Azariah’s story about the teacher who had his brains blown out by a bullet wasn’t really true. And Azariah himself wasn’t real. And neither were all those years. Or home. And neither are Michal and that old madman. What’s real is my life that’s beginning now. That’s my justice, to be by myself in the night, to belong to the silence, to go at my own pace, heading eastward, taking a bearing on the highest peak.

A patriotic song kept running through his head. “What more, O what more do you want, our land, that we haven’t given you yet?” A question for which he had no answer, but he couldn’t stop humming the melody. “Full are our granaries, teeming are our homes.” That’s all over with. I have no more home. Up in that wadi in the mountains of Edom the nomads are on the move. And I’m a nomad now myself. I’m as good as dead to them all, but I’ve never been more alive to myself. No one will ever tell me what to do any more. Just let them try and I’ll plug them full of holes. I was born dead. Like Rimona’s baby last year. I never even asked what that Syrian gynecologist in Haifa did with her body. What do they do with the stillborn? Store them in some ghost town in the mountains? In special hideaways cut out of stone? Deep in the valley of the shadow of death?

Rimona’s Efrat must be there. My daughter? Am I her father? How scary, that word “father.” Me? And how could I recognize a child I’ve never seen? Among so many children? If I called her name out loud—Efrat!—would she come to me and give me a hug?

He wiped his brow with the back of his hand and slightly loosened his shoulder straps.

She used to put my hand on her belly to feel the baby move, and peer at me as if I really cared. Me? A father? Efrat’s? The other baby’s too? When she had that abortion? Madness!

Mysteriously, Yonatan had the sensation of the baby moving in his own belly. Just then, the soles of his boots made a crunching sound. Clearly, he was now walking over gravel. Am I in the bed of a wadi? It wasn’t long before his feet could once again feel the silent sand beneath them.

Soon the moon will rise. That wadi I crossed a few minutes ago must have been Wadi Araba. That means I’m over the border. Out of Israel. In the Kingdom of Jordan, home of the cutthroat nomads. I’d better be alert.