Yoram Kaniuk - 1948

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.”