1948

by Yoram Kaniuk

  We landed on the beach and saw the Bosnians escaping. They walked slowly. They didn’t appear to be frightened or retreating. They walked in majesty. They carried their belongings with a kind of proper pride. Mishka banged on a can so there’d be more noise, and a Haganah Primus aircraft passed slowly overhead, lost altitude, and tried to drop a bomb, but the bomb exploded in the air and its pieces fell into the dunes. The Primus was buffeted by the blast and climbed like some Yiddisher cowboy. The Bosnians were deep in the dunes and I saw how they were still walking calmly. Perhaps their sadness was in their walk, which I didn’t understand then but do today. I asked Ari-nom-de-plume who they were bothering and he said, They’re bothering my ass, we’ve just got to make sure there aren’t any Arabs here and that’s why we’re expelling them. I went to the museum, from where my father’s friend had managed to rescue some of the rarer antiquities and take them with him, and Ari-nom-de-plume came up behind me and tried to go inside. I stopped him and asked him not to take anything. He shoved me with compassionate friendliness and went inside for a moment, I ran after him, he evaded me and went outside, raised his hands, and said, Look, they’re clean!

  We sat and smoked until an officer came and yelled, Caesarea is in our hands!—as if we’d beaten Herod and the Romans and the Germans as well. He sounded excited. I said to him, What’s this “in our hands”? What kind of “in our hands” is it? And somebody told him, You’re a man’s man! Kifaq hey! – Bravo! In the distance we could still see the column of refugees. They were wearing coats and hats and looked like ants chewing sand. At the tail of the column I saw a little girl wearing a green coat and clutching a doll. She was looking back and being dragged along by an Arab I identified as my father’s Bosnian friend, and I was saddened but didn’t do anything. What I saw didn’t yet have a name or a title. The man was a tiny movement in a landscape. There was also something aesthetic in that vast painting of the ruins of ancient walls, Greek marble columns, a mosque minaret half sunken in the heap of sand in front of it, and the human column.

  (Years later I was in the United States at a party marking the publication of my book about a man whose mother was Jewish and father was Arab, and the struggle of the Arab in him against the Jew in him, and there was a woman there who came over to talk to me. She said her name was Inaya and introduced her husband, and said with a kind of nice straightforward contrariness that he’s a Jew. She was tall and good-looking and said she’d written a good review of the book and that she is a Palestinian. Where from? I asked, and she replied, Caesarea. She told how, when she was five years old, the Jews had come with warships and cannons, and there was a battle and the Jews took Caesarea with great force. I looked at the little girl with the coat and the doll, and didn’t tell her about the two rifles, one of which fired and the other that didn’t. She was so nice to me. Her husband told me a joke about a Jew, a Frenchman, and an Englishman, and I thought, Fifty years earlier that little girl was but a Bosnian speck in space.)

  At Caesarea, on the day of the great conquest, which if I’m not mistaken was the first conquest of a village in the War of Independence, British police boats were seen searching for something, and Ari-nom-de-plume was sitting next to me and trying to press me into going into the museum again, which I’d been appointed to guard. An officer came out of the dunes in a jeep, a pistol on his belt, and put a padlock on the door. And five guys from Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael with a pistol and unarmed combat sticks came, and we left in boats for Sdot Yam. In the evening the commanding officer spoke about how we were fighting a war of no choice and how everything was as it should be. I said I don’t understand why we had to take Caesarea, which hadn’t fought against us, and the guy said that an illegal immigrant ship had been due to arrive and the villagers posed danger. I wondered where it was, and he said they’d probably spotted the British in the boats and set course for another beach.

  Before supper we were called in by the CO. He said that money and gold had been stolen from the museum and that he knew who the thief was, and added that we were leaving the camp area for an hour, and someone, whoever it was (and I of course knew who but I’m fair and compassionate and I’m giving him a chance) will put the money in the girl from Lehi’s empty tent. We left. The CO came back an hour later and found the money and gold and didn’t say a word. Only he and me and Ari-nom-de-plume knew who the thief was.

  I was walking along one of the kibbutz paths. I met a woman who said derisively that she was very proud that I’d taken Caesarea and that in blood and fire Judah fell; in blood and fire it will rise again. I said, That’s from the Etzel*, and she said, Today it’s all Etzel, and invited me to her room. She took out a cup and stuck an electrical heating element into the water and boiled it and poured two cups of weak tea and burst into tears. I asked her why she was crying. She said her name’s Tzila and she’s cold. I said, I’ll give you my battle-dress blouse. She said that’s not what would warm her. She asked, Did you know that the poet Hannah Senesh* once lived here? We used to cry together. It’s a good thing you took Caesarea from those Bosnian Nazis, according to the maps there’s an ancient Roman aqueduct and an amphitheater there, and we’re Jews, we’ll do something with it. Against who? I asked. She didn’t reply. I didn’t know what to do, I begged her pardon and left.

  As if he’d been following me, Ari-nom-de-plume suddenly appeared. I asked him what he was doing there, and he said he’d been passing by and had heard that the girl I’d been with puts out, and thought I was screwing her. Even in the darkness I paled and said that we’d just been talking about the cold and tea and Hannah Senesh, and he said, You always were a sap and you always will be, and went inside. I stood there to wait for him and he yelled from inside, Get out of here, she’s cold, go and screw some Bosnians, and the pale light was switched off.

  Afterward we came to blows. Ari-nom-de-plume went out searching for antiquities, and now and again I helped him. Sometimes he faked illness until Chana was sick of exempting him from duty. On the last night I went into the dunes on my own and inadvertently began turning over the sand. How clean and smooth that sand was, that most ancient of sands! Endless tracts of clear, pure gold. On it, bushes and shrubs, and at night the incessant howling of the jackals, and the sea sparkling as if it was combed lengthways. Not far from me a couple of lovers were groaning. My hand touched a blunt object. I dug deeper into the sand, and in the end came up with it. It was dark, and a guy who suddenly pulled himself up with a girl in his arms yelled at me that he was permitted to be alone, and that love was allowed even during these days of destruction, and I took off. Back in the hut I cleaned what I’d found. It was a small, chipped head of a woman, apparently Roman by the hairstyle. Ari-nom-de-plume examined it meticulously with a magnifying glass and flashlight, and asked how much I wanted. I’m not selling, I replied. Sell it, he said. Come on, sell it. He snatched the head, I ran after him. He started hitting me, and I retaliated. In the end I realized that if I wanted to live I should submit with dignity. He took the head I’d found, and somebody in the kibbutz snitched, and Ari-nom-de-plume faced charges in the dining hall, but before the trial got under way the Palyam CO arrived and announced that as of this moment the course had ended.

  There was a commotion. We packed up. We put all our stuff into kit bags we’d been issued, which had been stolen from a British army camp, and we had a hasty parade. The CO was red-faced with excitement and drew his pistol and fired a shot into the air. We sang the Palmach anthem and boarded trucks. Some were taken to Haifa to set up the navy, and the rest of us were driven to take Givat Olga. The British could be seen in their fast boats, and Arabs from some village were running toward the hill. We fired at them, I don’t know who and from where, some could be seen fleeing, there was a short battle, and I fired too, my hand hurt, and we entered Givat Olga. I don’t and didn’t have any idea what we were doing there. We found packages of sharp-tasting British cheddar cheese and British biscuits, and drilled. We went back to Sdot Yam to sail our boats again
, and a guy called Hasid and his buddy Hacham taught us what a cunning enemy was waiting for us at sea. Perhaps we also ate some fish that Ari-nom-de-plume caught.

  I think that afterward, or very soon beforehand, we went out on a few small operations that didn’t go down in history, and Ari-nom-de-plume sold the head and wanted to pay me, and I told him to leave me alone, and I think that for a few hours we took a semi-abandoned village at the mouth of Wadi Ara and left. At night I dreamed about girls but I didn’t know how you dream about naked girls because I’d never seen one.

  The order came to move out, we packed our gear and were driven to Sarona. Sarona, which in my childhood was a verdant German Templar settlement, had become an army camp after the Germans were expelled by the British. Now the British had left for Australia and we liberated it for the Jewish people. In my childhood we’d bought butter and sour cream there. They made good wine and olive oil, and were magnificent in their knowledge, and some of them became Nazis. When we lived in Kiryat Meir, in what was then a wilderness, we held marches, and the Arabs of Sumeil village came dressed up as Germans. The British had just left. Their pungent odor still hung in the beautiful German houses. Ari-nom-de-plume found some what we called “candoms,” which today are called condoms. As soon as he was able, Ari-nom-de-plume sold them at a high price and told everybody they’re a bargain because they’re from England and aren’t like the condoms in Palestine which are sacred—that is, “holy.”

  We were put into a beautiful old house built in the German style and then into a barn with a tiled roof, close to the ancient oil press. We sat in a hall with a beamed ceiling, and trucks began arriving with crates. The crates contained weapons and ammunition. They had arrived that morning on the Nora. They were Czech arms that had been manufactured for the Wermacht but after the war ended they lay in warehouses, and the Russians, who were the first to support the establishment of a Jewish state, ordered that they be shipped to Palestine. They were shipped illegally and we later realized that if the Nora hadn’t been dispatched we would have lost the war in Jerusalem. The ship carried some ten thousand rifles and lots of ammunition, a few machine guns, and a considerable quantity of submachine guns.

  We sat in the barn disassembling the weapons. We cleaned off the grease with benzene. Our heads were bursting from the acrid smell and the cloud of benzene vapor that enveloped us. We went to get something to eat. A young man in a suit and tie appeared and said he’d been sent to us, and that his name is Yehoshua but he’s called Shimon for short, and it was said he’d sung tangos at the Bat Galim casino, where he’d found a girl and said he wanted to screw her, but in the middle she said that she had to marry him, and he was flying high and went off and married her because every fuck has got to be followed by a wedding, and she gave him a son. I was with him one day and listened to him crying over his marriage, and I found an old tattered doll that had apparently belonged to a German girl, and it had gleaming yellow eyes. I was suddenly sad for the Germans who had lived here for so many years, for the Arabs of Sumeil who held Nazi parades with their German masters in Kiryat Meir, who had all been expelled, and I felt a kind of bitter choking sensation before I fell asleep.

  We cleaned weapons for three days. So as not to fall asleep we sang “She’ll be wearing no pajamas when she comes, she’ll be wearing no pajamas when she comes” and “She’s got a screw-on leg and her head’s about to fall / And at night she hangs her head right there up on the wall.” And “For centuries we ate pita and drank from finjans / Till the arrival of the Ben-Gurions and the Shertoks and the Weizmanns / And they said that Palestine was theirs alone / And we should start walking to Arabia on our own.”

  We calibrated the weapons according to the orders of someone they said was an officer and looked like a youth a bit older than me, and took them outside. It was a rainy day, from the citrus groves came a pleasing fragrance, and in the rain we heard the faint sound of weeping, and some princess in short pants walked by and said, So, you’re the great fighters, who are you to be fighters, who do you think you are, and we didn’t know what she was saying because she didn’t use question marks or exclamation marks. In those days question marks were a sign of intelligence. The newspaper headlines didn’t provide news but asked questions, “Will War Break Out?” “Will America Support Us?” And she said, You’re all your mothers’ sweeties, a terrible war is starting, and you’re not prepared, and so—and this is an order—you’re going to the blue building by the lemon trees and each of you will be issued a rifle, an ammunition pouch, and you don’t play around with your weapons, and you’ll go to sleep like mama’s boys, and you’ll be shipped out the day after tomorrow.

  In the morning I noticed that Ari-nom-de-plume had disappeared. I’d already learned not to ask about what he was up to. I got up to go to an old building where somebody from the course was making omelets and brewing coffee, I think he was from the senior intake at Sdot Yam, the one from which not one member would be alive a couple of months later, including that one of blessed memory, whose name was perhaps Naftuli. In my coat pocket I found a note, “Don’t Worry. Don’t ask. I’ll be back. Not a word about me, Ari.”

  We got together in the evening, and a new guy appeared who said he’s our battalion commander, and it’s the Fourth Battalion, and we are part of it because the Palyam has been part of this battalion for a long time, and it’s a renowned battalion. I didn’t know what it was renowned for. The guy spoke about war and attrition and killing and retaliation and the purity of arms and how he’d castrated an Arab by the River Jordan, and young people who’d already been killed on the road to Jerusalem, and that is where—and this is how he said it—we are bound.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. Ari-nom-de-plume hadn’t come back to protect me. I was a kid. Suddenly I was disassembling rifles and counting bullets and cleaning mirrors and muzzles, and I missed my bed at home, which was a fifteen-minute walk from Sarona. I looked out the window at the lights of Tel Aviv and Ari-nom-de-plume suddenly materialized out of nowhere. It was the teacher Blich who’d taught me maftzia, the high-register Hebrew for “materialized.” He gave me a “satisfactory” in composition, and my mother, who taught at the same school, told me to embellish a bit, and I learned words from the dictionary. With the maftzia he gave me a “very good.” And Ari-nom-de-plume maftzia and says, Yalla, I’m here. I was glad, because he’d interpret those moments for me when I didn’t know who I am and what I’m doing in this grown-up place where they talk about shooting and death and warfare.

  We went together to an empty green building where we were to meet before our departure. There was British army office furniture in it. Ari-nom-de-plume took a wad of bills from his pocket and said, I’ve made some money. I asked him how. He said, It’s for both of us. I said, Ari, I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t make money for me. Make it for yourself. He laughed and then turned serious and almost whispering he said, You’re spoiled. You’ve been given everything. Your father with his Beethoven and the museum and all the records and you with your Shlonsky and Tchernichovsky and all that, and your teacher mother, afternoon coffee, I grew up in the gutter, and I know how to sniff things out, and I laugh at someone like you, but you know, when I first met you I hated you because you were a goody-goody from Tel Aviv but I won’t forget you in the boat that capsized, with your Youth Encyclopedia, and how frightened you were but brave as well. It hurt you to see the Arabs fleeing from Caesarea. Look, listen to me, nothing will come of you. You’re not hungry enough to live in this world. I used to drive down Allenby Street at night in my father’s cart and he’d steal piping from the new houses that were going up, and I stole bottles of eau de cologne from locked shops and sold them to the whores at Bereleh’s on Chelouche Street, and you, what have you done? Beethoven.

  He got up, lit cigarettes for both us, and told me that the Primus pilots go to the exhibition grounds in north Tel Aviv, by the place we’d reached in the boat, not far from the Yarkon estuary. They get bombs for their planes
from a Mr. Wilenchuk, and they beg for more but he hasn’t got enough. Ari-nom-de-plume said, I followed this Wilenchuk, a nice man who crossed the Yarkon and there, in a deserted Arab mud hut, I saw him supervising the manufacture of the bombs. I hid in the trees and yelled, Air raid! Air raid! And there really was a raid right then, as if God was working for bastards like me and not for Beethovens like you, and that raid wasn’t far away, in Hawaii Park, and a few guys got killed. Everybody in that little factory are workers, they’re not in the Haganah, ordinary people who come to work, and they threw themselves onto the bombs to protect them, not themselves, only the bombs. I sneaked inside and borrowed ten bombs that Wilenchuk was about to hand over to the pilots.

  I drove to the woods on the Yarkon where I used to fuck a girl called Heshkovitz, and I went to the poor pilots who were crying out for bombs but there weren’t enough, and I said, I’ll sell you these at five hundred mils each, and they got excited and hugged me and bought the bombs and flew off in their comical Primuses, and I stashed the money in my hiding place in the Shapira neighborhood that’s not far from here. And now what? We’re off to war? I heard there’s a lot of money in the Arab villages. Gold. The Arabs hide gold in clay jaras. There’ll be no more Caesarea with that moron of an officer. Arabs don’t believe in banks. All their money and gold is in jaras with snakes, to scare off guys like me who aren’t scared of anything.

  As Ari-nom-de-plume was speaking the question-mark-less woman came along and gave out postcards and pencils, and everyone was told to write a card to his family. She said you can write anything except where you’ve been and where you are now. Ten minutes later she collected the cards and with a marker pen censored words she thought were dangerous. She found a few words to censor in my card too. In the end it looked like this: Shalom Mom, Dad, and Mira,… We’re going … see the … We’ll meet again when … I miss you … Regards to Amikam … Yours, Yoram. That was the only card my parents received from me until I came home for that one day in the middle of the war, when the two guys were shot inside the armored vehicle and we took Abba Eban to Tel Aviv.