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go to war? Fortunately Trabulsi is on my team. “But where is he?” I asked the commander. “He’s just had a son. He’ll be here,” he replied. I should have brought my transistor radio. Though what’s the point, when the news is so worrying and the commentary even more frightening. In the evening, when we had set up our tents and got ready to go to sleep, I wrote an army postcard to my parents.
    The next two days were spent in further training, and the third day Trabulsi arrived, having seen his son through the Brit , and brought us delicacies from the circumcision festivities – bagels, melabas , Moroccan biscuits. We all crowded around him.
    “You can’t imagine what’s going on in Tel Aviv,” he told us. “It’s a ghost town, the streets are empty and apparently thousands of casualties are expected. The rabbinate has prepared land for a mass grave in Independence Park, and secondary-school kids are being enlisted to dig trenches. It’s terrifying! People are running away, making macabre jokes: ‘The last one out of the airport turn off the light!’ that sort of thing…”
    “Eshkol is scared shitless. He won’t do anything. We should bring back Ben-Gurion,” said Aflalo.
    “Forget it!” said Trabulsi. “How long will that bunch of old-timers stay in power?”
    “We’re stuck here on our own. That’s when you know you’re in trouble,” said Slutzky.
    “Hey Nuri,” Aflalo challenged me, “you work for the government. What kind of a leader is Eshkol?”
    I didn’t reply at once. I used to see the Prime Minister from time to time, going up the stairs to his office, humming little snatches of song, ya-bam-bam , like a kindly grandpa from anold shtetl. The Minister in charge of his office says he’s a Yiddishe kop – a clever Jew, a good judge of people. And in fact once, when I accompanied him and his aides on a trip to Nazareth, I found him surprisingly astute and sensitive. But none of this shows from a distance or at a superficial glance.
    “Just look at Nasser,” Aflalo went on. “Young, handsome, tall, sturdy, charismatic, a brilliant speaker. And his opposite number? Eshkol! Old, bearish, balding, with a black beret flat on his head like a pitta, his belt under his armpits, and on top of all that, he’s a lousy orator. Bugger it!”
    Trabulsi laid a soothing hand on his shoulder and pulled some photos from his shirt pocket to show us the Brit celebration of his newborn son.
     
    Evening fell, finding us in wistful mood. The talk turned to home, children, wives. I saw Yardena running ahead across the sands of Ashdod like a wild colt, with me in hopeless pursuit. Yardena is a ripe succulent fig, while I’m still green. In our first winter together she knitted me a fancy sweater with a zip, and I walked around the streets of Jerusalem looking like a story-book pre-State fighter. She taught me to eat goulash with potatoes, seasoned with spicy paprika, and for someone brought up on rice, like me, it was quite an achievement. But two weeks ago she ended our relationship. “You’ve been leading me on for three years. There’s something screwed up about you,” she flung at me on Emek Refaim Street, not far from her little flat, and stormed off, leaving me standing on the pavement, open-mouthed and sweating. I knew she wanted to get married, and once in a delirious moment I promised to do so but since then I’d been evasive about any commitment.
    Now, in this parched desert, I remember her fragrance andfeel I’m dying of desire for her and going mad for a drink. Yardena detested the smell of slivowitz, to which I’m addicted, but as a special treat she would let me drink whisky. I’d massage her slender neck, her supple back, turn her over and pour the liquor into the hollow of her navel and suck it up noisily, while she giggled like an infant. Oh Yardena, Yardena, why did you discard me like an unripe fruit?
     
    I borrowed Hermosa’s transistor and moved to one side to listen to