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the man in Hadassah’s burn unit. He and his pretty, young wife, who had stood by her husband with an iron will throughout his miraculous and incredibly painful recovery, had gone on to live their lives, to have more children. The power of human resilience as well as the depths of human frailty were so unpredictable. You could never tell how a person pushed to extremes would behave.
    What would Elise do, he wondered, if—God forbid—something shouldhappen to me? And what, he thought, his arm quivering with a sudden strange cold as he fit the key into the ignition, would either of us do if something should happen to liana? He felt his eyes sting.
    It was unthinkable. Slowly, he released the seat belt.
    There were two ways to get home. The first was the shortest and easiest: a twenty-minute ride through the new tunnel that would leave them practically on their doorstep. Or the tortuous, ninety-minute detour that would take them almost into Tel Aviv. The tunnel had been built to avoid conflicts with Palestinian townships as well as the miserable shantytowns still called refugee camps, although most of their inhabitants had never known any other home.
    He switched on the news. All the roads were open, things were quiet. He made the left turn toward the tunnel, passing the shopping center in Kiryat Yovel and those new high-rise monsters. He drove uphill past the Egged bus terminal and the Arab grocery stores of Beit Tsafafa until the white expanse of the buildings of Gilo came into view, the red-tiled roofs of the little houses lining the entrance to the wadi. There was the Mishav building and the telephone company building with its colorful tiles, and the strange building without windows, which conventional wisdom held was the headquarters of the Israeli Secret Service. The trampiada , or hitchhiking station, was coming up. He looked to see if there was anyone waiting, but a bus must have just come by, because it was surprisingly empty. He passed the army roadblock checking cars coming in from the opposite direction from Gush Etzion and Hebron that wished to enter Jerusalem. liana waved at the young soldiers, and they smiled and waved back.
    After the last house in Gilo, a new fence had gone up, about a kilometer before the first tunnel. As he followed the road upward, he saw the troops encamped on the shoulders of the road, almost unseen. From that vantage point, they had a good strategic view of the entire area, he thought, exhaling, revealing to himself just how tense he really was.
    There was the first tunnel. It was only seven hundred meters long, short enough not to interfere with radio signals, so that the music he was playing continued. He emerged onto a bridge—the place where the first shootings had taken place. Terrorist snipers equipped with long-range rifles had taken up positions in the peaceful homes of Bethlehem’s Christian neighborhood of Beit Jala, firing at passing cars as one would at ducks in a shootinggallery. Now a new barrier was going up to protect motorists, thick white polyester sheets that reminded him of Venetian blinds. They seemed flimsy compared to the enormous stone barriers ahead on the second part of the bridge. Apparently, the bridge couldn’t handle such weight all the way across.
    There was the second tunnel coming up. He entered, and the car radio went dead. It was very long, almost two kilometers. He looked at the familiar graffiti on the wall, LOVE YOU KEREN , someone had written, and again he wondered, as he did each time he passed it, did that mean “I love you, signed Keren”? or “I love you, Keren, girl of my dreams”? Was our Keren the graffiti expert, or the object of the foolhardy and industrious artist’s affections?
    He would probably never know. But, then again, you could never tell. Someone in the War of Independence had written his name on a wall on the way to the besieged Jerusalem and years later a songwriter had written a popular song about him. People had looked