How the thought of that scared me. You’re crazy, I said, you’re out of your fucking mind, and I began to run like hell with that dying bastard on my back, and bullets and tracers and mortar shells exploding all over from that other Tawfik, the upper one, the one we never took, the one the Syrians held, and that fucker kept bleeding into my ear like a torn garden hose, screaming I’m done fo-o-or until he had no breath any more, and neither did I. My lungs were full of burned smells, burned fuel, burned rubber, burned weeds, burned blood. If I’d had a free hand, I’d have cut his throat with my hunting knife just to make him shut up, but I kept on running, bawling like a boy.

How we got through that mine field before Kibbutz Tel Katzir I’ll never know. By then I was howling too, oh God save me, God come save me, I don’t want to die, oh God I’m done fo-o-or. If only the bastard would die but not on my back before we reach Tel Katzir—he’d better not leave me alone here. And then this one crazy shell landed twenty meters off just to teach me not to run like a lunatic, to run more slowly. Oh God is he heavy, I can’t go on any more!

But we’d reached Tel Katzir, we were in the middle of all this barbed wire, being shot at. Don’t shoot, I began to scream, hey, don’t shoot, can’t you see we’re dying, hey, can’t you see we’re dying, until they heard me and brought us to a field hospital in a bomb shelter. That’s when they took him off my back at last. We were all glued together with blood and saliva and sweat and piss and all the fluids in our bodies like two newborn puppies, one blind filthy lump. We’d been soldered to each other, his nails stuck into my chest and back like staples. When they unpeeled him, there were pieces of my skin on him, and so soon as he was off me, I collapsed like an empty sack on the floor.

Suddenly in the badly lit bunker it turned out that I was really out of my skull, that it was all a mistake, that the blood which soaked through my clothes and my underwear and into my crotch and even my socks wasn’t his at all. He wasn’t even wounded, just in shock. All that blood was my own, from a piece of shrapnel in my shoulder, barely two inches from my heart.