1948

by Yoram Kaniuk

  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-th
an-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 whe
n 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.