1948

by Yoram Kaniuk

  I walked to Café Piltz where I met friends, we drank Spitfires, and they sang the idiotic song that was a big hit at the time, “In the Negev Desert,” as someone played the accordion and I got drunk. It was the first time I’d drunk brandy—and not washed in it—except for the time I’d lain under the iron hands of Eskimo, the colonel for the use of force, when he’d tried to knock me out with a bottle of brandy. Without prior warning I stood up and sang, the cast on my leg hurt, but I was evidently happy for a moment.

  We were a band of lost soldiers hanging around the city; in the mornings we’d sit in Café Nussbaum on the old promenade, and we listened to the Beethoven septet over and over. We dreamed about going to drain the Amazon in Brazil but there wasn’t a ship to take us. With us was Buba, the sweetest whore in the country. Buba gained fame as the one who, from the promenade railings, had seen a blond man lying naked on his back on the sand, and went to check him out, the way a doctor does, came back and said, He’s not from here. And when she saw a guy doing push-ups she’d yell, Hey! Where’s the girl gone?

  One poor guy came past with watches on both arms and gold teeth and Players cigarettes, shouting in Yiddish, and somebody got up and called him “Soap,” and I, who’d never hit anybody except for a Yugoslavian who’d come at me with a knife in Qaluniyya, grabbed the guy who’d called the man a soap and beat the shit out of him. He yelled, “What d’you want? What, he’s not a soap?” The beating continued until they dragged me away and poured cold water over me.

  We laughed a lot and were sad and lost. The war continued in the Negev. We’d walk from the promenade to Geula Street and Allenby and have lunch at the Yemenite’s, and from there we’d walk slowly to Dizengoff Street and sit in Café Pinati on the corner of Frishman, and a few hours later we’d go to Café Kassit and finish off the night. There was a big guy with us called Parser, who spoke in a kind of hoarse growl and would show us what a big man he was, and we noticed that he’d sometimes disappear, and once we followed him and saw this sham tough guy standing in Frug Street, beneath a balcony, calling in a soft, childish, pleading voice, “Tsippi! Tsippi!” because he loved the red-headed Tsippi. We envied him for loving her and her for apparently loving him back. She played hard to get, which was quite common back then, because you had to conquer a woman like any Arab village, and indeed, they later married. They were together all their lives. He became a truck driver, a courteous man who’d sing “Shoshana, Shoshana, Shoshana” in an almost lyrical voice.

  Twenty-two

  I wanted a girl. The ones I’d known before thought you got pregnant from kissing. I wanted to kiss a woman, after I’d killed people. I stood on the promenade one night with a girl at my side. She smelled of laundry soap and a kind of sweet stench. We turned to each other, and suddenly, as if it had been planned, we kissed. We held hands and went up to the Excelsior Hotel, a small hotel for soldiers on Hayarkon Street, and took a room. I asked them to put a baby’s crib inside. The cast on my leg did its job, and they brought a crib and placed it by the window overlooking the sea. It was nice there. She taught me everything I didn’t know. I loved her with a great love. She spoke hardly any Hebrew. She mumbled in Polish. She was lovely and sad and thought I was a German officer and she crouched on the floor and wept and shouted at me in German, and we came together again, and the night passed. We named the baby that would be born out of that love, but I don’t remember what we called it. Then it was morning. I wanted to know her name and tell her mine, but after an entire night of love it was difficult.

  We came out of the hotel and walked toward Ben-Yehuda Street. Buses and carts and trucks and a few cars were already on the streets. There was an old kiosk on the corner, and the man knew me and sold us each a roll and poured us black coffee, and we drank and kissed, and without thinking what I was doing I started walking toward my parents’ home farther down Ben-Yehuda. After a while I remembered and looked behind me, I was totally confused, she was standing there far away, in wonderment. She seemed angry. I felt so good that I smiled lovingly at her and went on walking, and then I realized that I didn’t know who she was, and how would I find her, and I turned to go back. Hordes of people were hurrying to work. She disappeared among them and I tried to run after her, and even saw her from a distance, but the cast restricted me. She’d vanished. Afterward I walked the city for a month trying to find my beloved and not succeeding. To this day, sixty-two years later, I don’t know who she was, her name, where she came from, whether she’d come from a camp. I loved her until the love faded. I fell in love with a different girl each day, but none of them was the mother of my would-be son, in that crib facing the sea.

  Twenty-three

  I had a friend, part of whose shoulder had been shot off. We’d walk down the street, and when we saw people coming he’d stop and look at his missing shoulder. The people would look on astonished, he was tall and good-looking, and he’d raise his arm and whirl it behind his head, which in the absence of a shoulder he could do, and they’d all scream and he’d smile at me and we’d go on our way.

  At Café Nussbaum there was talk about work at sea. I wanted to get to the fighting in the Negev. Miri, who was in charge of the Palmach wounded, told me I wouldn’t be going back because physically I wasn’t up to it. She suggested that I sign on to bring refugees by sea. She put me in touch with Zimmermann from the Shoham Maritime Company, who was responsible for the ships, and who came from Kfar Tavor, or Meskha as it once was known. He used his influence and I signed on aboard the Pan York. On each trip we brought around three thousand people.

  When I first saw them, shinnying up the hawsers to board, I hated them. I wrote an article for Shlonsky entitled, “I Hate the Jewish People.” Afterward I fell in love with them. I realized that they, not us, were the true heroes, and that to survive what they’d gone through you needed more than a few rifles and Stens. I would talk to them.

  I roamed the streets of Marseilles and Naples. After that I worked for the luxury tax office. I tried dating girls but they dropped me because all I talked about was death. I studied in Jerusalem. I finally found love, a woman I loved a lot, but I killed that love too, and the years went by.

  After ten years in New York I came back to Israel, or immigrated to Israel, depending on who’s talking, and “went up” to Jerusalem, as my mother used to say. I went onto the roof of the Talitha Kumi Monastery, where Jesus had told Talitha to stand up, and she did. I’d once lived on that roof, in the belfry, and on its door was a faded inscription: “Yoram has gone to Paris.”

  I looked down and saw the officer who ran away at Nabi Samwil passing below on the far side of the stone wall. I remember seeing a girl not far from me licking an ice cream, and I shivered. I wanted someone to say something about that officer, and how—suddenly—girls are eating ice cream in Jerusalem. We were all in the battles.

  The Palmach is a house. Actually, it’s two houses that cost millions. The Palmach House and the Yitzhak Rabin Heritage House, and the man has yet to be born who can explain exactly what that heritage is, and everything there today is one huge retrospective. The people who were commanders or close to headquarters and knew the top men, and vice versa, helped each other to create a virtual Palmach, a children’s story for grown-ups.

  Two thousand Jews who swam to Palestine on decrepit boats even before the second wave of immigration, most them aboard Betar* vessels, have been forgotten. Nobody counts them as heroes of the War of Independence. A German submariner who saw the Mafkura, a small vessel, just before it sank after being hit, said, “The Jews are swimming to Palestine.” They are not Palmach nor Haganah nor Etzel, they are nothing. Just like the unknown soldiers who got just about six pounds after the war.

  There are engagé books. Engagé films. Scholarly articles on battles in which I took part and didn’t know a thing about what the scholars have written. The past is painted so that’s what will be remembered. The fighters who lived through it, who are no longer the Palmach, are trying to heal their wounds to
this day, to escape the nightmares they’ve carried with them since the war. We are a stinking drop in the sea of memories of the Palmach heroes.

  I did not know the Palmach in its halcyon days of the early 1940s, when its members worked in kibbutzim, and stole chickens from the coops, and sang around the campfire and pissed on it to put it out. The Palmach I knew in the war was not the same Palmach. It was battalions of fighters. It wasn’t nice.

  In the summer of 1955, I came back to Israel for a visit. I traveled the country, met up with friends. In Bab el-Wad, on the wall of the lower pumping house, somebody had written in big letters: “Baruch Jamili.” It pleased me that someone unknown, who’d fought in the war, already knew what would be concealed later, with the Palmach generation commemorating the noncombatant headquarters people, and so he wrote his name in big letters to be seen by people going up to Jerusalem. A few years ago his name was erased. I don’t know who did it, but for me it was as if the Wailing Wall had been erased and used as the desert is being used: to build the walls of a luxury hotel for the very rich. His name should have been put up in lights.

  And one evening, in a small bar in Malkei Yisrael Square, I met a man whom I recognized from the Harel Brigade. He was a few years older than me, a tough guy, I remember that he was an excellent fighter, and we began drinking together. We drank Scotch, which in Israel is called whiskey. At the time I didn’t want to remember. The more I managed to forget, the better I felt. The man said that the war hadn’t ended, as many people thought. The vast majority went back home after the war, hung it up on a hook, and carried on.

  The man said that wars of independence persist for many years, and that even now, in 1955, we’re still fighting to establish the state. Countries aren’t founded in a single year. The war that began in 1920 in Jerusalem is still going on and will do so for years to come. It will continue for at least a hundred years. There are security agreements and calm, but we still don’t have peace or a state or a future or quiet. There is no “And the land had rest for forty years.” Forty years is just a prologue.

  At the time I thought that the war was over. I thought that in the end the Arabs would resign themselves to us and we to them, and we’d live in our state at the side of a Jordanian or some other state for many years. He alleged that I was deluding myself. He said that in the Bible the Hebrew word begida, betrayal, comes from the word beged, garment, and in the Talmud the word me’ila, treachery, comes from me’il, coat, so it’s all one and the same. I thought about how the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart had said, “My eye and God’s eye is one eye, and one sight, and one knowledge, and one love.”

  Many years later, quite recently in fact, when I am old and have had a serious illness, I was asked to speak to young students about the war. They were young and lovely and listened in relative quiet, and had bracelets and earrings and tattoos. Before I left, I stood for a moment at the school gate and in my mind said to them, sadly, In thy blood, live!

  Epilogue

  Not long ago a hoarse-voiced man called to talk about the book I’d written about the war, and said, There’s this man, Yechezkiel, who says you fought together, and he lives alone, a recluse, and he’d like you to come and see him, and I’ll take you there. When? Friday morning, at nine. I didn’t want to go, it was very hot outside, my computer had broken down, the phone wasn’t working properly, and I tried to find the man who’d said he’d take me, and couldn’t, and now it was nine and the man called and said he was waiting outside. I told him I was unwell, but in a loud, irresistible voice he said, You’re coming. Left with no choice I went outside, he was standing by a car, he wasn’t old like me but not young either, he was well spoken, and we drove off.

  Our route wasn’t particularly interesting until we reached the Nachshon interchange. There I remembered the woman with the vast bosom who’d worked in the kiosk, and how all the drivers on the old road to Jerusalem had stopped to view the wonder and buy coffee and a sandwich, and that is where the domesticated desolation of the Lachish region in the dry season begins, and we turned onto a potholed side road and passed three or four settlements with names from the Bible, and then reached the end of a path and drove into a huge expanse of land bounded by green cotton fields, olive trees, and there wasn’t a living soul to be seen, a kind of roaring emptiness in the burning sun, with a temperature of almost forty degrees. We drove along a path that jounced the car, and in the middle of nowhere finally came to a concrete hut, with a huge diesel fuel tank beside it, and a barking German shepherd.

  We got out of the car, and there beneath a densely foliaged tree was a table with chairs around it, then eight other men arrived, most of them in their seventies, and we all sat down and nodded at one another, smiling. From the heavens we probably looked like some kind of cabal, perhaps refounding the Palmach, something secret was happening there, we had all come to a little temple. That’s the way it was.

  The men took out freshly picked figs, and plums, and hummus, and salads, and bottles of arrack and fruit juice and water, and from the hut Yechezkiel emerged. Slightly bent, his teeth more absent than present, he smiled at his friends and at me. In his ruination he looked like some kind of ancient hero. He was wearing a gray peaked cap and sat at the head of the table facing me, and everyone looked at him and me alternately like the bull that knoweth its owner, and anyway, I’m a Taurus, May 1930, the most beautiful of all the Mays ever created by Mother Earth, as the poet Mayakovsky—who else—wrote, and we laughed a little, waiting for a conflagration, for something.

  I already knew that Yechezkiel has been a recluse for sixty-two years, since the War of Independence. For years his friends hadn’t known where he was. He worked on the roads for a while, building fences, he worked distributing something or other in the city, he was married for a year, he begot a daughter, his wife rediscovered her Jewish self and broke off contact. After eighteen years he’d heard that his daughter was getting married in Jerusalem, he got on a bus, went to Jerusalem, to the Me’a She’arim quarter, burst into the wedding hall, into the women’s section, they screamed, he didn’t hear, went up to the daughter he hadn’t seen for years, kissed her, and fled.

  Yechezkiel has remained at the battle for the Castel. Since that battle, this man has remained hidden with himself, and only the friends who discovered him and helped him build this pitiful hut in the middle of nowhere, in the asshole of the world close to which we fought in 1948—only they come to see him on Friday mornings, sometimes not all of them, but somebody always comes, they protect him, love him, and he looks at them as if he sees inside them, because they carry his secret, the secret that everyone except him knows. But the friends don’t understand the secret, because it’s one moment, an hour, perhaps a day, from a time they were not in. But I was, and when I sat down opposite Yechezkiel I became a seventeen-year-old again. I sat facing myself of sixty-two years ago, not a memory but a look into a mirror.

  Yechezkiel hears about the world on the radio, or from the friends who come to visit, but he lives in April 1948, and today he’s eighty-four. Yechezkiel is still taking the Castel. He has lived in that moment for most of his life, that day, perhaps two, on the Castel. It seems to me that he’s a bit confused but sweet, an old child with the smile of an infirm angel, and he’s fixed someplace we’ve never been to, even if I had, because when I was there I saw the following day, I saw how the moment passed, I saw the almost I’ve been seeking all my life, the moment before the sneeze when the face freezes and the body contorts and out comes a loud sound something like the orgasm of a god, a kind of relief, a kind of almost, like all of life’s great moments that teeter on the brink. And finally, after all these years, I see the absolute almost. Yechezkiel is the absolute almost. He is the second before the sneeze and the second before the spending. He has remained in the middle, in the place that a normal person cannot touch, for since that day he no longer lives but just exists, his body has moved on but he remains in one terrible moment, in a terrible battle, he was wounded an
d survived, and crawled. He’s still crawling, there on the slopes of the Castel that has long since gone, which a long time ago became a battle heritage site for youngsters enlisting for wars he did not know. He knew only one war, only one horror into which he was drawn, which permanently shaped him into a kind of sticky-paper eggshell on which he engraved his eternity, a shell that goes no further than the beginning of its breaking. Yechezkiel is the break. He is the past without a future. Without the past that will become a future. He can touch what we can’t—the moment of the horror itself, the moment of almost. And now it’s a hot summer day. Here it’s still Eretz Yisrael before the outburst, the hundredth of a second before the pleasure or the pain. That is Yechezkiel. He looks like an old man and a child. He will be born tomorrow and die yesterday. He possesses what none of us does: the terrible innocence of eternity, and he holds its unresolved profundity.

  I sat beneath the tree, a warm wind was blowing, the dog was barking at a latecomer, and I thought about Goya’s The Third of May 1808. In it a brown-complected man is raising his arms to the sides, and beside him are dead bodies, behind him are shattered houses, everything is gray, and soldiers, tense in the firing position, are aiming their rifles at the man’s heart. He is not yet really shot. He is standing inside the shot, in the almost that is within the shot. The bullets have exited the muzzles, they are very close to him, he is shouting or crying out, the atmosphere is dense, the almost-shot that in another fraction of a second will kill him is between him and the bullet.