I said, holding her thin wrists tightly. She did not say, I will not forgive you, but she didn’t have to say it. Uri was stationed on a mountain overlooking the Jordan Valley. He managed to call us once, so we knew he was there. Much later, years later, he told me how he could hear on the radio transmitter the desperate Israeli tank units fighting in the Golan. One after another simply vanished from the radio network, extinguished into silence, and he couldn’t stop listening, knowing he was hearing those soldiers’ last words. We knew from him that your brigade had been sent to Sinai. Every day we waited for the doorbell to ring, but it did not ring, and each dawn that broke without it ringing was another night you had survived. There were many things your mother and I didn’t say to each other during those days. Our fears drove us deeper and deeper into a bunkered silence. I knew that if something happened to you or Uri, she would not have allowed me the right to suffer as she would suffer, and I held it against her.
That night, two weeks after the war began, the telephone rang close to eleven. That’s it, I thought, and the bottom opened out in the depths of me. Your mother had fallen asleep on the sofa in the other room. Bleary-eyed, with static hair, she stood now in the doorway. As if I were moving through cement, I rose from my seat and answered. My eyes and lungs burned. There was a pause, long enough for me to imagine the worst. Then your voice came through. It’s me, you said. That’s all: It’s me. But in those two syllables I could hear that your voice was slightly different, as if a tiny but vital piece had broken inside of it like the filament of a lightbulb. And yet in that moment it didn’t matter. I’m all right, you said. I couldn’t speak. I don’t think you’d ever heard me cry. Your mother began to scream. It’s him, I said. It’s Dov, I choked. She rushed to me and we both put our ears to the phone. Our heads were coupled together and we listened to your voice. I wanted to listen to you talk forever. Talk about anything, it didn’t matter. The way we used to listen to you babble on in your crib in the mornings before you called to us. But you didn’t want to speak much. You told us you were in a hospital near Rechovot. That your tank had been hit, and that you’d been wounded from the shrapnel across your chest. It isn’t bad, you said. You asked about Uri. I can’t talk much now, you said. We’ll come for you, your mother said. No, you said. Of course we’re coming, she said. I said no, you snapped back, almost angrily. And then, softer again: They’ll bring me home tomorrow or the next day.
That night your mother and I held each other in bed. In our reprieve, we clung and forgave one another everything.
When you came home at last you were neither the soldier I had watched disappear into the crowd, nor the boy I knew. You were a kind of shell, emptied out of both of those people. You sat mute in a chair in the corner of the living room, a cup of tea untouched on the side table, and winced when I went to touch you. From your wound, but also, I sensed, because you could not bear such contact. Give him time, your mother whispered in the kitchen, preparing pills, teas, swabs. I sat in the living room with you. We watched the news and spoke little. When there was no news we watched the cartoons, cat-and-mouse chases, How many lumps do you want? and then the mallet on the head. In time it came out—not to me of course, only to her—that two others in the tank had died. The gunner who was only twenty, and the commander who was just a few years older. The gunner had died instantly, but the commander lost a leg and threw himself out of the tank. You climbed out after him. The communications system was dead, there was smoke and confusion, and the driver, who in all of this had perhaps not understood that the others had evacuated, started it up again in reverse and drove away through the sand. Perhaps he panicked,