There would be no rowdy competitions to recite the Ayalon-Shen’ar Arabic-Hebrew dictionary by heart, and therefore, no one would hit him with tadahlaz: “to dally in the corridors, of parliament etc.” (of course Ilan had to remember the “etc.”), or slip him, in a crowded elevator, nahedah—“a maiden with rounded, full breasts.” Gone were their Arabized Hebrew and Hebraized Arabic: he could not call bottles bakabik instead of bakbukim, or birds tzapafir instead of tziporim, or condoms kanadem for kondomim, or buttocks aka’ez for akuzim. And who would there be to immerse him in a bubbling cauldron, pass him with the call of the wild, carry him through a storm in his talons, and shuffle him off this mortal coil?
He went back to the war room just as the Israeli tanks flanked the Egyptian tanks and set two of them on fire. The soldiers throughout the stronghold cheered and hugged. They waved excitedly at the Israeli tanks and began to prepare for their rescue. When the forces disappeared over the sand dunes in pursuit of the unharmed Egyptian tanks, a heavy, toxic silence spread through the stronghold. The soldiers stood with their arms suspended awkwardly, mid-wave.
A few moments later, a wounded Egyptian soldier climbed out of his tank with flames shooting up from his shoulders. He jumped off the tank and started running around with his hands held high, until he finally collapsed facedown, convulsed, and eventually stopped moving. He lay there in strange surrender as the flames engulfed his body. Four Egyptian APCs showed up and discharged a few soldiers in camouflage fatigues, who looked at the stronghold and consulted. The stronghold commander gave an order, and everyone who had a weapon started shooting. Ilan, too. The first shot, his only one in the war, punctured his eardrum and scarred him with a constant ringing sound. The Egyptian soldiers jumped back into the APCs and retreated. Ilan pulled a water canteen out of an abandoned gear belt and gulped down almost the entire contents. His knees were shaking. The thought that he could have killed a person, and that he really wanted to, ripped off a layer of film that had been covering him since he began this journey.
The commander called him over, said he didn’t care where he’d come from, but from now on he was under his command. He told him to circle through the lookout positions and take care of anything the men asked for. Over the next several hours, Ilan hauled crates of ammunition, jerry cans of water and generator fuel, and sandwiches churned out by the medic. Together with a thick-bearded, reticent soldier, he dismantled a MAG from an APC in the yard and helped erect it on the northern post. He gathered more and more “administrative material,” papers and forms and activity logs, and burned them in the yard.
When he stopped to pee, a thought came to him. He went up to the APC, untied and rolled back the camouflage net, and peered in at the pile of instruments. He stood looking at them for a long time. Suddenly he jumped up as though someone had slapped him and ran as fast as he could to look for the Intelligence NCO. He dragged him back to the APC and explained what he wanted to do.
The NCO stared at him, then laughed loudly, cursed him, and yelled that HQ would kick his ass if anything happened to any of the instruments. In the same breath he added that in an hour or two they’d have to douse the whole thing with gasoline and burn it anyway. Ilan said, “Just gimme one instrument for an hour, that’s all.” The NCO shook his head and crossed his arms over his chest. He was a big guy, taller and broader than Ilan. Ilan said quietly, “We’re all going to die. Why would you cheap out on me for one lousy VRC?” The NCO tied the camouflage net back on the APC and whistled to himself. When he finished, he turned and saw Ilan still standing there. “Get lost,” he hissed, “there’s nothing for you to do here.” Ilan said, “Half an hour, you can time me.” The NCO turned red. He snarled that Ilan was getting on his nerves, and besides, the transceiver at Magma had been destroyed ages ago, so there weren’t any transmissions coming out of there anyway. Ilan smiled and asked pleasantly, almost sweetly (“Well, when Ilan wants something …,” Ora says, and Avram nods), “Just tell me one thing. What other instruments do they use in the strongholds?” The NCO, thrown by Ilan’s friendliness, muttered that Magma probably had a few PRC-6s, but there was no chance anything was left there. Ilan asked if this scanner could pick up a PRC-6 frequency. The NCO shoved Ilan’s hand off the instrument, fastened the net again, and growled that if Ilan didn’t get lost, he was done for. Ilan, with his usual coolheadedness, smiled again and said that if the NCO gave him an instrument now, just for an hour, he promised, he swore, not to tell the Egyptians when they came that he was the Intelligence NCO.
“What did you say?” the NCO blurted. Ilan pinned him to the APC with his arms, and repeated his offer face-to-face. The NCO’s eyes darted around in search of help, but Ilan could already see the wheels in his mind moving like a very simple abacus. “You’re fucked up,” the NCO panted in his ear, “you’re an asshole, a spy, this is treason.” But he spoke in a whisper that disclosed the results of his calculations. Ilan let go. They stood facing each other. “Where did you come from?” the NCO whispered hoarsely. “Who are you, anyway?” Ilan flooded him with his green eyes and shamelessly mimed fingernails being torn out and electrodes being hooked up to his balls. The guy moaned. His lips moved silently. All this lasted maybe ten seconds. The NCO could no longer deal with such a terrifying scenario and voluntarily gave in. Without a word, he undid the camouflage net and extracted a VRC device. He placed it on a small wooden table outside the war-room bunker and turned to leave. Ilan grabbed his arm and asked: “Are you sure this can pick up a PRC-6?”
“No,” the NCO mumbled, avoiding Ilan’s eyes like a hypnotist’s. “It’s not even in the right range.”
“Then make it in the right range.”
The NCO swallowed and hooked up the instrument with a wire to the only antenna that hadn’t yet collapsed. Then he pulled out a screwdriver, removed the instrument lid, dug through its innards, and expanded the frequency range. When he finished, he got up and walked away without looking at Ilan, his arms hanging by the sides of his body and the back of his shirt soaked with sweat.
As Ora talks, Avram slowly pulls his sleeping bag around his body like a cocoon. Only his white face peers out.
“Ora?”
“What?”
“He told you all that?”
“Yes.”
“The morning Ofer was born?”
“I told you—”
“What was it, some kind of urge he suddenly had, before the birth? To tell you all this?”
“I guess. Ask him.”
“Just like that, out of the blue, you were sitting there, chatting over your morning coffee, and he started telling you about—”
“Avram, I don’t remember all the details.”