1948

by Yoram Kaniuk

  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, smar
t 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.