My new roommate was an Arab from I’billin in the Galilee. I’ll never forget the expression on his face and the dance of joy he did when he came into the room. “They told me I was in Eleph. They sent me a letter — Eleph, it said — and here I am up on Mount Scopus,” he exclaimed. “My friends over at Eleph are going to die when they see this. A steam radiator, on campus. Do you know what Eleph looks like? It’s where they throw all the Arabs. Maybe they started letting Christians get rooms on Mount Scopus. Maybe that’s what happened. This is a miracle. I’m telling you, it’s the miracle of the Virgin Mary.” He kissed his cross, and frowned when he found out I was a Muslim, but he did not leave. “What does it matter — Muslim, Christian? At the end of the day it says Arab next to both of our names.”

Before leaving the house that night, Ruchaleh said, “I need one of the ID cards.” I took one out and gave it to her. The other one I put in my wallet. She opened up the little blue book, smiled, and tears started to well in her eyes. “Everything’s going to work out,” she said, and then she hugged me hard. “Go, go,” she said, “get out of here,” and she shut the door behind me.

GOLDSTAR

I want to be like them. That’s the sentence that was bouncing around my head as I followed Noa into the Ha’sira pub. She said “hey” to a few of the people there, exchanged kisses with a few others, introduced me to them. “Guys, this is Yonatan.”

She walked over to the DJ booth. The guy looked familiar. He slipped off his headphones and smiled at her, leaned over his turntables and his mixer, and kissed her on the cheek.

“Come here,” I read her lips as she motioned me over. “Meet Aviad,” she said. “He’s third-year, visual media.”

I shook his hand.

I want to be like them.

Noa asked what I wanted to drink and smiled when I said red wine, suggesting that I go with beer. I agreed. She preferred sitting at the bar, she said, but we took seats at a little wooden table in the corner because all the bar stools were taken. The DJ played some Radiohead and Noa moved her body to the music, saying that at this hour you could still enjoy the music.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” she said.

The more the place filled up, the faster the music got. Aviad played some soft Underworld, then switched to Plastic Man and then back to faster tracks from Underworld. Noa was a better drinker than I was, but she always waited for me to catch up. I struggled to keep the pace, which she thought was funny. I could see that off to the side of the bar the tiny dance floor was starting to fill up, people moving their bodies gently in front of the DJ, not wanting to be the first ones to really dance. I volunteered to buy the third round, and took my place in the crush around the bar. Noa smiled at me each time someone pushed past me. She wanted to get up and come help me but I signaled to her to stay put and save our seats. I was finally able to get two pints of Goldstar and make it back to the table.

I want to be like them. That’s what I thought when Noa said this was the only place she liked to go out in this ghost town of a city. “The nerd-in-disguise hangout,” she said.

Most of the people looked like they were students and I recognized many of the faces from the halls of Bezalel. I’d never been in a place like that, and I liked it. I’d been out to pubs before with Ruchaleh, but they were the kind of places that had soft light and cool jazz, nothing like what was happening here. I had to stop myself from shivering when I thought of Ruchaleh. What was she doing at this moment? How did she feel? I should have been with her. I shouldn’t have left. If everything was going according to plan, then the ambulance should have already left with Yonatan and taken him to the morgue in Shaare Zedek. They don’t check anything there, Ruchaleh had said, it’s just a refrigerated storage room where they keep the merchandise until it’s picked up. Anyone who asked about the funeral would be told that Yonatan, without her even knowing, had decided back in high school to give his body to science.

“What?” Noa asked. I couldn’t hear her.

“Nothing,” I mumbled, and I tried to return to her, to the pub, the music. “L’chaim,” I said, raising my glass, and she raised hers. “L’chaim,” I said again as I brought the glass to my lips and tried to remember that legendary hero from before the days of Islam, a-Zir, who was infamous for his love of women and alcohol. On the night that his father, the head of the tribe, was murdered, they came to the drunk poet and told him the news, to which he said, a pitcher of wine in his hand, “Ilyom hmar wa’ad amar.” Wine today, action tomorrow. The following day he embarked on one of the most brutal vengeance campaigns in the history of the Arabs.

Beer today, I said to myself and looked around. Today I want to be like them. Today I want to be one of them, to go into the places they’re allowed to go, to laugh the way they laugh, to drink without having to think about God. I want to be like them. Free, loose, full of dreams, able to think about love. Like them. Like those who started to fill the dance floor with the knowledge that it was theirs, they who felt no need to apologize for their existence, no need to hide their identity. Like them. Those who never looked for suspicious glances, whose loyalty was never questioned, whose acceptance was always taken for granted. Today I want to be like them without feeling like I’m committing a crime. I want to drink with them, dance with them, without feeling as though I’m trespassing in a foreign culture. To feel like I belong, without feeling guilty or disloyal. And what exactly was I being disloyal to?

“You coming?” Noa asked through the haze of house music.

“I don’t know how to dance,” I said.

She got out of her chair, leaned over the little table between us, and brought her mouth close to my ear.

“Neither do I,” she whispered, and I could feel her breath penetrating my ear, bringing me back to life.

The lawyer couldn’t say definitively whether he was asleep or awake. He heard the morning noises of his wife and kids, as he did every morning, but they seemed to be coming from somewhere else, somewhere foreign and unfamiliar. He opened his eyes and hoped to see his daughter standing in front of him but she was not there. The lawyer tried, unsuccessfully, to put his mind in order, and then he gave up and went back to sleep. When he awoke again he wasn’t sure how much time had passed, seconds or hours, before the din of the house reached him again. This time he rose to a familiar world. He knew he was sleeping in a bed, in his daughter’s room, in his house, and he heard footfalls on the stairs, coming his way.

“You still sleeping?” his wife asked in a soft voice, laying a hand on his forehead to see if he had a fever. “You’re a little warm,” she said, even though the lawyer knew he wasn’t sick. All he was was tired, exhausted. He had started reading The Kreutzer Sonata, sure he would never get past the first line, but he had found himself drawn into the plot, which involved a train, a young man, a woman, talk of love, and a character who murdered his wife and starts to tell his story.

“Mommy,” his daughter said, her feet pattering behind her mother.

“I asked you to watch your brother for a second,” his wife said, raising her voice.

“I know,” the girl said. “But I’m tired, I don’t want to.”

“So?” his wife said to him. “What do you want to do? You want to take it easy at home a little today?”

“No,” he said, flipping the blanket off. “I have a hearing in court at eight thirty.”

“Mommy,” the girl said. “When are you going to brush my hair?”

“Give your hair a rest, okay? I’ll brush it in a minute. So, do you want me to make you some coffee before I go?”