The Road North

Chapter One: The Sound of the Hour

The radio came on at five minutes to every hour, and at five minutes to every hour Dina Shavit stopped whatever she was doing and stood still.

This morning she was standing in the kitchen of her apartment on Herzliya Street, Haifa, with a folded dish towel in her hands and the smell of the sea coming up through the open window. Below her, the city fell away in terraces toward the bay: red roofs, cypress trees, the cranes of the port standing out over the water like a row of thin grey herons. It was late March and the light had the scrubbed quality it gets before the heat arrives, when everything looks a little too clear, a little too detailed, as if the world has put on new glasses.

The announcer said the time. Then he said, in the flat voice they all use, that the northern sector had been quiet overnight.

Dina let out a breath. She put the dish towel in the drawer where dish towels lived, folded in three, seam facing back. She had washed the floor at six. She had wiped down the top of the refrigerator, which no guest would ever see, because a woman who lets dust gather on the top of her refrigerator is a woman who has begun to let things go, and Dina had made herself a promise about that.

On the counter, in a line, were the things she needed for the drive: her keys, her sunglasses, a bottle of water, a paper bag of almonds, and a small tin of the honey cake her sister liked. Her overnight bag stood by the door with the handle up. She had packed it the night before, unpacked half of it at eleven, and repacked it at midnight.

She went into the second bedroom.

It had been Alon's room, then it had been the room where she put things she did not know where to put, and then, about two years ago, she had emptied it out again and made it into nothing. A bed with a white cover. An empty desk. A shelf with three books on it. The window there faced east, toward the mountain, and in the morning the light came in and lay across the floor in a long stripe. Dina stood in the doorway and looked at the stripe of light and did not go in.

There was one photograph in that room and it was small. Alon at nineteen, before his enlistment, at the beach at Dor with his back to the sea and his hair wet, laughing at whoever was holding the camera, which had been her. His shoulders were narrow. He had always been narrow. He used to say he was built for climbing and Dina used to say he was built for eating more, and he would take a piece of bread just to shut her up and put it in his mouth whole, and she would slap his arm and he would grin around the bread.

She did not pick up the photograph. She had a rule about the mornings: no photographs before noon. You could lose an entire day that way.

Her phone buzzed on the counter. Ayala.

*What time are you leaving?*

Dina typed: *Soon.*

Three dots appeared immediately, which meant her sister had been holding her phone in her hand, waiting.

*Soon means what. Nissim wants to know if you're eating fish.*

*I eat fish.*

*You don't eat anything. Leave by nine, the road fills up after ten.*

Dina put the phone face down. Then she picked it up again and looked at the other conversation, the one she opened perhaps forty times a day, the one at the top of her list.

Matan.

The last message was from Wednesday, two days ago, at 22:41.

*All good here mother of mine. Cold at night. Don't worry.*

And before that a photograph of a stray dog wearing somebody's fleece hat, and before that his answer to her question about whether the food was decent — *it's food, it's warm, it's brown* — and before that four messages from her, which he had not answered individually because he answered in clumps, when he came off the line, when the phones came out of the box.

Two days. Two days was nothing. Two days was routine. She had built up, over the eight months of his current posting, a working knowledge of how long silence could be before it meant anything. Four days was the edge. Two days was ordinary. She said this to herself the way you press on a bruise to see if it still hurts.

She knew things she should not have known how to know. She knew that his company had gone up on rotation on the fourth of the month and would come down around the twelfth of April. She knew the names of two of his officers and the nickname of his platoon sergeant. She knew, from a careless sentence he had let slip in February, roughly which stretch of the fence they were sitting on, and she had found it on a map, and she had zoomed in until the pixels went soft, and she had looked at the grey-green of that hillside for so long that she could have painted it.

She knew that this was not normal. Knowing that changed nothing.

Dina had taught first grade for twenty-nine years at the Ma'ayan school on the Carmel. She had been good at it. She had been the teacher parents requested, the one who could get a stuttering child to read aloud by December, the one who wrote on report cards in real sentences instead of the printed phrases everyone else used. Then Alon died, and she went back after the thirty days because staying home was worse, and she stood in front of twenty-eight six-year-olds and a boy in the second row put up his hand.

He had a narrow face and a cowlick and he wanted to tell her something about a beetle he had found. She looked at his hand in the air, the fingers spread, straining, wanting to be seen, and something in her came apart very quietly, without noise, the way a plate cracks in hot water.

She had lasted three more years. She had done it by not looking directly at anyone. Then two years ago the school nurse had found her sitting on the floor of the supply cupboard at ten in the morning with a box of pencils in her lap, and after that there were meetings, and a letter about early retirement on health grounds, and everyone was very kind, and now she had time. All the time in the world. She had time to wipe the top of the refrigerator.

She carried her bag down the three flights to the street. The building's stairwell smelled of wet stone and someone's cardamom coffee. Mrs. Barnea from the ground floor was watering her plants in the shaft of yard behind the mailboxes and called out, "Going away for the holiday?"

"To my sister. Near Ashkelon."

"Good. Good for you. Don't sit alone."

"No," Dina said. "Not this year."

Mrs. Barnea nodded with satisfaction, as if a small municipal problem had been solved.

The car was a nine-year-old grey Mazda with a dent in the rear door that Dina had never fixed because it happened while Alon was learning to reverse and she had decided, at some point, that the dent was his. She put the bag in the boot next to the crate she kept there — jumper cables, a blanket, a first-aid kit, three bottles of water, a torch. The crate was another kind of spell. If you are prepared for everything, nothing happens.

She got in. She put the almonds in the glove box, the water in the cup holder, the honey cake on the passenger seat. She adjusted the mirror although no one else ever drove this car. She put the key in the ignition.

And she did not turn it.

Her hand was on the key. The metal warmed under her fingers. Out through the windscreen she could see the road curving down toward Hadar, the bougainvillea over the wall of the building opposite, a boy in school uniform running with his bag banging against his back. It was twenty-five minutes to nine on the Friday before the seder. She had two hundred kilometres to drive and she had told her sister she would be there by two.

South. That was the direction. South was Ayala's kibbutz, and the long tables under the dining hall's fluorescent lights, and Nissim's booming voice, and a hundred people she was related to by blood or by marriage or by fifty years of proximity, all of whom would look at her with that particular softening of the face. South was the first family meal she had agreed to attend in five years, and she had agreed in a moment of weakness on the telephone in February when Ayala had said, *Dina, I'm sixty-three, how many more of these do you think I'm going to make?*

South was also two hundred kilometres away from the border.

That was the thing she was not going to say to herself, and she said it anyway, in the quiet of the car, with her hand on the key.

The radio came on when she pushed the button, mid-song, some man singing about the rain. She waited. The song ended. There was a short jingle, the three ascending notes.

"Nine o'clock. Good morning. Overnight and into the early hours, an exchange of fire in the northern sector: mortar rounds were fired from Lebanese territory toward two military positions in the eastern Galilee panhandle, and the army responded with artillery. There are no confirmed casualties. Details are still coming in. Residents of the area have been asked—"

Dina's hearing went strange. The announcer's voice continued but she was no longer receiving whole sentences, only pieces, and underneath them the sound of her own blood.

Eastern panhandle. Two positions.

She knew the geography of the panhandle the way she used to know the multiplication tables. She knew where the road ran up beside the fence, where the orchards stopped, where the hills went bare. She could see, with terrible clarity, the grey-green hillside she had memorised from the satellite map.

No confirmed casualties. But details are still coming in.

Details are still coming in was the sentence that had preceded everything. Five years ago, on a Thursday afternoon in June, she had been at the school, marking, and there had been a report on the radio in the teachers' room about an accident at a training exercise in the south, one dead, details still coming in, and she had thought: how terrible for that family. She had thought that. She had continued marking. She had put a small red tick next to a child's drawing of a lion. And at four twenty the car had pulled up outside her building, and the officers had climbed the three flights, and she had known from the sound of their boots on the stairs, before the knock, because there is no other sound in the world like two people coming up a stairwell who do not want to arrive.

She had been home. That was the thing. She had been sitting in her own living room with the balcony door open, waiting for the water to boil, and they had come and found her there.

Her phone rang. The screen said Michal.

Dina looked at it for two rings and then answered, because she had to know.

"Dina? Hi, it's Michal. Sorry, is it too early?"

"It's not early." Her voice came out steady. She had that, at least. She could always produce a steady voice, the way some people can whistle.

Michal Porat was twenty-four, a fourth-year medical student in Jerusalem, and she had been with Matan for two years. She was small and dark and precise, and when she spoke to Dina she was always a little too polite, the politeness of a young woman who understands she is standing near an open wound and does not want to knock into it.

"I wanted to ask," Michal said, "have you heard from Matan? Since Wednesday, I mean. Since Wednesday night."

The world tilted about three degrees.

"No," Dina said. "Have you?"

"No. I mean — it's normal, right? He goes quiet. Last month he went four days." Michal's voice was doing something Dina recognised: constructing an argument, out loud, for the benefit of the person constructing it. "It's just, I heard the news. The mortars. And I looked at where it was—"

"You looked at where it was."

"On the map. Yes." A pause. "That's stupid, I know that's stupid, they don't say exactly where—"

"It isn't stupid." Dina closed her eyes. "Michal. Listen to me. Everything is fine. It's exactly the kind of thing that happens twice a month and never makes the news at all, and it only made the news this time because it's a holiday and there's nothing else to talk about. He's fine. He'll call you tonight to wish you a happy holiday and you'll be angry with him for not calling sooner."

She listened to herself say it. She sounded like a woman who was calm. She sounded, in fact, exactly like her own mother, who had also been able to produce that voice from nowhere, in any weather.

"Okay," Michal said, and Dina could hear her breathing out. "Okay. Thank you. Sorry to call so early. Are you going to your sister's?"

"I'm in the car now."

"Have a good holiday, Dina. Really."

"You too. Are you with your parents?"

"Tel Aviv. Yes."

"Eat something," Dina said. "Students never eat."

Michal laughed, a small grateful laugh, and hung up.

Dina sat with the phone in her lap. The dashboard clock changed from 09:04 to 09:05. Somewhere below, a garbage truck was working its way up the street with its hydraulic groan.

Here is what she knew, and she knew it the way you know your own name: that if she drove south, if she put two hundred kilometres of country between herself and that grey-green hillside, and if she sat down at a long table under fluorescent lights with a hundred relatives and a plate of fish, then at some point during the evening a telephone would ring, and someone would look at her, and after that there would be no more mornings in which she washed a floor at six.

And here is the other thing she knew, which was not knowledge at all but which lived in her body like a second spine: that as long as she was moving *toward* him, it could not happen. That the officers with the terrible slow boots could not find a woman who was not where she was supposed to be. That distance was the enemy. That the whole disaster of five years ago had happened because she had been sitting still, in a chair, with the kettle on, like an idiot, like a woman who thought nothing could come up her stairs.

She was fifty-eight years old. She had a degree in education and thirty years of standing in front of children explaining that the world runs on causes and effects. She knew that a woman in a grey Mazda on the Carmel had no power over a mortar tube in a wadi across a border.

She turned the key.

She reversed out of the space, and at the top of the road, where the sign pointed left for Tel Aviv and the south, she went right.

Right, and then the ramp, and then the wide grey highway opening out ahead of her with the bay on one side and the mountain falling away behind, and the sign that said Akko, Nahariya, and above that, in smaller letters, in the way of a country that keeps its distances short and its dangers close: Kiryat Shmona, 96.

Her hands stopped shaking as soon as the wheels were pointed north. That was the part she could never explain to anyone, and never would: the relief. The pure animal relief of movement in the right direction. It came up through her arms and settled her, the way food settles a starving person, and she thought, with something close to shame and something close to joy: *there.*

At 09:22 her phone began to ring on the seat beside her. Ayala. She let it ring out. At 09:30 it rang again. At 09:41 a message arrived, and then another, and then several at once, and the phone lit and buzzed and slid slightly on the fabric of the seat, and Dina turned up the radio and drove north into the light.