In the corner of the tunnel, Naoum sat wiping the dust off her trousers, trying in vain to restore some order to her appearance.
She was pale, but her eyes still had that haughty gleam.
Daniel approached her cautiously, his voice low:
"You... were you in the army too?"
She smiled slightly, pulled strands of hair from under her helmet, which was no longer there, and said:
"Yes. Not a fighter like them... I worked at checkpoints. Monitoring people... Making them line up for hours, checking their papers... You know, it's a boring job."
She laughed lightly, then added:
"My friends and I used to laugh at them. They always looked so serious... and angry. We thoughtthey were funny and backward. Sometimes we would bet on how many would beg us to let them through.
Daniel froze, not knowing whether to smile or frown.
Her words sounded as if she were talking about a game... not about human suffering.
From where he stood, Yusuf intervened, his voice calm but heavy:
"You laughed at a man running to save his sick son? You laughed at a woman carrying food for her family and waiting under the sun?"
Naoum's laughter stopped abruptly, and she looked at him nervously.
Then she mumbled:
"We didn't think about it that way. It was just... orders. We were young. It was just... fun."
Yusuf took a step closer, his eyes boiling with suppressed anger:
"Your fun... was a wound for us. Every minute you laughed... was a mother's heart breaking on the barrier."
Naoum fell silent, this time without a smile.
She lowered her eyes to the ground, as if realising for the first time that her laughter had been like nails in people's hearts.
Daniel sat silently, feeling the weight in his chest double.
He saw in Na'oum a mirror of a stage in his own life: naivety, blind belief, turning others into distorted images...
But with Yusuf, and with these moments, he realised that all those images were a bigger lie
than he had imagined.