1948

Twenty

After a few days at home I was taken back to Donolo Hospital on the Jaffa seashore. In only a few weeks the cast had been taken off and I was practicing walking. I doggedly wanted to get back to the fighting that was about to start up again after the cease-fire. Gavrush came to see me and asked how I was doing. Making progress, I said. He said, I hear you want to come back. Yes, I replied. He asked me to join some fighters from the Harel Brigade who hadn’t been killed, and said we had to report to the town of Ramla to set up the brigade’s commando unit. He said I should report to the Opera building where they’d set up the navy headquarters, and we’d take their jeep and drive to Ramla.

I broke out of the hospital that night. I met two guys who were waiting for me, we reached the headquarters, which had two sentries at the gate. We told them we’d come for their jeep because we needed it in Jerusalem. They didn’t understand Hebrew and there was a hullabaloo. We overpowered those newly enlisted young lads and drove to Ramla in the jeep.

Ramla was empty and encircled by barbed wire. In their haste the Arab residents, who had fled or been driven out, had left behind smells, clothing, furniture. Their absence took the form of a massive presence. Ramla, capital of the sand dunes, Ramla, the vibrant town whose houses were so imposing, whose streets were so wide, whose thickly — foliaged acacias and sycamores were planted along its lovely avenues. But it was empty. Ramla, gleaming in the burning summer noonday sun, looked as if a tornado had passed through it, leaving only the houses. The town was separated from the other parts of the country. It was encircled by concertinas of barbed wire. It was guarded by soldiers, most of whom were new immigrants who didn’t speak Hebrew. Stray donkeys brayed in the deserted streets. A camel ruminated pensively as if it couldn’t understand where its owner had gone among the date palms and hedges of prickly pear and the smell of charred food. Inside the houses we saw tables laid for a meal; food congealing on plates. Scrawny, hungry dogs nosed impatiently through piles of garbage, their barks resounding in the echo of the void.

A huge broom had passed through the town, sweeping away everyone in its path — children, women, the elderly, young people — and leaving their emptiness behind. I was unable to remain unaffected, but to my shame I was as yet incapable of being really angry. I was young. I’d seen my comrades dying. I’d seen atrocities on both sides, I’d become impervious, I felt as if I had no feelings. The nothingness I saw on my arrival troubled but didn’t traumatize me. In the nights, in the painful silence, I felt I could hear the concrete moving. The hungry jackals came late at night, besieging the town as they howled.

Two or three days after I got to Ramla I limped slowly to neighboring Lydda, to the old railway station. When I was a child we’d traveled to Haifa via Lydda. It was the country’s biggest station, and it had the only switching line. I can remember the smell of burning coal mingling with the scent of cardamom, the fragrance of the blossoming citrus groves around the town, the smell of fallen carob pods, of the lavender and wormwood, the wild regal purple bougainvilleas, the turbaned vendors at the station entrance, the clashing of their little cymbals accompanied by rhythmic chants, selling huge, aromatic pretzels.

I walked around empty Lydda. The only smell left was a mixture of smoke, ash, and dust. The locomotives were still standing there, but without their rolling stock that had been transferred to Tel Aviv, they looked like huge iron beasts. Crows were hopping everywhere as they searched for rotting meat. I slowly walked back through the fields. It was hot. The summer flowers were dying under a blanket of thistles. I saw discarded clothing, shoes dried up in the sun, hats that had begun to fall to pieces. In the depths of my mind I heard the fleeing footfalls. Here and there I saw a few lone poppies that had survived the summer. A pastoral tranquility lay over the desolation, and the unrelenting smell of smoke and decay.

Beside a long barbed-wire concertina at the roadside I saw some people. A great many people, crowded together. The women were weeping and wailing. Children were calling out, and the men were shouting. I walked toward them. As I approached, an Israeli soldier appeared, the color and cut of his uniform revealing him as newly enlisted. He looked as if he didn’t know which way to hold his Sten. It seemed like he wasn’t sure if I were friend or foe. In broken Hebrew he ordered me to leave immediately and go back to Ramla. I was unarmed, and finally he managed to aim his Sten at me. The look in his eyes told me that perhaps he wouldn’t want to, but because of his inexperience he might unintentionally shoot me. I asked him who all these people are, looking at me pleadingly and trying to attract my attention, to beg my mercy. The soldier replied, Them? They’re just Arabs! They’re trying to get back to Ramla, but it’s forbidden.

I asked him on whose orders, it’s their town. Don’t be stupid, he said, not anymore it isn’t. He smiled at me as if he thought I was feebleminded. When I got back to the town I was angry with myself. That emptiness had a face, flesh, clothes, children. Old women lying in the thistles, men in suits but not always wearing shoes, who pleaded. I felt I was complicit, I felt that the conscience that had been with me in my youth, on which I’d always relied, had nodded off at the critical moment. Could I fight against a soldier of the state in whose establishment I had so recently played a part?

Our CO saw me come back and throw up, and said (and I have to say that there was a certain compassion in his voice), They’re present absentees. What? I asked, and he repeated, Present absentees, a term that was later perpetuated in the law of the land. I didn’t understand what it meant. That term, “present absentee,” sounds like it was taken from a science-fiction book. Any Arab who left a conquered town or village prior to May 14, 1948, and had gone to see somebody, buy something, even visit a relative outside Israel, and wanted to come back, it was as if he hadn’t been here when he left. He was present because he’s here but an absentee because he’s not.

Two days later, the day before we were supposed to leave for the renewed fighting in the Negev desert, a fleet of trucks appeared out of the darkness. They were old and the racket of their groaning wheels could be heard from afar. They ripped through the barbed-wire concertinas as if they were cotton wool, and the soldiers guarding the town fled before them. The trucks roared through the empty streets, shattering the nocturnal Ramla silence. When they halted, people, the like of which I’d never seen, jumped down. At the height of the Eretz Yisrael summer they were wearing several layers of dark, threadbare, torn, faded winter clothing, odd-looking hats, caps, and berets like in old films. They spoke in a babel of languages: Bulgarian, Polish, Russian, Greek, Yiddish, German. They dragged screaming children, and suspiciously carried their worn suitcases. They were like locusts swooping down on the town. They didn’t walk toward the empty houses — they pounced on them! They seized upon on them hungrily, eagerly, while the homeowners were standing by the distant fence, hoping to return, or perhaps were in columns walking toward the unknown.

These Jews didn’t discern the emptiness of the houses. They were not romantic, and unlike me, didn’t vomit due to a sham conscience. They’d found their place in the sun! The Arab nothingness was alien to them. It didn’t interest them. In answer to my irksome inquiries they replied, If those refugees have got somewhere to go, then they’re all right! We were behind barbed wire for more than ten years. What does a sabra like you know?

It was all strange for them: the heat, the chrysanthemums, the camels, the prickly pear hedges, the smells, the donkeys, the bright sun. When I saw families hurrying toward the house we were about to evacuate, I saw people beyond any moral accounting. They’d come from the garbage can of history. They were right because they’d survived — that is, they were sinners so great in their own eyes that they were unable to be judges.

They threw out whatever they felt was unsuitable, they took food from the iceboxes and ate, they took clothing from the cupboards and drawers, folded and packed it, as if they’d be compelled to continue their wandering very shortly. They lit fires in the yards and roasted sheep they’d hunted in the fields. In the two days before I left, I saw about one thousand five hundred people, maybe more, settling in a town that was foreign to them, whose name they’d never heard of until their arrival, and the moment they came, even though they couldn’t pronounce its name, they became its owners.

They didn’t stop selling and buying. They had watches on their arms under their coat sleeves, and they sold gold teeth and rings, Players and Craven A cigarettes, and condoms. They were like a school of crocodiles that had come down from the Black Mountains, people who had emerged from Hell to return to history, which lay beaten and weeping on the barbed-wire fences.

The sight of the Jews occupying every house was horrifying, but also possessed a kind of nonjudgmental human aesthetic. The last time that any of them had a house or apartment of their own was in the 1930s. They said — and I remember one trenchant conversation in florid Hebrew — Unlike the Arabs we didn’t have neighboring countries to go to! Their children, who were born in German or British camps, didn’t know what a building without barbed wire around it looked like. We were walking jokes, swelled with our own self-importance because we’d won some Mickey Mouse war. War for them was the Wermacht, Nazis, the Gestapo, tanks, freight trains, huts in gray, and going to God via the crematoria. They’d been through a war we wouldn’t have been able to win with unarmed combat, crappy Czech weapons, our campfires, and the guys, and with or without Palmach songs. They felt they were the wretched and they’d won because they were alive. They dismantled the barbed wire the way children unwrap a chocolate bar. They took and remained.