Sleep is our greatest pleasure. Our only pleasure. We sleep lying down, standing, even walking. Our world is a fog, hazy and unreal. Two or three times a day this fog suddenly lifts and we turn into wild animals. We wound and are wounded, kill and are killed, hunt and are hunted. As long as the action lasts, we are awake. But not normally awake. This kind strains our nerves and sharpens our senses. And as soon as the action is over our conscious-ness snaps like a spring that has been overstressed for too long. We are already asleep on the way back. Collapsed over the steering wheel or over the machine gun. We sleep and drive, sleep and walk, sleep and lie.
For eleven days we have been living like this.
Eleven days? Is it only twelve days ago that these hunted creatures were sitting in the battalion mess hall, sleek and content after a month’s ceasefire? Was it really me twelve days ago, sitting in a cafe in Rehovot1 eating strawberries and cream with Jamus, commenting on the charms of passing girls? No. It must be twelve years ago. Or perhaps twelve lifetimes.
I sleep. This is not the sweet sleep of forgetfulness. I am awake as I sleep, more awake than I was before I shut my eyes. My dream shows a real world. A hill, a road. Where is this hill? I don’t know. I am lying on the ground and a black Sudanese is crawling toward me. I can see his face, want to run away. But I cannot. Am I dead? Paralyzed? The Sudanese crawls slowly, in accordance with all the rules of a field exercise. He is smiling. No, that is no smile. A bul-let has ripped his face open from ear to ear. And the hole looks like a laughing mouth. I know this Sudanese. For five days he was lying by the road to the kibbutz. Bloated and stinking. One of the men who defended Hill 125. Now he has come to take his revenge. Someone has told him that I killed him. I know that I can save myself if I can only prove that it wasn’t me. But how?
Maybe it really was me. Did I kill him?
Maybe he was it - that dark something that moved five meters in front of me, and into which I emptied a whole salvo of machine gun fire? That was exactly the moment when our jeeps drove over their trenches into the middle of their position.
In a moment he will be upon me. He has a knife in his hand. A knife I recognize. It is my knife. The one I found in Chudad. He