Free the Debba (2010) by Avner Mandelman

they didn't take anything else to call him in the morning. They probably open only at ten." She sat beside me. "Why do you think the burglar wanted it, this play?"
    I shook my head. The jet lag, and now this odd burglary, somehow combined to reproduce in me the same queer black sensation I used to get before a takedown, when the past merged into the future and both dimmed into nothingness until only the present remained, hard and monstrous and clear.
    Ehud muttered, "Maybe he grabbed the first thing he saw, when we came--"
    "From under the sofa?" Ruthy said.
    There was a long silence.
    Ruthy said, "You think it's the same one that--that killed him?"
    "'Ana 'aref," I said in Arabic. What do I know?
    Ruthy whispered, "Maybe, like my mother said, it did come back, you know, like the stories from forty-eight--"
    "Shit in yogurt!"
    "Leave him alone," Ehud said to Ruthy, then turned to me. "Put it someplace safe. Tomorrow I'll make you photocopies."
    Toward the end of May '46, two weeks before the Six-Day War started, Ehud and I crossed over into the Sinai for a couple of dreck jobs: I to take down the operations officer of the Bir Gafgafa airfield, and Ehud the chief of radar maintenance on Um Marjam hill, five miles to the north. We had gone together, dressed as Bedouins, via the Gaza Strip, then hitchhiked south on an Egyptian fuel truck, paying the driver with hashish. But because we walked the last few dozen kilometers across sand dunes, we were late by two days, and on the morning of June 5, within five kilometers of our target, we heard the roar of planes and saw Mirage jets with Stars of David on their wings streaking overhead and diving onto the radar station on the hilltop.
    Ehud kicked at the sand. "These fuckers! They couldn't hold off until we finished?"
    As if anyone in the Israeli Air Force even knew we existed.
    Now there was nothing to do but wait; finally, a day and a half later, we saw the advance jeeps of the Armor Recon with their back-mounted recoilless guns driving down the Bir Gafgafa road. Ehud and I slid down the sand dune, in our Bedouin galabiehs, our palms raised with the fingers spread in the traditional gesture of Birkat Cohanim, the Blessing of the Priests, singing HaTiqva at the top of our voices, to make sure we wouldn't be shot.
    In the first jeep, to our surprise, we saw Mooky Zussman and Yonathan Avramson, also Alliance High School boys. They didn't ask any silly questions about our Bedouin clothes, just fed us combat rations and gave us a lift to Um Marjam hill, where the Egyptian radars had just been toasted and where, until the airfield became operational again, the Sinai sector command would be stationed.
    It was a windswept gravelly hill with one shallow incline and one steep shoulder, on whose peak a Hawk anti-aircraft missile battery was already operating. A platoon of Golani infantry reservists was to arrive any day for sentinel duty, but for now the Armor Recon unit was it. And to fend off boredom, while waiting for our ride north on a Hercules, Ehud and I joined them.
    By that time, the Egyptian army was broken--thirty thousand Egyptian soldiers perished in the sand, and the remainder, mainly poor fellaheen who had been drafted against their will, threw off their shoes and tried to give themselves up, begging for water. But our sentinels, by direct order of the Hawk-base commander, chased them away: stragglers still carried arms and were considered treacherous.
    On the third day, a few hours before Ehud and I were to drive down to the airfield to fly north, seven haggard skeletons appeared in the morning mist at the foot of the hill, and for several hours their thin voices wafted up, their pleas for water interrupted only for prayers, which they called out in a Masri accent, just like that of the muezzin at Hassan Ali mosque in Cairo, where I had once holed up after a dreck job. The beseeching voices wafted at us in the canteen, in the latrine, in the tent--just about everywhere. Once,