The Pure

her.
    An odd expression came over Andrzej’s face, somewhere between admiration and fear. For a moment he caught Uzi’s eye, giving him a glance that penetrated to his soul. After what seemed like an age he dropped his knife to the ground and slipped off into the darkness, followed by his accomplices. Eve pursued them at a slow pace, holding the pistol, shepherding them away; her men followed too, in the shadows. Uzi saw his chance – he only had a split second – and bolted. He didn’t think Eve would follow him; he didn’t care who she was or what she wanted. Death was close now, and some ancient instinct was driving him on. He ran hard, veering around corners, as police sirens began to wail in the distance.

 
6
    Fifteen years ago, when the Office first approached Uzi – or Adam, as he was known then – it had come at the right time. His parents had been dead for exactly a year, and the storm that ripped through his life thereafter had abated, leaving behind a landscape of desolation. Everything was ruined in him; everything had collapsed in the split second it took the bomber on bus 23 to pull the cord on his suicide vest.
    The phone call had been like an aircraft crashing into the ocean. The voice was soft, telling him only the basic details, and instantly he had known. He had gone under. The voice had sounded like the surf. His breath had been knocked noiselessly out of him and he found himself sitting on the floor, the telephone dangling on its wire before his face. He was a member of Shayetet 13, Israel’s most elite naval commando unit; renowned for their psychological resilience, they could function under levels of combat stress and fear that would have been debilitating to any other soldiers. The training had lasted twenty months. But it hadn’t prepared him for this. Over the next year he learned to adapt, to function in a state of devastation, perhaps more effectively than before. But he would never again come to the surface.
    When he was growing up, in a nondescript suburb of Tel Aviv where the summers were unbearably hot and the winters made a mockery of the sun-baked apartment blocks, the ocean was always present. He would go there most days with the kids from his class; they would have barbecues, eye up girls, play guitar, tumble in the waves, and on Friday evenings, on a spit of rock with hundreds of others, they would play drums, a great tribal pulse. Somehow his parents were in everything: the rocks, the sky, the ocean. His father, a squat, grizzled Special Forces officer, with battle scars from ’67, and half deaf from the bombs of ’73, had taught him to swim and to fish; they had played beach football and drunk beer together into the evenings. His mother; well, his mother. A painter who painted the seascape.
    It was like being told you will never see the ocean again.
    He had gone back to Atlit – the secret naval commando base on a fortified island in the Mediterranean – the following morning. But his commanding officer had turned him away, forced him to take a week’s compassionate leave, to see a Navy psychiatrist. It was during this time, as the days and nights blurred in endless cycles of numb insomnia, that two men from his unit – two of his friends, his brothers – were killed during a kidnap operation on the coast of Lebanon, their blood mingling with the shingle and the surf.
    Nehama had stayed by his side throughout. She had loved his parents, and buried her own grief as best she could in order to support him through his. That, perhaps, was where the trap-door opened. While she encased herself in rock for his sake, he sank to the ocean bed, and there would never be any way back. Over the months a distance grew between them; they slept spooned in opposite directions, they could no longer hold each other’s gaze. Their expressions of love became occasional and hollow. He no longer turned to her, the girl he had loved since childhood. He was still submerged, still drowning, and when she reached out to him, through her stone walls, through the water, the distance was simply too great.
    So when, a year on, Uzi’s – Adam’s – commanding officer took him aside and ordered him to report to the Shalishut military base on the outskirts of Ramat Gan and not to mention it to anybody, including Nehama, Adam knew intuitively that this was the change he needed. That Nehama needed. He shut his M-4 in a secure locker – it was too cumbersome, and he had his Glock – and,