1948

Twelve

Beit Yuba — an alternative name (and in the interest of good taste and the love I had for the man I’m going to tell you about, I’m changing his name too and I’ll call him N.). There was a vast gentleness in the village, which was set in an Eretz Yisrael landscape that no longer exists, on a hillside shaded by soft tamarisks and jujubes and thickly foliaged pines. It was a village that had witnessed bitter fighting that was now over. In our war there, after the wars of the Romans and the Crusaders who had faded away from our land, we had triumphed.

One of ours, whom I knew but whose name I don’t remember, was hanging from a tree, cut to ribbons and bound with ropes, his member stuck into his mouth. N. stood facing his mutilated comrade and his features contorted with rage. His wild hair stood on end, matted with dirt, his clothes torn, his feet in boots of different colors because they’d been taken from two different corpses — and he apparently cried out but we didn’t hear, and perhaps we’d already walked into the village and lay tired in the shade of a house under a fig tree, and were cleaning Stens and rifles, and searching for Arab records to take, and perhaps we heard the shouts but didn’t really care.

Earlier we’d climbed the hill shooting and singing. We sang “We are ascending and firing,” and a guy with a megaphone called to the Arabs to evacuate the village. The officers who’d sent us weren’t there. They were apparently sleeping at Pension Fefferman on the way to Ma’aleh HaHamisha, and perhaps they’d been listening to songs on the records we’d brought a few days earlier.

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.

Beads of cold sweat dripped from my forehead. I was parched. The guys stood by the wall and were silent. I pissed my pants and the Thompson was shaking. N. burst out laughing. Listen, you Arab ass-kisser, if you shoot the kid then I won’t slaughter him and if you don’t shoot him, I’ll slaughter his dead mother too, who’s maybe not even dead. He kicked her. She moved and he said, The whore isn’t dead, look at how the Arabs die without dignity. And you, kill your poor kid already. Two minutes. If you don’t shoot the kid, I’ll start in with my knife.

Everybody stood waiting. I was standing there with all my seventeen and a half years and aimed the Thompson at N. I took careful aim, I felt the tension, my hands weren’t trembling now, I knew I was right, that mean rightness strengthened muscles in me I didn’t know I had, and I could hear the blood flowing in my veins and I thought of my father and my friends from Hashomer Hatzair, with their binational state, for which back then, and even now, I had the only conceivable solution but one I couldn’t live with, and I aimed at N. and a shot was heard. A cloud of dust rose, and N. was standing there alive and well, but the boy fell, like a butterfly at first and then dropped like a stone. The bullet was aimed at N., I know I was aiming at him, but it was the boy who was killed. I wasn’t the best shot in the world but not the worst either, and the range was only a little more than two meters. The bread in the taboun oven stank. Through the window I saw a dog running and an extinguished bonfire and vines and a crooked tamarisk and the mountains beyond it, and I saw Bab el-Wad in whose hills we would be buried when we died. I put out the taboun with a bucket of water that stood there, I covered the boy’s body with a bloodstained blanket, I kissed his face, and moved his mother toward him and covered her with my paratrooper jacket, and went outside.

I joined the guys who’d gone back into the shade of the tree and we lay down. Nobody said a word. N. came outside trembling and tried to hug me but I shoved him away. They looked at us, waiting for something, I didn’t know what.

Later we went back to Kiryat Anavim. We buried two dead, including Raffi who’d been hung on the tree, and I went into the tent and came out and went to one of the senior officers, if that’s what you could call them, and told him what had happened. He asked who’d been killed. I said I wouldn’t tell him. For some reason or another he didn’t realize that I’d murdered a child. The senior officers barely knew the fighters, we died unnamed. We kept quiet and went on fighting and dying, and the officers, except for a few, were busy being officers.

After a day on the grass I didn’t submit to indifference and brought charges against N. What charges! There wasn’t even a state yet. We were partisans. I gathered everybody on the lawn. Benny Marshak came, who didn’t really want the hullabaloo but realized that as the political commissioner he had to go along with me, and he ordered that a trial be held. Then, reluctantly, everybody sat down and smoked and I related what had happened. They pitied me for being such a fool. N. sat there smiling silently. When I’d finished, he got up and told a story. He told us that once, near his small town, there was a Hashomer Hatzair kibbutz, and the kibbutzniks wanted amity among nations and used to invite the Arabs to their parties in the kibbutz dining hall. They’d dance with them. They liked them. When he spoke about how he peeled a cucumber, we’d drool. And he went on, There was one Arab, the nicest of them, whose name was Jamil. The kibbutz idiots would kiss Jamil for the world of tomorrow and amity among nations. And they’d bring him to their tents and feed him delicacies and try and teach him to read to bring culture to the oppressed. Then the fighting broke out and a gang attacked the kibbutz and who d’you think it was led by? Jamil. He knew every path and every tent. That amity among nations led them to the tents. He was the greatest ever in amity among nations, ala keyf keyf keyfaq—the great, great, greatest ever!

N. was such a good storyteller, he was the shaman of an ancient tribe, and smart, and everybody laughed and called me Jamil, and to this day there are some who meet me in the street, and say, Ahlan ya, Jamil—Hey there Jamil, and they hug me.

Afterwards we carried on singing. Nobody from the platoon, including N., ever told which of us had killed the boy at Beit Yuba. And I didn’t want to remember. I asked those who came out alive what had happened and they said, Enough, Jamil, nothing happened, and it’s expressly written that “Thou shalt not kill an infant,” and if the patriarch Moses says so, why would anyone kill?

After the war that child became an icon for me. N. told me, That’s not the important thing, Yoram Kaniuk — that’s what he always called me. What is important is that there’s a state and we established it in blood, and yes, there were some difficult moments but we were as full of holes as Swiss cheese, and d’you know how they make Swiss cheese? They take holes and wrap them in cheese. And who were we? The living dead, we were the holes in bagels and the holes in cheese. A kid, not a kid, so what?

But I killed him, I said, and he replied, That’s not certain. So who killed the boy? The Prophet Elijah? He said, You’ve shed enough blood, you took a couple of bullets, enjoy being alive. After all, your poet Alterman wrote, “Do not say from dust I came / From the living who fell before you, you came.”

I have related this stark event dozens of times; I did not tell about the warm, mournful smell that was there. Or the smell of blood. Or the shame. Not about the sweetness of squashed figs. Not about the misty morning with its scent of jasmine. I have not told about how, immediately afterward, I shaved my head with an old razor blade that left furrows in my scalp, and not one of the guys said a word about my unsightly baldness. What they knew, they kept to themselves. And I, too, kept quiet.