"Tell me, what will be the name of the country?"
When Stephan joins the cause for Israel's rebuilding, he is a definite outsider. He is quickly corrected in this question by the assertion that Israel is his country too. At first, he could not accept his identity with the homeland, having never actually lived there or visited or participated with the concept at all. With this one question, he reveals his own alienation from all that he considers identity -- at once devoted to this foreign culture's preservation and terrified of his own lack of belonging.
"My mama has left me alone. . . One morning, she did not wake up. She lay asleep and I spoke to her all day long in the hope that she might answer back."
Young Eva is unable to even comprehend her mother's death at first. She keeps hoping her mother will awake and tend to her, this coming after their abrupt separation and equally as abrupt reunion, her mother having been dropped back in bed beside Eva. In Phillips' telling of the story, Eva is a pure innocent. Her experience of life is being shaped by death.
"But he can never understand somebody like me. None of them can."
When Eva rejects the proposal, she does so without explanation. On the inside, however, she reveals a darker story. She feels completely, perfectly alienated from the human race. She's suffering from severe post trauma in addition to having framed her life through the lens of early childhood trauma -- pure horror. These experiences leave her profoundly unable to lead a normal life, so she believes that she has no business in a relationship with someone not like herself. And there are no people like her.
"Eventually, of course, we found a name for the collective suffering of those who survived. These unfortunate people have to endure a multitude of symptoms which include insomnia, shame, chronic anxiety, a tendency to suicide and an inability to communicate with others. They are often incapable of successful mourning, fearing that this act of self-expression involves a letting go, and therefore of the dead, ultimately committing the deceased, often loved ones, to oblivion."
Eva's doctor works closely with her and other survivors to try and effectively diagnose their problems. He concludes that the summation of their experiences during the war have led to a new condition, one characterized by a multitude of symptoms in the body. In the mind, however, this "disease" is most effective. It refuses to allow the survivors to move past their experiences, to grieve lost loved ones, and to establish any semblance of a life upon their re-initiation into society. They're stopped on all sides by shame and guilt and injustice.
