"How are you?" he asks, smiles, and closes his eyes again.
"Hey man! Are you sleeping? Don’t you know that there is a ceasefire?" I shout into his ear.
"Mmmmhhh."
"Ceasefire! Do you hear? Ceasefire!" I yell, shaking him.
"Yes," he says, and goes back to sleep. If he had been sentenced to death and received news of his pardon two hours before his execution, he wouldn’t react any differently. A real soldier.
"Leave him alone," says a passing squad leader. "The whole night they were assaulting the village, until they had it under control. And then they spent the whole day fighting off counter-attacks."
We walk through the fields, hither and thither, lose our way, and almost reach the little airfield which is still in Egyptian hands. We don’t find any bodies.
"Sons of bitches!" curses Kebab. "These dirty Egyptians have taken their dead with them."
"And I would so much have liked to relieve an officer of his pistol," Zuzik complains.
On the way back we see a suspicious white dot. A Fellah. Before he can get up, Zuzik has jumped on him, punched him in the face, removed his wallet from his pocket, and ripped the keffiyeh from his head.
The peasant is shaking with fear and flooding us with words. His nose is bleeding. Zuzik has let go of him to examine his loot.
"He says," Jamus translates, "that he is a Fellah from Manzuva. Yesterday he ran away and today he came back to get some things from the house."
"An Egyptian spy," says Kebab. "We should finish him off."
"We’ll hand him to intelligence. They will deal with it," the com-pany commander decides.
In Manzuva we hand over the man. Our orders are to stay as a reserve over night. We sleep in a big haystack, next to the jeeps. The last thing I remember is the fleas in the hay, and that they bite.
* * *
The next day we all sit in the company’s culture room in the camp. We didn’t arrive back until eight in the evening, threw our dirty clothes in the corner, and ran naked to the showers. Then we put on