Chapter Seventeen — The Entity of the Border

The road to the border passed between fields, and nothing in the landscape hinted at what lay ahead.

The same trees, the same road, the same gas stations.

And then, with the landscape barely changing, the barrier appeared, the line of cars, and the flags.

We stood in line for nearly an hour.

Drivers switched off their engines, and passengers got out of the cars to stretch their legs a little.

A child in the car in front of us waved to me from the back window, and I waved back.

I thought about how on the other side of the border people speak another language, use another currency, and live by other laws.

And yet, the sun that rises there in the morning is the same sun.

At last our turn came.

The officer looked at my passport, raised her eyes to compare my face with the photograph, stamped it, and nodded.

We drove on.

And within a moment we were in another country.

⸻

I tried to imagine the Border as an entity I could talk with.

In my imagination he was an older official sitting in a small booth, much like the one we had passed through, a stamp laid before him on the desk.

He did not look especially impressive.

But there was something resolute in the way he sat, as if he had grown used to telling people when they may pass and when they must stop.

"What are you, exactly?" I asked.

"I am the place where one thing ends and another begins."

"But outside there is no line. I crossed between the same fields."

"Not every border can be seen with the eyes. There are borders marked on maps, there are those set by laws, and there are borders people set for themselves."

"And who decides where you will run?"

He smiled.

"It depends which border you are asking about."

"This one, for example."

"People decided it. Sometimes by agreement, sometimes after wars and struggles."

"So you can change."

"Of course. There are borders that have moved many times throughout history."

I looked through the window.

The fields stretched on both sides of the road, as if they had no interest at all in human decisions.

⸻

"What would you ask the people who pass through you, if you could ask them something beyond the usual questions?" I asked.

The official thought for a moment.

"Perhaps I would ask what they carry with them."

"Suitcases," I laughed.

"Those too. But not only."

I thought of the things I take with me when I travel.

Clothes, documents, objects I am used to using.

But also things that do not fit into a suitcase.

My language.

My habits.

The foods I love.

The memories and the people who accompany me even when they are far away.

"When a person crosses into another country, he does not leave everything he was behind him," I said.

"Of course not."

"Sometimes he even discovers how much the things he knew matter to him only when they are no longer around him."

I thought of people who left their country and built lives in another place.

Of the time it takes to grow used to a language, to customs, and to the feeling that not everything is familiar.

And of the strange moment of returning for a visit to the place that was once home, and discovering that it, too, has changed.

"Can a person feel they belong to two places?" I asked.

"Don't you know the answer?"

I smiled.

"One can. But sometimes we also feel that part of us is always in the other place."

"Then perhaps your belonging does not have to end where the border runs."

⸻

"There are also borders I set for myself," I said after a while.

"For example?"

"What I am willing to do and what I am not. What I am willing to accept from others. How much I want to share and how much I prefer to keep to myself."

"And is it easy for you to set them?"

"Not always."

"Why?"

"Because sometimes I don't want to disappoint people. Sometimes it is easier to agree than to explain why I refuse."

"And what happens when you agree to something you don't want?"

"Sometimes I am angry afterward. At the person who asked, and mostly at myself."

He nodded.

"So how do you learn to set a border?"

"Sometimes only after someone has crossed it and I understood how much it disturbed me."

"And do you manage to hold it next time?"

"I am improving," I smiled. "But still not always."

I thought about how I once used to say yes almost automatically.

Today I try to stop and ask myself whether I truly want to.

"Some people think a border pushes people away," I said.

"Sometimes it really does."

"But sometimes it is precisely what allows a connection to be kept."

"How?"

"When I can say what suits me and what doesn't, I don't have to distance myself entirely in order to protect myself."

The official looked at me.

"So for you, a border is not necessarily a wall."

"No. Sometimes it is a door. I can choose when to open it, and to whom."

⸻

I remembered the Guard of Fear and his bundle of keys.

He, too, dealt with doors.

I thought how many of the entities I had imagined along the way return, in different ways, to the same question.

What we allow into our lives, and what we choose to leave outside.

"And don't you ever feel bad, that you separate?" I asked the Border.

"Sometimes there is good reason for separation."

"And sometimes there isn't."

"True."

"There are borders that protect people, but there are also those that keep them from reaching a safe place."

He was silent for a moment.

"I cannot promise that everyone who uses me does so justly."

"So the mere fact that a border exists does not make it right."

"No. One must ask who set it, whom it protects, and whom it makes things harder for."

I thought of the child who had waved to me from the car in front of us.

I did not know where he was traveling or why.

For me, crossing the border was part of a trip.

For someone else, that same barrier could be the beginning of a new life, or the place where the road stops.

⸻

The car was already several kilometers past the border.

The signs had changed.

The words on them looked different, but the road felt almost like the same road.

"Tell me," I asked, "are there borders that cannot be crossed?"

"There are some that are very hard to cross. And there are some that cannot be crossed back."

"Like the border between yesterday and today."

"For example."

"Or the moment we said something that can no longer be taken back."

"True. One can apologize, one can repair part of the damage, but one cannot turn something said into something never said."

I thought of the conversation I had held with the Entity of Words.

And of Time, who keeps moving even when we want to stop him.

And of beginnings, which sometimes look like a small step, but after them life is no longer exactly what it was.

"You are in far more places than I thought," I said.

"Perhaps because you did not always notice the moment you crossed me."

"For example?"

"The first time you said no to someone. The time you decided to leave something that no longer suited you. The moment you understood you were no longer the same woman you were years ago."

"Those are borders not always marked with a sign."

"True. Sometimes only in hindsight do you understand that you crossed them."

⸻

I looked at the passport lying on the seat beside me.

A new stamp had been added to one of its pages.

A small mark that I had crossed from one country to another.

But no stamp recorded the other borders I had crossed in my life.

The decisions I made.

The things I agreed to.

And those I learned to refuse.

"There is something strange about borders," I said to the imagined official.

"What?"

"Sometimes we wait years for the courage to cross one of them. And sometimes we do it without understanding how significant the step was."

"And how does one know whether crossing was right?"

I smiled.

"I thought you were supposed to answer my questions."

"I only check who passes. I cannot know where the road will take him."

I looked ahead again.

The road continued between the fields.

There was nothing especially different about it from the road we had traveled before the border.

But now we were already in another place.

I closed the passport and put it back in my bag.

Behind us remained the barrier.

Ahead of us, the road continued.

Continue to Chapter Eighteen: On the Way

© 2026 Nurit Rozenblat. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or distributed without the author's prior written permission.