Afterward they all went to his childhood house, and the boys filled their pockets with red lychees from the tree and got bitten by nasty ants in the grass, and then they drove to the neighboring Arab village for lunch and got chastised by the owner of the hummus place for giving their dog water from a bowl that humans ate out of. A plastic takeout box was brought with the water, which the dog didn’t want anyway.

Now they were on the highway driving home, and she was saying to Rafi that all week people had been telling her the most astonishing stories. She was not aware of having asked for these intimate and staggering stories about their lives, but maybe in her way she had been; maybe she had the look of someone who was trying to work something out, something at once vast and fleeting, which could never be approached head-on but only anecdotally.

The sea was going by turquoise in the passenger window. The kids were laughing or complaining.

“I told you the one about the chicken under the car in Lebanon, didn’t I?” Rafi asked. No, he hadn’t, she said; she would have remembered if he had.

Rafi might have been a dancer, but from the ages of eighteen until twenty-three he’d been in the Sayeret Golani, an elite special forces unit known for the physical extremes demanded of its soldiers. To become a man in his country was to become a soldier—being a soldier was the passage you had to go through, whether you liked it or not, on the way to becoming a man, though no one could say exactly when along that passage it happened that you stopped being a boy. The first time you fired your gun at a moving target? The first time you saw the enemy as an animal? Or the first time you treated him like one?

Like every other eighteen-year-old, Rafi had no choice but to enlist. But it had not been required of him to go through the grueling selection process to be chosen for the special forces, or the year of masochistic training that followed, nor had it been required, after completing three years of necessary service, to sign on for another two years as an officer. Yet it had always been Rafi’s understanding with himself that he would serve in the special forces, in a unit that would push him to the furthest limits of his physical and mental capacity. That he would become an animal, but a pure animal that operates on instinct alone, like the flying tiger that was the symbol of the Sayeret Golani, and which its commandos received during the induction ceremony in the form of a small metal pin.