“Out came the chicken,” Rafi said, “and then the guy ducks down again for a second look, straightens up, and orders everyone out of the car. All the doors flew open, the kids tumbled out along with the wife, and everyone went back into the house. Around me, many of my soldiers were furious—all of that for nothing, the mission had failed, our superiors were pissed off as hell.”

And him? she asked. How did he feel?

“The thing is,” he said, “that I can’t remember. And the more time passes, the more I feel I need to know what it seems I will never know: whether I was relieved, whether I understood at that moment that that chicken had saved my life, too, or whether I was no longer even an animal, and had become a machine.”

3

It was the late afternoon now, and they were driving away from Freedom, a fact that wasn’t lost on either Rafi or her. She’d had boyfriends one after another before marrying, and then after a decade of marriage she’d gotten divorced, and after that she’d been with a younger man for a long time, until now at last, for the first time in twenty years, she wasn’t attached to any man at all. It was a lack that had first produced in her a sense of terror that went so far back that she couldn’t identify its source. At the start of what had become a nightmarish period, she had met a friend for lunch who’d said to her, “There is no woman, however loved, who isn’t terrified of abandonment,” and for a very long time she’d tried to work out what that meant. Was it only because the friend was much older, shaped by a time in which women had little or no access to the avenues that might lead to self-sufficiency and independence, that she believed that? When she herself thought about it, there was very little left that a man could give her that she really needed, aside from sex, which was easy enough to find. After six months of panic attacks, unremitting insomnia, and depression, the fear of being alone, without the life support of a man, had at last receded and been replaced with a feeling of quiet euphoria.