she meant. These were the words he felt but could not form. Their world was so beautiful that physical sight was almost inconsequential.
How can it be so beautiful, David?
The startling sight of bloodstains at the small of her back as the two of them rose to return, finally, to the car. During their lovemaking, a sharp rock had been cutting into her spine, through her sweat-soaked cotton blouse. But it had not mattered, and he understood that too. He said nothing, but simply put his hand on the stain, as if his touch might heal her.
In the same instant, he watched as his brown-eyed son ran through their apartment, his face a masculine interpretation of his mother's beauty. Dovik. Perhaps his failures had begun there. In his memory, there were only the times when he had been too busy for the boy, when he had bellowed at Mira that the noise was intolerable when he had offered the boy only obtuse adult excuses for his unwillingness to take the child's requests seriously. Brown eyes, a striped shirt, and turned-up jeans.
Mira, the lawyer who had been working for laughable wages in an organization engaged in defending Palestinian rights. When an impatient warrior charged into her unready life. Who could ever say why humans loved?
Mira who had made him human, formidable in her beauty, but whose kisses spoke urgency at unexpected times. Looking back, it was almost as if she had known that they had little time, as if she had sensed all that was coming. He could not think her name without voicing it inwardly as a cry, as if calling out to her disappearing back across a growing distance.
He had been sitting loose-legged on the turret of his tank, drained by a successful battle, when the single code word came down over the radio net, irrevocable, reaching out to a spent tank company commander in the Bekka Valley, to infantrymen on the Jordan, to pilots guiding on the great canal.
There had been no immediate details, and he had been able to hope as he continued to fight. But, already, a part of him had known. When the order came to maneuver all vehicles into the most complete available defilade, to remove antennas, to cover all sights and seal the hatches, he had known with certainty. There would be no more warm flesh under shifting cloth.
He had failed. He had failed to defend his family, his nation. But that was only his most obvious guilt. In retrospect, he knew his failure had been far greater. He had never been the man he should have been, that Mira and his son had deserved. He had never been a man at all. Merely a selfish shell in the armor of a uniform.
He had read that epileptics experience a rare elation on the verge of a seizure, that their worst sufferings were preceded by a fleeting joy that some described as approaching holiness. And that was what time did to David Heifetz. In an unguarded instant, his memory filled with the fullness of his life with Mira, with blue seas and orange groves and a passionate woman's smell, only to kill her again and again and again. And he was convinced that each time she died anew in his memory, she suffered again. Time was far from a straight line. Mira was always vulnerable, her agony was endless. His God was the merciless god of eternal simultaneity.
In his wallet, Lieutenant Colonel David Heifetz, of the United States Army, had buried a trimmed-down snapshot of his wife and child. He was constantly aware of its presence and he knew each shadow and tone, he knew the exact thoughts behind the four eyes considering the camera, the faint weariness of the boy at the end of a long afternoon, Mira's needless anxiety about dinner, the history behind her necklace, and the slight blemish that had temporarily made her beauty human.
He had not looked at the photograph for seven years.
'Lucky Dave looks tired,' Merry Meredith whispered. He had just plopped back down in the field chair beside Manny Martinez, his closest friend. He felt drained by the intelligence briefing he had just delivered, troubled by its inadequacies, yet relieved, as always, that it was over. He did not fear Taylor. He only feared failing the old man. Now he sat, loose, and grateful that the honor of briefing had passed on to Heifetz. Meredith watched the S-3 as the man punched in the codes that filled the briefing screen with the exact map coverage he wanted. It seemed to Meredith that Heifetz was a bit off his usual crisp precision. Nothing the average observer would necessarily notice. But just the sort of thing an intelligence officer who had earned his spurs in the Los Angeles operation would pick up A minor human failing, perhaps the beginning of a vulnerability. 'He really looks tired,' Meredith repeated.
'Oh man,' Martinez said in a low tone of dismissal, 'Lucky Dave always looks tired. The guy was born tired.
He eats that shit up.'
'Yeah,' Meredith said. 'I know. But there's something off. He almost looks sick.'
'Lucky Dave?' Martinez said. 'Lucky Dave never gets sick.'
'Look at him. He's as white as if he'd just seen a ghost.'
The two men looked at the operations officer. A compactly built man, with graying hair and shoulders a bit too big for the rest of his bodily proportions. Heifetz was about to begin his briefing.
'I just wonder if he feels okay,' Meredith whispered to his friend.
'Come on,' Martinez answered. 'Old Lucky Dave doesn't
Heifetz surveyed the collection of officers before him, giving himself a last moment to catch his mental breath before he began sentencing them with his words. His instructions would send them to their particular fates, and he sensed that few of them really grasped the seriousness of the actions they would take in the coming hours. There was so much lightheartedness and swagger left in the Americans. No sense of how very dark a thing fate was. For many of the junior officers, this was a great adventure. And even those who were afraid feared the wrong things. These were men… who did not understand how much a man could ultimately lose.
But it was better so. Best to go into battle with a lightness of spirit, so long as it did not manifest itself in sloppiness. Best to go with a good heart into the darkness. With confidence that shone like polished armor. He remembered that feeling.
Perhaps a better god hovered over these bright-faced Americans sitting so uncomfortably in their Soviet greatcoats in the cold. After all their nation had suffered in recent years, the Americans still struck Heifetz as innocents. And perhaps they would be spared the sight of the black-winged god, whose jaws had slimed with the gore of Israel.
All of them except Taylor. Taylor had seen the burning eyes, smelled the poisoned breath. Taylor knew.
Taylor had insisted on this last face-to-face meeting with his subordinates. The purpose of the orders brief was to ensure that each man clearly understood his role, that there would be no
Heifetz knew about his nickname. He understood the soldierly black humor behind it and felt no resentment. And he knew that, in at least one sense, he truly was a lucky man. There were few men under whom he could have served without reservation, without resentment. Serving under Taylor was… like serving under a better, wiser, far more decent version of himself. There was only one fundamental difference between them. Taylor's sufferings had made him a better man. Heifetz would never have claimed the same for himself.
'Good afternoon, Colonel Taylor, gentlemen,' Heifetz began. 'I should almost say 'Good evening.' But we will
