1948

by Yoram Kaniuk

  I was suddenly dancing enthusiastically, and some of the old men even forgot that I was the enemy, and clapped, and the half-empty canteen flapped against my hip. I have no recollection of the friend I’d come with, perhaps he’d left earlier. I enjoyed being with those Jews who could be in any place at the same time, in Jerusalem, London, New York, even though they never had, or would ever have, a real homeland.

  I told a man dancing next to me that we’re fighting for him too, and he spat and said that we’re bringing down disaster upon them, and I thought about my father’s cousin who’d been killed at the Haifa refineries, about my grandfather who’d built a synagogue in Tel Aviv when he’d come from Tarnopol, a few months after my father had rescued him from the slaughter he knew was coming. He’d call me “Yoiram” and ask, Holekhsa kvar lebeis haknessess? (You’re going to the synagogue already?) After that I don’t remember a thing except for what I perhaps invented and didn’t actually happen, or perhaps did—but I do remember a little girl hiding in the stairwell and smiling at me, and my smiling back and thinking I’d like to hug her, but she disappeared.

  Nineteen

  At this point in what I’ve been writing over and over, there is—amid the heat and the noise and distress and wonderment—the problem of memory. What I’ve written so far could be condensed into a two-week period: Siris, Beit Makhsir, Deir Ayyoub, Nabi Samwil, the Old City, the Castel, and a few more places like Qaluniyya. But I’m writing about five months. I can see in my mind’s eye people falling like toys; an illogical movement of young bodies. They fall, and I can’t grasp when they died and began falling, or vice versa. In my mind’s ear I can hear the tangos on the records we took from the Arab villages, and see a column of Arab and Jordanian prisoners of war being led away by the Jerusalem force.

  I remember two different things. Both are clear in the depths of my mind. One is apparently erroneous, but I’ve no idea what actually happened. I remember being shot at in the assault on Zion Gate. First we took Mount Zion. I fired the Davidka and wounded the monastery dome, and the scar remained there for many years. I’d go to Jerusalem and say to the people with me, See? It was me who hit that roof. Big deal! Big hero that I was. I hit a roof far more beautiful than I’d ever be.

  The enemy fled and we had to wait until morning. I don’t know why we waited. Dawn broke and it began to get hot. We fell in and it seems to me that Dado said that this was a historic moment, after two thousand years we were returning to Temple Mount, the rock of our existence, the Old City, the City of David. We charged toward Zion Gate, and two bullets hit me, giving me a zipper in my leg, and I fell onto my back facing the city walls.

  The pain was terrible and I couldn’t move. My comrades didn’t notice and went on running forward. Maybe there were two other wounded men with me but the sunlight blinded me. When I opened my eyes I saw on the wall a man wearing the red kaffiyeh of the Arab Legion aiming his rifle, or maybe a submachine gun, at me. The light became even clearer. I saw one eye fixed on me. The second was apparently looking at me through the sight of the weapon aimed at me. I was wearing my British sailor’s white shirt, and realized, I don’t know how, that the man was British, so he had to be an officer.

  He didn’t shout. He didn’t say a word. We were about twenty meters apart and I knew that this was the end. He fired and missed my death, and now he was going to correct it. That’s what a soldier does. A soldier kills. I concentrated, or so I think, on the gaping maw of the muzzle. I remember it being far bigger than it could possibly be. I waited. That’s all I could do. Blood was still flowing from my leg. When a young man is awaiting death it’s not the same as when you’re old.

  Almost sixty years later I awaited another death, which came but did not vanquish me, and I felt it was the end but I enjoyed the thought of not returning to my miserable life. But back then in the war, in my youth, I was still in diapers. I had only a future and there was no present apart from death. Then I didn’t know what endings were. I knew quotations from Shlonsky, Bialik, Spinoza, and Dostoyevsky, which I’d been taught by Tony Halle. Back then I didn’t understand what the death awaiting me in another moment was. I had a head filled with sawdust.

  I knew I had only another moment or two to live and I remember, as if it’s happening right now, I remember my plea to the muzzle that it come already, a sort of expectation that it would be over and I would wait no longer, I remember my body longing that it be over. I saw my blood oozing and the wall gleaming in the bright sunlight, and I saw the colors playing on it, and the man’s eyes, and perhaps I wanted to shout to him, but I had no voice. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see the end, and I wasn’t afraid anymore. I’ve kept that fear with me throughout my life, whenever I awoke again and again over decades of bad dreams, sweating, and seeing the muzzle, and it’s not there.

  I pressed my hands to my eyes, and truly, I didn’t have the time to wait, and perhaps I thought, perhaps, perhaps I didn’t think, perhaps I thought in advance, that I shouldn’t feel how the waiting bullet penetrates my skull, and how, for a few seconds, I’ll be alive on the way to my death, and then, I’ve absolutely no idea how much time passed, I opened my eyes and there was wonderment. There was no death. No fresh blood. The pain remained where it had been earlier. There was no barrel aimed at me, no kaffiyeh, the man had simply vanished.

  That was the most incomprehensible moment I’ve ever experienced. What am I doing here? The pain I feel is me. I am the death that wandered from me to Bab el-Wad and the ground beneath me. The sun illuminated me, I fell illumined, and only years later would I know who that man was.

  He contacted me when I was in Paris in 1950. He was indeed an Englishman in the service of His Majesty King Abdullah. He told me that at the time I seemed to him like an angel, because of the light and the white shirt. I was lying like Jesus with my arms spread. He saw the blood flowing from my wound and thought I was the crucified Christ. He told me on the phone, Perhaps I’d had too much to drink the night before, when you took Mount Zion. I looked at you and knew I’d aimed at you but I’d only hit you in the leg. I should have finished the job and killed you, you were facing me, lying there like a little white rug, but I couldn’t. I tried to kill you but I also saved you. I loved you and hated you. I thought you’d died and said, I’ve killed a boy by the gate, and was told they hadn’t seen a body and that the Jews had probably taken you away.

  In the 1970s, I went to Los Angeles to work on a screenplay. When I reached the airport, the producer who’d sent me had left me a note on a rental car telling me to drive to the Intercontinental Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. The director I was to work with didn’t know exactly when I was due to arrive or to which hotel I’d been sent. I was supposed to call him in the morning. I got to the enormous hotel. The first five floors were for parking. As I waited to check in I changed my mind and said to myself, I haven’t come to Los Angeles to live in a concrete monster. Next to the hotel I saw a little motel like in the movies, pink and surrounded by palms, and I checked in there, was given a room, and I sat on the bed, tired from the flight, when suddenly the phone rang, I picked up, and the British officer was on the line.

  He welcomed me to the city, and said that many years ago, in the room I was in, the daughter of film star Lana Turner, who’d been married only eight times, had killed her mother’s lover, one Johnny Stompanato, and was found to have acted in self-defense. It was strange being in that room, when down below in the pool were aspiring young actresses who’d come to Hollywood to be discovered.

  The last time we spoke he was at death’s door, and wanted to tell me who he was but was unable to, and a woman, maybe his wife, shouted in a choked voice, Tell him already, but he didn’t, and I never heard from him again. May his memory be blessed.

  But there’s another version. A man I met not long ago told me he remembered that we’d fought together on Mount Zion, and how we’d charged up the hill together. He recalled details about me that I couldn’t remember, and told me I’d bee
n wounded just as the soldiers were listening to the commander’s speech and readying themselves for the assault on the Old City. He didn’t remember who the commander was, but in his dramatic address the officer said (and I’m sure it was Dado), After 1,800 years we are entering the Old City, passing through the wall, and reaching Temple Mount. He said I was lying in pain when we were fired on from the walls, and I wanted to rejoin the platoon but couldn’t move, and the guys lying there didn’t want to go on. He remembered that in the end Dado asked for volunteers, and there were a few, there was a bitter battle, they blew up Zion Gate, and the wounded were evacuated with me, said the man, who was the driver of the armored vehicle to the monastery or something, and a medic tried to bandage me but I wouldn’t let him, and the medic said, so this man told me, that I wanted to die because I hadn’t conquered the mount.

  I remember being taken to the Italian monastery. I remember being laid down on a white sheet, the first one I’d seen in four months. An elderly, sad-eyed nun gave me half a glass of water, and they stanched the flow of blood and gave me an injection for the pain. I lay in bed and the ceiling was very high. Painted on it were pale angels. A nun ran to get me a dressing. I looked at the beautiful ceiling, after all that time it was so pleasant to be lying in a bed on a sheet, with a ceiling, a floor, the smell of antiseptic. There was an explosion and the ceiling fell in on us, and the nurses and nuns serving as nurses ran in and took us to the cellar. There were dozens of wounded there, some groaning, others weeping; there were some who’d evidently died during the move. I apparently had a high fever and I started to burn up.

  In the cellar pain and stench reigned. The ceiling was circular. There was a bedpan next to each tattered mattress. On the wall facing me hung a painting of the Christ child and his mother. One of the nuns examined me and I was taken to another room that looked like an abattoir. Blood was flowing in there. The wounded were being cut. They screamed. They cried for their mothers. They moaned. Blood-spattered doctors were working frantically. One came over to me, told me his name, and said they’d found the first signs of gangrene in my leg and they’d have to amputate it. He added that they’d already amputated the legs of Uri and Margolin who’d been with me in the armored vehicle. Now it was my turn and there were no anesthetics. The soldiers were so tired that they accepted everything, just give us some water. Give us hope, just a little hope, which was in short supply for the men twisting in pain.

  I lay there trembling with fear, I didn’t want to lose my leg. Today I’ve no idea how I managed to persuade someone to call a distant relative who was a doctor at Hadassah Hospital. They knew who he was and he came. He didn’t remember what I looked like but he liked my mother and told me she’s a wonderful, courageous woman, and then there was a vociferous argument, and in the meantime I saw them amputating a leg as the soldier screamed, and the blood that spurted from it sprayed me. My relative said that they didn’t have the penicillin that would halt the curse, as he called gangrene, and that for two days the Primus pilots had been trying to drop drugs, but the parachute drop had failed due to high winds.

  Today I don’t know why they took pity on me, or perhaps they thought I was going to die anyway. They lay me on a narrow bed, bound me with restraints, and they brought in Eskimo, who was the brigade’s biggest bullyboy and who years later would be promoted to the rank of colonel for the use of force. Eskimo came in with another soldier who held a bottle, I was dazed with pain, and Eskimo, with a hand of iron, shoved the bottle containing some fiery liquid, which I afterward realized was cognac, into my mouth. He didn’t let me vomit it out, I swallowed half the bottle before I choked.

  Eskimo started punching me. I could dimly see two doctors opening up my leg and extracting the one bullet still embedded in it. The second had exited. Eskimo carried on pummeling me, and I remember a big cloud in his eyes, that bastard, he hit me and hit me and I wasn’t there, I was flying. I woke up later and I think I vomited my heart out. I was taken into a side room and laid down, and they told me that my relative had come and gone and said he’d be back to see me, and that I should be strong and of good courage. For a whole day I lay there semiconscious. A doctor came in and said that one of the pilots had managed to drop a batch of penicillin.

  I was taken back to the big room and every three hours was given a penicillin injection in my ass, which rapidly began to look like a sieve. I gradually began to feel things and sense my body, and the pain subsided a little. On the mattress next to me they lay a man without eyes and legs and who was punctured with shrapnel. Before me I saw a young man crumbling on a reddening mattress. He was crying. I’d never seen anybody without eyes cry. The boy was a human carcass, and all the time he mumbled “Shoot me, shoot me.”

  There was sometimes another young man with him who they said was his brother, and he was wounded too, but lightly, and he said he’d shoot his brother if he didn’t get any better, and what kind of a life would he have anyway, and I felt close to the half-dead young man. Perhaps I was envious that he was so seriously wounded. I tried to touch him but couldn’t reach him with my hand. He felt me and turned his blinded eyes toward me and it seemed that I saw a smile in his blindness. I was told that he used to be called the King of Jerusalem.

  My wounds started to heal. We heard the constant thud of exploding shells. We heard shouting all around. We hardly spoke to each other. We all lay there in a bubble of pain. We were given one glass of water a day. Some schmuck with a guitar came along. A dim-witted old man who sang an idiotic song about “Tomorrow at Seven I’ll Be Waiting, Elisheva,” and “War Is a Dream Soaked in Blood and Tears,” and then put down the guitar, and started telling jokes about an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Jew in a whorehouse, and more like them. He carried on telling lead-balloon jokes and finally fell silent and glared at us. Angrily, he asked, Why can’t you at least clap, I’m doing this for free and just for you, but we couldn’t laugh and he yelled, Clap, you bastards, I’m going and I won’t be back. I told him that was great news, and he looked at me and said, Haven’t you got even a little pity for somebody who works so hard? I go from place to place, and it’s hard for me, seeing all this pain, and I want to make things a bit easier for you, why won’t you laugh for me or at least clap? Somebody at the far end of the room shouted, Mister, we’re not clapping for you because we haven’t got hands, and the King of Jerusalem gurgled “Shoot me, shoot me.” The comedian left sadly, although I have to say that one of the nuns laughed until she cried and one of the doctors said that he’s terribly funny. Afterward I was taken away and I found myself in the operating room. Anesthetics had arrived, my leg was opened up again, and I fell asleep and awoke on a mattress next to the King of Jerusalem, and once again time began to move slowly.

  One night a few doctors came in together and looked at us. We pretended to be asleep, or maybe we were, and we woke up in the middle of a kind of tiny noise of something going on. We heard later that together they’d given the King of Jerusalem a lethal injection. His brother fired his pistol in the air and shouted in memory of the King and cried, and a nurse came along with an injection for me, and a day passed, maybe longer, and I found myself in an armored vehicle in the middle of a city locked in by shelling and devoid of human presence, being taken to Pension Bikel in the Beit Hakerem neighborhood.

  It had probably been a pleasant place once upon a time, but with scores of wounded, nurses, overworked and stinking toilets, with no water and food fit for rats, it was something like a slaughterhouse but with soap. The place reeked of the delicate soaps of rest homes, remnants of that now-defunct institution. But what do you do with sweet-smelling soap without water? It was used to freshen the air in the toilets.

  Most of the time we were taken outside, and those who were able crawled on the lawn. The thunder of shellfire could be heard here too. There was a haze of smoke. We were secondhand, but in bad condition. Not worth a lot. We could no longer be fighters. The nation didn’t need half-dead wounded on its head back then. What we
wanted was a fresh tomato, a watermelon, not dry leaves and bread crusts and an emaciated, smelly cucumber. We lay on lawns that had yellowed and that pricked us because they hadn’t been watered for weeks, though it was nice to lie in a cloud of early-morning dew. The sun came out later and dried the nettles but the birds no longer came, they scorned and detested us for not being able to feed them. Not one officer, soldier, mayor, or Palmach functionary came to visit us. About a hundred of us were separated not only from our homes but also from our comrades, who were still fighting.

  It’s hard for me to recall exactly what we did there. I only remember the harsh and bitter grief that penetrated my very bones. I was in a cast. I needed help to get out to the lawn, and there was nobody to offer it, everybody was wounded, and in any other place and at any other time they would have been hospitalized. The Pension Bikel staff did all they could to make our time as pleasant as possible at that temporary hospital, which was a little temple without a god and without drugs, except for the penicillin injections every three hours.

  From the nurses we heard about the cease-fire that had broken out. The shelling suddenly stopped. We saw soldiers smoking in the street outside the pension. Excessively dressed-up people could be seen walking scrawny, yapping dogs, all the time looking up to make sure that all was still quiet. Slowly we were returned to our cities, villages, and kibbutzim. An ambulance came to take me and five other wounded. We were given a little of the water that had begun to reach the city, the nurses checked our dressings, and off we went. We were told we’d be taking the Burma Road* that had recently been opened.