Although he tried to concentrate on the news coming over the radio—something about troop concentrations along the northern border that had already been broadcast several times that evening—he found it difficult to grasp what this might portend. He felt sorry for Prime Minister Eshkol, undoubtedly sitting at this very moment in a closed, crowded, smoke-filled room, struggling to fight off sorrow and fatigue while trying to assess battalions of nebulous rumors and unconfirmed facts. He felt sorry for himself as well, ground down as he was on the kibbutz by endless trivialities, not to mention his aches and pains, when he should have been at Eshkol’s side in that closed room, helping him to steer a moderate course. These hot-headed Huns, Scyths, Tatars surrounded him on all sides, pressuring him to do something melodramatic. Perhaps these aren’t just ordinary back pains, thought Yolek. Perhaps they’re a warning signal.

Quite apart from his physical woes, some obscure worry was gnawing away inside him. He felt he had forgotten some terribly important, even urgent, matter, one that was imperative to remember lest some great harm be done. Yet what it was, and why it was so urgent, he could not for the life of him recall. Could it be that he had left a door open or forgotten to unplug the electric kettle? But the kettle was unplugged, the doors were all shut, and so were the windows. Outside, the rain began to come down harder.

3

Yonatan thought of the words “beyond the call of duty.” That was how the army magazine had described his conduct on the night of the raid on Hirbet Tawfik. In the hasty retreat from the enemy’s position on those terraced, shell-blasted hills, lit by the hideous glare of Syrian artillery flares, he had carried on his back a bleeding soldier he didn’t know, a squat man who kept gasping, I’m done for, I’m done for, I’m done for, the last word drawing out into a thin wail.

And you, you suddenly decided that you’d had it. I can’t carry him another foot. Everyone else is already home safe except for the two of us lost in these hills with the Syrians breathing down our necks. If I just put the dying son-of-a-bitch down and let him die in peace among the rocks instead of on my back I may save my life, and no one will ever know, because there’s no one to rat, and I’ll be alive and not dead.