by Yoram Kaniuk
They probably thought that a troupe of pygmy circus clowns was visiting from darkest Africa. They saw us in our short pants, our ridiculous tembel hats, our rough sandals from the Carmel Market, screaming, and they evidently thought: Asiatics—Barbarians! And they regarded us with contempt because they’d come from Europe, which was no longer theirs but they didn’t know it. They came from my father’s culture, they were steeped in Cimarosa and Cimabue, and I thought about that Europe which had already started to expel them, and about them, who only a week before they arrived in Tel Aviv had probably reached Trieste or some other port and sailed under not the pleasantest of conditions and been hit by the Eretz -Yisraeli disaster that for us was the entire world.
A tired teacher feeling the pain of the nation’s fate—as the teacher Blich described himself— led us to stand and wait for the Jews. And when we saw them coming, right away we shouted, How good it is that they’ve come to Eretz Yisrael, and that was when on Fridays we’d put on shows about the ghetto and stick on beards of painted straw and put Plasticine on our noses so we’d look Jewish, like the ones who sell salt herring and blow their nose like a trumpet and speak Yiddish. Only a few of us knew Yiddish, and most of those in whose homes Yiddish was spoken pretended they didn’t understand it. After all, we are the sons of pioneers, Hebrew labor, Jew Speak Hebrew, and we’ll go to kibbutzim, we’ll be Sheikh Abrek*, we’ll conquer the wilderness, we’ll build and be built in our land. We shall smite our enemies. We’ll drive out the British. We’ll be heroes. We declaimed Brenner’s words, “Blessed is he who dies in such awareness—with Tel-Hai* before his eyes.” Just so we’re not bowed from fear and ugly like the Jews—that’s what we said, stupid kids that we were.
So what are Jews? The ones who came in 1938 when we stood facing them at the port and shouted our welcome? The ones who didn’t heed us? Those were the days when we emotionally declaimed Avigdor Hameiri’s poem: “On paper white as snow / A letter comes from the Diaspora / A weeping mother writes: To my good son in Jerusalem, / Your father is dead, your mother sick … / Come home, my lovely son …” And the reply: “On plain paper, gray as dust / A letter goes to the Diaspora / A pioneer writes with teary eye, Jerusalem, 1928 / Forgive me, my sick mother / I shall not return to the Diaspora! / If you love me / You come here and embrace me / And no longer shall I be a wanderer! / I shall never budge from here …”
In 1939 High Commissioner Wauchope had already been forced out, and the British halted immigration, and the Arabs won in their riots against Jewish immigration, so that Jewish refugees were unable to come, but they tried to come and the majority drowned on the way, and only a few succeeded.
Six
At the height of the war I came back from a talk with my commanding officer at Kiryat Anavim and went to sleep. Before that I’d had some dry bread with mallow. The loaf was wrapped in vine leaves, and somebody said I winced because I was wounded, but perhaps I was just thirsty. Someone woke me up and told me to go up to the Castel*, the old Roman town, with a few guys. He said there’d been some hard fighting that night and we’d taken the, but the guys who’d taken it were tired and needed to be relieved. We went up the mountain and saw them coming down. They were shuffling along like a funeral cortege. Rocking from side to side. One guy who knew me came over and said, Listen, don’t go up there, it’s a shithole of a place. I said that I had to go up. He held a kind of gauze pad with ointment on it against a wound on his arm and said with a smile, You know why it’s called gaza gauze? Because it’s from Gaza. I asked him if it was because they’d found gauze in Gaza one day, and he patted my cheek, laughed, and said, In Roman times or later, I don’t remember exactly when, I was a kid, the best cotton wool in the country came from Gaza and they built a gauze factory there.
The officer kicked him so he’d move on, and we shouted Ahalan—hi there—which was the opposite of what we should have said, and we marched on upward to the big building at the summit. My section commander, Kushi (“Blackie”—to this day I don’t know what his real name was), went up by a different route and was waiting for us when we got there. He said, We’ve got to defend the summit, and if we see anything move then raise the alarm, and if necessary, open fire, and also, we’ve got to keep an eye on the Jerusalem soldiers because they haven’t yet been under fire and maybe they’ll take off. We came to a fine stone building in the shade of thickly leaved trees and sat down. Two guys played cards. I looked at the view. There were those beautiful birds that wove arabesques in the sky. You could hear them twittering. To this day, in the mist of forgetfulness, I can hear them.
We didn’t see anything suspicious facing us and suddenly my friend Ari-nom-de-plume appeared and said he’d found hashish in the village below and put it in a sack and he was going down to Kiryat Anavim in the evening, and he’d take the sack, and come back, and I shouldn’t snitch on him because he’d make a lot of money from the hashish. Kushi saw him and knew how brave he was and ordered him to go down quickly and take a message to headquarters, and he wanted to be angry with him, but at that moment two of the Jerusalmites panicked and yelled that they wanted to go home, and he and I talked to them. They begged us to let them get out of there. I told them it was impossible. After a short period of sobbing they changed their minds, calmed down, and I fell asleep. After a quick nap I ate a little bread we’d found in the village and some delicious crushed olives and some carob pods from which we brewed tea. Just before morning Ari-nom-de-plume came back glowing and said that on the way to Kiryat Anavim he’d met some non-enlisted Jerusalemite on the fucking road and immediately realized that he was looking for bargains because he knew these types, and when the man heard he had some hashish he took out some money and gave it to him and ran down the hill to Pension Fefferman. Ari-nom-de-plume wanted to give me a few pounds in friendship, but I said that here in the war you’re either dead or crazy, and a lunatic doesn’t need money.
Suddenly we heard a shout, Fire! And a moment later, Ow! Somebody yelled, I’ve taken two bullets. He really had, we checked him out, one had hit him a millimeter from his right ear, and the second about a millimeter from the left one, but he was only scratched. We laughed, and then miraculously I took a bullet near my eye, it hurt a lot, burned, the round had apparently entered the pouch of skin that holds the eye, and the eye came loose and I held it in my hand, and since the bullet was perhaps almost spent it only scratched me, and the eye I was holding remained whole and I put it back into its socket, and a medic bandaged me.
The firing became more frequent and we said that the guy with two scratches by his ears would now hear better, and that I’d see better, and then we heard a roar. Then we heard something like a crawling sea, and emerging slowly from the roaring all hell broke loose. A human mass like locusts denuding the land climbed rapidly toward us. The black-and-red kaffiyehs stormed upward, skipping over the rocks. There were hundreds that jumped from the southern side of the mountain. We didn’t know where this big army had sprouted from and where it had hidden, and it was scary seeing it swarm like a band of apes climbing up rocks and shooting.
For a moment Kushi was as confused as us, and Haim K. had a panic attack and ran like a madman towards a sheikh’s tomb farther down the slope by the road, and he was fired at but the shots missed him, and Kushi sent a soldier to the command post with a message, and we started firing randomly at the attackers we could hardly see. They screamed Aleihum and Allahu Akbar, and Kushi laughed, and I thought we’re not getting out of here alive. Somebody started singing “Besame Mucho” in Arabic: “El bi mahrouf”, so we realized that this was the end of us.
We were some ten tired fighters by the mukhtar’s* house that was shrouded in olive trees, and there were hundreds in the horde charging at us from all directions, and we fire back and somehow manage not to fall asleep between the shots, and I see a magnificent kaffiyeh held in place with a golden akal and beneath it a man brandishing a sword, and Moshe yells, Look at that one, a real Rudolph Valentino! And the Buck Jones in t
he kaffiyeh shouts in English, Hello boys, and we don’t really understand why we’re being shouted at in English, and his men are firing at us and leaping, and Moshe hits Valentino just as he realizes he’s made a mistake and draws a pistol to shoot at us, and then the shit really hit the fan. Some of us are hit, time stands still, and there’s lots of shooting.
I didn’t understand why they hadn’t taken the village. They were many. Awake. They’d probably been drinking black coffee all night. We had little ammunition left. Then after a while we heard a call on the radio: We’re coming.
While we’re firing, a group of twenty-three guys under the command of Nahum Arieli arrives. They come running right into the firing. Nahum’s deputy orders us to withdraw and shouts, Privates retreat. Commanders cover them! The rocks shouted in pain. Carob pods were shed. Figs dropped. I’ll remember Shimon Alfassi who yelled, Privates retreat. Commanders cover them, all my life. Officers, the best soldiers in the brigade, of whom it was said of each and every one that one day he’d be the president of a state or a general, came to defend the seven or eight privates who were still alive, the shitheads who were retreating on orders.
The officers commanded by Nahum Arieli stood like a human avenue on both sides of the path, between charred buildings and amid an inferno of firing, and we passed between them as if on our way to the wedding canopy. Slowly, one after the other they were hit and fell and those left standing continued to cover us and at the same time went on firing at the attackers but also to die. With one eye I can see them shielding me as they fall like dominoes and I want to fire but I’m out of ammunition.
The black horde reached the upper slopes of the mountain by the sheikh’s house, and before they finished taking the mountain and killing the officers and us, they started brutalizing the bodies. Not all of us were fully dead and they began slashing the bleeding wounded with knives, and we’re running down the hill, not stopping, trying to fire at the slaughterers but unable to, and we reach the sheikh’s tomb down below, by the road to Jerusalem, and come under fire from the direction of Qaluniyya on the other side of the road, and suddenly we see that they’ve all halted. There’s a heavy silence. They stand over the bodies they’ve abused and start wailing. They’re standing over the line of bodies and they’re yelling and swaying like drunken dancers, and instead of taking the mountain that was already under their control, they suddenly became grief-stricken, we didn’t know what had happened to them, we saw our defenders who had been stabbed with daggers, bleeding and dying, and in their great victory the Arabs took flight between the bodies.
We’d already come down from the empty mountain, we’ve no idea what to do and our eyes are teary from the firing and we’re crawling, and then we reach Kiryat Anavim, and one of the officers there looks at the papers that one of us had taken from the pocket of Valentino with the kaffiyeh and the golden akal and says, Well I’ll be damned, it’s Abdel Khader al-Husseini. That elegant man had been the legendary commander of the Arab forces in the region since the 1930s and was the mufti’s cousin. That’s why, in great anguish at the man’s death, instead of taking the mountain that was already in their hands, they went back to Jerusalem to accompany their commander to his burial in a royal funeral attended by thousands.
Perhaps that moment, when we were all about to be killed and lose the most important hill strongpoint on the road to Jerusalem, in the war that Benny Marshak called the war for the six meters of the road leading to the city, perhaps it was that moment that changed the face of the war. We realized that you don’t leave a conquered village of strategic importance, and some guys from our battalion climbed the mountain quickly and blew up a few buildings. And now only Qaluniyya village was left, that most beautiful of the Land of Israel’s villages and the most pitiless, the village that controlled the seven bends of the road, where we had lost fighters and many of the convoys’ escorts. It was then decided, without too much thought, that a platoon should be left to guard the Castel. This was the second village, after our hilarious victory at Caesarea, which was taken in the war and became ours.
Seven
Some time later I was sitting by a well in some village. Maybe Beit Zurif. I don’t remember. I drank cool water from a clay jara and ate wood sorrel and the sight of the slaughtered bodies remained inside me. I thought, What had they come for? Twenty-three of the best had come to rescue how many? Six, seven, maybe eight. Who would ever understand what had really taken place in that Valley of the Shadow of Death, and I thought—I remember how I suddenly thought, perhaps for the first or second time in that entire war—why twenty-three people had come to defend six, why twenty-three who were the very best, far better than me in establishing states, better than all my shithead friends, and who were we? Did we have a future? Those dead had a future. They could have been violinists. Artists. Scientists. Military commanders. Who of us would be somebody in the future that had been taken from them?
Twenty-three people went up that hill, each and every one a legend of a man, who had already brought us honor, who had already proved himself, led by Nahum Arieli, a striking man, who sang beautifully, and he came to protect me—the noble man came to rescue the piddling clown that I was, and I’m thinking what will happen tomorrow, the day after, they’ll talk about it as a lever, Look, they’ll say, see how the Palmach protected its own. Today I know that it was in that battle that the “follow me” legend was born, the “follow me” ethos of the Israeli army, because of which the best of the best would be killed, and is it worthwhile? Is it wise? Did someone smarter and more intelligent and older than me have to stand over me in that avenue of death, to fall, to die in front of me, to be slaughtered just so that I, who was my mother’s darling, would stay alive? What kind of a life can you live after that whole story?
Then I was able to think that without Nahum Arieli and his comrades a state would not come about, that with them the force that was supposed to fight after us had been destroyed. And now, as I write this and I am old, ailing, I think that the “follow me” ethos is wonderful and noble, but misguided. A myth should never have been created from the “follow me” on the Castel. The best are always worth more. They could have contributed what I would be unable to contribute. Nahum Arieli would have become Chief of the General Staff or Minister of Defense, and I remained with a torn-off limb, sitting in my home and writing about what I never was and who I didn’t become, and about my life in contrast with the lives of Nahum Arieli and Shimon Alfassi, the hero among men who uttered those terrible words, Privates retreat. Commanders cover them, and died. And they all died, to the last man.
I don’t know. I stayed alive. I was shot. They missed. They didn’t miss, but my life is nothing but the vanity of a weak man. What is a war without tanks, without aircraft, just a few small ramshackle Auster planes, or “Primuses” as we called them, in the sky, without weapons, without food, without water, without artillery, without a change of clothes, without anything, Jerusalem under siege, whipped, shells falling constantly, people being killed standing in line for water and kerosene. How do you explain to the young soldiers of today, who will die in other wars, with equipment and training, how do you explain the Palmach spirit to them? What the human spirit is. What a vision is. What it is to dream. What do you dream about? I don’t know. Perhaps it was all in vain.
After I got back home half dead and the country was filled with Holocaust survivors, who our nice guys referred to as “soaps” and who were a thousand times stronger than us, I realized that it had been worthwhile. But even then, how do you explain to a boy on the Pan York, a boy who at age twelve in Auschwitz had searched for diamonds in his dead parents’ rectums so he could sell them to the SS, how do you explain what happened on the Castel to him? The Castel was a nice children’s story compared with the little that this boy told me and then kept silent for sixty years.
One day, many years later, walking down Allenby Street and minding my own business, I passed what had once been the Allenby Cinema, and suddenly a silve
r-haired, very thin man stopped in front of me, with a little girl in his arms, his granddaughter perhaps, so pretty, delicate, frightened by the strange man I was for her in the middle of a busy street, and behind him was his wife, and he stared at me in astonishment and I’m sure I recognized him, but from where? And he said, You’re Yoram, and I said, Yes, and he said, Don’t you remember me, and burst out laughing, and I laughed with him and suddenly I recognized him, his eyes had remained inside me, deep behind all the onion skins with which we all encase ourselves. We exchanged a few words, I said something to him, he was moved, I was moved, and then there were no more words. His life and mine had not stayed the same. We had a memory from one day aboard a ship, when he was a young, scarred, and angry boy who had sold his dead parents’ diamonds to the SS, and now he’s an adult introducing me to his wife and daughter or granddaughter, I don’t remember. We remained silent for a few moments and went our separate ways because we didn’t have anything to say to each other, the memories exchanged glances and sentences, but we didn’t have the words to talk about them.
Eight
In 1946, when I was still at the Tichon Hadash High School, I went to Frishman Beach between mathematics and history lessons to think by the sea, which always lubricated the cogs of my brain. All that time, deeply imprinted in me was the sight of the man who came to see my father, with his downtrodden-clown expression, and the blood and final breaths of the Arab who pleaded for his life, and whose soul I’d actually seen departing, and I thought that perhaps in the right clothes I’d look like him.