Yoram Kaniuk - 1948

He listened and was silent, and then he said that thousands of Jews had already seen the light. He told me that a young Jewish soldier had by chance been present at a Christian ritual and had suddenly found God, seen the light, and he’d wept and asked to join the church, and he was baptized here in Notre Dame and received Communion, and the next day he was killed in battle, not of the church but yours, and he was found not far from the Mount of Olives with Jesus on his lips and a cross in his hand, and his story was told to his family and they accepted the cross and converted to Christianity. I smiled at this sweet, rotund man, this solitary man who on the way to Hell would convert people, and who somehow knew I wouldn’t be easy prey, but if you’ve got God on your side why not try anyway. The fact is that his attempt was only halfhearted. I told him that Heine left his estate to his wife on the condition that she remarried, for that way, he wrote, there would be at least one man who regretted his death. The fat monk smiled and said, Come if you want. The church is waiting. I again quoted my father, who quoted Rabbi Huna, who said that if a man commits a transgression punishable by death, what must he do to live? If he is taught to read one page, he will read two, and if he is taught to study one chapter he will study two, and if he is not taught to read and study, what must he do to live? He will become the leader of the congregation and collector of alms and he will live.

The monk said, It’s probably hard to fight, isn’t it? I told him that a few days earlier I’d seen the head of one of our people stuck on a pole, and with things like that it really isn’t easy fighting, God wasn’t around, neither yours nor ours. And I said that when the French king’s army attacked the Cathars the commander of the army told the king that he couldn’t destroy the city because there were Catholics in it too, and the king said, Kill them all and God will do the selection afterward. I told him I’d read that in one of the stranger-than-fiction books I loved to read. He seemed surprised.

Shells exploded nearby, shots could be heard, a woman shouted or cried, and the monk evidently felt apologetic for his God and said, He’s the same God, and I told him, Ours can’t bear a son. He looked at me sadly, perhaps with compassion, for that’s what Jesus wanted, and he flushed and said, that poor man stranded in the land of wars and hatred, Jesus spoke with the lame and the halt and the rejected that the superior Jews forbade to enter the temple, for that was his power.

I left him and reached HQ. I think it was in the Schneller Compound. At the office door stood a toy soldier in a pressed uniform and I couldn’t even begin to imagine where it had come from. Because in Jerusalem there wasn’t yet a state and the Capital of Israel for All Eternity and a government, and these guys had already had uniforms made and even insignia on their shirt epaulets, and one of them saluted and I burst out laughing, and I was told that there’s a nice woman in Jerusalem who invented the rank stars. She lived in Nahlaot and had seen the rank insignia with the British when she used to sew shirts for their generals and mend their uniforms, and he told me that his commanding officer — the commander of Jerusalem whom I’d apparently come to see — had six stars sewed for him, just like the British who commanded the Jordanians.

I realized that this guy wasn’t a soldier like us but Shaltiel’s janitor. His uniform was pressed. Everyone there maintained distance from one another. Silence reigned and it was suffocating. I was taken in to Shaltiel who was dressed like a Mexican general complete with stars. Perhaps I’m confused and it was someone else on another occasion. Whoever he was, I laughed at the sight of him, and the Mexican general got to his feet and fixed me with an angry glare. I told him that where I’d come from there aren’t many live soldiers, and we hadn’t yet had uniforms made. Today I don’t remember either why I was there or my assignment, but that place, the room in the depths of the horror all around, the devastating arrogance of the moment, were puzzling. I evidently said something that offended the Mexican general and I was quickly shown out, after conveying a message whose content I don’t remember.

I walked to Talbieh, to the building that had housed the British military court and that had been evacuated several days earlier. Some of the guys came and collected me. We walked and sang with eyes closed from fatigue through the empty and sad and whipped and bleeding streets of Jerusalem. A small, funny, roly-poly elderly man who was transparent and sad, said in a German accent, Don’t sing because there’s shooting here, and if you sing they won’t be burying you in any Bab el-Wad but here, on Jaffa Road.

In the morning the cold hung over us and stung. There was a parade and we were divided into two groups. I was in the second one. We were allotted to homes for the Passover Seder. I waited until evening and set out for Beit Hama’alot. I poked around in the big military court building and found half a loaf of dry bread in the corner of one of the rooms; it apparently had belonged to a British soldier. I also found some mallow and vine leaves in a yard, and in a garden I found a flower dying for water, went on my way, and then climbed quite a lot of stairs to the family’s apartment, and all the time could hear shells falling. I reached the door and knocked — there was no electricity for a bell — the door was opened suspiciously and I gave the flower to a nice woman, who smiled, and I then gave her the dry bread, the mallow, and the leaves.

We were seated around the table. A nice yekke , German-origin, family. The man of the house told me that he knew Walter Katz, a good friend of my father’s who lived in Jerusalem. He also told me that he’d been a friend of theirs back in Munich, which he pronounced München. They were particularly pleased with the bread. The woman looked at it with unrestrained fondness and said, So what shall we do, close the windows tightly so as not let the Lord of Hosts peep in, and say that it’s matzo?

On the table was a plate with some sardines, one tired tomato, the bit of salad stuff I’d brought, and a cucumber their daughter had found in one of the yards. The flatware was beautiful. There was no water but there was a bottle of wine and a gramophone. It was playing a beautiful Brahms string sextet, which I found very touching amid the vortex of shame I was caught up in. I perhaps allowed myself to shed a tear and was amazed that I had any fluid in my eyes because I’d been drinking barely one cup of water a day. The thudding of the shells spoiled the music. Through the window I heard a prayer of yearning rising. I saw a bird on the window ledge and the husband said, A bird, it’s all right for a bird, it can also be in other places. The cold didn’t stop stinging. The wife asked how old I was and I said, Ten minutes to eighteen, and she laughed because perhaps she wanted to cry, and her husband said, You’re the youngest here, you’ll ask the four questions, and handed me a Haggadah*. There was hardly any light but I managed to read the questions because as I said earlier, I had excellent night vision. Just like at every Passover I laughed at what I thought was a meaningless riddle, and everybody sang the chorus, and a vast but restrained sorrow hung in the air, and we were lonely together facing an invisible and incomprehensible world behind shuttered windows.

The shells didn’t stop falling and endowed the tranquility enveloping us with a savage tom-tom-like leitmotiv. I thought, What are all these words of the Haggadah, what do they mean, perhaps they’re a code to fool the Romans. The loaf was passed from hand to hand and we each tore off a bit, and the husband blessed the bread and called it matzo, and said, God, don’t look. I heard a siren, people outside shouted, Be careful, God knows of what, a dog howled and the wife threw it a bit of her bread saying, Poor doggie.