Then time would swallow him up into one of its unseen cataracts, and in the artificially measured brevity of a second he would relive the past with gorgeous intensity, not merely remembering, but inhabiting it all again, there. Mira by an olive tree, seated with her arms around her knees, smiling up at the warm blue sky with her eyes closed. And he could feel it all with her, the air still and pungent with thyme. The sun. He could feel the warmth deepening in her cheeks, as though there were no difference between them at all. The spilled dregs of wine, the spoiling ruins of a picnic on a stony hillside overlooking their rich, ripe world. How can it be so beautiful? she said, without opening her eyes, and he knew exactly what she meant. These were the words he felt but could not form. Their world was so beautiful that physical sight was almost inconsequential. How can it be so beautiful, David? He closed his eyes too. Settling for the coursing of flies and the distant sounds of automobiles on a road that sacred feet had marked with blood. In that instant of memory, there was also time to remember the feel of a cotton skirt under his hand, and the warmth beneath the cloth, and the intoxicating feel as he moved the cloth higher to let the sun touch more of her.
How can it be so beautiful, David?
The startling sight of bloodstains at the small of her back as the two of them rose to return, finally, to the car. During their lovemaking, a sharp rock had been cutting into her spine, through her sweat-soaked cotton blouse. But it had not mattered, and he understood that too. He said nothing, but simply put his hand on the stain, as if his touch might heal her.
In the same instant, he watched as his brown-eyed son ran through their apartment, his face a masculine interpretation of his mother's beauty. Dovik. Perhaps his failures had begun there. In his memory, there were only the times when he had been too busy for the boy, when he had bellowed at Mira that the noise was intolerable when he had offered the boy only obtuse adult excuses for his unwillingness to take the child's requests seriously. Brown eyes, a striped shirt, and turned-up jeans. Mira, for God s sake, could you please….
Mira, the lawyer who had been working for laughable wages in an organization engaged in defending Palestinian rights. When an impatient warrior charged into her unready life. Who could ever say why humans loved?
Mira who had made him human, formidable in her beauty, but whose kisses spoke urgency at unexpected times. Looking back, it was almost as if she had known that they had little time, as if she had sensed all that was coming. He could not think her name without voicing it inwardly as a cry, as if calling out to her disappearing back across a growing distance. Mira.
He had been sitting loose-legged on the turret of his tank, drained by a successful battle, when the single code word came down over the radio net, irrevocable, reaching out to a spent tank company commander in the Bekka Valley, to infantrymen on the Jordan, to pilots guiding on the great canal.
Armageddon.
There had been no immediate details, and he had been able to hope as he continued to fight. But, already, a part of him had known. When the order came to maneuver all vehicles into the most complete available defilade, to remove antennas, to cover all sights and seal the hatches, he had known with certainty. There would be no more warm flesh under shifting cloth.
He had failed. He had failed to defend his family, his nation. But that was only his most obvious guilt. In retrospect, he knew his failure had been far greater. He had never been the man he should have been, that Mira and his son had deserved. He had never been a man at all. Merely a selfish shell in the armor of a uniform.
How can it be so beautiful?
He had read that epileptics experience a rare elation on the verge of a seizure, that their worst sufferings were preceded by a fleeting joy that some described as approaching holiness. And that was what time did to David Heifetz. In an unguarded instant, his memory filled with the fullness of his life with Mira, with blue seas and orange groves and a passionate woman's smell, only to kill her again and again and again. And he was convinced that each time she died anew in his memory, she suffered again. Time was far from a straight line. Mira was always vulnerable, her agony was endless. His God was the merciless god of eternal simultaneity.
Armageddon.
In his wallet, Lieutenant Colonel David Heifetz, of the United States Army, had buried a trimmed-down snapshot of his wife and child. He was constantly aware of its presence and he knew each shadow and tone, he knew the exact thoughts behind the four eyes considering the camera, the faint weariness of the boy at the end of a long afternoon, Mira's needless anxiety about dinner, the history behind her necklace, and the slight blemish that had temporarily made her beauty human.
He had not looked at the photograph for seven years.
"Lucky Dave looks tired," Merry Meredith whispered. He had just plopped back down in the field chair beside Manny Martinez, his closest friend. He felt drained by the intelligence briefing he had just delivered, troubled by its inadequacies, yet relieved, as always, that it was over. He did not fear Taylor. He only feared failing the old man. Now he sat, loose, and grateful that the honor of briefing had passed on to Heifetz. Meredith watched the S-3 as the man punched in the codes that filled the briefing screen with the exact map coverage he wanted. It seemed to Meredith that Heifetz was a bit off his usual crisp precision. Nothing the average observer would necessarily notice. But just the sort of thing an intelligence officer who had earned his spurs in the Los Angeles operation would pick up A minor human failing, perhaps the beginning of a vulnerability. "He really looks tired," Meredith repeated.