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never trained on houses that looked like that and it felt strange, but there was nothing to do be done, so Avi and the others swept the rooms upstairs, throwing grenades and following their barrels through the doors as they had been taught.
    Yohai headed down a staircase toward a small room that opened to his left, and inside he found a young man crouching in the corner, looking up at him and holding a grenade launcher, and Yohai squeezed his trigger but the gun jammed, and they just looked at each other. Yohai’s number two was coming through the doorway after him, pushing him in, and Yohai had to shove him back out—the whole thing lasted a second, but it seemed much longer. When they got out Yohai threw grenades through the door and then had a tank fire a few shells through the wall, and when they went back in they found two dead guerrillas. The second was in another corner, and Yohai hadn’t noticed.
    Avi was sent to the vehicles for a stretcher, and as he sprinted off he made a discovery. He always thought that when engaged in combat you wouldn’t get tired, that supernatural forces would kick in and the regular rules wouldn’t apply. But it was downhill to the vehicles and uphill coming back, and he slowed and was winded and walking by the time he returned. This was the kind of detail he noticed.

12
    A VI WASN’T SURE he could handle this sort of thing, no one is until it happens, but it turned out he was fine. He told Yossi so the next time he made it home. Yossi was Avi’s father. He had once been in the Fighting Pioneer Youth himself and had helped capture the Old City of Jerusalem from the Jordanians in 1967. He withstood Egyptian bombardments in the Suez Canal outposts after that war—the worst were the 60 mm shells, he remembers, which were inaudible until just before they hit. Then he fought across the canal after the reversals of 1973. There is nothing military about Yossi. He’s a smiling man despite everything, compact like Avi. One day he was back from Suez in his kitchen with Avi’s mother, Raya, and older brother, an infant at the time. The baby’s bottle thumped to the floor, and the young family contemplated Yossi flat on his stomach with his hands covering his head.
    Yossi knew about such matters and was worried about his son. Avi said he didn’t mind the shelling. What he did mind was going out in front on patrol with the metal probe that engineers use to poke the ground and spot mines and booby traps. Yossi wasn’t sure if this was for the obvious reason or because when they had been taught to use the probe in engineers’ training Avi might have been elsewhere with a cigarette and a novel.
    Avi arrived at an agreement with Raya. If something happened on the hill, he would use the single phone line at the outpost to call home. He would say only, “Everything’s okay.” That would mean that everything was not okay but Avi was, and the family would know he was alive by the time anything was reported on the radio a few hours later. In those years the radio announcers in Israel would report “heavy exchanges of fire” in Lebanon, and that was a code—it meant soldiers were dead but this couldn’t be reported yet because their families hadn’t been informed. Everyone understood, and if you had a son in Lebanon you had a few difficult hours before things became clear, after which either things went back to normal or life as you knew it ended.
    Avi smoked cigarettes and toasted sandwiches on the little spiral heaters with bread and processed cheese pilfered from the kitchen. There were occasional interruptions of the drudgery. The platoon was supposed to set off on an ambush one frigid evening, for example, lying in wait for guerrillas in bushes near the outpost from nightfall to dawn; these excursions were one of the garrison’s regular missions. But the infantry gods decided the platoon had suffered enough and sent