1948

Eleven

A few months earlier at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, a short time after the girl from Lehi disappeared, we were told we were going to take Caesarea, which was sunken in the sand with only the minaret of the mosque and the jetty protruding from it. The jetty was supported by light-colored marble columns that Lady Hester Stanhope — of whom it was said that she thought Palestine an erotic country — had brought from Ashkelon in the previous century. When I was a boy my father would take me to visit the Bosnian who’d established a small museum on the jetty at Caesarea. He’d send a car to pick us up from the main road. A sweet roly-poly man with a childlike smile, who had lots of coins, icons, and jars. We’d sit with him on the jetty facing the sea and he’d bring out two nargilehs, a boy would fill them with coals and spread the ash and light them, and the man and my father would smoke and talk in German about their student days in Heidelberg.

Now we’d been told we were going to take Caesarea because an illegal immigrant ship was due, and the Arabs would make trouble. I said that they’re not Arabs but Bosnians. They said, An Arab’s an Arab even if he’s a Basunian. Bosnian, I said. Whatever, they replied. They said that there mustn’t be a lot of Arabs there who’d make trouble, and what the hell are Bosnians? They’re all Arabs. One of us was sent to observe the town and draw a map and first thing the next morning we went out. It was dark. We went in two boats, the Dov and the Tirzah. We rowed out, not under sail, with six oarsmen on each side. We had two rifles, one that fired and another that was taken from the cache and cleaned. We reached the edge of the bay. Ari-nom-de-plume and Haim-and-a-half fired, one rifle worked, the other didn’t. They tried the other one again and the cartridge, that had sand stuck to it, got jammed in the barrel, and the barrel bent and a miserable bullet was ejected and hung in the air, and immediately afterward fell, looking like a drop of an old man’s sperm.

We landed on the beach and saw the Bosnians escaping. They walked slowly. They didn’t appear to be frightened or retreating. They walked in majesty. They carried their belongings with a kind of proper pride. Mishka banged on a can so there’d be more noise, and a Haganah Primus aircraft passed slowly overhead, lost altitude, and tried to drop a bomb, but the bomb exploded in the air and its pieces fell into the dunes. The Primus was buffeted by the blast and climbed like some Yiddisher cowboy. The Bosnians were deep in the dunes and I saw how they were still walking calmly. Perhaps their sadness was in their walk, which I didn’t understand then but do today. I asked Ari-nom-de-plume who they were bothering and he said, They’re bothering my ass, we’ve just got to make sure there aren’t any Arabs here and that’s why we’re expelling them. I went to the museum, from where my father’s friend had managed to rescue some of the rarer antiquities and take them with him, and Ari-nom-de-plume came up behind me and tried to go inside. I stopped him and asked him not to take anything. He shoved me with compassionate friendliness and went inside for a moment, I ran after him, he evaded me and went outside, raised his hands, and said, Look, they’re clean!

We sat and smoked until an officer came and yelled, Caesarea is in our hands! — as if we’d beaten Herod and the Romans and the Germans as well. He sounded excited. I said to him, What’s this “in our hands”? What kind of “in our hands” is it? And somebody told him, You’re a man’s man! Kifaq hey! — Bravo! In the distance we could still see the column of refugees. They were wearing coats and hats and looked like ants chewing sand. At the tail of the column I saw a little girl wearing a green coat and clutching a doll. She was looking back and being dragged along by an Arab I identified as my father’s Bosnian friend, and I was saddened but didn’t do anything. What I saw didn’t yet have a name or a title. The man was a tiny movement in a landscape. There was also something aesthetic in that vast painting of the ruins of ancient walls, Greek marble columns, a mosque minaret half sunken in the heap of sand in front of it, and the human column.

(Years later I was in the United States at a party marking the publication of my book about a man whose mother was Jewish and father was Arab, and the struggle of the Arab in him against the Jew in him, and there was a woman there who came over to talk to me. She said her name was Inaya and introduced her husband, and said with a kind of nice straightforward contrariness that he’s a Jew. She was tall and good-looking and said she’d written a good review of the book and that she is a Palestinian. Where from? I asked, and she replied, Caesarea. She told how, when she was five years old, the Jews had come with warships and cannons, and there was a battle and the Jews took Caesarea with great force. I looked at the little girl with the coat and the doll, and didn’t tell her about the two rifles, one of which fired and the other that didn’t. She was so nice to me. Her husband told me a joke about a Jew, a Frenchman, and an Englishman, and I thought, Fifty years earlier that little girl was but a Bosnian speck in space.)

At Caesarea, on the day of the great conquest, which if I’m not mistaken was the first conquest of a village in the War of Independence, British police boats were seen searching for something, and Ari-nom-de-plume was sitting next to me and trying to press me into going into the museum again, which I’d been appointed to guard. An officer came out of the dunes in a jeep, a pistol on his belt, and put a padlock on the door. And five guys from Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael with a pistol and unarmed combat sticks came, and we left in boats for Sdot Yam. In the evening the commanding officer spoke about how we were fighting a war of no choice and how everything was as it should be. I said I don’t understand why we had to take Caesarea, which hadn’t fought against us, and the guy said that an illegal immigrant ship had been due to arrive and the villagers posed danger. I wondered where it was, and he said they’d probably spotted the British in the boats and set course for another beach.

Before supper we were called in by the CO. He said that money and gold had been stolen from the museum and that he knew who the thief was, and added that we were leaving the camp area for an hour, and someone, whoever it was (and I of course knew who but I’m fair and compassionate and I’m giving him a chance) will put the money in the girl from Lehi’s empty tent. We left. The CO came back an hour later and found the money and gold and didn’t say a word. Only he and me and Ari-nom-de-plume knew who the thief was.

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.”

We calibrated the weapons according to the orders of someone they said was an officer and looked like a youth a bit older than me, and took them outside. It was a rainy day, from the citrus groves came a pleasing fragrance, and in the rain we heard the faint sound of weeping, and some princess in short pants walked by and said, So, you’re the great fighters, who are you to be fighters, who do you think you are, and we didn’t know what she was saying because she didn’t use question marks or exclamation marks. In those days question marks were a sign of intelligence. The newspaper headlines didn’t provide news but asked questions, “Will War Break Out?” “Will America Support Us?” And she said, You’re all your mothers’ sweeties, a terrible war is starting, and you’re not prepared, and so — and this is an order — you’re going to the blue building by the lemon trees and each of you will be issued a rifle, an ammunition pouch, and you don’t play around with your weapons, and you’ll go to sleep like mama’s boys, and you’ll be shipped out the day after tomorrow.

In the morning I noticed that Ari-nom-de-plume had disappeared. I’d already learned not to ask about what he was up to. I got up to go to an old building where somebody from the course was making omelets and brewing coffee, I think he was from the senior intake at Sdot Yam, the one from which not one member would be alive a couple of months later, including that one of blessed memory, whose name was perhaps Naftuli. In my coat pocket I found a note, “Don’t Worry. Don’t ask. I’ll be back. Not a word about me, Ari.”

We got together in the evening, and a new guy appeared who said he’s our battalion commander, and it’s the Fourth Battalion, and we are part of it because the Palyam has been part of this battalion for a long time, and it’s a renowned battalion. I didn’t know what it was renowned for. The guy spoke about war and attrition and killing and retaliation and the purity of arms and how he’d castrated an Arab by the River Jordan, and young people who’d already been killed on the road to Jerusalem, and that is where — and this is how he said it — we are bound.

I couldn’t sleep that night. Ari-nom-de-plume hadn’t come back to protect me. I was a kid. Suddenly I was disassembling rifles and counting bullets and cleaning mirrors and muzzles, and I missed my bed at home, which was a fifteen-minute walk from Sarona. I looked out the window at the lights of Tel Aviv and Ari-nom-de-plume suddenly materialized out of nowhere. It was the teacher Blich who’d taught me maftzia, the high-register Hebrew for “materialized.” He gave me a “satisfactory” in composition, and my mother, who taught at the same school, told me to embellish a bit, and I learned words from the dictionary. With the maftzia he gave me a “very good.” And Ari-nom-de-plume maftzia and says, Yalla, I’m here. I was glad, because he’d interpret those moments for me when I didn’t know who I am and what I’m doing in this grown-up place where they talk about shooting and death and warfare.

We went together to an empty green building where we were to meet before our departure. There was British army office furniture in it. Ari-nom-de-plume took a wad of bills from his pocket and said, I’ve made some money. I asked him how. He said, It’s for both of us. I said, Ari, I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t make money for me. Make it for yourself. He laughed and then turned serious and almost whispering he said, You’re spoiled. You’ve been given everything. Your father with his Beethoven and the museum and all the records and you with your Shlonsky and Tchernichovsky and all that, and your teacher mother, afternoon coffee, I grew up in the gutter, and I know how to sniff things out, and I laugh at someone like you, but you know, when I first met you I hated you because you were a goody-goody from Tel Aviv but I won’t forget you in the boat that capsized, with your Youth Encyclopedia, and how frightened you were but brave as well. It hurt you to see the Arabs fleeing from Caesarea. Look, listen to me, nothing will come of you. You’re not hungry enough to live in this world. I used to drive down Allenby Street at night in my father’s cart and he’d steal piping from the new houses that were going up, and I stole bottles of eau de cologne from locked shops and sold them to the whores at Bereleh’s on Chelouche Street, and you, what have you done? Beethoven.

He got up, lit cigarettes for both us, and told me that the Primus pilots go to the exhibition grounds in north Tel Aviv, by the place we’d reached in the boat, not far from the Yarkon estuary. They get bombs for their planes from a Mr. Wilenchuk, and they beg for more but he hasn’t got enough. Ari-nom-de-plume said, I followed this Wilenchuk, a nice man who crossed the Yarkon and there, in a deserted Arab mud hut, I saw him supervising the manufacture of the bombs. I hid in the trees and yelled, Air raid! Air raid! And there really was a raid right then, as if God was working for bastards like me and not for Beethovens like you, and that raid wasn’t far away, in Hawaii Park, and a few guys got killed. Everybody in that little factory are workers, they’re not in the Haganah, ordinary people who come to work, and they threw themselves onto the bombs to protect them, not themselves, only the bombs. I sneaked inside and borrowed ten bombs that Wilenchuk was about to hand over to the pilots.

I drove to the woods on the Yarkon where I used to fuck a girl called Heshkovitz, and I went to the poor pilots who were crying out for bombs but there weren’t enough, and I said, I’ll sell you these at five hundred mils each, and they got excited and hugged me and bought the bombs and flew off in their comical Primuses, and I stashed the money in my hiding place in the Shapira neighborhood that’s not far from here. And now what? We’re off to war? I heard there’s a lot of money in the Arab villages. Gold. The Arabs hide gold in clay jaras. There’ll be no more Caesarea with that moron of an officer. Arabs don’t believe in banks. All their money and gold is in jaras with snakes, to scare off guys like me who aren’t scared of anything.

As Ari-nom-de-plume was speaking the question-mark-less woman came along and gave out postcards and pencils, and everyone was told to write a card to his family. She said you can write anything except where you’ve been and where you are now. Ten minutes later she collected the cards and with a marker pen censored words she thought were dangerous. She found a few words to censor in my card too. In the end it looked like this: Shalom Mom, Dad, and Mira,… We’re going … see the … We’ll meet again when … I miss you … Regards to Amikam … Yours, Yoram. That was the only card my parents received from me until I came home for that one day in the middle of the war, when the two guys were shot inside the armored vehicle and we took Abba Eban to Tel Aviv.

The next day we were crowded onto trucks. Ari-nom-de-plume bought the seat next to the driver for twenty grush*. The officer came along to sit in the cab because he was in command, but Ari-nom-de-plume said he was already sitting there, and the officer got mad, and we could hear their raised voices, and another officer standing there said that this is the Palmach and there aren’t any privileges, and the first officer said, But this shit bought the seat and that isn’t exactly the Palmach either, and the driver said, What’s the matter with you, I’m not in the Palmach, I’m from the Histadrut.

We drove along a dirt road, and were thrown from side to side and fell all over one another. One guy spat, the guy who caught the spit hit the spitter, others sang “She’ll be wearing no pajamas,” and at the end of the road, tired, looking like cadavers — except for Ari-nom-de-plume who got down from the cab as fresh as a daisy and as happy as a clam — we went into a kibbutz they said was Kibbutz Hulda. We lay down somehow, I don’t remember where, it was raining lightly, and we cleaned our weapons. We were given bread and sardines and tomatoes and heard firing. We realized that the guys who’d left before us were in a battle not far away. We were told to come, go figure where to today, there was a wood and a hill with maybe a gravestone on it and a cypress that stuck in my memory, such a beautiful, noble cypress, it swept sharply into the sky that seemed low because of the mist. We got up and ran to the hill, we lay on top of dead bodies there. We heard more firing. There was no officer with us. Ari-nom-de-plume took charge and yelled at us to move this way and that, and we saw hundreds of Arabs streaming toward us, running and shooting and shouting, and Ari-nom-de-plume said that our planning and theirs is piss-poor because nobody knows what to do.

Meanwhile the fighting on the hill continued and there were still no communications between the two battles, ours and the one on the hill, and food trucks to Jerusalem fell apart on the road and armored vehicles were hit. Shouts could be heard from one of them, the firing was intense, I didn’t know how bullets whistle, I didn’t have time to be frightened because it all looked like a film at the community center, and then the officer from the armored vehicle, whose men had all been wounded, yelled that he can’t carry on, the blood’s flowing, some have been killed and the others wounded, and he won’t be taken prisoner because of the ill-treatment. And “Shalom comrades, over and out,” and the vehicle with its wounded blew up and a column of smoke rose and there was silence.

The Arabs withdrew to regroup. Some of our fighters came from agricultural training groups and had brought musical instruments that fell amid the shells. I heard a flute playing itself in contrast with something that was perhaps a machine gun. Afterward we slept like logs. It was cold. We slept on the grass. Each man and his rifle with its swastika clutched to him. The food trucks stood in the shade of the trees. There was noise. We had no food. They gave out a little water. Some guys had brought stuff from home but the officers took everything not needed for the fighting and said that at six after the war they’d get it all back in Mugrabi Square by the phone box.

We were issued twenty-five rounds. Moshe Katz said that this is a historic day and I remember thinking that ever since I joined the Palmach I’d been hearing that this is a historic day. I tried to walk and stumbled, and I saw Arabs streaming toward us. Some of our fighters were moved to fire from the other side of the wood and we went back to the burned-out armored vehicle.

The dead soldiers inside it were laid out in a line on the ground. They looked like slabs of meat in a butcher shop. Then we buried them. Some twenty people were killed. There was a profound sadness in the air. Two days later we started over. The convoy of armored vehicles and trucks stood in the dark waiting for the order, and it all sounded like a big locomotive warming up its motors. The officer came along and said he’d heard from my companions on Course No. 9 that I could see in the dark. I told him that was right. He said, Right now you’re going to do something for the nation, and he put me in front of the convoy. We were ordered to start moving. I marched along the ruined road as behind me a big convoy of trucks and armored vehicles moved quietly, and I’m there to make sure there aren’t any wires stretching from one side of the road to the other that are connected to mines. I found a few and pointed at them and people came right away and detonated the mines.

You’ve got to be a perfect idiot, more than perfect, to walk through a minefield and believe it’s for the nation, which I’d never met personally. When we got to wherever we were going, the officer came up to me, I don’t remember who he was, apart from the fact that he was killed a short time afterward, and said I’d been fine and he gave me a round cigarette, which were the best. Usually when there were cigarettes we’d get seven round ones or twenty flat Latif. It was nice to smoke the round cigarette with its Virginia tobacco.

Later we reached the junction. Dawn “became manifest,” the way the teacher Blich liked it, and I got into one of the armored vehicles and we drove in a convoy toward Jerusalem. We came under fire on the way. We fired back. Perhaps I hadn’t yet digested that earlier on the road I’d been a dead man walking so that others would live. We reached the lower pumping station in Bab el-Wad and rested. There was more shooting. This time we ran up the hill and fired at a gang that left behind cigarettes, which we collected, and one of us was wounded. On one of the dead Arabs we found a map of Kiryat Anavim drawn with a pen. Somebody said, I didn’t know that Arabs knew how to draw. Yes, he was told, but in Arabic. What Arabic? he said. You speak Arabic, you don’t draw in it.

We went back down and the convoy continued on its way. I was put onto a food truck and was told that I was now an escort. I sat between two sacks of flour and there was shooting here and there but nothing special. We unloaded part of the load at Kiryat Anavim and carried on toward Jerusalem. The road was narrow and wretched. On the seven bends at Motza the truck groaned. The driver was killed by sniper fire from Qaluniyya and the truck began rocking from side to side. Somebody ran and jumped into the cab, stood on the brakes, lifted the dead driver onto our flour sacks, and was killed by a bullet. There was nobody who knew how to drive, and a guy who was with us on Course No. 9 said that Yoram drove stolen cars with Ari-nom-de-plume. I didn’t have time to explain that I’d never driven a car, that it was Ari-nom-de-plume, and I got into the cab. I remembered that you had to release the hand brake, I pressed down on the clutch, the truck groaned, I held on to the big steering wheel, the truck shivered because two of its tires had been blown out, and I drove on the wheel rims. We drove for an hour, maybe an hour and a half. I don’t know how. We were taking fire all the time, and a bullet smashed the left wing mirror so I couldn’t see what was behind me because the big mirror above the wheel was smashed too. At Qaluniyya by the seven bends I drove slowly. I’ve no idea how I knew how to drive. I had no contact with the guys in back because of the smashed mirrors but I knew they were firing and I heard a yelp from someone who’d apparently been hit. I suddenly realized that the so respectable and so gentle yelp had come from the beautiful daughter of Ernst, my father’s bosom friend, who I later visited in hospital in Jerusalem before I was wounded too and hospitalized. Ruth, that sweet blond girl I’d loved as a child, limped for the rest of her life.

We reached Jerusalem on a Saturday. We didn’t know what day it was. The city was starving. The people clapped for us. In the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods they raised white flags and threw stones at us. I was angry. I went with Ari-nom-de-plume, who got down from the second truck, and we beat up a few of the stone throwers. They cursed us in Yiddish and shouted “Shabbess, Shabbess. No driving on the Sabbath!” Ari-nom-de-plume gave one of them a punch that flattened him against a wall and said, That’ll teach you what Shabbess is.