But first, you and I must come to an agreement. You must agree to tell us what you know about the bombing campaign, what you know about Amon Tobin and those two men in particular." I couldn't get any words out, and I wasn't even sure I wanted to get any words out. Instead, I just sat, my chin cupped in my hand, watching Finkel and Spitz, realizing how utterly wrong the picture of the U.S. in my head was. In that picture, it was the bad guys, not the good guys, who had guns. And in this version of it, everyone was good and everyone was armed. They were all armed to kill. Suddenly it was real. It's a simple thing to talk about it now, because it was a simple thing to discover. I was the same age as every single one of them, and I'd never known this could happen. I never knew you could be the target. I never knew anything about the sort of evil that had made me the target, and of course I had no idea how any of it started or why. That would have been too much to want to know. That would have been an answer that, like a horror-film creature, went the other direction and dragged me into something even more awful. Amon Tobin had done it by killing the father of the last living boy, the boy who'd been left for dead. Who knew how he'd done it? Maybe he'd taken that rifle apart and put it back together again. Maybe it had been an explosion, some sort of terrorist attack or some kind of retaliation that Tobin had set off on his own. Maybe he had simply called it in. I didn't want to talk about it, but of course I had no choice. I told them, as best I could, everything I knew about the bombing, not even trying to sort it out for myself: that, in addition to what I saw on the streets of Jerusalem, I'd heard it was an attack by a militant Jewish group called the Oketz, that it was set to take place on the third day of Yom Kippur, the most important of Jewish holidays, and that there was supposed to have been a warning. "Did you see anything?" Finkel asked. I told him I didn't know. I remembered the words on the board in the school office about the Oketz, about the warnings and about the attack, but that was it. I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know how to picture it in my head. "I thought you saw something, or I would have told you about the shooting." I told them I had done what I could and then asked about the men on the street, one of whom said, _Who's the dead man?_ Finkel and Spitz looked at each other and frowned. "No one knows who they were," Spitz told me. "And what about this Malka?" Spitz and Finkel glanced at each other again. "Malka?" Finkel said. "Yeah. The girl in the room next door to the dead one. She was the one who was in the bathroom when the raid started. Or she was in the bathroom when the bombing started. And you can tell, because she was looking out the window. She saw the plane coming before the sirens, saw the bombs falling, saw the debris hitting the building. She probably saw the dead man being pulled out of the building." "It's not a he. It's a she. Her name's Malka." I felt some relief. "So she's alive?" Spitz looked down at the floor. "We think she is. But we don't know how well she's going to be doing." I didn't understand, because I didn't understand how the room next door was still there. I looked away from them and thought about the bomb. I'd stood out on the deck and seen the explosion in the distance, and I'd heard it, I realized, heard the first explosion and then the second. I'd been listening to it even while I'd been running from it. "The next blast took the building next to this one. It took the one I was in, the one I was on the roof of. It was too close. She was thrown out of her bathroom window and into the next room. Malka hit her head when she fell and when they pulled her out. She lost a lot of blood. The only reason we think she's still alive is that she's breathing, and she's getting into a hospital." I didn't know what he was talking about, what I was missing, but I could hear the pain in his voice. "What was the bomb?" I asked. Finkel shook his head and started to answer, but Spitz interrupted him. "Who are you?" he asked. I looked at Finkel. "Who?" "His name is Yoni," Spitz told him. "He's eighteen. He lives in the neighborhood, and he's been in the building since the bombing started. He's fine. Nothing happened to him." I tried to remember Yoni and couldn't. "This was my first building," Finkel said. "This is the one that got hit. And I had to live for several months in the room next door with Malka. She couldn't bear to be left alone." I nodded. I didn't want to look at him, and I didn't want to make him feel worse. "How bad is she?" I asked. "She'll be fine," Spitz told me. "She was pretty badly hurt, but she'll be fine. It's just going to take a while." I didn't know what he meant by "a while." Years, I thought. "How did I get to the camp?" I asked, "and how did I end up there?" "You're a bit fuzzy on how it happened. I can explain it to you." Spitz offered it to me as it had been explained to me. He began with when the bomb exploded, which I hadn't heard yet, and ended with the blast at the fence, which I did know. I shook my head as he tried to find the right sequence of events to offer. "I've had it," Finkel told him. "I don't care what you've had. You're going to tell him exactly what you told me and what I told him before I went off to the army." Finkel frowned but nodded. "Fine. You know there was a bombing in the area, and you know there were bodies being pulled out of the rubble. You know there was someone in the next building, and you know you found her injured." I nodded. "It's all real," I said. Finkel looked at me, unsure of what to say next. I waved my hands, trying to make them know what I meant. "It's all real," I repeated. "I don't mean it's all real in this world. I just mean that it was real, it was happening. I mean, what I was seeing, what was happening, it's all real, it really happened. It's true. I saw it." They both looked away and then at each other, and they both looked back at me. "Yes," Finkel said. "You saw it." # Part 5 # Malka # CHAPTER 17 In the beginning it was just a question of getting her to the hospital. Then they didn't know whether she was going to be all right. She'd fallen back into a deep sleep. She'd been put in the intensive care unit for observation, but she had a hemorrhage from her head wound and needed surgery. She was all the talk in the ward, which was a small place and always a lot of work. She was all anyone could talk about. Someone who worked on the hospital floor had gone and left their radio playing, and it played music all day, all night, a constant background that made the day and the night seem the same. The music might have been a blessing, if she hadn't been conscious. She had been unconscious after the bombing, and she woke up confused and frightened. She was afraid of her head wound and afraid for her family, and they were all dead. She knew that much. She spent a couple of days in the hospital, and someone had to stay with her, even though she slept for much of the time. When she wasn't sleeping she was being given anesthesia, and the procedure to repair the head wound was going to take a while. So, mostly she slept. The nurses talked among themselves. There were a number of them, and they had a rotating shift. They laughed about her. Somebody described her as a Jewish Golda Meir. She was pretty, her hair was blond and she was a little girl, and she was going to pull through. Other nurses were from Iraq, and there were a lot of jokes about her being a terrorist. At one point, a nurse walked in with her hair in braids and started talking about the attack, telling all the nurses that her head had been cut off. Everyone went silent. She