Yoram Kaniuk - 1948

In the background Jerusalem broke through the mist that shrouded the whole mountain. In the big house next to which we sprawled we saw an old Arab sitting cross-legged on a torn blanket and covering his fly-infested body with his robes. In his eyes was a tiny smile, a kind of painful challenging disdain, or perhaps he felt betrayed by his splendidly dressed officers who had played the big hero but had already taken to their heels. He was evidently a man on his own trying to win a war with a disdainful smile. N. had yelled, We’ve got to kill everybody in the village, even the cats here are Arabs. Except for the bullet hole in the body that lay there, we didn’t see much.

N. drove off the crows that had gathered around the tree and looked for a while at the young man who’d been his close friend and was now hanging there with his dick in his mouth. He removed the young man’s boots, tried them on, and the Arab sitting cross-legged got up and started running. N. threw the boots at the crows, which had come fat and sated from a battle that had taken place not far from us, and from which we’d seen smoke rising and we realized that there, too, there were dead. The smell of the distant battle mingled with the smell of death here, and we fired at the fleeing Arab but missed. A crow hopped to our tree and one of the guys lying beneath the fig tree killed it.

I didn’t have a Sten but an American Thompson submachine gun I’d “borrowed” from a Jordanian soldier who’d been killed with a little help from me. We’d gone to blow up a house with five bags of TNT, and when it detonated the house collapsed in a graceful pirouette, the man was killed, and that’s where I found the weapon. I took it and asked what kind of ammunition you need for a Thompson and I was told we had it, and it became my personal weapon, and I gave my Sten to somebody else.

I went back to the yard and saw N. go into the house. He climbed in through a window and I suddenly saw somebody else, who looked as if he’d shrunk into himself. N. was incandescent with animosity, a terrible, almost divine hatred, it was impossible to see him through the loathing that clouded his face and moved over him, crawled on him, and cloaked even his arms and legs.

I stood outside the house by the window and was joined by a few of the guys, and we saw, in a shadowy corner, the body that the Arab had covered earlier, before he fled. Now, from some hiding place an Arab woman of about forty, maybe less, wearing a glittering Bedouin dress ran out. She was covered with black blood, the way blood is in real life, and she knelt the way Arab women know how to kneel, and intermittently wept and wailed half-swallowed words. N. stood silently, his mouth clamped shut, and his eyes were almost closed. He lowered his Sten and saw us standing by the window and smiled.

The Arab woman who knelt there he hated in a terrible silence because, he said, you can’t trust Arabs, even dead ones. Somebody yelled that dead Arabs come back with murder in their eyes, and the woman wept bitterly, and then into the big room came a withered old woman, her skin tattooed with blue lines and wrinkled from the sun. Her expression was one of wonderment. Her eyes were deeply sunken in their sockets. She blurted a few grating syllables and looked like a statue of a woman with a latticed face, scarred with blue lines. She looked out from her deep-sunken eyes with a questioning expression and grunted.

I went inside. The taboun oven emitted a strong smell of seared meat, ash, and burned bread. N. hit the old woman hard and shouted something unintelligible, and she fell, and with the force of her fall the dead body moved, and the younger woman leapt to face N., her eyes sparks of hostility, and she spat in his face; he looked at her, slowly wiped away her spittle as if he were enjoying this moment, glared at me, and smiled. He tore off her scarf and stuffed it into the old woman’s mouth, and she gurgled and it seemed like they wanted to escape, but she couldn’t even stand up, and he yelled: All Arab women are the means of production of murderers, you shit of a communist, amity among nations, you take a good look at Raffi’s green shirt, it’s his shirt that the Araboosh is wearing, I gave it to Raffi only yesterday, and now the Araboosh is wearing it and Raffi’s dead with his dick in his mouth.

N. pulled out a blunt sapper’s knife designed for slitting bags of TNT and began stabbing the younger woman. The whole gang, even those who’d been lying under the fig tree, now stood in silence by the wall whose windows opened onto the tree. I jumped to help the woman. They saw what I wanted to do and held me back. What’s wrong with you? they said. He’s your friend, isn’t he? Let him vent his anger. I said, Don’t let him kill her, and they shouted, Him? Her? What’s the difference? Ginger held me back with the terrible strength he had in his arms, and N. looked at me and laughed, Go play them some Bach with your intellectual of a father, you shit of a mama’s boy, you piece of nothing from that socialist Hashomer Hatzair, how can you fucking sleep at night with all the Arabs you’ve killed? What, the Arabs you shot aren’t amity among nations? Aren’t they your brothers, you piece of shit? They’re not binational? And what about Abdel Khader al-Husseini at the Castel?

And like an idiot I said, But it wasn’t me who killed him, it was someone who was with me who hit him, I fired but missed. As I said it I realized that perhaps I wanted to be the one who’d killed Abdel Khader al-Husseini at the Castel, and was ashamed of myself. N. said contemptuously, You fired and missed. You probably wanted to wipe his ass with amity among nations.

The woman went on shouting at N., Jabaar! Jabaar! You think you’re such a hero! And as if to spite him she managed to take the scarf out of the old woman’s mouth. N. dealt her a sharp samurai blow, the way we’d seen in a film a few months ago, and then he screamed and pinned the woman to the floor and blood burst from her mouth and eyes, and he shouted, Look at how she falls, look at how Arabs die, that’s how they fall and die, slowly, slowly, only Jews die on their feet or slashed to ribbons on a tree.

The back door opened and a little boy of about eight came running in. His belly was distended and flies swarmed around his hair like a coronet. I stood there staring and unfocused. N. grabbed the frightened boy whose face, under the dirt and soot from the taboun oven, I can’t really recall after more than sixty years, but I think it was lovely. The boy laughed nervously and seemed afraid, and N. held him close and shouted, Look at what a shit this little Arab is! The old woman groaned, and I shouted at N., Don’t touch him, he’s just a kid, have pity on him, and N. laughed, What, you’re worried about him, Bubbeleh*?

He held the boy with one hand and with the other brought the knife to his throat, and I could see the tremor in his hand from the power of his grip. The boy screamed, and N. gave an alien laugh and said to me, Will you sing him “The Bird Has a Nest Among the Trees”? Remember, you told me that you asked your teacher mother how can a nest be among the trees? What? The national poet Bialik didn’t know that nests aren’t among the trees but in them? A new spasm was expelled from the part of his soul that grew up with Arabs in the small town, and he shouted, What’s going to happen in ten years? This nice little boy will grow up and go home and take a rifle and come to your backyard and sit in the trees, and you and your father will whistle Beethoven to him, and he’ll shoot you in the balls. If you’ve got balls.

Stop it! I yelled, and the boy’s throat was already red, and Ginger shouted at me, What a baby you are, Yoram, leave N. alone, he’s angry. And I, who had loved N. for many years, before and after, trembled. I was flooded with a wave of anger and remorse. I aimed my Thompson at N. and said, Either you leave the boy alone or I’ll shoot you.