to eat. You kept going to the window to look at the sky for planes.
I drove you to the meeting point. Do you remember that car ride, Dov? Afterwards, there were things you couldn’t remember, so I don’t know if you do. Your mother didn’t come. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Or maybe she didn’t want to infect you with her anxiety. Your gun sat across your knees along with a bag of food from her. We both knew you were going to throw it out or give it away, even she knew. As soon as we got on the road, you turned to look out the window, making it clear you were in no mood for conversation. So fine, we won’t talk, I thought to myself, what’s new? And yet I was disappointed. Somehow I thought that the circumstances, the emergency brewing around us, the fact that I was delivering you to a war—I thought the pressure of it all would force the cork and that something of you would come trickling out. But it was not to be. You made yourself clear, turning sharply away to stare out the window. And though I was disappointed I was also, I admit, a little relieved. Because I, who always had something to say, who leaped to have the first word and pressed on until I had the last—I was at a loss. I saw how your body had grown around the gun. How casually you held it, how at home you felt with it in your hands. As if you had absorbed its mechanism—all it demanded of you, its power and its contradictions—right into your flesh. The boy whose own arms and legs were once alien to him had ceased to be, and in his place, sitting next to me in dark sunglasses, his sleeves pulled up to show bronzed forearms, was a man. A soldier, Dova’leh. My boy had grown up to be a soldier, and I was delivering him to war.
Yes, there were things I wanted to say but I couldn’t just then, so we drove in silence. A huge convoy of trucks was already there, the soldiers eager and restless. We said goodbye—it was as simple as that, a kind of hurried pounding on each other’s backs—and I watched you disappear into the sea of uniforms. At that moment you were no longer my son. My son had gone off somewhere to hide for a while. Wherever it was you’d been before you came home—walking some trail alone in the hills—it was as if you knew what was to come, and had gone off to bury yourself in a hole. To hide there, beneath the cool earth, for as long as it took for the danger to pass. And what was left once you’d subtracted yourself from the equation was a soldier who had grown up eating Israeli fruit, with the dirt of his forefathers under his nails, who was leaving now to defend his country.
In those weeks your mother hardly slept. She wouldn’t speak on the phone so as not to occupy the line. But it was the doorbell we feared the most. Across the street they arrived at the Biletskis’ to say that Itzhak, little Itzy whom you and Uri played with as children, had been killed in the Golan. He had burned to death inside of a tank. After that, the Biletskis disappeared inside their house. Wild grass grew up around it, the curtains were always drawn, sometimes, very late at night, a light came on inside and someone could be heard playing two notes on the piano over and over, pling plong pling plong pling plong. One day when I went to deliver a piece of mail that came to our house by mistake I saw a pale spot on the doorframe where the mezuzah had been. That could have been us. There was no reason it had happened to their son and not to ours, why it was Biletski playing two notes and not me. Every day sons were being sacrificed. Another boy in the neighborhood was exploded by a shell. One night we got into bed and turned off the lights. If I lose one of them, your mother said to me in a low, trembling voice, I will not be able to go on. Either I could have said, You will go on, or I could have said, We will not lose them. We will not lose them,