Two Societies' Hope
Ceasefire
The sound came first: the staccato crack of automatic fire, close enough that Ran Gvili felt it in his chest before his ears registered the direction. He was halfway off the couch before his mother could turn from the kitchen window, her hand frozen mid-reach toward the kettle.
“Ran,” she said. Just his name. Not a question, not a command.
His shoulder screamed when he pulled his service pistol from the lockbox in his bedroom. Six weeks into healing, the bone still tender where the fracture had knitted itself together. He checked the magazine with his good hand, slapped it back into place. Outside, the gunfire had become something else: a sustained conversation between multiple weapons, punctuated by screaming.
His father appeared in the doorway. Retired infantry, thirty years removed from service, but his eyes had that particular flatness Ran recognized from his own reflection.
“How many?” his father asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Your shoulder.”
“I know.”
Ran pushed past him into the hallway. His mother had followed, standing now at the living room entrance with both hands pressed against her mouth. She was not crying. She was holding something in, something that would come later or never.
“I have to go,” Ran said. “You understand.”
His father nodded once. His mother made a sound that might have been his name again.
Ran opened the front door. Morning light flooded in, obscenely bright, as if the day hadn’t noticed what was happening. Down the street, he could see smoke rising. Someone ran past, a woman carrying a child, neither of them making any sound at all.
He stepped outside.
Three years, one month, and twenty-eight days later, Mariam al-Rashid filled a plastic jug from the communal tap and watched the thin stream of water slow to a trickle, then stop entirely. She did not curse or cry. Such luxuries required energy she no longer possessed.
Around her, the neighborhood that had once been a neighborhood was now a tapestry of absence: walls without roofs, rooms open to the sky like broken teeth. The ceasefire had held for fifty-six days. Aid trucks came sporadically, their cargo parceled out in portions calculated to sustain life without restoring it.
“Any word?” asked her neighbor, Um Khaled, who had lost her husband in the first months and two sons in the last weeks of fighting.
“One more,” Mariam said. “They say there is one more.”
Everyone knew. The broadcasts came through in fragments, caught on phones with dying batteries, passed from mouth to mouth until the words became worn smooth as river stones. Hundreds of the captured had been returned over the long months of negotiation: some walking, some carried, some in bags that did not require carrying so much as cradling. Families on both sides had wept and buried and begun the impossible arithmetic of moving forward.
But one remained. One body, unaccounted for, and until that body was found, the final provisions of the ceasefire could not be fulfilled. The aid would remain limited. The borders would remain controlled. The reconstruction would remain theoretical.
Mariam had heard his name so many times it had become almost holy, almost cursed: Ran Gvili. A young man in his twenties. Military police. Had run toward the gunfire rather than away from it. Had not been seen since.
“Where do they think he is?” Um Khaled asked.
“Everywhere. Nowhere.” Mariam lifted the half-empty jug. “Under us, maybe. Under all of this.”
The rubble stretched in every direction, an impossible puzzle that would take years to clear even with equipment they did not have. Somewhere beneath the shattered concrete and twisted rebar, beneath the compressed layers of what had once been homes and shops and schools, were the things that war always left behind: pipes and wires and bones.
At the mosque, what remained of it, men gathered for afternoon prayers. Mariam heard the call to prayer float out over the ruins, the muezzin’s voice made thin by distance and exhaustion. She imagined the prayers rising, imagined them dispersing over the wreckage, settling into every crack and hollow like rain.
Let him be found, they prayed. Let this be over.
Not hatred in the prayer. Not anymore. Just the simple, desperate arithmetic of survival: one body for a million meals, one body for medicine and concrete and excavators and the possibility of tomorrow.
Mariam thought of her remaining daughter, seventeen years old, thin as a reed and stubborn as his father had been. She thought of her future, balanced now on the location of a stranger’s remains. She thought of Ran Gvili’s mother, somewhere across the border, waiting for the same resolution.
We are the same, she thought. In this, at least, we are exactly the same.
The sun moved across the sky. The search teams continued their work, slow and careful, sifting through the layers of destruction. Every day they found things: a child’s shoe, a cooking pot, the warped frame of a bicycle. Every day they did not find him.
Beneath the rubble, where no light reached and no sound penetrated, he lay where he had been taken: one leg bent beneath him, his arms bound with zip-ties. The ceiling had come down all at once, a mercy of physics that had spared him the slower endings.
The concrete above him had settled into something like permanence. Rain had seeped through and stopped. Insects had done their work and moved on. What remained was only the architecture of absence: a small cavity in the wreckage, a pocket of still air, a young man who had run toward the shooting and found it.
His face had not survived intact, but something of its shape remained, something that might be called serene if serenity could exist without consciousness to feel it. Perhaps it was only the arrangement of bone, the accident of how gravity and pressure had treated him. Perhaps it was something else.
Above him, unseen, the search teams marked another grid square as cleared and moved on. Above him, Mariam carried her half-filled jug home. Above him, his mother lit a candle and did not let herself hope.
The future waited. The ceasefire tenuously held. The aid trucks idled at checkpoints, their engines running, their drivers checking their watches.
And Ran Gvili lay still, patient, the weight of nations pressing down on him, the resolution of decades of conflict resting somewhere in the darkness just beyond the next day’s search.