Where the Desert Meets the Sea

by Werner Sonne

studied the passing ads for businesses bearing Arabic, Hebrew, and English lettering, depending on the neighborhood. She noted with satisfaction that she could understand them all. She’d worked hard to master Hebrew as well as English, along with her mother tongue, and in the hospital had even learned some basic Yiddish. The British, Youssef, her mother, her career—they all spun around in her head. And yet again, she had that one thought she didn’t want to have but couldn’t stop: David.

But Tamar’s family came from Poland. None of her relatives were still living. They’d died in the Warsaw Ghetto, starved to death. Wasn’t she, too, now living in a ghetto, cut off from the regular world? Couldn’t her own family come to the same end? She decided to broach the subject with Yossi in the morning.

Her thoughts went back to that morning in the valley. She was certain she had gunned down several Arabs at Bab el-Wad. She was astonished to discover that the thought didn’t bother her now. She had been attacked, she had returned fire, her attackers had fallen by the wayside. Could a person really become dulled to it all so quickly? she wondered. Was there such a thing as a just war—and if so, was she on the right side? Or was it really like in the Torah, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? Was everything just a matter of survival?