To her mother’s surprise, she had announced on her eighteenth birthday that she was returning to Israel to fulfill her commitment to the armed forces there. The day they had parted, she had looked into her mother’s eyes and given her some measure of peace. Speaking in their mother tongue, she had told her she was a Yemenite and she was returning to the homeland to take up arms in its defense. She had left and never looked back. To this day she had no idea what had happened to her mother or stepfather, they were a sadness necessarily left in the past.

While her Israeli colleagues in the army may have been standoffish about the apparently Arab woman in their midst, her superiors had seen her value immediately. She had been earmarked for recruitment into the Mossad from the start, and her performance in her first few months of service had only heightened the ardency of her unseen suitors. They approached her after close combat training one day and asked her why she fought with such vigor.

The nineteen-year-old dark-set Ayala had not hesitated, “Because no one will come to my aide but me.” If she had been looking to impress them, she could not have said anything more apropos. But she had no idea what they had in store for her.

She was a Jew who could speak fluent Arabic, both the Standard, Nadji, and Hijazi dialects, and she had no close relatives in Israel. The only hesitation they had was the fear that she was simply too perfect. Their test: she had been forced to return to her old district of Kerem HaTeimanim and find one person who recognized her. The difficulty of finding one had almost broken her, but a cousin had eventually seen in her now-hardened eyes the nine-year-old who had left the district with her shamed mother and they had even spent one strange afternoon reminiscing of old times.

But it had been a brief reunion. After setting their considerable resources to vetting the cousin in question the Mossad had been satisfied. And Ayala’s course would not be of her own choosing for the next thirty years. As the years passed, she developed a way of envisioning herself that helped her to remember who she was. This helped her center when she needed to, and more importantly, to forget when she needed to as well. She saw herself like a Matryoshka doll, her consecutive lives and personas piled atop each other like rings in a tree, dating back to her earliest memories.