You and the wounded commander were left alone in the dunes. How many times I tried to imagine it as if it had been me. Nothing but the endless dunes and the wires on the ground left from Egyptian missiles. The sound of explosions. Trying to carry the wounded man on your back, but it being impossible to make any headway in the sand. The commander, in shock, begging you not to leave him. If you stayed there, you both would die. If you left to find help, he might. You were taught never to leave another soldier wounded in the field. It was a cardinal rule the army had driven into you. How you must have struggled with yourself. Only there was no self to struggle with. The dumbstruck look on his face when he understood you were going. How with difficulty he removed his watch and held it out: This is my father’s. Does it surprise you that I imagined it, that I tried, I really did, to put myself in your shoes? There was no one left in you, and so like the walking dead you abandoned the commander. Put him gently down in the sand, became the last thing he would ever see except for the endless repeat of sand, and walked away. You walked and walked. In the desert, in the heat, with the explosions in the distance, and the missiles overhead. Dizzier and dizzier, losing your senses, hoping you were headed in the right direction. Until at last, like a mirage, a rescue unit appeared and you were lifted up among the dead and the barely living. The truck was full of the wounded and dying, so they could not go for him then, they told you, they would have to return for him later. Either they returned and couldn’t find him, or they never returned. He was not heard from again, and was listed among the missing. Even after the war they never found his body.
The watch sat on your desk for days. When you finally got the address of the family in Haifa, you borrowed the car and drove yourself. I don’t know what happened there. When you returned that night you went into your room and closed the door without a word. Your mother bit her lip as she washed the dishes, holding back tears. All I know is that the commander was an only child, and that you returned the watch to his parents. We thought that would be the last of it. In the weeks that followed, you improved a little. Uri came to visit you every few days, and the two of you walked together. But about three weeks later a letter came to the house from the dead soldier’s father. I discovered it in the pile of mail, and put it aside for you. I barely looked at the return address, I was entirely ignorant of what it contained, but it was I who delivered it to you and I, in the end, who became wrapped up in its accusations. A father writing to a son, only he was not your father, and you were not his son, and yet all the same, through associations I was powerless against, I was dragged into it.
It was not an eloquent letter, but the crudeness made it worse. He blamed you for the death of his son. You took his watch, he wrote in spindly handwriting, and let my son die. How do you live with yourself? He had survived Birkenau, and brought this into it. He summoned the courage of the Jewish inmates at the hands of the SS, and called you a coward. In the last line of the letter, scratched so hard that the pen had broken through the paper, he wrote: It should have been you.
The letter destroyed you. Whatever fragile wholeness you had managed to preserve was shattered when you read it. You lay in bed with your face to the wall, and you wouldn’t get up and you wouldn’t eat. You refused to see anyone, numbing yourself with the opiate of silence. Or perhaps you were trying to starve the little surviving portion of yourself to death. Your mother now feared for your life in a new way. (How many ways are there to fear for your child’s life? Pass over it.) At the beginning your girlfriend used to come, but you turned her away and she left