by Yoram Kaniuk
The senior intake also brought the singer Yaffa Yarkoni from Givatayim, who sat erect, beautiful, and sexy at the piano, crossed her legs, and sang about war, that it’s a dream dipped in blood and tears, and how Elisheva would be waiting tomorrow for her soldier at seven. Benny Marshak appeared and was enraged by the sight of Yaffa Yarkoni sitting like that and he remembered me and said, Come here, where are you, who sent Shlonsky a poem. He went on to say that since I’d almost completed high school, what about a real cultural evening, not this garbage.
Friday came and we all gathered. Sabbath eve in the sand dunes, somebody said, and the commanding officer sat there, and studied everyone with a tough expression on his face and said they had to listen. I spoke as if I really understood what I was talking about. I spoke about Bialik and Shlonsky and Tschernichovsky. Everybody pretended to be awake but they were asleep with their eyes open, and I got carried away by my own enthusiasm and talked about poems and recited Bialik’s “Take me under your wing,” which my mother had sung to me when I was a child, and I fell asleep as I was talking and remained sitting there asleep. When I woke up there was nobody there, the rain was whipping at the tin roof.
Haim-and-a-half came to tell us that the woman from Lehi had disappeared. An officer we didn’t know came in and asked questions and we asked about her, and he suddenly seemed tired and sad and said that she wouldn’t be coming back. An hour later, Ze’evik, the senior intake’s leader, came out of their tent. He was tall, with tough black eyes and reddish-brown hair and muscles he could move like a yo-yo. He was always angry. He got up, stretched, stood outside the woman from Lehi’s little tent, and seemed to be shrouded in a terrible sorrow. We all went over, stood around him, me too, and there was a kind of sanctity in that moment, and it frightened us. He went on standing there to attention. After a time the guys got tired and went off to sleep, the senior intake didn’t sleep in tin huts like us but in a big tent, and I remained standing with him. He didn’t move from there the whole night. He fixed the empty tent with a penetrating gaze and didn’t take his eyes from it and all the time stood tensely to attention in memory of the woman they said had been his great love and who didn’t even know it.
Amos the Jerk came out of the senior intake tent and laughed at the sight. Ze’evik hit him but even as he did he didn’t budge from his cast-iron stance. Toward morning I fell asleep. It was cold and I wrapped myself in a smelly greatcoat and a storm blew up, then the whistles blew and we stripped off and ran to the sea half naked, and in the freezing weather dragged the boats onto the sand with shouts against that bastard Bevin. After we’d secured the boats on the beach we ran to dry off and sleep awhile.
A few days later Ari-nom-de-plume and I went off to answer a call of nature separately, because I didn’t like exposing myself in front of others like everyone else, who used to piss in a circle and also put out campfires that way. I always stood to one side, embarrassed.
It was afternoon and the sun was shining. Ari-nom-de-plume was digging in the sand and suddenly yelled. I thought he’d been stung by a scorpion. I went over, he said, Quick, wipe your ass with a stone, and I said I had, and it’d scratched. I stood there. Ari-nom-de-plume opened his hands and sand flowed slowly between his fingers and when it stopped I saw green coins. Afterward Ari-nom-de-plume would teach me how to clean off the rust of two thousand years and reveal smooth and beautiful Roman coins.
In the evening, when we went for a walk on the beach, Ari-nom-de-plume said there’s nothing more beautiful than war. Look at how I won the bet, and now this, I’m going to get rich from those coins. Then he said he was in terrible pain and he was shuddering, and threw up, and Chana was alarmed and he asked to go to the doctor in Hadera. Chana said he knows how to lie like Jascha Heifetz knows how to play the violin, but she had no choice because of the high fever he was suddenly running, so they drove him, burning up, into Hadera. After the people who’d accompanied him had left the clinic, he came out and lifted—in the Palmach they lifted, not stole—a car that had previously been lifted in Tel Aviv by some officer, and he drove it to Tel Aviv and parked it where the officer had found it, on Ahad Ha’am Street near the Great Synagogue, where there was a shop that sold antiques and souvenirs where my father used to buy stuff.
Ari-nom-de-plume showed the coins to the shopkeeper, and told me afterward that the guy’s eyes lit up and tears flowed from them, and he looked like he’d gone crazy and said, These are rare Roman coins and one of them is even a Hebrew coin from the period of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt*, with a relief of a seven-branched menorah, and he asked where they’d come from. Ari-nom-de-plume told him that if he didn’t ask too many questions and if he accepted that they weren’t stolen and if there were no problems, he’d bring more. He got twenty Palestinian pounds.
The next day we were sent home for the weekend. I went for a walk. The Red House had become Palmach headquarters. Next to it I saw two girls who were perhaps guarding it. They looked innocent. Beautiful. I approached them. I wanted to say something and they looked at me and said, What’s the matter, pal, and I said, You look like the light of a shadow, and they laughed and said, You’re a strange one, what’s the light of a shadow? I said, The opposite of the opposite. That’s what they once said about a man who had three dogs and he called them and one came, one didn’t, and the third either did or didn’t. One of the girls said, Do you actually understand what you’re saying? All at once their magic dissipated. Now they looked how their mothers would look in another ten years, and I said, Yes, I don’t understand.
I left. Evening fell. I went to a club on the beach near Café Piltz, to see the great Shimon Rudi. There was a girl there who jumped through a burning hoop, and everyone got excited because they wanted to see her get burned. I liked how Shimon Rudi rippled his muscles and how he made them jump and the girls he threw into the air, and I thought to myself then that he’s a man who lives apart. Man shall dwell alone within his muscles.
In the morning Ari-nom-de-plume was waiting for me by Silicate. We walked to Bograshov Street, he lifted a car, and we drove to Hadera. We left it in the same lot and went back to Sdot Yam, and as we were getting dressed we were called out on an operation.
Ten
Later, in the middle of the war, a tall, light-haired guy with clear blue eyes showed up at Kiryat Anavim, and in his eyes you could see the Baltic Sea, which I’d never seen, at best I knew Frishman Beach. He said he’d learned Hebrew on the boat and in the transit camp. I’ve no idea how he managed to get to us through the siege. I’d just been transferred to a different company, with the people who’d stayed alive, and he arrived sometime later. When two people from our tent were killed, he was given their clothes because his were falling to pieces. I liked him from the first minute. All we knew about him was that he’d been a partisan and to us he was Yashka the Partisan. He had Slavic features like those we’d seen in that Russian film A White Sail Gleams, a great film. I sang him the song from the film. We gave Yashka an old Austrian Schwarzlose because he knew about heavy machine guns, and we also gave one to somebody else, whose name I’ve forgotten, a Holocaust survivor who’d infiltrated the lines to get to us and was killed a week later in Siris. If I’m not mistaken we gave the other guy the Browning, because he too was a professional killer, and had been one in Russia, or so they said.
Yashka and I stood in line at the dining hall with the little chits we had to give to Shika at the door. I’d taught him to make a salad from mallow leaves, vine leaves, bread crumbs, and weeds whose names I’ve forgotten. Shika—who during the war called the British and American troops the British army or the American army, but always called the Russians “our forces”—admiringly called Yashka “comrade partisan.”
We were driving together one day and suddenly I felt a burning sensation. I looked down and saw a hole in my pants and then another, and at that moment I saw that he too was looking at his pants and in the mixture of Hebrew, Russian, and German we used, he said, Bullet come in undertrousers. A
foreign, hostile, and stupid bullet had penetrated the area of our rumps and sailed from one pant leg to the other and out, but except for burns and holes in our pants it didn’t leave a mark. We laughed and he said that we were ass-kameraden.
He was quiet, daring, and fought like they said the Polish cavalry did, what years later would be called “exposed in the turret,” but back then we didn’t have a turret to be exposed in. It was 1948, the time of the Children’s Crusade.
On mornings after a battle we divided up the clothes of the dead. The evenings were cold and Yashka sang Russian songs. In battle he’d stand as he fired. He said he could see the enemy better if he stood. He had no fear and obviously loved shooting. The moment he went into battle he’d glow and speak in Russian and sing, and in one of our assaults on Siris—two had already failed—or perhaps it was Beit Iksa or another village, I’ve forgotten where exactly, we were left in a scorched hilly area, everybody except the two of us was asleep, and Yashka the Partisan sat and let out a shout of joy as if he were an animal. I moved over to him and he gave me a Strand Special cigarette, which were hard to come by, and tried to explain something to me. I didn’t understand everything but he spoke with a lot of hand gestures. He didn’t know Yiddish, and I knew only very little, and I’m not even sure he was Jewish, not that I cared. From what he told me I understood that he’d fought in Stalingrad as a boy. He said that the battle there had been the bitterest ever fought and thousands had been killed, and once he’d killed a German with a head-butt. He said, apparently, that there was hunger and cold and he loved (here he drew a heart in the sand with a twig) our war because the Jews deserved a country because in Stalingrad many Jews had fought and died and were not awarded a medal of honor, and after the fighting they’d been attacked and murdered because they were Jews, and his grandfather had been a religious Jew in Siberia, and what we were doing here was right and true but was like a children’s war, against Arabs who yelled and slaughtered and fled at the first shot. He’d never, so he told me, seen worse soldiers, but not the Jordanians who are excellent soldiers. But the Arabs are many and they’ve got weapons, and he kills as many of them as he can because if he doesn’t you won’t have a state here. Perhaps he said “we” but I’m not sure.
He started singing a Russian song in a whisper and it sounded like a Hebrew song, and he embraced me tightly and said, Just as long as we succeed. We’ve got to fight well. You’re a bit funny. You also want morals. There are no morals in war, he said in broken Hebrew that’s hard for me to reconstruct today, but I understood him, he meant me because I’d made a song and dance about what is permitted and what is forbidden. He said he’d once read books on philosophy and knew that morals were all right for professors, every animal kills other animals, every man fights for his life and kills if he wants to live, there are no moral wars. Do you wait for someone to kill you and then what? Only afterward you shoot at him? Someone like you, who was in Hashomer Hatzair and lay wounded says you’ve got to be right, but you’ve also got to be bad. Without the bad guys there are no wars, said Yashka the Partisan, and he chewed on a stalk of grass and laughed. He had a lovely clear and wise and open laugh, and sometimes he’d even fall asleep in the middle of laughing.
We tried to sleep during the day. There was no food or water, and when we were in Jerusalem itself, after or before the battles, we went to see the only film showing in the city, Fiesta. The owner of the only cinema open at the time had a generator. He was madly in love with the cinema and it was said he’d sell his wife and children for one new film, but there weren’t any, all he had was this one, Fiesta, with Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban. He’d watch it every day and when somebody came into the darkness he’d yell, Shalom folks, it’s two mils for the Jewish National Fund, and continue watching. Ricardo, wearing a silvery suit, sang in Spanish, which I thought was Mexican, and the blond Esther with the terrific body would dive into a pool filled with girls who looked like fish in their lustrous swimsuits, and the water sprayed in glorious Technicolor, and we’d sit with him in the dark and sing the theme song together. Yashka learned the song from us and maybe thought it was in Hebrew.
I remember becoming apathetic. I waited for death so I could rest awhile. I was tired. I recalled the monks at Latrun, to whom my father would take me when he went to read The City of God with them, a book that he loved. They didn’t speak and mumbled memento mori all day, remember death. And now the bullets whistled in my sleep too, and I remembered death. Even in my dreams. I tried to meet Death but it laughed at me and decided to give me a miss.
We went up to Jerusalem with its windows closed in fear and sang as we marched, and Death that had given me a miss applauded us. The brigade suffered so many dead, and we were all kids, bad and good. I tried to learn things from Yashka, for instance how the partisans fought, but his explanations were in Russian and I didn’t always understand. Now and then we wanted to ask him details about himself, where he was from, had he really been a partisan, how did he get to Palestine, on an illegal immigrant ship? But we were busy and tired and it was postponed. We wanted water. But instead we listened to records we’d taken as booty from Arab villages, tangos in Arabic. Abdel Wahab, Layla Murad, who they said was Jewish. I thought, Tomorrow I’ll ask what his surname is, but I didn’t. I was almost eighteen. He was about twenty. A girl I met on the lawn in the kibbutz said he’s a hell of a guy and looked at him admiringly. Maybe I was envious and maybe not. And then one night he was killed. That wasn’t out of the ordinary. We usually buried boys like him as “Unknown,” which is less appropriate than the “Known only to God” they wrote on graves from the riots of the 1920s and ’30s. Known only to God—powerful words.
He was killed beside me but I don’t remember where it happened. We were on the ground. I suddenly saw him writhing in pain. I cradled his head in my arms and wished him to live. Fuck it, he had to live. When he started to breathe quietly I was happy. I tried to think about how to get him someplace where there was a medic, and suddenly he began choking, then he stopped and breathed easily, and he took a deep breath and I could see how the air entered his lungs and I was sure he was safe but the air didn’t come out. He didn’t exhale. With that deep breath he died. The air didn’t want to come out.
I went up to Pension Fefferman and asked to speak to Yitzhak Rabin. They let me in and I told him that a true hero had been killed and perhaps we could write “Yashka the Partisan” on the temporary grave marker. Rabin thought about it and approved. The dead were buried each morning, and when his turn came, the body was placed in the grave. We were usually too tired to attend the burials but this time we came, it was uncharacteristic, but we said, Poor guy, he’s got nobody else. As if the rest of us had. But he didn’t have parents in a village or city. We filled in the grave and stuck in the marker on which we’d written “Yashka the Partisan.”
In the cemetery at Kiryat Anavim, where I thought Yitzhak Rabin would be buried beside his dead soldiers and comrades, where my comrades rest, Menachem the friend of my youth and others, today there is no headstone bearing the name Rabin, but there isn’t one bearing the name Yashka the Partisan either. I could have inquired at the kibbutz whether they’d forgotten or perhaps they’d learned his real name and found relatives who’d taken his body, and perhaps he’d been buried someplace else under his full name or transferred to another cemetery or that the pit was full and they didn’t see and he disappeared. It says in Psalms 6, “For in death there is no remembrance of Thee; in the netherworld who will give Thee thanks?”
Yashka the Partisan was a Jew even if perhaps he wasn’t. If his dead body had been transferred elsewhere or the rabbinate had discovered his grave and checked if his mother was Jewish, and perhaps she’d tried to have him circumcised postmortem, he remained where he was buried even if they’d moved him. In an eternal heaven absent of God there is Yashka the Partisan, whatever his name might have been.
Eleven
A few months earlier at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, a short time
after the girl from Lehi disappeared, we were told we were going to take Caesarea, which was sunken in the sand with only the minaret of the mosque and the jetty protruding from it. The jetty was supported by light-colored marble columns that Lady Hester Stanhope—of whom it was said that she thought Palestine an erotic country—had brought from Ashkelon in the previous century. When I was a boy my father would take me to visit the Bosnian who’d established a small museum on the jetty at Caesarea. He’d send a car to pick us up from the main road. A sweet roly-poly man with a childlike smile, who had lots of coins, icons, and jars. We’d sit with him on the jetty facing the sea and he’d bring out two nargilehs, a boy would fill them with coals and spread the ash and light them, and the man and my father would smoke and talk in German about their student days in Heidelberg.
Now we’d been told we were going to take Caesarea because an illegal immigrant ship was due, and the Arabs would make trouble. I said that they’re not Arabs but Bosnians. They said, An Arab’s an Arab even if he’s a Basunian. Bosnian, I said. Whatever, they replied. They said that there mustn’t be a lot of Arabs there who’d make trouble, and what the hell are Bosnians? They’re all Arabs. One of us was sent to observe the town and draw a map and first thing the next morning we went out. It was dark. We went in two boats, the Dov and the Tirzah. We rowed out, not under sail, with six oarsmen on each side. We had two rifles, one that fired and another that was taken from the cache and cleaned. We reached the edge of the bay. Ari-nom-de-plume and Haim-and-a-half fired, one rifle worked, the other didn’t. They tried the other one again and the cartridge, that had sand stuck to it, got jammed in the barrel, and the barrel bent and a miserable bullet was ejected and hung in the air, and immediately afterward fell, looking like a drop of an old man’s sperm.