by Yoram Kaniuk
She said she knew who I was and had asked about me, and that her husband was an Austrian violinist from Graz whose hand had been injured when they fled or something, I don’t know exactly, but even during the flight, in the forests, he’d wrapped the record up in rags and protected it, and afterward they’d reached Haifa on the Knesset Yisrael, and from there to Cyprus, and then secretly back to Palestine, and he’d even protected the record when standing in line for the toilet on the boat. He said he’d once stood in line for five hours, all the while clasping the record to his chest, and he said that the boat’s commander was surprised by the fact that the man with the shattered hand wouldn’t let go of the record. He invited him to his cabin and gave him a tangerine. And the woman explained that there, aboard that boat, was God’s luminosity. She said that the commander told him that if he reached Palestine he had to go up to Jerusalem—where the commander, was born—and go up to Mount Scopus and see the most glorious sunrise in the world.
The woman was standing and I was sitting, and she said, After a year in Cyprus he managed to escape but didn’t have the hands to play again. He walked from Haifa to Tel Aviv with the record, and British policemen stopped him, and he told them in Hebrew that he didn’t speak any language, and they took pity on him and laughed, and said, What’s that you’ve got there, and he showed them, and they laughed again and let him go, and he reached Tel Aviv. He asked where the Tel Aviv Museum was and reached Rothschild Boulevard, and Partos, his childhood friend from Vienna, was rehearsing a Mozart quartet there. Partos introduced him to your father, Kaniuk the museum director, and your father asked him where he was going, and he said to Jerusalem, and your father said, The city’s under siege. He said he was going because the commander of the boat that brought him had said that he had to see the sunrise in Jerusalem. Your father said he thinks perhaps he’s got a son someplace there.
The man left the museum and somehow got to Jerusalem. He went up to Mount Scopus, saw the sunrise, and a car stopped by him with a man in it who got out to piss, and he saw the poor guy standing there with his record in the middle of nowhere, and said he was going to Kiryat Anavim and that he’d take him there. At the kibbutz office the man told them that the commander of the boat he’d come on had sent him.
The woman stopped for a moment, looked at me, and I saw a small tear wending its way from her eye and she said, I was on dining-hall duty. He came in and was so polite, starving, but polite. And what was there to eat? I saw how he took the dry bread and the leaves and the quarter sardine and he seemed to be the hungriest man I’d ever met. He ate ravenously, trembling, but politely. They gave him custard and he said that Amnon, the boat’s commander, told him that they eat fresh fruit in Eretz Yisrael. I told him I was sorry, but there’s none left. There was a kind of enigmatic, curious otherness in him. He was his own man. We got married two days later, without a rabbi. Just a few friends on the lawn. We broke a glass too. He wanted to fight but he was told that he hadn’t been taught how to fight in Bergen-Belsen, so they let him escort a convoy. Later he said he’d heard he had a cousin in a place called the Etzion Bloc in the West Bank, and I told him not to go, it was too dangerous, and tried to dissuade him, but he insisted and said he had to because the cousin is the only relative he’s got in the world.
She’d wept and told him that she loved him, and remember, things like that were left unspoken back then. He told her that she is the only love he had in his life. And he said he was alone. That his whole family had perished. The woman looked at me and went on with her story: At night as I slept, he got up, and I saw him getting up and didn’t let on. I don’t remember how, but I heard he’d reached Kfar Etzion. Two days later somebody brought me a letter he’d sent, it was in German and I didn’t understand it. One of the kibbutz members read it to me and I knew it was a kind of eulogy. There was a big assault at the time, there was a massacre at Kfar Etzion, and my husband was burned alive.
They brought his body back here. It was decided that he should be buried in the cemetery close to the Palmach plot, but we didn’t have his papers, we didn’t even know who he was, except for the fact that his name was Kurt. We didn’t know his surname. His passport was forged, with a photograph of an eighty-year-old man, a passport the Haganah gave him when they gave them out for the illegal immigrant ships. They make a hundred like it in an evening and simply stuck in any old photograph. By feel.
She spoke dryly. She said that the record should be mine. Kurt said that your father told him how much his son, that’s you, loves this Bach fugue and that by pure chance, that’s what this record is. He was my beloved.
I, the youth of then, envied her as she uttered the words “my beloved.” I went back to the tent. Perhaps it was hot. Maybe cold. I don’t remember. The guys brought their gramophone and set it up and played the Arab records we’d brought the previous night or maybe in the morning or the afternoon. The records were made of Bakelite and after listening to them they’d smash them on the rocks. Those songs suddenly got on my nerves, I missed something else apart from Abdel Wahab and his trilling, and I asked them to let me play a record I’d been given as a present. Go right ahead, they said.
They lay on the rags that were called beds back then, or knelt on the ground, and as usual tried to imagine the taste of a tomato that N. had described with his terrible talent. I played the record and felt good. It felt like being a child. To be in peace. To be at home with my parents. With the sea. With my friend Amos and our animals, with the anemones in the field below before you get to Hayarkon Street, and with the yellow fire plants by the Muslim graves, by the sea, and quietude came to me.
Back then I thought that by changing two letters of the Hebrew krav, battle, you got kever, grave. And the same Hebrew root gives you morning and test and visit and battle and decay. I sat and listened and replayed the record over and over, with the words playing in my head, until the guys had had enough and said, Yalla, enough already, but I couldn’t stop. They got mad, What’s with you, mama’s boy, enough of your Beethoven, and I said, It’s Bach, and they said, Beethoven, Bach, it’s all the same shit, and I could see they were about to jump me. I grabbed my Thompson, aimed at them, and yelled that if anybody moved I’d shoot, and you already know that I killed a kid so I can definitely do the same to you. With one hand I wound up the gramophone and held the Thompson in the other and played the record a few more times until they fooled me, they came up behind, grabbed me, threw me down, grabbed the record, and threw it to shatter on the rocks. That poor, old, wonderful record from Berlin shattered into smithereens. I got up and went out, I don’t remember where to.
That evening an operation was cancelled and the whole battalion was called to the cowshed basement. That’s where, every now and again, we’d hear greetings from home on a battery-powered radio. We all sat quietly. Dado, David Elazar, who was the best-loved of all the commanders, ordered us to keep quiet. The radio broadcast all kinds of greetings, we were all tense, and then the announcer said: “For Yoram Kaniuk, somewhere in Eretz Yisrael. On your eighteenth birthday your parents send their congratulations and would like us to play the record you loved as a child.” And then, in the deepest silence imaginable, they were forced to listen once more to my little fugue.
That was perhaps the best thing that has ever happened to me on any birthday. It was a sweet revenge. An embrace from my parents and sister.
Fifteen
The battle at Nabi Samwil was one of the bitterest and one of the stupidest in the War of Independence. I was not part of the assault on the hill overlooking the road to Jerusalem—we were sent in four armored vehicles with a Davidka mortar, which sometimes fired too, as a diversion from the rear. We drove in the direction of Beit Iksa, close to the British radar station, on an operation we didn’t exactly know much about. Everything I write now is not completely clear to me. I’d forgotten the battle. For more than thirty years it lay quenched inside me.
One day, thirty years after, I drove in my poor old Simca 1000 t
o the Sidna Ali beach and gazed at the water and it was beautiful and calm, and below I saw youngsters swimming naked and laughing aloud, and a woman shouted in a foreign language and looked like a dolphin, perhaps she was a volunteer from Finland, and from the water a memory surfaced, as good as new, which had been hidden away inside me and had refused to come out. I looked at it the way you watch a film. I drove home and wrote what I’d remembered. But what I wrote is not necessarily what happened.
I remembered that our commander kept the operation order to himself. I was in the vehicle with the Davidka, which when we fired it made more noise than it caused damage, but it was all we had. On the way we were ambushed. Mines overturned three of the vehicles. We extricated ourselves and took the Davidka and its huge shells. The fourth vehicle wasn’t hit. Gavrush, the driver of the fourth vehicle’s commander and the Harel Brigade’s greatest exponent of the art of driving, managed to turn the vehicle around. We were already under fire and there were wounded. The officer who was in the vehicle said he was going back to Ma’aleh HaHamisha to get help. We told him that there was nobody there who could come because they were all taking part in the big attack with Puza, who we didn’t know had already been killed, and we pleaded with him not to go, but if he was going and leaving us then at least he should tell us what we were supposed to do and take some of the wounded with him. He looked stressed and angry and said that he’s in a hurry to call help, which he would of course find, and can’t stop now and he’ll soon be back with reinforcements. I’m still waiting for him to come back.
We remained in the open under heavy fire. We didn’t know what to do. Did we really take off our shirts to bandage the wounded? Did we really run out of shirts? Were there really crows in the sky dancing like God’s clowns, little bastards that looked like toy Hasidim or converted penguins, lacking the magnificence of an eagle or the vulture that settled deep in the sky and regarded us with contempt, us, the not yet dead. The living were of no interest to it, it swooped down onto a corpse but not onto the wounded.
The crows put on a show, perhaps to entertain the vulture, but it scorned them too, and we’d run out of ammunition and fired the Davidka and the shell fell into the no-man’s-land between us and the enemy and didn’t explode. Where was I exactly? I once asked Uri Bogin, a true hero who died a long time ago and was born in Kfar Malal, and he said we were lying behind terraces. I asked him if he remembered us playing dead and he said he didn’t. He was a strong man. A farmer. The scene I had in my mind wasn’t in his. He was older than me. I asked him if the Arabs didn’t dare to touch the Davidka shell because we used to scratch all kinds of dials on the huge shells, and we’d heard them talking on the radio about an atomic bomb and they waited for the Jordanians to blow it up.
Uri said perhaps that was true but he doesn’t remember exactly if there’d actually been a Davidka shell there. I remembered that there’d been nowhere to run to. The sky above us was vast, spread out, and ugly with all the glints of the screaming crows, and I remember that we played dead because the enemy was above us and could see us, they saw each and every one of us precisely, and we were all lying by ourselves and trying to find cover. I remember that next to me was the friend of my youth, Menachem, who went to school with me, and my mother was his teacher, and I’m not at all sure that he liked me particularly, perhaps because I was a year younger and the son of his teacher and the museum director, but I liked him and we lay there close to each other. Uri said he thinks that Menachem was farther away and that somebody else was lying next to me, and he said I was exposed and didn’t have the sense to find cover and that’s why I think I played dead. The terror in that place was indeed great.
I remember that we were afraid to move; we realized that they could see the whites of our eyes so we shut them. We heard them laughing. That was the decisive moment in the history of the Davidka, which by not exploding had done its job and saved us from slaughter.
Through my closed eyes I saw them brewing coffee over a fire, the wind carried the smoke toward us, and there was much gaiety there. They were in no hurry, and sang, and got bored and fired at us even though they thought we were dead, and they shouted in Hebrew because maybe they thought that dead Jews understood Hebrew. They shouted, “We’re killing the dead yahud,” and it sounded like a poem, “We’re Killing Dead Jews,” and all the time the sham dead were being wounded and so were the already wounded, and we couldn’t move. I felt something warm oozing onto my right hand, and through the slits of my eyes I saw the vulture gliding like some god over Menachem. I realized that what I’d felt oozing onto my hand was Menachem’s blood. It oozed slowly, I didn’t hear a sound. Perhaps Uri’s right and Menachem bled someplace else, but for me he died next to me. And the crows danced to entertain the vulture and the sun was mantled in a shroud of mist, and I wanted to shout but I had no voice. I heard they said that Menachem had blown himself up with a grenade. If that’s the case then it wasn’t Menachem who died beside me, but the dead don’t care about being mixed up.
After about three, maybe four hours, I straightened up. Something horrifying made me dare, as if I’d decided to commit suicide, I couldn’t carry on getting shot at every few minutes—we could hear the bullets exiting the rifle muzzles and we heard the whistle of the shots and we waited for death and didn’t die, those who weren’t dead, that is. I knew that in the end one of those bullets would hit me. Through my shut eyes I saw the rifle muzzles of the people firing at us by the campfire, and without asking anyone we suddenly became three who stood up, and separately but together we started running up the hill toward Ma’aleh HaHamisha.
At first the enemy didn’t grasp what was happening. When they did they started shooting again. They fired like maniacs but apparently because of the surprise their aim was off and we managed to reach a coppice and were swallowed up among the trees. Feeling helpless, half dead, tired, thirsty, and hungry we reached headquarters at Pension Fefferman. There was nobody there except for a frightened nurse who looked at us like we were shadows. She’d apparently seen the battle from the hill and perhaps she was frightened because we looked like dead men. She bandaged us and perhaps even gave us some clothing, my memory has been erased here, and we took off to find the commander who’d fled. One of us, whose name I think was Mizrachi, ran to find him and kill him, but he was told that he’d been flown in a Primus to the fighting in the Negev.
Only that night we heard that the main battle at Nabi Samwil had been a resounding failure. On that hill there were dozens of dead and many wounded, including those from our side who had died. I searched for Menachem, but he was nowhere to be found. I think I was shell-shocked or battle-fatigued, which was unknown back then, and I entered a frozen desolation, and apparently ran and leapt, I dimly remember how I was there, looking for my friend who died beside me, and perhaps I drank some water, perhaps I hit myself, perhaps I looked for the vulture that could no longer be seen. We had been twenty-three men, and eight came back, or so I think.
A friend told me later that he was sent to check out the dead on the hill. There were some, he said, that had been found killed by their own hand, by a grenade or gunshot. Commanders had disappeared and apparently hidden. There were those who fought, but without a commanding officer they didn’t know what they were doing exactly, and didn’t know whether they were firing at their own men or the enemy, who fought bravely and surprised us, employing excellent stratagems. It was then quietly decided, without saying a word, that there would be no further discussion of this battle. To this day the Palmach safeguards the secret of Nabi Samwil. Instead of investigating the fuckup they let it pass. That’s a pity. Heroism is not only in winning but also in failure. Failure in war or art or anything else can be an encouragement, to invent wise consolation and vanquish the next failure with itself.
Six months later, my leg in a cast and moving with difficulty, I went to my dear friend Menachem’s home by the sea, not far from the Tel Aviv harbor. His mother was standing by the ricinus tree in their
yard, and his father, an old teacher, was watering a dried-up tree and wore a faded wide-brimmed hat. I told his mother what had happened and how we were fired on and how Menachem had died beside me and I survived, and she gave me a bitter smile and said, Pity it wasn’t the other way around.
Sixteen
I don’t remember when we went out to the slaughter mistakenly called the Battle of Saint Simeon’s Monastery. I didn’t take part in the first attack. I think I’d been asked to sort ammunition at Kiryat Anavim or in Jerusalem and apparently didn’t continue with the forces, and I remember feeling guilty about not being there. Some of my friends were and one of them came back and gave me a watch that belonged to a guy who’d died, because mine was broken, and the watch that belonged to the dead friend had a leather cover so it wouldn’t shine in the dark. I did take part in the second attack, a few hours later. Perhaps we’d come from a building on the fringes of the Katamon neighborhood in Jerusalem, or Givat Shaul in West Jerusalem, or from the Valley of the Cross. We’d apparently waited. I remember a mess of charred bushes, shells, a thorny bush pricking me, the roar of vehicles from afar, grave-looking stone buildings, and gunfire.
We charged and were shelled and took rifle and machine-gun fire, and I’d reached a green-shuttered building adjacent to the monastery. The firing intensified. There was a lofty coppice of pine trees. All I could think of was that the poet Tschernichovsky’s wife had lived in the monastery. I remember shouting and more gunfire. There was a terrace, and we lay by it, and after a while went up or down and I’d somehow reached the building with the green shutters, where a fire broke out whose stench was awful, and we took the building and then the monastery.