They are the ghosts. The Syrians we’ve killed. The Arabs my brother bayoneted. And Rimona naked on a white sheet, a frozen smile on her marble face. My parents in the valley of the dead, her head wrenched back, his sunk on his chest, amidst the ruins of Sheikh Dahr, soaked in the dead pale silver. They are dead. I am alive. I’ve murdered them all.

He fell face down on the parched, salty ground. What have you done, you madman, what have you done, it’s your death. He grabbed his rifle, released the safety catch, and squeezed the trigger as hard as he could, whimpering like a dog. The butt kicked back against him. The smell of the gunpowder turned his stomach. The long volley merged with the pounding of his heart.

The desert and the wadi walls returned the fire with high, whining echoes, bullet for bullet, each reverberation more distant and muffled, yet proliferating, as if all the mountains around had taken up the challenge and were zeroing in on one another. The silence returned, and Yonatan knew there was no going back. He loaded a second clip and fired it off in one burst, raising his rifle, catching the moon in his sights, and blasting away at it to the last bullet.

He undid the buttons of his pants. He urinated in fits and starts, pissing and puking, puking and gagging out loud, his knees knocking, his stomach churning, his pants wet with his pee and his boots spattered with his vomit. A perfect target in the light of a full moon.

Panic-stricken, he spun around and took off on the run. He ran as he had never run in his life, stumbling without falling, lurching blindly down inclines, gasping for breath, sobbing aloud, a vicious stitch in his rib, his rifle held before him with both hands as if he were leading an assault, and he did not stop running even when his feet encountered the gravel bed of Wadi Araba again, he did not stop running until, ringed round by cobwebs of moonlight, he fell to the ground, face down in the silvery sand.

It was nearly three in the morning when he reached the trailer at the far end of the camp at Ein-Husub. The old man wiped his face with a filthy, tattered towel soaked in gin and icewater. It was half-past-three when Yonatan began to cry.