The novel is narrated by an Israeli reserve soldier, literature teacher and academic whom his army friends call Harush. From the opening pages, he warns the reader that what follows may make him sound insane. He explicitly compares his project to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: war, he argues, may be as unstoppable as a glacier, but that does not mean every act committed inside a war is inevitable or necessary. His own story begins after the October 7 attack. He is at home with his partner, Shahar, and their ten-month-old son when the sirens begin and horrifying images start arriving. He packs for reserve duty and leaves his child behind, repeatedly saying goodbye because he cannot make himself leave. He drives south with Assulin, whose own kibbutz has been attacked, and eventually rejoins his reserve company. The soldiers spend an agonizing period waiting, organizing and reorganizing equipment, hearing rumors, watching the news and expecting every day to be the day they enter combat. One soldier, Amir, comes back from abroad without even waiting to be formally called up and is later killed when a bullet enters through the armpit and reaches his heart, bypassing the protection of his vest. The narrator learns early that the unofficial logic of the battlefield can be summarized in the phrase “anything that moves must die”: anything moving in the dangerous space around them is to be treated as an enemy. He finds the idea both militarily comprehensible and morally grotesque, because the more basic law of living things, in his eyes, is that anything that moves wants to live.
Before entering Gaza, the company operates around Sderot, which itself has become almost indistinguishable from a battlefield. Harush is already falling apart. During a video call with his baby, he breaks down completely, horrified by the thought that when his son needed protecting, his strongest desire was simply to run home. He begins describing himself as if his face has been broken into a Cubist painting and reconstructed incorrectly, with a black hole where his mouth should be. Soon the book’s psychological metaphors become literal events. He begins floating a few centimetres above the ground. In Gaza, his comrades sometimes have to pull or anchor him. The company crosses the border with the right foot first, following the commander’s half-superstitious instruction, and establishes positions near the sea. Gaza becomes “the surface of the moon” in Harush’s imagination: destroyed buildings form skeletal horizons, civilians have vanished from the spaces the soldiers occupy, and soldiers themselves seem like exhausted green extraterrestrials. Yet gradually he starts imagining the people who used to live in these buildings and recognizing that their homes, unlike the soldiers’ temporary positions, have been permanently transformed into ruins.
Much of the wartime narrative consists of raids, guard duty, searches and stretches of boredom punctuated by terror. Harush remembers a disastrous incident in which a sniper team leaving a damaged building is hit by an explosive device and comes under fire. The radio fills with confused overlapping voices, the building itself is filling with smoke because soldiers have set part of it on fire, and Harush is trapped between the urge to rush outside to help and the knowledge that the open space is being shot through. Tanks eventually arrive and overwhelm the opposing fire. Afterwards, as if the event has not already become absurd enough, a falling chunk of concrete injures Maor’s knee; later a D9 bulldozer accidentally drives through the wall of the building where Harush’s own men are sitting. He tells these stories with an emotional flatness that alarms his colleague Lior when he later recounts them to her. Another raid becomes one of the book’s central images. The soldiers search houses near orchards, overturn furniture and cupboards and find traces of ordinary lives alongside possible military evidence. Engineering troops prepare one large house for demolition. As the company withdraws, a D9 driver uses the spare time before the detonation to uproot rows of lemon and grapefruit trees. Harush watches the machine tear living trees out of the ground for no immediately apparent reason. Then the house is blown apart. The human destruction has become so routine that the supposedly ridiculous question posed in Harush’s mind by one of the company’s ducks becomes the moral question of the book: whatever justification might be offered for destroying the house, what were the lemons guilty of?
