Chapter Two: The Disguise

Morning arrived not with sirens, but with sparrows.

They sang from the rooftops above Isa’s apartment, flitting between rusted antennae and broken clay pots filled with soil and stubby mint. Their chirping was not delicate, but insistent—a busy, bright kind of music that made no room for dreams to linger. Isa stood at the window, his hands wrapped around a chipped ceramic mug, watching as the city stretched itself awake.

Hebron, in daylight, wore its resilience openly. Laundry lines danced in the wind like flags of quiet revolt. Rooftops bore scars—shrapnel cracks, bullet-pitted tanks for water—yet remained adorned with flowerpots and windchimes. The old city stirred below like something ancient that refused to become ruin. Its pulse was steady, slow, and deeply human.

Today would be his first full day as Isa Baruch.

The name still felt foreign in his mouth, not for how it sounded, but for what it demanded. It was not just a name. It was an inheritance he had not earned. A script he would have to write into his gestures, his silences, his smallest instincts. In the Agency, they taught you to enter a new identity like stepping into a garment. But this felt different. This name didn’t clothe him. It peeled him.

He turned from the window and set the cup down. The room had warmed slightly in the morning light. Shadows stretched long across the floor. The prayer rug lay folded in the corner. His Qur’an sat on the table, still unopened since the night before. He ran his hand over its spine. Part of him expected it to resist, as if the book itself might know he was not ready.

He dressed in the clothes selected for him by the handlers weeks before. Simple, clean, locally bought. The kind of fabric that didn’t wrinkle, didn’t announce itself, but blended into the soft symphony of Palestinian morning life. He wrapped the keffiyeh around his shoulders—not tight, but familiar. The motion had been practiced until it felt natural.

He looked at himself in the mirror. The beard he had grown for this mission was fuller now. His eyebrows furrowed less from suspicion, more from thought. The eyes staring back at him looked not like a spy prepared to deceive, but like a man unsure which version of himself would answer when someone called his name.

The disguise was working.

And that was what frightened him most.

The streets were alive by the time he stepped outside, his feet finding their rhythm among shopkeepers unrolling awnings and schoolchildren swinging backpacks stitched with cartoon characters and crescent moons. The early bustle was different from the frantic energy of Tel Aviv. It held no rush, only repetition—a daily ritual of presence.

Isa nodded to the old calligrapher downstairs, who sat cross-legged with a steaming cup of tea and a newspaper too faded to read. The man looked up, offered him a smile that reached his eyes, then returned to tracing invisible letters on the tabletop with his forefinger.

He turned into the market street and was met with a cascade of scent—lemons sliced fresh for juice, cumin warming in metal pans, soap made of olive oil and eucalyptus. The colours, too, were fierce in their quiet way. Not loud, not overwhelming, but saturated. Deep reds of tomato crates. Soft yellows in fresh pita piled in baskets. The indigo blues of woven shawls fluttering from wooden poles.

He passed a butcher gently stroking the ears of a goat, whispering something only the animal could hear. A woman in a navy hijab sold sesame rings from a cart. A child no taller than Isa’s waist tugged at his sleeve, holding out a box of chewing gum with hands too small and eyes too wide.

“No, thank you,” Isa said softly.

The boy smiled anyway, then skipped away.

He found the tea stall again—the same one from yesterday—and ordered a glass. The young vendor, still polishing a copper tray, didn’t look up. “You’re the one from Fez,” he said.

“I am.”

“What brings you here?”

Isa paused.

“Faith,” he said.

It wasn’t a lie. Not exactly. Not yet.

The vendor chuckled. “You and half the city.”

He handed Isa the glass. The tea was hotter than before, sharper. Isa took a sip and let it burn. It was the kind of fire that reminded you you were alive.

From the far end of the market, a voice rose in song—not loud, not performed, just someone humming a tune that seemed too old to have ever been written. A man pushing a cart of roasted corn joined in with a harmony barely audible.

Isa listened.

This was not a place of ease. But it was a place of meaning.

He knew how to read patterns. To map exits. To memorize shadows.

But nothing had prepared him to read this.

And already, he could feel his training tugging against the pull of something he didn’t have a name for.

It felt less like espionage.

More like invitation.

He walked with his tea in hand, the glass warming his palm, toward a quieter bend in the street where the market thinned into archways. Above him, prayer flags fluttered across a stretch of hanging wires, their edges frayed by years of wind and dust. A mural on the wall beside him showed the outline of a key—painted in black, bold strokes—with Arabic calligraphy spiraling from its stem like vines. Isa paused, reading the inscription. It was a verse from Surah Al-Baqarah, painted with care: “And do not despair of the mercy of Allah.”

A child’s drawing had been taped beside it—a crude house, a tree, a bird flying. Scrawled in pencil underneath: Lifta 1948.

He felt it then—not guilt, not yet—but gravity. A kind of ache just below the collarbone. The key wasn’t just metaphor. It was muscle memory for the families still waiting to return. He had read about them in training reports: “intergenerational displacement,” “symbolic narrative reinforcement.” But the key painted here was not a strategy. It was a pulse. Still beating. Still believed in.

Further down the alley, the road curved around a crumbling stone wall overtaken by jasmine vines. Isa reached out and brushed the leaves gently with his fingertips. The petals released their scent like a secret, and for a moment, he felt as though he’d trespassed into someone’s prayer.

A woman passed, balancing a crate of bread on her head. She didn’t look at him. But behind her, a boy no older than ten glanced over his shoulder and gave Isa a half-smile. One of those knowing, narrow, child-smiles that said: I see you, even if I don’t know who you are.

He turned into the mosque’s courtyard just before noon.

The fig tree cast its long shadow across the tiles. A cat slept beneath the ablution fountain, curled into a posture of deep trust. Two elderly men played tawla in the shade, speaking without speaking. Their dice clicked softly, like beads knocking in prayer.

No one stopped Isa. No one questioned him.

But a man sweeping the steps looked up, briefly, and offered him the kind of nod reserved for people you think you might recognize from a dream.

The air inside the mosque was cool and thick with incense. It wrapped around his shoulders like cloth. His sandals echoed quietly on the stone as he stepped into the prayer hall and sat near the rear. He didn’t join the prayer. Not yet. He sat.

And listened.

The imam’s voice hadn’t yet begun. The space filled slowly with men of every age—farmers, students, tailors, children too young to recite but eager to mimic. One boy, barefoot and serious, sat cross-legged in the front row, cradling his Qur’an as if it were fragile.

Isa watched.

Then he lowered his head.

And for the first time since his arrival, he did not feel like a man pretending.

He felt like a man arriving.

The prayer hall breathed like a living thing.

Its domed ceiling cradled sound in a way that made every whisper linger longer than it should. The walls were not lavish, but they bore the softness of age—textured with gentle cracks, corners smoothed by generations of backs leaning, hands reaching, foreheads touching stone. The carpets bore the imprint of time, worn in all the places where knees had bent and tears had fallen.

Isa’s back rested against one of the central pillars. His eyes traced the calligraphy above the mihrab—curved, verdant, elegant strokes that spelled not dogma, but yearning. The Arabic was a prayer he had memorized during his field training, but here, in this room, the words refused to stay confined to memory. They moved differently. They felt like breath given form.

Around him, the murmur of men preparing for the dhuhr prayer began to still. The sound of sandals slipping off, feet washing in rhythm, children being hushed. A hush that came not from fear, but from anticipation. It was not discipline. It was readiness.

And then, from behind the partitioned doorway, a quiet cane-tap.

Tap.

Pause.

Tap.

Another pause.

Then a soft, shuffling step.

Imam Youssef.

Isa did not turn to look. He didn’t need to. The energy of the room shifted the moment the imam entered. It was not awe, and certainly not spectacle. It was the peace of a familiar gravity returning to its center.

The imam’s voice began without introduction.

He recited softly, not to command but to calm. His voice was low and textured—not polished like a broadcast, but lived-in. Each word carried the weight of a man who had spoken to grief and still chosen tenderness.

“Say, ‘My Lord has guided me to a straight path—an upright religion, the way of Abraham, who was devoted to God alone.’”

Isa had heard the verse before. But never like this.

He closed his eyes.

In training, they had studied the rhythm of Qur’anic recitation the way one might study code—patterns, pauses, tonality. But nothing in his training had captured this: the hush that followed each verse like the inhale after a confession. The way even the walls leaned forward to listen.

When the recitation paused, Isa opened his eyes.

The imam was seated now, framed by the mihrab’s arch, his sightless gaze turned upward, as if tracing stars no one else could see. A boy brought him water. The imam touched the boy’s shoulder gently in thanks, though his eyes remained closed.

Then he spoke.

His khutbah was not long. It did not thunder. It did not rise in pitch or pace. It unfolded like a letter written by a father to a son who had forgotten how to write back.

He spoke of humility—not as a virtue, but as a refuge.

“Humility,” the imam said, “is what remains when the fire of pride has burnt itself to ash. It is not weakness. It is the soil in which all things can begin again.”

Isa felt the words settle in his ribs.

He had come to observe this man.

He had come to report on him, to read the congregation for signs of dissent, to track whispers that might lead to deeper networks.

But now he was not reading.

He was remembering.

Something long buried. Something that perhaps never had words to begin with.

The prayer ended with a silence thicker than its beginning.

No applause, no words. Just the unspoken unity of men rising in rhythm, smoothing their garments, and slipping their sandals back on with slow, deliberate motion. The children darted ahead, as they always did—racing through the courtyard toward afternoon light. The elders lingered, their conversations low and calm, stitched together with brief nods and blessings.

Isa moved with them, his body following their pace. He passed through the same arched doorway he had entered through, but the air felt different now—cooler on his skin, heavier in his lungs. The fig tree in the courtyard seemed brighter, more vivid. As though its leaves had been listening too.

He paused beneath it for a moment. The cat had gone, but a pair of doves now nested in the branch above, cooing softly. One of the old men from earlier walked past him, stopped, and turned.

“You prayed with us today,” the man said, his voice sandpapered with age.

Isa nodded.

“You carry something in your shoulders,” the man added. “Let it go, son. The floor is strong enough.”

And with that, he shuffled on, his misbaha beads clicking lightly in his hand.

Isa didn’t respond. Couldn’t. He stood there, rooted, heart knocking quietly beneath his shirt.

He stepped out into the street, the light now slanting at that soft angle that always came before dusk in old cities. The kind of light that didn’t just illuminate, but revealed—textures in stone, threads in fabric, the curve of a cheekbone beneath shadow.

He found himself walking without aim.

Past stalls now half-empty. Past a group of boys playing football with a ball made from tied rags. Past a cart of red onions glistening like jewels in the low sun. Everything felt sharper, more intimate. As though the city had turned toward him, not suspiciously, but openly. Asking no questions, but offering no cover.

He heard his own footsteps echo as he passed through a narrow archway. From a nearby balcony, a woman was reciting Qur’an in a voice so soft it sounded like the wind reading to itself.

He stopped.

Closed his eyes.

And listened.

Not as a spy.

Not as Isa Baruch, the fabricated convert.

But as a man who, for a moment, had no name at all.

Just ears.

Just breath.

Just stillness.

When he opened his eyes, the street looked the same. And yet, he could not name what had shifted.

Only that something had.

And that whatever it was, it had nothing to do with training.

Nothing to do with his mission.

It was quieter than that.

But also louder.

It was the sound of something beginning.

And beginning not with a lie—but with a question.

The apartment was still, dim in the late afternoon hush.

Isa stepped inside and closed the door behind him without sound. The air smelled of warm plaster and dried ink, with a hint of jasmine from the window that had remained cracked open since morning. He did not light the bulb. The light that came through the wooden slats of the shutters was enough—a faded amber that painted long stripes across the cot, the prayer rug, and the small desk by the far wall.

He stood in the center of the room and did nothing for a while.

Just stood.

A man between the mask he wore and the face that no longer fit beneath it.

The Qur’an lay on the desk, exactly where he had left it. Its cover was unadorned except for the quiet sheen of gold embossing that shimmered faintly in the angled light. He had memorized the weight of it, the size, the feel. In training, he had studied how to hold it with reverence, how to turn the pages without haste, how to make his pauses seem sincere. But none of that prepared him for this moment.

This was not rehearsal.

This was not role.

This was curiosity. Hesitant, but honest.

He sat.

Slowly.

His legs folded beneath him. His hands reached out. Not with grace, but with caution—like a man reaching for a letter written in a language he almost fears he might understand.

He opened it.

The scent of paper and old ink rose like breath from between the pages. The script danced across the parchment in curves and flourishes, not mechanical but alive. Arabic calligraphy had always struck him as something closer to weather than writing—its movement unpredictable, its beauty unsettling.

He turned to the first page of Surah Al-Fatiha.

“In the name of God, the Most Merciful, the Most Compassionate.”

He whispered it.

Badly. His throat caught on the vowels. His cadence was uneven. But he whispered it all the same.

He read the next line.

“Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds.”

He paused.

The words weren’t reaching his mind.

They were stopping somewhere deeper.

And resting there.

A knock sounded on the wall below—just the old calligrapher tapping his broom against the stairwell. Isa startled anyway, heart jumping in his chest. The Qur’an slipped slightly in his lap, and he steadied it quickly, as though afraid of spilling something sacred.

He closed it gently, not out of disrespect, but out of reverence he didn’t yet know how to carry.

He sat back against the wall and let his head rest.

The sunlight was fading.

Outside, the city prepared for night again—olive oil lamps being lit, bread dough rising in warm corners, old radios tuning into static and then into song.

Inside, Isa sat in the darkening room, the Qur’an closed beside him, but not silent.

He had not come for this.

But it had begun to come for him.

And somehow, he did not want to run.

Not yet.

Night wrapped itself around Hebron like a shawl, heavy with memory.

The sky above the Old City deepened into indigo, and the stars blinked through layers of dust and time. Isa lay on his cot in the dark, the window half open to let in the scent of stone, fig leaves, and something else—something like waiting.

His breath came slow.

His body was tired, but his mind wandered restlessly through the corridors of the day: the scent of jasmine on his fingers, the look in Aseel’s eyes as she spoke to the children outside the mosque, the imam’s voice brushing against his chest like wind touching water. The mosque had been quiet, but not empty. Something had moved there. Something that had nothing to do with resistance cells or sermon transcripts.

Something that watched back.

He drifted into sleep not all at once, but gradually, as though descending through layers of silk. Thought became breath. Breath became sound. And then, he was elsewhere.

In the dream, he was walking barefoot through the market at night. But the stalls were covered, the streets silent. No vendors. No shoppers. Just narrow corridors lit by lanterns that flickered without flame. The air smelled not of spice or smoke, but of ink and old paper.

He turned a corner.

There, beneath the fig tree in the mosque courtyard, stood a long wooden table covered in books. Open Qur’ans, pages fluttering in windless air. Scrolls of poetry. Notebooks with children’s drawings. A single red thread ran through them all, connecting page to page like a vein.

A figure stood at the end of the table.

It was Imam Youssef.

But younger.

His eyes were not blind. They were clear, sharp, searching. He looked at Isa and smiled—not as a stranger, not as a prophet, but as someone who already knew the story Isa had not yet learned how to tell.

Then another figure emerged from behind him.

Aseel.

Dressed in white, her scarf glowing faintly. In her hands, she carried a bowl of water and a stone.

She did not speak.

She placed the stone in front of Isa.

On it was written a single word in calligraphy so fluid it looked like breath:

Witness.

Then she poured the water over the stone.

The word vanished.

But the stone began to pulse in Isa’s hands, as if it contained his heartbeat.

He looked up.

The courtyard was empty.

Only the fig tree remained.

And it began to speak—not in words, but in images: a bird landing on a checkpoint rifle, a child drawing a house in the dirt, a woman kneading dough while humming verses from Surah Maryam, a boy folding a piece of paper into the shape of a mosque and placing it on a soldier’s boot.

Then silence.

The kind of silence that holds a question too large to phrase aloud.

Isa awoke with the taste of metal in his mouth.

His chest felt hollow, but full.

He sat up, heart beating as if he had run from something—or toward something—and didn’t yet know which.

The window let in the faintest blue of approaching dawn.

The first call to prayer would begin soon.

But Isa didn’t move.

He sat there, in the dark, holding nothing.

But remembering everything.

Not the details of the mission.

Not the names from the file.

But the feeling in the dream when the stone had pulsed in his hand.

It had felt like truth.

And he didn’t know yet whether it belonged to this place, or to him.

Only that it was real.

And that it was waiting.

The light came softly.

Before the call to prayer, before the birds stirred, before the street dogs announced the return of morning—there was a stillness that hovered like breath suspended. A blue not yet morning, a hush not yet broken. Isa opened his eyes into that silence and found the room changed—not in shape, not in content, but in gravity.

He sat up slowly, his hands resting on the edge of the cot. The Qur’an still lay on the table beside him, closed but not untouched. The memory of his dream clung to the walls, faint as steam after a bath—unseen, but warm. He blinked into the dim light, as if the fig tree from the courtyard might suddenly appear, whispering truths again through the leaves.

The air was cold against his bare feet. He moved with care, as though he might wake something sacred. The basin in the corner waited with a small jug of water, its surface smooth and unbroken. He reached for it, pouring it slowly over his hands, over his face, over his arms. Each splash struck him with a startling clarity. Not shock. Not discomfort.

A kind of cleansing.

He didn’t dress as he normally would—with the careful calculation of a man slipping into someone else’s life. This morning, the fabric felt less like costume and more like skin. He wrapped his scarf loosely and let his face remain unshaven. No need for perfection. The man he was performing had begun to step aside for the man he might become.

He left the apartment before the call to prayer rose.

The streets were still sleeping. Only a few lights flickered behind shuttered windows—soft amber glows from kitchens where women stirred kettles and whispered their first invocations of the day. The calligrapher’s door was still closed, though Isa imagined the old man already awake, grinding ink in silence like a monk preparing sacred dye.

He made his way toward the mosque.

The fig tree stood still, its branches black against the paling sky. The courtyard stones were damp with dew, reflecting what little light the sky offered. He removed his sandals and stepped onto the cool stone barefoot, the chill grounding him in a way words never could.

He did not rush.

He approached the prayer hall as the first line of the adhan uncoiled into the morning air.

“Allahu Akbar...”

It floated from the minaret like a single thread of gold drawn across sky, stitching the city back into breath.

He entered.

There were a dozen men already gathered, seated in silence or quiet recitation. The imam had not yet arrived. A boy swept the carpet at the front, pausing only to fix a crooked Qur’an stand.

Isa sat in the middle row.

Not at the back.

Not in hiding.

He folded his legs beneath him and closed his eyes—not to meditate, but to stop thinking. He tried not to hear with his ears, but with whatever it was inside that had pulsed when he had touched the stone in the dream.

He let the prayer begin.

And when it did, he rose.

He bowed.

He prostrated.

He whispered the verses.

And this time, there was no part of him watching.

There was only presence.

The sun lifted gently over the city like a slow-breathing child, casting long streaks of honey across the rooftops. Hebron was waking, but it did so without haste. The city emerged from sleep the way an old storyteller might rise from bed—deliberate, careful, carrying centuries in every gesture.

Isa walked through the narrow alleys near the mosque, the warmth of prayer still lingering in his limbs. The calligraphy on the stone walls seemed to glisten now, as if the letters themselves were catching light. He stopped to trace a verse with his eyes—its meaning half-remembered, its rhythm familiar in his throat: “Surely, in the remembrance of God, hearts find rest.”

The wall did not reply.

But his heart did.

Children passed him on their way to school, uniforms mismatched, backpacks worn. One girl carried her younger brother on her hip, her other hand balancing a notebook wrapped in a plastic bag. She looked up at Isa for only a second, her eyes vast and steady, then turned her gaze forward again, as if she had already seen too much for her age and had no time for strangers.

He passed a row of vendors preparing their stalls. A man with ink-stained hands was arranging rows of handmade soap, each wrapped in wax paper and labeled in slow, careful script. Another, younger, was fixing a broken scale with a screwdriver and a whispered prayer. A boy no older than twelve was sweeping fallen flower petals from the steps of a spice shop, humming a tune Isa couldn’t place but felt he had heard once in a room filled with lanterns.

No one looked at Isa for long.

But he felt seen, nonetheless.

Not exposed.

More like… included.

As if the city, in its own quiet way, had nodded in his direction. Not in welcome, and not in warning. But in acknowledgment.

He turned a corner and found a narrow side street paved in mismatched stones. Along its walls were fragments of painted tiles—half-erased verses, dates, declarations. One tile bore the shape of a key, like the one he had seen the day before. Another showed a broken door, flames licking at the edges, and a hand reaching through the smoke.

It was not art for tourists.

It was scripture for the wounded.

He stood before the wall, feeling the weight of it press against his chest. Not guilt. Not yet. But something close to recognition.

A voice behind him cleared its throat gently.

He turned.

Yahya.

The old Sufi scholar stood beneath the shadow of a crumbling arch, wrapped in a soft gray shawl, his walking stick held not for support, but for rhythm.

“I thought I might find you here,” he said.

Isa tried to mask his surprise, but failed. “You know this place?”

Yahya smiled with his eyes. “There is no corner in this city that doesn’t carry a whisper.”

Isa stepped aside as the old man approached the wall.

Yahya looked at the tiles, the broken mosaics, the smudged memories.

“This wall,” he said, “is not for tourists. It is for those who forgot that faith can bleed.”

Isa said nothing.

Yahya turned to him, then added softly, “It is also for those who don’t yet know which side of the prayer they stand on.”

Then he walked past him, slowly, his steps steady, deliberate, like a man carrying water through wind.

Isa remained by the wall a moment longer.

He did not take a picture.

He did not make a note.

He simply stood there, the sun rising higher now, his shadow longer, stretching into the dust like a question without an answer.

The sun was higher when Isa reached the apartment.

The air had warmed and the rooftops shimmered with heat-light. Laundry lines swayed gently between buildings, pinned with damp cotton and silent prayers. Somewhere down the alley, a radio crackled to life—an old tune, half drowned in static, half drowned in memory.

He climbed the stairs slowly.

Each creak beneath his feet no longer sounded like alarm but like something honest. A conversation between wood and weight. At the landing, the calligrapher’s door was ajar, and Isa caught a glimpse of his ink-stained hands sketching letters in the air—his finger dancing above the wood, as if rehearsing words not yet ready for parchment.

Inside, the apartment was quiet.

The stillness that once felt surgical now felt clean. The floor was swept. A shaft of sunlight spilled across the prayer rug, touching the hem of the Qur’an’s cover. He stood in the doorway for a long time, not moving. Just watching the light. Listening to the silence.

And then—slowly—he removed his scarf.

Not with dramatic finality.

Not as a gesture of revelation.

But as a man who had carried the same breath for too long and finally remembered how to exhale.

He laid it on the back of the chair. Undid the top button of his collar. Let his shoulders fall.

The Qur’an sat in the same place. Unopened since dawn. But somehow, it felt nearer now, less like a relic, more like an invitation. He approached it, ran his fingers over the cover again—not pressing, not turning pages. Just resting there. Skin to skin.

He closed his eyes.

There were reports to write. Signals to transmit. But none of that rose to meet him. Only the quiet pulse of his own heartbeat, softer now, no longer shadowed by the thrum of mission.

He walked to the window and opened it wider.

Outside, the street moved on—slow, eternal, unbothered by spies or seekers.

Children laughed. A fruit vendor shouted about pomegranates. The muezzin’s voice echoed faintly in the hills beyond, delayed by distance, softened by dust.

And Isa, standing in that small room in a city built on sorrow and silence, felt something subtle slip beneath his ribs.

Not guilt.

Not purpose.

But a readiness.

Not to act.

But to stay.

To listen.

To begin again—not with a report, but with presence.

Next Chapter: Chapter Three: The First Prayer