He picks up and goes, said Yonatan out loud, swept by a drunken joy. He stuck the booklet in his pack, rolled up the maps, and slipped them under his shirt. It was almost noon. He badly wanted a cigarette. Oh no you don’t! You’re all through with that.

He stripped his rifle and cleaned it with a barrel rod and a flannel swatch, taking time to do a thorough job. Once it was reassembled, he lay down on his back, his head on his pack, his rifle resting on his chest, only to feel last night’s thrill of pleasure once again in his loins. He yawned and stretched luxuriously. Scattered words and phrases from the booklet passed like clouds through his mind. Ghosts. Unearthly dread. Jackals. Human skulls. We’ll go have a look-see. Once we’ve come back it’ll be time enough for life to begin.

He dozed off. As flies paraded across his face, he envisioned his death that night from a burst of bullets in the chest or a curved dagger between the shoulder blades. There was no fear in the thought of such a death, alone in the wilderness on enemy soil, face down on the dark sand, his blood soaking into the dust like a venom purged from his body. In such a death, he might at last find perfect peace, as sometimes he had found it when, during a childhood illness, he had lain between the cool sheets of his parents’ bed, in the dim light of the shuttered blinds, beneath his mother’s quilt. Yonatan yearned for a death as gentle and painless as this, one that would turn him into just another rock in the stony desert, one that would leave him without a single thought or longing, cold, inanimate, and forever still.

Anyone looking at Yonatan at that moment could have easily detected beneath the mask of dust, the scraggly growth of beard, and the tangled, grimy hair the face of the delicate eight-year-old boy he had once been, the sleepy-eyed child always enveloped in a quiet sorrow, as if the grown-ups had made him a promise that he had been sure would be kept but still had not been. Even sleep, when it came to gather him up, failed to wipe away the lines of hurt from his face. So he appeared to the man leaning over him now, staring at him intently with light blue eyes, his gaze slowly shifting to take in the pile of equipment, the sleeping bag tied to the pack, and the rifle cradled on the young man’s chest. A weary, compassionate smile spread over his face. With the tip of a long finger, he prodded the sleeping Yonatan.

“Hey, you chudak, dehydrate is what you’ll do here. Come on now, let’s put you to bed in style. In a fourposter, like a king. On sheets of royal purple, of byssus and lace.”