Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  In 1941 Shosh was left alone with a seven-month-old baby. She was matter-of-fact about it. Among her papers I later found a typed document stating, “Since my husband, Zvi Spector, volunteered for activity connected with the war effort, and since he didn’t return and his fate remains unknown, I hereby agree to take the sum of six hundred Palestinian pounds as final indemnity. I hereby free the military authorities, the government of Palestine, and all Jewish foundations in and out of country from any financial responsibility, and undertake to indemnify them for any charge connected to the above.” At the end of the page was her signature, in her beautiful script. Since then nobody owed her anything, and she owed nothing to anybody, and kept all inside her.

  She made her own decisions, and decided to invest herself totally in the military wing of Israel’s national struggle. She was one of the founders of the Palmach, the strike force of the Hagana, headed by Yitzhak Sade.

  “If anybody wants to know the actual date of the establishment of the Palmach,” she once told the press, “it was on the eighteenth of May 1941. It’s over forty years that I have lived this date.” It was Shosh Spector together with Zehava, Sade’s wife, and a cleaning woman, who were the founding three women in the first group. In the following years the Palmach was Shosh’s whole life.

  By nature she was meticulous and punctual, obsessively responsible. The missions she took on were fulfilled to the last detail. From the beginning she took on the job of adjutant for manpower and administration. When World War II ended, the struggle against the British Mandate regime was renewed, mainly because of their refusal to allow immigration of the remnant of European Jews to Palestine. The Palmach went underground, and the Brits issued warrants for their arrest. Shosh kept the master list of the names of the Palmach members. She dragged the box of cards with her and hid it first at Kibbutz Mizra, then at Kibbutz Alonim. When she visited me there—I was taken in by her close friends there, the Admons—the box was under her bed.

  I found that card box once, when I crawled under her bed to catch a small bird that had flown in the room and vanished.

  “Get out of there!” she ordered me sternly. And when I asked her what all those papers under the bed were, she gave me a grown-up lecture. “If the Brits come and ask questions we both die and reveal nothing regarding this black cardboard box.”

  I was five or six, and I shall never forget the excitement of that moment. I had become partner to a conspiracy, like Emil and the detectives. The body of the bird was finally found pressed between the card box and the wall, her tiny body dried up. For some time I kept a feather that changed beautiful colors in the sunlight and didn’t tell the other children what I knew.

  The Brits didn’t come that night, but on June 29, 1946, remembered as “black Saturday,” they surrounded the kibbutzim that hosted Palmach training camps. The leaders of the Jewish settlements were arrested, and thousands were taken prisoner and sent to detention camps in Latroun and Raffah. The Palmach List—that black box—was discovered at Mizra. But the data were coded, and Shosh had the key. Meticulously, she reconstructed the lost data.

  WHEN THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE broke out in 1947 I was with her in Tel Aviv. We lived in a small top-floor apartment at 78 Allenby Street. As long as my secondary school studies continued, I returned home at noon. It was a considerable walk from the “Education home for workers’ children” at 13 Bezalel Street. We children would cling to the fences and watch the British officers playing tennis with Jewish ladies. They all were dressed in white. Then, past Allenby Street to King George Street, at the intersection, I used to stop to watch a blind mandolin player. This was an interesting corner, with news bulletins scribbled in large script on a placard above his head. This blind man with his two vacant eye sockets was indeed a sorry sight. Each day a new disaster visited him: on Sundays, he was struck and robbed of his belongings; Mondays were when his house was burned about his head, and so on, each day of the week. We were taught at school about compassion and love of humanity, and all mine concentrated in this thin skeleton of a guy. I also read about little Hanna’le who helped an old woman to carry her sack of coal although she was dressed for Shabbat with her white dress, and the reward she eventually received from the good fairy. Looking at the blind man filled me with a sweet and agonizing pity.

  Then I walked up Allenby Street, pressing my nose to the display window at Peel Shoes, then studying the jewelry and the cream cakes in the other windows along the road till I finally reached No. 78. Then I climbed up the four flights of stairs to the top, inhaling the smells of cooking potatoes and jellied meat from behind the doors. Near the topmost door stood a bottle of milk. I opened the door. Inside, after a sip, I could go hurriedly out to the flat roof and into the sun, to squash with my thumbs the softened, warm tar.

  On this flat roof, on its peeling whitewashed surface, beneath the sky and among many similar roofs with thickets of electric wires and radio antennae, I built castles from leftover building blocks and planks. The sea could be seen as a blue line few blocks away, and it sent me its fresh breath. There, on the roof, I had my own kingdom. I fortified my castles and ordered my battles and told my stories until evening and the time for homework came.

  ‡

  ‡

  ON ONE OF THOSE MORNINGS I became a man.

  My mother entrusted me with the annual school fees, thirty Palestine pounds, a lot of money for her. The bills were to be handed to the school bursar in person. My mother stapled them to my breast pocket with a pin, exactly as in Kestner’s Emil and the Detectives, and I went out to the street happy and proud. On the way to school I passed by the blind man. I took the money out, together with the pin, and put it inside the beggar’s box.

  Several days passed with no repercussions, and then my mother was called to school. She returned furious and dragged me out of bed. We searched the streets to find that blind man, but he had vanished without a trace. I was very sad that he had disappeared—it was clear he found his destiny—but I was even sadder to learn that I was just a useless parasite and was no help to our survival as a family.

  For this I had a solution: on the next morning I began working and earning my living. In the evening my mother came back and found me near the Izersky Library—not far from the big synagogue and Café Brazil—with her shoeshine brush and polishes. Proudly I gave her half a pound in shillings and pennies. Only I was out of black polish, I told her. She gaped at me. Could she please get some more?

  Two healthy slaps straightened me out and sent me back to the school for parasites.

  THE SEMESTER WAS OVER and the summer vacation of 1947 arrived, but I lost the use of my flat roof. I was stuck inside now, for the enemy was shooting again from the nearby town of Jaffa. I spent the first week in my room, getting the full milk bottles in and the empties out and listening to the continuous chatter on the radio. Then Uncle Shaike arrived.

  Shaike, Yeshayahu (Isaiah) Spector, was my father’s youngest brother. He stayed with us for couple of days. Shaike was about twenty, dark-haired and quiet, and to me he looked like a child himself. But he was a Palmach member, of the Negev brigade. He took me for a walk along the seaside, and to the Mughrabi cinema. He didn’t have enough money for the movies, but he bought us instead salted corncobs. That was fun.

  On the morning after the decision of the United Nations on the partition of the country—that was on the twenty-ninth of November—there was a knock at the door. They explained to me that Shaike was needed in the Negev, where the water pipeline between Mishmar-Hanegev and Hatzerim was subject to sabotage. Shaike hurried to pack his knapsack and was gone. A few days later my mother came and told me that Shaike had been killed. She explained that now only two of the four brothers were left: Israel and Aaron (Aronchik) Spector.

  Many years later I learned how Shaike died. The guarding of the water pipe was being done in small foot patrols. Due to the presence of the Brits, the military gear of the scouts was limited and consisted of wooden clubs, and some pistol
s and hand grenades that were hidden, taken apart in pieces, on their bodies. On December 11 a company commanded by Yeshayahu Spector encountered Arabs on the line. The molested bodies of Shaike and two of his men were returned few days later by the British. They were buried temporarily in the Negev, and later passed to a graveyard. The other two were missing and their fate unknown. Shaike and two of his men were members of Amelim (workers), a youth group preparing to settle in the mountains of Jerusalem and raise a new kibbutz, to be called Tsuba.

  THE SUMMER WAS ENDING, as well as with the peaceful days when I was permitted to walk down Geula Street to the sea, barefoot and wearing only my bathing suit. Bullets were whistling over the city. During the day I was kept locked in the apartment, and in the evening the city was under curfew. At night, only the tires of the British armored cars were heard, whining on the asphalt. Their headlights painted passing squares of orange on the ceiling of my room. Sometimes a single shot was heard, or the mad shout of somebody down in the street. Shosh vanished. She worked and slept at Palmach headquarters in Beit Romano house in the south of the city. Suddenly she would appear, sleep like the dead, and vanish again. The radio said all kinds of fearful things. Some nights there were shots fired from nearby Jaffa. I knew, as did everybody else, that the Palmach was aligning itself clandestinely to face the expected great Arab assault. I expected my father to come back, take his place, and change everything.

  One morning I was alone at home. Somebody knocked on the door. I opened it, and my Uncle Aronchik entered. He was the third brother, the one between my father and Shaike. Aronchik was the tallest and most good-looking of them, and his smile was charming. He presented me with a sheet of Syrian ledder, an almost forgotten sweet made of pressed apricots. We packed a backpack for me. Down the stairs, a large BSA motorcycle was waiting. Aronchik sat me on the fuel tank in front of him. We chugged noisily northward, crossing hills and passing towns. The wind sent insects flying into my face and chest. The one thing I recall from this trip was the fuel tank—black, shining tin, and on its face a white indicator hand quivering over a green and red arch.

  In the evening we came down the mountain past Safed on the twisting, potholed road, and reached Hulatta. Immediately I joined the kibbutz’s first class of children.

  ARONCHIK AND HIS GIRLFRIEND, Dvorah, lived in a plywood barracks at the lower camp, the initial settlement. This camp stood on a thorny, rocky hill, few dozen meters from the lake shore. I see them both there in a small photo from that time. It is a gray postcard with scalloped edges, as was common at the time. They are very young. They stand erect and serious, close to each other, as if to stress their kinship. Behind them, out of focus, is the barracks. They live behind one of its four doors. Each door has one room behind it. In the background of this photograph, the blurred vista of the Syrian Golan mountain range looms up, like a dark and barren wall, cracked and dotted with stains of remote vegetation. The picture radiates a feeling of disquiet, as if it were underwater or in shadow. Perhaps this feeling ensues from the fact that this was 1947, and it was all about to happen. And perhaps there was another reason. Maybe the anonymous photographer instilled into this photograph his own feeling of confinement, with another mountain ridge towering behind him. Indeed, Hulatta was imprisoned inside a long and narrow valley. Chains of mountains rose above it on both sides, and on each of them sat enemies: the Syrians on the Golan Heights on the east, and the Lebanese on Naphtali Ridge on the west. North of the valley, those two ridges converged at the nine-thousand-foot-high, snowcapped Mount Hermon. On Dvorah’s lips I see, or imagine seeing, a slight smile. Her eyes—the real and the glass one—look directly into the camera, straight and bright and brave as they were all her life, until the night she died.

  Shortly before her death, Dvorah told me about that first year I spent with them. “Suddenly you just showed up. Listen, I really had no interest in a seven-year-old boy. I had no idea of how to care for children. And especially one like you, a nonstop talker who couldn’t shut his mouth.” I disagreed. On the contrary, I told her, I was shy and introverted, a daydreamer immersed in himself and reading books.

  “What the hell were you supposed to do?” I asked. She laughed, in that same girlish way that even the pain couldn’t take from her.

  THE HEART OF HULATTA was the lake. In the heavy summer heat the upper layer of the water cleared, and mirroring the sky above, became almost blue. On Saturdays, under the burning sun, we floated boxes and planks among the water flora and the leaves of the blue water lilies, the nymphaeas. Giant colorful dragonflies hurried about with loud buzzing voices. We fried carp and conchs over fires and ate them, stirring the brown water with our thumbs.

  The muddy water was mysterious and scary. When you went deep it darkened fast, as if pulling you down. I would jump in and paddle like mad to the beach, feeling safe only when I felt firm ground under my feet. Dvorah laughed at me and my fantasies. She loved the water and was a good swimmer. I still can see her, swimming far away on a wide expanse of clear water, her black head floating like the head of an otter. She was narrow-waisted, light and sleek, and did not disturb the surface of the water when she dove deep, searching for the cool, secret places. She would disappear for a long, scary time and then return laughing to the surface.

  ACROSS THE LAKE LAY the big swamp.

  Early in the morning all of us children got out of bed and were led to the jetty. A fishing boat took us across the lake and into the forest of phragmite reeds. The canal divided into secondary narrow channels that expanded in places to make pools. It was like wandering in a maze. The brown water passed the boat slowly and silently. Hulla buffaloes, the jamusses, raised heavy, horned heads. The crowns of the cyperus, the papyrus rushes, closed over our heads like a roof, and the pink of the morning sky disappeared in the blue shades of the tunnel. Around us sailed huge rafts of yellow nuffar water lilies and white and blue nimphaeas. Their massive floating roots banged the boat’s sides like logs.

  Pairs of us were unloaded in different places and vanished in the thickets. The boat pushed off with a big paddle and continued deeper into the swamp. The number of kids who remained on board diminished.

  Finally our turn came. Sweet Ronnie and I left the boat and entered, on all fours, into a tunnel among typha reeds and tendrils of stinging “holy” raspberry. A narrow path opened before us, dark and secretive and thrilling. Our soles chirped like frogs in the black slime. Wild pigs and swamp cats were listening and knew we were coming. I trembled, for we had lost the golden thread that led out of the black forest, but just when I was getting really frightened, a green light appeared. A bale of hay floated in the clear water of a small pool. This was the bird-watchers’ hide allotted to us.

  On the raft was a low shelter covered with straw. We entered it and squeezed, shaking and whispering to each other, plucking black and red leeches from our ankles and cooling the burning mosquito stings with water. Our mission was to keep absolutely quiet, watch and remember anything that went on around us, and bring back a detailed report. Anxiety filled me.

  “We are hunters,” I whispered in sweet Ronnie’s ear. “I am Vinetu.”

  “Minnehaha, the avenging Indian,” she introduced herself. The color of her eyes was rich brown, almost red, like her hair.

  The morning sun finally peeped over the wall of canes, and all turned gold and azure. The air warmed. The vegetation around us woke up and spread out toward the light, and the birds rose, about their business. A magnificent kingfisher, all shining green and blue, appeared and stood right above us, sharpening his large beak with a harsh zik-zakking sound and inflating his red chest to show the clear white of his belly. He searched the water with his beady eyes. Under the shallow, slow going and diamond-clear water, crabs ran merrily around, leaving strings of fine footprints on the muddy bottom, vying for the tiny, elegant cyprinodon fishes that glided in the underwater thickets like multicolored lightning. Sweet water oysters opened, breathed water, and closed in small dust clouds. A big fin
of a catfish emerged and slashed the surface. Black grebes turned over on their heads.

  The sun was high already when a gray Nile goose came out of the canes near us and sat herself on the water of the small pool. Soon a convoy of goslings followed her. And suddenly Ronnie pointed with a pounding heart to the other side of the pool. Less than ten meters away a heron fed its nestlings. When we observed her, she straightened up, long and thin, and vanished into the reeds.

  Heavy heat descended on the swamp, and all around us fell asleep. We woke when the wind came up and the surface of the water was covered with green-gray waves. The forest of canes around us was agitated, whistled and swished and moved to and fro under the blows of the hot wind. The air above our heads filled with powder and flying pollen, a golden rain falling on our heads. Light arrows penetrated in, combed the space, and lit the ground.

  Suddenly we recognized prints in the mud—small split hooves. Wild boar. After they had reconnoitered the area with their snouts, the dreadful beasts hid in their dark dens among the plants and waited with their yellow tusks for the right moment, when the light dims. All the birds took screaming to the air and circled over us. The sun sank and disappeared behind the papyrus tufts, and the first wave of cold wind passed. Exactly at that moment the boat sounded its horn, and Mussa was calling us back.

  We collected our notebooks and pencils and ran. Back on the quay a bonfire waited, and we were served slices of bread spread with margarine, olives, tomatoes, and eggs toasted in embers that smelled like burned hair. We yawned, but Mussa didn’t give up until he had debriefed us and investigated every detail. He checked the sketches in our notebooks and examined every finding we brought from the marsh: flowers, leaves, insects. Coppery wings suddenly shone, glowing green, and a wave of excitement rose among us: can this be the golden bug?