by Yoram Kaniuk
The ambulance jounced. The route was confusing and bumpy. I banged my head on the roof each time the vehicle bounced. We drove for six hours, and my watch now stopped too, and time drew out into an eternity. It was hot in the ambulance. There were no nurses with us and we were strapped in. We passed rocks that seemed as if they’d just been blown up. The landscape seemed mutilated. We sang “Yama yama yama shorba,” and “Samara hop hop hop,” and “Get being last right out of your mind,” and mainly “Gentlemen, history repeats itself,” and “On June sixteenth nineteen forty-four,” and we came to a stop and were taken out.
We lay in the sun on stretchers from the ambulance. Facing us was a deep, wide wadi, and there were jeeps carrying wounded from one end to the other. We waited our turn. Three of us were loaded onto a jeep that traversed the wadi, jouncing in a way that made what we’d already experienced feel like driving on cotton wool. Waiting at the other end were more ambulances and armored vehicles, we were loaded onto them and reached Sarafand.
We were taken into a big room with tables loaded with salads, fruit, hard-boiled eggs, jugs of water, fruit juices, cold coffee, rolls, and cigarettes. Who’d seen stuff like this over the last few months? How did we know what we were actually seeing? We looked at the bounty before us and our gastric juices churned, but we didn’t move. There was a kind of collective moan that simultaneously came from the bellies of some two hundred men.
Around the table we saw some women we didn’t know, who ran around and called to us to eat right away and drink already, but we couldn’t. We were stunned. We slowly approached the tables and started to move our lips and laughed, we gave an appalling, terrible laugh and began gulping air, and after a few gulps and rumbles from my stomach that rose into my mouth, we began eating and drinking. Our bellies swelled but we didn’t stop. I remember chewing a fresh cucumber in one corner of my mouth and a slice of fresh caraway bread in the other, and I do remember that it was caraway. We stood there stuffing ourselves until we began to drop. We started to convulse. The women took fright and ran to call the doctors and nurses, and they ducked our heads into the baths there so we could throw up, and we vomited up our guts, and tried to sing, and we were hurting, sated, and ashamed, and I’ve no idea how it all ended.
Later, I was transferred to the Donolo Hospital in Jaffa, where I was examined, had my cast changed, was injected and cleaned up. With a nurse supporting me lest I fall, I was put into a shower stall, and that was the first shower I’d had since the one in the yard at Kiryat Anavim, and I let myself take off. I was soaped, my wild hair was cut, I was shaved, and a few days later, once my stomach stopped troubling me, I was put into an ambulance and taken to my parents’ home. I got there in the morning. In the street the rumor had spread that I was coming home. People stood on their balconies and showered me with sweets and flowers, but my parents and sister weren’t there. My mother was teaching at her school and my father was at the museum. They all surrounded me in incredulity, but not one of them remembered that my parents weren’t there. Once the first wave of enthusiasm subsided, they all went about their business. I slowly climbed to the third floor and waited. My sister, Mira, came home from school and very excitedly let me in, as my parents, who had apparently been told, came running. The boy had come home from the war.
Twenty
After a few days at home I was taken back to Donolo Hospital on the Jaffa seashore. In only a few weeks the cast had been taken off and I was practicing walking. I doggedly wanted to get back to the fighting that was about to start up again after the cease-fire. Gavrush came to see me and asked how I was doing. Making progress, I said. He said, I hear you want to come back. Yes, I replied. He asked me to join some fighters from the Harel Brigade who hadn’t been killed, and said we had to report to the town of Ramla to set up the brigade’s commando unit. He said I should report to the Opera building where they’d set up the navy headquarters, and we’d take their jeep and drive to Ramla.
I broke out of the hospital that night. I met two guys who were waiting for me, we reached the headquarters, which had two sentries at the gate. We told them we’d come for their jeep because we needed it in Jerusalem. They didn’t understand Hebrew and there was a hullabaloo. We overpowered those newly enlisted young lads and drove to Ramla in the jeep.
Ramla was empty and encircled by barbed wire. In their haste the Arab residents, who had fled or been driven out, had left behind smells, clothing, furniture. Their absence took the form of a massive presence. Ramla, capital of the sand dunes, Ramla, the vibrant town whose houses were so imposing, whose streets were so wide, whose thickly -foliaged acacias and sycamores were planted along its lovely avenues. But it was empty. Ramla, gleaming in the burning summer noonday sun, looked as if a tornado had passed through it, leaving only the houses. The town was separated from the other parts of the country. It was encircled by concertinas of barbed wire. It was guarded by soldiers, most of whom were new immigrants who didn’t speak Hebrew. Stray donkeys brayed in the deserted streets. A camel ruminated pensively as if it couldn’t understand where its owner had gone among the date palms and hedges of prickly pear and the smell of charred food. Inside the houses we saw tables laid for a meal; food congealing on plates. Scrawny, hungry dogs nosed impatiently through piles of garbage, their barks resounding in the echo of the void.
A huge broom had passed through the town, sweeping away everyone in its path—children, women, the elderly, young people—and leaving their emptiness behind. I was unable to remain unaffected, but to my shame I was as yet incapable of being really angry. I was young. I’d seen my comrades dying. I’d seen atrocities on both sides, I’d become impervious, I felt as if I had no feelings. The nothingness I saw on my arrival troubled but didn’t traumatize me. In the nights, in the painful silence, I felt I could hear the concrete moving. The hungry jackals came late at night, besieging the town as they howled.
Two or three days after I got to Ramla I limped slowly to neighboring Lydda, to the old railway station. When I was a child we’d traveled to Haifa via Lydda. It was the country’s biggest station, and it had the only switching line. I can remember the smell of burning coal mingling with the scent of cardamom, the fragrance of the blossoming citrus groves around the town, the smell of fallen carob pods, of the lavender and wormwood, the wild regal purple bougainvilleas, the turbaned vendors at the station entrance, the clashing of their little cymbals accompanied by rhythmic chants, selling huge, aromatic pretzels.
I walked around empty Lydda. The only smell left was a mixture of smoke, ash, and dust. The locomotives were still standing there, but without their rolling stock that had been transferred to Tel Aviv, they looked like huge iron beasts. Crows were hopping everywhere as they searched for rotting meat. I slowly walked back through the fields. It was hot. The summer flowers were dying under a blanket of thistles. I saw discarded clothing, shoes dried up in the sun, hats that had begun to fall to pieces. In the depths of my mind I heard the fleeing footfalls. Here and there I saw a few lone poppies that had survived the summer. A pastoral tranquility lay over the desolation, and the unrelenting smell of smoke and decay.
Beside a long barbed-wire concertina at the roadside I saw some people. A great many people, crowded together. The women were weeping and wailing. Children were calling out, and the men were shouting. I walked toward them. As I approached, an Israeli soldier appeared, the color and cut of his uniform revealing him as newly enlisted. He looked as if he didn’t know which way to hold his Sten. It seemed like he wasn’t sure if I were friend or foe. In broken Hebrew he ordered me to leave immediately and go back to Ramla. I was unarmed, and finally he managed to aim his Sten at me. The look in his eyes told me that perhaps he wouldn’t want to, but because of his inexperience he might unintentionally shoot me. I asked him who all these people are, looking at me pleadingly and trying to attract my attention, to beg my mercy. The soldier replied, Them? They’re just Arabs! They’re trying to get back to Ramla, but it’s forbidden.
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nbsp; I asked him on whose orders, it’s their town. Don’t be stupid, he said, not anymore it isn’t. He smiled at me as if he thought I was feebleminded. When I got back to the town I was angry with myself. That emptiness had a face, flesh, clothes, children. Old women lying in the thistles, men in suits but not always wearing shoes, who pleaded. I felt I was complicit, I felt that the conscience that had been with me in my youth, on which I’d always relied, had nodded off at the critical moment. Could I fight against a soldier of the state in whose establishment I had so recently played a part?
Our CO saw me come back and throw up, and said (and I have to say that there was a certain compassion in his voice), They’re present absentees. What? I asked, and he repeated, Present absentees, a term that was later perpetuated in the law of the land. I didn’t understand what it meant. That term, “present absentee,” sounds like it was taken from a science-fiction book. Any Arab who left a conquered town or village prior to May 14, 1948, and had gone to see somebody, buy something, even visit a relative outside Israel, and wanted to come back, it was as if he hadn’t been here when he left. He was present because he’s here but an absentee because he’s not.
Two days later, the day before we were supposed to leave for the renewed fighting in the Negev desert, a fleet of trucks appeared out of the darkness. They were old and the racket of their groaning wheels could be heard from afar. They ripped through the barbed-wire concertinas as if they were cotton wool, and the soldiers guarding the town fled before them. The trucks roared through the empty streets, shattering the nocturnal Ramla silence. When they halted, people, the like of which I’d never seen, jumped down. At the height of the Eretz Yisrael summer they were wearing several layers of dark, threadbare, torn, faded winter clothing, odd-looking hats, caps, and berets like in old films. They spoke in a babel of languages: Bulgarian, Polish, Russian, Greek, Yiddish, German. They dragged screaming children, and suspiciously carried their worn suitcases. They were like locusts swooping down on the town. They didn’t walk toward the empty houses—they pounced on them! They seized upon on them hungrily, eagerly, while the homeowners were standing by the distant fence, hoping to return, or perhaps were in columns walking toward the unknown.
These Jews didn’t discern the emptiness of the houses. They were not romantic, and unlike me, didn’t vomit due to a sham conscience. They’d found their place in the sun! The Arab nothingness was alien to them. It didn’t interest them. In answer to my irksome inquiries they replied, If those refugees have got somewhere to go, then they’re all right! We were behind barbed wire for more than ten years. What does a sabra like you know?
It was all strange for them: the heat, the chrysanthemums, the camels, the prickly pear hedges, the smells, the donkeys, the bright sun. When I saw families hurrying toward the house we were about to evacuate, I saw people beyond any moral accounting. They’d come from the garbage can of history. They were right because they’d survived—that is, they were sinners so great in their own eyes that they were unable to be judges.
They threw out whatever they felt was unsuitable, they took food from the iceboxes and ate, they took clothing from the cupboards and drawers, folded and packed it, as if they’d be compelled to continue their wandering very shortly. They lit fires in the yards and roasted sheep they’d hunted in the fields. In the two days before I left, I saw about one thousand five hundred people, maybe more, settling in a town that was foreign to them, whose name they’d never heard of until their arrival, and the moment they came, even though they couldn’t pronounce its name, they became its owners.
They didn’t stop selling and buying. They had watches on their arms under their coat sleeves, and they sold gold teeth and rings, Players and Craven A cigarettes, and condoms. They were like a school of crocodiles that had come down from the Black Mountains, people who had emerged from Hell to return to history, which lay beaten and weeping on the barbed-wire fences.
The sight of the Jews occupying every house was horrifying, but also possessed a kind of nonjudgmental human aesthetic. The last time that any of them had a house or apartment of their own was in the 1930s. They said—and I remember one trenchant conversation in florid Hebrew—Unlike the Arabs we didn’t have neighboring countries to go to! Their children, who were born in German or British camps, didn’t know what a building without barbed wire around it looked like. We were walking jokes, swelled with our own self-importance because we’d won some Mickey Mouse war. War for them was the Wermacht, Nazis, the Gestapo, tanks, freight trains, huts in gray, and going to God via the crematoria. They’d been through a war we wouldn’t have been able to win with unarmed combat, crappy Czech weapons, our campfires, and the guys, and with or without Palmach songs. They felt they were the wretched and they’d won because they were alive. They dismantled the barbed wire the way children unwrap a chocolate bar. They took and remained.
Twenty-one
One evening in Ramla, while we were waiting for something that nobody knew about, an officer came along and told us that we were going to be the spearhead of a new unit to be called the Palmach Tenth Battalion. He said we’d be leaving for Abu Ghosh in the morning. Since we’d come into possession of a few more jeeps, which we’d lifted from other units, we drove in a convoy up the Burma Road to Abu Ghosh. With us was a column of trucks taking food into Jerusalem. Some of us climbed onto the moving trucks and handed down eggs and bread and pickled herring and I don’t remember what else, and drove into the big village. The houses were abandoned but they emitted a different smell than that in Ramla, the smell of betrayal. The smell of a village that should have remained because its inhabitants were the only ones in the area who had helped the Jews.
We hid the jeeps in the olive trees and settled ourselves into a few empty houses. More soldiers I didn’t know arrived, refugees from other units that had been almost destroyed. There was one guy in a yarmulke who read the festival prayer book. He went off to look for something to eat and I leafed through it. When I was young I’d read it every so often, and I came to the line “The hill of our roots, rejected yet by the builders.” It stuck in my mind. I didn’t understand it but it embraced me from a hidden place. The guy also had a Bible, and as I leafed through it I came to Ezekiel, and read “In thy blood, live; yea. I said unto thee: In thy blood, live,” and I felt a kind of great sadness. For myself. For us. For the Tenth Battalion, some of whose men would soon die.
Somebody once said that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. The days in Abu Ghosh were empty with fullness. Benny Marshak brought a quartet to play for the men. He sent one violinist to another battalion, a second violinist and a cellist to another one. I told him that a quartet is an instrumental ensemble that plays together as a single entity, but he said he hadn’t got time for the wonders of music and that a recital isn’t the Pentateuch. He also found records of Beethoven’s Fifth, six records in all, and he sent two to here, two there, and the rest to another platoon.
We sat and waited. The shock of the nothingness was great. The waiting was difficult. Why had we expelled the villagers? Finally an officer came along and said that Ben-Gurion’s aide had demanded the return of the residents of Abu Ghosh, and that a callous act had been perpetrated against them, and the Arabs started to come back and we dispersed. I was sent to an NCO course at Ju’ara, where I fainted and they discovered that my leg was still in bad condition and I was sent home.
The first thing I did on my return home was what we’d talked about a lot during the war. I went to Mugrabi Square and stood by the phone box we’d joked about, saying that after the fighting all the survivors could gather inside it, and a few more of us actually appeared and we all crowded into the small booth.
Then began a confused, terrible, and amusing period. I underwent a series of treatments at the clinic, I listened to music and hobbled around the city looking for friends, most of whom had died. There was a birthday party for one of them and I got up onto a table and delivered a ghastly, hideous, and aggressive speech agains
t everything, I was what was called swimming against the current, and when I’d finished I found myself standing on my own, everybody had vanished, the birthday boy had gone inside, and I wept.
A few days later in Herzl Street, I was stopped by a man who said he was a military policeman—something I’d never heard of—and another guy came by, and since neither of us had an army ID, he arrested us. By chance, a police officer came along and witnessed the arrest, our laughter, and the military policeman who looked like a cartoon soldier, and remembered us from the war. He released us, and advised us to go to Allenby Street near Herbert Samuel Square, where there was an office dealing with soldiers who’d left the army outside of their own accord.
It was crowded. Everybody was looking for their own files, which were torn and falling to pieces. I found mine right away. When it was my turn, a recently enlisted young guy looked at the papers and said, I’ve got to reenlist you. I said, Into which army? The Israel Defense Forces, he replied. Is that our army? I inquired. Yes, he said. Well, I said, it’s time I swore allegiance to the State of Israel. At the conclusion of the swearing in, he discharged me from the Israel Defense Forces and I was given a certificate to that effect, and I realized that I’d enlisted and been discharged in the same half hour, and I liked it.
I told the guy that it was quite nice being discharged from an army I hadn’t served in, and that I’d served in the one we’d had previously. He stood up, and in the middle of that big room crowded with soldiers and youngsters who’d been caught without documents, saluted me. It was ridiculous but touching. I tried to return his salute but didn’t know how. He gave me a six-pound payment, and I attested that I, the undersigned, had been discharged and received payment for six months of service, and I went back to Mugrabi Square. I went to the hot-dog seller, who recognized me, and had to tell him that Goethe was greater than Shakespeare, and after all those years he varied his response and said, And Schiller too. I said that in any event I trusted his judgment.
