At ten minutes after two in the morning, Yonatan woke from a troubled sleep. A bloody, faceless corpse had been brought into the tractor shed on an army stretcher. It’s your father, buddy, the corps commander said, tapping Yonatan on the shoulder. He’s been hacked to death with a dagger by two-legged beasts. But my father is a sick old man, protested Yonatan, trying to talk or bargain his way out of the truth. Your father was butchered with biblical cruelty, barked the corps commander. Instead of just standing there answering back, why don’t you get off your ass and try to patch him together.

The words “biblical cruelty” struck Yonatan with a frothlike fury, as if he had been spat on in disgust. He shrank back, murmuring, okay, okay, dad, just don’t be annoyed, you know I’m doing my best. The prostrate Yolek ignored this plea. His voice rang out like a gong. You evil seed! You generation of vipers! You degenerate race of Tatars! You will counterattack and retake Sheikh Dahr this very hour regardless of losses. You’ve got to get it through your thick skulls that this is a life-and-death battle. If we lose, not only you but the entire Jewish people will die like dogs. But if they do, you boys must see to it that this time we take the whole wicked world down with us. Remember, we’re counting on you. I’m sorry to have to say this, dad, said Yonatan, but aren’t you dead? At that, the bloody, faceless corpse leaped from the stretcher and advanced on Yonatan with arms open to embrace him.

Dressed in his undershorts and a gray T-shirt, Yonatan rose with a start from the living-room couch he had been sleeping on. His head weighed a ton. He gasped for breath from all the cigarettes he had smoked. Once, in a movie, he had seen condemned men led from their cells to the scaffold in the middle of the night. Now, frozen and only half-awake, he felt almost without regret that his time too had come.

He went to the bathroom barefoot to pee and missed the bowl, wetting not only the seat but the floor around it. Idiot! he thought, what got into you to drink all that whisky and blab your head off? And how the hell did you end up sleeping like a stiff on the couch?