Yoram Kaniuk

1948

For my dead and living comrades from the Harel Brigade, and for Hanoch Kosovsky, a valiant warrior, who loves who I am and looks askance at me, a man of this land, a bloodthirsty man, like all of us. With profound love for all who were there in the hell of slaughter, and yes, who also established a state.

And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live.

— Ezekiel 16:6

One

Whether or not it happened, one way or another, no memory has a country, no country has a memory. I can remember or invent a memory, and at the same time invent a country or think that in the past it was different. There is no country that can be different if it was first not different.

Most important of all is whether it is true that the confused man at the hospital did actually tell me, from the depths of his bitter weeping and without me asking, that everything in life and perhaps in death too (even though he admitted that he hadn’t yet been there) is based on three fundamentals: vengeance, betrayal, and envy. I asked him what about love, and he replied, Love — only when it’s betrayed or in fun. Love comes after betrayal, but with you it will come beforehand.

I thought I’d write a book quite the reverse of a laudable one and call it “The Funniest Thing that Happened to Me in the War.” In the end I wrote it under this other name, 1948, which isn’t at all funny, because I truly wanted to write about the funniest thing that happened to me in the war.

Right after the conversation with the confused man at the entrance to the hospital in bombarded Jerusalem, which was an Italian monastery converted into an abattoir for soldiers, I was laid on a real bed and was flooded with pleasure, because after all those months I was lying on a sheet. My leg hurt a lot, but once I settled in I felt good, the sheet touched my back, a glass of water stood beside the bed and I drank from it, and just as I began feeling like a human being once more, there was a sudden loud noise, the ceiling collapsed from a shell that sliced through it, its hanging innards began falling like jets of snot, and two nuns hurried to me, got me onto a stretcher, and on the way to the cellar I was covered with ancient Christian plaster that continued to drizzle from the ceiling. The sister looked at me, I was half naked, and in Germanic Hebrew she said that attempting to prevail over Satan was like a spark from hell falling onto the soul’s wedding dress. According to Ben-Azzai — that’s what she said, I remember! — according to Ben-Azzai, “My soul thirsts for Torah, and the preservation of the world is in the hands of others.”

There was a connection there. I was young. She was young. I was half naked. She was dressed as a nun. But she had decided to be a virgin whereas I was forced to be one, and she, I don’t remember why, went on to say that the doctors are playing God! I evidently do remember, because it’s impossible to remember the terrible pain, but I remember that it hurt. The nuns put me down, covered in dust, this time onto a mattress without a sheet. For some reason I laughed, and one of the nuns — who because it is said that there is no humor in heaven had never heard laughter, and didn’t know exactly what this sound coming from me was, and why my face had suddenly opened — cleaned me up thoroughly and asked what I was thinking when I turned up my mouth like that. She spoke Hebrew quite fluently, and I replied that I just, I don’t think, I just do it. She said, But you look like someone who knows how to think, and I told her that maybe I’d try thinking, and she said, You know, you’re a sweet man. And then she stopped short because she didn’t know what to say to an eighteen-year-old boy about to have a leg amputated. I told her that what made me laugh was that only now, when I wouldn’t be fighting anymore, I realized that I had no idea in which war I’d been fighting and what exactly had happened to me in that war and why I’d carried on fighting when the chances of my getting back home were nil. I told her I understand that I don’t exactly know who I am. That I don’t know what I’m doing and don’t know where I’ve been. After she laid me down on the stinking mattress in the cellar that was gradually filling up with the wounded, she ran into the corridor to fetch somebody else.

Throughout the days of the fighting I didn’t think. I didn’t make plans. I did what I was told and took initiative only when there was no choice and we had to improvise. I was told to sleep, I slept. I was told to get up, I got up. They gave out food, I ate. When they didn’t, I wasn’t hungry. It was evidently true that they put sodium bicarbonate in the small quantity of water we were given to drink because I didn’t think about girls, who a year earlier had devoured me with their budding femininity. I remembered that there had been absolutely nothing inside my battered skull. We were like kids, so shamefully young, volunteers, we were boors, partisans. Except for me there weren’t any youngsters who had previously worked in youth movements — they would be called up later, after we’d finished establishing a state for them. We were just one from here and another from there, we still had no documents whatsoever, except for Palestinian birth certificates, which of course we didn’t carry with us. So why had I remained in that parched hole and why hadn’t I gone home while the siege had not yet been tightened? Why hadn’t I gone home? After all, nobody would have known what had happened to me and anyway, there was no time to think, and they would surely have assumed I’d been captured by the Jordanians or died and been buried in a forlorn grave “known only to God,” the way the gravestones were inscribed in the field of the dead in Trumpeldor Street in Tel Aviv, and perhaps they’d find my body if I had indeed died someplace where no one imagined I’d be.

I was a fool who’d gone off to be a valiant soldier and smite the enemy. That’s what I was. Had I enlisted so early, at seventeen and a half, because I was a hero or was it because I was scared and had run away from something? And if so, from what? I was evidently a coward. People with creative imaginations also possess this ability to be fools who volunteer for lost causes. I emerged from my dread as a hero who had overcome his fears. And beforehand I’d been a bundle of fears. Of death. Of the dark. Of people. Of crowds. Of disease-bearing flies, of Anopheles mosquitoes that carry malaria, about which my mother, Sarah, would speak as a woman who’d been personally acquainted with them in her youth in Palestine. I wasn’t a courageous hero like many of the troops. I was somebody who didn’t give up. Somebody who, although frightened, saw death and did not flinch. I knew that aboard the small ships at sea there were thousands of homeless Holocaust survivors unwanted by any country, and I’d read that three years earlier Herr Goebbels had said that if the Jews were so clever and so talented, and played so beautifully, how was it that no country wanted them, and I remember it sticking in my craw and I wanted to take part in bringing those Jews here.

Was that truly the real reason I enlisted in November 1947, a short time before the United Nations resolution on the partition of Palestine? What I do remember is that one day, in the first semester in twelfth grade at the Tichon Hadash High School, which was the most wonderful place to be, with its stirring principal, Tony Halle, who looked like a magnificent mouse and one day stood on a chair and closed her eyes, with tears oozing from beneath their lids, and with a kind of profound yearning began describing how, in 1077, Heinrich IV stood facing the fortress of Canossa, where Pope Gregory VII was hiding behind a curtain, and how poor Heinrich stood there in the cold, the snow, in a desolate land, how he stood there barefoot, she said with her deep beauty, how he stood without shoes, without socks, without a coat, without a shirt, without underpants, and wept before the pope, who was hiding in warm clothing, and behind him a blazing hearth, and he looked and saw the handsome, heroic Heinrich IV, the magnificent and beloved king, his true love, freezing naked and pleading for his life, and all of us, the whole class, wept at hearing about the fate of Heinrich IV, and one day, just like that, I left that sweet school with an adage that even I didn’t believe, that we wouldn’t drive the British out with cube roots, and I volunteered for the Palyam* because I said I’d bring the survivors to our country’s shores and didn’t really think about where the boats carrying them would come to. Right after our sea training we went off to fight in the Jerusalem and Judean hills. So I’d said I’d enlisted to bring Jews, so what? Did I really think that the boats would reach the Port of Jerusalem that’s buried alive between the desert and the green landscape and Bab el-Wad*? And even before that, our absurd teachers had gone on at us and stuffed our minds with building and being built in the Land of Israel, but we didn’t really understand what it meant. After all, we were born here. With the thistles. With the jackals. With the carts harnessed to blinkered mules, and the prickly pears, and the pomegranates, and the cypresses with their beautiful foliage, so how do you actually build and be built?

Here and there one heard talk of a Jewish state. The concept of “state” didn’t ring true, it didn’t sound real, since when, after two thousand years, had our people had a state? And what kind of a state would it be? What would this little state be like? Liechtenstein, the Congo? And what, would Ben-Gurion wear a top hat and stand on a box like Herzl on the balcony in Basel so as to look tall? And would a Jewish policeman blow a whistle or a shofar, a ritual ram’s horn?

In an old volume hidden behind my father’s German books — highlighted in red ink and written in the cursive Rashi script he liked to use with that latent spark of a Galician Jew who thought he’d been born in Berlin and who sometimes sang Jewish prayers between Schubert and Brahms lieder — I found the story about the Rabbi of Ladi who fought a historic battle with the Rabbi of Konitz over the possible conquest of Moscow by Napoleon. They had to decide, once and for all, whether or not this conquest was good for the Jews, and since the fate of the Jews was about to be sealed, the vigorous Rabbi of Ladi, who was so concerned by the magnitude of the task that tears flowed from his eyes, summoned the Rabbi of Konitz to the synagogue to decide what would be good for the Jews. Something happened, the Rabbi of Ladi was somewhat late and the Rabbi of Konitz got there before him, took his shofar and started to blow it, and the Rabbi of Ladi ran inside, snatched the shofar from his hands together with the blast from the Rabbi of Konitz’s shofar, and that’s what caused Napoleon’s defeat at Moscow and decided the fate of the Jews.

That’s what happened to us. We went off to bring Jews by sea and ended up establishing a state in the Jerusalem hills. It’s a mistake to think that we fought for the establishment of this state. How were we to know how you establish a state? Had anybody done it before us? Nonsense, a Jewish state was the blast snatched from the shofar of others, and yes, somehow with the power of a miracle that was actually the act, the sound of the shofar reached its destination. For when the Palmach* took Safed (I wasn’t there), the town’s rabbi said that Safed had been saved by a miracle and deeds: the deeds were prayers and the miracle was that the Palmach arrived. We were charged with miracle making. A state was a vague, even ridiculous notion. The first thing we know about the history of our people was the patriarch Abram fleeing from his homeland because he heard God, not Moses’s god but another Canaanite god, say to him, Get thee out of thy country! So how could we know what love of country is? And of all the peoples in the world that didn’t think of fleeing from their homeland for two thousand years, we should suddenly become a people that loves a land of its own, that isn’t its own, and establish a state in it? We’re a people of suitcases, of wandering, of yearning for a place we were never in. Abram comes and finds famine in the land of his dreams and right away goes down to Egypt to sojourn there and returns after a long time, the way an American Israeli of today returns with great wealth from California, for the God of the Hebrews got tired of creating worlds and decided to create a new Hebrew world and started it in heaven and only later it came to Earth, since states do not dwell in heaven. So we’ll build a state of nomads? We — the serfs of the Almighty, whom we despised, for whom “Abroad” was the name of some country, and we only knew about real countries from our stamp collections, and for us, because of the stamps’ size and beauty, Luxembourg was bigger than the United States, and if we’d learned anything about countries we’d learned how to aspire to one but not how to establish it, especially if it were to be created in a hostile region like ours — we would establish it? But what did they say back then when they wanted to play with words? Ha-ikar, bat ha-ikar. Beikar kesheha-ikar eino babayit. (The main thing is the farmer’s daughter. Especially when the farmer’s not home.)

And it must be remembered that with us was that sweet lunatic Benny Marshak, the secular Hasid political commissar who dreamed of a Jewish state, and caught cold from yearning so much for a state, and vilified the enemies of Israel even in his sleep, and who came with us from Caesarea — where we were waiting for the illegal immigrants who didn’t come— to the war in the hills that came with a vengeance, and who’d shout over and over — he knew how to shout — that we should establish a state for him already, and we thought, Poor guy, he loves a nonexistent state, and if it is established, it’ll probably be Afula, which at the time was the only city, even if all its buildings were outside it, and which was actually a bus stop on the way to the Valley of Jezreel or a toilet stop on the road to Haifa. Poor Benny really and truly had waited two thousand years plus a few days, whose duration isn’t written in any ledger. So we went along with him because he hadn’t slept for two months, and we’d checked, we’d spied on him, he really hadn’t slept, eaten, drunk, or washed (we could feel the last item even without spying on him), and all the time he was busy with establishing a state that nobody before him had seen what it looked like, and when he tried to describe it he’d tremble with the tears choking him and yell excitedly. And when he’d had it with all his yearning and we thought that something must really be done about it and a state should be established for Benny so he’d get off our back, we were stuck on some hilltop strongpoint, I don’t remember which, and a good-looking boy, whose name I’ve forgotten, straightened up for a moment and took a direct hit from a three-inch mortar shell that sliced him, actually sliced him, as if it were a sharp knife, and we saw his body split into two parts that fell to the two sides it had beforehand, when he was good-looking and not a bleeding human salami as he was now. And the blood flowed. We covered him with our long, heavy, woolen army coats, which in belles letters were called greatcoats, and somebody asked who he was, perhaps a new immigrant who’d fallen in with us, and we fell asleep.

It was cold without our greatcoats. We heard sudden shouting. Not shouting, but wild yelling. Somebody came and woke us up in the terrible darkness, and weeping and laughing told us in a hoarse voice that someone had heard on a battery radio that Ben-Gurion had established a state, and then said, Come, let us arise and sing “Hatikva*” (they used forms like that back then), and we told the jerk, Crap! We don’t even know the words, and anyway, where has Ben-Gurion established his state? And he said he’d heard that he’d established it in Tel Aviv, and we said, Look, we’re under siege here, in Jerusalem, we’re in Bab el-Wad and there’s no state here, and Jerusalem isn’t in the State of Tel Aviv, and we fell asleep.

Early the next morning, at four or five, Benny Marshak loomed out of the mist, and we noticed that he looked like he’d shed two thousand years plus a few days. Suddenly he was young, dauntless, and laughing, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills, and singing, and for a moment I thought that even his odor of ancient sweat had dissipated. But he carried on, not even noticing the sliced boy on the ground covered with greatcoats. He stood to attention and stood at ease, his hair tangled, and he tried to sing “Hatikva” and what came out was the hoarseness of an Eretz Yisrael generation which thought that the louder you shout the righter you are. Standing steadfastly, planted in the soil, barely moving, he began dancing a clumsy, heavy-footed hora they’d brought with them from the Diaspora, a hora of Hasidim, and he danced in threadbare khaki pants with a Parabellum-Pistole strapped to his waist, because back then you only trusted God with a gun in your hand, and it was a hora of one man multiplied by two thousand years plus a few days, and he leapt and swayed and yelled, “God will build Galilee / God will build Galilee”; and we told him, We’re in Jerusalem, and one of us, still asleep, suddenly began declaiming the poem: “Man was born to die / The horse was born to foal / If you’ve climbed a pole / Then you’re bound to fall.” And Benny Marshak yells, Insolent rascals, what are you thinking of? This is a historic moment! The most historic moment in two thousand years! And then he suddenly starts crying and we get up and join him. I don’t want to, I’m tired, but Benny is begging and grabs me with a hand that’s strong from forty years in the kibbutz, and in the middle of nowhere, at four or five in the morning, in the asshole of the world, next to a body that had begun to stink, on a pissant hilltop, amid the firing, a few young idiots are dancing and yelling “God will build Galilee” in Jerusalem that had never seen Galilee, yelling “A Jewish state, a Jewish state,” and as we dance I start trembling, my eyes close, I stick matches between my eyebrows and cheeks but fall asleep as I dance, and Benny runs off to tell some other guys. Afterward we carried the sliced guy to Kiryat Anavim*, handed him over to the kibbutz oldsters who were in charge of burials, and slept a while. When we were awakened we were sent off to fight another battle and again we forgot why, and that was the funniest thing that happened to me in that war, that I established a state while asleep and dancing the hora next to an unknown comrade who’d been sliced into two.

Two

A few nights later we were marching through the hills singing “We’re walking like dead men,” which as far as I know wasn’t written by our national poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, and we sang, “When all the girls are bottles / The boys will be the stoppers / We’ll screw and screw and screw” which was not written by Tschernichovsky. And Jerusalem is empty, shells are falling on the Eternal City, its residents hiding in the stone buildings, hungry and thirsty. And booms all the time, and people are being killed in the street and the houses and the schools and in the middle of the songs. After some godforsaken battle that took place and I don’t remember where, I heard that five of the seven boys who’d danced with Benny Marshak and me at the absurd celebration on the hilltop had been killed, and that the two who hadn’t been killed had been transferred to another company. So of the whole gang that had fought together since the battle at Hulda, I was the only one left. I sat on the grass in Kiryat Anavim with my bundle beside me and waited. I wanted water but there wasn’t any. Somebody, who would be killed a day later, came along and asked where the guys were, and I told him that five were dead and two had been transferred to Dado’s company, and he said, Join our armored vehicle, you’re on your own and we’ve got a job for you.

I remember that we had to get Major Even, who was Abba Eban — and perhaps it was even someone else — back to Tel Aviv. And Jerusalem was cut off. Abu Hajar, as Ezer Weizmann was to call him later, who spoke with a soft British accent, looked at us admiringly and it seemed that he trusted us, which I wouldn’t have done in his shoes. After a night of jouncing on a winding drive along back roads and wadis*, behind enemy lines and almost inside them — after being shot at because we couldn’t be clearly identified, and after we fired back here and there not knowing exactly at whom, and we were told that one of us had killed a donkey but apart from me nobody was sorry for the poor Arab beast — we reached Tel Aviv in the early morning. We went into town and the air-raid siren sounded. Egyptian planes were bombing the city and people were scurrying for the shelters. We got down from the armored vehicle by the central bus station, from a distance we saw people wounded and ran to help them, and then more bombs fell and we saw the German aircraft in the sky, flying slowly and making a terrible racket, but we were tired, and there were already a lot of people who had come to treat the wounded, so we stretched while standing and loosened up because we’d been sitting for eight hours, crowded into that fucking armored vehicle, and Abba Eban went into the nearest shelter and more booms were heard and I walked to my parents’ home.

The streets were empty and it was quiet, except for sporadic antiaircraft fire, and I saw old people of my father’s generation wearing black berets with the Civil Guard insignia on them. I heard their whistles and their cries of Kindly switch that light off, even though it was already morning and it wasn’t dark anyway, but the oldsters were confused and tired and carried gas masks slung over their shoulders and shouted, Kindly go down to the shelters, kindly switch that light off, and who says “kindly” today? That ancient verbal beauty had remained in Berlin, which was only renting a place in Tel Aviv at the time.

I looked at the houses that were so deeply planted in the streets I knew and in which I’d grown up. I envied the people unseen in the street, who perhaps I’d dreamed about as if through opaque glass. I thought of my father who, when the Italians bombed Tel Aviv in the big war, would not go down into the shelter because according to the statistics, he explained, the odds against a person being hit in Tel Aviv were five million to one. So he sat in his room on the fourth floor facing the sea and the jackals that wandered by the Muslim cemetery at night, and read Jean-Paul or Heine, until one day he went down into the shelter. Everyone was surprised and asked him, Moshe, what about your statistics? He replied that he’d heard on the BBC that in Moscow there was a zoo in which only one elephant remained, and in an air raid the day before yesterday the elephant had been killed.

Before I reached our apartment at 129 Ben-Yehuda Street, some bombs fell not far away, in Arlosoroff Street, I think. On entering the building I saw the neighbors wrapped in blankets in the lobby that had been turned into a shelter with a wall of white bricks to protect them from shrapnel, and they apparently said hello and apparently were surprised to see me because they knew I was away. I nodded, I didn’t have the words, and I climbed the stairs and went into the apartment. My mother ran after me. She later told me that I’d come in and didn’t say hello and didn’t say a word and hurried into my sister, Mira’s, room, who was seven at the time, and I slammed the door behind me and didn’t come out for a long time. I didn’t eat. I didn’t drink. For hours and hours I drew with colored crayons I found in my desk drawer. I apparently moved the desk and stood on it to draw on the ceiling. I drew monstrous drawings: I drew a vulture, I drew an eagle with a human eye in its beak, I drew Holocaust survivors who were already to be seen on the streets, I drew roofs, especially one from which I apparently thought I wanted to jump. I didn’t let anybody in. After the war, when I saw the drawings again, I cleaned them off with detergent.

As I drew I remember the smell of burned sausage coming from the kitchen, which wafted through the window above my sister’s bed. I dragged myself to the kitchen and wolfed down the sausage, and I dimly remember the kerosene stove and the Primus on which a pot of goulash stood waiting for me in vain. I heard my mother’s weeping and somehow I remember, as if in a dream, going out onto the balcony and staring at my sea, which was more of a home to me than any other home I ever lived in, and whose deep blue beauty on winter evenings was my secret life, and I heard the sad howling of the jackals near the Muslim cemetery, and I remember the music of the gutters in the rain that hit me, and the sun slicing the sea, and all of this apparently imbued me with a kind of confidence.

My father and mother, so they told me later, understood and didn’t ask. They didn’t even know that I’d come from Jerusalem. After a night and half a day I went out of the house and walked to the central bus station, which was almost destroyed. I ran part of the way. The armored vehicle was waiting there with some guys who’d come and seemed to be asleep on their feet. A plane passed overhead. A fat man gave me a Simon Arzt Egyptian cigarette with a gold mouthpiece of the kind not seen in Palestine. I stood with them. We didn’t say hello. I don’t remember the start of the journey, only that the day was at its height and the light full, big, and when we reached Bab el-Wad we were identified and a massive fusillade began. We fired back through the slits we slid open, and when I moved back to change the magazine a round came through the open slit and ricocheted from side to side. It sounded like a steel bee, its banging on the metal sides feeble. We had nowhere to hide. We saw passing darts of flame and we were imprisoned and the bullet flew and flew and flew, and in the air hung a smell more of wonderment than of fear because we hadn’t been prepared for such a situation. The bullet could only be detected by the tracers of dim light it left in its wake, and two of our number fell onto our legs. They moved slightly, yelled, and suddenly fell silent and their blood flowed onto our feet. The bullet continued to fly until its force was spent. When it fell, Mishka grabbed it and threw it out as if he wanted to exact vengeance. The bodies at our feet, saliva drooling from their mouths, we continued on our way.

I’ve been trying to write about this for fifty-nine years. In 1949, when I was a deckhand aboard the SS Pan York and took part in bringing Holocaust survivors to Israel, I wrote a book I called “Benny’s Comrades”—Benny Marshak, that is. A beautiful woman from the village of Kfar Yehoshua copied the manuscript but no one wanted it and it was lost.

I’m not sure what I actually remember since I do not rely on memory, it is sly and does not possess a one and only truth. And what’s really all that important? A lie that comes from seeking truth can be more genuine than truth itself. You think, and a moment later you remember only what you want to. I was a seventeen-and-half-year-old youth, a nice Tel Avivan boy in the middle of a bloodbath. I’m trying to fish myself out of what seem to be memories, but perhaps I was someplace else? Years later, a serious man told me that the story about the bullet in the armored vehicle didn’t take place in Bab el-Wad but on Mount Zion — maybe he’s right. So what? Perhaps for five months I was lying under a down quilt in the magnificent palace belonging to my late grandfather Yankele Hariri, who was an aristocratic Jew in Venezuela, and I dreamed all these things.

Exactly who was I back then? What exactly did I do?

Did I go to the toilet? Did we even have toilets? Did I ever brush my teeth? Did I have a toothbrush? And if I did brush my teeth like every nice boy in Eretz Yisrael, where did I get toothpaste? And what did I do between the battles? Who was I, what did I think about, apart from the few occasions that I remember thinking? And what is memory? Memory is what I write is memory.

I’m old, ailing, thinking about the new state that Ben-Gurion established, sixty years old now, its parents no longer with us and its heirs are idiots, fools, robbers, wicked people who’ve forgotten where they came from. For remembering is difficult for anyone who wasn’t there and didn’t see how good people made mistakes and didn’t make mistakes, who made puzzling but also daring decisions. To remember, and very soon those who were there with me will no longer be here, even though I see that today there are more than there were then. They’ve reproduced postmortem. Today there’s a Palmach House that’s bigger than the whole Palmach when there was a Palmach, and there’s a Palmach generation that makes Palmach films and organizes Palmach conventions and appoints Palmach commemoration committees, and they award Palmach prizes and rewrite Palmach history — they’ve founded an enterprise for the misrepresentation of the Palmach memory! The real Palmach was terminated in 1948 on the orders of Ben-Gurion, who with his brutal zealotry realized that the political parties’ private armies — of which the Palmach was one — must be disbanded, and it made no difference how much blood it spilled and how much happiness it brought in the end, and how with a few other battalions it established a state out of nothing. At a sad assembly in Tel Aviv they shouted, “The Moor has done his duty, the Moor may go.” After its death the Palmach became a big army with a huge palace where ninety percent of those frequenting it weren’t even in the Palmach back then, when it was fighting. There’s life after death, as the saying goes, at least when it concerns the Israeli underground movements.

Israel. Judah. A Hebrew state. Jewish. Israeli. Maybe it’s nothing but a new Canaan, the land of the Amorites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, the State of the Jews. Instead of teachers we had oratorical prophets who wanted us to bring them salvation, that we beat the Nazis, may their name be erased. “We,” except for me, since my father was indifferent to new states in the Middle East and read books in German and listened to Beethoven quartets and Monteverdi’s music and dreamed in German about Berlin, but most of my friends had parents who spoke Yiddish or Romanian or Hungarian, and when we started to sense that war was approaching, they became very frightened because they had only just heard that their families, which they had left when they emigrated to Palestine, had perished in the recently ended Holocaust. They enthusiastically sent us to establish a state for their families that had perished, to establish a state for their dead, and they didn’t know that the state would be a sort of lunatic asylum in the desert, strewn with the bonemeal of the Jews who didn’t make it here alive.

Israel is indeed a state of the dead. It was established for the dead. It is a remembrance of the fact that perhaps they might not have died had we established it fifty years earlier. How can a Jewish state live with the historic glue of the kind of Almighty, blessed be He, who matter-of-factly, indifferently, murdered one-third of its people? Behind us stood old, melancholy revolutionaries. A few of them were flamboyant, small of stature, and zealots, beautiful in their fervor and love of history that gave their children the right to exact vengeance on their behalf, and perhaps they were even noble in the ill-fated sense of the word, and they saw us for one moment in the history of Israel, the Eternal People, an ancient people that for two thousand years had wanted to live with dignity and didn’t know how, a people that loves yearning more than living, that was born in the desert and left their homeland, their father’s house, to wander and be downtrodden, but not to do anything valiant with those yearnings. Our teachers thought that we would resurrect our ancient land, our national home, and avenge Jewish history, avenge the pogroms. They wanted us to undertake a vast reprisal operation against Jewish history, as in “The Lesson” by Haim Hazaz, which we all learned by heart. They wanted us to start creating a new, manly Jewish history of our own and no longer live by the grace of someone else’s history. We were to bring honor to the humiliated nation that had been attacked in order to annihilate it, and we went off to establish a state against Chmelnitsky and his pogroms and the Cossacks and the Germans, and all we found facing us were Arabs, who we’d known from the time they fired on us in the 1930s when we traveled to Gedera, and from the donkeys, and the market in Jaffa, and from the shouts of “Itbakh al-Yahud” (Kill the Jews), from the tasty tahini, the coffee with cardamom, from the Khayyat Beach that belonged to the aristocratic Arab my father liked to visit in his palace in Haifa, from the stories about Hanita and Major-General Wingate and the killing and the rage and the struggle from 1920 onward.

For our forefathers what happened here two thousand years ago was the stuff of legend, shards of fired clay, and for us what happened back then is history and geography. We were the children of the Bible, but also the children of Bialik and Ravnitzky’s Book of Legends, and we loved reading about how Moses sees Joshua going into the Tent of the Congregation and envies him and says to God, “Rather a hundred deaths than a single pang of envy.” Our parents were Poles, Russians, Germans, Romanians, and Greeks who had known calamity and humiliation and had come to the historic homeland to restore our days as of old. Sixty years ago, from December 1947 to the end of 1948, we were the “handsome, tousle-headed youngsters” we really were. I swear we were.

Back then there were three kinds of toothpaste: Shemen; Shenhav, which was made by the Kupat Holim Health Fund; and the British Collins, which was the jewel in the crown. We smoked Matossian, Latif, Degel, Odem, Dubek, Players, and Craven A cigarettes in packets of ten. We were almost weaponless, with commanders thirsty for battle but with no combat experience, who before they became commanders all they’d known about the war of murder, bereavement, and massacre was blowing up bridges and hitting each other in hand-to-hand combat. And in fact, we were indeed few. During those bitter months, until the first cease-fire, we were alone, hungry, and thirsty. Most of our peers had not yet enlisted. They were called up only later and forced to leave twelfth grade before the end of the school year, but with their matriculation certificate. And I had only a certificate attesting to the fact that I had completed elementary school, and that wasn’t any great shakes either.

I enlisted earlier. A few months earlier, and to this day I wonder if I was a fool, because I was always falling off the bike I’d been given for my bar mitzvah, a red Peugeot when everybody else was riding a Raleigh. And perhaps I’d banged my head because I’d look at every pretty girl walking down the street, and even at those who weren’t pretty — what did I know about girls’ beauty — and it was dangerous, and I fell.

We were in Jerusalem and Bab el-Wad. Unlike other units of kibbutzniks and enlisted training groups and Palmach tents and songs through the night, while we had a few kibbutzniks who had finished school, most of us were peasants from all kinds of backwaters around the country: the rural villages, Makhloul, Shipur Hayam, Kfar Malal, Kfar Yehezkel, Haifa, Kfar Sava, Nahalal, Musrara. We snuck into all kinds of places, we didn’t have a pot to piss in, and we marched and sang about how we’d die in Bab el-Wad. We sang yearningly and with mental fortitude. Putzes that we were, we really thought it would be great to die in Bab el-Wad, and we imagined how they’d shoot us with armor-piercing bullets.

While we actually were handsome, tousle-headed youngsters, smart we were not. Smart people don’t go off to die by choice when they’re seventeen, eighteen, or even twenty years old. Smart people prefer actual countries over dreamed ones. Smart people don’t try to establish new countries in hamsin heat waves in a country full of native Arabs, and surrounded by Arab countries that view them as malevolent foreigners.

I came to the battles and to death straight from the Palyam’s Course No. 9, where we learned to swim, tie knots, and sail boats. On the course I took part in a grand total of one firing-range session in the sand dunes, and after it — right into the war. After the first massacre at Hulda I knew more about war than my commanders. You see, you’ve got to be a crazy youngster to fight a suicidal war for someone you don’t know and for something about which you haven’t the faintest idea. Only after the war were we to discover, and not always sympathetically, that we had established a state for the dead who would not live in it.

Three

One day a man was standing at the door of our apartment on Ben-Yehuda Street. He didn’t ring the doorbell but banged loudly on the door. I looked through the peephole and didn’t see anyone. I strained, and a moment later a man whose face looked squashed appeared in the peephole. I was alarmed and opened the door for him. He stood erect. Beforehand, when I didn’t see him, he had evidently been bending down. He wore a faded blue peaked cap askew on his head. He looked pale. His eyes were lifeless. When he recognized me, his mouth twisted in a kind of anger, but at the same time there was an impish twinkle in his eyes, an impish-gloomy twinkle, like I’d once seen on the face of a boy standing with his hands raised in a film about the Warsaw ghetto. With his wretched impishness he seemed both defeated yet strong. His eyes half closed, and with a sudden movement, as if he were trying to hide beneath the small doormat, he knelt on the floor like a dog.

Miss Gross the English teacher, who had just finished her second shave of the day, heard the noise. She opened her door, which adjoined ours, and on seeing the man she seemed threatened and shouted, “I told you the Nazis would come!” and as usual when the Nazis came, she quickly hid in the electrical cabinet in the building’s entrance downstairs. Her father had been a lion hunter in Africa for zoos in Germany. He was beaten to death on Kristallnacht, when he had hidden in a big electrical cabinet in a restaurant on Fassane Strasse.

The man in the doorway turned his head toward her and fixed her with a brief, evil look, and I saw the blood drain from her cheeks. His half-closed eyes followed her as she hurried downstairs, but then she changed her mind and didn’t go down as far as the electrical cabinet but came back up and fled into her apartment to stand on her balcony overlooking the sea and want, again and again, to swim to Berlin.

The man’s eyes opened fully and he got up from the floor, and with an even more downcast look roughly asked me if I was the sohn of “the bastard.” I said I’m Moshe’s son. He said, That’s what I asked, boy. And Yiddish you surely kennen*. I said I didn’t. He said, The first thing in this land here was to kill the Jews mehr than they were killed there. I said I was sorry I don’t speak Yiddish, and he smiled sweetly and said, You’re not, but tell me, in your traumen* don’t you dream in Yiddish? Because a Jew cannot dream in anything but Yiddish and cannot count in another language. I said I don’t speak Yiddish and I dream in Hebrew and count in Hebrew, and he said, Don’t worry, when you die you’ll die in Yiddish. Every Jew when he dies will die in Yiddish. Hebrew is a language of Arabs masquerading as Jews.

He continued in his funny accent, Hebrew Ich kennen only a little, I learned in your Moshe’s Tarnopol, and I say “hafeytz” for “want” and you won’t say anything because you say “roytzeh*,” and we’ll see who laughs last or first, but your bastard of a father’s bastard Deutsch I will not speak. And anyway, where is he? I said that he isn’t a bastard, and he said, And how he’s a bastard, and he shouted, Listen, don’t be so froilich*. I replied that I’m not happy, and he said, But despite that, a hendshake from me you won’t get, you sabra* bastard, and go already and tell Moshe I’m here.

I asked him who he was so I could tell my father, and he shouted, He’ll know who I am. And surely enough, my father heard the commotion and evidently recognized his voice, and he came out of his room and found the man facing him, and they both froze as if struck by lightning. They looked like waxworks in a profound moment that burst from within them, and they began measuring each other up, and the blank-faced man moved toward my father and halted close to him and then moved away momentarily, as if it were a Rina Nikova ballet I’d once seen with my aunt Esti. Then they fell upon each other and began hitting each other. They really struggled soundlessly, and the shouts could be seen but remained silent, although their mouths were moving and their bodies screamed. Then they shifted into Yiddish, and that was the first time I’d heard my father speak Yiddish and the first time I’d seen him hit someone and the first time I’d seen him hug anyone. He didn’t even hug his wife or us, my sister and me.

My father didn’t even see me. He didn’t glance at me. He looked toward the neighbor’s door and muttered something, and a few moments later they both took a few, almost identical steps back and moved away from each other, and the strange man spat. Then my always well-groomed father, whose clothes were Bohemian, elegant, and handmade by Neumann the tailor, my father who even wore a tie to go to the toilet, that poor dandy, crouched like an animal, took a starched white handkerchief from the pocket of his blue shirt, wiped up the man’s spittle, and afterward carefully refolded the handkerchief and returned it to his pocket. That was my father, who was capable of polishing cakes of soap so they would be cleaner. He drew the man into his room, slamming the door behind them.

They were closeted in my father’s room for a long time. After a while, raised voices were heard and I heard the man shouting in somewhat odd Hebrew, but it was Hebrew intended for my ears. What, Moshe? You don’t vant your uncircumcised son, the shaygetz fon Eretz Yisrael, your not-only-child to hear? Tell me, what about Yoshka? And what about Bomek? And what about Yetka? And that friend, Nathan, of your brother Dov-Ber, who before he disappeared they said he killed some Cossack? And what about Naftuli the poet of “Bo-ee Tzion ve-Sha’alu Shloma”? And my father asked, What, the one who played for the HaKoah Vienna football team? And the man said, And how he played, and wasn’t there a rose of Sharon? And Hassia, and how is it that you haven’t got some heart, a bissel herz? How Mottele ran away when he went looking for your dear brother in Siberia, and where were you? They search for you in heaven. You’re a bastard, and not because of the Torah because it died there with us when you ran away, but a bastard because of your father, Mordechai, whom you abandoned, Moshe.

My mother hurried in and asked if the man would like coffee or tea or something cold, and he shouted at her, I don’t vant anything from you, Missus Moshe, go to the devil, I don’t vant cold, or hot, or water, I don’t vant anything.

My mother stood mesmerized by what she would later describe as an epiphany and didn’t know how to interpret it and say of what. She was not a spoiled girl from a Swiss boardinghouse, she grew up in poverty, and when she was a little girl she came to Palestine on a reeking boat from Odessa, and later was expelled from Tel Aviv to the fields of Ein Ganim near Petach Tikva, and the Turks, who she always referred to as “May their name be erased,” beat her. She saw a lot of wonders. In her Ein Ganim exile she lay in a field of thistles and looked for goats in the nearby Arab village to bring milk to her sick father. When they returned to Tel Aviv, she would sit by the door as he taught young girls Hebrew, which was forbidden by order of the Turks, and barked like a dog when a Turkish policeman approached, and when the girls heard the barking they began singing as if they were attending a singing lesson, which the Turks permitted. They all died: her father, mother, her two brothers, the jackal, her friends, Bograshov the teacher, Brenner the teacher, Nesher the teacher. And in the 1921 riots she tended the charred bodies of Brenner and his friends. My mother knew wars, in 1929 and 1936, and the world war, but facing that man I saw how her mouth pursed, as if she again was her father’s dog, and she left the room, and there were a few moments of silence.

She went into the kitchen and wept and at the same time heated water for nobody, since my father never drank coffee that she had made, only coffee he made himself in a strange machine he’d brought with him from Germany, and he detested tea because it was too Jewish. The sound of the waves could be heard and they sometimes shouted and sometimes spoke in whispers. And the man said, Moshe, kim aherr, come here and bow to me, bastard of an angel’s son, and I realized that my father had fallen to the floor, which today seems to me an impossibility, but I remember, I remember it well. After two hours the door opened, they both stood there crying, my father, whom I’d never seen cry, and the pale man, whose tears flowed like water from a faucet. They came out of the room, and the man moved closer to me. He didn’t have many teeth, and he shouted, Dust, you, you all are dust, and for no purpose, your father is for no purpose, your mother is for no purpose, you are for no purpose, that kind of Hebrew I do know. How does a nation of Jews become dust? Since when have Jews lived in a country of their own? There will not be a state. Jews are not the Jewish National Fund and not Ben-Gurion. Herzl understood that and so he died outside of Eretz Yisrael, what was he looking for in a country of Jews? He despised Jews like us. And your father, where was he born? He was born in Tarnopol in Galicia, an Austrian only because Emperor Franz Josef’s bastards reached there. And he fought for them and became an officer and wanted to join forces with the German army. And you, who are you? A kind of Arab who doesn’t know what a Jewish language is, and you’ll kiss the tuchess of the Germans here, who this time are dressed up as Arabs, and you’ll bring here all the bones of the Jews to be buried, and you’ll be a cemetery for the dust of dead Jews. You know, mein kind, what kind of a man your grandfather was, and your father doesn’t want me. He’s ashamed of a man like me, but he’s good with Germans. Them he likes. He left us to die in Tarnopol. He dressed up as a German and kissed the tuchess of Germans in Nazi bars in Berlin and played there, and not with me. With me he didn’t play. I’m too Jewish. I, as you say, am of the Diaspora. And then he smiled sweetly and kissed my father on the lips, and my father kissed him back, and all at once he drew away from my father and continued weeping quietly, straightened his cap, and before he left he looked toward my father’s room with all his German books, and said, Your son will die young but he looks the way his handsome grandfather did.

The man skipped quickly down the stairs and my father watched him go. I was mesmerized by that man. He was the fallen statue of a dead king. He was a dead man walking. He was a crumbling ancient palace. My father went back into his room right away and I heard him playing the Monteverdi opera he loved on his gramophone. I thought about the man for many days and my father tried to ignore me. I finally asked him who the man was, and my father asked, Who? What do you mean, “who”? I asked. The man who was here, who spoke Yiddish to you, whom you kissed, and my father suddenly seemed confused, as if a cloud had entered his head. Who? There was nobody here, he said repeatedly, and looked embarrassed and went into what was then called the water closet, from where I heard choked sobbing.

I was a youth back then. A sixteen-year-old half man. I’d never seen scenes like that — the most I’d seen was Oedipus Rex directed by Tyrone Guthrie at the Habima National Theatre, while outside the Lehi* people and the British were firing at each other and something was blown up not far away — and I longed for an innocence that was gradually leaking from me, as it was from everybody. The streets began filling up with wretched creatures that resembled the man who’d visited my father, dressed as beggar princes. The city was filled with broken people.

I started seeking them out, searching for the man I thought was my father’s cousin. They crowded together and spoke in whispers and bought and sold, and one carried a bundle and shouted, Thermometer, thermometer going cheap, and he was told, Who needs a thermometer, and he’d say, Buy it so you won’t need it. I thought, Who is the man who came to our house? I wanted to carry him to the Land of Israel again, to be a hero for his people. I was filled with the awful feeling that I, not he, was human dust. I was to blame because I’d eaten sour cream in the war when I traveled to Gedera, while they died. I remember the teacher Zvi Katan once saying angrily that when his family was murdered in the ghetto, the economy here in Palestine was the best. There was food. There was money. Everybody did business with the British.

Then I came across a man who cleaved to me. He said in the old Hebrew of translations from many years ago, with its gendarme and posta and piaster, that I looked familiar and that I’d been with him in the DP camp near Frankfurt, and I said I hadn’t. He said that he remembered my eyes well and couldn’t forget because I and his son who had died in that damned place were like two peas in a pod, and how dare I not know him, and that his son was dead? How, when I am he? I told him that it’s not me. I’m just a shitty Palestinian native, a sabra, a good family, my father’s a museum director, when the Jews died he was holding chamber concerts and they played all his Germans: Bach. Beethoven. Quartets. Sonatas. And the man came close to me and embraced me and shouted, Don’t forget your father, mein kind, and suddenly he straightened up and started running, and then, I swear to my loyal readers who have come this far, he flew, or that’s how I recall it, and hovered over the Mugrabi Cinema and touched the roof that started to move and open, and the fat German who sold hot dogs in the square below, who in the meantime has been murdered, shouted, Tell me, who is better, Goethe or Shakespeare, and when I said Goethe’s better, he gave me a hot dog and I fled in great shame.

I went to the dunes. I wanted to touch them against the fat German who sold hot dogs in Mugrabi Square with his and my father’s Goethe. I wanted to be me, for the sabras, for the Land of Israel citrons we were, for the sweet and prickly sabras that we were created to be, against the ugly and mistaken Diaspora Jews, and against them I wanted sabras, soda pop, and the howling of jackals, and I thought about someone who’d said back then that we’d begged them to come here to save themselves, there was a pro-Jewish high commissioner, and the Germans wanted them out of Europe because they stank and were a wretched race, and there was an office for Jewish immigration in Vienna, with an expert on Jews called Eichmann, and it was possible but they didn’t want to. And when I first heard about the camps I said, That’s good, they’ll learn for the next time, and then got frightened by what I’d said and I cried.

Like most of us I was a fool and thought that perhaps I don’t know much about my father. How is it that he hasn’t got any family here, except for a sister and one cousin in Safed who runs a small hotel on the mountainside, and there were lots of uncles and aunts and cousins. I went to see his friend Ernst who lived on Yoash Street, where I sat facing one of my father’s bosom friends, and told him about the man who was my father. I knew that Ernst’s wife, Lili, the gentlest of women, Lili, had been my father’s love and he had been hers, and everybody knew that she was the only woman he’d ever loved. I don’t know how I knew that when I was sixteen, but I did. Ernst was married to Lili because of the inferiority complex of my father, Moshe the Ostjude*, who due to his terrible need to respect only failure and out of his love for failed heroes, out of his failure to play the violin like Huberman and out of his demand of himself to be only great and out of the knowledge that he isn’t really great and can’t be and because of his feeling, like so many others, that he isn’t as distinguished as Ernst, who was born rich in Berlin, thought he wasn’t good enough for Lili, who loved him so much — that sweet putz, my father, gave his only love Lili to his beloved friend Ernst.

Ernst told me what my father, Moshe, had never told me. That he had all these relatives in Tarnopol, and that most of them lived on Baron Hirsch Street, until all of them, sixty men and women, were taken on the same day to a nearby forest and forced to dig a pit, and when they’d finished digging they were driven into it by shooting and were shot again and again in the pit and buried there one on top of the other, and they say that one, the son of Uncle Menashe, survived and came to Palestine via Syria, and the man I’d seen was perhaps that cousin. I felt sadness and shame that my father hadn’t invited the man to live with us and didn’t want to know where he would live. Ernst said that the man was angry with my father for not staying there. For betraying them and not being in the piles of bodies with them.

A little later I heard from a friend of my mother’s, Ze’ev Shiffman, that the man had started work at the refineries in Haifa, and after a time when the riots began, we heard he’d been killed in an Arab attack on the refineries, and my father said drily, That man you asked about was murdered. He was saved when his family died over there in order to die here in the Land of Israel.

On the floor below us lived our neighbor Mrs. Kramsky. A few days earlier she had an elderly lady visitor whom I met in the hallway, and when I asked her if she’d like me to switch on the hall lights upstairs, she seemed confused and said, I don’t understand Hebrew, and she asked, Why? I said, Just because. She said, What’s just because, is just because against why? I said, Why’s the opposite of just because. She said, I don’t understand anything here. Our neighbor Mrs. Kramsky liked me, and once I even drew her late husband for her using an old photograph hanging on her wall. I told her that I wanted to know about her elderly visitor. I told her I’d seen a man who thought I was somebody else, that someone had come to see my father, that perhaps he really was a cousin, and that my father had said he wasn’t, and I want to know.

Mrs. Kramsky smiled. You’re a sabra and you want to know? Very much, I told her. She called to the old lady. The old lady looked at me and asked, Why just because? and smiled toothlessly. Mrs. Kramsky said something to her in Polish and the old lady moved closer to me, touched my face gently, and laughed. It was cold in the room. The old lady sat bent at the window and above her a sudden shaft of sunlight distorted her appearance. Mrs. Kramsky said that the old lady wouldn’t want to talk to me, but she told me herself at great length how the old lady had escaped and how she was in the hands of a man and how she’d pushed wheelbarrows in the snow barefoot, and how they’d wanted to put her to death but they needed her because she knew how to calculate. Her eyes closed, the old lady listened to her history as it was related to me and she began declaiming numbers in German. I knew some German, and she added and subtracted big numbers and said, Ja, ja, Gottenyu gayt schlafen—our God went to sleep — and SS tore off my ear. How whole family killed. How whole town killed. And then she said to Mrs. Kramsky that I wouldn’t understand what she was talking about, and Mrs. Kramsky told her that I would understand, and we sat there until my father came downstairs in his slippers, which back then were called pantofles, and he knocked on the door and said angrily, Don’t talk his ears off with who suffered more.

Here’s another pearl of memory. Was my father really there? Does this story say anything? Is it even important? I’ve written it fifty times since I was a deckhand aboard the Pan York in 1949, when we brought refugees from Europe, when we searched for them in all kinds of holes in Italy and Yugoslavia, and when they came begging us to let them board and there was no more room and they shinnied up the hawsers to board the sardine can that was the Pan York.

One morning I was working on deck scraping off rust and the sea was rough. I saw a group of immigrants coming up from the depths of the ship’s underworld to eat and wait in line for the toilet. They stood in line for hours, and the ship was lurching, and I saw a woman who took out a little toy mirror, which she’d evidently bought from a haberdasher in the ship’s belly because they bought and sold even when they were packed in like sardines, and she tilted her head back, shook out her hair, and curled it with one finger and smiled at herself in the tiny mirror and looked happy.

In Tel Aviv, at night, I lay helpless. I had this talent of thinking about something until I actually entered it. I didn’t really know what I was forbidden to know. I imagined that my father had fallen off a roof, and I felt the break and the pain and I felt death. It was hard for me and I thought that the Jews, well, it was impossible that they shouldn’t have a home. The interim year had been 1945, the connecting year, the middle year between the destruction and what seemed then to be our great strike in the battles against Jewish destiny. Two years had passed since the war in Europe ended and hopes were high. I didn’t really know what the hopes aspired to, but we felt it was good that they were there.

Four

At Hanukkah in 1946, the last one before the war broke out, the winter was harsh. Hail in abundance, strong winds, snow piled up in Jerusalem and Hebron, and we climbed Masada*, where Jewish rebels had taken their own lives rather than surrender to the Roman Empire, to touch the Holocaust that had become real for us. In the past, during the Jews’ harsh years, we’d known a little about it, but we were mainly preoccupied with the struggle between the left-wing Achdut Ha’avodah and Mapai political parties, and didn’t understand what we read in the papers.

We climbed the winding, potholed path to Masada, but we couldn’t see a thing because darkness was upon the face of God’s deep, and we reached the summit. The mountain was terrifying, broken, forsaken, orphaned, and wounded, and on top it was flat and barren. A black sky lay on top of us with its multitude of stars. We shivered with cold and excitedly stood to attention. The Dead Sea shone in a pure light that did not come from the sun because it had not yet risen. We placed a stone on which we scratched “If I Forget Thee, O Diaspora” and said something about how the Germans had exterminated the Jews. We hadn’t heard any details, I was to meet my father’s cousin only later, and we knew very little about the concentration and death camps. A guy from the Palmach who accompanied us pulled out his pistol and fired one shot into the air, and it sliced into the silence, and it was moving to see a Jewish pistol round fired at the enemies of Israel.

I left my friends, who lay down deadbeat and fell asleep in the middle of the biting cold of the desert, and walked away slowly. The blackout enforced in the country throughout the war had now been lifted, and intoxicated I looked at the beautiful lights flickering from afar: Hebron, Bethlehem, Beit Jallah especially, but Jerusalem too. That colorful scene in the middle of the night moved me; one of my friends, I don’t remember who, came looking for me, and found me — a schmuck standing on the cliff edge. I pointed at the lights and told him that it looked like the Christmas I’d seen at the Migdalor Cinema in the film It’s a Wonderful Life, with James Stewart, who out of the goodness of his heart sacrificed himself for his family, and he was in despair, grieving for his lost and wasted life and he came to a bridge over a frozen river to leap to his death. At that moment appears Clarence, a chubby angel sent to help him and who’s working on earning his wings and has to do a good deed to win them. Clarence jumps into the river and shouts for help, and Stewart, who hears him, jumps into the freezing water and rescues him, and the angel screens a flashback of Stewart’s life, and Stewart sees how he changed the lives of so many people and how much goodness he showered on them and how selfless he was, and he takes back what he’d said, that it would have been better if he hadn’t been born, and he comes back to reality, and all the people he helped in his life come to his house with presents, and all this happens on Christmas Eve, with the tree, the lights shining from it, the tiny fairy lights on its branches, and a great light shines as the bell on the Christmas tree tinkles, and Stewart’s daughter says that when the ringing is heard, it means that an angel has earned his wings.

My friend was amazed by the story, which in his view was so alien to the Jewish Masada, the mistaken choice of death, which is innocent of any tree or sound. You’re crazy, Yoram, he yelled. What’s Masada and Jewish heroism got to do with a shitty film at the Migdalor? And I said to him, Perhaps there is a connection but only in my twisted mind. Masada lay deep inside me, troubling me, I was obsessively preoccupied with the glory of death and liberty, and also with the genocide, in that a people like that had punished itself with genocide. My mother had been among the first of this country’s sons and daughters who had climbed Masada, Masada that the Jews hadn’t liked mentioning, for they had idolized Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai who fled and came down from the wall in a coffin, and who made sure it stank of excrement so that the Romans wouldn’t open it, and had asked the Romans to let him build a yeshiva in Yavneh and didn’t say that it was to save Judaism, and the Romans thought he was betraying his brethren. Afterward the great slaughter of the Jews took place, and the mass suicide so loathsome and abhorrent to the Jewish sages, and only the traitorous Flavius Josephus who wrote the history of the Jews perpetuated it.

But the Jewish-Arab struggle created a need for heroes. The people in Eretz Yisrael espoused the Masada rebels, who preferred death to slavery. Standing on that cliff facing the darkness illumining itself on the desert became a mystical experience for entire generations of Israelis.

I stood and thought that today’s Hanukkah and the long days had started to come to an end and the world is kindling lights and I heard a rock falling into the chasm and I felt I was falling, but luckily my friend grabbed me and pulled me back, and I said to him that if I’d taken one more small step I’d have become a Roman stone at the foot of the mountain.

Then I looked again at the beautiful infinite lights of the Arab towns and I said that if you stand on the edge of the abyss, as the songs back then termed our national situation, you’re like the Jews seeing Paradise beyond the end. And then a guy called Nehemiah came running and called us to help his Palmachnik friend who had been wounded by a stray bullet fired from the pistol hidden in his pants pocket because he fancied a girl he shouldn’t have. And one of the youth leaders ran ten kilometers to Kibbutz Beit Ha’arava to bring a dressing, and we sat there pressing on the shot guy’s arm so he wouldn’t lose any more blood, and only some five hours later the youth leader and a medic got back to us. We went down to the Dead Sea and saw a platoon of British soldiers there, it wasn’t easy getting down, we walked south beyond the spit and reached the Jordanian side, and the mountains loomed over us and we swam beneath them, lying on our back with our satchels sprouting from our belly like fat flowers, for we couldn’t sink but were burned by the salt water. Above us the mountains of Moab were spread proudly, and jagged projections of dark rock in the darkness of the hill, and there was a bat, and an eagle traversed the sky, and we laughed, we couldn’t believe that we really could lie on the water without sinking. A girl swam at my side, I don’t remember who she was, she reached out and touched me, and it was very unusual for a girl to touch you. I looked at the mountains, and light of sunrise began to emerge from behind them, and the desert shadowed it all into a bed of beauty, which for some reason seemed to me to be sad and perhaps even superfluous here, in the light moving over this darkness, and I held her hand in mine, I looked at her, she didn’t look at me but I felt the warmth crawling into me and I was hot. You see, I didn’t really understand the meaning of that terrible expression “the edge of the abyss,” coined by the poet Alterman, which if you’re standing on it you can see Paradise but also the opposite.

We went back to Tel Aviv and went home and my mother cried because she’d heard that I’d almost fallen off Masada. I was a bit in love with the girl who gave me her hand but by the time I realized I loved her, she’d fallen in love with somebody else. In Tel Aviv we’d swim in the sea, practice unarmed combat by the Yarkon River, hit one another in Hadassah Garden, and swim in the round pool, and we’d dance the hora and the krakowiak and talk about free immigration and the struggle against the British and agricultural training and self-realization, and we had heart-to-heart talks about Jewish destiny that we were supposed to resist and rebel against, as our poor teacher Gedalyahu Ben-Horin told us, who wanted to rebel against Perfidious Albion himself. We wanted to rebel without really understanding what exactly we were rebelling against. We read Plekhanov’s On the Role of the Individual in History. We argued about whether history creates leaders or vice versa. We read Turgenev’s Rudin and held a big trial in which I defended nihilism as opposed to the liberal dreams and trends of Turgenev’s time. Perhaps I won although I think I was actually soundly defeated, for who wanted a nihilistic revolution back then instead of a secular Hebrew kingdom, or more precisely, a socialist-Zionist revolution.

We sang “Katz’s Dad / Katz’s Mom / Yama yama shorba” and “She’s got a screw-on leg and her head’s about to fall / And at night she hangs her head right there up on the wall.” Everybody loved coming to my house and standing on our balcony and watching Miss Gross shaving on the adjacent balcony and peering over the sea through her binoculars to see Berlin. She’d smile and say, It’s all right for you, you’re sabras, and we told her that we haven’t got prickles, and she’d laugh and say, But I have, and we could see them growing on her cheeks. And we read Panfilov’s Men over and over, which became our Bible, and Memories of the House of David, about the travails of exile and the wonders of the Jews in Spain, and I recited Ibn Ezra, which made girls like me: “I am a prisoner and with me is a man / He will not break away, he will not depart / Without a sword, he is the death of me / Without plague, he will cause my death / What am I to do? A Sisera has come / But there is no Jael of the House of Heber / Hurry and come to my defense / As did Abraham to Shemever.”

Five

One fine day in October 1947 the sea was as smooth as silk and a few of us went to the American Bar in Herbert Samuel Square to have a special sundae. Suddenly we were fired on from the Hassan Bek Mosque in Jaffa. The people in the American Bar seemed scared and wanted to see where the shots were coming from, and my friends apparently took off and I remained standing by what is today the Opera building, and shots were heard again and I saw a window shatter and at the same time saw a man running from the direction of the Manshiye neighborhood. A Jewish policeman who saw the frightened man yelled, That’s the Araboosh who fired. Then he ran to take cover in the doorway of my uncle Henio’s photography shop, who for twenty years had been photographing idiots who wanted to look handsome against a backdrop of paper jungles he’d hang behind them, but who for his soul had for twenty years photographed the sunsets on the same beach and at the same hour and not one of those photographs was preserved.

The Arab stood nailed to the spot and was caught by a huge, wild-haired woman who threw away an almost full ice-cream cone so she’d be able to move freely and she spat at him and yelled in Romanian that he’d never again shoot from Hassan Bek. She repeated her shouts in German so he’d understand her better. He pleaded and cried and said in Hebrew that it wasn’t him who’d fired and he was there by mistake, and I believed him, he looked wretched, confused, and miserable, but they didn’t want to believe him. They had a real enemy in their hands. Other people came too, they threw their ice creams onto the sidewalk and began hitting the Arab and stomping on him. He was wailing and they were hitting him for everything he’d done to them in the Diaspora, and I tried to lie on top of him to shield him and I felt how he was trembling and quivering and blood was oozing from his nose and I was hit and cursed, by the Jewish policeman too, who had emerged from his hiding place and come over. He shoved me and yelled at me to leave the fucking Arab alone because he’d come to kill me and they’d been born to kill us, and I told him that I hadn’t seen that he was coming to kill me, and the policeman slapped me and yelled, What, didn’t you see the people who fell dead here? What kind of a schmuck are you? They went on hitting him and laughed at me for kissing the Araboosh’s ass but I didn’t give up. The Arab’s breathing rasped and for the first time in my life I saw how somebody died. I saw how the Arab’s life came out of his mouth and from his eyes that were opaque, eyes that no longer saw a thing and protruded, and how he finished wheezing and died.

I went home. I was drenched with the blood of the first dead man I’d seen, a poor Arab, wretched but also valiant. I later killed quite a few Arabs and saw blood in war, but he was the first dead man and he was killed for nothing. They probably thought they’d smitten Amalek. You could have filled the Sea of Galilee with that Arab’s blood. I went home hurt. My mother, Sarah, took care of me and consoled me, and my father, Moshe, said, It’s savage here, that’s how it is in Palestine. I went out onto the balcony. A ship moved slowly toward Tel Aviv Port. From the area below wafted the smell of a bonfire. The image of my father’s cousin mingled with the dead Arab and pain welled inside me, and more than pain, sorrow. I became fertile soil for the preaching of Aviva from my class, who influenced me to leave the Hamachanot Ha’olim* youth movement and join Hashomer Hatzair* because of the idea of a binational state it espoused and to prevent what I’d told her about the dead Arab.

One time on our way home from Tichon Hadash, which was on Hayarkon Street, we met a friend who liked Aviva and tried to gain her affections through me. He was a tall boy called Nahum. There was something deep-rooted about him that I never possessed, something connected with the soil, he wasn’t arrogant and didn’t shout and didn’t make political statements and hated sentimentality, but while we were all in high school he worked in the port to support his family.

One day he asked me to go the port. Everything was locked. Barbed wire. Lights off in daytime. British soldiers on guard. Machine guns aimed in every direction. He got a pass for me and I was meticulously checked by a short, stocky British policeman and with Nahum I boarded one of the tugs that brought the barges laden with cargo and passengers from the ships to the jetty and back. It was the first time in my life I’d traveled abroad. There was a foreign smell. We climbed the gangway to the deck of a cargo ship. There was an unfamiliar atmosphere there. Smells I didn’t understand. People were wearing strange hats and moved back and forth, some looked dark and wore heavy coats. There was a mist and the sounds of foreign languages were heard. A youngish man, perhaps French, offered me a packet of Craven A and in a fraction of a second lit the cigarette I’d taken with one hand, and put the long match between his lips to extinguish it. He smiled and said in English, which I barely spoke, It’s good for you, that’s what he said. I stood there; perhaps for the first time in my life I was feeling a sense of freedom. The sea was there but it was a different sea. Infinite on its three sides, and on the fourth side my home, shrouded in mist and invisible. It was a whole sea, with no borders, without distance, without deck chairs, without beach paddles, without popsicles, without lifeguards’ surfboards, and without soda pop. I smelled it. I knew the smell from our balcony but from this sea came a kind of fragrance of power, of anything goes. Afterward I told my father, I was in your abroad, and he laughed but beyond the laugh he understood me and said, It’s terrible that they won’t allow Jews to come, but it will be all right. It was strange to hear from someone that it will be all right and from my father, Moshe, yet. Up to that moment my whole life had moved between it will be bad and it will get worse.

On the deck among the sailors and the stevedores I yearned for some distant place where it would be good and in which I’d never been. I remembered how, in 1938, in third grade, we’d written letters to Germany: “Dear Jewish child, Yoram Kaniuk is writing to you from the Ledugma School in Tel Aviv. Flee quickly and come to Eretz Yisrael, because if you do not, you will surely die.” I didn’t write just “you will die” but “you will surely die,” so that the German child would know the difference between “you will die” and “you will surely die.” All the letters were collected in mailbags and sent to Germany and Austria. We’d stand in the new Tel Aviv Port in the midst of the gnats, the flies, with the stevedores from Saloniki cursing and shouting, and the pallid German and Austrian immigrants, to whose children we’d perhaps written that they would surely die if they didn’t come, timidly descended the gangway from the ship to the barges, carefully because the barges rose and fell. Thus they reached the jetty, men mummified in suits, women with fox furs around their neck, and frightened by the burning sun, and I also saw skiing equipment. They perspired on the boats, and we in short pants and white shirts, stood and sang “The ships sail to distant shores / A thousand hands unload and build / We conquer the wave and shore / We are building a port,” and then we’d recite “Hoo hee, what do I see? / A ship with a funnel come from the sea / Where have you come from, my fair ship and what have you brought? / I’ve come from afar / Where Jews wait to sail / With staff and satchel to Eretz Yisrael!”

They probably thought that a troupe of pygmy circus clowns was visiting from darkest Africa. They saw us in our short pants, our ridiculous tembel hats, our rough sandals from the Carmel Market, screaming, and they evidently thought: Asiatics — Barbarians! And they regarded us with contempt because they’d come from Europe, which was no longer theirs but they didn’t know it. They came from my father’s culture, they were steeped in Cimarosa and Cimabue, and I thought about that Europe which had already started to expel them, and about them, who only a week before they arrived in Tel Aviv had probably reached Trieste or some other port and sailed under not the pleasantest of conditions and been hit by the Eretz — Yisraeli disaster that for us was the entire world.

A tired teacher feeling the pain of the nation’s fate — as the teacher Blich described himself— led us to stand and wait for the Jews. And when we saw them coming, right away we shouted, How good it is that they’ve come to Eretz Yisrael, and that was when on Fridays we’d put on shows about the ghetto and stick on beards of painted straw and put Plasticine on our noses so we’d look Jewish, like the ones who sell salt herring and blow their nose like a trumpet and speak Yiddish. Only a few of us knew Yiddish, and most of those in whose homes Yiddish was spoken pretended they didn’t understand it. After all, we are the sons of pioneers, Hebrew labor, Jew Speak Hebrew, and we’ll go to kibbutzim, we’ll be Sheikh Abrek*, we’ll conquer the wilderness, we’ll build and be built in our land. We shall smite our enemies. We’ll drive out the British. We’ll be heroes. We declaimed Brenner’s words, “Blessed is he who dies in such awareness — with Tel-Hai* before his eyes.” Just so we’re not bowed from fear and ugly like the Jews — that’s what we said, stupid kids that we were.

So what are Jews? The ones who came in 1938 when we stood facing them at the port and shouted our welcome? The ones who didn’t heed us? Those were the days when we emotionally declaimed Avigdor Hameiri’s poem: “On paper white as snow / A letter comes from the Diaspora / A weeping mother writes: To my good son in Jerusalem, / Your father is dead, your mother sick … / Come home, my lovely son …” And the reply: “On plain paper, gray as dust / A letter goes to the Diaspora / A pioneer writes with teary eye, Jerusalem, 1928 / Forgive me, my sick mother / I shall not return to the Diaspora! / If you love me / You come here and embrace me / And no longer shall I be a wanderer! / I shall never budge from here …”

In 1939 High Commissioner Wauchope had already been forced out, and the British halted immigration, and the Arabs won in their riots against Jewish immigration, so that Jewish refugees were unable to come, but they tried to come and the majority drowned on the way, and only a few succeeded.

Six

At the height of the war I came back from a talk with my commanding officer at Kiryat Anavim and went to sleep. Before that I’d had some dry bread with mallow. The loaf was wrapped in vine leaves, and somebody said I winced because I was wounded, but perhaps I was just thirsty. Someone woke me up and told me to go up to the Castel*, the old Roman town, with a few guys. He said there’d been some hard fighting that night and we’d taken the, but the guys who’d taken it were tired and needed to be relieved. We went up the mountain and saw them coming down. They were shuffling along like a funeral cortege. Rocking from side to side. One guy who knew me came over and said, Listen, don’t go up there, it’s a shithole of a place. I said that I had to go up. He held a kind of gauze pad with ointment on it against a wound on his arm and said with a smile, You know why it’s called gaza gauze? Because it’s from Gaza. I asked him if it was because they’d found gauze in Gaza one day, and he patted my cheek, laughed, and said, In Roman times or later, I don’t remember exactly when, I was a kid, the best cotton wool in the country came from Gaza and they built a gauze factory there.

The officer kicked him so he’d move on, and we shouted Ahalan—hi there — which was the opposite of what we should have said, and we marched on upward to the big building at the summit. My section commander, Kushi (“Blackie”—to this day I don’t know what his real name was), went up by a different route and was waiting for us when we got there. He said, We’ve got to defend the summit, and if we see anything move then raise the alarm, and if necessary, open fire, and also, we’ve got to keep an eye on the Jerusalem soldiers because they haven’t yet been under fire and maybe they’ll take off. We came to a fine stone building in the shade of thickly leaved trees and sat down. Two guys played cards. I looked at the view. There were those beautiful birds that wove arabesques in the sky. You could hear them twittering. To this day, in the mist of forgetfulness, I can hear them.

We didn’t see anything suspicious facing us and suddenly my friend Ari-nom-de-plume appeared and said he’d found hashish in the village below and put it in a sack and he was going down to Kiryat Anavim in the evening, and he’d take the sack, and come back, and I shouldn’t snitch on him because he’d make a lot of money from the hashish. Kushi saw him and knew how brave he was and ordered him to go down quickly and take a message to headquarters, and he wanted to be angry with him, but at that moment two of the Jerusalmites panicked and yelled that they wanted to go home, and he and I talked to them. They begged us to let them get out of there. I told them it was impossible. After a short period of sobbing they changed their minds, calmed down, and I fell asleep. After a quick nap I ate a little bread we’d found in the village and some delicious crushed olives and some carob pods from which we brewed tea. Just before morning Ari-nom-de-plume came back glowing and said that on the way to Kiryat Anavim he’d met some non-enlisted Jerusalemite on the fucking road and immediately realized that he was looking for bargains because he knew these types, and when the man heard he had some hashish he took out some money and gave it to him and ran down the hill to Pension Fefferman. Ari-nom-de-plume wanted to give me a few pounds in friendship, but I said that here in the war you’re either dead or crazy, and a lunatic doesn’t need money.

Suddenly we heard a shout, Fire! And a moment later, Ow! Somebody yelled, I’ve taken two bullets. He really had, we checked him out, one had hit him a millimeter from his right ear, and the second about a millimeter from the left one, but he was only scratched. We laughed, and then miraculously I took a bullet near my eye, it hurt a lot, burned, the round had apparently entered the pouch of skin that holds the eye, and the eye came loose and I held it in my hand, and since the bullet was perhaps almost spent it only scratched me, and the eye I was holding remained whole and I put it back into its socket, and a medic bandaged me.

The firing became more frequent and we said that the guy with two scratches by his ears would now hear better, and that I’d see better, and then we heard a roar. Then we heard something like a crawling sea, and emerging slowly from the roaring all hell broke loose. A human mass like locusts denuding the land climbed rapidly toward us. The black-and-red kaffiyehs stormed upward, skipping over the rocks. There were hundreds that jumped from the southern side of the mountain. We didn’t know where this big army had sprouted from and where it had hidden, and it was scary seeing it swarm like a band of apes climbing up rocks and shooting.

For a moment Kushi was as confused as us, and Haim K. had a panic attack and ran like a madman towards a sheikh’s tomb farther down the slope by the road, and he was fired at but the shots missed him, and Kushi sent a soldier to the command post with a message, and we started firing randomly at the attackers we could hardly see. They screamed Aleihum and Allahu Akbar, and Kushi laughed, and I thought we’re not getting out of here alive. Somebody started singing “Besame Mucho” in Arabic: “El bi mahrouf”, so we realized that this was the end of us.

We were some ten tired fighters by the mukhtar’s* house that was shrouded in olive trees, and there were hundreds in the horde charging at us from all directions, and we fire back and somehow manage not to fall asleep between the shots, and I see a magnificent kaffiyeh held in place with a golden akal and beneath it a man brandishing a sword, and Moshe yells, Look at that one, a real Rudolph Valentino! And the Buck Jones in the kaffiyeh shouts in English, Hello boys, and we don’t really understand why we’re being shouted at in English, and his men are firing at us and leaping, and Moshe hits Valentino just as he realizes he’s made a mistake and draws a pistol to shoot at us, and then the shit really hit the fan. Some of us are hit, time stands still, and there’s lots of shooting.

I didn’t understand why they hadn’t taken the village. They were many. Awake. They’d probably been drinking black coffee all night. We had little ammunition left. Then after a while we heard a call on the radio: We’re coming.

While we’re firing, a group of twenty-three guys under the command of Nahum Arieli arrives. They come running right into the firing. Nahum’s deputy orders us to withdraw and shouts, Privates retreat. Commanders cover them! The rocks shouted in pain. Carob pods were shed. Figs dropped. I’ll remember Shimon Alfassi who yelled, Privates retreat. Commanders cover them, all my life. Officers, the best soldiers in the brigade, of whom it was said of each and every one that one day he’d be the president of a state or a general, came to defend the seven or eight privates who were still alive, the shitheads who were retreating on orders.

The officers commanded by Nahum Arieli stood like a human avenue on both sides of the path, between charred buildings and amid an inferno of firing, and we passed between them as if on our way to the wedding canopy. Slowly, one after the other they were hit and fell and those left standing continued to cover us and at the same time went on firing at the attackers but also to die. With one eye I can see them shielding me as they fall like dominoes and I want to fire but I’m out of ammunition.

The black horde reached the upper slopes of the mountain by the sheikh’s house, and before they finished taking the mountain and killing the officers and us, they started brutalizing the bodies. Not all of us were fully dead and they began slashing the bleeding wounded with knives, and we’re running down the hill, not stopping, trying to fire at the slaughterers but unable to, and we reach the sheikh’s tomb down below, by the road to Jerusalem, and come under fire from the direction of Qaluniyya on the other side of the road, and suddenly we see that they’ve all halted. There’s a heavy silence. They stand over the bodies they’ve abused and start wailing. They’re standing over the line of bodies and they’re yelling and swaying like drunken dancers, and instead of taking the mountain that was already under their control, they suddenly became grief-stricken, we didn’t know what had happened to them, we saw our defenders who had been stabbed with daggers, bleeding and dying, and in their great victory the Arabs took flight between the bodies.

We’d already come down from the empty mountain, we’ve no idea what to do and our eyes are teary from the firing and we’re crawling, and then we reach Kiryat Anavim, and one of the officers there looks at the papers that one of us had taken from the pocket of Valentino with the kaffiyeh and the golden akal and says, Well I’ll be damned, it’s Abdel Khader al-Husseini. That elegant man had been the legendary commander of the Arab forces in the region since the 1930s and was the mufti’s cousin. That’s why, in great anguish at the man’s death, instead of taking the mountain that was already in their hands, they went back to Jerusalem to accompany their commander to his burial in a royal funeral attended by thousands.

Perhaps that moment, when we were all about to be killed and lose the most important hill strongpoint on the road to Jerusalem, in the war that Benny Marshak called the war for the six meters of the road leading to the city, perhaps it was that moment that changed the face of the war. We realized that you don’t leave a conquered village of strategic importance, and some guys from our battalion climbed the mountain quickly and blew up a few buildings. And now only Qaluniyya village was left, that most beautiful of the Land of Israel’s villages and the most pitiless, the village that controlled the seven bends of the road, where we had lost fighters and many of the convoys’ escorts. It was then decided, without too much thought, that a platoon should be left to guard the Castel. This was the second village, after our hilarious victory at Caesarea, which was taken in the war and became ours.

Seven

Some time later I was sitting by a well in some village. Maybe Beit Zurif. I don’t remember. I drank cool water from a clay jara and ate wood sorrel and the sight of the slaughtered bodies remained inside me. I thought, What had they come for? Twenty-three of the best had come to rescue how many? Six, seven, maybe eight. Who would ever understand what had really taken place in that Valley of the Shadow of Death, and I thought — I remember how I suddenly thought, perhaps for the first or second time in that entire war — why twenty-three people had come to defend six, why twenty-three who were the very best, far better than me in establishing states, better than all my shithead friends, and who were we? Did we have a future? Those dead had a future. They could have been violinists. Artists. Scientists. Military commanders. Who of us would be somebody in the future that had been taken from them?

Twenty-three people went up that hill, each and every one a legend of a man, who had already brought us honor, who had already proved himself, led by Nahum Arieli, a striking man, who sang beautifully, and he came to protect me — the noble man came to rescue the piddling clown that I was, and I’m thinking what will happen tomorrow, the day after, they’ll talk about it as a lever, Look, they’ll say, see how the Palmach protected its own. Today I know that it was in that battle that the “follow me” legend was born, the “follow me” ethos of the Israeli army, because of which the best of the best would be killed, and is it worthwhile? Is it wise? Did someone smarter and more intelligent and older than me have to stand over me in that avenue of death, to fall, to die in front of me, to be slaughtered just so that I, who was my mother’s darling, would stay alive? What kind of a life can you live after that whole story?

Then I was able to think that without Nahum Arieli and his comrades a state would not come about, that with them the force that was supposed to fight after us had been destroyed. And now, as I write this and I am old, ailing, I think that the “follow me” ethos is wonderful and noble, but misguided. A myth should never have been created from the “follow me” on the Castel. The best are always worth more. They could have contributed what I would be unable to contribute. Nahum Arieli would have become Chief of the General Staff or Minister of Defense, and I remained with a torn-off limb, sitting in my home and writing about what I never was and who I didn’t become, and about my life in contrast with the lives of Nahum Arieli and Shimon Alfassi, the hero among men who uttered those terrible words, Privates retreat. Commanders cover them, and died. And they all died, to the last man.

I don’t know. I stayed alive. I was shot. They missed. They didn’t miss, but my life is nothing but the vanity of a weak man. What is a war without tanks, without aircraft, just a few small ramshackle Auster planes, or “Primuses” as we called them, in the sky, without weapons, without food, without water, without artillery, without a change of clothes, without anything, Jerusalem under siege, whipped, shells falling constantly, people being killed standing in line for water and kerosene. How do you explain to the young soldiers of today, who will die in other wars, with equipment and training, how do you explain the Palmach spirit to them? What the human spirit is. What a vision is. What it is to dream. What do you dream about? I don’t know. Perhaps it was all in vain.

After I got back home half dead and the country was filled with Holocaust survivors, who our nice guys referred to as “soaps” and who were a thousand times stronger than us, I realized that it had been worthwhile. But even then, how do you explain to a boy on the Pan York, a boy who at age twelve in Auschwitz had searched for diamonds in his dead parents’ rectums so he could sell them to the SS, how do you explain what happened on the Castel to him? The Castel was a nice children’s story compared with the little that this boy told me and then kept silent for sixty years.

One day, many years later, walking down Allenby Street and minding my own business, I passed what had once been the Allenby Cinema, and suddenly a silver-haired, very thin man stopped in front of me, with a little girl in his arms, his granddaughter perhaps, so pretty, delicate, frightened by the strange man I was for her in the middle of a busy street, and behind him was his wife, and he stared at me in astonishment and I’m sure I recognized him, but from where? And he said, You’re Yoram, and I said, Yes, and he said, Don’t you remember me, and burst out laughing, and I laughed with him and suddenly I recognized him, his eyes had remained inside me, deep behind all the onion skins with which we all encase ourselves. We exchanged a few words, I said something to him, he was moved, I was moved, and then there were no more words. His life and mine had not stayed the same. We had a memory from one day aboard a ship, when he was a young, scarred, and angry boy who had sold his dead parents’ diamonds to the SS, and now he’s an adult introducing me to his wife and daughter or granddaughter, I don’t remember. We remained silent for a few moments and went our separate ways because we didn’t have anything to say to each other, the memories exchanged glances and sentences, but we didn’t have the words to talk about them.

Eight

In 1946, when I was still at the Tichon Hadash High School, I went to Frishman Beach between mathematics and history lessons to think by the sea, which always lubricated the cogs of my brain. All that time, deeply imprinted in me was the sight of the man who came to see my father, with his downtrodden-clown expression, and the blood and final breaths of the Arab who pleaded for his life, and whose soul I’d actually seen departing, and I thought that perhaps in the right clothes I’d look like him.

I sat there smoking, an exhilarating breeze was blowing and clean deep air entered me. From the Keite Dan Hotel a tall, charming lady emerged wearing a silk dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat, and smiled at me. I smiled back. She said she knows my uncle Yosef, the handsomest man in the country, and said that I should be cautious of beauty, beauty is something fatal, people are frightened of beauty, they want to take revenge on it. She was very beautiful, a long noble face like in a Botticelli painting. I took a Players from the packet of ten I’d bought earlier at a kiosk on Ben-Yehuda Street, and the woman, who smelled of face powder and a pleasing eau de cologne, bent down to me — I came up to her bosom — lit my cigarette with a gold-plated lighter, looked at me, and said, You really are a lovely boy just as your uncle Yosef was, you’ve got thick hair, and take care. And then a black taxi pulled up whose green number plate bore three digits, 333—I liked the fact that it was 333—and with a floating pirouette the thin and magnificent giantess got into the taxi and disappeared forever. I carried on smoking, facing the waves on Frishman Beach, and thought in the second person. Yoram, what exactly are you doing here? What blood is lying there dead with my father, and both must be avenged?

In July the illegal immigrant ship Exodus sailed along the coast and on the Haganah* radio we heard the commander speak, and the country was abuzz with rumors. The ship’s passengers were deported back to Germany, and then United Nations delegates called for the establishment of two states in Palestine, and the land rejoiced and was happy. The trees rejoiced. The electric poles rejoiced. The tin baths on the roof rejoiced. And when November came everyone stood outdoors or crowded around those who owned a radio and laughed, happier than they’d ever been or would ever be again, and they counted the votes from the United Nations anxiously, excitedly, aggressively, pleadingly, believingly. Through the open windows, in the cafés, the cobblers’ shops, the bakeries — everyone was shouting the count as if it were a prayer. Thousands of people chanted together, One, two, three, four … and then came the trumpet blast. Two thousand years of exile and fear and humiliation had come to an end. We danced in the streets. On the corner of Dizengoff and Frishman there was a vacant lot facing the area on which the Cameri Theatre would later be built, and people brought wood for a bonfire and the café owners brought drinks and we danced all night long, and first thing the next morning the war broke out.

Shooting at intercity transport began. There were already dead and wounded. The Palmach reserve units were recalled to service, and one morning on the corner of Ruppin Street and Keren Hakayemet Boulevard I overheard a conversation between two older guys. One of them said, I told my father this morning that I’d gone back to the Palmach, and he said that when you want to piss, your belly wants to, your eyes want to, your hands want to, but in the end what pisses is the putz.

I got out of there and that night went to see Tony, my school principal, whose life partner, Gustav, was a big expert on Fichte and Schelling, but here he swept Dizengoff Street with a big broom, and Tony would run after him with sandwiches so he’d eat, and in the meantime he taught me philosophy. Tony saw me coming, but her attention was fixed on Gustav and she got up onto the sidewalk and stood facing him, and she came up to his belt that was held in place by a nail he’d found in the road, and the chicken mayonnaise sandwich flew from her hand, and a dog barked, and she called Gustav liebchen, and that gentle giant bent and kissed her, and how much beauty there was in that kiss. And suddenly the image of the man who came to see my father came back to me. What was it in the man’s eyes then? Contempt or envy? Afterward they’d shouted in German. I was tired. I fell asleep walking and was unable to speak. Tony walked me to the corner of Keren Hakayemet and said, Go and sleep now, come back tomorrow only at nine, sleep, little one.

I returned the next day to Tony the principal, the most wonderful woman I’d ever met, she was standing facing the sea by a thick-branched tree in the yard of the school she had founded, and I told her I was joining the Palyam. She was angry and asked me to wait. She said I should wait until I had a matriculation certificate. I explained something. She was sad. I could see that she understood me, but still she didn’t agree.

Yochanan Krasner’s father, who was an important functionary in the Haganah and rode a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, told me that if I really wanted to enlist, I should go secretly to a small button shop on Dizengoff Street near Nordau Boulevard. I went there and said that the man with the Harley-Davidson had sent me, and the man in the shop said that he knows a man like that, his son’s called Yaki, and he knows him well, and I told him that his son’s name is Yochanan, and then his manner softened and he sent me to Ben-Yehuda Street near Vilna Street, to a shop that also sold buttons, and there a redheaded young man told me to come back the next day. I went back. He said, Listen kid, in the building you live in, there’s an office on the third floor. I was surprised. There were two apartments there — one belonged to Mrs. Kramsky and the other to Oded Nachmani, who worked in the Histadrut*.

I walked down the stairs from my parents’ apartment and knocked on the door. A guy opened it and asked for the password, I said, You know me, I live upstairs, and he slammed the door. I knocked again, he opened the door, and I asked, Does the man from the Histadrut live here? The guy said, Who’s asking, and I said, I think the password’s “buttons.” He asked, What buttons? I said, Round ones, and he said, Go to Nachalat Binyamin Street, next to Schwarz’s fabric shop, and ring twice, somebody will shout something and you sing the song “You have to ring twice, you have to wait a moment,” and do whatever the person who opens the door tells you.

That was the song they sang when the city filled up with new immigrants and they had to be housed in small apartments and there weren’t any telephones, and whoever wanted to see the new neighbor would ring twice. I sang “You have to ring twice,” and a short girl appeared who looked every which way before leading me into a dark hallway and putting a pillowcase over my head. We walked a short distance, climbed two floors, came down again and went up again in order to hoodwink the enemy, and the whole time she remained silent. I tried to speak, but she put her hand over my mouth through the pillowcase and stopped me, and I was finally led into an apartment. The pillowcase was removed and in the darkness I could see a few young men talking in whispers. One asked me, Who is “The spoil speedeth, the prey hasteth,’ and what is “A damsel, two damsels to every man,” and where is it taken from, and what does the acronym “Palmach” mean? They wanted to make sure I wasn’t an enemy. After I’d given them the correct answers, and they were particularly surprised that I knew that “The spoil speedeth, the prey hasteth” meant the Prophet Isaiah’s son, they asked why I’d come. I lied and said that my parents were Revisionists*, and I also lied by telling them I was eighteen. They were pleased that a youngster from the other side of the political map wanted to enlist, and after a few more questions, with the room still darkened, they swore me in on the flag, the Bible, and a pistol. They gave me a brown round tin used for Atara coffee, and told me it contained a Mills bomb and I had to take a No. 7 bus from the central station on Geula Street, take the box as far as the seminar, and come back. I was scared by anyone who looked like a British detective. When I got back a man opened the tin and showed me that all it contained was an iron shot used by the Hapoel Tel Aviv athletes, and explained that it had been an exercise in courage. He told me to be at the central bus station in two days at eight in the morning.

I left a goodbye letter for my parents. At the station, not far from the main ticket office, stood a young man who’d apparently been soaked by the rain. He was holding a damp Davar newspaper, and his head was buried in it. I had to pass him three times at a slow walk and then approach him and ask him which bus goes to Netanya. I walked by him three times, counting my steps, I was excited, I halted, he gave me a squinty glance and pretended not to see me. I asked him if by any chance he knew which bus goes to Netanya. He lowered his paper and glanced at me and said, Young man, I’m not the information desk. I regained my senses and said, To work. To defense. To the kibbutz. To agricultural training. His expression changed and he looked behind him and to the sides, and said as if talking to someone else, We should go up. I answered, For we are well able to overcome it. He added, The usurper of the teacher’s prerogative, and I answered, Deserves to be bitten by a snake. He softened and became almost friendly and asked my name, and I told him. He turned around, took a sheet of paper from his pocket, studied it, and said, Don’t be sorry, I read a poem you sent to the editor Shlonsky, a great poet you won’t be, try something else.

Then he said, Listen, you make out like you’re going to Haifa with a ticket I’ll give you but you’re only going as far as Hadera. You get off and walk around by the toilets, and try to look like you’re from Hadera and don’t draw attention to yourself. Walk quietly toward the sea. I asked him how you don’t draw attention to yourself and how you look like you’re from Hadera. He folded up his newspaper and walked slowly back and forth, screwed up his eyes, as if he were facing the sun, and tried to draw his head into his hunched shoulders. People looked at him dumbfounded. Fortunately he didn’t see them and said, That’s how you walk. From Hadera you walk west, more or less, in the direction of the sea, you’ll smell it and in the distance you’ll see the Caesarea mosque, and from there go to Kibbutz Sdot Yam. And make sure you’re not seen. And if you’re stopped by the British, say you’re looking for antiquities.

I got onto the Haifa bus, which as usual stopped in Hadera. Like everyone else I went to the kiosk and bought a glass of soda water for five mils. I looked around and checked out the area and made myself transparent and walked quickly to the toilets at the rear. I saw two drivers smoking by a planter with wilted flowers and hurried away and did another diversion and trod on some couch grass. There was a beautiful solitary anemone there and I moved surreptitiously between sycamore and cypress, and all the thickly foliaged eucalyptuses shaded me as I walked, and I sank into the sand. It wasn’t too cold. The sand was enormous. The bushes were damp and spread onto the sand. It was clear and November and you could see the glint of the distant sea. I was tired and sat down atop a hummock. I felt elation and like a prophet declaimed: “Thy beauty, O Israel, upon thy high places is slain! How are the mighty fallen.” That’s the kind of schmucks we were back then. Suddenly a couple emerged who looked like penguins glistening in the sun. They were wet and she was big and her eyes were blue and she looked at me smilingly, and the man got angry in an unfamiliar language. She said, Young man. She knew that word in Hebrew. The man, still dripping water, got mad at her in their language, she laughed and hugged him, and he said to me in his best biblical Hebrew, Piss off, can’t you see what’s happening here?

I carried on walking and reached the kibbutz gate, tired from the difficult trudge through the damp sand. The man at the gate asked, Are you the new guy? Yes, I said. Are you for the course? he asked. Yes, I said. He said, Don’t dare say that aloud again. I said I was thirsty from the walk and perhaps he had a glass of water for me. He said, Look son, first of all you report to Chana. I asked, Who’s Chana? He said, You don’t ask questions like that here. I said, If I’d asked where’s the woman you call Chana, what would you have said? He didn’t fall into the trap and said, You don’t look for Chana, you find her. You’ll get some water only after Chana says you’re okay.

I walked along the paths of the small kibbutz and saw a young woman and I was scared to ask her, and then a grumpy elderly man passed me wheeling a bicycle and I asked him about Chana, and he said that she’s a snake charmer and everybody’s scared of her but she’s a lovely person, and he directed me to a hut not far away. I went into what was an office, and a huge woman gave me a glass of water and said that here I’d have to obey orders because I’d sworn on the Bible. My name’s Chana, and you don’t ask questions, I’ve got a heroic boyfriend who’s defending you right now, and this is also a kind of clinic. She pointed at a shelf and said, There’s black ointment for cuts and iodine and bandages. The white pills are for sore throats, earache, and fever. The red pills at the side are for stomachache and broken legs and arms. I asked, What if I get bitten by a snake? Nonsense, she replied. I said, Last year at the youth movement camp at Hefzibah I was bitten by a viper, and they put me in a hammock, and someone sucked out the venom, and there weren’t any drugs, and the pain was unbearable. The white ones are also good for snakebites, she said. Did you know that the Arabs have got lots of names for the camel and only one for all the snakes? Did you know that ants have got five noses? I didn’t. She showed me the way to a big boat shed, and from there somebody showed me the way to a big corrugated iron hut.

I went inside and there was nobody there. There were forty beds, twenty on each side, and I began looking for a place for my stuff. In my knapsack I’d brought a set of colored pencils and I drew undisturbed for about two hours and I stuck the picture on the wall above me. Some young guys came in and yelled, What’s your name, and some told me their name, and they all sat down on their beds, and one lay down on the bed opposite me and fell asleep. My neighbor to the left said, The one who’s asleep is Michael, he’s an illegal immigrant, he doesn’t eat lettuce, he thinks it’s cow fodder. Michael woke up and saw the drawing and started shouting, Germans, Germans, and somebody took down the drawing and ripped it up. Afterward he told me that he’d done it not only for Michael’s sake but because here you’re a grown-up guy. Grown-up guys don’t draw. My little brother Moishele draws, you’re in the navy now and you don’t do kid’s crap.

Nine

We’d be woken up at five in the morning by loud banging on the corrugated iron, we ran to the sea in swimming trunks, shivering with cold, and we swam. At first three kilometers and later five, and then we’d do fifteen minutes of backbreaking physical exercises, still in our wet swimming trunks, then shower in cold water, dress quickly, and run to the dining hall. We’d have a little bread, eggplant, white cheese, drink lukewarm chicory coffee, and chew a dry cookie. After that we’d rest for half an hour and smoke, and then training would begin. When a storm came up at night we’d be woken up and run down to the beach. It was cold and wet. We’d pull the boats out of the water and chant in time, Fuck you, Bevin, and not one of us had the faintest idea why. The illegal immigrants who’d come on the ships didn’t manage to reach the shore, and no Palyam boat was waiting for them. The Palyam guys worked on the ships as escorts not deckhands, and many of them didn’t even know how to swim. Back then the immigrants were brought to the foreign ports through the mountains and the snow, and most of the time the sea was rough.

We were given lectures on navigation, sails, and sailing, and we trained by running and carrying stick rifles with improvised bayonets. And Chana — who could move a house without breaking a sweat, who beat all the heroes of the Palmach at arm wrestling, and who cried only once in her life when a woman from “there” told her about an aktion—shouted at us as we ran with fixed bayonets, I want to see a smile on your faces when you stick those Germans. I asked her if I’d have to smile in the war as I ran with my bayonet to kill the enemy, and she asked the commanding officer to give me a pep talk.

The commanding officer had very few words in his repertoire but he was known as a man who almost got killed bringing immigrants ashore and he really knew how to shout. In his hoarse voice he tried to explain to me about the struggle and the need to vanquish the enemy, and I said that I accept all that but why have we got to smile when running with our bayonets. He didn’t reply, and Chana, who’d forgotten she was mad at me, took us out to the sand dunes. An officer I didn’t know brought a pistol and fifty rounds, and each of us fired his first and last shot on the course with live ammunition, before the battles that lay ahead. When I fired my hand was shaking, my arm hurt, and Chana gave me a red pill and said that it looked like I had a stomachache. I explained that I didn’t, and she said it was already too late and in any case she didn’t have any other pills and if you do get a stomachache, she said, the pill will help anyway, and if not, it won’t do any harm.

In the ideological talks on cold and rainy winter evenings, as we sat in the boathouse that was built of tin that amplified the sound of the raindrops, we were taught what life was like in the Jewish army, and we said that we’d volunteered for the Palmach, partisans and not an army, and we were told that it’s just like an army and orders must be obeyed because the Jewish Yishuv* expected us to be prepared for any mission.

One day we were taken deep into the dunes. It was already dusk. We had a parade. It wasn’t raining. The wind sighed. We practiced concealment. Chana bellowed at every one of us to try and crawl but we had no idea about how to get deeper into the sand. On the way back I got a thorn in my foot. I sat alone facing the sea and smoked. I recalled one of father’s stories: A man held a bar mitzvah celebration for his son and invited guests, and they came to celebrate and drink and he asked his son to climb up into the loft and bring down a cask of wine, and the boy climbed up, was bitten by a snake, and didn’t return. The man climbed up to see what had happened and saw his son lying dead, and he climbed down and ate and drank with his guests and they praised the boy and in the end asked, When is the celebration? You came to celebrate, he said, and now you are mourners. My father liked that story and the pain in my foot was appropriate to the memory. I missed the smoke from my father’s pipe. I missed the sea from our balcony. There was only the sea at Caesarea.

On the course — half of whose participants would later be killed, and they wouldn’t be killed in boats but on the way to Jerusalem, at Saris, the Castel, and Nabi Samwil — was a small, painfully thin young woman, who looked like a leaf on the wind and was foreign to us, as if she’d come from nowhere. It was said she’d been a member of Lehi, that she’d killed a British sergeant, and it was also said she’d had a fling with him beforehand or maybe later, and then killed him. They said it was nothing, but for me it was the first time I’d thought about the splendor of betrayal. I thought that perhaps there was no true love unless it was for someone who’d died.

When I was a kid I was madly in love with a mysterious friend of my father’s, someone from Berlin, whom I’d seen in the only remaining photo of her that was taken ten years before I was born. She was sitting in a boat on a river in Germany and was wearing a white dress, and my father was standing beside her in a white suit and it looked as if he’d been poling while standing, and his face seemed so soft looking at her.

The girl from Lehi lived in her own tent but rowed with us. She was locked in an aura of mystery. When she said something to somebody it seemed like she was talking to herself. She looked like someone who’d escaped from a remote and beautiful castle or someone who’d come up out of a drain and prettied herself up.

Lunch was a thin vegetable soup, a little fish, lettuce, potatoes, compote, and hard black bread. I gave my compote to anybody prepared to give up his soup, and they stood in line. Ari-nom-de-plume — who in contrast with the rest of us said that the war was the most wonderful thing that had happened to him in his life, and who would die an idiotic death at Saint Simeon’s Monastery when the last round fired in the battle would hit him, and he would fall dead on his face, charred by the flames — organized the compote line and got one for free, and he managed my trading as if it were his own. I’d loved him right from the start. He had a white face. Reddish-brown hair. He had the charm of a film pirate. The Robin Hood of our sad sand dunes. The Palyam’s own Gary Cooper. He was a clever devil. He knew everything. He came from great poverty, his father died lugging a refrigerator up to the fourth floor, and it fell on him and killed him. He didn’t have any family because his mother died of grief and his brother either committed suicide or went to America. He was a loyal friend.

We trained in boats for something of which there was no need, certainly not for repelling the enemy on the road to Jerusalem. We practiced knots and fucking seamanship, and one night the senior intake had enough of me talking their ears off about the need to fight instead of this crappy training, and all kinds of what’s right and what’s not, and that the enemy isn’t only an enemy, and they got ratty, one of them broke off a shower fitting and hit someone on the head with it, and he took off yelling and there was a huge hullabaloo, and then they came over and hit me. It was raining and there were lots of them and I was beaten quite easily. The commanding officer turned up and I saw he was smiling, he didn’t like me very much, what with the Shlonsky poems I was always quoting, “With a hint of thunder-flashes the tempest cautions them, with a fiery acrostic — Omens, omens, omens!” He said that this happens on the courses because youngsters whose heads are filled with stupid poems have to vent their anger, and also because they give us sodium bicarbonate against the sex drive, and until we finish establishing a state we had to hit out now and again. He said I shouldn’t take it personally and I should take my knocks gracefully.

There was a flagstaff on which we’d raise the flag, while a few us made sure that the British weren’t coming. I found quite a big stone around the flagstaff, I crawled to it and climbed the flagstaff quickly, angrily, painfully. I tied the stone to the end of the lanyard, let it drop, and thought, Gustav’s Fichte should see me now, and I began swinging around on the lanyard, and the stone tied to it flew around in circles, and one or two people got hit. I was given a punishment, spending a night alone in the hills tied to a concrete slab. I was scared at first. I could hear the jackals. The sea roared. But it was beautiful and filled with splendor. I was alone facing the most ancient of seas. I felt as if I were facing my Tel Aviv sea, which resided on our balcony. The silence was the only sound I could hear. My heart stopped racing. I loved those moments because they were something beyond fear, they were me and the sea and the sand. Perhaps I dozed. In the morning there was a biting chill and torrential rain began falling. Ari-nom-de-plume came along and told me he’d seen how I’d fought and had liked it. We sat and I drank rainwater I collected in my cupped palm, and then they came to release me and bring me back, and I laughed at them and they were upset. That one’s crazy, they said.

Ari-nom-de-plume was a kind of lovable rogue, which is how a young woman kibbutznik who served us in the dining hall described him, and he said she was in love with him. We didn’t talk about stuff like that back then but he said whatever he pleased. Ari-nom-de-plume and I started rowing side by side in the boat, and he told me that he came from the Shapira neighborhood and how his father who was a refrigerator porter died and how his mother was a whore. People were scared of him. He had boxer’s hands and knew how to stare at people until they got frightened. To me he looked like someone who knew a thing or two about life.

We went out in the boat and hauled up the sails, set course, Ari-nom-de-plume was at the tiller. They said they’d seen how I was such a good climber, so I climbed the mast to unfurl a sail, and suddenly, like a gust from a bellows, a strong wind came up that got savagely stronger. At first we didn’t understand exactly where the wind was blowing from because it was so unexpected. The waves heightened and the boat started to bounce. From atop the mast, to which I was clinging like a monkey, the guys below looked like dolls inside a peel in a vast sea, which looked like huge hills rising and falling and dancing. When I got back down, with great difficulty, almost falling, I saw that the commander was panicky and with the aid of a compass was trying to understand where we were sailing to. It didn’t help because the sea rose ever higher, and in the thick fog that had come down and in the heavy rain, we lost our way.

After a while we managed to see a strip of coastline in the distance, but the fog and the waves impeded our vision and we didn’t know which coast it was, and the British were still on parts of the coastline, and the commander was concerned about going too close, and what’s more, rocks could rip out the bottom of the boat. A strong gust of wind snapped the mast, the sails flew every which way and billowed with a kind of roar, and everybody had to yell at his neighbor. Ari-nom-de-plume looked at me and said, You said you’re a coward and you’re the only one who isn’t scared. I yelled back that I’m only scared until something happens, but when something does I’m not scared.

The commander threw up, the oars were swept away, and I yelled to Ari-nom-de-plume; I read in the Youth Encyclopedia that wooden boats don’t sink. Amid the tumult and the stinging rain and the whistling wind and the looming waves Ari-nom-de-plume yelled back that he hoped the boat read the encyclopedia too. We were apparently off Givat Olga and the British radar station. We heard a siren and for a moment through the fog and rain we glimpsed a British motorboat trying to forge its way toward us and it fired a few rounds but couldn’t make it through the waves. The motorboat was carried so high that it came down with a tremendous crash, and I yelled to Ari-nom-de-plume, as I swallowed seawater, that according to what I’d read in the encyclopedia, a metal boat like the British one would sink but a wooden one like ours would float, and we should hold on to the sides and the main thing is not to get too close to the shoreline because a boat’s speed increases in a storm and there are big rocks on the Netanya and Herzliya coastline.

The commander recovered from the faintness that had gripped him and he heard me and said he thinks I’m right. The boat filled with water and capsized, but just like the Youth Encyclopedia said it didn’t sink. We clutched the sides and swam with it for about six hours. Swimming for hours in winter, in freezing water, without food or drink, put us in the grip of dizziness, and because we had nothing else to do we sang stupid songs. “Get being last right out of your mind, as for being first, you’re always behind,” and “Samara hop hop, with the white-winged gull,” and “A fisherman his net did haul, zum zum zum, then he found he’d lost his balls,” and “Every wave a memento bears.” My head was spinning, my arms were like lumps of lead. Ari-nom-de-plume was swimming next to me. There was a moment when I lost consciousness and he grabbed me. He had terrible strength in his hands. We knew that this might be the end of us. One cried Mama, Mama, but she didn’t hear, and when he realized that nothing could help him, he stopped.

At the end of that chaotic sail we reached the Yarkon estuary. Headquarters at Sdot Yam had heard what had happened to us, and sailors went out searching for us in the heightening storm and found us off the estuary. Young members of Hapoel Yam jumped into the water and dragged us one by one, frozen and exhausted, into the Hapoel Yam hut and gave us blankets and dried us off. They put us into a hot shower and gave us dry clothes. They gave us water and sandwiches and said that we should all go home and those not from Tel Aviv should come to the Palmach tents by the Yona camp, which had already been taken from the British. Ari-nom-de-plume and I set off toward home through the exhibition grounds, where today they sell faucets and ice cream. The buildings were shattered and the crooked statue of the Hebrew worker stood there. We wore battle dress and gray flannel pants, which they used to issue to the Aliya Bet illegal immigration people for trips to Europe, warm shirts and sweaters, and we were wearing new shoes. Three of my friends who were youth leaders in Hashomer Hatzair were standing by the statue. Each had a bicycle. They were wearing shorts. They weren’t wearing jackets. They looked at me and my flannel pants and shoes and sneered and said angrily that I should be ashamed of myself because I’d become a capitalist and an imperialist and an oppressor of the workers and had run off to kill Arabs, and all because of the gray pants. Salt was still stuck to my eyelashes and I couldn’t tell them where I’d been and anyway I had no inclination to tell them what six hours in the freezing sea means. We were the Palmach. I went home and went to sleep.

I woke up the next morning and my hands were rigid and I couldn’t move my fingers and even under the blankets I was shivering. My mother wanted to know what had happened but we were forbidden to say where we’d been. Later, Ari-nom-de-plume, who looked like new, came over and said that the order is to lift a car from by the sycamore at Silicate. I said I didn’t know how to drive and Ari-nom-de-plume said I had nothing to worry about. We went to Silicate and looked left and right. The rain was bucketing down, there wasn’t a soul in the street and he got into the car, bent down, connected wires under the dashboard, and told me to jump in. A man in pajamas appeared from the doorway of one of the buildings and ran after us in the rain, and Ari-nom-de-plume shouted, Don’t worry, mister, the car will be waiting for you in Hadera. We got to Hadera and Ari-nom-de-plume left the car by the bus station and we walked through the sand dunes for an hour to get to the camp.

One of the kibbutzniks bought provisions from Hamashbir and said he’d seen seven cars parked in a field by the Hadera bus station, and Ari-nom-de-plume said, It’s because they sow them, and with a drop of rain and dung they’ll grow into a forest.

One afternoon all the instructors vanished — perhaps they’d been called out on an operation — and we did as we pleased, we played cards, and the senior intake passed the culture hour by blowing out candles with farts. I went to the sand dunes with Ari-nom-de-plume and we sat there among the thorny bushes. Suddenly Ari-nom-de-plume punched a rock and yelled something, I didn’t understand what, his words were confused, and then in a soft voice he started to tell me about his mother and father, how they had no money to bury his father, and how once, before he went back to portering and died, he’d started bringing girls home. Then he bought a Harley-Davidson to do the haulage, and had been killed when driving behind a truck and the motorcycle overturned. The girls snatched the money, jumped off, and fled, and he remained dead on his own, and Ari-nom-de-plume was taken to identify him and he told me that he looked like a meat patty.

He laughed and then said, I was only kidding, you mama’s boy, your dad’s sweetie, with his pipe and the Germans on his gramophone. He wanted me to know, and then we suddenly saw — blurred at first by the flying sand, and then much more clearly — a young man with a burned face walking in the sand, his hair ash, a basket in his hand. As we moved closer to him we saw there was a human head in it.

Ari-nom-de-plume said, You see? That’s what my father looked like, Hello Dad, and he gave the saddest laugh I can remember. We spoke to the man with the basket but he was evidently dumb and also couldn’t hear. The head in the basket was ugly but it also had a kind of deep beauty like the head of Jesus in the altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald in Colmar, a work my father loved. The man tried to speak, his mouth gaped. He seemed horror-stricken. The words would not come and he fell. Ari-nom-de-plume ran back to the camp, and I sat staring at the two heads because the man with the basket also looked like a dead man and blood flowed from his mouth. Ari-nom-de-plume brought an officer I didn’t know, maybe he was just visiting, a short guy who seemed determined and gave the impression that he knew who the man was and what to do. He examined him and said, He’s dead! I said, But there aren’t any signs of violence. He was silent and checked the man’s clothes, I searched with him and there were no documents on him. The officer checked his private parts and discovered that his genitals were mutilated. He looked here and there and told us not to move. He went off. We waited. Ari-nom-de-plume and I sat there and smoked. It was cold. The officer, who suddenly had a name, Kuti, returned about an hour later. Kuti who? He said, It doesn’t matter, friend. I’m not your friend. You’re an insolent young pup.

A police jeep from Hadera arrived. They checked out the man. They examined the head. A doctor had come with them. They were looking for something. They seemed worried. They took shovels from the jeep and the four of us had to dig a deep pit where the soil was soft beneath a scar of sand, and we buried the man with the head in the basket. Kuti made us swear we’d seen nothing.

Two days later we heard that Kuti had been wounded and nobody knew which hospital he was in. We didn’t know the names of the policemen who’d been with him. We asked, and in turn we were asked what we had to do with Kuti, and what did we want, and then we realized we had to keep quiet.

Ari-nom-de-plume went to see the young woman kibbutznik, who perhaps really was in love with him. He’d always claimed that they love to submit to him. He talked to her and learned the secret. He invented a story, that Kuti was actually a traitor and evidently wouldn’t be coming back, and that nobody knows who the man we buried was and who the head belonged to.

One day we were told that a woman married to a senior Palmach member was coming to give us a lecture on Y. H. Brenner, the author whose words “Blessed is he who dies in such awareness — with Tel-Hai before his eyes” were inscribed in bold black on a wooden board in the doorway of our hut. The senior intake and the woman from Lehi, who was sometimes rude and at other times tender, said that this lecturer had a son who was killed and that they’d heard the lecture more than once. They said she spoke passionately, went hysterical when she talked about Brenner, and then she smoothed her dress over her ass. One of them said, Yeah, six times. The woman from Lehi suddenly became talkative and said she smoothed her dress eight times. Yossi, who was also in that intake and came from Givatayim and knew everybody from Yaffa Yarkoni’s Café Tslil, whose husband was a legendary Haganah commander, said that his friend from Ramat Gan told him that he’d heard her speaking with excitement bordering on hysteria because the dead Brenner was her lover, or so they said, and when she spoke she smoothed her dress over her ass at least ten times.

They started yelling about how many times she smoothes it, and then they decided to take bets on it. It was to be a national wager. Somebody persuaded the kibbutz Haganah commander to let him have his walkie-talkie for a few hours and he contacted all kinds of settlements and kibbutzim, and then the whole course attended the lecture. The woman was surprised by the large number of volunteers who’d come to hear her, since until then she’d spoken to closed eyes. She spoke emotionally about Brenner and his slain comrades and with her right hand smoothed her dress over her ass (I was evidently the only one who heard the lecture, all the rest were busy counting), and she became excited, almost shouting, and her face was red with weeping over the death of that wonderful man, and all around me I could hear excited whispering: One. Two. Three … She smoothed her dress eleven times, and over the walkie-talkie we heard counting and strangled shouts from Ramat Rachel, Ein Harod, Hanita, and excitement was rife.

The officers, who due to the shortage of girls were in love with our female instructors, used the lecture time to make out in the damp sand dunes and didn’t see the great wager. Torrential rain came down again, but who cared. Ari-nom-de-plume was the big winner, of course.

One evening, a few days later, Benny Marshak showed up and gave us an hour-long lecture on the national situation and the war and that we didn’t have any weapons but we’d fight with our bare hands, teeth, fists, bellies, backs, and smite the bitter enemy and conquer the Land of Israel, and we’d triumph, and everybody was tired and fell asleep but Benny was shortsighted and couldn’t see that he was all fired up just for me and two new immigrants, who didn’t know a word of Hebrew but were amazed by his screaming abilities and the belief that squirted from his eyes and his mouth dripping saliva. All the rest woke up and took off to the sand dunes.

Benny got hold of me and said that I’m a cultured boy and that he wants me to organize a Friday-night party. I didn’t know how it was done, I’d had enough of blowing out candles with farts, and anyway, Benny forbade it. Somebody from the senior intake heard me lamenting about what to do for culture, and arranged with Yossi from Givatayim that he bring to the camp two whores from Tel Aviv. The whores were happy to be with Jewish soldiers and he divided them among the guys, and Ari-nom-de-plume did a deal with the guys and collected a penny a bang, and owed me big-time for not saying a word. Afterward everyone sat on boxes and the wrecked boats that were there, and somebody brought a piano, I don’t remember where from, it wasn’t tuned and looked pretty awful, but wonder of wonders, it was a real piano.

The senior intake also brought the singer Yaffa Yarkoni from Givatayim, who sat erect, beautiful, and sexy at the piano, crossed her legs, and sang about war, that it’s a dream dipped in blood and tears, and how Elisheva would be waiting tomorrow for her soldier at seven. Benny Marshak appeared and was enraged by the sight of Yaffa Yarkoni sitting like that and he remembered me and said, Come here, where are you, who sent Shlonsky a poem. He went on to say that since I’d almost completed high school, what about a real cultural evening, not this garbage.

Friday came and we all gathered. Sabbath eve in the sand dunes, somebody said, and the commanding officer sat there, and studied everyone with a tough expression on his face and said they had to listen. I spoke as if I really understood what I was talking about. I spoke about Bialik and Shlonsky and Tschernichovsky. Everybody pretended to be awake but they were asleep with their eyes open, and I got carried away by my own enthusiasm and talked about poems and recited Bialik’s “Take me under your wing,” which my mother had sung to me when I was a child, and I fell asleep as I was talking and remained sitting there asleep. When I woke up there was nobody there, the rain was whipping at the tin roof.

Haim-and-a-half came to tell us that the woman from Lehi had disappeared. An officer we didn’t know came in and asked questions and we asked about her, and he suddenly seemed tired and sad and said that she wouldn’t be coming back. An hour later, Ze’evik, the senior intake’s leader, came out of their tent. He was tall, with tough black eyes and reddish-brown hair and muscles he could move like a yo-yo. He was always angry. He got up, stretched, stood outside the woman from Lehi’s little tent, and seemed to be shrouded in a terrible sorrow. We all went over, stood around him, me too, and there was a kind of sanctity in that moment, and it frightened us. He went on standing there to attention. After a time the guys got tired and went off to sleep, the senior intake didn’t sleep in tin huts like us but in a big tent, and I remained standing with him. He didn’t move from there the whole night. He fixed the empty tent with a penetrating gaze and didn’t take his eyes from it and all the time stood tensely to attention in memory of the woman they said had been his great love and who didn’t even know it.

Amos the Jerk came out of the senior intake tent and laughed at the sight. Ze’evik hit him but even as he did he didn’t budge from his cast-iron stance. Toward morning I fell asleep. It was cold and I wrapped myself in a smelly greatcoat and a storm blew up, then the whistles blew and we stripped off and ran to the sea half naked, and in the freezing weather dragged the boats onto the sand with shouts against that bastard Bevin. After we’d secured the boats on the beach we ran to dry off and sleep awhile.

A few days later Ari-nom-de-plume and I went off to answer a call of nature separately, because I didn’t like exposing myself in front of others like everyone else, who used to piss in a circle and also put out campfires that way. I always stood to one side, embarrassed.

It was afternoon and the sun was shining. Ari-nom-de-plume was digging in the sand and suddenly yelled. I thought he’d been stung by a scorpion. I went over, he said, Quick, wipe your ass with a stone, and I said I had, and it’d scratched. I stood there. Ari-nom-de-plume opened his hands and sand flowed slowly between his fingers and when it stopped I saw green coins. Afterward Ari-nom-de-plume would teach me how to clean off the rust of two thousand years and reveal smooth and beautiful Roman coins.

In the evening, when we went for a walk on the beach, Ari-nom-de-plume said there’s nothing more beautiful than war. Look at how I won the bet, and now this, I’m going to get rich from those coins. Then he said he was in terrible pain and he was shuddering, and threw up, and Chana was alarmed and he asked to go to the doctor in Hadera. Chana said he knows how to lie like Jascha Heifetz knows how to play the violin, but she had no choice because of the high fever he was suddenly running, so they drove him, burning up, into Hadera. After the people who’d accompanied him had left the clinic, he came out and lifted — in the Palmach they lifted, not stole — a car that had previously been lifted in Tel Aviv by some officer, and he drove it to Tel Aviv and parked it where the officer had found it, on Ahad Ha’am Street near the Great Synagogue, where there was a shop that sold antiques and souvenirs where my father used to buy stuff.

Ari-nom-de-plume showed the coins to the shopkeeper, and told me afterward that the guy’s eyes lit up and tears flowed from them, and he looked like he’d gone crazy and said, These are rare Roman coins and one of them is even a Hebrew coin from the period of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt*, with a relief of a seven-branched menorah, and he asked where they’d come from. Ari-nom-de-plume told him that if he didn’t ask too many questions and if he accepted that they weren’t stolen and if there were no problems, he’d bring more. He got twenty Palestinian pounds.

The next day we were sent home for the weekend. I went for a walk. The Red House had become Palmach headquarters. Next to it I saw two girls who were perhaps guarding it. They looked innocent. Beautiful. I approached them. I wanted to say something and they looked at me and said, What’s the matter, pal, and I said, You look like the light of a shadow, and they laughed and said, You’re a strange one, what’s the light of a shadow? I said, The opposite of the opposite. That’s what they once said about a man who had three dogs and he called them and one came, one didn’t, and the third either did or didn’t. One of the girls said, Do you actually understand what you’re saying? All at once their magic dissipated. Now they looked how their mothers would look in another ten years, and I said, Yes, I don’t understand.

I left. Evening fell. I went to a club on the beach near Café Piltz, to see the great Shimon Rudi. There was a girl there who jumped through a burning hoop, and everyone got excited because they wanted to see her get burned. I liked how Shimon Rudi rippled his muscles and how he made them jump and the girls he threw into the air, and I thought to myself then that he’s a man who lives apart. Man shall dwell alone within his muscles.

In the morning Ari-nom-de-plume was waiting for me by Silicate. We walked to Bograshov Street, he lifted a car, and we drove to Hadera. We left it in the same lot and went back to Sdot Yam, and as we were getting dressed we were called out on an operation.

Ten

Later, in the middle of the war, a tall, light-haired guy with clear blue eyes showed up at Kiryat Anavim, and in his eyes you could see the Baltic Sea, which I’d never seen, at best I knew Frishman Beach. He said he’d learned Hebrew on the boat and in the transit camp. I’ve no idea how he managed to get to us through the siege. I’d just been transferred to a different company, with the people who’d stayed alive, and he arrived sometime later. When two people from our tent were killed, he was given their clothes because his were falling to pieces. I liked him from the first minute. All we knew about him was that he’d been a partisan and to us he was Yashka the Partisan. He had Slavic features like those we’d seen in that Russian film A White Sail Gleams, a great film. I sang him the song from the film. We gave Yashka an old Austrian Schwarzlose because he knew about heavy machine guns, and we also gave one to somebody else, whose name I’ve forgotten, a Holocaust survivor who’d infiltrated the lines to get to us and was killed a week later in Siris. If I’m not mistaken we gave the other guy the Browning, because he too was a professional killer, and had been one in Russia, or so they said.

Yashka and I stood in line at the dining hall with the little chits we had to give to Shika at the door. I’d taught him to make a salad from mallow leaves, vine leaves, bread crumbs, and weeds whose names I’ve forgotten. Shika — who during the war called the British and American troops the British army or the American army, but always called the Russians “our forces”—admiringly called Yashka “comrade partisan.”

We were driving together one day and suddenly I felt a burning sensation. I looked down and saw a hole in my pants and then another, and at that moment I saw that he too was looking at his pants and in the mixture of Hebrew, Russian, and German we used, he said, Bullet come in undertrousers. A foreign, hostile, and stupid bullet had penetrated the area of our rumps and sailed from one pant leg to the other and out, but except for burns and holes in our pants it didn’t leave a mark. We laughed and he said that we were ass-kameraden.

He was quiet, daring, and fought like they said the Polish cavalry did, what years later would be called “exposed in the turret,” but back then we didn’t have a turret to be exposed in. It was 1948, the time of the Children’s Crusade.

On mornings after a battle we divided up the clothes of the dead. The evenings were cold and Yashka sang Russian songs. In battle he’d stand as he fired. He said he could see the enemy better if he stood. He had no fear and obviously loved shooting. The moment he went into battle he’d glow and speak in Russian and sing, and in one of our assaults on Siris — two had already failed — or perhaps it was Beit Iksa or another village, I’ve forgotten where exactly, we were left in a scorched hilly area, everybody except the two of us was asleep, and Yashka the Partisan sat and let out a shout of joy as if he were an animal. I moved over to him and he gave me a Strand Special cigarette, which were hard to come by, and tried to explain something to me. I didn’t understand everything but he spoke with a lot of hand gestures. He didn’t know Yiddish, and I knew only very little, and I’m not even sure he was Jewish, not that I cared. From what he told me I understood that he’d fought in Stalingrad as a boy. He said that the battle there had been the bitterest ever fought and thousands had been killed, and once he’d killed a German with a head-butt. He said, apparently, that there was hunger and cold and he loved (here he drew a heart in the sand with a twig) our war because the Jews deserved a country because in Stalingrad many Jews had fought and died and were not awarded a medal of honor, and after the fighting they’d been attacked and murdered because they were Jews, and his grandfather had been a religious Jew in Siberia, and what we were doing here was right and true but was like a children’s war, against Arabs who yelled and slaughtered and fled at the first shot. He’d never, so he told me, seen worse soldiers, but not the Jordanians who are excellent soldiers. But the Arabs are many and they’ve got weapons, and he kills as many of them as he can because if he doesn’t you won’t have a state here. Perhaps he said “we” but I’m not sure.

He started singing a Russian song in a whisper and it sounded like a Hebrew song, and he embraced me tightly and said, Just as long as we succeed. We’ve got to fight well. You’re a bit funny. You also want morals. There are no morals in war, he said in broken Hebrew that’s hard for me to reconstruct today, but I understood him, he meant me because I’d made a song and dance about what is permitted and what is forbidden. He said he’d once read books on philosophy and knew that morals were all right for professors, every animal kills other animals, every man fights for his life and kills if he wants to live, there are no moral wars. Do you wait for someone to kill you and then what? Only afterward you shoot at him? Someone like you, who was in Hashomer Hatzair and lay wounded says you’ve got to be right, but you’ve also got to be bad. Without the bad guys there are no wars, said Yashka the Partisan, and he chewed on a stalk of grass and laughed. He had a lovely clear and wise and open laugh, and sometimes he’d even fall asleep in the middle of laughing.

We tried to sleep during the day. There was no food or water, and when we were in Jerusalem itself, after or before the battles, we went to see the only film showing in the city, Fiesta. The owner of the only cinema open at the time had a generator. He was madly in love with the cinema and it was said he’d sell his wife and children for one new film, but there weren’t any, all he had was this one, Fiesta, with Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban. He’d watch it every day and when somebody came into the darkness he’d yell, Shalom folks, it’s two mils for the Jewish National Fund, and continue watching. Ricardo, wearing a silvery suit, sang in Spanish, which I thought was Mexican, and the blond Esther with the terrific body would dive into a pool filled with girls who looked like fish in their lustrous swimsuits, and the water sprayed in glorious Technicolor, and we’d sit with him in the dark and sing the theme song together. Yashka learned the song from us and maybe thought it was in Hebrew.

I remember becoming apathetic. I waited for death so I could rest awhile. I was tired. I recalled the monks at Latrun, to whom my father would take me when he went to read The City of God with them, a book that he loved. They didn’t speak and mumbled memento mori all day, remember death. And now the bullets whistled in my sleep too, and I remembered death. Even in my dreams. I tried to meet Death but it laughed at me and decided to give me a miss.

We went up to Jerusalem with its windows closed in fear and sang as we marched, and Death that had given me a miss applauded us. The brigade suffered so many dead, and we were all kids, bad and good. I tried to learn things from Yashka, for instance how the partisans fought, but his explanations were in Russian and I didn’t always understand. Now and then we wanted to ask him details about himself, where he was from, had he really been a partisan, how did he get to Palestine, on an illegal immigrant ship? But we were busy and tired and it was postponed. We wanted water. But instead we listened to records we’d taken as booty from Arab villages, tangos in Arabic. Abdel Wahab, Layla Murad, who they said was Jewish. I thought, Tomorrow I’ll ask what his surname is, but I didn’t. I was almost eighteen. He was about twenty. A girl I met on the lawn in the kibbutz said he’s a hell of a guy and looked at him admiringly. Maybe I was envious and maybe not. And then one night he was killed. That wasn’t out of the ordinary. We usually buried boys like him as “Unknown,” which is less appropriate than the “Known only to God” they wrote on graves from the riots of the 1920s and ’30s. Known only to God — powerful words.

He was killed beside me but I don’t remember where it happened. We were on the ground. I suddenly saw him writhing in pain. I cradled his head in my arms and wished him to live. Fuck it, he had to live. When he started to breathe quietly I was happy. I tried to think about how to get him someplace where there was a medic, and suddenly he began choking, then he stopped and breathed easily, and he took a deep breath and I could see how the air entered his lungs and I was sure he was safe but the air didn’t come out. He didn’t exhale. With that deep breath he died. The air didn’t want to come out.

I went up to Pension Fefferman and asked to speak to Yitzhak Rabin. They let me in and I told him that a true hero had been killed and perhaps we could write “Yashka the Partisan” on the temporary grave marker. Rabin thought about it and approved. The dead were buried each morning, and when his turn came, the body was placed in the grave. We were usually too tired to attend the burials but this time we came, it was uncharacteristic, but we said, Poor guy, he’s got nobody else. As if the rest of us had. But he didn’t have parents in a village or city. We filled in the grave and stuck in the marker on which we’d written “Yashka the Partisan.”

In the cemetery at Kiryat Anavim, where I thought Yitzhak Rabin would be buried beside his dead soldiers and comrades, where my comrades rest, Menachem the friend of my youth and others, today there is no headstone bearing the name Rabin, but there isn’t one bearing the name Yashka the Partisan either. I could have inquired at the kibbutz whether they’d forgotten or perhaps they’d learned his real name and found relatives who’d taken his body, and perhaps he’d been buried someplace else under his full name or transferred to another cemetery or that the pit was full and they didn’t see and he disappeared. It says in Psalms 6, “For in death there is no remembrance of Thee; in the netherworld who will give Thee thanks?”

Yashka the Partisan was a Jew even if perhaps he wasn’t. If his dead body had been transferred elsewhere or the rabbinate had discovered his grave and checked if his mother was Jewish, and perhaps she’d tried to have him circumcised postmortem, he remained where he was buried even if they’d moved him. In an eternal heaven absent of God there is Yashka the Partisan, whatever his name might have been.

Eleven

A few months earlier at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, a short time after the girl from Lehi disappeared, we were told we were going to take Caesarea, which was sunken in the sand with only the minaret of the mosque and the jetty protruding from it. The jetty was supported by light-colored marble columns that Lady Hester Stanhope — of whom it was said that she thought Palestine an erotic country — had brought from Ashkelon in the previous century. When I was a boy my father would take me to visit the Bosnian who’d established a small museum on the jetty at Caesarea. He’d send a car to pick us up from the main road. A sweet roly-poly man with a childlike smile, who had lots of coins, icons, and jars. We’d sit with him on the jetty facing the sea and he’d bring out two nargilehs, a boy would fill them with coals and spread the ash and light them, and the man and my father would smoke and talk in German about their student days in Heidelberg.

Now we’d been told we were going to take Caesarea because an illegal immigrant ship was due, and the Arabs would make trouble. I said that they’re not Arabs but Bosnians. They said, An Arab’s an Arab even if he’s a Basunian. Bosnian, I said. Whatever, they replied. They said that there mustn’t be a lot of Arabs there who’d make trouble, and what the hell are Bosnians? They’re all Arabs. One of us was sent to observe the town and draw a map and first thing the next morning we went out. It was dark. We went in two boats, the Dov and the Tirzah. We rowed out, not under sail, with six oarsmen on each side. We had two rifles, one that fired and another that was taken from the cache and cleaned. We reached the edge of the bay. Ari-nom-de-plume and Haim-and-a-half fired, one rifle worked, the other didn’t. They tried the other one again and the cartridge, that had sand stuck to it, got jammed in the barrel, and the barrel bent and a miserable bullet was ejected and hung in the air, and immediately afterward fell, looking like a drop of an old man’s sperm.

We landed on the beach and saw the Bosnians escaping. They walked slowly. They didn’t appear to be frightened or retreating. They walked in majesty. They carried their belongings with a kind of proper pride. Mishka banged on a can so there’d be more noise, and a Haganah Primus aircraft passed slowly overhead, lost altitude, and tried to drop a bomb, but the bomb exploded in the air and its pieces fell into the dunes. The Primus was buffeted by the blast and climbed like some Yiddisher cowboy. The Bosnians were deep in the dunes and I saw how they were still walking calmly. Perhaps their sadness was in their walk, which I didn’t understand then but do today. I asked Ari-nom-de-plume who they were bothering and he said, They’re bothering my ass, we’ve just got to make sure there aren’t any Arabs here and that’s why we’re expelling them. I went to the museum, from where my father’s friend had managed to rescue some of the rarer antiquities and take them with him, and Ari-nom-de-plume came up behind me and tried to go inside. I stopped him and asked him not to take anything. He shoved me with compassionate friendliness and went inside for a moment, I ran after him, he evaded me and went outside, raised his hands, and said, Look, they’re clean!

We sat and smoked until an officer came and yelled, Caesarea is in our hands! — as if we’d beaten Herod and the Romans and the Germans as well. He sounded excited. I said to him, What’s this “in our hands”? What kind of “in our hands” is it? And somebody told him, You’re a man’s man! Kifaq hey! — Bravo! In the distance we could still see the column of refugees. They were wearing coats and hats and looked like ants chewing sand. At the tail of the column I saw a little girl wearing a green coat and clutching a doll. She was looking back and being dragged along by an Arab I identified as my father’s Bosnian friend, and I was saddened but didn’t do anything. What I saw didn’t yet have a name or a title. The man was a tiny movement in a landscape. There was also something aesthetic in that vast painting of the ruins of ancient walls, Greek marble columns, a mosque minaret half sunken in the heap of sand in front of it, and the human column.

(Years later I was in the United States at a party marking the publication of my book about a man whose mother was Jewish and father was Arab, and the struggle of the Arab in him against the Jew in him, and there was a woman there who came over to talk to me. She said her name was Inaya and introduced her husband, and said with a kind of nice straightforward contrariness that he’s a Jew. She was tall and good-looking and said she’d written a good review of the book and that she is a Palestinian. Where from? I asked, and she replied, Caesarea. She told how, when she was five years old, the Jews had come with warships and cannons, and there was a battle and the Jews took Caesarea with great force. I looked at the little girl with the coat and the doll, and didn’t tell her about the two rifles, one of which fired and the other that didn’t. She was so nice to me. Her husband told me a joke about a Jew, a Frenchman, and an Englishman, and I thought, Fifty years earlier that little girl was but a Bosnian speck in space.)

At Caesarea, on the day of the great conquest, which if I’m not mistaken was the first conquest of a village in the War of Independence, British police boats were seen searching for something, and Ari-nom-de-plume was sitting next to me and trying to press me into going into the museum again, which I’d been appointed to guard. An officer came out of the dunes in a jeep, a pistol on his belt, and put a padlock on the door. And five guys from Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael with a pistol and unarmed combat sticks came, and we left in boats for Sdot Yam. In the evening the commanding officer spoke about how we were fighting a war of no choice and how everything was as it should be. I said I don’t understand why we had to take Caesarea, which hadn’t fought against us, and the guy said that an illegal immigrant ship had been due to arrive and the villagers posed danger. I wondered where it was, and he said they’d probably spotted the British in the boats and set course for another beach.

Before supper we were called in by the CO. He said that money and gold had been stolen from the museum and that he knew who the thief was, and added that we were leaving the camp area for an hour, and someone, whoever it was (and I of course knew who but I’m fair and compassionate and I’m giving him a chance) will put the money in the girl from Lehi’s empty tent. We left. The CO came back an hour later and found the money and gold and didn’t say a word. Only he and me and Ari-nom-de-plume knew who the thief was.

I was walking along one of the kibbutz paths. I met a woman who said derisively that she was very proud that I’d taken Caesarea and that in blood and fire Judah fell; in blood and fire it will rise again. I said, That’s from the Etzel*, and she said, Today it’s all Etzel, and invited me to her room. She took out a cup and stuck an electrical heating element into the water and boiled it and poured two cups of weak tea and burst into tears. I asked her why she was crying. She said her name’s Tzila and she’s cold. I said, I’ll give you my battle-dress blouse. She said that’s not what would warm her. She asked, Did you know that the poet Hannah Senesh* once lived here? We used to cry together. It’s a good thing you took Caesarea from those Bosnian Nazis, according to the maps there’s an ancient Roman aqueduct and an amphitheater there, and we’re Jews, we’ll do something with it. Against who? I asked. She didn’t reply. I didn’t know what to do, I begged her pardon and left.

As if he’d been following me, Ari-nom-de-plume suddenly appeared. I asked him what he was doing there, and he said he’d been passing by and had heard that the girl I’d been with puts out, and thought I was screwing her. Even in the darkness I paled and said that we’d just been talking about the cold and tea and Hannah Senesh, and he said, You always were a sap and you always will be, and went inside. I stood there to wait for him and he yelled from inside, Get out of here, she’s cold, go and screw some Bosnians, and the pale light was switched off.

Afterward we came to blows. Ari-nom-de-plume went out searching for antiquities, and now and again I helped him. Sometimes he faked illness until Chana was sick of exempting him from duty. On the last night I went into the dunes on my own and inadvertently began turning over the sand. How clean and smooth that sand was, that most ancient of sands! Endless tracts of clear, pure gold. On it, bushes and shrubs, and at night the incessant howling of the jackals, and the sea sparkling as if it was combed lengthways. Not far from me a couple of lovers were groaning. My hand touched a blunt object. I dug deeper into the sand, and in the end came up with it. It was dark, and a guy who suddenly pulled himself up with a girl in his arms yelled at me that he was permitted to be alone, and that love was allowed even during these days of destruction, and I took off. Back in the hut I cleaned what I’d found. It was a small, chipped head of a woman, apparently Roman by the hairstyle. Ari-nom-de-plume examined it meticulously with a magnifying glass and flashlight, and asked how much I wanted. I’m not selling, I replied. Sell it, he said. Come on, sell it. He snatched the head, I ran after him. He started hitting me, and I retaliated. In the end I realized that if I wanted to live I should submit with dignity. He took the head I’d found, and somebody in the kibbutz snitched, and Ari-nom-de-plume faced charges in the dining hall, but before the trial got under way the Palyam CO arrived and announced that as of this moment the course had ended.

There was a commotion. We packed up. We put all our stuff into kit bags we’d been issued, which had been stolen from a British army camp, and we had a hasty parade. The CO was red-faced with excitement and drew his pistol and fired a shot into the air. We sang the Palmach anthem and boarded trucks. Some were taken to Haifa to set up the navy, and the rest of us were driven to take Givat Olga. The British could be seen in their fast boats, and Arabs from some village were running toward the hill. We fired at them, I don’t know who and from where, some could be seen fleeing, there was a short battle, and I fired too, my hand hurt, and we entered Givat Olga. I don’t and didn’t have any idea what we were doing there. We found packages of sharp-tasting British cheddar cheese and British biscuits, and drilled. We went back to Sdot Yam to sail our boats again, and a guy called Hasid and his buddy Hacham taught us what a cunning enemy was waiting for us at sea. Perhaps we also ate some fish that Ari-nom-de-plume caught.

I think that afterward, or very soon beforehand, we went out on a few small operations that didn’t go down in history, and Ari-nom-de-plume sold the head and wanted to pay me, and I told him to leave me alone, and I think that for a few hours we took a semi-abandoned village at the mouth of Wadi Ara and left. At night I dreamed about girls but I didn’t know how you dream about naked girls because I’d never seen one.

The order came to move out, we packed our gear and were driven to Sarona. Sarona, which in my childhood was a verdant German Templar settlement, had become an army camp after the Germans were expelled by the British. Now the British had left for Australia and we liberated it for the Jewish people. In my childhood we’d bought butter and sour cream there. They made good wine and olive oil, and were magnificent in their knowledge, and some of them became Nazis. When we lived in Kiryat Meir, in what was then a wilderness, we held marches, and the Arabs of Sumeil village came dressed up as Germans. The British had just left. Their pungent odor still hung in the beautiful German houses. Ari-nom-de-plume found some what we called “candoms,” which today are called condoms. As soon as he was able, Ari-nom-de-plume sold them at a high price and told everybody they’re a bargain because they’re from England and aren’t like the condoms in Palestine which are sacred — that is, “holy.”

We were put into a beautiful old house built in the German style and then into a barn with a tiled roof, close to the ancient oil press. We sat in a hall with a beamed ceiling, and trucks began arriving with crates. The crates contained weapons and ammunition. They had arrived that morning on the Nora. They were Czech arms that had been manufactured for the Wermacht but after the war ended they lay in warehouses, and the Russians, who were the first to support the establishment of a Jewish state, ordered that they be shipped to Palestine. They were shipped illegally and we later realized that if the Nora hadn’t been dispatched we would have lost the war in Jerusalem. The ship carried some ten thousand rifles and lots of ammunition, a few machine guns, and a considerable quantity of submachine guns.

We sat in the barn disassembling the weapons. We cleaned off the grease with benzene. Our heads were bursting from the acrid smell and the cloud of benzene vapor that enveloped us. We went to get something to eat. A young man in a suit and tie appeared and said he’d been sent to us, and that his name is Yehoshua but he’s called Shimon for short, and it was said he’d sung tangos at the Bat Galim casino, where he’d found a girl and said he wanted to screw her, but in the middle she said that she had to marry him, and he was flying high and went off and married her because every fuck has got to be followed by a wedding, and she gave him a son. I was with him one day and listened to him crying over his marriage, and I found an old tattered doll that had apparently belonged to a German girl, and it had gleaming yellow eyes. I was suddenly sad for the Germans who had lived here for so many years, for the Arabs of Sumeil who held Nazi parades with their German masters in Kiryat Meir, who had all been expelled, and I felt a kind of bitter choking sensation before I fell asleep.

We cleaned weapons for three days. So as not to fall asleep we sang “She’ll be wearing no pajamas when she comes, she’ll be wearing no pajamas when she comes” and “She’s got a screw-on leg and her head’s about to fall / And at night she hangs her head right there up on the wall.” And “For centuries we ate pita and drank from finjans / Till the arrival of the Ben-Gurions and the Shertoks and the Weizmanns / And they said that Palestine was theirs alone / And we should start walking to Arabia on our own.”

We calibrated the weapons according to the orders of someone they said was an officer and looked like a youth a bit older than me, and took them outside. It was a rainy day, from the citrus groves came a pleasing fragrance, and in the rain we heard the faint sound of weeping, and some princess in short pants walked by and said, So, you’re the great fighters, who are you to be fighters, who do you think you are, and we didn’t know what she was saying because she didn’t use question marks or exclamation marks. In those days question marks were a sign of intelligence. The newspaper headlines didn’t provide news but asked questions, “Will War Break Out?” “Will America Support Us?” And she said, You’re all your mothers’ sweeties, a terrible war is starting, and you’re not prepared, and so — and this is an order — you’re going to the blue building by the lemon trees and each of you will be issued a rifle, an ammunition pouch, and you don’t play around with your weapons, and you’ll go to sleep like mama’s boys, and you’ll be shipped out the day after tomorrow.

In the morning I noticed that Ari-nom-de-plume had disappeared. I’d already learned not to ask about what he was up to. I got up to go to an old building where somebody from the course was making omelets and brewing coffee, I think he was from the senior intake at Sdot Yam, the one from which not one member would be alive a couple of months later, including that one of blessed memory, whose name was perhaps Naftuli. In my coat pocket I found a note, “Don’t Worry. Don’t ask. I’ll be back. Not a word about me, Ari.”

We got together in the evening, and a new guy appeared who said he’s our battalion commander, and it’s the Fourth Battalion, and we are part of it because the Palyam has been part of this battalion for a long time, and it’s a renowned battalion. I didn’t know what it was renowned for. The guy spoke about war and attrition and killing and retaliation and the purity of arms and how he’d castrated an Arab by the River Jordan, and young people who’d already been killed on the road to Jerusalem, and that is where — and this is how he said it — we are bound.

I couldn’t sleep that night. Ari-nom-de-plume hadn’t come back to protect me. I was a kid. Suddenly I was disassembling rifles and counting bullets and cleaning mirrors and muzzles, and I missed my bed at home, which was a fifteen-minute walk from Sarona. I looked out the window at the lights of Tel Aviv and Ari-nom-de-plume suddenly materialized out of nowhere. It was the teacher Blich who’d taught me maftzia, the high-register Hebrew for “materialized.” He gave me a “satisfactory” in composition, and my mother, who taught at the same school, told me to embellish a bit, and I learned words from the dictionary. With the maftzia he gave me a “very good.” And Ari-nom-de-plume maftzia and says, Yalla, I’m here. I was glad, because he’d interpret those moments for me when I didn’t know who I am and what I’m doing in this grown-up place where they talk about shooting and death and warfare.

We went together to an empty green building where we were to meet before our departure. There was British army office furniture in it. Ari-nom-de-plume took a wad of bills from his pocket and said, I’ve made some money. I asked him how. He said, It’s for both of us. I said, Ari, I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t make money for me. Make it for yourself. He laughed and then turned serious and almost whispering he said, You’re spoiled. You’ve been given everything. Your father with his Beethoven and the museum and all the records and you with your Shlonsky and Tchernichovsky and all that, and your teacher mother, afternoon coffee, I grew up in the gutter, and I know how to sniff things out, and I laugh at someone like you, but you know, when I first met you I hated you because you were a goody-goody from Tel Aviv but I won’t forget you in the boat that capsized, with your Youth Encyclopedia, and how frightened you were but brave as well. It hurt you to see the Arabs fleeing from Caesarea. Look, listen to me, nothing will come of you. You’re not hungry enough to live in this world. I used to drive down Allenby Street at night in my father’s cart and he’d steal piping from the new houses that were going up, and I stole bottles of eau de cologne from locked shops and sold them to the whores at Bereleh’s on Chelouche Street, and you, what have you done? Beethoven.

He got up, lit cigarettes for both us, and told me that the Primus pilots go to the exhibition grounds in north Tel Aviv, by the place we’d reached in the boat, not far from the Yarkon estuary. They get bombs for their planes from a Mr. Wilenchuk, and they beg for more but he hasn’t got enough. Ari-nom-de-plume said, I followed this Wilenchuk, a nice man who crossed the Yarkon and there, in a deserted Arab mud hut, I saw him supervising the manufacture of the bombs. I hid in the trees and yelled, Air raid! Air raid! And there really was a raid right then, as if God was working for bastards like me and not for Beethovens like you, and that raid wasn’t far away, in Hawaii Park, and a few guys got killed. Everybody in that little factory are workers, they’re not in the Haganah, ordinary people who come to work, and they threw themselves onto the bombs to protect them, not themselves, only the bombs. I sneaked inside and borrowed ten bombs that Wilenchuk was about to hand over to the pilots.

I drove to the woods on the Yarkon where I used to fuck a girl called Heshkovitz, and I went to the poor pilots who were crying out for bombs but there weren’t enough, and I said, I’ll sell you these at five hundred mils each, and they got excited and hugged me and bought the bombs and flew off in their comical Primuses, and I stashed the money in my hiding place in the Shapira neighborhood that’s not far from here. And now what? We’re off to war? I heard there’s a lot of money in the Arab villages. Gold. The Arabs hide gold in clay jaras. There’ll be no more Caesarea with that moron of an officer. Arabs don’t believe in banks. All their money and gold is in jaras with snakes, to scare off guys like me who aren’t scared of anything.

As Ari-nom-de-plume was speaking the question-mark-less woman came along and gave out postcards and pencils, and everyone was told to write a card to his family. She said you can write anything except where you’ve been and where you are now. Ten minutes later she collected the cards and with a marker pen censored words she thought were dangerous. She found a few words to censor in my card too. In the end it looked like this: Shalom Mom, Dad, and Mira,… We’re going … see the … We’ll meet again when … I miss you … Regards to Amikam … Yours, Yoram. That was the only card my parents received from me until I came home for that one day in the middle of the war, when the two guys were shot inside the armored vehicle and we took Abba Eban to Tel Aviv.

The next day we were crowded onto trucks. Ari-nom-de-plume bought the seat next to the driver for twenty grush*. The officer came along to sit in the cab because he was in command, but Ari-nom-de-plume said he was already sitting there, and the officer got mad, and we could hear their raised voices, and another officer standing there said that this is the Palmach and there aren’t any privileges, and the first officer said, But this shit bought the seat and that isn’t exactly the Palmach either, and the driver said, What’s the matter with you, I’m not in the Palmach, I’m from the Histadrut.

We drove along a dirt road, and were thrown from side to side and fell all over one another. One guy spat, the guy who caught the spit hit the spitter, others sang “She’ll be wearing no pajamas,” and at the end of the road, tired, looking like cadavers — except for Ari-nom-de-plume who got down from the cab as fresh as a daisy and as happy as a clam — we went into a kibbutz they said was Kibbutz Hulda. We lay down somehow, I don’t remember where, it was raining lightly, and we cleaned our weapons. We were given bread and sardines and tomatoes and heard firing. We realized that the guys who’d left before us were in a battle not far away. We were told to come, go figure where to today, there was a wood and a hill with maybe a gravestone on it and a cypress that stuck in my memory, such a beautiful, noble cypress, it swept sharply into the sky that seemed low because of the mist. We got up and ran to the hill, we lay on top of dead bodies there. We heard more firing. There was no officer with us. Ari-nom-de-plume took charge and yelled at us to move this way and that, and we saw hundreds of Arabs streaming toward us, running and shooting and shouting, and Ari-nom-de-plume said that our planning and theirs is piss-poor because nobody knows what to do.

Meanwhile the fighting on the hill continued and there were still no communications between the two battles, ours and the one on the hill, and food trucks to Jerusalem fell apart on the road and armored vehicles were hit. Shouts could be heard from one of them, the firing was intense, I didn’t know how bullets whistle, I didn’t have time to be frightened because it all looked like a film at the community center, and then the officer from the armored vehicle, whose men had all been wounded, yelled that he can’t carry on, the blood’s flowing, some have been killed and the others wounded, and he won’t be taken prisoner because of the ill-treatment. And “Shalom comrades, over and out,” and the vehicle with its wounded blew up and a column of smoke rose and there was silence.

The Arabs withdrew to regroup. Some of our fighters came from agricultural training groups and had brought musical instruments that fell amid the shells. I heard a flute playing itself in contrast with something that was perhaps a machine gun. Afterward we slept like logs. It was cold. We slept on the grass. Each man and his rifle with its swastika clutched to him. The food trucks stood in the shade of the trees. There was noise. We had no food. They gave out a little water. Some guys had brought stuff from home but the officers took everything not needed for the fighting and said that at six after the war they’d get it all back in Mugrabi Square by the phone box.

We were issued twenty-five rounds. Moshe Katz said that this is a historic day and I remember thinking that ever since I joined the Palmach I’d been hearing that this is a historic day. I tried to walk and stumbled, and I saw Arabs streaming toward us. Some of our fighters were moved to fire from the other side of the wood and we went back to the burned-out armored vehicle.

The dead soldiers inside it were laid out in a line on the ground. They looked like slabs of meat in a butcher shop. Then we buried them. Some twenty people were killed. There was a profound sadness in the air. Two days later we started over. The convoy of armored vehicles and trucks stood in the dark waiting for the order, and it all sounded like a big locomotive warming up its motors. The officer came along and said he’d heard from my companions on Course No. 9 that I could see in the dark. I told him that was right. He said, Right now you’re going to do something for the nation, and he put me in front of the convoy. We were ordered to start moving. I marched along the ruined road as behind me a big convoy of trucks and armored vehicles moved quietly, and I’m there to make sure there aren’t any wires stretching from one side of the road to the other that are connected to mines. I found a few and pointed at them and people came right away and detonated the mines.

You’ve got to be a perfect idiot, more than perfect, to walk through a minefield and believe it’s for the nation, which I’d never met personally. When we got to wherever we were going, the officer came up to me, I don’t remember who he was, apart from the fact that he was killed a short time afterward, and said I’d been fine and he gave me a round cigarette, which were the best. Usually when there were cigarettes we’d get seven round ones or twenty flat Latif. It was nice to smoke the round cigarette with its Virginia tobacco.

Later we reached the junction. Dawn “became manifest,” the way the teacher Blich liked it, and I got into one of the armored vehicles and we drove in a convoy toward Jerusalem. We came under fire on the way. We fired back. Perhaps I hadn’t yet digested that earlier on the road I’d been a dead man walking so that others would live. We reached the lower pumping station in Bab el-Wad and rested. There was more shooting. This time we ran up the hill and fired at a gang that left behind cigarettes, which we collected, and one of us was wounded. On one of the dead Arabs we found a map of Kiryat Anavim drawn with a pen. Somebody said, I didn’t know that Arabs knew how to draw. Yes, he was told, but in Arabic. What Arabic? he said. You speak Arabic, you don’t draw in it.

We went back down and the convoy continued on its way. I was put onto a food truck and was told that I was now an escort. I sat between two sacks of flour and there was shooting here and there but nothing special. We unloaded part of the load at Kiryat Anavim and carried on toward Jerusalem. The road was narrow and wretched. On the seven bends at Motza the truck groaned. The driver was killed by sniper fire from Qaluniyya and the truck began rocking from side to side. Somebody ran and jumped into the cab, stood on the brakes, lifted the dead driver onto our flour sacks, and was killed by a bullet. There was nobody who knew how to drive, and a guy who was with us on Course No. 9 said that Yoram drove stolen cars with Ari-nom-de-plume. I didn’t have time to explain that I’d never driven a car, that it was Ari-nom-de-plume, and I got into the cab. I remembered that you had to release the hand brake, I pressed down on the clutch, the truck groaned, I held on to the big steering wheel, the truck shivered because two of its tires had been blown out, and I drove on the wheel rims. We drove for an hour, maybe an hour and a half. I don’t know how. We were taking fire all the time, and a bullet smashed the left wing mirror so I couldn’t see what was behind me because the big mirror above the wheel was smashed too. At Qaluniyya by the seven bends I drove slowly. I’ve no idea how I knew how to drive. I had no contact with the guys in back because of the smashed mirrors but I knew they were firing and I heard a yelp from someone who’d apparently been hit. I suddenly realized that the so respectable and so gentle yelp had come from the beautiful daughter of Ernst, my father’s bosom friend, who I later visited in hospital in Jerusalem before I was wounded too and hospitalized. Ruth, that sweet blond girl I’d loved as a child, limped for the rest of her life.

We reached Jerusalem on a Saturday. We didn’t know what day it was. The city was starving. The people clapped for us. In the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods they raised white flags and threw stones at us. I was angry. I went with Ari-nom-de-plume, who got down from the second truck, and we beat up a few of the stone throwers. They cursed us in Yiddish and shouted “Shabbess, Shabbess. No driving on the Sabbath!” Ari-nom-de-plume gave one of them a punch that flattened him against a wall and said, That’ll teach you what Shabbess is.

Twelve

Beit Yuba — an alternative name (and in the interest of good taste and the love I had for the man I’m going to tell you about, I’m changing his name too and I’ll call him N.). There was a vast gentleness in the village, which was set in an Eretz Yisrael landscape that no longer exists, on a hillside shaded by soft tamarisks and jujubes and thickly foliaged pines. It was a village that had witnessed bitter fighting that was now over. In our war there, after the wars of the Romans and the Crusaders who had faded away from our land, we had triumphed.

One of ours, whom I knew but whose name I don’t remember, was hanging from a tree, cut to ribbons and bound with ropes, his member stuck into his mouth. N. stood facing his mutilated comrade and his features contorted with rage. His wild hair stood on end, matted with dirt, his clothes torn, his feet in boots of different colors because they’d been taken from two different corpses — and he apparently cried out but we didn’t hear, and perhaps we’d already walked into the village and lay tired in the shade of a house under a fig tree, and were cleaning Stens and rifles, and searching for Arab records to take, and perhaps we heard the shouts but didn’t really care.

Earlier we’d climbed the hill shooting and singing. We sang “We are ascending and firing,” and a guy with a megaphone called to the Arabs to evacuate the village. The officers who’d sent us weren’t there. They were apparently sleeping at Pension Fefferman on the way to Ma’aleh HaHamisha, and perhaps they’d been listening to songs on the records we’d brought a few days earlier.

In the background Jerusalem broke through the mist that shrouded the whole mountain. In the big house next to which we sprawled we saw an old Arab sitting cross-legged on a torn blanket and covering his fly-infested body with his robes. In his eyes was a tiny smile, a kind of painful challenging disdain, or perhaps he felt betrayed by his splendidly dressed officers who had played the big hero but had already taken to their heels. He was evidently a man on his own trying to win a war with a disdainful smile. N. had yelled, We’ve got to kill everybody in the village, even the cats here are Arabs. Except for the bullet hole in the body that lay there, we didn’t see much.

N. drove off the crows that had gathered around the tree and looked for a while at the young man who’d been his close friend and was now hanging there with his dick in his mouth. He removed the young man’s boots, tried them on, and the Arab sitting cross-legged got up and started running. N. threw the boots at the crows, which had come fat and sated from a battle that had taken place not far from us, and from which we’d seen smoke rising and we realized that there, too, there were dead. The smell of the distant battle mingled with the smell of death here, and we fired at the fleeing Arab but missed. A crow hopped to our tree and one of the guys lying beneath the fig tree killed it.

I didn’t have a Sten but an American Thompson submachine gun I’d “borrowed” from a Jordanian soldier who’d been killed with a little help from me. We’d gone to blow up a house with five bags of TNT, and when it detonated the house collapsed in a graceful pirouette, the man was killed, and that’s where I found the weapon. I took it and asked what kind of ammunition you need for a Thompson and I was told we had it, and it became my personal weapon, and I gave my Sten to somebody else.

I went back to the yard and saw N. go into the house. He climbed in through a window and I suddenly saw somebody else, who looked as if he’d shrunk into himself. N. was incandescent with animosity, a terrible, almost divine hatred, it was impossible to see him through the loathing that clouded his face and moved over him, crawled on him, and cloaked even his arms and legs.

I stood outside the house by the window and was joined by a few of the guys, and we saw, in a shadowy corner, the body that the Arab had covered earlier, before he fled. Now, from some hiding place an Arab woman of about forty, maybe less, wearing a glittering Bedouin dress ran out. She was covered with black blood, the way blood is in real life, and she knelt the way Arab women know how to kneel, and intermittently wept and wailed half-swallowed words. N. stood silently, his mouth clamped shut, and his eyes were almost closed. He lowered his Sten and saw us standing by the window and smiled.

The Arab woman who knelt there he hated in a terrible silence because, he said, you can’t trust Arabs, even dead ones. Somebody yelled that dead Arabs come back with murder in their eyes, and the woman wept bitterly, and then into the big room came a withered old woman, her skin tattooed with blue lines and wrinkled from the sun. Her expression was one of wonderment. Her eyes were deeply sunken in their sockets. She blurted a few grating syllables and looked like a statue of a woman with a latticed face, scarred with blue lines. She looked out from her deep-sunken eyes with a questioning expression and grunted.

I went inside. The taboun oven emitted a strong smell of seared meat, ash, and burned bread. N. hit the old woman hard and shouted something unintelligible, and she fell, and with the force of her fall the dead body moved, and the younger woman leapt to face N., her eyes sparks of hostility, and she spat in his face; he looked at her, slowly wiped away her spittle as if he were enjoying this moment, glared at me, and smiled. He tore off her scarf and stuffed it into the old woman’s mouth, and she gurgled and it seemed like they wanted to escape, but she couldn’t even stand up, and he yelled: All Arab women are the means of production of murderers, you shit of a communist, amity among nations, you take a good look at Raffi’s green shirt, it’s his shirt that the Araboosh is wearing, I gave it to Raffi only yesterday, and now the Araboosh is wearing it and Raffi’s dead with his dick in his mouth.

N. pulled out a blunt sapper’s knife designed for slitting bags of TNT and began stabbing the younger woman. The whole gang, even those who’d been lying under the fig tree, now stood in silence by the wall whose windows opened onto the tree. I jumped to help the woman. They saw what I wanted to do and held me back. What’s wrong with you? they said. He’s your friend, isn’t he? Let him vent his anger. I said, Don’t let him kill her, and they shouted, Him? Her? What’s the difference? Ginger held me back with the terrible strength he had in his arms, and N. looked at me and laughed, Go play them some Bach with your intellectual of a father, you shit of a mama’s boy, you piece of nothing from that socialist Hashomer Hatzair, how can you fucking sleep at night with all the Arabs you’ve killed? What, the Arabs you shot aren’t amity among nations? Aren’t they your brothers, you piece of shit? They’re not binational? And what about Abdel Khader al-Husseini at the Castel?

And like an idiot I said, But it wasn’t me who killed him, it was someone who was with me who hit him, I fired but missed. As I said it I realized that perhaps I wanted to be the one who’d killed Abdel Khader al-Husseini at the Castel, and was ashamed of myself. N. said contemptuously, You fired and missed. You probably wanted to wipe his ass with amity among nations.

The woman went on shouting at N., Jabaar! Jabaar! You think you’re such a hero! And as if to spite him she managed to take the scarf out of the old woman’s mouth. N. dealt her a sharp samurai blow, the way we’d seen in a film a few months ago, and then he screamed and pinned the woman to the floor and blood burst from her mouth and eyes, and he shouted, Look at how she falls, look at how Arabs die, that’s how they fall and die, slowly, slowly, only Jews die on their feet or slashed to ribbons on a tree.

The back door opened and a little boy of about eight came running in. His belly was distended and flies swarmed around his hair like a coronet. I stood there staring and unfocused. N. grabbed the frightened boy whose face, under the dirt and soot from the taboun oven, I can’t really recall after more than sixty years, but I think it was lovely. The boy laughed nervously and seemed afraid, and N. held him close and shouted, Look at what a shit this little Arab is! The old woman groaned, and I shouted at N., Don’t touch him, he’s just a kid, have pity on him, and N. laughed, What, you’re worried about him, Bubbeleh*?

He held the boy with one hand and with the other brought the knife to his throat, and I could see the tremor in his hand from the power of his grip. The boy screamed, and N. gave an alien laugh and said to me, Will you sing him “The Bird Has a Nest Among the Trees”? Remember, you told me that you asked your teacher mother how can a nest be among the trees? What? The national poet Bialik didn’t know that nests aren’t among the trees but in them? A new spasm was expelled from the part of his soul that grew up with Arabs in the small town, and he shouted, What’s going to happen in ten years? This nice little boy will grow up and go home and take a rifle and come to your backyard and sit in the trees, and you and your father will whistle Beethoven to him, and he’ll shoot you in the balls. If you’ve got balls.

Stop it! I yelled, and the boy’s throat was already red, and Ginger shouted at me, What a baby you are, Yoram, leave N. alone, he’s angry. And I, who had loved N. for many years, before and after, trembled. I was flooded with a wave of anger and remorse. I aimed my Thompson at N. and said, Either you leave the boy alone or I’ll shoot you.

Beads of cold sweat dripped from my forehead. I was parched. The guys stood by the wall and were silent. I pissed my pants and the Thompson was shaking. N. burst out laughing. Listen, you Arab ass-kisser, if you shoot the kid then I won’t slaughter him and if you don’t shoot him, I’ll slaughter his dead mother too, who’s maybe not even dead. He kicked her. She moved and he said, The whore isn’t dead, look at how the Arabs die without dignity. And you, kill your poor kid already. Two minutes. If you don’t shoot the kid, I’ll start in with my knife.

Everybody stood waiting. I was standing there with all my seventeen and a half years and aimed the Thompson at N. I took careful aim, I felt the tension, my hands weren’t trembling now, I knew I was right, that mean rightness strengthened muscles in me I didn’t know I had, and I could hear the blood flowing in my veins and I thought of my father and my friends from Hashomer Hatzair, with their binational state, for which back then, and even now, I had the only conceivable solution but one I couldn’t live with, and I aimed at N. and a shot was heard. A cloud of dust rose, and N. was standing there alive and well, but the boy fell, like a butterfly at first and then dropped like a stone. The bullet was aimed at N., I know I was aiming at him, but it was the boy who was killed. I wasn’t the best shot in the world but not the worst either, and the range was only a little more than two meters. The bread in the taboun oven stank. Through the window I saw a dog running and an extinguished bonfire and vines and a crooked tamarisk and the mountains beyond it, and I saw Bab el-Wad in whose hills we would be buried when we died. I put out the taboun with a bucket of water that stood there, I covered the boy’s body with a bloodstained blanket, I kissed his face, and moved his mother toward him and covered her with my paratrooper jacket, and went outside.

I joined the guys who’d gone back into the shade of the tree and we lay down. Nobody said a word. N. came outside trembling and tried to hug me but I shoved him away. They looked at us, waiting for something, I didn’t know what.

Later we went back to Kiryat Anavim. We buried two dead, including Raffi who’d been hung on the tree, and I went into the tent and came out and went to one of the senior officers, if that’s what you could call them, and told him what had happened. He asked who’d been killed. I said I wouldn’t tell him. For some reason or another he didn’t realize that I’d murdered a child. The senior officers barely knew the fighters, we died unnamed. We kept quiet and went on fighting and dying, and the officers, except for a few, were busy being officers.

After a day on the grass I didn’t submit to indifference and brought charges against N. What charges! There wasn’t even a state yet. We were partisans. I gathered everybody on the lawn. Benny Marshak came, who didn’t really want the hullabaloo but realized that as the political commissioner he had to go along with me, and he ordered that a trial be held. Then, reluctantly, everybody sat down and smoked and I related what had happened. They pitied me for being such a fool. N. sat there smiling silently. When I’d finished, he got up and told a story. He told us that once, near his small town, there was a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz, and the kibbutzniks wanted amity among nations and used to invite the Arabs to their parties in the kibbutz dining hall. They’d dance with them. They liked them. When he spoke about how he peeled a cucumber, we’d drool. And he went on, There was one Arab, the nicest of them, whose name was Jamil. The kibbutz idiots would kiss Jamil for the world of tomorrow and amity among nations. And they’d bring him to their tents and feed him delicacies and try and teach him to read to bring culture to the oppressed. Then the fighting broke out and a gang attacked the kibbutz and who d’you think it was led by? Jamil. He knew every path and every tent. That amity among nations led them to the tents. He was the greatest ever in amity among nations, ala keyf keyf keyfaq—the great, great, greatest ever!

N. was such a good storyteller, he was the shaman of an ancient tribe, and smart, and everybody laughed and called me Jamil, and to this day there are some who meet me in the street, and say, Ahlan ya, Jamil—Hey there Jamil, and they hug me.

Afterwards we carried on singing. Nobody from the platoon, including N., ever told which of us had killed the boy at Beit Yuba. And I didn’t want to remember. I asked those who came out alive what had happened and they said, Enough, Jamil, nothing happened, and it’s expressly written that “Thou shalt not kill an infant,” and if the patriarch Moses says so, why would anyone kill?

After the war that child became an icon for me. N. told me, That’s not the important thing, Yoram Kaniuk — that’s what he always called me. What is important is that there’s a state and we established it in blood, and yes, there were some difficult moments but we were as full of holes as Swiss cheese, and d’you know how they make Swiss cheese? They take holes and wrap them in cheese. And who were we? The living dead, we were the holes in bagels and the holes in cheese. A kid, not a kid, so what?

But I killed him, I said, and he replied, That’s not certain. So who killed the boy? The Prophet Elijah? He said, You’ve shed enough blood, you took a couple of bullets, enjoy being alive. After all, your poet Alterman wrote, “Do not say from dust I came / From the living who fell before you, you came.”

I have related this stark event dozens of times; I did not tell about the warm, mournful smell that was there. Or the smell of blood. Or the shame. Not about the sweetness of squashed figs. Not about the misty morning with its scent of jasmine. I have not told about how, immediately afterward, I shaved my head with an old razor blade that left furrows in my scalp, and not one of the guys said a word about my unsightly baldness. What they knew, they kept to themselves. And I, too, kept quiet.

Thirteen

Afterward there were more battles, there was no time to sleep. As I write these lines I am very old and my mind is empty. I am the hole in the bagel. I do not remember more than what I write here, and perhaps I have invented some of my memories with the passing of the years. I know I fought at Siris, Beit Makhsir, the Castel, Nabi Samwil, Qaluniyya, Mount Zion, Saint Simeon’s Monastery, and in other places, I’m sure I was there, inside my closed eyes I can see those battles, but I can’t see myself in them. Did I really see what I saw? And where was the “me” who is present today, with all those days that I locked away inside me? And could have I dreamed it all?

I recall how one morning we’d come back from someplace whose name I’ve forgotten, and a cold wind was blowing. We walked through Jerusalem. Jordanian shells that came from the hills to the south of the city were falling all the time. People today don’t know the extent of Jerusalem’s suffering back then. In Rehavia, two people standing in line for water, behind a cart harnessed to a whinnying horse, were killed. The water spilled onto the sidewalk from the tanks on the cart and the horse took fright and overturned the cart, and people tried to soak up the water from the sidewalk with their headscarves and squeeze it out into their mouths, and a child licked the paving stones. The windows of the houses were darkened. We walked by a house whose wall bore an advertisement for the dancer Rina Nikova, and it said that she would be appearing at the Zion Cinema and that the audience should bring candles.

I was then sent to the headquarters of David Shaltiel, the Haganah commander in Jerusalem. On the way, by Notre Dame, I was accosted by a fat monk. He looked at me with jovial Christian compassion and said, You speak Hebrew good, you are fighting losing war, only Jesus will reign in Jerusalem, and he gave me a book called Light and Happiness so I’d see the light. I laughed because who’s the kid who’d want to see lights from monks. Laughing wasn’t very nice of me, the man looked pitiful because his God had got stuck here in a Valley of the Shadow of Death that had nothing to do with Him. I quoted Heine to him, who’d written, “The defeated Judah wrought a terrible vengeance on Rome and set Christianity against it, and its imperial battle cry sank to the praying whimper of priests and the trilling of eunuchs,” or so my father used to say.

He listened and was silent, and then he said that thousands of Jews had already seen the light. He told me that a young Jewish soldier had by chance been present at a Christian ritual and had suddenly found God, seen the light, and he’d wept and asked to join the church, and he was baptized here in Notre Dame and received Communion, and the next day he was killed in battle, not of the church but yours, and he was found not far from the Mount of Olives with Jesus on his lips and a cross in his hand, and his story was told to his family and they accepted the cross and converted to Christianity. I smiled at this sweet, rotund man, this solitary man who on the way to Hell would convert people, and who somehow knew I wouldn’t be easy prey, but if you’ve got God on your side why not try anyway. The fact is that his attempt was only halfhearted. I told him that Heine left his estate to his wife on the condition that she remarried, for that way, he wrote, there would be at least one man who regretted his death. The fat monk smiled and said, Come if you want. The church is waiting. I again quoted my father, who quoted Rabbi Huna, who said that if a man commits a transgression punishable by death, what must he do to live? If he is taught to read one page, he will read two, and if he is taught to study one chapter he will study two, and if he is not taught to read and study, what must he do to live? He will become the leader of the congregation and collector of alms and he will live.

The monk said, It’s probably hard to fight, isn’t it? I told him that a few days earlier I’d seen the head of one of our people stuck on a pole, and with things like that it really isn’t easy fighting, God wasn’t around, neither yours nor ours. And I said that when the French king’s army attacked the Cathars the commander of the army told the king that he couldn’t destroy the city because there were Catholics in it too, and the king said, Kill them all and God will do the selection afterward. I told him I’d read that in one of the stranger-than-fiction books I loved to read. He seemed surprised.

Shells exploded nearby, shots could be heard, a woman shouted or cried, and the monk evidently felt apologetic for his God and said, He’s the same God, and I told him, Ours can’t bear a son. He looked at me sadly, perhaps with compassion, for that’s what Jesus wanted, and he flushed and said, that poor man stranded in the land of wars and hatred, Jesus spoke with the lame and the halt and the rejected that the superior Jews forbade to enter the temple, for that was his power.

I left him and reached HQ. I think it was in the Schneller Compound. At the office door stood a toy soldier in a pressed uniform and I couldn’t even begin to imagine where it had come from. Because in Jerusalem there wasn’t yet a state and the Capital of Israel for All Eternity and a government, and these guys had already had uniforms made and even insignia on their shirt epaulets, and one of them saluted and I burst out laughing, and I was told that there’s a nice woman in Jerusalem who invented the rank stars. She lived in Nahlaot and had seen the rank insignia with the British when she used to sew shirts for their generals and mend their uniforms, and he told me that his commanding officer — the commander of Jerusalem whom I’d apparently come to see — had six stars sewed for him, just like the British who commanded the Jordanians.

I realized that this guy wasn’t a soldier like us but Shaltiel’s janitor. His uniform was pressed. Everyone there maintained distance from one another. Silence reigned and it was suffocating. I was taken in to Shaltiel who was dressed like a Mexican general complete with stars. Perhaps I’m confused and it was someone else on another occasion. Whoever he was, I laughed at the sight of him, and the Mexican general got to his feet and fixed me with an angry glare. I told him that where I’d come from there aren’t many live soldiers, and we hadn’t yet had uniforms made. Today I don’t remember either why I was there or my assignment, but that place, the room in the depths of the horror all around, the devastating arrogance of the moment, were puzzling. I evidently said something that offended the Mexican general and I was quickly shown out, after conveying a message whose content I don’t remember.

I walked to Talbieh, to the building that had housed the British military court and that had been evacuated several days earlier. Some of the guys came and collected me. We walked and sang with eyes closed from fatigue through the empty and sad and whipped and bleeding streets of Jerusalem. A small, funny, roly-poly elderly man who was transparent and sad, said in a German accent, Don’t sing because there’s shooting here, and if you sing they won’t be burying you in any Bab el-Wad but here, on Jaffa Road.

In the morning the cold hung over us and stung. There was a parade and we were divided into two groups. I was in the second one. We were allotted to homes for the Passover Seder. I waited until evening and set out for Beit Hama’alot. I poked around in the big military court building and found half a loaf of dry bread in the corner of one of the rooms; it apparently had belonged to a British soldier. I also found some mallow and vine leaves in a yard, and in a garden I found a flower dying for water, went on my way, and then climbed quite a lot of stairs to the family’s apartment, and all the time could hear shells falling. I reached the door and knocked — there was no electricity for a bell — the door was opened suspiciously and I gave the flower to a nice woman, who smiled, and I then gave her the dry bread, the mallow, and the leaves.

We were seated around the table. A nice yekke, German-origin, family. The man of the house told me that he knew Walter Katz, a good friend of my father’s who lived in Jerusalem. He also told me that he’d been a friend of theirs back in Munich, which he pronounced München. They were particularly pleased with the bread. The woman looked at it with unrestrained fondness and said, So what shall we do, close the windows tightly so as not let the Lord of Hosts peep in, and say that it’s matzo?

On the table was a plate with some sardines, one tired tomato, the bit of salad stuff I’d brought, and a cucumber their daughter had found in one of the yards. The flatware was beautiful. There was no water but there was a bottle of wine and a gramophone. It was playing a beautiful Brahms string sextet, which I found very touching amid the vortex of shame I was caught up in. I perhaps allowed myself to shed a tear and was amazed that I had any fluid in my eyes because I’d been drinking barely one cup of water a day. The thudding of the shells spoiled the music. Through the window I heard a prayer of yearning rising. I saw a bird on the window ledge and the husband said, A bird, it’s all right for a bird, it can also be in other places. The cold didn’t stop stinging. The wife asked how old I was and I said, Ten minutes to eighteen, and she laughed because perhaps she wanted to cry, and her husband said, You’re the youngest here, you’ll ask the four questions, and handed me a Haggadah*. There was hardly any light but I managed to read the questions because as I said earlier, I had excellent night vision. Just like at every Passover I laughed at what I thought was a meaningless riddle, and everybody sang the chorus, and a vast but restrained sorrow hung in the air, and we were lonely together facing an invisible and incomprehensible world behind shuttered windows.

The shells didn’t stop falling and endowed the tranquility enveloping us with a savage tom-tom-like leitmotiv. I thought, What are all these words of the Haggadah, what do they mean, perhaps they’re a code to fool the Romans. The loaf was passed from hand to hand and we each tore off a bit, and the husband blessed the bread and called it matzo, and said, God, don’t look. I heard a siren, people outside shouted, Be careful, God knows of what, a dog howled and the wife threw it a bit of her bread saying, Poor doggie.

I swallowed a rancid sardine but who noticed things like that, I drank some wine and thought what would happen if we had to go into battle and I’m here and didn’t know about it, but everything passed quietly. We sang Passover songs, they had Haggadahs from Germany with pages in which you could slide a piece of card and see Moses’s crib in the bulrushes. We sang what we remembered. They and I remembered the same tunes but not all the words.

Someone knocked on the door. A young man came in with the dog and moved from person to person kissing them, and he was apparently half blind because he kissed me too. From a satchel he carried he took a few biscuits and a bottle of water he’d picked up from a water seller on the way. The dog looked scared, its tail drooping, but a dim, wise hope flared in its eyes. The wife gave it half a biscuit and its tail pricked up and wagged and stroked us, it had hair as soft as cotton wool. A shell exploded not far away. The windows rattled but that did not stop our weeping. We sat and cried. We sang, “Who Knows One” with made-up mistakes; if God hadn’t died in Bergen-Belsen he’d have died on hearing the words. We sat reclining as it is written and wept on the rivers of Babylon in unbuilt Jerusalem. That was the most beautiful moment I experienced in that fucking war.

Fourteen

We lived in the barn at Kiryat Anavim for a while and afterward under the vast roof of the cowshed, which perhaps was empty but maybe not completely. I later lived in a big tent at the entrance to the kibbutz. Every now and then I’d find myself sitting in the dining hall opposite a jerk who kept a pack of Latif cigarettes in his shirt pocket. It opened from the top. Inside it he kept an Arab’s ear. Each time he was asked he said he’d harvested it in a different place. When he took the ear out in the dining hall to chew on it the way you chew gum, there were girls who fled and that way he got a bit more food. It wasn’t right for us not to reproach him but we were tired and hungry, and we went out to some battle every night, and we’d get one or two cups of water a day for drinking and washing, and there were some who even washed their clothes with one cup of water.

Once a truck with water arrived, I’ve no idea from where. We set up a field shower and it was crowded. The dirt that washed off people’s bodies looked like black stones and it moved like jelly. The smell was heavy. I tried to wash myself in the little water there was, and then we all stood naked looking for a sliver of soap, and because I can’t stand naked men or women near me, I hid inside myself. Even when I took a crap I didn’t go with everyone into a field but sat by myself and tried to hide, and the smell was pungent and hard. That’s the way it was.

Before we went out to battle we’d say to the kibbutz oldsters, Dig the graves as fast as you can because we’re on the way. There was this sentence we’d repeat: “The officers gave the order to go and the privates went straight to hell.” In between, we tried to live.

A tall, tanned woman wearing shorts and boots, with a distant, empty expression on her face, was walking along a kibbutz path and stopped by me and called me by my name, and after a few words she invited me to her room. A scrubbed room. It looked like it had been licked clean, and that was when there was no water. Empty orange boxes, and books too, which served as a table and chairs, and on the walls there was a painting by Schur and another by Käthe Kollwitz. She took out an old record from somewhere that told me it was a Deutsche Grammophon issue, which I knew from my father’s collection by the tiny rim protruding above its grooves, and it was wrapped in rags.

She said she knew who I was and had asked about me, and that her husband was an Austrian violinist from Graz whose hand had been injured when they fled or something, I don’t know exactly, but even during the flight, in the forests, he’d wrapped the record up in rags and protected it, and afterward they’d reached Haifa on the Knesset Yisrael, and from there to Cyprus, and then secretly back to Palestine, and he’d even protected the record when standing in line for the toilet on the boat. He said he’d once stood in line for five hours, all the while clasping the record to his chest, and he said that the boat’s commander was surprised by the fact that the man with the shattered hand wouldn’t let go of the record. He invited him to his cabin and gave him a tangerine. And the woman explained that there, aboard that boat, was God’s luminosity. She said that the commander told him that if he reached Palestine he had to go up to Jerusalem — where the commander, was born — and go up to Mount Scopus and see the most glorious sunrise in the world.

The woman was standing and I was sitting, and she said, After a year in Cyprus he managed to escape but didn’t have the hands to play again. He walked from Haifa to Tel Aviv with the record, and British policemen stopped him, and he told them in Hebrew that he didn’t speak any language, and they took pity on him and laughed, and said, What’s that you’ve got there, and he showed them, and they laughed again and let him go, and he reached Tel Aviv. He asked where the Tel Aviv Museum was and reached Rothschild Boulevard, and Partos, his childhood friend from Vienna, was rehearsing a Mozart quartet there. Partos introduced him to your father, Kaniuk the museum director, and your father asked him where he was going, and he said to Jerusalem, and your father said, The city’s under siege. He said he was going because the commander of the boat that brought him had said that he had to see the sunrise in Jerusalem. Your father said he thinks perhaps he’s got a son someplace there.

The man left the museum and somehow got to Jerusalem. He went up to Mount Scopus, saw the sunrise, and a car stopped by him with a man in it who got out to piss, and he saw the poor guy standing there with his record in the middle of nowhere, and said he was going to Kiryat Anavim and that he’d take him there. At the kibbutz office the man told them that the commander of the boat he’d come on had sent him.

The woman stopped for a moment, looked at me, and I saw a small tear wending its way from her eye and she said, I was on dining-hall duty. He came in and was so polite, starving, but polite. And what was there to eat? I saw how he took the dry bread and the leaves and the quarter sardine and he seemed to be the hungriest man I’d ever met. He ate ravenously, trembling, but politely. They gave him custard and he said that Amnon, the boat’s commander, told him that they eat fresh fruit in Eretz Yisrael. I told him I was sorry, but there’s none left. There was a kind of enigmatic, curious otherness in him. He was his own man. We got married two days later, without a rabbi. Just a few friends on the lawn. We broke a glass too. He wanted to fight but he was told that he hadn’t been taught how to fight in Bergen-Belsen, so they let him escort a convoy. Later he said he’d heard he had a cousin in a place called the Etzion Bloc in the West Bank, and I told him not to go, it was too dangerous, and tried to dissuade him, but he insisted and said he had to because the cousin is the only relative he’s got in the world.

She’d wept and told him that she loved him, and remember, things like that were left unspoken back then. He told her that she is the only love he had in his life. And he said he was alone. That his whole family had perished. The woman looked at me and went on with her story: At night as I slept, he got up, and I saw him getting up and didn’t let on. I don’t remember how, but I heard he’d reached Kfar Etzion. Two days later somebody brought me a letter he’d sent, it was in German and I didn’t understand it. One of the kibbutz members read it to me and I knew it was a kind of eulogy. There was a big assault at the time, there was a massacre at Kfar Etzion, and my husband was burned alive.

They brought his body back here. It was decided that he should be buried in the cemetery close to the Palmach plot, but we didn’t have his papers, we didn’t even know who he was, except for the fact that his name was Kurt. We didn’t know his surname. His passport was forged, with a photograph of an eighty-year-old man, a passport the Haganah gave him when they gave them out for the illegal immigrant ships. They make a hundred like it in an evening and simply stuck in any old photograph. By feel.

She spoke dryly. She said that the record should be mine. Kurt said that your father told him how much his son, that’s you, loves this Bach fugue and that by pure chance, that’s what this record is. He was my beloved.

I, the youth of then, envied her as she uttered the words “my beloved.” I went back to the tent. Perhaps it was hot. Maybe cold. I don’t remember. The guys brought their gramophone and set it up and played the Arab records we’d brought the previous night or maybe in the morning or the afternoon. The records were made of Bakelite and after listening to them they’d smash them on the rocks. Those songs suddenly got on my nerves, I missed something else apart from Abdel Wahab and his trilling, and I asked them to let me play a record I’d been given as a present. Go right ahead, they said.

They lay on the rags that were called beds back then, or knelt on the ground, and as usual tried to imagine the taste of a tomato that N. had described with his terrible talent. I played the record and felt good. It felt like being a child. To be in peace. To be at home with my parents. With the sea. With my friend Amos and our animals, with the anemones in the field below before you get to Hayarkon Street, and with the yellow fire plants by the Muslim graves, by the sea, and quietude came to me.

Back then I thought that by changing two letters of the Hebrew krav, battle, you got kever, grave. And the same Hebrew root gives you morning and test and visit and battle and decay. I sat and listened and replayed the record over and over, with the words playing in my head, until the guys had had enough and said, Yalla, enough already, but I couldn’t stop. They got mad, What’s with you, mama’s boy, enough of your Beethoven, and I said, It’s Bach, and they said, Beethoven, Bach, it’s all the same shit, and I could see they were about to jump me. I grabbed my Thompson, aimed at them, and yelled that if anybody moved I’d shoot, and you already know that I killed a kid so I can definitely do the same to you. With one hand I wound up the gramophone and held the Thompson in the other and played the record a few more times until they fooled me, they came up behind, grabbed me, threw me down, grabbed the record, and threw it to shatter on the rocks. That poor, old, wonderful record from Berlin shattered into smithereens. I got up and went out, I don’t remember where to.

That evening an operation was cancelled and the whole battalion was called to the cowshed basement. That’s where, every now and again, we’d hear greetings from home on a battery-powered radio. We all sat quietly. Dado, David Elazar, who was the best-loved of all the commanders, ordered us to keep quiet. The radio broadcast all kinds of greetings, we were all tense, and then the announcer said: “For Yoram Kaniuk, somewhere in Eretz Yisrael. On your eighteenth birthday your parents send their congratulations and would like us to play the record you loved as a child.” And then, in the deepest silence imaginable, they were forced to listen once more to my little fugue.

That was perhaps the best thing that has ever happened to me on any birthday. It was a sweet revenge. An embrace from my parents and sister.

Fifteen

The battle at Nabi Samwil was one of the bitterest and one of the stupidest in the War of Independence. I was not part of the assault on the hill overlooking the road to Jerusalem — we were sent in four armored vehicles with a Davidka mortar, which sometimes fired too, as a diversion from the rear. We drove in the direction of Beit Iksa, close to the British radar station, on an operation we didn’t exactly know much about. Everything I write now is not completely clear to me. I’d forgotten the battle. For more than thirty years it lay quenched inside me.

One day, thirty years after, I drove in my poor old Simca 1000 to the Sidna Ali beach and gazed at the water and it was beautiful and calm, and below I saw youngsters swimming naked and laughing aloud, and a woman shouted in a foreign language and looked like a dolphin, perhaps she was a volunteer from Finland, and from the water a memory surfaced, as good as new, which had been hidden away inside me and had refused to come out. I looked at it the way you watch a film. I drove home and wrote what I’d remembered. But what I wrote is not necessarily what happened.

I remembered that our commander kept the operation order to himself. I was in the vehicle with the Davidka, which when we fired it made more noise than it caused damage, but it was all we had. On the way we were ambushed. Mines overturned three of the vehicles. We extricated ourselves and took the Davidka and its huge shells. The fourth vehicle wasn’t hit. Gavrush, the driver of the fourth vehicle’s commander and the Harel Brigade’s greatest exponent of the art of driving, managed to turn the vehicle around. We were already under fire and there were wounded. The officer who was in the vehicle said he was going back to Ma’aleh HaHamisha to get help. We told him that there was nobody there who could come because they were all taking part in the big attack with Puza, who we didn’t know had already been killed, and we pleaded with him not to go, but if he was going and leaving us then at least he should tell us what we were supposed to do and take some of the wounded with him. He looked stressed and angry and said that he’s in a hurry to call help, which he would of course find, and can’t stop now and he’ll soon be back with reinforcements. I’m still waiting for him to come back.

We remained in the open under heavy fire. We didn’t know what to do. Did we really take off our shirts to bandage the wounded? Did we really run out of shirts? Were there really crows in the sky dancing like God’s clowns, little bastards that looked like toy Hasidim or converted penguins, lacking the magnificence of an eagle or the vulture that settled deep in the sky and regarded us with contempt, us, the not yet dead. The living were of no interest to it, it swooped down onto a corpse but not onto the wounded.

The crows put on a show, perhaps to entertain the vulture, but it scorned them too, and we’d run out of ammunition and fired the Davidka and the shell fell into the no-man’s-land between us and the enemy and didn’t explode. Where was I exactly? I once asked Uri Bogin, a true hero who died a long time ago and was born in Kfar Malal, and he said we were lying behind terraces. I asked him if he remembered us playing dead and he said he didn’t. He was a strong man. A farmer. The scene I had in my mind wasn’t in his. He was older than me. I asked him if the Arabs didn’t dare to touch the Davidka shell because we used to scratch all kinds of dials on the huge shells, and we’d heard them talking on the radio about an atomic bomb and they waited for the Jordanians to blow it up.

Uri said perhaps that was true but he doesn’t remember exactly if there’d actually been a Davidka shell there. I remembered that there’d been nowhere to run to. The sky above us was vast, spread out, and ugly with all the glints of the screaming crows, and I remember that we played dead because the enemy was above us and could see us, they saw each and every one of us precisely, and we were all lying by ourselves and trying to find cover. I remember that next to me was the friend of my youth, Menachem, who went to school with me, and my mother was his teacher, and I’m not at all sure that he liked me particularly, perhaps because I was a year younger and the son of his teacher and the museum director, but I liked him and we lay there close to each other. Uri said he thinks that Menachem was farther away and that somebody else was lying next to me, and he said I was exposed and didn’t have the sense to find cover and that’s why I think I played dead. The terror in that place was indeed great.

I remember that we were afraid to move; we realized that they could see the whites of our eyes so we shut them. We heard them laughing. That was the decisive moment in the history of the Davidka, which by not exploding had done its job and saved us from slaughter.

Through my closed eyes I saw them brewing coffee over a fire, the wind carried the smoke toward us, and there was much gaiety there. They were in no hurry, and sang, and got bored and fired at us even though they thought we were dead, and they shouted in Hebrew because maybe they thought that dead Jews understood Hebrew. They shouted, “We’re killing the dead yahud,” and it sounded like a poem, “We’re Killing Dead Jews,” and all the time the sham dead were being wounded and so were the already wounded, and we couldn’t move. I felt something warm oozing onto my right hand, and through the slits of my eyes I saw the vulture gliding like some god over Menachem. I realized that what I’d felt oozing onto my hand was Menachem’s blood. It oozed slowly, I didn’t hear a sound. Perhaps Uri’s right and Menachem bled someplace else, but for me he died next to me. And the crows danced to entertain the vulture and the sun was mantled in a shroud of mist, and I wanted to shout but I had no voice. I heard they said that Menachem had blown himself up with a grenade. If that’s the case then it wasn’t Menachem who died beside me, but the dead don’t care about being mixed up.

After about three, maybe four hours, I straightened up. Something horrifying made me dare, as if I’d decided to commit suicide, I couldn’t carry on getting shot at every few minutes — we could hear the bullets exiting the rifle muzzles and we heard the whistle of the shots and we waited for death and didn’t die, those who weren’t dead, that is. I knew that in the end one of those bullets would hit me. Through my shut eyes I saw the rifle muzzles of the people firing at us by the campfire, and without asking anyone we suddenly became three who stood up, and separately but together we started running up the hill toward Ma’aleh HaHamisha.

At first the enemy didn’t grasp what was happening. When they did they started shooting again. They fired like maniacs but apparently because of the surprise their aim was off and we managed to reach a coppice and were swallowed up among the trees. Feeling helpless, half dead, tired, thirsty, and hungry we reached headquarters at Pension Fefferman. There was nobody there except for a frightened nurse who looked at us like we were shadows. She’d apparently seen the battle from the hill and perhaps she was frightened because we looked like dead men. She bandaged us and perhaps even gave us some clothing, my memory has been erased here, and we took off to find the commander who’d fled. One of us, whose name I think was Mizrachi, ran to find him and kill him, but he was told that he’d been flown in a Primus to the fighting in the Negev.

Only that night we heard that the main battle at Nabi Samwil had been a resounding failure. On that hill there were dozens of dead and many wounded, including those from our side who had died. I searched for Menachem, but he was nowhere to be found. I think I was shell-shocked or battle-fatigued, which was unknown back then, and I entered a frozen desolation, and apparently ran and leapt, I dimly remember how I was there, looking for my friend who died beside me, and perhaps I drank some water, perhaps I hit myself, perhaps I looked for the vulture that could no longer be seen. We had been twenty-three men, and eight came back, or so I think.

A friend told me later that he was sent to check out the dead on the hill. There were some, he said, that had been found killed by their own hand, by a grenade or gunshot. Commanders had disappeared and apparently hidden. There were those who fought, but without a commanding officer they didn’t know what they were doing exactly, and didn’t know whether they were firing at their own men or the enemy, who fought bravely and surprised us, employing excellent stratagems. It was then quietly decided, without saying a word, that there would be no further discussion of this battle. To this day the Palmach safeguards the secret of Nabi Samwil. Instead of investigating the fuckup they let it pass. That’s a pity. Heroism is not only in winning but also in failure. Failure in war or art or anything else can be an encouragement, to invent wise consolation and vanquish the next failure with itself.

Six months later, my leg in a cast and moving with difficulty, I went to my dear friend Menachem’s home by the sea, not far from the Tel Aviv harbor. His mother was standing by the ricinus tree in their yard, and his father, an old teacher, was watering a dried-up tree and wore a faded wide-brimmed hat. I told his mother what had happened and how we were fired on and how Menachem had died beside me and I survived, and she gave me a bitter smile and said, Pity it wasn’t the other way around.

Sixteen

I don’t remember when we went out to the slaughter mistakenly called the Battle of Saint Simeon’s Monastery. I didn’t take part in the first attack. I think I’d been asked to sort ammunition at Kiryat Anavim or in Jerusalem and apparently didn’t continue with the forces, and I remember feeling guilty about not being there. Some of my friends were and one of them came back and gave me a watch that belonged to a guy who’d died, because mine was broken, and the watch that belonged to the dead friend had a leather cover so it wouldn’t shine in the dark. I did take part in the second attack, a few hours later. Perhaps we’d come from a building on the fringes of the Katamon neighborhood in Jerusalem, or Givat Shaul in West Jerusalem, or from the Valley of the Cross. We’d apparently waited. I remember a mess of charred bushes, shells, a thorny bush pricking me, the roar of vehicles from afar, grave-looking stone buildings, and gunfire.

We charged and were shelled and took rifle and machine-gun fire, and I’d reached a green-shuttered building adjacent to the monastery. The firing intensified. There was a lofty coppice of pine trees. All I could think of was that the poet Tschernichovsky’s wife had lived in the monastery. I remember shouting and more gunfire. There was a terrace, and we lay by it, and after a while went up or down and I’d somehow reached the building with the green shutters, where a fire broke out whose stench was awful, and we took the building and then the monastery.

I saw somebody walking through the smoke, and an Arab armored vehicle fired on us as we went in, and then another one. Every time shrapnel hit one of the monastery bells it tolled as if we were at a funeral in a small American town. After the battle, which I don’t remember, we took over the monastery and, I think, two adjoining buildings, one of which was apparently the one with the green shutters. The assault on us intensified and now we were under siege. We were surrounded by a determined enemy firing with everything they had. And they had a lot. We had bubkes, nothing — a few mortars and Williams machine guns. I remember terror and how Raful — Rafael Eitan — who later became chief of the general staff, was wounded and that I helped him into a chair on a table so he could carry on firing. Somebody yelled at him to stop and let the medic attend to him, and with a wail he’d shouted, But I’m killing the enemy!

I was lightly wounded, and then ran out of ammunition. Shklar the medic, who was a Holocaust survivor, though I don’t remember how he came to our battalion, rescued a body from the other side of the courtyard because he saw the enemy approaching and was afraid they’d start mutilating it, and then ran from one wounded man to the next, and stopping by me, smiled, gave me some ammunition, and I carried on firing. After a while Dado our commander came in and took me and another guy outside. I’ve no idea why. There was a cloister, with just a few meters separating us from the enemy, and we had to run between the low wall and the monastery building. It was like being in a tunnel of death, and people were dropping every minute, dead or wounded. I saw two young women in the entrance. They said they were nuns. I didn’t remember seeing them earlier. Dado ran upward and I looked for a cigarette. Somebody fired at me and I crouched. The bullet hit one of the women who’d said they were nuns. I looked at her. The shot shook her body. Her gray dress was cut to ribbons. Someone yelled at me to come up, then he died and fell at my feet. All this time we could hear the savage screams of the attackers. A pall of smoke rose from the flames. I went back down again because somebody called me, but he fell, wounded. When I got back the nun’s clothing had been pulled up. That was the first time I’d seen female nudity. She was young.

Grenades were thrown. We came under fire from three-inch mortars and I saw a line of fire above me. Yelling came from above. I stood mesmerized by the half-naked woman. I still had the ammunition Shklar had given me, and again I was called to come up, Benny Marshak took a bullet in his jaw and somebody laughed and said that now Benny wouldn’t be able to shout, with the plaster stuck over his mouth, and after he said that he too took a bullet and fell dead. I kept on firing like crazy. I don’t know at whom. I only remember the direction. I went back down to the nun. Her pudendum was clear to see. Since then it’s been hard to look at pudenda even though I’ve had need of them. I drew her dress over her body. I was hit in the arm by a bullet and Shklar tossed me an iodine-soaked rag with which I dabbed at the wound, and the dead nun, if she was indeed a nun, was dressed again, and I closed her eyes and mouth. It was difficult, her mouth didn’t want to close and I had to push, and Dado said to Raful that we had no chance of survival but we’d fight to the end.

I heard, I don’t remember how, that they’d placed explosives on the floors of the rooms to blow up the badly wounded if we were forced to withdraw, because we couldn’t evacuate them. In a big room the wounded lay sadly, silently, looking around, and it seemed they understood what was going to happen to them. One of them shouted something to me, perhaps he recognized me, and died. Another was bleeding into his own mouth. They each clutched a grenade so they wouldn’t be taken prisoner. Anybody not dead or wounded carried on firing. Raful yelled that they’re Iraqis, the ones with the field gun. Time passed. I don’t know where it went, but it was clear that we would be killed.

Then it was decided that we had to retreat. The pity of it, we just didn’t leave wounded behind. A thin spray of blood spattered me and I wasn’t sure if it was mine or Hanan’s, who I’d seen running and firing, climbing upward. Somebody dragged the nuns’ bodies to the rear, I don’t know where, the firing intensified and I ran out of ammunition, and nobody near me had any. We all felt we had no chance, that the Arabs were many and fought well, when suddenly, in the distance, we saw enemy vehicles moving out, perhaps to the Etzion Bloc that was fighting for its life. Someone yelled that the enemy’s retreating, and I looked through a small gate and saw them moving out, carrying their wounded, I saw their dead bodies sprawled on the rocks.

I think the sun rose, perhaps there was an easterly desert wind, perhaps not, I used my sleeve to press into my wound and the blood slowly stopped flowing, and Dado shouted, They’re retreating, give them everything you’ve got. One of the battalion’s platoons, along with a force from Jerusalem, managed to reach us bringing weapons and ammunition, and they’d brought water with them as well. Benny Marshak danced with rage because he couldn’t shout. The Jerusalem force treated the wounded in silence. Dado looked at the retreating enemy and said, We were eyeball to eyeball, and they blinked first. And it had happened that five minutes before our expected surrender, Ari-nom-de-plume had appeared and come over to me. He’d started to say something, I heard gunfire, and he fell dead. I kissed him on the mouth. He was the only man I’ve kissed in my whole life. We gathered our many dead in a corner on the roof. Afterward, perhaps an hour later, maybe more, it was all over.

We went down to the Katamon neighborhood and took it after a short battle. On the way back we saw the Jerusalemites looting as we walked through the city singing, and the residents who weren’t looting applauded us. The residents of Katamon with its splendid buildings had fled, leaving behind food on the tables and unmade beds. In one home there was a huge radio yelling in Arabic. Someone fired at it and killed it. The homes were of wealthy people. We’d never seen such magnificence. Gold. Huge mirrors. Gleaming kitchens, crystal chandeliers, and lots of food. Silver dishes. Bottles of drinks standing in ranks like soldiers. We ran from house to house. There were still a few fighters firing at us, and after a while, maybe hours, we fell asleep in the houses. It was quiet, and there were some who ate the food that had been cooked before our arrival. I couldn’t eat because I had the taste of Ari-nom-de-plume in my mouth, but I drank a bottle of water and slept.

An armored vehicle came along on which we loaded the bottles, mainly the big ones, containing champagne, and we reached someplace, maybe it was Kiryat Anavim, or perhaps somewhere else. We got undressed, all the ones that hadn’t been killed, and stood in line naked, and poured the champagne over one another. We were like soldiers who’d reached Paradise, pouring over one another a wonderful beverage which back then we didn’t know much about. I know today that we were the first soldiers in history to bathe in sparkling champagne instead of drinking it. I felt heavenly little ants crawling over me and we licked our bodies and then poured over ourselves a brown liquid with a pleasing bouquet, which we later learned was French cognac.

It was a real party, and we sang in hoarse voices, “Who’s that standing on my grave and doesn’t know how to behave,” with its idiotic ending, “With the fiftieth blow Katrina still hadn’t died, and with the fifty-first blow Katrina still hadn’t died.” We gulped and got drunk and afterward got dressed and took our dead and buried them.

At the graveside we sang “Ama’s got a cataract / Ama loves me madly / I sit with him upon the rocks / And hope it does end badly,” and Benny didn’t like it — he removed the bandage from his jaw and yelled, Sing something else, and wanted to know why we disrespected the great moments, the birth of the Jewish nation, for now all of Jewish Jerusalem would be unified and be ours until the end of time. Back then we didn’t know the equivalent of the end of time.

A few days later we went somewhere whose name I no longer remember. Benny shouted that we’re going to conquer Ramallah, which had the best radio station in the country, but we didn’t conquer it because we couldn’t. The enemy fought well, and our Fifth Battalion, which fought at Sheikh Jarrah* on the road to Ramallah, didn’t manage to take the neighborhood, and Davidka mortar shells killed two of our guys, two unfortunates who were manning the mortar as it blew up in their faces. That night it rained and pools of water formed that gleamed in the morning sun. In one of the villages somebody found some chocolate and we ate it. Someone said he’d seen a Piper, which was carrying explosive pipes whose fuse was lit with a match and dropped on a group of Arab fighters. They made a lot of noise and scared the Arabs, but the damage was minimal.

Maybe thirty years later, Dado called to invite me to a swearing-in ceremony for recruits on Masada. I asked why me, and he said he’d invited several poets, but I was special because he remembered me from Saint Simeon’s. I asked him what he remembered and he said there’d been a moment when I’d fired and saved his life. I didn’t remember it, but of course I went, and we met at the Sdeh Dov airfield. Dado welcomed me, and with two other officers we boarded a helicopter, and I told him that Itzik Manger had written that when the last of the Gypsy kings died, ten thousand violinists had played in his memory — and on seeing his amazed expression I added that Manger had probably meant to say that ten thousand Jewish kings had played in memory of one Gypsy violinist.

I was pretty scared in the helicopter because the pilot, who had some very senior officers on board, stunned us with his aerobatics. He flew into wadis then climbed, and I was shaking, and the officer sitting next to me shouted — because it’s noisy in a helicopter and you’ve got to shout to be heard — that the helicopter is an extremely safe aircraft. His name was Talik — Yisrael Tal. At the ceremony I went to sit where I’d stood before the war, when I’d seen the lights of Paradise. Talik came over and sat next to me and said he wanted to talk to me about Leibniz. I looked at him. We sat on the cliff edge and talked about Leibniz and Spinoza for a long time. It was a time of grace. Behind us the recruits were sworn in, soldiers who would die in the wars to come, and somebody sang a silly song. We sat on the Masada cliff edge facing the desert where you could still see God, even if He wasn’t there and even if it was impossible to believe in Him even if I’d shoot Him, were He to exist. In the vastness of the dark it seemed that He was still there, continuing to create the world, crumpling mountains, slicing hills, painting yellow mountains in red. Since that evening I’ve loved Talik, the man who would replace Dado as commander of the Armored Corps and become the father of the Merkava tank.

Seventeen

I can barely remember the girls in the brigade. They were older than me. They belonged to the big, strong, senior guys, and to me they seemed as if they’d come from another world. I was shy, but I wanted some gentleness to touch, and a dream came to me that I remember to this day, sixty-two years later. I dreamed I was sitting in a deck chair on Frishman Beach in Tel Aviv with an older girl, her hair falling onto me as she bent over me, her lips moving closer to mine, and suddenly a kiss materializes out of nowhere, outside me and outside her. And the girl shifts and says something nice, and I look at her and she fades away.

I remember that after Jimmy’s body was brought to the church in Abu Ghosh, his father, the painter Menachem Shemi, raised the blanket covering him and didn’t make a sound. He took out a sketchbook and pencil and for a long time drew his dead son’s face, and not a muscle in his own face moved. He was concentrating as if he himself had died instead of his handsome son.

Afterward I was taken by a girl, I can’t remember who, to drink water from a jara. We sat in the shade of an old fig tree. She said she’d had enough of all this death. Perhaps I loved her for a moment. She put the jara down in the shade and said, Guess what I’m dreaming about? And I thought, What does a girl dream about? Death is the opposite of a young woman and it ruled everything. We’d just seen a painter sketching his dead son. What does she dream about? I didn’t know and she forgot her question, which hung in the air after she got up and vanished, and I remember thinking that I wanted her to go even though it was the pleasantest, most tranquil, sweetest, and wonderful moment I’d had in my life so far, which had been pretty short at the time.

Our Palmach girls dressed simply, which didn’t detract from their beauty. During the war they left their dreams for another time, but this friend couldn’t withstand the temptation despite the sodium bicarbonate they gave us to suppress our sexual desire, as it was called back then. This friend, not really a friend, we had a few photographs that had been taken of us together, met a girl, gave her a child, and became a father at an age at which we still thought we’d go back home and our mother would breastfeed us.

There was another girl who brought water or milk to the fighters, I don’t remember where we were. For me she epitomized our lost innocence; for her beauty, or force, was solely an option. She was apparently a Zionist. She believed in purity of the spirit. Her mental angle neutralized pathos. Then eyes met the exposed knee but the knee was exposed not like today, to sell meat, not like today where the woman is meat on a hook in the market with everything exposed, but because of the weather, and because it was nice when the wind caressed the leg, stroking it with silent words. Back then they sang: “The wind ruffles the hem of her dress.” She is eternally frozen in my memory, passing alone between the sandbags, her expression shy, her shirt buttoned, on her head a steel helmet that had perhaps been taken as booty, shy and smiling, something humble in her, but not without strength. Back then a young girl was like a floral coronet adorned with a bunch of thistles, her sweet, innocent, and sad expression was part of a secret.

Eighteen

One day we heard that the British were leaving the Generali Building in Bevingrad, which was their largest complex in Jerusalem. We drove into the city in armored vehicles and trucks and waited until they left, but were too late. The Jerusalemites had swooped on the complex the moment the British left and taken most of the clothing, and by the time I got there, dressed in my filthy rags, all that was left was a British sailor’s white shirt with its striped collar, just like the ones we wore as kids when we went to have our photograph taken in Nachalat Binyamin Street.

I walked with somebody, possibly my friend Avinoam, perhaps down the street, and it was pleasant, the shells falling on us in heaps but we paid no heed, if one kills us then it’ll kill us, and the experts said back then that everyone had a number. We’d take out the only photo of our unit, where and when it was taken I don’t remember, and we’d black out the dead and look at ourselves in the knowledge that tomorrow or the day after they’d be blacking us out too. I imagined being the pungent stink of a corpse, which wasn’t in my imagination at all but the stink of real corpses that were lying in a shop doorway. We lost our way and ended up in Me’a She’arim*.

There was a morning mist or it was a gray afternoon, I remember that walking was difficult, as if the blast of the shells was pushing us back. Nobody paid any attention to the bodies in the doorway and our senses were swept up into a horror lacking enjoyment. We came to a place I didn’t comprehend. I’d been there once with my father, who liked to buy old books at the monasteries, and Hasidic books in Me’a She’arim. It’s something alien to someone born in Tel Aviv, that ancient, hostile, and daunting fortress of Me’a She’arim. The white flags of surrender still fluttered on the rooftops. People saw us and shouted that we were blasphemers, building a homeland for heretics. I looked at them, they could hear the shells and knew that each one had a name on it, but they were unafraid.

I admired their lack of fear, their devotion. The fact that they did not blame any person or friend or god. They had the Almighty to either protect or slaughter them. But I couldn’t understand their contempt for us. They didn’t hate the Arabs, they hated us. As my father once said in a moment of grace, We should not have breached the wall, revolted against the Kingdom of Heaven to establish a state without a messiah. We were two different peoples. They’ve come to wipe us out, somebody shouted, and we halted. The children became more insolent from one moment to the next.

All this gave me a longing for something unknown to me. A tall man approached us, one of God’s soldiers with the whole traditional costume, and said something in Yiddish. I didn’t speak Yiddish and he jeered at me by blowing his nose loudly and saying in Book of Lamentations Hebrew that he wants us to join him at a wedding in one of the small halls, where they had been expecting the Arabs’ victory, and we could no longer delay the end and pose a threat to the Messiah, who would come if we let him and didn’t fight him. I told him that at the entrance to the quarter we’d seen a few bodies, and he riposted, That’s all right, they’re not ours, your civil guard will take them away.

We accompanied the tall, thin man to a small, sweaty hall and saw men dancing a heavy-footed hora filled with an old, extinguished splendor. There were no women, and above the partition I saw a young girl, evidently the bride, who didn’t look more than twelve or thirteen, as she was borne aloft. She looked happy, but also in her eyes was a kind of plea, like Go already, you’re confusing me with your vanities, which were nothing more than our submachine guns and ammunition pouches and the grenades hanging from our belts in the event that we had to kill ourselves, and I even had a half-full canteen.

The man said, Now sing. We didn’t know what to sing. Their Shabbess, the shouts, the white flags they hoisted against us. Through the partition we could see the eyes of the screaming women, only their eyes peeping through the holes.

And then, out of a sadness bearing a great deal of yearning for myself, being as I was outside the entire Eretz Yisrael experience I knew, outside the war, Zionism, the songs about Sheikh Abrek and death, I felt a hidden happiness. It was a happiness also directed against that monk by Notre Dame. Now I was abroad, in the house of my grandfather, whose existence my father refused to acknowledge. I was with Grandfather Mordechai the baker from Amos Street in Tel Aviv, who baked the challahs loved by so many people. I’d go to him on Fridays to get the challahs for home and see the sadness in his eyes, and Grandmother Malka hiding in a room sealed with blankets because she was afraid of the sun, and the Arabs on their donkeys, and the misbehaving children behind the Basel Market. On the rare occasions she spoke, all she wanted was to go back to Tarnopol, to the darkness, the goyim, to her Jews, after having been saved by my father’s persistence.

I was suddenly dancing enthusiastically, and some of the old men even forgot that I was the enemy, and clapped, and the half-empty canteen flapped against my hip. I have no recollection of the friend I’d come with, perhaps he’d left earlier. I enjoyed being with those Jews who could be in any place at the same time, in Jerusalem, London, New York, even though they never had, or would ever have, a real homeland.

I told a man dancing next to me that we’re fighting for him too, and he spat and said that we’re bringing down disaster upon them, and I thought about my father’s cousin who’d been killed at the Haifa refineries, about my grandfather who’d built a synagogue in Tel Aviv when he’d come from Tarnopol, a few months after my father had rescued him from the slaughter he knew was coming. He’d call me “Yoiram” and ask, Holekhsa kvar lebeis haknessess? (You’re going to the synagogue already?) After that I don’t remember a thing except for what I perhaps invented and didn’t actually happen, or perhaps did — but I do remember a little girl hiding in the stairwell and smiling at me, and my smiling back and thinking I’d like to hug her, but she disappeared.

Nineteen

At this point in what I’ve been writing over and over, there is — amid the heat and the noise and distress and wonderment — the problem of memory. What I’ve written so far could be condensed into a two-week period: Siris, Beit Makhsir, Deir Ayyoub, Nabi Samwil, the Old City, the Castel, and a few more places like Qaluniyya. But I’m writing about five months. I can see in my mind’s eye people falling like toys; an illogical movement of young bodies. They fall, and I can’t grasp when they died and began falling, or vice versa. In my mind’s ear I can hear the tangos on the records we took from the Arab villages, and see a column of Arab and Jordanian prisoners of war being led away by the Jerusalem force.

I remember two different things. Both are clear in the depths of my mind. One is apparently erroneous, but I’ve no idea what actually happened. I remember being shot at in the assault on Zion Gate. First we took Mount Zion. I fired the Davidka and wounded the monastery dome, and the scar remained there for many years. I’d go to Jerusalem and say to the people with me, See? It was me who hit that roof. Big deal! Big hero that I was. I hit a roof far more beautiful than I’d ever be.

The enemy fled and we had to wait until morning. I don’t know why we waited. Dawn broke and it began to get hot. We fell in and it seems to me that Dado said that this was a historic moment, after two thousand years we were returning to Temple Mount, the rock of our existence, the Old City, the City of David. We charged toward Zion Gate, and two bullets hit me, giving me a zipper in my leg, and I fell onto my back facing the city walls.

The pain was terrible and I couldn’t move. My comrades didn’t notice and went on running forward. Maybe there were two other wounded men with me but the sunlight blinded me. When I opened my eyes I saw on the wall a man wearing the red kaffiyeh of the Arab Legion aiming his rifle, or maybe a submachine gun, at me. The light became even clearer. I saw one eye fixed on me. The second was apparently looking at me through the sight of the weapon aimed at me. I was wearing my British sailor’s white shirt, and realized, I don’t know how, that the man was British, so he had to be an officer.

He didn’t shout. He didn’t say a word. We were about twenty meters apart and I knew that this was the end. He fired and missed my death, and now he was going to correct it. That’s what a soldier does. A soldier kills. I concentrated, or so I think, on the gaping maw of the muzzle. I remember it being far bigger than it could possibly be. I waited. That’s all I could do. Blood was still flowing from my leg. When a young man is awaiting death it’s not the same as when you’re old.

Almost sixty years later I awaited another death, which came but did not vanquish me, and I felt it was the end but I enjoyed the thought of not returning to my miserable life. But back then in the war, in my youth, I was still in diapers. I had only a future and there was no present apart from death. Then I didn’t know what endings were. I knew quotations from Shlonsky, Bialik, Spinoza, and Dostoyevsky, which I’d been taught by Tony Halle. Back then I didn’t understand what the death awaiting me in another moment was. I had a head filled with sawdust.

I knew I had only another moment or two to live and I remember, as if it’s happening right now, I remember my plea to the muzzle that it come already, a sort of expectation that it would be over and I would wait no longer, I remember my body longing that it be over. I saw my blood oozing and the wall gleaming in the bright sunlight, and I saw the colors playing on it, and the man’s eyes, and perhaps I wanted to shout to him, but I had no voice. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see the end, and I wasn’t afraid anymore. I’ve kept that fear with me throughout my life, whenever I awoke again and again over decades of bad dreams, sweating, and seeing the muzzle, and it’s not there.

I pressed my hands to my eyes, and truly, I didn’t have the time to wait, and perhaps I thought, perhaps, perhaps I didn’t think, perhaps I thought in advance, that I shouldn’t feel how the waiting bullet penetrates my skull, and how, for a few seconds, I’ll be alive on the way to my death, and then, I’ve absolutely no idea how much time passed, I opened my eyes and there was wonderment. There was no death. No fresh blood. The pain remained where it had been earlier. There was no barrel aimed at me, no kaffiyeh, the man had simply vanished.

That was the most incomprehensible moment I’ve ever experienced. What am I doing here? The pain I feel is me. I am the death that wandered from me to Bab el-Wad and the ground beneath me. The sun illuminated me, I fell illumined, and only years later would I know who that man was.

He contacted me when I was in Paris in 1950. He was indeed an Englishman in the service of His Majesty King Abdullah. He told me that at the time I seemed to him like an angel, because of the light and the white shirt. I was lying like Jesus with my arms spread. He saw the blood flowing from my wound and thought I was the crucified Christ. He told me on the phone, Perhaps I’d had too much to drink the night before, when you took Mount Zion. I looked at you and knew I’d aimed at you but I’d only hit you in the leg. I should have finished the job and killed you, you were facing me, lying there like a little white rug, but I couldn’t. I tried to kill you but I also saved you. I loved you and hated you. I thought you’d died and said, I’ve killed a boy by the gate, and was told they hadn’t seen a body and that the Jews had probably taken you away.

In the 1970s, I went to Los Angeles to work on a screenplay. When I reached the airport, the producer who’d sent me had left me a note on a rental car telling me to drive to the Intercontinental Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. The director I was to work with didn’t know exactly when I was due to arrive or to which hotel I’d been sent. I was supposed to call him in the morning. I got to the enormous hotel. The first five floors were for parking. As I waited to check in I changed my mind and said to myself, I haven’t come to Los Angeles to live in a concrete monster. Next to the hotel I saw a little motel like in the movies, pink and surrounded by palms, and I checked in there, was given a room, and I sat on the bed, tired from the flight, when suddenly the phone rang, I picked up, and the British officer was on the line.

He welcomed me to the city, and said that many years ago, in the room I was in, the daughter of film star Lana Turner, who’d been married only eight times, had killed her mother’s lover, one Johnny Stompanato, and was found to have acted in self-defense. It was strange being in that room, when down below in the pool were aspiring young actresses who’d come to Hollywood to be discovered.

The last time we spoke he was at death’s door, and wanted to tell me who he was but was unable to, and a woman, maybe his wife, shouted in a choked voice, Tell him already, but he didn’t, and I never heard from him again. May his memory be blessed.

But there’s another version. A man I met not long ago told me he remembered that we’d fought together on Mount Zion, and how we’d charged up the hill together. He recalled details about me that I couldn’t remember, and told me I’d been wounded just as the soldiers were listening to the commander’s speech and readying themselves for the assault on the Old City. He didn’t remember who the commander was, but in his dramatic address the officer said (and I’m sure it was Dado), After 1,800 years we are entering the Old City, passing through the wall, and reaching Temple Mount. He said I was lying in pain when we were fired on from the walls, and I wanted to rejoin the platoon but couldn’t move, and the guys lying there didn’t want to go on. He remembered that in the end Dado asked for volunteers, and there were a few, there was a bitter battle, they blew up Zion Gate, and the wounded were evacuated with me, said the man, who was the driver of the armored vehicle to the monastery or something, and a medic tried to bandage me but I wouldn’t let him, and the medic said, so this man told me, that I wanted to die because I hadn’t conquered the mount.

I remember being taken to the Italian monastery. I remember being laid down on a white sheet, the first one I’d seen in four months. An elderly, sad-eyed nun gave me half a glass of water, and they stanched the flow of blood and gave me an injection for the pain. I lay in bed and the ceiling was very high. Painted on it were pale angels. A nun ran to get me a dressing. I looked at the beautiful ceiling, after all that time it was so pleasant to be lying in a bed on a sheet, with a ceiling, a floor, the smell of antiseptic. There was an explosion and the ceiling fell in on us, and the nurses and nuns serving as nurses ran in and took us to the cellar. There were dozens of wounded there, some groaning, others weeping; there were some who’d evidently died during the move. I apparently had a high fever and I started to burn up.

In the cellar pain and stench reigned. The ceiling was circular. There was a bedpan next to each tattered mattress. On the wall facing me hung a painting of the Christ child and his mother. One of the nuns examined me and I was taken to another room that looked like an abattoir. Blood was flowing in there. The wounded were being cut. They screamed. They cried for their mothers. They moaned. Blood-spattered doctors were working frantically. One came over to me, told me his name, and said they’d found the first signs of gangrene in my leg and they’d have to amputate it. He added that they’d already amputated the legs of Uri and Margolin who’d been with me in the armored vehicle. Now it was my turn and there were no anesthetics. The soldiers were so tired that they accepted everything, just give us some water. Give us hope, just a little hope, which was in short supply for the men twisting in pain.

I lay there trembling with fear, I didn’t want to lose my leg. Today I’ve no idea how I managed to persuade someone to call a distant relative who was a doctor at Hadassah Hospital. They knew who he was and he came. He didn’t remember what I looked like but he liked my mother and told me she’s a wonderful, courageous woman, and then there was a vociferous argument, and in the meantime I saw them amputating a leg as the soldier screamed, and the blood that spurted from it sprayed me. My relative said that they didn’t have the penicillin that would halt the curse, as he called gangrene, and that for two days the Primus pilots had been trying to drop drugs, but the parachute drop had failed due to high winds.

Today I don’t know why they took pity on me, or perhaps they thought I was going to die anyway. They lay me on a narrow bed, bound me with restraints, and they brought in Eskimo, who was the brigade’s biggest bullyboy and who years later would be promoted to the rank of colonel for the use of force. Eskimo came in with another soldier who held a bottle, I was dazed with pain, and Eskimo, with a hand of iron, shoved the bottle containing some fiery liquid, which I afterward realized was cognac, into my mouth. He didn’t let me vomit it out, I swallowed half the bottle before I choked.

Eskimo started punching me. I could dimly see two doctors opening up my leg and extracting the one bullet still embedded in it. The second had exited. Eskimo carried on pummeling me, and I remember a big cloud in his eyes, that bastard, he hit me and hit me and I wasn’t there, I was flying. I woke up later and I think I vomited my heart out. I was taken into a side room and laid down, and they told me that my relative had come and gone and said he’d be back to see me, and that I should be strong and of good courage. For a whole day I lay there semiconscious. A doctor came in and said that one of the pilots had managed to drop a batch of penicillin.

I was taken back to the big room and every three hours was given a penicillin injection in my ass, which rapidly began to look like a sieve. I gradually began to feel things and sense my body, and the pain subsided a little. On the mattress next to me they lay a man without eyes and legs and who was punctured with shrapnel. Before me I saw a young man crumbling on a reddening mattress. He was crying. I’d never seen anybody without eyes cry. The boy was a human carcass, and all the time he mumbled “Shoot me, shoot me.”

There was sometimes another young man with him who they said was his brother, and he was wounded too, but lightly, and he said he’d shoot his brother if he didn’t get any better, and what kind of a life would he have anyway, and I felt close to the half-dead young man. Perhaps I was envious that he was so seriously wounded. I tried to touch him but couldn’t reach him with my hand. He felt me and turned his blinded eyes toward me and it seemed that I saw a smile in his blindness. I was told that he used to be called the King of Jerusalem.

My wounds started to heal. We heard the constant thud of exploding shells. We heard shouting all around. We hardly spoke to each other. We all lay there in a bubble of pain. We were given one glass of water a day. Some schmuck with a guitar came along. A dim-witted old man who sang an idiotic song about “Tomorrow at Seven I’ll Be Waiting, Elisheva,” and “War Is a Dream Soaked in Blood and Tears,” and then put down the guitar, and started telling jokes about an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Jew in a whorehouse, and more like them. He carried on telling lead-balloon jokes and finally fell silent and glared at us. Angrily, he asked, Why can’t you at least clap, I’m doing this for free and just for you, but we couldn’t laugh and he yelled, Clap, you bastards, I’m going and I won’t be back. I told him that was great news, and he looked at me and said, Haven’t you got even a little pity for somebody who works so hard? I go from place to place, and it’s hard for me, seeing all this pain, and I want to make things a bit easier for you, why won’t you laugh for me or at least clap? Somebody at the far end of the room shouted, Mister, we’re not clapping for you because we haven’t got hands, and the King of Jerusalem gurgled “Shoot me, shoot me.” The comedian left sadly, although I have to say that one of the nuns laughed until she cried and one of the doctors said that he’s terribly funny. Afterward I was taken away and I found myself in the operating room. Anesthetics had arrived, my leg was opened up again, and I fell asleep and awoke on a mattress next to the King of Jerusalem, and once again time began to move slowly.

One night a few doctors came in together and looked at us. We pretended to be asleep, or maybe we were, and we woke up in the middle of a kind of tiny noise of something going on. We heard later that together they’d given the King of Jerusalem a lethal injection. His brother fired his pistol in the air and shouted in memory of the King and cried, and a nurse came along with an injection for me, and a day passed, maybe longer, and I found myself in an armored vehicle in the middle of a city locked in by shelling and devoid of human presence, being taken to Pension Bikel in the Beit Hakerem neighborhood.

It had probably been a pleasant place once upon a time, but with scores of wounded, nurses, overworked and stinking toilets, with no water and food fit for rats, it was something like a slaughterhouse but with soap. The place reeked of the delicate soaps of rest homes, remnants of that now-defunct institution. But what do you do with sweet-smelling soap without water? It was used to freshen the air in the toilets.

Most of the time we were taken outside, and those who were able crawled on the lawn. The thunder of shellfire could be heard here too. There was a haze of smoke. We were secondhand, but in bad condition. Not worth a lot. We could no longer be fighters. The nation didn’t need half-dead wounded on its head back then. What we wanted was a fresh tomato, a watermelon, not dry leaves and bread crusts and an emaciated, smelly cucumber. We lay on lawns that had yellowed and that pricked us because they hadn’t been watered for weeks, though it was nice to lie in a cloud of early-morning dew. The sun came out later and dried the nettles but the birds no longer came, they scorned and detested us for not being able to feed them. Not one officer, soldier, mayor, or Palmach functionary came to visit us. About a hundred of us were separated not only from our homes but also from our comrades, who were still fighting.

It’s hard for me to recall exactly what we did there. I only remember the harsh and bitter grief that penetrated my very bones. I was in a cast. I needed help to get out to the lawn, and there was nobody to offer it, everybody was wounded, and in any other place and at any other time they would have been hospitalized. The Pension Bikel staff did all they could to make our time as pleasant as possible at that temporary hospital, which was a little temple without a god and without drugs, except for the penicillin injections every three hours.

From the nurses we heard about the cease-fire that had broken out. The shelling suddenly stopped. We saw soldiers smoking in the street outside the pension. Excessively dressed-up people could be seen walking scrawny, yapping dogs, all the time looking up to make sure that all was still quiet. Slowly we were returned to our cities, villages, and kibbutzim. An ambulance came to take me and five other wounded. We were given a little of the water that had begun to reach the city, the nurses checked our dressings, and off we went. We were told we’d be taking the Burma Road* that had recently been opened.

The ambulance jounced. The route was confusing and bumpy. I banged my head on the roof each time the vehicle bounced. We drove for six hours, and my watch now stopped too, and time drew out into an eternity. It was hot in the ambulance. There were no nurses with us and we were strapped in. We passed rocks that seemed as if they’d just been blown up. The landscape seemed mutilated. We sang “Yama yama yama shorba,” and “Samara hop hop hop,” and “Get being last right out of your mind,” and mainly “Gentlemen, history repeats itself,” and “On June sixteenth nineteen forty-four,” and we came to a stop and were taken out.

We lay in the sun on stretchers from the ambulance. Facing us was a deep, wide wadi, and there were jeeps carrying wounded from one end to the other. We waited our turn. Three of us were loaded onto a jeep that traversed the wadi, jouncing in a way that made what we’d already experienced feel like driving on cotton wool. Waiting at the other end were more ambulances and armored vehicles, we were loaded onto them and reached Sarafand.

We were taken into a big room with tables loaded with salads, fruit, hard-boiled eggs, jugs of water, fruit juices, cold coffee, rolls, and cigarettes. Who’d seen stuff like this over the last few months? How did we know what we were actually seeing? We looked at the bounty before us and our gastric juices churned, but we didn’t move. There was a kind of collective moan that simultaneously came from the bellies of some two hundred men.

Around the table we saw some women we didn’t know, who ran around and called to us to eat right away and drink already, but we couldn’t. We were stunned. We slowly approached the tables and started to move our lips and laughed, we gave an appalling, terrible laugh and began gulping air, and after a few gulps and rumbles from my stomach that rose into my mouth, we began eating and drinking. Our bellies swelled but we didn’t stop. I remember chewing a fresh cucumber in one corner of my mouth and a slice of fresh caraway bread in the other, and I do remember that it was caraway. We stood there stuffing ourselves until we began to drop. We started to convulse. The women took fright and ran to call the doctors and nurses, and they ducked our heads into the baths there so we could throw up, and we vomited up our guts, and tried to sing, and we were hurting, sated, and ashamed, and I’ve no idea how it all ended.

Later, I was transferred to the Donolo Hospital in Jaffa, where I was examined, had my cast changed, was injected and cleaned up. With a nurse supporting me lest I fall, I was put into a shower stall, and that was the first shower I’d had since the one in the yard at Kiryat Anavim, and I let myself take off. I was soaped, my wild hair was cut, I was shaved, and a few days later, once my stomach stopped troubling me, I was put into an ambulance and taken to my parents’ home. I got there in the morning. In the street the rumor had spread that I was coming home. People stood on their balconies and showered me with sweets and flowers, but my parents and sister weren’t there. My mother was teaching at her school and my father was at the museum. They all surrounded me in incredulity, but not one of them remembered that my parents weren’t there. Once the first wave of enthusiasm subsided, they all went about their business. I slowly climbed to the third floor and waited. My sister, Mira, came home from school and very excitedly let me in, as my parents, who had apparently been told, came running. The boy had come home from the war.

Twenty

After a few days at home I was taken back to Donolo Hospital on the Jaffa seashore. In only a few weeks the cast had been taken off and I was practicing walking. I doggedly wanted to get back to the fighting that was about to start up again after the cease-fire. Gavrush came to see me and asked how I was doing. Making progress, I said. He said, I hear you want to come back. Yes, I replied. He asked me to join some fighters from the Harel Brigade who hadn’t been killed, and said we had to report to the town of Ramla to set up the brigade’s commando unit. He said I should report to the Opera building where they’d set up the navy headquarters, and we’d take their jeep and drive to Ramla.

I broke out of the hospital that night. I met two guys who were waiting for me, we reached the headquarters, which had two sentries at the gate. We told them we’d come for their jeep because we needed it in Jerusalem. They didn’t understand Hebrew and there was a hullabaloo. We overpowered those newly enlisted young lads and drove to Ramla in the jeep.

Ramla was empty and encircled by barbed wire. In their haste the Arab residents, who had fled or been driven out, had left behind smells, clothing, furniture. Their absence took the form of a massive presence. Ramla, capital of the sand dunes, Ramla, the vibrant town whose houses were so imposing, whose streets were so wide, whose thickly — foliaged acacias and sycamores were planted along its lovely avenues. But it was empty. Ramla, gleaming in the burning summer noonday sun, looked as if a tornado had passed through it, leaving only the houses. The town was separated from the other parts of the country. It was encircled by concertinas of barbed wire. It was guarded by soldiers, most of whom were new immigrants who didn’t speak Hebrew. Stray donkeys brayed in the deserted streets. A camel ruminated pensively as if it couldn’t understand where its owner had gone among the date palms and hedges of prickly pear and the smell of charred food. Inside the houses we saw tables laid for a meal; food congealing on plates. Scrawny, hungry dogs nosed impatiently through piles of garbage, their barks resounding in the echo of the void.

A huge broom had passed through the town, sweeping away everyone in its path — children, women, the elderly, young people — and leaving their emptiness behind. I was unable to remain unaffected, but to my shame I was as yet incapable of being really angry. I was young. I’d seen my comrades dying. I’d seen atrocities on both sides, I’d become impervious, I felt as if I had no feelings. The nothingness I saw on my arrival troubled but didn’t traumatize me. In the nights, in the painful silence, I felt I could hear the concrete moving. The hungry jackals came late at night, besieging the town as they howled.

Two or three days after I got to Ramla I limped slowly to neighboring Lydda, to the old railway station. When I was a child we’d traveled to Haifa via Lydda. It was the country’s biggest station, and it had the only switching line. I can remember the smell of burning coal mingling with the scent of cardamom, the fragrance of the blossoming citrus groves around the town, the smell of fallen carob pods, of the lavender and wormwood, the wild regal purple bougainvilleas, the turbaned vendors at the station entrance, the clashing of their little cymbals accompanied by rhythmic chants, selling huge, aromatic pretzels.

I walked around empty Lydda. The only smell left was a mixture of smoke, ash, and dust. The locomotives were still standing there, but without their rolling stock that had been transferred to Tel Aviv, they looked like huge iron beasts. Crows were hopping everywhere as they searched for rotting meat. I slowly walked back through the fields. It was hot. The summer flowers were dying under a blanket of thistles. I saw discarded clothing, shoes dried up in the sun, hats that had begun to fall to pieces. In the depths of my mind I heard the fleeing footfalls. Here and there I saw a few lone poppies that had survived the summer. A pastoral tranquility lay over the desolation, and the unrelenting smell of smoke and decay.

Beside a long barbed-wire concertina at the roadside I saw some people. A great many people, crowded together. The women were weeping and wailing. Children were calling out, and the men were shouting. I walked toward them. As I approached, an Israeli soldier appeared, the color and cut of his uniform revealing him as newly enlisted. He looked as if he didn’t know which way to hold his Sten. It seemed like he wasn’t sure if I were friend or foe. In broken Hebrew he ordered me to leave immediately and go back to Ramla. I was unarmed, and finally he managed to aim his Sten at me. The look in his eyes told me that perhaps he wouldn’t want to, but because of his inexperience he might unintentionally shoot me. I asked him who all these people are, looking at me pleadingly and trying to attract my attention, to beg my mercy. The soldier replied, Them? They’re just Arabs! They’re trying to get back to Ramla, but it’s forbidden.

I asked him on whose orders, it’s their town. Don’t be stupid, he said, not anymore it isn’t. He smiled at me as if he thought I was feebleminded. When I got back to the town I was angry with myself. That emptiness had a face, flesh, clothes, children. Old women lying in the thistles, men in suits but not always wearing shoes, who pleaded. I felt I was complicit, I felt that the conscience that had been with me in my youth, on which I’d always relied, had nodded off at the critical moment. Could I fight against a soldier of the state in whose establishment I had so recently played a part?

Our CO saw me come back and throw up, and said (and I have to say that there was a certain compassion in his voice), They’re present absentees. What? I asked, and he repeated, Present absentees, a term that was later perpetuated in the law of the land. I didn’t understand what it meant. That term, “present absentee,” sounds like it was taken from a science-fiction book. Any Arab who left a conquered town or village prior to May 14, 1948, and had gone to see somebody, buy something, even visit a relative outside Israel, and wanted to come back, it was as if he hadn’t been here when he left. He was present because he’s here but an absentee because he’s not.

Two days later, the day before we were supposed to leave for the renewed fighting in the Negev desert, a fleet of trucks appeared out of the darkness. They were old and the racket of their groaning wheels could be heard from afar. They ripped through the barbed-wire concertinas as if they were cotton wool, and the soldiers guarding the town fled before them. The trucks roared through the empty streets, shattering the nocturnal Ramla silence. When they halted, people, the like of which I’d never seen, jumped down. At the height of the Eretz Yisrael summer they were wearing several layers of dark, threadbare, torn, faded winter clothing, odd-looking hats, caps, and berets like in old films. They spoke in a babel of languages: Bulgarian, Polish, Russian, Greek, Yiddish, German. They dragged screaming children, and suspiciously carried their worn suitcases. They were like locusts swooping down on the town. They didn’t walk toward the empty houses — they pounced on them! They seized upon on them hungrily, eagerly, while the homeowners were standing by the distant fence, hoping to return, or perhaps were in columns walking toward the unknown.

These Jews didn’t discern the emptiness of the houses. They were not romantic, and unlike me, didn’t vomit due to a sham conscience. They’d found their place in the sun! The Arab nothingness was alien to them. It didn’t interest them. In answer to my irksome inquiries they replied, If those refugees have got somewhere to go, then they’re all right! We were behind barbed wire for more than ten years. What does a sabra like you know?

It was all strange for them: the heat, the chrysanthemums, the camels, the prickly pear hedges, the smells, the donkeys, the bright sun. When I saw families hurrying toward the house we were about to evacuate, I saw people beyond any moral accounting. They’d come from the garbage can of history. They were right because they’d survived — that is, they were sinners so great in their own eyes that they were unable to be judges.

They threw out whatever they felt was unsuitable, they took food from the iceboxes and ate, they took clothing from the cupboards and drawers, folded and packed it, as if they’d be compelled to continue their wandering very shortly. They lit fires in the yards and roasted sheep they’d hunted in the fields. In the two days before I left, I saw about one thousand five hundred people, maybe more, settling in a town that was foreign to them, whose name they’d never heard of until their arrival, and the moment they came, even though they couldn’t pronounce its name, they became its owners.

They didn’t stop selling and buying. They had watches on their arms under their coat sleeves, and they sold gold teeth and rings, Players and Craven A cigarettes, and condoms. They were like a school of crocodiles that had come down from the Black Mountains, people who had emerged from Hell to return to history, which lay beaten and weeping on the barbed-wire fences.

The sight of the Jews occupying every house was horrifying, but also possessed a kind of nonjudgmental human aesthetic. The last time that any of them had a house or apartment of their own was in the 1930s. They said — and I remember one trenchant conversation in florid Hebrew — Unlike the Arabs we didn’t have neighboring countries to go to! Their children, who were born in German or British camps, didn’t know what a building without barbed wire around it looked like. We were walking jokes, swelled with our own self-importance because we’d won some Mickey Mouse war. War for them was the Wermacht, Nazis, the Gestapo, tanks, freight trains, huts in gray, and going to God via the crematoria. They’d been through a war we wouldn’t have been able to win with unarmed combat, crappy Czech weapons, our campfires, and the guys, and with or without Palmach songs. They felt they were the wretched and they’d won because they were alive. They dismantled the barbed wire the way children unwrap a chocolate bar. They took and remained.

Twenty-one

One evening in Ramla, while we were waiting for something that nobody knew about, an officer came along and told us that we were going to be the spearhead of a new unit to be called the Palmach Tenth Battalion. He said we’d be leaving for Abu Ghosh in the morning. Since we’d come into possession of a few more jeeps, which we’d lifted from other units, we drove in a convoy up the Burma Road to Abu Ghosh. With us was a column of trucks taking food into Jerusalem. Some of us climbed onto the moving trucks and handed down eggs and bread and pickled herring and I don’t remember what else, and drove into the big village. The houses were abandoned but they emitted a different smell than that in Ramla, the smell of betrayal. The smell of a village that should have remained because its inhabitants were the only ones in the area who had helped the Jews.

We hid the jeeps in the olive trees and settled ourselves into a few empty houses. More soldiers I didn’t know arrived, refugees from other units that had been almost destroyed. There was one guy in a yarmulke who read the festival prayer book. He went off to look for something to eat and I leafed through it. When I was young I’d read it every so often, and I came to the line “The hill of our roots, rejected yet by the builders.” It stuck in my mind. I didn’t understand it but it embraced me from a hidden place. The guy also had a Bible, and as I leafed through it I came to Ezekiel, and read “In thy blood, live; yea. I said unto thee: In thy blood, live,” and I felt a kind of great sadness. For myself. For us. For the Tenth Battalion, some of whose men would soon die.

Somebody once said that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. The days in Abu Ghosh were empty with fullness. Benny Marshak brought a quartet to play for the men. He sent one violinist to another battalion, a second violinist and a cellist to another one. I told him that a quartet is an instrumental ensemble that plays together as a single entity, but he said he hadn’t got time for the wonders of music and that a recital isn’t the Pentateuch. He also found records of Beethoven’s Fifth, six records in all, and he sent two to here, two there, and the rest to another platoon.

We sat and waited. The shock of the nothingness was great. The waiting was difficult. Why had we expelled the villagers? Finally an officer came along and said that Ben-Gurion’s aide had demanded the return of the residents of Abu Ghosh, and that a callous act had been perpetrated against them, and the Arabs started to come back and we dispersed. I was sent to an NCO course at Ju’ara, where I fainted and they discovered that my leg was still in bad condition and I was sent home.

The first thing I did on my return home was what we’d talked about a lot during the war. I went to Mugrabi Square and stood by the phone box we’d joked about, saying that after the fighting all the survivors could gather inside it, and a few more of us actually appeared and we all crowded into the small booth.

Then began a confused, terrible, and amusing period. I underwent a series of treatments at the clinic, I listened to music and hobbled around the city looking for friends, most of whom had died. There was a birthday party for one of them and I got up onto a table and delivered a ghastly, hideous, and aggressive speech against everything, I was what was called swimming against the current, and when I’d finished I found myself standing on my own, everybody had vanished, the birthday boy had gone inside, and I wept.

A few days later in Herzl Street, I was stopped by a man who said he was a military policeman — something I’d never heard of — and another guy came by, and since neither of us had an army ID, he arrested us. By chance, a police officer came along and witnessed the arrest, our laughter, and the military policeman who looked like a cartoon soldier, and remembered us from the war. He released us, and advised us to go to Allenby Street near Herbert Samuel Square, where there was an office dealing with soldiers who’d left the army outside of their own accord.

It was crowded. Everybody was looking for their own files, which were torn and falling to pieces. I found mine right away. When it was my turn, a recently enlisted young guy looked at the papers and said, I’ve got to reenlist you. I said, Into which army? The Israel Defense Forces, he replied. Is that our army? I inquired. Yes, he said. Well, I said, it’s time I swore allegiance to the State of Israel. At the conclusion of the swearing in, he discharged me from the Israel Defense Forces and I was given a certificate to that effect, and I realized that I’d enlisted and been discharged in the same half hour, and I liked it.

I told the guy that it was quite nice being discharged from an army I hadn’t served in, and that I’d served in the one we’d had previously. He stood up, and in the middle of that big room crowded with soldiers and youngsters who’d been caught without documents, saluted me. It was ridiculous but touching. I tried to return his salute but didn’t know how. He gave me a six-pound payment, and I attested that I, the undersigned, had been discharged and received payment for six months of service, and I went back to Mugrabi Square. I went to the hot-dog seller, who recognized me, and had to tell him that Goethe was greater than Shakespeare, and after all those years he varied his response and said, And Schiller too. I said that in any event I trusted his judgment.

I walked to Café Piltz where I met friends, we drank Spitfires, and they sang the idiotic song that was a big hit at the time, “In the Negev Desert,” as someone played the accordion and I got drunk. It was the first time I’d drunk brandy — and not washed in it — except for the time I’d lain under the iron hands of Eskimo, the colonel for the use of force, when he’d tried to knock me out with a bottle of brandy. Without prior warning I stood up and sang, the cast on my leg hurt, but I was evidently happy for a moment.

We were a band of lost soldiers hanging around the city; in the mornings we’d sit in Café Nussbaum on the old promenade, and we listened to the Beethoven septet over and over. We dreamed about going to drain the Amazon in Brazil but there wasn’t a ship to take us. With us was Buba, the sweetest whore in the country. Buba gained fame as the one who, from the promenade railings, had seen a blond man lying naked on his back on the sand, and went to check him out, the way a doctor does, came back and said, He’s not from here. And when she saw a guy doing push-ups she’d yell, Hey! Where’s the girl gone?

One poor guy came past with watches on both arms and gold teeth and Players cigarettes, shouting in Yiddish, and somebody got up and called him “Soap,” and I, who’d never hit anybody except for a Yugoslavian who’d come at me with a knife in Qaluniyya, grabbed the guy who’d called the man a soap and beat the shit out of him. He yelled, “What d’you want? What, he’s not a soap?” The beating continued until they dragged me away and poured cold water over me.

We laughed a lot and were sad and lost. The war continued in the Negev. We’d walk from the promenade to Geula Street and Allenby and have lunch at the Yemenite’s, and from there we’d walk slowly to Dizengoff Street and sit in Café Pinati on the corner of Frishman, and a few hours later we’d go to Café Kassit and finish off the night. There was a big guy with us called Parser, who spoke in a kind of hoarse growl and would show us what a big man he was, and we noticed that he’d sometimes disappear, and once we followed him and saw this sham tough guy standing in Frug Street, beneath a balcony, calling in a soft, childish, pleading voice, “Tsippi! Tsippi!” because he loved the red-headed Tsippi. We envied him for loving her and her for apparently loving him back. She played hard to get, which was quite common back then, because you had to conquer a woman like any Arab village, and indeed, they later married. They were together all their lives. He became a truck driver, a courteous man who’d sing “Shoshana, Shoshana, Shoshana” in an almost lyrical voice.

Twenty-two

I wanted a girl. The ones I’d known before thought you got pregnant from kissing. I wanted to kiss a woman, after I’d killed people. I stood on the promenade one night with a girl at my side. She smelled of laundry soap and a kind of sweet stench. We turned to each other, and suddenly, as if it had been planned, we kissed. We held hands and went up to the Excelsior Hotel, a small hotel for soldiers on Hayarkon Street, and took a room. I asked them to put a baby’s crib inside. The cast on my leg did its job, and they brought a crib and placed it by the window overlooking the sea. It was nice there. She taught me everything I didn’t know. I loved her with a great love. She spoke hardly any Hebrew. She mumbled in Polish. She was lovely and sad and thought I was a German officer and she crouched on the floor and wept and shouted at me in German, and we came together again, and the night passed. We named the baby that would be born out of that love, but I don’t remember what we called it. Then it was morning. I wanted to know her name and tell her mine, but after an entire night of love it was difficult.

We came out of the hotel and walked toward Ben-Yehuda Street. Buses and carts and trucks and a few cars were already on the streets. There was an old kiosk on the corner, and the man knew me and sold us each a roll and poured us black coffee, and we drank and kissed, and without thinking what I was doing I started walking toward my parents’ home farther down Ben-Yehuda. After a while I remembered and looked behind me, I was totally confused, she was standing there far away, in wonderment. She seemed angry. I felt so good that I smiled lovingly at her and went on walking, and then I realized that I didn’t know who she was, and how would I find her, and I turned to go back. Hordes of people were hurrying to work. She disappeared among them and I tried to run after her, and even saw her from a distance, but the cast restricted me. She’d vanished. Afterward I walked the city for a month trying to find my beloved and not succeeding. To this day, sixty-two years later, I don’t know who she was, her name, where she came from, whether she’d come from a camp. I loved her until the love faded. I fell in love with a different girl each day, but none of them was the mother of my would-be son, in that crib facing the sea.

Twenty-three

I had a friend, part of whose shoulder had been shot off. We’d walk down the street, and when we saw people coming he’d stop and look at his missing shoulder. The people would look on astonished, he was tall and good-looking, and he’d raise his arm and whirl it behind his head, which in the absence of a shoulder he could do, and they’d all scream and he’d smile at me and we’d go on our way.

At Café Nussbaum there was talk about work at sea. I wanted to get to the fighting in the Negev. Miri, who was in charge of the Palmach wounded, told me I wouldn’t be going back because physically I wasn’t up to it. She suggested that I sign on to bring refugees by sea. She put me in touch with Zimmermann from the Shoham Maritime Company, who was responsible for the ships, and who came from Kfar Tavor, or Meskha as it once was known. He used his influence and I signed on aboard the Pan York. On each trip we brought around three thousand people.

When I first saw them, shinnying up the hawsers to board, I hated them. I wrote an article for Shlonsky entitled, “I Hate the Jewish People.” Afterward I fell in love with them. I realized that they, not us, were the true heroes, and that to survive what they’d gone through you needed more than a few rifles and Stens. I would talk to them.

I roamed the streets of Marseilles and Naples. After that I worked for the luxury tax office. I tried dating girls but they dropped me because all I talked about was death. I studied in Jerusalem. I finally found love, a woman I loved a lot, but I killed that love too, and the years went by.

After ten years in New York I came back to Israel, or immigrated to Israel, depending on who’s talking, and “went up” to Jerusalem, as my mother used to say. I went onto the roof of the Talitha Kumi Monastery, where Jesus had told Talitha to stand up, and she did. I’d once lived on that roof, in the belfry, and on its door was a faded inscription: “Yoram has gone to Paris.”

I looked down and saw the officer who ran away at Nabi Samwil passing below on the far side of the stone wall. I remember seeing a girl not far from me licking an ice cream, and I shivered. I wanted someone to say something about that officer, and how — suddenly — girls are eating ice cream in Jerusalem. We were all in the battles.

The Palmach is a house. Actually, it’s two houses that cost millions. The Palmach House and the Yitzhak Rabin Heritage House, and the man has yet to be born who can explain exactly what that heritage is, and everything there today is one huge retrospective. The people who were commanders or close to headquarters and knew the top men, and vice versa, helped each other to create a virtual Palmach, a children’s story for grown-ups.

Two thousand Jews who swam to Palestine on decrepit boats even before the second wave of immigration, most them aboard Betar* vessels, have been forgotten. Nobody counts them as heroes of the War of Independence. A German submariner who saw the Mafkura, a small vessel, just before it sank after being hit, said, “The Jews are swimming to Palestine.” They are not Palmach nor Haganah nor Etzel, they are nothing. Just like the unknown soldiers who got just about six pounds after the war.

There are engagé books. Engagé films. Scholarly articles on battles in which I took part and didn’t know a thing about what the scholars have written. The past is painted so that’s what will be remembered. The fighters who lived through it, who are no longer the Palmach, are trying to heal their wounds to this day, to escape the nightmares they’ve carried with them since the war. We are a stinking drop in the sea of memories of the Palmach heroes.

I did not know the Palmach in its halcyon days of the early 1940s, when its members worked in kibbutzim, and stole chickens from the coops, and sang around the campfire and pissed on it to put it out. The Palmach I knew in the war was not the same Palmach. It was battalions of fighters. It wasn’t nice.

In the summer of 1955, I came back to Israel for a visit. I traveled the country, met up with friends. In Bab el-Wad, on the wall of the lower pumping house, somebody had written in big letters: “Baruch Jamili.” It pleased me that someone unknown, who’d fought in the war, already knew what would be concealed later, with the Palmach generation commemorating the noncombatant headquarters people, and so he wrote his name in big letters to be seen by people going up to Jerusalem. A few years ago his name was erased. I don’t know who did it, but for me it was as if the Wailing Wall had been erased and used as the desert is being used: to build the walls of a luxury hotel for the very rich. His name should have been put up in lights.

And one evening, in a small bar in Malkei Yisrael Square, I met a man whom I recognized from the Harel Brigade. He was a few years older than me, a tough guy, I remember that he was an excellent fighter, and we began drinking together. We drank Scotch, which in Israel is called whiskey. At the time I didn’t want to remember. The more I managed to forget, the better I felt. The man said that the war hadn’t ended, as many people thought. The vast majority went back home after the war, hung it up on a hook, and carried on.

The man said that wars of independence persist for many years, and that even now, in 1955, we’re still fighting to establish the state. Countries aren’t founded in a single year. The war that began in 1920 in Jerusalem is still going on and will do so for years to come. It will continue for at least a hundred years. There are security agreements and calm, but we still don’t have peace or a state or a future or quiet. There is no “And the land had rest for forty years.” Forty years is just a prologue.

At the time I thought that the war was over. I thought that in the end the Arabs would resign themselves to us and we to them, and we’d live in our state at the side of a Jordanian or some other state for many years. He alleged that I was deluding myself. He said that in the Bible the Hebrew word begida, betrayal, comes from the word beged, garment, and in the Talmud the word me’ila, treachery, comes from me’il, coat, so it’s all one and the same. I thought about how the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart had said, “My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.”

Many years later, quite recently in fact, when I am old and have had a serious illness, I was asked to speak to young students about the war. They were young and lovely and listened in relative quiet, and had bracelets and earrings and tattoos. Before I left, I stood for a moment at the school gate and in my mind said to them, sadly, In thy blood, live!

Epilogue

Not long ago a hoarse-voiced man called to talk about the book I’d written about the war, and said, There’s this man, Yechezkiel, who says you fought together, and he lives alone, a recluse, and he’d like you to come and see him, and I’ll take you there. When? Friday morning, at nine. I didn’t want to go, it was very hot outside, my computer had broken down, the phone wasn’t working properly, and I tried to find the man who’d said he’d take me, and couldn’t, and now it was nine and the man called and said he was waiting outside. I told him I was unwell, but in a loud, irresistible voice he said, You’re coming. Left with no choice I went outside, he was standing by a car, he wasn’t old like me but not young either, he was well spoken, and we drove off.

Our route wasn’t particularly interesting until we reached the Nachshon interchange. There I remembered the woman with the vast bosom who’d worked in the kiosk, and how all the drivers on the old road to Jerusalem had stopped to view the wonder and buy coffee and a sandwich, and that is where the domesticated desolation of the Lachish region in the dry season begins, and we turned onto a potholed side road and passed three or four settlements with names from the Bible, and then reached the end of a path and drove into a huge expanse of land bounded by green cotton fields, olive trees, and there wasn’t a living soul to be seen, a kind of roaring emptiness in the burning sun, with a temperature of almost forty degrees. We drove along a path that jounced the car, and in the middle of nowhere finally came to a concrete hut, with a huge diesel fuel tank beside it, and a barking German shepherd.

We got out of the car, and there beneath a densely foliaged tree was a table with chairs around it, then eight other men arrived, most of them in their seventies, and we all sat down and nodded at one another, smiling. From the heavens we probably looked like some kind of cabal, perhaps refounding the Palmach, something secret was happening there, we had all come to a little temple. That’s the way it was.

The men took out freshly picked figs, and plums, and hummus, and salads, and bottles of arrack and fruit juice and water, and from the hut Yechezkiel emerged. Slightly bent, his teeth more absent than present, he smiled at his friends and at me. In his ruination he looked like some kind of ancient hero. He was wearing a gray peaked cap and sat at the head of the table facing me, and everyone looked at him and me alternately like the bull that knoweth its owner, and anyway, I’m a Taurus, May 1930, the most beautiful of all the Mays ever created by Mother Earth, as the poet Mayakovsky — who else — wrote, and we laughed a little, waiting for a conflagration, for something.

I already knew that Yechezkiel has been a recluse for sixty-two years, since the War of Independence. For years his friends hadn’t known where he was. He worked on the roads for a while, building fences, he worked distributing something or other in the city, he was married for a year, he begot a daughter, his wife rediscovered her Jewish self and broke off contact. After eighteen years he’d heard that his daughter was getting married in Jerusalem, he got on a bus, went to Jerusalem, to the Me’a She’arim quarter, burst into the wedding hall, into the women’s section, they screamed, he didn’t hear, went up to the daughter he hadn’t seen for years, kissed her, and fled.

Yechezkiel has remained at the battle for the Castel. Since that battle, this man has remained hidden with himself, and only the friends who discovered him and helped him build this pitiful hut in the middle of nowhere, in the asshole of the world close to which we fought in 1948—only they come to see him on Friday mornings, sometimes not all of them, but somebody always comes, they protect him, love him, and he looks at them as if he sees inside them, because they carry his secret, the secret that everyone except him knows. But the friends don’t understand the secret, because it’s one moment, an hour, perhaps a day, from a time they were not in. But I was, and when I sat down opposite Yechezkiel I became a seventeen-year-old again. I sat facing myself of sixty-two years ago, not a memory but a look into a mirror.

Yechezkiel hears about the world on the radio, or from the friends who come to visit, but he lives in April 1948, and today he’s eighty-four. Yechezkiel is still taking the Castel. He has lived in that moment for most of his life, that day, perhaps two, on the Castel. It seems to me that he’s a bit confused but sweet, an old child with the smile of an infirm angel, and he’s fixed someplace we’ve never been to, even if I had, because when I was there I saw the following day, I saw how the moment passed, I saw the almost I’ve been seeking all my life, the moment before the sneeze when the face freezes and the body contorts and out comes a loud sound something like the orgasm of a god, a kind of relief, a kind of almost, like all of life’s great moments that teeter on the brink. And finally, after all these years, I see the absolute almost. Yechezkiel is the absolute almost. He is the second before the sneeze and the second before the spending. He has remained in the middle, in the place that a normal person cannot touch, for since that day he no longer lives but just exists, his body has moved on but he remains in one terrible moment, in a terrible battle, he was wounded and survived, and crawled. He’s still crawling, there on the slopes of the Castel that has long since gone, which a long time ago became a battle heritage site for youngsters enlisting for wars he did not know. He knew only one war, only one horror into which he was drawn, which permanently shaped him into a kind of sticky-paper eggshell on which he engraved his eternity, a shell that goes no further than the beginning of its breaking. Yechezkiel is the break. He is the past without a future. Without the past that will become a future. He can touch what we can’t — the moment of the horror itself, the moment of almost. And now it’s a hot summer day. Here it’s still Eretz Yisrael before the outburst, the hundredth of a second before the pleasure or the pain. That is Yechezkiel. He looks like an old man and a child. He will be born tomorrow and die yesterday. He possesses what none of us does: the terrible innocence of eternity, and he holds its unresolved profundity.

I sat beneath the tree, a warm wind was blowing, the dog was barking at a latecomer, and I thought about Goya’s The Third of May 1808. In it a brown-complected man is raising his arms to the sides, and beside him are dead bodies, behind him are shattered houses, everything is gray, and soldiers, tense in the firing position, are aiming their rifles at the man’s heart. He is not yet really shot. He is standing inside the shot, in the almost that is within the shot. The bullets have exited the muzzles, they are very close to him, he is shouting or crying out, the atmosphere is dense, the almost-shot that in another fraction of a second will kill him is between him and the bullet.

Those people died long ago. Goya is dead. The man is dead. The shot remains. The way in which Yechezkiel is the only one who remained on the Castel, for the Castel is long gone. Yechezkiel says he carried one of the wounded. He doesn’t remember who shot him, but the wounded man died and Yechezkiel was saved. That’s the way it is.

We talked there. We laughed. We touched upon the present somewhat, but it slipped through our fingers, not really existing, and we couldn’t talk about Bibi or Barak or those poor children of foreign workers that Eli Yishai wants to deport. No, we didn’t touch upon life, we touched only the past, which is dead.

The friends became friends of themselves, too. They know each other from nowhere, one of Israel’s leading cinematic artists, and the expert on Arab affairs, and others, each of whom has accomplished a great deal in his life, and they want to touch the only man who remained on the Castel. Perhaps there are more. All of us who fought there and are still living are battle-fatigued. Yechezkiel also expresses something that we don’t talk about. Quite recently somebody told me, You could have taken off, why did you go on fighting when you knew you didn’t have much chance of survival? And there, with Yechezkiel, seeing his face furrowed with wrinkles, the sad glory of an old soldier, I thought that there’s something in soldiers, in every war that people who have not fought will never know: the terrible dependency on killing. There is a primordial instinct in man, we were born to kill in order to live, to be hunters, to protect our families. I remember that in between, between pain and nothingness, I loved the moments of battle. We all loved them. Every fighting soldier loves to shoot and kill. He’s got an enemy. And the enemy leaves no need for philosophizing about morals and things like that. In battle we are human beasts. Bloodthirsty.

At the birthday party I mentioned earlier in this book, I stood on the green lawn of a little house that has since been supplanted by a four-story building, and ranted about death. About the happiness in death. About the beauty of death. About my part in the sacrifice, and about having no regrets. Afterward I did regret it. Afterward I criticized myself. But not then. And not now that I’ve grown old.

I’ve written that I killed a child. But everyone who was in that battle knows that it wasn’t me who killed him. Guilt etched a deep incision. Only today do I realize what a punishment I imposed upon myself when I wrote that I killed a child. And now it’s noon on Friday, August 6, the hottest day yet until Saturday, and Yechezkiel remains there to escape what I have suffered all my life; he remains there, and he has no guilt or self-examination or remorse. He is still in the almost, waiting for the bullet that will kill him.

Glossary

Bab el-Wad

The point on the Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem highway where the road begins to ascend. During the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the Jordanian Arab Legion and Jewish convoys fought for control over the narrow road, for it allowed access to the blockaded city of Jerusalem. In Arabic it is known as Sha’ar Hagai, meaning “Gate of the Valley.”

Bar-Kokhba Revolt

A Jewish revolt against the Romans from 132–136 CE. As the third and final major rebellion against the Roman Empire, the revolt established an independent state of Israel over parts of the Judea Province.

Betar

A revisionist Zionist youth movement that was founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in 1923. The group encouraged Jewish nationalism and military action, and aided in the widespread immigration of Jews to Palestine during the British Mandate.

British Mandate

for Palestine

Formally confirmed by the League of Nations in July of 1922, the period from 1923 to 1948 in which Palestine was under civil British administration.

Bubbeleh

A Yiddish term of endearment.

Burma Road

A makeshift bypass road built by Israeli forces when the Arab Legion seized control over Bab el-Wad. Israelis built the road to break the siege and deliver food to the Jewish population in Jerusalem.

Castel

The location of an old Arab village in the Judean Mountains that overlooks the strategic Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem highway (

see:

Bab el-Wad). There was only one such road to Jerusalem, so when the Israeli Defense Forces conquered and destroyed the village in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, the triumph significantly boosted the morale of the Israelis.

Etzel

A Hebrew acronym for Irgun, an underground military organization that splintered from the earlier and larger paramilitary group, Haganah, between 1931 and 1948. The group’s policy was based in Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism.

Froilich

Yiddish for “jolly.”

Grush

A small coin similar to a penny, but in modern Hebrew slang the term doesn’t refer to a specific denomination.

Haganah

Literally meaning “defense” in Hebrew, Haganah was

a Jewish paramilitary organization in Palestine during the British Mandate, and eventually became the core of today’s Israeli Defense Forces.

Haggadah

A religious text that recounts the Jewish liberation from slavery in Egypt, as described in the Book of Exodus. The book includes commentary, liturgy, and songs, and is traditionally read aloud during the Passover Seder.

Hamachanot Ha’olim

A socialist Zionist youth movement that was founded in 1926 by pupils from the Herzliya high school in Tel Aviv. Members believed agricultural labour and military service were necessary for the realization of a Jewish state.

Hannah Senesh

(July 17, 1921- November 7, 1944) Hannah Senesh was an Israeli poet who was deployed by the British during World War II. She was captured, tortured, and eventually killed by the Nazis without ever revealing the details of her mission, which was to rescue Jews in Hungary before they were deported to Auschwitz.

Hashomer Hatzair

Literally meaning “The Youth Guard” in Hebrew, Hashomer Hatzair is a socialist youth movement that was founded in 1913. Members believed immigration

to Palestine and living in

kibbutzim

would liberate the Jewish youth, and help them attain their Zionist ideals.

Hatikva

The Israeli national anthem, literally meaning “hope.”

Histadrut

Israel’s organization of trade unions that was founded in 1920. Membership expanded rapidly during the British Mandate period, and the organization played an influential role in the Jewish state-building process.

Kennen

Yiddish for “know.”

Kiryat Anavim

The first Kibbutz built in the Judean hills. The land was purchased from the Arab Abu Gosh family in 1913, and Jewish pioneers began settling the area in 1919. Kiryat Anavim served as a base for the Palmach during the battle of Jerusalem.

Lehi

An offshoot from the Irgun, Lehi was a militant Zionist group founded by Avraham Stern in 1940. The group’s objective was to forcibly remove British authorities from Palestine to enable the unrestricted immigration of Jews to the budding Jewish state. The term Lehi is an acronym for the Hebrew title, Lohamei Herut Israel, or “Fighters for the Freedom of Israel.”

Masada

Located atop a mountain in the Negev desert, the

fortress is an iconic historical location for the Jewish people. The palace and fortification, now in ruins, stand for the collective suicide of the Jewish rebels so they would not have to surrender to the Roman Empire in the first century CE.

Me’a She’arim

An ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem.

Mukhtar

Refers to the head of an Arab village.

Ostjude

A derogatory term meaning “Jew from the East,” used by assimilated and educated Jews from central Europe to describe Eastern European Jews who spoke Yiddish. The

Ostjude

were often poor and dressed like today’s ultra-Orthodox.

Palmach

Founded in 1941, Palmach was the underground Jewish army during the British Mandate, and became the elite fighting force of the Haganah (

see:

Haganah). The word is defined literally as “Strike Force” in Hebrew.

Palyam

The maritime force of the Palmach that was set up in 1945. Palyam translates from Hebrew as “Sea Company.”

Revisionists

A right wing, nonreligious faction of the Zionist

Nationalist movement. Led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, revisionist ideology is distinguished by its belief in restoring the historic Land of Israel to the Jewish state.

Roytzeh

Hebrew for “want.”

Sabra

A Hebrew term used to describe the “new Jew,” who was born in Israel and stereotypically a confident, better assimilated, laborer of the Zionist movement. The term alludes to the desert plant that was thorny and tough on the outside, and soft and sweet on the interior. Where the Sabras commonly cultivated the land and worked on

kibbutzim

, they were often compared to the European, “old Jews” who were born in exile.

Sheikh Abrek

A small village in the Jezreel Valley that was settled by Arab Armenian refugees in 1926. When they were relocated in the 1980’s, they left behind several graves on the northern hill.

Sheikh Jarrah

An Arab neighborhood, even today, that sits between the westward Jewish and eastward Arab communities in Jerusalem.

Tel-Hai

A site in the Northern Galilee in which a famous

battle was waged between Arabs and Jews in 1920. The Jews were led by Joseph Trumpeldor, a now iconic figure in Zionist history, who said before his death, “it is good to die for our country.”

Traumen

Yiddish for “dreams.”

Wadi

Arabic term referring to a valley or dry riverbed.

Yishuv

Meaning “settlement” in Hebrew, the term refers to the Jewish residents living in Palestine before Israel established statehood in 1948.

About the Author

YORAM KANIUK, one of Israel’s leading writers, was born in Tel Aviv in 1930. After being wounded in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, he moved to New York for 10 years. A novelist, painter and journalist, Kaniuk has published many novels, memoirs, short stories, non-fiction and books for children and youth. Named an Officer in France’s Order of Arts and Letters in 2012, Kaniuk is also the recipient of the Mediterranee Etranger (2000), the Newman Prize (2006), the Kugel Prize for Lifetime Achievement (2008), the France-Israel Foundation Award (2010) and the Sapir Prize (2010). In 2011, he received an Honorary Doctorate from Tel Aviv University. Kaniuk’s books have been published in 20 languages.

ANTHONY BERRIS was born in the UK and has lived in Israel for most of his life, working as a teacher and freelance translator.

Content

Yoram Kaniuk
1948

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Epilogue

Glossary

About the Author