The People, Food for Kings
Published in Issue #15 Translated from Hebrew by Dalya Bilu(Excerpt from a Novel)
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For soldiers the world is open but the country is shut and locked. And don’t be deceived by the stars, it’s impossible to follow them and impossible to lay your head in their lap and be stroked and scratched and no matter how far you follow them, in the end you’ll only tire yourself out, sweat, catch cold, get a fever and return to your barracks, surrounded by barracks, surrounded by a fence, surrounded by other army camps, surrounded by fences, surrounded by borders and countries and borders and armies, so you might as well calm down and relax, like a louse. This time too the Sabbath draws to a close, and at the sides of the roads, in the twilight, and afterwards too, in the dark, soldiers moved, like shadows, crowds of soldiers, on foot, in cars, in buses, as if a war was going to break out the next day, or as if a state of emergency had been declared in the afternoon, but there was no war and no state of emergency, and no brawl going on at the end of the world that everyone was running to see without knowing exactly who was fighting whom and whose side they were supposed to be on, but an ordinary Saturday evening, with that pre-sleep, pre-war, pre-rain look. They move slowly, like rainwater in canals, twigs carried in different directions, no coordination, no rhythm, no order, no organization, ants scattered and seeking their anthill, and by the end of...
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