A Bottle in the Gaza Sea

Naïm asks Tal if she is okay after hearing about a bombing in Rehavia, where she said she would be visiting her grandparents. He writes again, and then again to say he knows she is not dead because he checked an Israeli website that listed the victims of the bus bombing. He runs through the list of people, most of whom are not Israeli but from Canada, Georgia, and Ethiopia. He says he will keep looking through news coverage for images of her in case Tal Levine is not her real name.

Naïm imagines that someone Tal loves is dead or injured or that she hates all “the Palestinians” now, himself among them. He adds up all the meaningless deaths on both sides. Naïm has finally gotten back online after avoiding the internet cafe by going to an Anglo-Italian NGO down the street, where they know his father. Now that he can be alone with a computer and write to her freely just three flights of stairs from his own apartment. He begs her to let him know she is alive.

Tal writes back, apologizing and explaining that she was filming at the scene of the bombing—it was a beautiful sunny morning, and then it wasn’t; it was “as if hell had suddenly sprung up from some invisible place and crashed down in the middle of the street” (96).