On the day the war ended, I saw myself going back to the land before it became the land of Eretz, and was asked by the wondering people there, how best too make a people be no more?

Why do you ask? I said. They told me they had found a land to call home, but it is home to another.

Why do you need to take another, if there is plenty? I asked.

Our home must be on the land where the olive trees live, they said. There is only one such land.

The menu for death is old I thought, it is from the time of the first people. It comes with one soul in many forms. Then there was murder, still there is murder. Back then it was blood drawn out by a fist, later an axe, then later a bullet. Then came bombs that blew up people to pieces, and later mushroom clouds pregnant with deconstructed life. One soul, endless forms.

I am handed camel milk, fresh and warm. The men sit around a soft freshly lit fire, the women within eavesdrop close to the tents. My mind goes back into the future to the land where the olive trees live, and there I can hear a sparrow’s song coming from the top of a tree on the edge of a burnt olive grove. It reaches my ear warm and soulful. From deep under the rubble the stench of death rises continuously and spreads over the strip, small enough to cover end to end with the skin of all the dead children killed in the war. Shadows of past people linger everywhere. I can hear the sound of bread being broken, and the warm smiles forming on the faces of the people sitting on the floor as it is passed around. Everywhere I turn, I hear the echo of laughter lingering, persistent, refusing to leave, whose owners were made no more long ago. On the other side of the fence, a few miles away, something else can be heard. I travel there too. It is the chuckles of people watching something on a screen. They dance and mock on TiKTok like modern roman spectators in a mausoleum. On one of their screens a baby covered with dried bits of flesh is squatting wide eyed, dazed from a blast.

I drink the satisfying milk, and set the jug down on the sand. They are looking at me with the eager but tired eyes of a people yearning for rest in want of answers. Forty years, forty years, the old man’s first rises in the air. In their eyes flicker images of their past. I see women with deep wrinkled faces, and old men bent over like blown-over tall grass after a storm, walking in a an endless desert. They were going to where the sea meets the land. There beyond the water, where the olives lives, a new promised land lay. It was a promise of freedom from bondage, the promise of heroes.

What is the recipe? The old man reminded me of the question.

I reached for my milk, and drank the last of it.