The word for child changes on a Tuesday.

Yael notices it during the morning session, when the woman from the eastern district uses the old form—kefrin—and the man from the western district flinches as though struck. She watches his pupils contract, his jaw tighten. He responds in his own tongue, using the new form—kefrin-sa—and emphasizes the suffix with a precision that sounds like accusation.

The woman’s face hardens. She repeats: kefrin.

Yael sits between them in the mediation room, her dictionary open on the steel table. The book is three hundred pages, handwritten, accumulated over six years of translations. She flips to the K section. Under child, she has written:

kefrin (East) = kefrin (West)
Last verified: 14 months ago

Fourteen months. She remembers the verification. A joint census, the last one. She had walked through both districts with her clipboard, counting children, recording names. Her daughter had still been speaking to her then.

She adds a new line: kefrin-sa (West), meaning unclear, possibly pejorative modification.

“Please,” Yael says in the Eastern tongue, then repeats in Western: “We can clarify terms.”

But the woman is already standing, and the man is already turning away, and Yael knows—she has learned to recognize—the particular quality of silence that means the session is over.
_
She has been the city’s official translator for six years. Before the split, before the eastern and western districts stopped pretending they were one city, there was no need for her position. Everyone spoke the common tongue, the old tongue, the language of grandparents and shared streets. Yael grew up in the eastern district, married a man from the western district, raised a daughter in the buffer zone back when it was just called the center.

The marriage ended before the split formalized. Dov moved back west; Yael stayed east. Their daughter, Liat, was twelve. She chose to live with her mother.

That’s the eastern version.

The western version: Liat was kept from her father. The eastern version: Liat chose. The western version: children cannot choose; they are shaped by whoever holds them. The eastern version: children know. Children always know.

Liat is eighteen now. She crossed into the western district on her sixteenth birthday and has not spoken to Yael since. Yael knows, from her position, from the reports that cross her desk, that Liat has taken a western name. That she has publicly renounced her eastern upbringing. That she has described her childhood, in interviews Yael has had to translate, as a form of captivity.

The word Liat used was kefrinar. It means, roughly, the state of having been a child in the wrong place. It is a western coinage. It has no eastern equivalent.
_
Yael walks home through the buffer zone, the three blocks of empty buildings that separate east from west. The apartment she raised Liat in is four streets away, abandoned now, too close to the line. Graffiti covers the walls in both languages, the scripts so divergent now that they barely resemble each other. She can read them all. She is the only one who can.

Tonight the eastern wall says: They are teaching their children to forget us

The western wall says: They are teaching their children we never existed

Both statements use the word children. In the east: kefrin. In the west: kefrin-sa. Yael stands between the two walls and thinks: Liat would read only the western one. Would walk past the eastern script as though it were decoration, meaningless shapes.

She wonders if Liat has forgotten how to read eastern entirely. She wonders if forgetting is something that happens to you or something you do.
_
At home, Yael opens her dictionary and begins the nightly update. Seven new words diverged today. The word for water has split into mira (east) and mira-kol (west), the suffix suggesting ownership or right. The word for home now has three variants. The word for memory in the east has acquired a prefix that makes it inherently communal, while the western form has become strictly individual.

Mira. Her daughter’s middle name, given before the split, when mira just meant water, clear and uncontested.

She writes until her hand cramps, until the words blur. She is trying to hold a language together that wants to become two languages, three languages, a thousand mutually incomprehensible dialects of rage. She tells herself this is service. Neutral service. The necessary work of translation.

She does not write down what she knows: that every entry in this dictionary is a small act of preservation, and that preservation is not neutral, has never been neutral, that by recording the divergence she is perhaps enabling it, giving it form, making it real.

Her phone rings. The eastern council. They need her for an emergency session tomorrow—a child has crossed into the western district. No, they correct themselves, not crossed—was taken. The word they use is stolen, but the western district will undoubtedly use rescued or welcomed or freed.

Yael asks: “How old?”

“Five years. A girl. A kefrin.”

She hears the emphasis on the old form, the refusal to acknowledge the western modification.

“What’s her name?”

A pause. “Tamar. Tamar Lev.”

Yael writes the name in her notebook. She writes it in both scripts, eastern and western, side by side. The letters are still mostly the same for proper names. Mostly.

“I’ll be there,” she says.
_
The next morning, both councils sit on opposite sides of the mediation room. Yael sits between them with her dictionary open, though she already knows it won’t help.

But the session does not begin with councils.

The western delegation has brought the child.

Tamar sits in a chair too large for her, her feet dangling above the floor. She wears western clothes—the cut is distinctive, the colors muted where eastern children wear bright—and her hair has been braided in the western style, tight to the scalp. But her face is the face of a child, and her eyes move around the room with the darting confusion of someone who has been moved too many times in too short a period to track where she is.

The eastern delegation sees her and something shifts in the room. One of the councilors, a woman Yael recognizes from the housing committee, makes a sound—not a word, something before words, grief or rage compressed into a single exhaled syllable.

“She’s safe,” the western councilor says. “She’s cared for. She came to us.”

“She’s five years old,” the eastern councilor says. “She didn’t come anywhere. She was taken from her bed.”

“She was brought to safety. Her parents—”

“Her parents are in the eastern district, waiting—”

“Her parents,” the western councilor says, and the word parents lands differently in his mouth, carries a modifier Yael hasn’t heard before, “sel-kofrim—”

Yael’s pen stops moving.

“What was that word?” she asks.

The western councilor looks at her. “You heard me.”

“I need the definition. For the record.”

“It means,” he says, “those who call themselves parents but have forfeited the name.”

The eastern councilor stands so fast her chair falls backward. “You’re saying her parents are not her parents?”

“I’m saying the relationship has been legally severed. Under western law, as of her arrival, she is a ward of—”

“She did not arrive. She was stolen from her home while she slept—”

“She was carried to safety by people who loved her enough to act—”

Tamar begins to cry.

The sound cuts through the room. Both councils stop talking. Yael watches the child’s face crumple, watches her small body curl inward, and she thinks: this is what I am translating. This is what the dictionary is for. To render this into something manageable, something that can be discussed in sessions, something with terms and definitions and clean divergences.

“Tamar,” Yael says. She uses the common tongue, the old tongue, the language that still exists in lullabies and nursery rhymes. “Tamar, can you understand me?”

The child looks at her. Nods.

“Do you know where you are?”

Another nod. Then, in a voice so small Yael has to lean forward to hear: “The between place. Mama said you never go to the between place.”

“Which mama?” the eastern councilor asks, and Yael holds up a hand—stop—and the councilor stops, perhaps because of Yael’s authority, perhaps because even she can recognize that this is not a moment for politics.

“Tamar,” Yael says. “Do you want to tell me anything?”

The child looks at the western delegation. Then at the eastern delegation. Her eyes are calculating in the way that children’s eyes become when they learn that adults are watching, that their words will be used, that they are no longer just children but evidence.

“I want to go home,” Tamar says.

“Where is home?” the western councilor asks.

Tamar opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.

“I don’t know the word,” she says.
_
The session dissolves. Of course it does. The eastern delegation demands the child be returned; the western delegation refuses to acknowledge the premise. Yael sits alone in the mediation room after everyone has gone, her dictionary open to the page where home used to have one entry and now has three.

Bayis (East): the structure where one’s family lives
Bayis-am (West): the structure where one’s true people live
Bayis-kof (East, archaic): the structure one has been taken from

She thinks about Tamar saying I don’t know the word. She thinks about what it means to be five years old and fluent in two languages that are rapidly becoming mutually incomprehensible, to have a mother in each district, to have two homes that are both called home but cannot both be home because the definitions have diverged.

She thinks about Liat at five. Liat learning to read, Liat asking why some letters looked different in Dov’s handwriting than in Yael’s. Yael explaining: we grew up in different places, we learned different ways, but it’s all the same language. And Liat accepting this, as children do, because children can hold contradictions that adults cannot.

Until they can’t.

Until they are sixteen and they walk across a line and they never come back.
_
That night, Yael does not update her dictionary.

She sits at her desk and looks at the three hundred pages of careful notation, six years of trying to hold meaning stable while it writhed and split. She thinks about Tamar in that too-big chair, her feet dangling, her eyes moving. She thinks about the word the western councilor used: sel-kofrim. Those who call themselves parents but have forfeited the name.

She flips to the P section. Under parent, she has written:

kofrim (East) = kofrim (West)
Last verified: 8 months ago

She picks up her pen. She adds:

sel-kofrim (West): those who have forfeited parenthood (through abuse? neglect? political affiliation?)

The question marks are not standard notation. She has never used question marks in this dictionary. The whole point is precision, clarity, the elimination of ambiguity. But she writes them anyway, because she does not know what Tamar’s parents did to earn this word, or if they did anything at all, or if the word was invented specifically for this purpose, to make it possible to take a child and call it rescue.

She thinks: I have been writing this dictionary for six years. I have documented every divergence. I have recorded the exact moment when child stopped meaning the same thing on both sides of the line.

She thinks: I have never once tried to stop it.
_
The next morning, there is smoke.

Yael wakes to the smell of it, thick and chemical. She goes to the window. The buffer zone is burning—not all of it, not yet, but the building on the corner, the one with the graffiti, the one where she once bought bread from a baker who served both districts and has since relocated, no one knows where.

She watches the flames eat the walls. The graffiti disappears letter by letter, eastern script and western script alike, all of it rendered into the same ash. She thinks: this is the only true translation. This is the only language both sides share.

Her phone rings. Both councils, different lines. She answers the eastern line.

“We need you at the border. The child—”

“What about her?”

“The western delegation is returning her. There’s been—something has happened, we don’t know what, they’re saying she’s—she’s not—”

Yael hangs up. She grabs her coat, her dictionary, and runs.
_
The border crossing is a single gate in a concrete wall, manned by guards from both sides who do not speak to each other. By the time Yael arrives, a crowd has gathered—eastern parents, western officials, journalists with cameras, everyone shouting in their respective languages.

She pushes through. Her credentials get her past the guards, into the no-man’s-land between the two checkpoints.

Tamar is there.

She is sitting on the ground in the exact center of the crossing, the line painted beneath her. She is not crying. She is not speaking. She is staring at something in her hands.

Yael approaches slowly. “Tamar?”

The child looks up. Her face is blank in a way that Yael recognizes, that she has seen before, that she saw in the mirror for months after Liat left.

“They said I have to go back,” Tamar says. “But I don’t know which way is back.”

Yael kneels. She looks at what Tamar is holding: two pieces of paper, one from each delegation. Instructions, she realizes. Directions. One written in eastern script, one in western script, both telling Tamar where to go, what to do, who to follow.

“I can read both,” Tamar says. “But they say different things.”

“What do they say?”

“This one says go home. This one says go home.” She looks up at Yael. “But they don’t mean the same home. And I don’t know which one is mine.”

Yael takes the papers. She reads them. The eastern document refers to Tamar’s bayis, her family home, her parents. The western document refers to her bayis-am, her true home, her rightful guardians.

She thinks: this is what I have been documenting. This is the split I have been recording. And I have never, not once, asked myself which version I believe.

She thinks: I know which version I believe.

She thinks: I have always known.

“Tamar,” she says. “I’m going to tell you something, and I need you to listen.”

The child watches her.

“Both of these papers are telling the truth. The people who wrote them believe what they wrote. Do you understand?”

Tamar nods slowly.

“But the truth is not the same as what’s right. And I can’t tell you what’s right. I can only—” She stops. She looks at her dictionary, three hundred pages of careful neutrality, of documented divergence, of the exact moment when she stopped being a person and became a function.

“I can only tell you what I should have told my daughter,” Yael says. “Before she left. Before I let her walk away without—”

Her voice breaks. She didn’t expect it to break. She has been professional for six years, neutral, the perfect translator, and she didn’t expect that a five-year-old girl sitting on a painted line would be the thing that cracked her open.

“Tamar. I don’t know where your home is. I don’t know which family is your real family. But I know—”

The crowds are pressing closer. The guards are shouting. Someone is demanding that Yael step back, that she stop interfering, that she remember her role.

“I know that you are a child,” Yael says. “Not kefrin, not kefrin-sa. A child. And you deserve to be somewhere safe and loved and whole, and I am sorry—I am so sorry—that we have made that impossible.”

She hands the papers back.

“I can’t tell you which way to go,” she says. “But I can walk with you. If you want.”

Tamar looks at the eastern checkpoint. The western checkpoint. The crowd pressing in from both sides.

“Which way are you going?” she asks.

Yael thinks about her apartment in the buffer zone, the buffer zone that is currently burning. She thinks about her dictionary, her six years of service, her credentials that let her pass through gates. She thinks about Liat, who she hasn’t spoken to in two years, who learned to read in both scripts and chose one, who made a choice that Yael has never forgiven her for and never tried to understand.

“I don’t know,” Yael says.

And it is the truest thing she has said in six years.