Yoram Kaniuk - 1948

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.

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.