A shadow passed over Rimona’s brow. Through her slightly parted lips, Yonatan could make out the white tips of her teeth. He thought of expanses of white sand incandescent in the sun, blasted by the wild midday light of the Zin Desert near a bone-dry site that was marked on his map as Caravan Spring. The memory flooded him with a pain unlike any he had ever known, and the sharpness of it made him shut his eyes.

He recalled how their love began. He recalled the weeks before their marriage. The long ride by jeep through the mountains and down to the gray flatlands below. The campfire of dried branches that smoldered all night long. The sleeping bag they shared on that desert night behind the silent jeep. Her child’s breasts caught in his heavy hands like two warm starlings. Her tears, her whispers. “Try not to mind it, Yoni. It’s not your fault. You just go ahead and don’t mind.”

He thought too of how their love had ended. Three years ago at half-past-two in the morning when she said, “Look, Yoni, lots of girls are like that. You have to try not to mind.”

He thought of her first pregnancy. And of the last one. Of the dead baby girl he had refused to look at in the hospital. And once more of her delicate body, that cold, exquisite slab of marble. Of his last, abasing attempts to arouse in that pale adamant some life, some pain, some injury or anger. So many days and nights, nights and days. And the distances. Her suffering that he could only imagine, and not even that. His aloneness. At three in the morning on a wide, arid sheet beneath a wide, arid ceiling with everything gleaming like the bones of a cadaver in the light of the full dead moon in the window, wide awake yet abducted by some white nightmare in a snowy polar wasteland, wide awake but alone with a corpse.