ki

Long. Important thread. A Shadow in the Record of Silence 1. I am here. At least, that is how it looks to the living. But inside, the clock has stopped. Part of me remains trapped among the steel containers, the smell, and the deafening silence of Beit Shura. Since that day, I have walked through this world as a shadow of the person I used to be, trying to return but unable to find the way back. Now I am standing here by the hangar wall. I see them—the living. They walk around in white protective suits, like astronauts who have landed on a dead planet. I hear the hum of the refrigerated containers. I would recognize that sound among a thousand others: the low, monotonous rumble of Thermo King generators. They run without rest so the cold will keep the smell from escaping. But the smell is more cunning. It passes through metal, through mask filters, through skin. Welcome to Machane Shura, the military rabbinate base. Before October 7, it was quiet here. Fallen soldiers were brought here—one or two a year. With respect. In silence. Then the world turned upside down. I remember the first day. Trucks. Not military Humvees, but ordinary freight trucks, supermarket refrigerated trucks, trucks used to transport chickens. They lined up. Liquid leaked from them, leaving dark, greasy puddles on the asphalt. We spread sand over the puddles so we would not slip. Slipping on what was once a person is terrifying. There was nowhere near enough space. The containers were not placed on the parade ground; they would have been too visible there. They were stacked at the far end of the base, in a tight ring around the building where we carried out the examinations. An entire city of metal. And after a week, the laws of physics caught up with us. The refrigerated containers held the temperature at four degrees Celsius above zero, not below. That was enough for food, but not for what had lain inside for weeks. The bodies began to thaw. Then came a hell the newspapers do not describe. The liquid. It was everywhere. Bodies we had not yet managed to examine lay on stretchers in the corridors, waiting their turn. Liquid dripped, streamed, and poured from the bags onto the floor. Heavy, oily puddles formed. You could not even walk to the bathroom without stepping in what had been a person. You walked down the corridor, and it squelched beneath your feet. The sludge flowed out of the building, along the gutters, across the thresholds, and into the street. It soaked the ground around the hangar. Outside, the asphalt and soil were black and wet, as though there had been a downpour. But the sky was clear. It was not rain. It was them. Sometimes it felt as though I was walking home knee-deep in that liquid. I had to throw my shoes away. The soles had absorbed death, and no amount of bleach could remove it. You think hell is fire? No. Hell is white bags. Thousands of white bags piled in containers. I am a forensic investigator. My work is facts: fingerprints, genetics, dental records. Before October 7, I believed science could explain everything, that death had an order to it. But there was no order here. We were assigned to identify the dead. We were not ready. No one was. There were stainless-steel tables in the room. Cold. The light from the lamps was sterile and merciless. These were not purpose-made body bags with zippers. The country did not have enough of those. They were simply enormous, thick white plastic bags, like garbage bags. Their openings were pulled tight with plastic ties. There was no way to untie or unzip them. We simply cut them open. The sound of a knife cutting through taut plastic became the sound of our nightmare. Sometimes there was a person inside. Sometimes a part of one. Sometimes just charcoal - a small charred piece the size of a doll. When we cut open those bags, we were confronted with more than the dead. Reality spilled out at us: decomposed organs, body parts, a mangled mass.