to stifle my complaints. I gave up my questions and put aside my editorial suggestions. I put myself in your hands. And as the pages turned, my objections came less and less often. I gave in to your story and it picked me up and carried me away with it, with poor Beringer fingering the crack in the tank while in the little rooms attached by wires to the great hall that held the tank the dreamers lay dreaming, the boy Benny, and Rebecca who dreamed of her father (tell me, Dovik, was it me you modeled him after? Did you really see me like that? So heartless, and arrogant, and cruel? Or am I being as egotistical as he to think I had any place in your work?). I developed a soft spot for little, feverish Benny and his still-undying belief in magic, and I took a special interest in the dreams of Noa, the young writer, who, of all of them, reminded me the most of you. I even felt, God knows how, a strange compassion for that great, suffering shark. When the bundle of pages came to an end I was always a little saddened. What would happen next? And what about the terrifying leak that Beringer watches helplessly, and the sound of the water, drip drip drip, which filters into all of their dreams at night, invading them, becoming a hundred different echoes of the saddest things? Sometimes I had to wait weeks when you were especially busy in the army, even months for the next section. I would be left in the dark, not knowing what would happen next. Only that the shark was getting sicker and sicker. Knowing what Beringer knew, but which he kept from the dreamers in their windowless rooms: that the shark wouldn’t live forever. And then what, Dovik? Where would they go, these people? How would they live? Or were they already dead?
I never found out. The last section you sent home was three weeks before you were sent to Sinai. Afterwards, there was no more.
ON THAT SATURDAY in October, your mother and I were at home when we heard the air raid sirens. We turned on the radio but, being Yom Kippur, there was only dead air. It crackled in the corner of the room for half an hour until at last a voice came on saying that the sirens had not been a false alarm; if we heard them again we were to go down to the shelter. Then they played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata—to what? to soothe us?—and at some point the broadcaster returned to say we had been attacked. The shock was terrible: we had convinced ourselves that we were finished with wars. Then more Beethoven, interrupted with coded mobilization messages for the reserves. Uri called from Tel Aviv, speaking loudly as if to the nearly deaf; even halfway across the room I could hear what he was saying to your mother. He joked with her; he might have been going to perform a magic show for the Egyptians. That was Uri. Afterwards the army called looking for you. We thought you were with your unit on Mount Hermon, but they told us you’d taken leave for the weekend. I wrote down the location you were to report to in a matter of hours.
We called everyone but no one knew where you were, not even your girlfriend at the university. Your mother worked herself into a wreck. Don’t jump to conclusions, I told her. I who had known about your midnight ramblings for years, who was familiar with your way of escaping the rest of us, of finding a way to live a little in the world while it was unpolluted by people. It gave me pleasure to know something about you that your mother didn’t.
Then we heard the keys in the door and you burst in, agitated and excited. We didn’t ask where you’d been and you didn’t tell us. It was some time since I’d last seen you, and I was surprised by how broad you’d become, almost physically imposing. The sun had tanned you and given you a new sturdiness, or maybe something else, a kind of dynamism I hadn’t noticed in you before. Looking at you, I felt a pang for my own lost youth. Your mother, full of nerves, hurried around the kitchen preparing food. Eat, she urged you, you don’t know when you’ll get your next meal. But you didn’t want