visit today, I'm worn out from the demo." I took off my shoes and flopped down on my bed.

He sighed. "Why, why, why do you do these things? Where were you, anyhow?" He sat down at the edge of the bed.

I told him about the demonstration. It had not been reported on the news, he didn't know it had taken place.

"The last place on earth I would want to be, the last thing on earth I would want to do," he said, shaking his head.

"I'm sure there are a zillion things you would want to do even less," I said. "Swallowing a live cockroach. Getting into a booth full of scorpions. Shooting a child."

"You have an answer for everything." He sighed again. "So I can't stay? I just had another visit from Miriam, I need someone sane to talk to."

"I'm sure I'm as messed up as Miriam. Come back later, I'm going to sleep."

"Your eyes are red."

"From the tear gas."

"I can't understand why you do these things to yourself. On behalf of people who are trying to kill you, people who cheer every time a bus with someone like you on it explodes."

"Please, Benny. I'm tired."

"Okay, I'm going, do you need anything?"

"Just sleep."

"What does tear gas feel like?' he asked, curious.

"It stings. Your lungs burn. You feel like throwing up, or at least I do. You get scared."

"Poor Dana."

"No, poor Palestinians."

Benny sighed heavily. "You have a good heart, Dana, but you refuse to see the writing on the wall. I'll drop by later, unless business picks up."

"Great." I shut my eyes, and the sound of Benny shutting the door as he left was already mingling with a dream.

First Daniel and I fixed up our flat, then we married, and then we fought.

When Daniel and I bought the three rooms that became our ground-floor flat, they looked as if they'd drawn inspiration from those black-and-white Time-Life photos of inner-city blight: broken sinks, cakes of dirt in every corner, spotted mirrors nailed to the wall. Prostitutes had lived in the building, and they'd left behind not only mirrors but also their shiny damask bedspreads. Daniel was horrified when I suggested we wash the bedspreads and use them as sofa covers.

The building was also stained and run down. But this was prime seaside property, and even the smallest of the three flats was very expensive. Daniel's parents were heavily in debt, so my father came to the rescue. "It's the least I can do, duckie," he said.

Daniel's younger sister Nina moved in with their grandmother, though she chose to sleep in the living room and to use the converted balcony for meditation. Nina was twenty-two and recently divorced; she was also unemployed and "off men" for the time being. Moving in with Granny suited her; in any case it was better than going back to her parents' house. At Granny's she could play tapes of her guru's teachings and listen to Ravi Shankar to her heart's content. She had even started giving yoga lessons to Elena, the prim Russian woman who came to read to Granny, and who, as it turned out, had back problems.

Daniel and I set up a tent in one of the rooms and lived in it while we worked on the flat. We broke down walls, retiled the floor, plastered and painted. Daniel was good with his hands, and he engraved small angels in the molding along the ceiling. The walls were replaced by arched passages: Daniel didn't like doors.

When the flat was ready we folded up the tent and bought a bed and olive green sofas and a faded olive and pink Turkish carpet for the living room. Then we invited everyone we knew to celebrate our marriage. My father arrived without Gitte, who had lost her parents in an air crash and was afraid of flying. She sent profuse apologies and a charming tapestry of tiny happy people enjoying themselves in a park. The wedding party lasted all night: over three hundred guests crowded into the two empty apartments on the third floor, which we had illegally taken over for the evening. Eventually the party spread to the beach, where we danced to live music and stuffed ourselves with catered food until sunrise.

In the early morning, after all the guests had left, Daniel and I walked slowly back to our flat and flopped down onto the new green sofas. The caterers had tidied up, more or less, but gifts lay scattered everywhere, a sea of boxes and packages. The smell of grass and hashish and ordinary cigarette smoke hung heavily in the air.

"The emperors of hash and grass have fled," I said, "leaving a trail behind them."

"You're more stoned than I thought."

"I'm not. I didn't smoke."

"It's enough to breathe in the air here."

"It's childish to humanize objects. I read that somewhere. But I can't help it. You've married a childish person, Daniel."

This was Daniel's cue to say something affectionate and reassuring, but he didn't answer. It was the first time he used silence against me, and I understood that we were moving toward a fight, though I was still hoping to stop it.

We were not used to discord. Until then we had only wondered, day after day and night after night, at how alike we were: the coincidences were almost alarming, and had we been inclined toward mysticism we might have posited fantastic phenomena: twins in another lifetime, carriers of sibling souls. We had the same hairbrush and toothbrush; we owned the same scarf, which we had both picked up at the same street stall. Our handwriting was nearly identical. In high school we had both given oral presentations on manipulation in the media, and a week before we met we had clipped the same cartoon from the newspaper. We even had male and female versions of the same name.

And now, married, exhausted, trying to hold on to my happiness, I said, "I wonder how a person knows. I wonder how you know when you see someone that this person is right for you, just by watching them sing and tell dumb jokes onstage."

"You must have a sixth sense, Dana. I had no clue at all."

"I know."

"I barely noticed you at the wedding."