Aaron wakes up at two thirty in the morning and although he doesn’t feel any sort of anxiety, he can’t go back to sleep. At six he gives up, meditates, drinks coffee, and leaves, careful not to wake the nomads up. Carmel isn’t asleep on the couch, even though Aaron vaguely remembers he said something about crashing there.

He looks at the map app for the rendezvous point he decided on with Yoni, sees that it’ll take him about twenty minutes to walk or take the bus, and decides to do the former. Not very efficient, but that way he can be sure he won’t be late. Between the military base known as The Kirya and the middle-class consumption center called Sharona, the sun shines on the leftovers of yesterday’s demonstration, the signs and tents standing unguarded. Pictures of children and their parents, of young guys and girls taking selfies before a party. It’s hard not to imagine where they are now, to wonder if those smiles will ever return. But he succeeds. He’s well practiced, so he ponders instead the more technical question of whether any other country has had demonstrations by citizens begging their governments to return its captive citizens, and the officials responding that they can’t, that war is the only way. 

Yoni arrives at their rendezvous point in a small, gray car. He stops by the side of the road right before the ramp to the highway, and barely waits for Aaron to close the door before he picks up speed again.

“Aaron, how’s it going?”

“Walla, alright Yoni, thanks for taking me along.”

“Sorry it’s so early. I need to interview someone from the school today—an optometrist who wants to teach math, a refugee from the Otef—and we said we’d talk at ten and I’d show him the curriculum, see if he’d fit.”

“No problem. At least I’m mostly over my jetlag,” Aaron lies.

When they leave the boundaries of Tel Aviv, he realizes that until that morning, his journeys have focused on that city and its neighbors. He’s excited to be in a place that isn’t a city. 

The tall buildings are gradually replaced by agricultural (legal) settlements. The rest is fields or an abandoned wilderness of weeds dried to death by the ever lengthening summer. The sky is gray, but it isn’t raining yet. 

“You know,” Yoni says, “I grew up in that settlement there. It wasn’t called Yavneh then; it was called Ib’neh, and it belonged to Arabs. Here on the left is Aviv Village, where the first rocket of this war landed. Destroyed a house. When I grew up here, this whole area was entirely empty.”

“What’s it like, seeing Israel as it is now, and remembering how it used to be?”

“You don’t really notice it. It’s like watching a child grow: the changes come slowly, and before you know it you’re looking at something completely different.”

When the prairie turns into proper desert, Aaron is surprised at how much he missed this view. He’s reminded of a friend who immigrated from Russia at a late age, who says she doesn’t believe our desert is real—that it feels to her like walking on Mars. For Aaron this always seemed like the primal, original landscape, and something in him has waited to return to it.

Tin houses appear among the dunes and rocks, first hiding in the shadows of hills, then spreading into whole settlements. The same thin white metal that’s used to fence off construction sites in the city,is used here as walls and roofs and doors. 

“These are the Bedouin’s settlements,” Yoni says. “Aaron, don’t pity them. Their lives are much better than they seem.”

Aaron doesn’t quite believe Yoni. By the side of the road a child in a torn black T-shirt, maybe ten, is dragging a bike up a sandy hill. Further down the road, a girl, her face covered in black cloth, shepherds a herd of a couple hundred goats. Aaron tries to estimate how much grass it takes to feed so many mouths, and how much walking that requires. 

“Yoni,” he says suddenly, maybe because he thought about Mars. “I worked on a book for two years. Let me try and pitch it to you.”

“OK.”

Aaron tells him that it’s a science fiction book about Israel, about how in space our problems will be different but also much the same. About death, and how we only fear it because we’re thinking about it the wrong way. He doesn’t tell him the entire story takes place in a death camp¹.

“OK,” Yoni says when Aaron’s done. “It reminds me of that Korean show.”

“Squid Game?”

“No.” Yoni pulls at his nose. “Now we’re reaching Be’er sheva. You must have had a great time here, during your undergrad years.”

Aaron takes a deep breath. His family is what it is, and he can’t change them. He lets the subject change. “Yeah, a great time. I remember that memorial statue. On my days off I’d ride my bicycle up here until the road ended, then climb on foot along the dry river all the way to the top.” He points at a sandy hill with a couple of round concrete structures at its summit, like toys abandoned by a colossal child. His heart fills with freedom, seeing this place where he’d come to be alone, at the peak of a very challenging time. 

“No, that’s The Memorial for the Armored Corps. It’s too far away from Be’er Sheva to get to on a bike.”

“I rode a lot, back then.”

They drive a couple of kilometers further, and another hill appears, this one also with concrete structures at the top, and Aaron notices, humblingly, that these are the right ones. This time his heart doesn’t fill as much.

“Here, south of Be’er Sheva, is Tel Sheva. It’s a Bedouin city.” Yoni points at a town that looks similar to Be’er Sheva but smaller, dirtier. “Wow, it stinks here. That’s gas from the purification plant. Close the window.”

Aaron obeys. The drive becomes more quiet, the surroundings more deserted. Fewer streetlights, more rocky cliffs. 

“Look, look,” Yoni says, and points to the left. “All their pipes go through here; that’s where they take water to the Bedouin settlement.”

Aaron sees a structure like an electrical closet by the side of the road, connected to a tangle of thin black pipes—not the single wide pipe his education as an engineer taught him to expect. “They must have insane pressure losses on that thing. Why don’t they take it all together?”

“Because that’s how they are. Each family takes one pipe that goes all the way to their home. And they’re black, too, so by the time it gets to their house the water must be boiling. Do you see the tanks near each house? That’s where it cools down. They’ve got everything sorted out, believe me. Their problem is their crime families, the fact they’re killing each other, the protection money. And still, that professor who worked with your aunt,” Yoni’s ex-wife, that is, “grew up in a place like this, and still went to study in the Technion and become a professor of computer science at Ben Gurion University.”

Aaron wonders how hard that must have been, and thinks of the two Arabic students that studied mechanical engineering with him. Although both were clever and hardworking, their math background was significantly less substantial than what a Jewish student comes out of highschool with, even a mediocre one. Aaron really wanted to stay friends with at least one of them, but they had so little in common. Even though they were all Israeli citizens, they felt like people from different countries. 

He remembers a Bedouin high schooler he practiced Taekwondo with in Be’er Sheva who’d had an amazing degree of motivation to learn—he planned on getting a bachelor’s in chemistry in Romania, and simply never return. 

“Soon you’ll see, to the right here, Ramon Prison and Nafhah Prison.”

Around the corner a tall wall appears, with wires at the top of it, then more walls and guard towers. “Why are there two different prisons in the same place?” Aaron asks. 

“Ramon is for Israeli prisoners; Nafhah is for administrative detainees.”

The prisons’ near identical appearance covers a significant difference. If a Jew is charged with some offense, let’s say throwing a rock at a person, they will be judged by a judge, according to Israeli law, and during their prison term there will be discussions of shortening the term, granting vacations, and getting phone calls. On the other side of the fence, if a Palestinian is caught committing the same offense, they will be judged by military officers with some law qualifications, according to military law, and there will be no discussion of vacation, early release, or phone calls. And that’s not even taking into account people who are arrested for urgent security offenses, who can be detained for years before trial. 

When Aaron watched the animated show Arcane, he was frustrated by the unreliable depiction of its penitentiary system. How could it be that one of the characters spends so long incarcerated, and no one even knows what her crime was? When he looks at Nafhah prison, he finds it strange that he found it strange. 

The road leads them up over a cliff and down into the valley. “Here, if it rains a lot, the road is flooded and blocked. It’s called Tzin Brook.” Yoni points at a long groove, like a huge fingernail came down and scratched at the dry earth. In Canada we wouldn’t have called that a brook.

They go into Mitzpe Ramon, turn onto the meandering path among its tall hills and short houses. There’s something relaxing about the age of the homes, the paint peeling off the fences, the sand accumulating between the road and sidewalk. 

“Good,” Yoni says as he looks at the clock. “Nine-thirty; we have time to eat a little something. Then we either drive to the school or the guy comes to us.” He parks and they close the windows manually. The house has one story, and a front and back yard crowded with desert plants in pots. Right by the front door waits a jar of olives, with a note. Yoni bends slowly, picks it up, reads the note, and laughs. “Do you see what it’s like, being a teacher?”

“Who’s that from?” Aaron asks, also wanting to know what’s funny.

“I’ll tell you in a bit.” Yoni opens the front door, calls his cat. “Grayish, where are you? Grayish, how come the food is gone? Did you let other cats get inside and eat your food? It’s Israel here. You gotta fight for what’s yours.” He laughs. “You hungry, Aaron?”

Aaron isn’t used to eating so early, but he wouldn’t want to bother Yoni later, when one o’clock comes and he’s actually hungry, so he agrees. 

Yoni leads him inside. The house has three rooms, the little living room connecting with the kitchen. There are two old but clean sofas, and the little desk is covered with puzzles. Aaron checks them out while Yoni is in the bathroom. ‘Ha’aretz’² newspaper on the coffee table, books on the shelves, and another pile of puzzles by the dresser. “I’ll make us something to eat,” Yoni says when he returns. “You sit; I’ll get you something to solve.” He picks up a box from the table, takes out the wooden pieces, puts them on the table in a pile. “See if you can get those pieces back in the box.”

“Sorry, Yoni: I already saw it in the solved position.”

“That’s the problem with you: your memory’s too good,” Yoni says and God, isn’t he right. “I’ll get you something else. Here, try to take these two apart.”

He hands Aaron a cross made of two wooden rectangles cut in the middle to pass through each other. He examines the structure, plays with it a little. He feels that there are round rods inside the rectangles, holding the thing together, and builds a couple of models of the internal structure. He eliminates one, eliminates another, and then a gestalt appears and joy floods Aaron’s heart even before he solves the puzzle. He spins the cross around its center, and the centrifugal force pulls the rods out. The rectangles fall apart in his hands. 

“Thanks, Yoni: it’s wonderful.”

Yoni straightens after placing food in a bowl, where a little gray predator is gorging. Aaron didn’t see her come in. “Did you spin it?”

“Yes.”

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“Then here’s the next one.”

The next puzzle isn’t as elegant, but demands thinking, asking questions, making assumptions and eliminating them. He takes it apart, the two rings that used to hold one another, and each of them breaks down into two more pieces. 

“Well, did you solve it?”

“Halfway. I took it apart, but I don’t know how to put it back together.”

“Taking apart is easy. The hard part is putting things back the way they were. Yalla, come eat.”

The meal is modest but delicious: rye bread with nuts, one avocado for both of them, half-hard cheese, and a lot of olives. On the table are three different jars filled to the brim with them. “They really love making olives here,” Yoni says. “I love it too. The doctor says I shouldn’t, but I have them anyway.”

“Why shouldn’t you?”

“A lot of salt.” Yoni shrugs, spreads a layer of avocado on a piece of toast, and grinds up a similarly thick layer of salt on top of it. “But what do I care. Do you wanna see what they wrote to me?” He hands Aaron the note that was tied to the olive jar they found by the door.

Aaron takes the note. In the ugly handwriting of a child or teenager, it reads:

Yoni I’m sorry

That I hurt you

3X5 easy

“It’s this kid I really didn’t want to teach. I almost never do private lessons anymore, but he has some sort of problem, and sometimes a kid needs more help, it’s alright. But his parents are spoiling him, which I really don’t like. Last time I was there he kept saying that he doesn’t want to learn and I said alright, I only teach those who want to learn, so if you don’t want to you don’t have to. There’re a lot of things a person can do with their life; not everything requires math. So I said thank you, goodbye, and left. I guess his parents talked to him and told him to apologize. Didn’t hurt me much, but it’s still fine that he wrote it.”

“And what does it mean, three times five easy?”

“Every time I give a student a question, I ask them if they want an easy, medium, or hard one, and this kid always says easy. So I gave him three times five and he was so used to complaining and avoiding that it was also hard for him. Now he says it’s easy. Well, alright.”

It would be nice, Aaron thinks to himself, if he too could choose the difficulty of the problems he’s facing. 

Yoni calls the optometrist, holds the phone to his ear for ten seconds, then takes it down. “The subscriber is not available. Well,” he says, reads the phone’s screen, and announces, “Bibi is coming out with a declaration: I was wrong, I apologize.”

Aaron’s eyes open wide. “Really? That’s it. He’s done for.”

“Why?”

“The same reason he didn’t apologize until now. He’s a classic narcissist, and that shit works. He’s starting to make mistakes and regret them; he can’t even pretend that he has any idea what he’s doing. That’s the first thing in a while that makes me…” Aaron wonders if he has the courage to feel hope again. He’s learned already that the higher you rise, the more it hurts to fall. He doesn’t check what it is that Bibi is apologizing for. (Not for a very long time. When he does, several months later, he’ll find that it was a bullshit non-apology, and he was right to tie his hopes to the ground.)

“Believe me,” Yoni says, “this is the hardest time Israel has had to face.”

“More than the Yom Kippur War?”

“In Kippur they didn’t ask soldiers to risk their lives for a deranged royal family. I don’t know if he’s a lunatic, but his wife and kid sure are. The security guards are reporting to the press that they can hear her screaming at him over the wall. The tanks should get out of Gaza and trample Caesarea³. Wait a second, I have a phone call. Yeah hello, did you arrive already?”

Aaron can hear the person on the other end of the phone, and immediately dislikes him. He apologizes because his phone died; repeats it a couple of times. Explains that he’s being asked to teach gym and he doesn’t know when he’ll be free. Yoni tries to get a decisive answer out of him, and when that fails, notifies him that he’ll go to the school and see him there.

“Well,” Yoni says to Aaron. “So what did we get up so early for? Let’s go to school, see what’s going on.”

NEXT: Teachers 2

1. You can read it here. ↩︎
2.  Literally ‘The Land’. Israel’s oldest daily newspaper currently in circulation, and most left-leaning one. ↩︎
3. Where the prime minister’s residence happens to be. Talk about nomenclatural determinism. ↩︎