Don't Ask Me If I Love

by Amos Kollek

  For a while we didn’t talk, we just sat silently in the car.

  “We’re not doing so well,” I commented finally. “I don’t think we’re doing so well.”

  “You don’t, huh?”

  “No.”

  He wasn’t the type to reveal his moods, but I suspected he wasn’t feeling too happy himself.

  “Let’s go to the Old City. Maybe we can start a fight or something.”

  Ram sighed.

  “Oh, be your age,” he said wearily.

  I was driving to the Old City anyway. I went through Meah Shearim, the old quarters where the extreme orthodox Jewish group, the Neturey Karta, live.

  As we were approaching I could see the bearded men in their heavy black suits and their big black hats, moving off the sidewalk to block the road.

  “You can’t go through there,” Ram said. “It’s Friday night.”

  “Watch me.”

  I stepped on the gas and the car shot forward in a beautiful sprint. We went through fast, almost hitting a couple of older people who weren’t as quick as the rest in rushing to the sidewalks. When they were all far behind us, I slowed down a bit.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Ram said, unamused.

  I was still wondering vaguely why neither of us had a girl friend. I came to the conclusion that we were both scared of being turned down. It would be a blow to our self-image and reputation. It was all very stupid. I felt irritated.

  “They’ve got the whole sidewalk,” I said.

  “You don’t have to hurt their feelings.”

  “I can drive where I want. I don’t stop them from driving in my neighborhood, do I?”

  Ram leaned back in his seat, his face was hard.

  “You’re a spoiled child.”

  I was that.

  “They don’t go into the army,” I said, trying to put some weight between the words. “They don’t fight. They don’t do a thing. This is their Holy City, but they won’t do a thing for it, except keep other people from living the way they want.”

  “They pray.”

  Was he kidding me?

  “That’s beautiful.”

  “At least they believe in what they are doing. That’s a hell of a lot more than I can say for you.”

  “Oh! Enough of that!” I said irritably.

  We were driving on the wide road that goes around the walls, which was renamed after the paratroopers who conquered the city in the Six Day War. It was very beautiful. It never meant a thing to me, emotionally, but it was very beautiful. The walls were lit by dim yellow floodlights which made them look even more mysterious and old. The road was quite empty, and very quiet, and the air was fresh and clean. I suddenly felt sad and lonely and I took my foot off the accelerator and slowed down. Misplaced, displaced, and wasted, I thought to myself, secretly admiring my choice of words. What the hell am I doing in this world, anyway.

  Compromising.

  Not even between others’ wills and my own. Just between others’ wills and the general state of affairs. Never really having the power and the guts and the determination to have my own way.

  Fighting the Arabs, for example. I had no interest in that. I never cared about the Arabs one way or another. I didn’t think much of them. They were usually stupid and ignorant and extremely inefficient. So what? I didn’t want to solve the nation’s problems. I wanted to solve my own. Need they be the same?

  They tell you you have to be proud of being a Jew. I didn’t care if I was a Jew or a Moslem or a Christian. I didn’t believe in religion. It was the oldest and most primitive invention of them all.

  Don’t worry, boys, someone is watching you from above. You can’t go wrong. Jesus loves you.

  If there was any God he must have been joking, anyway.

  Then there was my father, who was harder to dismiss. He had plans for me. He wanted me to join the party, become a politician, fill the part he didn’t have the time or the will to play himself. There’s a lot of force behind any wish of my father’s.

  Compromise.

  I hated the word.

  Be great or small but don’t be average. Win or lose but don’t compromise.

  What the hell is one worth if he can’t have his own stupid way?

  You can’t ignore people, my mother would say, you cannot live in a void. A void.

  “Hey,” said Ram, “there’s one for you.”

  I took a look. Quite far away there was a girl making her way toward us. I couldn’t see her too clearly except for her white dress and her long yellow hair.

  I scratched my cheek nervously with my forefinger.

  “You are the guy who is always looking for beautiful blond girls,” he said, almost smiling.

  I sensed he knew I wasn’t going to do anything. I wondered what was going on in his mind. I could never understand his attitude toward girls.

  He was the big dream hero of the girls in school. He had the status of an almost sacred institution, as far as the girls were concerned. He never made anything out of it, though. Maybe, I thought, maybe he just didn’t know how they felt.

  Once, when we were in our last year of high school, I came to his flat after supper, to work on a history paper. It had been raining hard and I arrived at his place soaking wet.

  As I entered the building I saw a nice wet, blond girl in a raincoat standing by the staircase, leaning patiently on the wall. I stopped for a moment to look at her because she was very pretty. She looked familiar. Then I realized she went to our high school. Her name was Sharon Or and she was considered a promising beauty. Members of my class mentioned her name quite often.

  I hesitated for a minute. She looked at me and blushed slightly.

  “Waiting for Ram?” I asked her finally with a sudden insight.

  She blushed a bit more, but didn’t say a word.

  “Like to come up? I’m going up there now.”

  She shook her head.

  I shrugged and started up the stairs.

  “Give him my regards,” she said abruptly, and walked out of the building.

  “What is this Sharon Or business?” I asked him as I entered the room.

  “What?”

  I took off my coat.

  “She was downstairs. Waiting, it seems, and quite wet, in fact.”

  Ram raised a dubious eyebrow.

  “Silly girl,” he said.

  “Quite a looker.”

  He took my coat and hung it on the back of a chair. Then he placed the chair by the electric heater.

  He stared at the floor for a moment.

  “It’s a pretty hard rain,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, we’d better start studying.”

  He was hard to figure out.

  The girl was getting near. She was coming slowly down the sidewalk on my side. I looked at her silently but she was staring down at the gray asphalt ahead of her. I couldn’t see her face.

  She had to be a tourist, I thought. Israeli girls usually didn’t look like that. They usually didn’t walk with their faces down. They were seldom on their own in this area at night.

  I took a deep breath. I spoke just as she passed my door.

  “Excuse me.”

  She looked up and stopped walking. I could get a good look at her face now. It was worth my while.

  She didn’t say a word, she just stopped walking.

  I studied her, fascinated. I was always fascinated by beauty. Her features were delicate and composed; thin straight nose, full lips, pale blue eyes and dark eyebrows.

  Ram cleared his throat.

  “I’m glad I met you,” I said, not thinking at all.

  Her mouth curled up slightly.

  “Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “I can’t think of anything original,” I said, rubbing my chin with the back of my hand, “because my mind has stopped working, but I would like to know you a lot better.”

  “Why?”
/>   I put my hand down.

  “Maybe I would like you,” I said slowly, “I think.”

  She was silent for a moment, then she smiled.

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  The wind blew her yellow hair in long waves around her face and shoulders.

  “Are you from the States?”

  “Yes.”

  I gazed at my hands, resting on the wheel.

  O.K., I thought, so here we go.

  “Will you join us? Please?”

  She shook her head.

  “Thank you, but I am on my way to meet someone.”

  I laughed softly to myself. Not because I was happy, just because sure, that’s the way it had to be. (Spinoza.)

  “Tough luck,” Ram commented quietly. The girl looked at him for a moment and then turned back to me.

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” I said, to no one in particular.

  “What is your name?” she asked.

  “Assaf. This is Ram.”

  “How do you do?” she said. “My name is Joy.”

  A bright, charming smile appeared on her lips.

  “How do you do?” Ram said.

  I turned to look at him, but he was again peering into the night with an expressionless face.

  I turned back to her, sadly.

  “I hope I’ll see you again.”

  “Well,” she shrugged, “my friend and I are probably going to be in a discotheque around here later on. Maybe you can happen to meet us there?”

  And with a slight gesture of her hand, she turned and walked away.

  We sat silently, our eyes following her tall retreating figure.

  “Well, what do you think?” Ram’s voice seemed to come through the clouds around me.

  “Guess I’ll have to get this one,” I said.

  “Oh God.”

  “I won’t be needing Him.”

  “A discotheque?” he said dubiously.

  “What?”

  “Have you ever been in one?”

  “Sure,” I said, “I think so.”

  He shook his head slowly, still doubtful.

  “It won’t be so good.”

  “Why?”

  “With your dancing?”

  “Don’t be narrow-minded.”

  “Anyway, how do you know which discotheque?”

  “No one ever goes anywhere in the Old City on a Friday night, except to the Blue Goose, especially if he wants to dance. Don’t you know anything?”

  Ram winced in shocked disbelief.

  “Where did you pick that up?”

  “I saw an advertisement in the papers today, naturally.”

  “Naturally.”

  “I wonder what she meant by ‘friend.’ In English it could refer to either sex.”

  “Or both.”

  “Yes, there’s always that.”

  I turned on the radio and closed my eyes. Frank Sinatra was singing “One for My Baby” with a slow caressing voice.

  I had an uneasy feeling about Ram. I wasn’t sure what he was thinking. He never talked much, not even to me.

  For some reason, my thoughts trailed back to things that had happened a few months before. And it only increased my restlessness.

  Chapter Two

  IT was during the first weeks after I had been made a sergeant in Ram’s company. We were doing our routine job of holding the line on the Jordan, and it wasn’t too tough, when you had gotten used to it. It wasn’t anything like the Suez Canal, which made Ram feel guilty. But I didn’t share this attitude.

  Then, one night, one of our command cars hit a mine and four soldiers were killed.

  It happened in the early dawn. At the first pale light of sunrise, the command car was on its way, collecting the ambush groups. I sat by the pathway with the other four members of my squad. We were to be the last to be picked up, and we waited quite a while. We sat wrapped in our coats and blankets, shivering violently, and clinging to our weapons with numb, frozen fingers. I closed my eyes wearily and wished that the sun would rise faster. The freezing night was worse than the boiling day, especially when you had to lie motion-lessly on the ground for nine hours. I always wondered how soldiers managed to fall asleep on ambushes. That was a trick I could never pull. The rattling of my teeth would wake me up immediately.

  It was very quiet. The soldiers sat silently, rubbing their red eyes and yawning. I felt sorry for them. They still had two and a half years ahead of them.

  From far away came the dim humming of the motor. I opened my eyes and blinked at the bright rays of the sun. I looked at my watch: it was ten minutes to five.

  The soldiers got slowly to their feet and stretched themselves.

  “Why does he drive so slowly? That son of a bitch,” one of them said sulkily.

  Then there was a huge, shattering explosion.

  I jumped to my feet. Somewhere someone screamed with pain.

  “It’s the command car, isn’t it?” one of the soldiers asked stupidly.

  I didn’t answer, I was already running toward the sound as fast as I could. The others followed after me, breathing heavily from the effort and their excitement. The blast knocked the command car a few yards in the air and it landed vertically on the side of the path. When we got there we found ten people lying on the ground. Six of the unit’s soldiers were only wounded but the other four were dead.

  “Oh, my God,” the soldier who had asked if it was the command car way back at the pick-up point said. “Oh my God.”

  “Come here and give me a hand,” I told him, watching his pale face and feeling my own stomach turn. “Don’t just stand there, goddammit.”

  Two days later, we crossed the river along with five more companies of paratroopers, and went into a small village called Saame. We blew it up. The village had been known to be the base of the terrorists. We captured three of them, and another nine were killed. We didn’t touch any civilians, but we blew up all their houses. By noon we were back on the West Bank. We had no dead, and no wounded. The same evening Ram and I went to Jerusalem. One of the soldiers who had been killed by the mine had gone to school with us, though he was three years younger.

  We took a twenty-four-hour leave to pay a call on his parents. Ram did not want to take the C.C.’s jeep and so we hitchhiked. We had started out late and weren’t doing too well. It was past eleven o’clock when we finally reached the old police station of Latrun.

  This was the place where one of the bloodiest and most fruitless battles of the war of independence had taken place. The Israelis had not managed to take it then, but they did in June 1967. Since that time it has been just an old gray building, standing harmlessly on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

  Ram and I were quiet and unenthusiastic. This leave held no charm for us. We stood there on the side of the road, each immersed in his private unappealing thoughts, and not really caring if we got a ride or not.

  Not many cars were passing at that time of evening but the first one that did, stopped for us. We got in the back of a big old Ford, and it pulled away from the curb and started going again. The driver was an elderly man, and his elderly wife sat beside him.

  There was another passenger in the back seat at Ram’s side. She was a girl of twenty years or so, quite dark and reasonably good looking. I wasn’t paying much attention to her. I didn’t know about Ram, because most of the time I was staring out the window, and ignoring everyone.

  Anyway, after a while the girl seemed to have grown tired of the silence so she turned to us and started talking.

  “Going to Jerusalem?”

  “Yes,” said Ram.

  “On leave?”

  “Yes.” said Ram.

  “Nice evening, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Ram. He was a talkative bastard.

  There was a short pause. I imagined she was using it to get over her shock that neither of us seemed to seize this great opportunity. Soldiers were usually more forward with girls.

  “Is it rea
lly tough in the paratroopers?” she started on another angle.

  “So so,” Ram said.

  I stared aimlessly at the darkness outside trying to decide whether it would be worth while to try getting some sleep. The springs in the seat were old and the ride was quite uncomfortable. I decided against it.

  “I am studying at the university,” the girl was saying. “I couldn’t go into the army because I have to look after my mother who is very sick.”

  I turned and looked at her briefly. She was staring at the two of us with interest. Ram gazed at me uneasily and, getting no support, turned back to the girl.

  “What are you studying?” he asked.

  “Art.”

  “Oh.”

  I smiled to myself. In the front seat the elderly couple was taking in every word. Maybe they were thinking of their youth.

  “I figure on studying myself next year,” Ram added woodenly, because she was looking at him expectantly. “Once I am through with the army.”

  “Art?”

  “No. Political science.”

  “And you?”

  Silence.

  “Hey.”

  I realized she was talking to me now, and tried to seem absorbed in the invisible landscape outside. I thought to myself that I could do without contributing to this conversation.

  “I think your friend ignores me on purpose,” the girl commented cheerfully to Ram.

  “He has his moods.”

  “Oh.”

  The next thing I knew she was leaning toward me and tapping me lightly on the shoulder.

  “Are you ignoring me, soldier?” she asked.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said.

  She looked at me encouragingly. The woman in the front seat turned to look back, and then, embarrassed when she met my gaze, turned around again. I smiled and shook my head thoughtfully.

  “You are not being very polite, are you?” the girl asked.

  “No.”

  She burst out laughing.

  “You’re cute.”

  I grimaced. I didn’t like that word.

  She shrugged and looked at Ram.

  “Are you two old friends?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Quite.”

  “Comrades in arms,” she said dreamily, “isn’t that the strongest kind of friendship?”

  I leaned my head against the window and went to sleep.