1948

by Yoram Kaniuk

  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 th
em? 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.