Feathers

Chapter One

Chapter One 1. As with most human endeavors, the beginnings of this story lie shrouded in a dream. Months after I had finished my long stint of reserve duty along the western shores of the Great Bitter Lake, I still saw Fanara in my dreams. In those days right after the Yom Kippur War I belonged to a small detachment whose job it was to find what was left of the Israeli soldiers who had been killed in the battle for the Egyptian naval base there. Every morning at dawn we left our little room, which was attached to the morgue at Faid, and drove south on the road that led to the “Nasser Works” that were visible in the distance, and beyond them, to the port of Adabia on the outskirts of the town of Suez. There were three of us in the cabin of the truck. Mintz sat lost in thought while playing with his graying beard, his lips moving inaudibly . At least once a week, he told me, he made sure to re-read the text of Nachmanides’ famous epistle to his son in Catalonia. He turned the pages of his prayer book and declared that this sevenhundred -year-old letter was just the thing to restore me—and the sooner, the better—to the true faith. Our captured Egyptian truck kept bouncing on the badly paved road, which made it hard to read the small, blurred print. When I came to the part where Nachmanides writes, “Always remember whence you have come, and whither you go, and that you are a home for worms and maggots in your lifetime, as you are in your death,” I shut the book and said that I knew it all already and would rather not strain my eyes. Mintz went on murmuring to himself, while the driver, who had taken no part in the conversation, tried getting the army station on the radio. Yet the halting voice of the announcer of the Cairo Hebrew-language program came in strongly instead, masking the distant voices beamed from Israel. “What a place!” said the driver, switching off the receiver. After a while he pointed out the range of the Genifa that rose to the right of us. The shitty bastards, he added, were close by on its other side. Soon, at a point where the military police had erected a hastily written, corrugated-tin road sign on which was drawn a red arrow, we turned left for Fanara. There Mintz roused himself, spread open a map, and decided where to search that day. So, day by day, we patiently combed the area, which was heavily mined. Mintz was good at his work. The tail of a jacket sticking out from a bush, a button, or the even swarm of an anthill was enough to guide him to the crumpled shape beneath it that was already merging with the earth. The road was fenced with barbed wire and marked with red triangles on either side. In the afternoon, after we had found that day’s dead, soldiers from the engineering corps came to clear a path to them through the mines. For months after I was home again, even though I washed my hands every day with strong soap, I was afraid to touch my own children and I dreamed of Fanara all the time. I dreamed that Mintz and I were walking along an abandoned road, through whose cracked pavement the weeds sprouted, carefully making our way toward the jetty in the lake. While Mintz went about his business I scanned the mine-strewn lake shore through my binoculars. More than one reservist, I knew from a soldier on patrol, had been killed going down to the water to bathe or wash his clothes. I trained the binoculars on five ships that were huddled like frightened sheep in the middle of the lake. They were perfectly still, without a sign of life, and only their red-and-white buoys bobbed gently up and down on the waves. Then, very slowly, I turned to look at the ruined houses in the open space to my left. They seemed so close that I could almost reach out and touch them. There was a tin-surfaced military mosque painted with Egyptian camouflage colors, a chinked British bungalow, and a house whose four walls had collapsed to reveal a floor with Arab tiles, a table, a chair, and a branch of bougainvillea—a fiercely flowering...