The commander gathered all the soldiers again in the war-room bunker. He said it didn’t look like anyone was coming to rescue them, and they had to try to get out on their own. He asked for their opinions. There was a quiet, friendly conversation. People talked about the duty to save lives. Others feared that in the army, and in the country, they would be seen as cowards or traitors. Someone mentioned Masada and Yodfat. Ilan sat among them. He had no body, he had no spirit. The commander summed up and said he was planning to notify Arik Sharon immediately that they would leave that night. “What if Arik says no?” someone asked. “Then they’ll slap us with a five-year prison term,” one guy said, “but we’ll be alive.”
The landline wasn’t working, and the officer used the two-way radio and asked to speak with “the boss.” He said the situation was hopeless and he’d decided to leave. There was a short silence, and then Arik said, “Excellent, you leave and we’ll try to hook up with you on the way.” The soldiers listened as Arik said, “Do whatever you can.” He stopped, and you could hear the cogwheels running in his mind. Finally he sighed and said, “Okay, then, um, goodbye, I wish you well …”
The religious soldiers recited the evening prayers before leaving, and a few other soldiers joined them. Then everyone prepared for departure. They filled their canteens and made sure they didn’t rattle. They emptied their pockets of change and keys. Everyone had a weapon. Ilan got a bazooka in addition to his Uzi. “An anti-tank pipe,” they explained. He didn’t know how to operate it. He didn’t say a word.
At two a.m. they set off. In the light of the full moon the stronghold looked like a ruin. It was hard to believe that this lopsided enclosure had protected them all those days. Ilan avoided looking left, toward Avram’s stronghold.
They walked in two rows, at some distance from one another. At the head of Ilan’s row was the commander, and at the head of the other one was his deputy. Next to the commander walked a soldier who was born in Alexandria. If they ran into Egyptian forces, he was supposed to shout that they were Egyptian commandos on their way to nail the Yahud. The soldier recited his lines to himself as they walked, trying to embody the Egyptian commando spirit. Ilan was somewhere in the middle of the row with his head bowed. They tripped on the sand frequently and fell in silence, quietly cursing.
Suddenly they heard shouts in Arabic. An Egyptian armored vehicle was driving nearby, shining a spotlight to track the sides of the road.
“Turns out we’d walked into an Egyptian parking lot,” Ilan told Ora that dawn. His body had quieted down, but he was still enfolded in her and his hands dug into her shoulders. “I even stepped on the blanket of someone sleeping there.”
She lay stunned, her flesh still fluttering around his.
“We didn’t move, we didn’t breathe. The armored vehicle went on. They hadn’t seen us. Hadn’t seen anything. We lay there, thirty-three men, and they didn’t see us. We got up and ran back to the sand to get away from the road.” She could feel his warm breath against the back of her neck. “We kept going east and walked all night at a half run. I ran with my gun and the bazooka. It was hard, but I wanted to live. As simple as that.”
She wanted him to pull out of her right away. She couldn’t speak.
“Then the sun rose. We didn’t know where we were, or whether it was our territory or theirs. Or where the IDF was, if it even existed. I saw tire marks in the sand, and I remembered that the IDF only uses APCs with chains, but these tracks were from a Soviet BTR, which the Egyptians used. I told the commander, and we quickly changed course. We walked and walked until we reached a small wadi with hills and mounds, and we sat down to rest. We were dead tired. Tanks were burning on the hills around us. Giant torches. We didn’t know whose they were. The whole area reeked of scorched flesh. You can’t imagine it, Ora.”
She flinched, and he tightened closer to her body. He was barely letting her breathe. The fetus felt as if it was throbbing too quickly. She wondered if it might somehow absorb anything of what Ilan was telling her.
“On the radio they told us they couldn’t reach us. We had to wait some more. We waited. After a few hours they told us to try to reach this mountain range. They gave us a code map. We walked until we could see the range straight ahead. But see, the Egyptians are shooting at us all the time, from all the hilltops, and they’re not hitting us. It’s all miracles. We’re walking with bullets whistling past us like in the movies. When we got to the mountain range we realized it was swarming with Egyptians. We thought it was all over.”
“I can’t breathe this way, Ilan—”
“But a minute later, our tanks arrived and stormed them. A battle started. Gunfire. We just sit on our asses and watch the movie. Everything’s on fire. Burning people jump out of tanks. People getting killed ’cause they came to rescue us. We sit on our asses and watch. And we feel nothing — nothing!”
“Ilan, you’re really suffocating me—”
“They yelled at us over the radio to shoot up flares so they could see where we were. We shot a flare and they found us. One tank came down from the range, and it’s a steep incline, a wall. It came all the way to us. An M60 Patton. An officer sticks his head out the turret and motions for us to come quickly and get in the tank. We shout at him: ‘What should we do? How?’ And he gestures: Climb up, there’s no time. ‘You mean, all of us?’ ‘Get up. Get up!’ ‘What do you mean get up? Where?’ ‘Get up already!’ And there’s thirty-three of us. Ora, what did you say?”
“Ilan!”
“Sorry, sorry. Did I hurt you?”
“Pull out, pull out now.”
“One more minute, please, just a minute, I have to tell you—”
“It’s not good, Ilan—”
“Listen, just give me one more minute. Please, Ora, that’s all.” He spoke quickly, firmly. “We climbed up on the tank, every guy grabbed on to something, people glued themselves to the MAG hatches, ten guys crowded into the turret basket, I jumped up on the back and grabbed on to the leg of the guy above me, someone else took hold of my shoes, and the tank rolled. Not just rolled but barreled, in zigzags, to get away from the Saggers, and we barely held on. And the whole time I just kept thinking: Don’t fall, don’t fall.”
This child, Ora thought, the things he’s hearing before he’s even born.
“The tank is jumping around like crazy,” Ilan murmured and clutched her again, convulsing. “Your bones are breaking, you can barely breathe, dust everywhere, stones flying, you just stop up all your holes and just stay alive.”
Dust penetrated her mouth, her nose. Yellow desert streams. She choked and coughed. She felt as though the fetus inside her was also shrinking, fighting to turn over, to turn his back. Stop, stop, she groaned inside, stop poisoning my child.
“It went on that way for a few kilometers, stuck onto the tank, and then all of a sudden — that’s it. Over. We were out of the line of fire. I could barely let go of the other guy’s leg. My hand wouldn’t open.”
His muscles relaxed. His head plunged onto her neck, heavy as a rock. His fingers slowly disengaged from her body and lay open in front of her face. She did not move. He slid out of her. A moment went by, and then another. He breathed heavily. His face was up against her and he lay in an utterly helpless huddle. A spasm went through her body.
“Ilan,” she murmured. Her temples began to throb, and little beads of sweat glistened on her skin. Her body was telling her something. She lifted herself up on her elbow as if she were listening. “Ilan, I think—”
“Ora, what have we done?” she heard him whisper in a panic. “What have I done?”
She touched her wet thighs and sniffed. “Ilan, I think this is it.”