I escorted her back to the security gate. A moment before we parted ways she gave me a hug and took a pen out of her pocket. She rolled up my right sleeve and wrote her number on my forearm.

“Try talking to Korczak,” she asked. “If you get him to change his mind, give me a call.”

She gave me another hug, and this time a kiss on the cheek too. I think she wanted the other soldiers to see. Then she turned around and walked back to the bus station, disappearing into the desert from which she had come.

I heard clapping behind me.

“Well, did you fuck her?” Yanai yelled out the window of the security booth, but I pretended not to hear. I quickly slunk off to my room, trying not to make eye contact. I kept turning it over in my mind, the prickly touch of her pen etching blue ink into my skin.

4.

I KEPT HER number in my cell phone under the name “Girl from the north.” I also wrote it down in three different places, but still tried to preserve the traces of the digits she had scrawled on me. Most of them faded after two days, but during the weekend leave briefing on Thursday evening, I could still make out the four and the seven.

The briefing took place earlier than usual because Waxman and the other officers had to stay overnight at the training base for a regimental day seminar. Waxman glanced at his watch and announced that we had less than twelve hours before our weekend leave; that he wanted to believe a company of combat soldiers could get through one night without a babysitter. Then everyone scattered and I went up to the watchtower for guard duty.

I didn’t like guarding at night. Most soldiers don’t like pulling all-nighters in the tower. For me the reason wasn’t tiredness or lack of sleep, but rather the elusive feeling that if I were ever to lose my mind, it would probably happen there. As if the soul’s defense mechanisms were weaker at night. There was something about nights in the tower that magnified the feeling of detachment, the feeling that even if a missile were to destroy the entire outpost, no one would know. I would look at the dark sand for hours, wondering whether one day, in the distant future, Neptune would become the center of the world; that maybe a million years from now, right where I was standing, there would be a swimming pool, and dozens of kids diving into the water one after the other, not knowing a thing about the desperate soldier who had once stood there.