1948

Seventeen

I can barely remember the girls in the brigade. They were older than me. They belonged to the big, strong, senior guys, and to me they seemed as if they’d come from another world. I was shy, but I wanted some gentleness to touch, and a dream came to me that I remember to this day, sixty-two years later. I dreamed I was sitting in a deck chair on Frishman Beach in Tel Aviv with an older girl, her hair falling onto me as she bent over me, her lips moving closer to mine, and suddenly a kiss materializes out of nowhere, outside me and outside her. And the girl shifts and says something nice, and I look at her and she fades away.

I remember that after Jimmy’s body was brought to the church in Abu Ghosh, his father, the painter Menachem Shemi, raised the blanket covering him and didn’t make a sound. He took out a sketchbook and pencil and for a long time drew his dead son’s face, and not a muscle in his own face moved. He was concentrating as if he himself had died instead of his handsome son.

Afterward I was taken by a girl, I can’t remember who, to drink water from a jara. We sat in the shade of an old fig tree. She said she’d had enough of all this death. Perhaps I loved her for a moment. She put the jara down in the shade and said, Guess what I’m dreaming about? And I thought, What does a girl dream about? Death is the opposite of a young woman and it ruled everything. We’d just seen a painter sketching his dead son. What does she dream about? I didn’t know and she forgot her question, which hung in the air after she got up and vanished, and I remember thinking that I wanted her to go even though it was the pleasantest, most tranquil, sweetest, and wonderful moment I’d had in my life so far, which had been pretty short at the time.

Our Palmach girls dressed simply, which didn’t detract from their beauty. During the war they left their dreams for another time, but this friend couldn’t withstand the temptation despite the sodium bicarbonate they gave us to suppress our sexual desire, as it was called back then. This friend, not really a friend, we had a few photographs that had been taken of us together, met a girl, gave her a child, and became a father at an age at which we still thought we’d go back home and our mother would breastfeed us.

There was another girl who brought water or milk to the fighters, I don’t remember where we were. For me she epitomized our lost innocence; for her beauty, or force, was solely an option. She was apparently a Zionist. She believed in purity of the spirit. Her mental angle neutralized pathos. Then eyes met the exposed knee but the knee was exposed not like today, to sell meat, not like today where the woman is meat on a hook in the market with everything exposed, but because of the weather, and because it was nice when the wind caressed the leg, stroking it with silent words. Back then they sang: “The wind ruffles the hem of her dress.” She is eternally frozen in my memory, passing alone between the sandbags, her expression shy, her shirt buttoned, on her head a steel helmet that had perhaps been taken as booty, shy and smiling, something humble in her, but not without strength. Back then a young girl was like a floral coronet adorned with a bunch of thistles, her sweet, innocent, and sad expression was part of a secret.