«¿Cómo es que no caíste tú también»

“How is it that you did not fall too?” is the question Atalia puts to Shmuel about his survival, and the question he later carries through the night as he imagines Mija’s death. Its force lies in the gap between the two men: Mija entered the war despite serious physical vulnerability and died; Shmuel, also medically unfit for combat, did not. Repeated in solitude, Atalia’s words turn that difference into an accusation without a simple answer and a burden of witness without certainty.

The question in Atalia’s challenge

Atalia’s question follows her insistence that Shmuel belongs to the very society whose revolutionary, socialist, and rebellious ideals he might seem to oppose. Mija, she says, had become one of them too. She first asks how Shmuel had not fallen, and he answers that he was only thirteen during that war. Atalia does not let the explanation settle the matter: she asks how he survived later reprisals, Operation Kadesh, incursions, special operations across the border, or an accident during military training.

Shmuel reddens, hesitates, and admits that he was not a combat soldier. He has asthma and an enlarged heart; as he confesses this, tears fill his eyes, which he tries to conceal from Atalia out of shame. Her question thus brings a private bodily limitation into the open, setting the conditions of Shmuel’s survival beside the risks Mija accepted. It does not establish that Shmuel could have chosen a different fate; it makes the fact that he lived, while Mija died, impossible for him to treat as an abstract difference.

Mija’s enlistment and the web of deception

In his later thoughts, Shmuel remembers the contradiction surrounding Mija’s enlistment. Mija had only one kidney: at nine, he underwent an operation at Hadassah Hospital on Haneviim Street, where his left kidney was removed. He was physically disabled, like his father, yet falsified his medical certificate and his father’s signature to enlist. His wife and father-in-law opposed the war, opposed the establishment of the state, and strongly opposed his joining the battles; Mija went anyway.

Atalia describes the episode as a chain in which everyone was deceived, including those who did the deceiving. Mija fooled the authorities, and his parents were glad to be fooled; even Gershom Wald, Mija’s father, is included in the circle of the deceived. The revelation sharpens the question directed at Shmuel. Mija’s disability did not prevent him from entering combat, while Shmuel’s asthma and heart condition kept him from being a combat soldier. The contrast is not presented as proof that either man was free of constraint: it is the troubling difference between a survival shaped by exclusion and a death pursued in defiance of it.

The question returns in the deserted city

Hours after Atalia’s challenge, Shmuel reaches the café associated with his former socialist-renewal circle. Its rusty iron shutter is down. Standing there, he wonders what he is doing and suddenly recalls her question. The phrase has moved from conversation into solitary thought: no longer something he can answer by explaining his medical condition, it now opens onto the life and death of Mija.

The scene is set in a nearly empty Jerusalem shortly after one in the morning. Shmuel checks his watch; only a faint light shines in a window, where he imagines a young religious student reciting Psalms. Inwardly, he addresses the imagined student as someone also seeking something immeasurable, something neither of them will find by searching through the night or even beyond death. This reflection does not answer Atalia’s question. Instead, it places the unanswered question within a larger sense of longing that cannot be satisfied by explanation.

Mija’s last assault and the limits of imagining

On the walk home up Zikhron Moshe Street, Shmuel thinks of Mija as a mathematical genius who had been loved by Atalia and had loved her before she became embittered. He pictures him as a married man of thirty-seven, not a robust young Palmach fighter, climbing a hill in an attack on the night of April 2, 1948. Mija’s companions withdrew down the dark hillside toward the stopped convoy on the road, unaware that he had been left behind.

Shmuel’s imagining proceeds through unanswered alternatives. He wonders whether Mija was afraid to call out lest enemy fighters hear him, whether he lost consciousness, or whether he tried to crawl toward the road. He considers the opposite possibility: that Mija cried out from pain and was found by Arab fighters because of those cries. Shmuel cannot know whether Mija spoke to them, whether he knew Arabic like his father-in-law, whether he fought, or whether he begged for his life. The passage gives these possibilities as questions, not recovered facts; its distress comes precisely from the distance between Mija’s death and the surviving man’s inability to know what happened.

Repetition, bodily fear, and survivorhood

The remembered question reaches its most physically charged point when Shmuel imagines the moment Mija’s trousers were lowered. He wonders whether Mija understood what the fighters intended to do, then shudders and puts a hand to his own trousers as if to protect his body. He quickens his pace. The gesture makes the imagined violence register in Shmuel’s present body, even though the event he fears to picture belongs to Mija’s past and remains uncertain.

As Shmuel walks, the question returns once more. Its repetition connects Atalia’s earlier interrogation to his belated, solitary effort to witness a death he did not see. The expression is therefore not simply a request for the reason Shmuel escaped combat. It holds together his shame at having been spared, Mija’s deliberate enlistment despite disability and family opposition, and the survivor’s helpless attempt to imagine the last moments of the dead. The novel leaves the question open: survival is disclosed as circumstance, while its meaning remains unresolved.