Temporary Homes

1

Elka’s interview for her new job took place on a beautiful, bright morning in January. She wore an orange cotton shirt with a gray diamond print, out of which thousands of purple eyes framed in delicate turquoise smiled at her in the rearview mirror. She tried to detangle a knot in her hair while sipping coffee and chatting with Sophie over speakerphone.

When she drove up Gaza Street it appeared she still had plenty of time left, but before she reached King George Street, at an intersection that wasn’t usually busy, traffic came to a standstill. Now she was forty minutes late. “Maybe it’s a bomb threat,” she told Sophie.

Sophie was sitting at her kitchen table, trying to read a Russian newspaper while simultaneously listening to Elka. “You don’t say,” she murmured. “But there are no more terror attacks now!”

Elka said, “True, but what else could it be?”

In response, sirens sliced through the street, a black car whizzed by, followed by another and another, until a long line of black cars with opaque windows lined up at the traffic light.

“Oh, it’s the Prime Minister,” Elka said. But a breathless radio announcer corrected her when he reported that a ceremony to welcome German Chancellor Angela Merkel had just concluded at Ben Gurion Airport, and that the chancellor was currently headed to the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in a convoy, which Elka’s car was now riding behind.

“Hello?” said Sophie. “Elka? What’s wrong?”

But Elka forgot all about Sophie and her job interview. The window in one of the black...