The Theatre - Kellerman, Jonathan

When the young Jordanian had stopped twitching, Daniel turned his head and vomited.

He collapsed, lay there for a second, atop the pile of bodies. Then gunfire and Gavrieli's whimpers brought him to his elbows. He foraged in the trench, managed to pull a bloody shirt off a corpse and used a clean corner of the garment to bind his hand, which now felt as if it had been fried in hot grease.

Then he crawled out of the trench and went to Gavrieli.

The commander was alive, his eyes open, but his breathing sounded bad-feeble and echoed by a dry rattle. Gavrieli struggled, tossing and shaking as Daniel labored to unbutton his shirt. Finally he got it open, inspected the wound, and found it a neat, smallish hole. He knew the exit side could be worse, but couldn't move Gavrieli to check. The bullet had entered the right side of the chest, missing the heart but probably puncturing a lung. Daniel put his face to the ground, touched blood, but not enough to make him give up hope.

"You're all right," he said.

Gavrieli lifted one eyebrow and coughed. His eyes fluttered with pain and he started to shiver.

Daniel held him for a while, then climbed back into the trench. Fighting back his own pain, he yanked combat jackets off of two dead Jordanians. Clambering back up, he used one for a blanket, rolled the other into a pillow and placed it under Gavrieli's feet.

He found Gavrieli's radio and whispered a medic call, identifying his location and the status of the rest of the company, informing the communications officer that the trench had been neutralized, then wriggled over to Kobi's body. The kibbutznik's mouth was open; other than that, he looked strangely dignified. Daniel closed the mouth and went searching for both the Uzis.

After several moments of groping in the dark, he found Kobi's, then his, handle dented but still functional. He brought the weapons back to where Gavrieli lay and huddled beside the wounded man. Then he waited.

The battle continued to rage, but it seemed distant, someone else's problem. He heard machine-gun fire from the north, a recoilless response that shook the hills.

Once, Gavrieli gasped and Daniel thought he'd stopped breathing. But after a moment his respiration returned, weak but steady. Daniel stayed close by, checking him, keeping him warm. Cradling the Uzis, his arm enveloped by pain that seemed oddly reassuring.

Suffering meant life.

It took an hour for the rescuers to arrive. When they put him on the stretcher, he started to cry.

Three months later Gavrieli came to visit him at the rehab center. It was a hot day, choked by humidity, and Daniel was sitting on a covered patio, hating life.

Gavrieli had a beach tan. He wore a white knit shirt and white shorts-apres tennis, very dashing. The lung was healed, he announced, as if the state of his health had been Daniel's primary worry. The cracked ribs had mended. There was some residual pain and he'd lost weight, but overall he felt terrific.

Daniel, on the other hand, had started seeing himself as a cripple and a savage. His depression was deep and dark, surrendering only to bouts of itchy irritability. Days went by in a numbing, gray haze. Nights were worse-he fell into smothering, terrifying dreams and awoke to hopeless mornings.

"You look good too," Gavrieli lied. He poured a glass of fruit punch and, when Daniel refused it, drank it himself. The discrepancy between their conditions embarrassed Gavrieli; he coughed, winced, as if to show Daniel that he, too, was damaged. Daniel wanted to tell him to leave, remained silent, bound by manners and rank.

They made small talk for a turgid half hour, reminisced mechanically about the liberation of the Old City: Daniel had fought with the medics to be released for the march through the Dung Gate, ready to die under sniper fire. Listening to Rabbi Goren blow the shofar had made him sob with joy and relief, his pain spirited away for a golden moment in which everything seemed worthwhile. Now, even that memory was tarnished.

Gavrieli went on about the new, enlarged state of Israel, described his visit to Hebron, the Tomb of the Ancestors. Daniel nodded and blocked out his words, desiring only solitude, the selfish pleasures of victimization. Finally, Gavrieli sensed what was happening and got to his feet, looking peeved.

"By the way," he said, "you're a captain now. The papers should be coming any day now. Congratulations. See you soon."

"And you? What's your rank?"

But Gavrieli had started to walk away and didn't hear the question. Or pretended not to.

He had, in fact, been promoted to lieutenant colonel. Daniel saw him a year later at Hebrew U. wearing a lieutenant colonel's summer uniform bedecked with ribbons, strolling through campus among a small throng of admiring undergraduates.

Daniel had attended his last class of the day, was on the way home, as usual. He'd completed a year of law studies with good grades but no sense of accomplishment. The lectures seemed remote and pedantic, the textbooks a jumble of small-print irrelevancies designed to distract from the truth. He processed all of it without tasting, spat it out dutifully on exams, thinking of his courses as tubes of processed food ration, the kind he'd carried in his survival kit-barely enough to sustain him, a long way from satisfaction.

Gavrieli saw him, called out. Daniel kept walking-his turn to feign deafness.

He was in no mood to talk to Gorgeous Gideon. No mood to talk to anyone. Since leaving the rehab center he'd avoided old friends, made no new ones. His routine was the same each day: morning prayers, a bus ride to the university, then a return, immediately after classes, to the apartment over the jewelry store, where he cleaned up and prepared dinner for his father and himself. The remainder of the evening was spent studying. His father worried but said nothing. Not even when he collected the jewelry he'd made as a teenager-mediocre stuff, but he'd saved it for years-and melted it down to a lump of silver that he left on a workbench in the shop's back room.

"Dani, hey. Dani Sharavi!"

Gavrieli was shouting. Daniel had no choice but to stop and acknowledge him. He turned, saw a dozen faces-the undergraduates following their hero's glance, staring at the short, brown student with the kipah pinned to his African hair, the scarred hand like something the butcher had thrown away.

"Hello, Gideon."

Gavrieli said a few words to his fans; they dispersed grudgingly, and he walked over to Daniel. He peered at the titles of the books in Daniel's arms, seemed amused.

"Law."

"Yes."

"Hate it don't you? Don't tell me stories-I can see by the look on your face. Told you it wouldn't suit you."

"It suits me just fine."

"Sure, sure. Listen, I just finished a guest lecture-war stories and similar nonsense-and I have a few minutes. How about a cup of coffee?"

"I don't-"

"Come on. I've been planning to call you anyway. There's something I want to talk to you about."

They went to the student cafeteria. Everyone seemed to know Gavrieli; the woman serving the pastries took extra time to pick out an especially large chocolate roll for him. Daniel, basking in the light reflected by the halo, got the second-biggest one.

"So, how've you been?"

"Fine."

"Last time I saw you, you were pretty damned low. Depressed. The doctors said you'd been that way for a while."

Damn liar Lipschitz. "The doctors should have kept their mouths shut."

Gavrieli smiled. "No choice. Commanding officer has a right to know. Listen, I understand your hating law-I hate it, too, never practiced a day, never intend to. I'm leaving the army, too-they want to turn me into a paper shuffler."

The last statement was uttered with dramatic flourish. Daniel knew he was supposed to react with surprise. He drank his coffee, took a bite of chocolate roll. Gavrieli looked at him and went on, undaunted.