The trip in the hold of the ancient freighter was finished. So was the rumble through Gaza City traffic, the long trek hunched in the dampness of the tunnel, prone to discovery at any moment by Israeli security teams. But he had made it to the Promised Land.

In a nameless village in the Negev, not far from the Erez Crossing, he climbed aboard a decrepit vehicle and paid his shekel passage. It was crowded, but he found his way to the rear and got a seat. Nobody looked twice at him. And why should they? He was of them.

He wore a loose tribal turban over his head and loose shirts and a scarf, all of it of the random sort picked up by laborers the Middle East over. His loose pants had seen so many other days and owners, his boots were scuffed from their own record of days and owners. He was the nameless one, the Arab, sustained by faith but otherwise oblivious to reality. He was the millions. If he had or had had a wife and family, it was all forgotten in the ceaseless turmoil and labor. This side of the wire, that side, this wire, that wire, made no difference. He was eternally on the move, and the only pleasures he could seek were religious or illicit. He had no place to go, he had nothing to belong to. To such, Allah would be everything, for in Allah and the next life was the only hope.

The bus coursed the Negev, stopping now and then in other nameless villages that had sprung up along the road. The desert here was vast, but not as cruel as much of its other territory, which was scorched land, inhospitable and dark, with stone rills running crazily this way and that. It could kill you fast if you didn’t know what you were doing. Here, though, agriculture had taken hold. Still close enough to the sea, and the Jews had built their kibbutz, where they lived and sang and farmed and fucked, while, on the lesser land, Arabs farmed wheat or dates, mostly by the power of their own backs, and the sea temperature was mild enough so that those wheat and dates usually were ready for harvest on schedule. The Jews patrolled in their machine-gun-equipped jeeps, young men drawn from the city, serving for only a few years. They knew nothing, their eyes saw nothing. It was a game of wasted time for them, until they had done their service and could be about better business.