1948

by Yoram Kaniuk

  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.