“I don’t get it.” Yaron, the soldier next to Ofir, a skinny kid of Iraqi Jewish descent, pointed his chin at the ground strewn with stones. “They must be dismantling their own homes to round up all these rocks.”
Soon, Ofir thought. Soon this would all be over. A few months ago Arafat and Rabin shook hands in front of the White House, shook hands in front of the world, in front of his mother, who collapsed on the sofa in front of the television with her hand over her chest, while his stepfather, eyes shining, whispered, “Would you look at that? That’s what three thousand years of fighting coming to an end looks like.” Soon the army might be pulling out of Gaza City and Jericho. Maybe he wouldn’t have to serve a whole three years?
Over the clamor of the square floated the adhan. The hallowed call to prayer fanned the riot’s fire. More plastic bottles and cardboard boxes were thrown into the flames, and the noxious fumes thickened. Young men began pitching stones at the soldiers. Maybe that’s what was missing from his composition: the sound of fear. Could that be it? It wasn’t only about taking flight, but taking flight from something . . . Ofir rolled his head to release the tension in his neck. If it was the sound of fear, he had a lot more work to do. But he would do it. He wasn’t aiming for good enough. Now every muscle ached to be at the piano. While he scanned the square, he hummed the melody, listening for where he could balance the—
Smack! Stone, just below the groin. Inner thigh. Ofir struggled to withhold a cry. God damn it. Fuck. He clenched his teeth. His whole body clenched, muscles gripping the bones. Tears escaped. He couldn’t help it. Also, a little urine.
When his breath returned, and the world reemerged from behind a sheet of tears, his eyes picked out a Palestinian boy about his age, sixteen or seventeen, not thirty yards away. The boy stood still and looked right at him. His China-made fake American T-shirt read: I’M A HOT DOG, MAN! At the end of one of his long skinny arms was another stone. The boy smiled at Ofir, a smile that out of context might have seemed good-natured. Ofir, pretending not to notice, scanned the square without letting the boy slip from his vision.
Behind the boy, to his left, was the last entryway into the kasbah. He had only seen pictures of the kasbah’s narrow, cobblestoned alleyways, the same National Geographic–type shots his American doppelgänger would have seen: women in headdresses milling past barrels of vivid spices; butchers’ stands with raw carcasses dangling from hooks; silversmiths’ workshops glistening in the shadows like polished buttons on a dark coat. It was so near, but so foreign. So near, but that entrance into the kasbah might as well have been on the other side of the world. It was strange living next door to the other side of the world.
The boy ran at Ofir, testing. Ofir lowered his head, leveled his eyes on him. The boy stopped. Now he was only twenty or so yards away. Ofir looked to his commander, but Dan squinted elsewhere.
“Yalla!” Ofir waved at the boy to move back. “Go back!”
The boy stood his ground.
“Yalla! Back! Back!”
The boy raised his arm and pitched the stone so hard and fast, Ofir barely managed to skip-dance out of the way. The stone whooshed an inch past his ear.
“Fucking asshole.” Yaron shook his head.
Gadi, standing on the other side of Ofir, appearing even shorter in a lineup, said, “That was close, Ofi.”
Ofir straightened his ammunition belt and took up his position again, widening his stance. The Arab boy laughed at him. Of course. He must have looked hilarious, loaded down with an M-16, a helmet, combat boots, pockets full of grenades, and dancing around a stone.
The frustration Ofir had suppressed all morning rose inside him, a tingling, angry upswell. It surged through every cell in his body and gathered in his head. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to fucking be here. Fuck this kid! If it weren’t for fuckers like him and all this fucking bullshit, he could be in the dining hall right now working on his music, or, better yet, he could be packing for fucking university. Like his doppelgänger. He hated the Arab boy. He hated them for making him hate them—
No. Stop. He took a deep inhale. We are all human. An artist can’t lose sight of that. An artist has to hold on to the humanity. We are all pawns of history. Aren’t we? Are we? He couldn’t think straight.
He pretended to survey the square, looking left and right, as if he could see anything other than the boy. They were two teenagers locked in a game, a game that might be photographed by an ambitious journalist and put on the front page of the New York Times. The paper would sit on his doppelgänger’s kitchen table, next to a box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, him looking like the bad guy. It wouldn’t say underneath it that the only thing the teenager with the M-16 wanted to be doing at that moment was playing the piano. Ofir tried to remember: Arafat and Rabin shook hands. In front of the world. Peace was here. This was the last bang of thunder before the sky cleared. Six months in Nablus, though. He was so tired.
The boy, not taking his eyes off Ofir, crouched down and picked up another stone. He stepped forward. Ofir gripped his rifle, bent his knees, braced to dance around like a soldier-clown again. Face twisting from the effort, the boy hurled the stone. It flew. Ofir could see it. Then he couldn’t. He jerked to the left, the right, and, jumping back, took it right in the chin.
He buckled forward, retching. No pretending it didn’t hurt this time. Dark blood dripped onto the dirt, the dirt his stepfather liked to say these two peoples had been fighting over since the Book of Kings. He brought his fingers to his chin. He was going to need stitches.
Gadi laid his hand on his back. “Ofir, you all right?”
Ofir raised his head. The Palestinian boy came into sharp focus as the rest of the world, Gadi’s voice, the burning tires, the wailing alarms, even the sun itself, receded. Now there really was only him and the boy. The Palestinian boy was everything. He fucked up his chin, killed his father, made his mom a fat tearful mess. Even put his grandmother in Treblinka. Why? Because the Palestinian boy in his stupid I’M A HOT DOG, MAN! T-shirt became the face of the undying hate for the Jews. Everything that kept him from his fucking piano.
Dan placed his hand on his shoulder. “Go to the police station and sit it out.”
Ofir stared at the boy, and the boy stared back with an expression that said, Your move.
“Nu, Ofir. Go to the station . . .”
Dan’s words trailed behind him. He was running. Running like water after a dam breaks. Running like blood through the veins. And it felt so good. Free. It took the boy three or four seconds to realize what was happening and make a break for it. If he was going to catch the boy, it had to be before the kasbah, and that wasn’t going to be easy, weighed down by all this gear. The boy stumbled on a rusty exhaust pipe, and Ofir gained a few yards.
He was reaching out for the hot dog T-shirt when the boy ran into the shade of the kasbah. Ofir jogged to a halt and watched the boy beat it down the cobblestoned alleyway. He stood with his heart pounding, not ready to stop running, to calm down, to turn around and go back to the usual hell. He flipped out the rubber cartridges, chambered in a live round, and ran into the kasbah.
The shouts and sirens of the riot were dampened inside. The cool air smelled of cumin and wet stone. Ofir dodged a woman in a black robe and white headscarf. Otherwise the street was deserted. All the men and boys were at the riot, the women and girls indoors. Ofir didn’t glance behind to see if he was being followed; he didn’t want to know.
The boy was nowhere in sight. He must have taken the first turn off the alleyway. This lane