The unpredictable bus assigned to gather the Colonel up from the airstrip clanked through the outskirts of Coproliabad, audible but unseen. The people stood breathless, all the better to listen, and clapped in anticipation. And then the bus appeared, a floundering whale that staggered down the main drag and collapsed in a gear-stripping halt. The skiffle band churned up a sour rendition of “Ha’Tikva.” With Daphne at my side I watched, about fifty yards away, as Ish-Chayl stepped down out of the bus.

He was a ramrod of a man in the starched and immaculate uniform of the Israeli Army. A manifestation of verdict girded his long, lean frame, the only body within a radius of a million square miles, I’d venture to say, that wasn’t sweating. He had a certain serene swagger that I found mesmerizing, as if he enjoyed being the focus of the event and at the same time somehow being above it. Mine were not the only eyes that clung to him obediently, unable to resist the pull of his charisma. Struck dumb, I watched as he strode gravely to Abdul, and then a voice at my ear said softly, “Have you talked to him?”

I turned to face Derek. “Yes,” I lied, “but I don’t have an answer.”

I looked back at Ish-Chayl as he and the young sheik exchanged greetings. They were joined by Val, who demurely placed a garland of flowers around the Colonel’s neck.

Ish-Chayl stood in the square, the quintessential soldier-operator, tall as a cedar of the Psalms, surrounded by Abdul’s ministers. His bearing was such that to each he seemed to give his undivided attention, and to all at the same time. Each shift of his body was economical, at once fluid and restrained, reflecting an assertive self-possession denied to most mortals.

Yet there was something familiar about him; where had I seen that man, that Lion of Judah, before? On the illustrated pages of a book, some saga perhaps of the Israeli wars? In a documentary? On TV?

And then in a slant of sharp sunlight the Colonel turned his face toward me, and I found myself racing toward him, stumbling and sobbing. “Pop!” I howled.

Even in the highly charged, somewhat aberrational tableau of our reunion, the Colonel had lost neither his bravura nor his colossal dignity. As for me, I was staggered by the wild intoxication of the advent, unaccustomed as I was to the sight of a father. Certainly when I swooped down on him he gave no outward sign of recognition, and for a valid reason: he hadn’t the slightest idea who the hell I was. But of course there was a rich variety of reactions from the gallery.