by Amos Oz
The squad answered him with a clicking of buckles on shoulder straps. Without any further signal, all began jumping lightly up and down in place, listening for any tinkling of metal or splashing of water in a canteen that had not been properly filled. Then a group of general-duty men walked between the lines, carrying tin pots full of soot. They passed from soldier to soldier, and each dipped his finger in the soot and smeared it on his cheeks, forehead, and chin: if the light of the enemy’s searchlights should catch their faces as they crawled on their stomachs toward the objective, the soot would prevent their sweating skin from giving them away. To Nahum Hirsch, the medical orderly, the procedure looked like some primeval initiation ritual, and the men carrying soot were like priests.
The battalion began trudging toward the trucks. The girls swooped upon them: clerks, typists, and nurses, all handing out candy and chewing gum. Itcheh flung his bear-like arms around the waist of Bruria, the adjutant, swung her through the air in a wide circle, and roared, “Make sure our cognac’s ready, girls, or you won’t get any pretty souvenirs!”
There was laughter. And silence again.
Nahum Hirsch wanted to boil over with anger or disgust, but laughter got the better of him and he laughed with the rest of them and he was still laughing to himself as the soldiers began climbing aboard the trucks that waited for them with lights dimmed.
2
AND THEN the enemy threw up into the sky three nervous flares, red, green, and purple. Dar an-Nashef crouched there at the foot of the eastern mountains, chewing its fingernails in fear. All its lights were extinguished. The darkness of guilt or of terror brooded over its cottages. Only the beam of the searchlight rose from it, probing the sky as if the danger lay there. At that very moment our reconnaissance party was making its way through the dense orchards toward the crossroads that were to be blocked against enemy reinforcements.
The general-duty men, those who never took part in any raid and for that reason were dubbed by Itcheh Les Misérables, began crowding around the trucks, staring awkwardly at the combat troops. They tried to cheer them up with jokes. Nahum Hirsch put his arm around little Yonich, then clapped him twice on the shoulder and whispered, “A sheep in wolf’s clothing, eh?” It was supposed to sound ironical, but his voice betrayed him, and the words rang with venom.
Yonich was not one of the combat troops but a general-duty man. He was a refugee from Yugoslavia, a gloomy little survivor who served the men of our unit from behind the canteen counter. Sometimes they called him the Biscuit Brigadier. His face was deformed, set in a permanent grimace. The right side of his mouth was always smiling as if he found everything endlessly funny; the left was as grim as death. Some said that the Germans had twisted his face once and for all in some labor camp or in the selection process. Or perhaps it was the Yugoslav partisans who had broken his chin or his jaw with a punch, telling him to stop getting on their nerves with his Jewish misery.
Why had they decided this time to put little Yonich, of all people, into the task force, and authorize him to join in the raid against Dar an-Nashef? Perhaps they saw him as a sort of mascot. His little body looked ludicrous, almost pathetic, in the straps of the tattered harness. Evidently one of the officers had seen some kind of subtle humor in putting Yonich in the task force. He was to serve as personal runner to the unit commander, keeping close to him throughout the progress of the battle and ready to leap up when necessary and run to the commanders of the back-up troops, keeping communications going. He had been told: “You’re going to have to run like hell, pal. Imagine that the biscuits are here and the customer’s over there, and at the same time there’s somebody waiting for soda and somebody else who wants cigarettes and matches.”
Nahum Hirsch said: “Yonich, you’re going into battle like Samson’s little brother, and you don’t understand that they’re just treating you as a joke. Lucky that the Arabs can’t see who’s coming to beat the shit out of them.”
Yonich turned around, and Nahum saw the twisted half-smile and then the front teeth protruding from the cleft lips. And he stepped back.
At that moment the tank engines suddenly started up beside the pine grove, and the earth shook. These tanks would not participate directly in the raid against Dar an-Nashef but were to be deployed in the mountain passes to anticipate any possible development, however remote. The roar of the mighty engines set all hearts pounding. The signal was given and the convoy set out toward the mouth of the wadi. There the troops would be ordered down from the transports and would set out on foot to cross the dense orchards, then march over the frontier and to the outskirts of Dar an-Nashef from the northwest and the southwest. The girls waved their hands, bidding them good-bye and good luck.
Nahum left the parade ground. He sat down at the foot of a whitewashed eucalyptus tree. Little fragments of whitewash fell from the tree trunk, and some of them stung his sweating brow. As always, his thoughts turned to men and women, and not to the other creatures of which the night is full. The sounds of the night came and dispersed his thoughts.
3
OUR UNIT could boast of a distinguished commander and many daring officers, but Itcheh was our pride. He was a king. It was not only Bruria who loved him and bore everything in silence. We all did. He loved to pinch everybody, the soldiers, the girls, Bruria herself. She would say, “You’re disgusting, stop that,” but these words always came from her lips warm and moist, as if she were really saying, “More, more!” And he loved to insult her and even to humiliate her in the presence of the entire battalion, from our commanding officer to the last of the general-duty men, Yonich or Nahum Hirsch or somebody of that sort. He used to scold Bruria, telling her to leave him alone, stop running after him all day, and come to him only at night, stop clinging to him as if she were his mother or he were her father: he’d had enough, he was sick of her.
When his insults were more than she could bear, she would sometimes go to the operations room to seek consolation from Rosenthal, the operations officer. Let them tell Itcheh, let him be jealous, she didn’t care, he deserved it. Rosenthal did not treat her as Itcheh did. He was not the type to fling up her skirt or thrust his hand inside her blouse when there were drivers and supply men standing around. His courting manners were like something out of a film, and he often tried to impress her by speaking English with a slight American accent. He was slim and athletic, he dressed immaculately, and his compliments were as deft as his tennis shots. Often, when he sat with Bruria in the operations room, he would translate for her into Hebrew the contents of the pornographic magazines that his brother had brought from Europe. But he did not dare touch her, or perhaps he did not want to; if ever he did touch her, it was gently and courteously. In the end she always came back to Itcheh, chastened, moaning and servile, almost begging for punishment, and everything was as before. The whole battalion was waiting for the day when Itcheh’s jealousy would explode and there would be a showdown with the soft-spoken operations officer. In fact, Itcheh surprised us and showed not the slightest hint of jealousy; he only laughed and told Bruria to go to blazes, to leave him alone, he was sick of her and he was sick of them all and why did she hang around him all day.
After every reprisal operation Itcheh’s name was heard in high military circles. Twice he was seen in newsreels, and once his picture appeared on the cover of the army magazine. It was he who discovered the Viper’s Path, leading from the south of Jerusalem across the desert of Judea and through enemy territory to Ein Gedi on the shores of the Dead Sea in one night’s march. It was he who settled a longstanding account with the Bedouins of the tribe of Arab al-Attata. The Divisional Commander himself once described him as the spiritual brother of the warriors of King David in Adullam or of the Gideonites and Jephthahites. In the course of one raid he leapt, alone, into a cave where dozens of enemy soldiers were entrenched. He so terrified them with his ferocious, blood-curdling yells that they melted away before him as he darted among the murky rifle pits throwing in hand grenades. Petrif
ied by astonishment or horror, the enemy troops gave themselves up, as if mesmerized, to the bursts of fire from his machine gun. Alone he entered the cave and alone he emerged from it, panting and disheveled, roaring and waving his gun above his head.
Itcheh let his beard grow wild. The hair on his head was thick and matted and seemed always to be full of dust. His beard began at his temples and almost met his thick eyebrows, flowing down over his cheeks and neck and merging without a break into the bear’s fur that covered his chest and arms and perhaps the whole of his body.
Sometimes Itcheh surprised Nahum Hirsch in the tin shower hut. The medical orderly would dry himself in a hurry and leave without bothering about the soap bubbles left in his armpits. For it was well known that Itcheh always made a point of humiliating the supply men and the drivers and the orderlies, his greatest admirers, those whom he called Les Misérables. Yet he would sometimes astonish them with an act of unexpected generosity. He would give one of them a pistol taken from a dead Syrian officer, or he would take one of the supply men aside and talk to him as an equal, chatting about politics and girls and striking the poor fellow dumb with his frankness.
Between the men’s and the women’s shower there was a thin partition of patched tin. The general-duty men had punched peepholes here and there, and they used to spend hours in the shower hut, especially on weekends. Itcheh loved to press his huge naked body against the partition until the tin began to creak and groan. On the other side of the partition the girls responded with squeals of fright or anticipation. Then Itcheh would roar with laughter and all those present on both sides of the wall would join in his laughter. Once it happened that Itcheh sprained his ankle on the camp soccer field. He limped to the clinic and surprised Nahum Hirsch as the young man was cutting nude pictures out of a foreign magazine. Nahum probed the twisted ankle to make quite sure that it was a sprain and not a fracture. Itcheh was his usual carefree self. Even when the young man’s fingers groped higher up the leg and his whole body shook, still Itcheh continued to joke and he noticed nothing. Then Nahum fitted an elastic bandage on the ankle joint and stretched it mercilessly. Itcheh let out a low moan of pain but still he seemed not to suspect anything. Finally Itcheh smiled, thanked the orderly for the treatment, and held out his hand. Nahum put his fingers into the huge hand. Itcheh began to squeeze his fingers with fearful pressure. Wave upon wave of pain, pride, and pleasure flowed around the base of the young orderly’s spine. Itcheh intensified his grip still further. Nahum abandoned himself to the sweet ripples of pain, but on his face there was only a polite smile as if to say: I only bandaged your ankle because it was my duty. Then Itcheh relaxed his hold and released Nahum’s hand. He said, “Perhaps we’ll decide to take you on the next raid. The time has come to make you a combat orderly. Eh?”
The sweet smell of chewing gum was wafted over Nahum’s face, and he found nothing to say.
Of course Itcheh had forgotten this promise, and perhaps he was in the habit of throwing similar promises around among the general-duty men. They had chosen little Yonich, of all people. Now, at this very moment, he was running around bent double in the clinging darkness, or perhaps crawling on the ground, half of his face grinning foolishly and the other half like a stone carving. Still complete silence, not a sound to be heard. Only crickets and jackals and faint music from a radio in the living quarters. There is still time.
4
A DENSE night breeze came and stirred the treetops. The shower of whitewash fragments grew. Nahum was overcome by the kind of weariness that follows despair. Suddenly he noticed that unconsciously he had been snapping small twigs between his fingers.
The enemy searchlight was still raking the sky. Even the conquered earth kept sending out waves of clinging warmth, heavy with fragrance.
Light footsteps approached. Nahum knew those footsteps. He stood up and pressed himself against the trunk of the eucalyptus. He lay in wait in the darkness, allowing a crazy hallucination to take control of him. When she passed in front of him, he leapt out from his hiding place and blocked her path. She let out a low cry of fear. But at the same moment she recognized him.
“Hey,” said the orderly in a low voice.
“Out of my way, cut it out,” she said. “Don’t be childish.”
“He’s going to be wounded,” said Nahum sadly and patiently.
“Idiot,” said Bruria.
“He’s going to be wounded tonight. Seriously wounded.”
“Let me pass. I don’t want to see you or listen to you. You’re mad.”
“He’s going to be wounded seriously, but he won’t die. I promise you that he won’t die.”
“Go away. Go to hell.”
“Are you angry? I’m going to save him myself; you shouldn’t be angry with me—this very night I’m going to save his life.”
“You’re a joke. Stop running after me. Don’t say things like that to me. I didn’t tell you to follow me. Get out. I didn’t give you permission to enter this room. Get out, go away, or I’ll call the sergeant major. Get out of here or you’ll be in trouble.”
Nahum followed her movements with a look of longing. She switched on the light, nervous and distracted, began sorting out some papers that were scattered on the chair and the table, pushed something away under the cupboard, and sat down on the unmade camp bed, her face to the wall and her back to him.
“Are you still here? What do you want from me? Tell me, what have I done that makes people like you come here and cause trouble? Get out. Leave me alone. You men make me sick.”
“You’ve insulted me twice in less than ten minutes,” said Nahum Hirsch, “but I won’t hold that against you, not tonight. I’m going to save his life.”
Bruria said: “Any minute now, Jacqueline will be back. If she comes in and finds you here you’ll regret it. I don’t even know who you are. You’re Nahum the orderly. OK, Nahum the orderly, get out of here, now.”
Suddenly Nahum ripped off all the buttons of his khaki shirt with a wild, hysterical movement, and the girl pressed herself against the wall, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide open and terrified. She was speechless. Nahum pointed to his thin, bare chest.
“Now watch carefully,” he whispered frantically, “look. This is where the bullet has entered. He’s taken the bullet full in the throat. It goes in here and out there. On the way, it cuts his windpipe. The veins are severed as well. And blood starts to flow here, down, inside, straight into his lungs.”
His pale fingers sketched the course of the wound on his chest, and the feverish lecture raced on.
“And from the windpipe, here, all the blood pours into the lungs. A hemorrhage like this nearly always causes suffocation and death.”
“That’s enough. Shut up. Please, stop it.”
“They suffocate, simply because there’s no room for air if the lungs are full of blood. Now they are bringing him in from the field straight to me, in the clinic. His face is blue, he’s choking, vomiting blood, spitting blood, his clothes are full of blood, his beard is full of blood, his eyes have rolled up and you can only see the whites. But I don’t panic. I take a knife, a rubber tube, and a pocket light, and I cut his windpipe. Like a butcher, except that I’m doing it to save his life at the last moment. I’m not looking for decorations or prizes. I save his life because we are all brothers-in-arms. Very low down I cut his windpipe—look here, watch—farther down—here. And I insert the rubber tube through the severed windpipe right into his lung. Like this.”
Bruria sat upright, her neck taut, as if mesmerized, under a spell, watching the pale, nimble fingers running over the thin chest like sewing needles, as if searching for some invisible opening. She was silent. Nahum went on without a pause, his voice choking and feverish.
“Now I’m gripping the end of the tube in my mouth. I start sucking the blood out of his lungs to give him a chance to breathe, so he won’t die of suffocation. Watch, sucking and spitting, sucking and spitting, not pausing for a moment, devotedly, lovingly.
And watch, now I’m breathing into his lungs, like this, in-out, in-out, like saving a drowned man.”
Gradually, without her realizing it, Bruria’s breathing changed as well. She began to follow the rhythm of the orderly’s breathing. There was a short silence.
“He’s recovering now,” Nahum shouted suddenly. “I can see his eyes moving. And his knees. He’s showing signs of life now.”
Bruria opened her mouth as if to weep or to cry out, yet she neither wept nor cried out, but went on breathing deeply.
“Now he’s already breathing by himself—not through his nose or his mouth, but through the tube that I inserted in his lung. Look. Spitting blood. That’s good for him. Choking. That’s a good sign, too. He won’t die on us now. He’s going to live. Here, open his blurred eye for a moment. Look. This one. The left. Close it. Pale. Now you can go down on your knees beside the stretcher and take his hand in yours and try to talk to him. He won’t be able to answer you, but perhaps he can hear you. I’m going now. Yes. Don’t try to stop me, I don’t need any thanks. I’ve done my duty. I’m going, the ambulance is honking outside and the doctor has arrived. An unknown orderly has taken it upon himself to carry out a difficult operation under field conditions and has saved the life of a national hero. Itcheh and I will embrace on the front page of the newspaper. You don’t owe me anything. Far from it. You’ll get married, live happily ever after. I’ve only done my duty. And I shall continue to love you both from a distance. Good-bye, good-bye, I’m off, I’m going, good-bye.”
Nahum said good-bye, but he did not go. Instead he sank down, exhausted, on the camp bed at Bruria’s feet. He began weeping softly. She placed a comforting hand on his shoulder. The room was filled with a pale, sickly light from the unshaded yellow bulb. A sheaf of blank forms lay on the top of a steel filing cabinet in the corner of the room. Here and there pieces of women’s clothing were scattered; perhaps underwear, too; Nahum did not dare to look, just buried his head in Bruria’s lap and rubbed his burning cheek. She stroked his hair, staring into space and saying over and over again, “That’s enough, enough, enough.”