“We Were Sparta,” you called it, like the title of some highbrow book. I sat there for two hours and three cups of coffee, and what can I tell you, Yuli, my child? I couldn’t understand it. Not really. The terms were completely foreign to me, your whole world view undecipherable. I never knew much about Athens or Sparta, so how could I understand what they were supposed to represent? I called your dad and asked him to explain it to me, but he refused to read something of yours that he didn’t get directly from you, and once again I felt as though he had defeated me. So I told him he was absolutely right and that I’d overreached, and then I hung up and read it all over again, from the beginning. And a third time. And I started reading about ancient Greece, hoping that if I understood your paper, maybe I’d begin to understand you. Like it was some key card into your mind. And you know what? I daresay maybe I did understand some of it. You wrote that there are two types of power in this world, a moderate power, like Athens was, and a violent one like Sparta. You said it was like the Haganah and the Lehi, or Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, that duos like those existed throughout human history. And if I’m not mistaken, you argued there was one major difference between them—that the moderate power sanctifies the quality of life, while the violent power sanctifies life itself. Meaning, Athens dealt primarily with improving the quality of its citizens’ lives, while Sparta was in constant battle over the mere right to live. You also wrote that as human beings, we want to believe the dominant power is the moderate one. That Martin Luther King made a greater impact on the world than Malcolm X, but that we’re just deluding ourselves, because we can’t handle the truth. Which is that human history is driven by its violent actors. “Like dark energy,” you wrote. And after that, you wrote the weirdest thing, which I don’t even know if I agree with, but you claimed that the violent force is also the moral one, because life itself should always come first. You wrote that Israel is the Sparta of the twenty-first century, and that that was a good thing. “Because where there is violence, there is life.” I’ll never forget that sentence. You wrote that people don’t even remember history. That Athenian culture might have contributed more to the world, to democracy, but it makes no difference. Because the great war between Athens and Sparta was won by the Spartans, and that, we mustn’t forget. What can I tell you, my child? All those words, all that violence, seemed so unrelated to you, to that inner peace of yours. I spent days on end trying to figure out where all those theories came from. The need to survive? To fight at all costs? Was it because of the divorce? The debts? I truly don’t know, Yuli. To this day, I can’t understand it. And it’s only now that I’m realizing it was with all those thoughts and convictions that you went off to war. God, that’s what you took with you into Lebanon?