Through the open bedroom door, by the bathroom light, he could see Rimona asleep on her back and their young guest on the rug at her feet, curled in a fetal position, his head buried deep under a pillow. You son-of-a-bitch, you! What a fucking whorehouse! Yonatan struggled into his khaki army pants and shirt, began to fight his way into his patched work sweater, confused the sleeves, and had to fight his way out of the tangle and start all over again. He stepped out on the porch to breathe the clean night air. Tia followed him. In the wet, black hush Yonatan lit a cigarette.

Downhill, around each of the perimeter lights, shimmering circles of mist gave off a strange, sickly glow. A frog croaked in a puddle and then broke off. A barren sea breeze blew through the shadowy branches of the pine trees. Yonatan Lifshitz silently began to drink it all in. The vastness of the waiting night. The terrifying spaces that stretched darkly away, devoid of a human presence. The emptiness of the bunkers, the trenches, the fortified positions, the mine fields, the burned-out armor, the no-man’s-land, the border posts left unguarded. And the earth itself conspiring slowly upward in the soft swell of its hillocks, in the humps of its hills, in its jagged faults that thrust skyward until it suddenly writhes in a spasm of mountains, range after range, chains of wild peaks, cliffs, canyons, ravines, tunneled gorges flooded by darkness—and beyond these the first desert plunging down to the long Jordan Rift, with yet more mountains on its other side, the high peaks of Edom, of Moab, of Gilead, of the Golan, the Hauran, and the Bashan, and fast upon them great tablelands of desert again, wilderness upon wilderness of sand and stone, a huge, dark stillness over all—here and there a lone rock, and another, and yet another, and on and on and on, for no purpose, for no person, untouched by human hand since the beginning of time and to be touched by none until its end, an illimitable wasteland consigned to howling winds. And after that still more mountains, their snow-capped summits eternally lashed by storms, with slopes where no foot has ever trod, gullies where no man has ever gone, gulches ripped by cascades, beneath monstrous outcroppings of basalt and pillars of granite. And beyond these the endless uninhabited prairies; the huge rivers coursing stilly in the darkness, tearing out their banks as if with fangs; the age-old rain forests, their ferny mosses twining up the tangled boughs of massive trees; the broad, unpopulated valleys; the empty brushland; the steppe after steppe stretching forever in the breathless wind; and finally the enormity of ocean, the cold, befogged, writhing seas and all their dark, indifferent waters. Behold the whole wide world—upon whose fullness a molten biblical wrath once upon a primeval time spilled like a geyser of lava.