The Most Beautiful Night of the Soul

by Sandor Jaszberenyi

  “You won’t be in the way.”

  “When do you want to leave?”

  “Now.”

  “I’ve got to check out.”

  “I’ll wait for you here.”

  They lived in Sderot, less than three kilometers from the Gaza Strip. Aviad had been born there; his whole family lived there. He got about in a black, ramshackle Ford Focus. By the time I got out to the hotel parking lot, the engine was running.

  “Just toss your stuff into the back seat,” he said.

  I opened the rear door. There, on the seat, was a sand-colored, emblemless vest, a Kevlar helmet, and Aviad’s military rucksack. Propped up in the child seat was a Tavor TAR-21 assault rifle, its ammunition pouch on the floor. I threw my backpack and laptop bag onto the bulletproof vest, and then sat down in front, beside Aviad.

  “No smoking in the car,” he said with a grin.

  We headed off through snow flurries. In the rush-hour traffic we wormed our way out of the city. For quite a while along the road leading to the main highway I stared at a huge billboard featuring Robodog, recommended for all children for Hanukah. Aviad turned on the radio: the news, in Hebrew.

  “What’s being said?” I asked.

  “They’re firing those rockets all day. All fucking day.”

  “Did anyone die?”

  “No. Those scum don’t know how to aim. And we do have the Iron Dome.”

  “How do Éva and the kids stand it?”

  “They get by. She’s drilled a lot with them in getting down to the air-raid shelter.”

  “Are they down there all day?”

  “No. Only when the sirens ring out. The Iron Dome is really something. Takes down everything that would fall on the city.”

  I recalled the pictures I’d taken in Khan Yunis, in the Gaza Strip, of the rocket factory. Aviad was right: in fact the rockets had no guidance systems. They simply had to be fired up and pointed a certain way. They flew as long as their fuel lasted, and then they fell. The explosives they contained distinguished them from fireworks. Those that did explode could implode the walls of a house or tear apart a car. Under normal conditions they could not reach Tel Aviv or Jerusalem, but they were sufficient to terrorize border towns.

  “You can go to the rocket factory,” Ahmed had told me officiously in the Hotel Palestine. Recently out of school, he was unemployed, like practically everyone in the Gaza Strip. I paid him to take care of things for me. For security they blindfolded me so I wouldn’t be able to say where I’d been. Perhaps, for a few extra dollars, they only wanted to enhance the uniqueness of the visit, or perhaps they really were concerned that if I knew every coordinate by heart I would pass them along. In any case, I was pretty nervous by the time they removed the blindfold from my eyes after a half-hour of driving. A grimy garage—this was the rocket factory, with a few lathes and with little Palestinian kids romping about inside. “Abu Qassam,” I was told by way of introduction to the bomb manufacturer, the father of the Qassam rockets. He was a constantly grinning, toothless old man. He offered me tea, and then proudly led me around, showing me the rockets, which went by various names.

  Sderot was an hour and a half from Jerusalem. There was hardly any traffic by the time we arrived, but it was snowing. Aviad and his family lived in a big tower block on the outskirts of town. Though Aviad’s family had a large house in the vicinity, Éva had insisted that they not live together with his parents, so Aviad had put in an application for a service flat, which was approved. They lived on the top floor. We now took the elevator, loaded up with things. Aviad pressed the buzzer and Éva opened the door. The two kids immediately ran out on recognizing their father’s voice.

  “Hi Dani,” said Éva in Hungarian, with a smile and a customary peck on each cheeks. “It’s been a while.”

  “Yes, but you’re still lovely,” I said.

  I wasn’t lying. With her curly brown hair, snow-white skin, and red lips, Éva was among those Jewish girls men kill for. Giving birth had left no traces on her.

  “You’re a dear. Say hi to Dani, kids.”

  “How do you do,” they said in unison before turning back to their father.

  “Come on in, Dani,” said Éva. “I’ll show you your room. I’m so happy you were able to come.”

  I went in. Their small flat was cozily furnished, warm, and well lit. The guest room opened from the living room. An artificial, decorated Christmas tree stood in front of a large bookshelf.

  “Put down your things, catch your breath, and then come out to join us for dinner,” said Éva.

  The guest room had a double bed and an adjacent closet with a bronze menorah on top. After unpacking my things I went back out to get the bulletproof vest and the helmet Aviad had brought for me, and took those into the room as well. I then realized that I hadn’t brought any sort of gift for the children. That made me uneasy. I went out to the living room, where Éva and Aviad were speaking. She was sitting in his lap. It was apparent just how much these two people loved each other even after seven years of marriage.

  “Sorry,” I said when they noticed me.

  “Oh, come now,” Éva replied.

  “I didn’t bring a gift for the kids. Aviad only said today that I should come.”

  “Typical,” said Éva, patting Aviad’s head.

  “No cause for panic,” said Aviad. “I brought one.”

  “You managed to buy it?” asked Éva with gleaming eyes.

  “Not quite. But the point is, I have it.”

  I didn’t have a chance to ask what he was talking about, since the two boys now scampered into the room and kept asking their parents what they were getting for Christmas.

  “You’ll see after supper,” replied Éva, getting up to set the table.

  We ate in the kitchen. Potato casserole. Éva put a bottle of wine on the table, too. Canaan Red brand, bottled in Galilee. It occurred to me that this was, practically speaking, the same wine Jesus of Nazareth had drank.

  Éva dished the food out onto the plates. Four-year-old András and six-year-old Jacob were squirming at the table, hardly able to wait.

  “Let us pray,” said Aviad, bowing his head. They prayed in Hebrew. When they finished, we began to eat. The kids could not contain themselves.

  “Can we get it already?” asked Jacob. “We’re not hungry.”

  “Give it to them before they go crazy,” said Éva.

  Aviad stood up, went into one of the rooms, and returned with a somewhat tattered box.

  “Robodog!” the boys shouted from the table on seeing it.

  “Don’t break it within two minutes,” said Aviad, pressing the box into Jacob’s hands. The two boys stood from the table and ran into the living room.

  “And it’s for both of you!” Aviad called after them.

  Aviad and Éva exchanged a smile, and she kissed her husband full on the lips.

  “You’re a hero for having managed to get it.”

  “Well, it wasn’t easy,” replied Aviad, pouring wine for the three of us. The sounds of clinking and clanking and fighting could be heard from the living room.

  “I’ll go make order in there between them before they kill each other,” said Éva, standing up and going into the other room. We could hear Robodog barking.

  “You wouldn’t believe the trouble I had to go through to get this piece of shit,” said Aviad.

  We toasted.

  “For the toy?”

  “Every kid in Israel is crazy about it.”

  “It does seem pretty exciting. Maybe I’ll take one for my son.”

  “You won’t, because you can’t get one anywhere. I wanted one for the boys for Hanukah. I’d been in every plaza, every shopping center from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. It was nowhere in stock. The clerks kept saying they’d have it only in January.”

  “You bought it under the table?”

  “Hell I did. Not even the black marketeers had them. Those that did, wanted a thousand bucks. A thousand bucks for this shit.
”

  “Did you pay it?”

  “I can’t afford a thousand dollars for a toy on my salary. There’s just no way. You should have seen the boys scowl on the last day of Hanukah when they saw that there was no Robodog. Even Éva got into a fight with me. She was like, ‘I moved here to Israel to be with you, and you can’t even get this much done.’”

  “Sounds like hell.”

  “You’re not kidding.”

  “How did you finally get a hold of it?”

  “Well, you won’t believe it. It’s a fucking miracle. You know, I’m in special forces at the moment.”

  “Do I want to know this?”

  “Yeah, so keep quiet. Anyway, I’m a major with Shayetet 13. Four days ago intelligence notified us that Dzheba Demokratiya wants to infiltrate Israel through a tunnel.”

  “Those are the communists?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” said Aviad, filling the glasses once again.

  “So then, the order came quickly for us to destroy the tunnel and neutralize the threat. A team of six of us went, at night. I was the senior officer on the scene.”

  “You went into Gaza?”

  “We did. We attacked at 3 AM. Intel said the tunnel started under a farm. It had two entrances. We attacked from both sides. We totally surprised the jihadists. Two of the eight were awake. I broke down the door, shot in a stun grenade, and went in. I put four bullets into one of the guards, and when I saw the two dudes sleeping by the wall spring up, they got two each. In the head. It was like, ‘Merry Christmas, motherfuckers.’”

  “Serious business.”

  “We don’t goof around. The others took care of the rest of them and secured the scene. I started looking for the tunnel entrance and anything Intel could use. Well, there was no fucking tunnel.”

  “What the fuck, they were civilians?”

  “Hell they were. The Kalashnikovs were right there in a neat row leaning up against the wall. The guards had weapons, too. They would have used them sooner or later to shoot us.”

  “The whole region is full of weapons.”

  “Yep. So, imagine, while I’m rummaging through the house, there, looking at me, from beside the wall, in a pile of stuff next to one of the bastards with a hole in his head, is a brand new Robodog, in factory packaging. I snatched it up and brought it with me.”

  “Can you put a bomb in this piece of shit?”

  “Hell no. It’s a fucking toy. Just to be on the safe side, though, I had it looked at by the guys at the base, but they didn’t find anything suspicious. Today I brought it with me along with your vest.”

  “Why the hell did a Palestinian militant have this toy on him?”

  “Beats the hell out of me. In any case, I got to complete the holidays this way. The kids are happy, Éva is calm, all is beautiful. Merry Christmas.”

  “Merry Christmas,” I said.

  We clinked glasses. We drank the remaining wine. We agreed to put off our gossiping to the next day, since Éva was already putting the boys to bed. I went into my room and opened the window. I shivered as the wind struck me head on. I lit up a cigarette. I could see into the distance. The Israeli villages and towns glowed with yellow lights; the Gaza Strip lay dark in the falling snow. I looked at my watch. It was midnight. Two thousand some years ago, tradition had it, a certain Jewish woman had just been completing her labor.

  My cell phone beeped. I closed the window and took it out of my pocket to see who’d written.

  “The Hamas foreign affairs press office wishes all foreign correspondents a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.”

  The Peacock Angel

  The night had finally begun to disperse over the hills. The air was getting palpably warmer, and yet the breaths of the men lying around the fire, under thick wool horse-blankets, were still visible. It was silent in the camp, the only sounds to be heard being the heavy breathing of the sleeping men.

  The sun was rising. At first it illuminated the hills in the distance; then the road, lined with craters and burnt-out tanks; and, finally, the festering ruins of the captured village, beside which greasy black smoke rose up into the air. The mass grave was smoking still. Inside it were blackened villagers doused with diesel oil: the shrunken bodies of men, women, and children. The smell of burnt flesh was no longer in the air, since the wind had ceased.

  Amanj stood up beside the M777 howitzer, which he’d been leaning up against until now. He stretched out and added wood to the fire, which crackled. The men coughed and stirred. It was dawn at Jalawla.

  I felt a hand on my back.

  “Kak Sardar,” said Amanj, giving me a gentle shake. “Wake up, Kak Sardar, it’s morning.”

  I opened my eyes. The peshmerga were all waking up. Zirak, the Shiite, took the tea kettle, blackened from the fire, and filled it with water. He fished tea leaves out of the upper pocket of his tactical vest, sprinkled them in, and put the kettle on the fire. Hussein, the Sunni, went about cleaning his AK-74 with a greasy rag and a listless expression, while Hesin, the colonel, paced back and forth anxiously, a satellite phone in his hand. He was on the line with headquarters, in Khanaqin, trying to find out when the pickup truck would finally come to take away the dead. Many had died in the previous day’s offensive. The corpses lay under blankets at the edge of the camp. The peshmerga took all their dead to Kurdish territory; they did not bury them in mass graves. This was exactly why Hesin was anxious for the pickup to arrive on time. It is not good if the dead remain long in the desert sun.

  I sat up from the ground and wiped the sand off my face. I was dirty and unwashed, like anyone else from the unit. We’d been on the front for four nights.

  “Drink this, Kak Sardar,” said Zirak with a grin, pressing into my hand a plastic cup he then filled with tea.

  As he reached out his hand, I could see on it the figure tattooed there along with the name of his onetime sweetheart, in Farsi. One night we drank beer together while watching the lights of the projectiles raining down, and he meanwhile told the story of how he’d had the tattoos made in Abu Ghraib, in prison, back during the regime of Saddam Hussein. “It was made with a safety pin dipped in boiled ink mixed with water and ash,” he recounted. “It hurt like all hell.” His sweetheart was of course someone else’s wife by the time Zirak left prison.

  I picked up the tea and sipped. It had a smoky taste but it warmed my belly. I took out a pack of cigarettes, offered one to the Shiite, and lit up.

  “It’s still giving off smoke,” I said, pointing toward the village.

  “Yeah. I figure they poured in all the diesel.”

  “Why?”

  “So they’d all burn. People don’t burn to well.”

  “Were they Arabs?”

  “Fuck no,” he said, and spat. “Ours.”

  He stood up, adjusted his American tactical vest, went over to the edge of the hill, and took a piss. I watched as the other peshmerga prepared the M777 for firing. Two of them pulled the military canvas off the howitzer’s barrel while three more, on a truck a bit further back, began lifting off the projectiles and placing them side by side beside the weapon. I turned toward the sun, which was looming pale and feebly on the horizon. It was still cold, but I knew that within a couple of hours it would be hot as hell. My shirt would get soaked with sweat and dry against my skin repeatedly. The salt oozing out of me would draw patterns on the shirt like the veins on calcified seashells.

  I’d arrived in Iraq a week earlier to photograph the Kurds’ offensive. The country had been aflame for months. That caliphate declared from nothing, Islamic State, had shown mercy to nothing and no one in the course of its campaign. Its path was marked by mass graves; crucified men, women, and children; villages burnt to the ground; and institutionalized slavery.

  In contrast with the collapsing regular Iraqi army, the Kurds were able to stop the Islamists’ adavance. True, for that the whole of Kurdistan had to enter the war. Grandfathers, grandmothers, women, and teenagers were firing on the front.
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  I knew I’d make good money with the photos. I got in contact with the Kurdistan Communist Party, and a couple of days later I was already on the front, embedded with a unit of fighting peshmerga. Islamic State took the beheading of Western journalists seriously: my head was worth 50,000 US dollars. I was assigned to accompany Colonel Hesin, so he could protect me. The colonel really took a liking to me when I asked him to shoot me dead without regrets if the situation was such. He shouldn’t let me be taken alive. Not only he, but also the guys belonging to his team of bodyguards, were of the same mind in this matter. They gave me a Kurdish appellation, since they couldn’t get my real, Hungarian name down right, but they recognized that I’d joined up with them. They did not make me feel as if I were a mosquito having come for blood.

  The unit was a ragtag bunch from all over Kurdistan. Amanj was a twenty-something Marxist from Erbil; Hussein was a deeply religious Sunni, likewise from Erbil; and Zirak was a Shiite, though he believed more in his rifle than in Allah. The colonel had been sent to the front from Sulaymaniyah; and Sardar, who belonged to the Kakei minority, was, at sixty-four, the oldest of them all. He was from Jalawla, the city the peshmerga were laying siege to just now. They, like all Kurds, were united by their common, searing hatred for Islamic State.

  Every night, when the last attack came to a close, and they’d gathered up their dead, we often sat down together to drink smuggled liquor and look upon the lights of the burning city. With crass and vulgar jokes we shooed away death, which was prowling about us.

  “Get ready, everyone,” said Hesin, stepping to the fire and pouring himself some tea. “We are leaving in an hour.”

  I picked up the camera beside me and looked at its battery. According to the readout, it had a hundred pictures. Replacing the memory card, I put the previous day’s photos in my satchel.

  “Hey, take a look at that,” said Amanj, nudging my shoulder and pointing toward the edge of the camp.

  Standing right beside the truck that held the howitzer ammunition was old Sardar, barechested, facing the sun. He held his hands palm upward level with his waist. His lips were moving. His huge, thick mustache was twitching all about, we saw, but what he was saying, we couldn’t hear.