Nadav paused for a second, taken aback as he often used to be when Isaac stunned the people in the study house with a sudden brilliant point. He felt his jaw going slack. But at the sound of another shell hitting nearby, Nadav wrenched his mind back into the trench and rammed his brother’s leather-wrapped arm with the butt of his gun, growling, “Isaac, cut the lyrical bullshit, would you? It’s not worth it!”

Isaac winced in pain, and Nadav watched him and swallowed. He hadn’t meant to really hurt him. But as Isaac’s face turned redder and purple veins began bulging beneath the skin of Isaac’s forehead, Nadav saw that it wasn’t the hit in the arm that had made Isaac wince.

The pressure was building inside Isaac’s forehead, his lips shaking. And then, suddenly, he exploded, shouting, “You think you can just forget about something and it goes away, but you can’t, Nadav! That’s not the way it works! Even if you think you’ve forgotten it and gotten rid of it, it never goes away!”

Nadav felt himself growing hot under his fatigues. He swallowed, then shouted, “What the hell are you talking about?”

“You!” Isaac screamed.

Nadav looked at Isaac’s face, bursting red under the black leather straps, and screamed back, “You’re a goddamn lunatic!”

This time Nadav turned full-face to Isaac and shoved him hard, not expecting him to move much. But to his surprise, Isaac lost his footing and stumbled backward several feet. He staggered to catch his balance again, then tripped in a small pit in the ground, landing on the dwindling ammunition stockpile.

As Isaac fell backward, a crack of sound loud enough to break open the heavens fell between them like a colossal windowpane slamming shut. Nadav himself was blown backward and slammed against the trench wall by the force of the shell that had just exploded. A moment later, desperately trying to escape from the flames of the ignited ammunition pile, Nadav would notice the gashes on his own left arm and feel the screaming pain in his own broken leg. But in that first moment, he looked only at where Isaac had been standing. It seemed to Nadav that God himself had appeared in a cloud, reaching down from the sky to grab Isaac. But when the smoke cleared, Nadav saw Isaac’s body on the ground, his legs burning and his neck severed by shrapnel, his dark mop of hair, grown back to its old length in the trenches, soaked with a blast of blood. The lacquered box of the tefillin anointed his forehead with blood. Isaac’s blood, Nadav now saw, was redder.