They hiked up a narrow trail back to the street. He took her hand and blew warm air into it.

She looked at the people trudging along the sidewalk and then at him, thinking how much intimacy had sprung up between them since he had become the only person in the world who knew her exact location.

They went for a bite at a mediocre Italian restaurant. She ordered ravioli with mushrooms and he told her to take a photo of it, preferably from above. She protested, noting that it wasn’t a German dish, but Michael insisted that when it came to photos of food, national indicators were irrelevant.

“Beer is the only telltale,” he argued, and ordered them two bottles of Weihenstephaner. He said he preferred Goldstar, but the ends justified the means.

“So really, you live to impress others.”

“Well, part of the time,” he admitted. “The problem is that others do it all the time.”

His apartment was on the second floor of a building not far from the train station. He said he believed it was a Jewish thing, the need to live next to an exit route. He opened the door and she fumbled her way to the bed before he even turned on the light—as if to say, no more photos. She closed her eyes and after a few moments felt him lying down beside her, his hand reaching out but not touching. She turned around, pressed her face against his, and kissed him. Then she opened her eyes and caressed his cheek. They both smiled mischievously, as if they had pulled one over on the world and lived to tell the tale.

10.

WHEN SHE WOKE up the following morning, a cup of coffee was waiting for her on the bedside table. She looked around curiously, surprised to find out his apartment wasn’t the dim hideout she had imagined it would be. The floor was parquet, the walls a light cream. She recognized textbooks from their university days in the heavy bookcase, above which hung an acoustic guitar. Michael emerged from the kitchen with a tray laden with bread, an omelet, and chopped vegetable salad, saying it was a small, insufficient compensation for persuading her to spend two weeks in Hadera. She bit into the fresh bread, nibbled the salad, and considered asking if he was ideologically opposed to salt, but decided against it.

He had a folder on his laptop that contained dozens of photos of tourist sites in Berlin. “Time to create some lies,” he told her. “I shot them all myself,” he boasted, and asked her to choose three. He said they didn’t have to be the prettiest photos, but of places she was likely to visit.

“And then you photoshop me in?” she wondered.