The dawn chill was sharp but bracing. Yonatan put on his jacket, wrapped himself in the blanket with the solemnity of a Jew donning a prayer shawl, and stood with his face to the mountains in the east. Thin and hazy like ancient glass, the air exuded anticipation. The lights of the perimeter fence were still on. Here and there a few heavily clad figures scurried about the tents and shacks. Beyond the camp stretched the desert vastness, serenely attending night’s end. Yonatan squinted into the wind, pulled down his woolen cap, and lifted his jacket collar. His nostrils flared, like those of an animal feeling the call. His whole body was being swept away by an urge to set out at once, to the mountains, the wadis, the canyons, the steep, slippery rock ledges, the dwelling places of the deer and the mountain goat, the lair of the wildcat, the mighty pinnacles where nested the vulture, the griffin, and the lammergeier, where twisted and swiveled the efa and the horned viper. Names known by heart from maps, from years of army maneuvers, took on magic. Mount Ardon. Mount Gizron. Mount Lotz. Woody Mountain, on which no wood ever stood. Mount Arif. The Tsichor Range. The Shizafon Plateau, on which, a thousand years ago, Rimona and he had once sighted four or five stray camels wandering like specters on the horizon. The Ye’elon Plateau, its treeless, shrubless, lifeless canyons broiling in the sun without a penciling of shade. Uvda Canyon. Scouts Canyon. The broad shingle flats. Yes, even that remote stretch of level ground north of Ramon Canyon, Demons’ Plain.

What have I done with my life all these years? From the citrus groves to the dining hall, to a dead double bed to this committee, to that meeting. Here, praise be, I’ve come home at last. Here, I’m no longer theirs. Thank you for all this beauty. For Michal. For every breath. For the very sunrise. I should break out in applause without further ado—or make a deep bow.

The advance guard of sunlight flared on the western hills behind him. And then, in a nascent halo over Edom, in an ancient script of molten violet and lime green, in an unearthly Roman candle of awesome fiery gold, a toothed arc on the horizon burst into flame, splitting the sky as a spear as a wound as a blood-red sun.

This is my last day. By sun-up tomorrow I shall be dead, and that is just what I should be, what I’ve waited for all my life, and here, at last, it is. How cold I feel in my bones.