1948

Epilogue

Not long ago a hoarse-voiced man called to talk about the book I’d written about the war, and said, There’s this man, Yechezkiel, who says you fought together, and he lives alone, a recluse, and he’d like you to come and see him, and I’ll take you there. When? Friday morning, at nine. I didn’t want to go, it was very hot outside, my computer had broken down, the phone wasn’t working properly, and I tried to find the man who’d said he’d take me, and couldn’t, and now it was nine and the man called and said he was waiting outside. I told him I was unwell, but in a loud, irresistible voice he said, You’re coming. Left with no choice I went outside, he was standing by a car, he wasn’t old like me but not young either, he was well spoken, and we drove off.

Our route wasn’t particularly interesting until we reached the Nachshon interchange. There I remembered the woman with the vast bosom who’d worked in the kiosk, and how all the drivers on the old road to Jerusalem had stopped to view the wonder and buy coffee and a sandwich, and that is where the domesticated desolation of the Lachish region in the dry season begins, and we turned onto a potholed side road and passed three or four settlements with names from the Bible, and then reached the end of a path and drove into a huge expanse of land bounded by green cotton fields, olive trees, and there wasn’t a living soul to be seen, a kind of roaring emptiness in the burning sun, with a temperature of almost forty degrees. We drove along a path that jounced the car, and in the middle of nowhere finally came to a concrete hut, with a huge diesel fuel tank beside it, and a barking German shepherd.

We got out of the car, and there beneath a densely foliaged tree was a table with chairs around it, then eight other men arrived, most of them in their seventies, and we all sat down and nodded at one another, smiling. From the heavens we probably looked like some kind of cabal, perhaps refounding the Palmach, something secret was happening there, we had all come to a little temple. That’s the way it was.

The men took out freshly picked figs, and plums, and hummus, and salads, and bottles of arrack and fruit juice and water, and from the hut Yechezkiel emerged. Slightly bent, his teeth more absent than present, he smiled at his friends and at me. In his ruination he looked like some kind of ancient hero. He was wearing a gray peaked cap and sat at the head of the table facing me, and everyone looked at him and me alternately like the bull that knoweth its owner, and anyway, I’m a Taurus, May 1930, the most beautiful of all the Mays ever created by Mother Earth, as the poet Mayakovsky — who else — wrote, and we laughed a little, waiting for a conflagration, for something.

I already knew that Yechezkiel has been a recluse for sixty-two years, since the War of Independence. For years his friends hadn’t known where he was. He worked on the roads for a while, building fences, he worked distributing something or other in the city, he was married for a year, he begot a daughter, his wife rediscovered her Jewish self and broke off contact. After eighteen years he’d heard that his daughter was getting married in Jerusalem, he got on a bus, went to Jerusalem, to the Me’a She’arim quarter, burst into the wedding hall, into the women’s section, they screamed, he didn’t hear, went up to the daughter he hadn’t seen for years, kissed her, and fled.

Yechezkiel has remained at the battle for the Castel. Since that battle, this man has remained hidden with himself, and only the friends who discovered him and helped him build this pitiful hut in the middle of nowhere, in the asshole of the world close to which we fought in 1948—only they come to see him on Friday mornings, sometimes not all of them, but somebody always comes, they protect him, love him, and he looks at them as if he sees inside them, because they carry his secret, the secret that everyone except him knows. But the friends don’t understand the secret, because it’s one moment, an hour, perhaps a day, from a time they were not in. But I was, and when I sat down opposite Yechezkiel I became a seventeen-year-old again. I sat facing myself of sixty-two years ago, not a memory but a look into a mirror.

Yechezkiel hears about the world on the radio, or from the friends who come to visit, but he lives in April 1948, and today he’s eighty-four. Yechezkiel is still taking the Castel. He has lived in that moment for most of his life, that day, perhaps two, on the Castel. It seems to me that he’s a bit confused but sweet, an old child with the smile of an infirm angel, and he’s fixed someplace we’ve never been to, even if I had, because when I was there I saw the following day, I saw how the moment passed, I saw the almost I’ve been seeking all my life, the moment before the sneeze when the face freezes and the body contorts and out comes a loud sound something like the orgasm of a god, a kind of relief, a kind of almost, like all of life’s great moments that teeter on the brink. And finally, after all these years, I see the absolute almost. Yechezkiel is the absolute almost. He is the second before the sneeze and the second before the spending. He has remained in the middle, in the place that a normal person cannot touch, for since that day he no longer lives but just exists, his body has moved on but he remains in one terrible moment, in a terrible battle, he was wounded and survived, and crawled. He’s still crawling, there on the slopes of the Castel that has long since gone, which a long time ago became a battle heritage site for youngsters enlisting for wars he did not know. He knew only one war, only one horror into which he was drawn, which permanently shaped him into a kind of sticky-paper eggshell on which he engraved his eternity, a shell that goes no further than the beginning of its breaking. Yechezkiel is the break. He is the past without a future. Without the past that will become a future. He can touch what we can’t — the moment of the horror itself, the moment of almost. And now it’s a hot summer day. Here it’s still Eretz Yisrael before the outburst, the hundredth of a second before the pleasure or the pain. That is Yechezkiel. He looks like an old man and a child. He will be born tomorrow and die yesterday. He possesses what none of us does: the terrible innocence of eternity, and he holds its unresolved profundity.

I sat beneath the tree, a warm wind was blowing, the dog was barking at a latecomer, and I thought about Goya’s The Third of May 1808. In it a brown-complected man is raising his arms to the sides, and beside him are dead bodies, behind him are shattered houses, everything is gray, and soldiers, tense in the firing position, are aiming their rifles at the man’s heart. He is not yet really shot. He is standing inside the shot, in the almost that is within the shot. The bullets have exited the muzzles, they are very close to him, he is shouting or crying out, the atmosphere is dense, the almost-shot that in another fraction of a second will kill him is between him and the bullet.

Those people died long ago. Goya is dead. The man is dead. The shot remains. The way in which Yechezkiel is the only one who remained on the Castel, for the Castel is long gone. Yechezkiel says he carried one of the wounded. He doesn’t remember who shot him, but the wounded man died and Yechezkiel was saved. That’s the way it is.

We talked there. We laughed. We touched upon the present somewhat, but it slipped through our fingers, not really existing, and we couldn’t talk about Bibi or Barak or those poor children of foreign workers that Eli Yishai wants to deport. No, we didn’t touch upon life, we touched only the past, which is dead.

The friends became friends of themselves, too. They know each other from nowhere, one of Israel’s leading cinematic artists, and the expert on Arab affairs, and others, each of whom has accomplished a great deal in his life, and they want to touch the only man who remained on the Castel. Perhaps there are more. All of us who fought there and are still living are battle-fatigued. Yechezkiel also expresses something that we don’t talk about. Quite recently somebody told me, You could have taken off, why did you go on fighting when you knew you didn’t have much chance of survival? And there, with Yechezkiel, seeing his face furrowed with wrinkles, the sad glory of an old soldier, I thought that there’s something in soldiers, in every war that people who have not fought will never know: the terrible dependency on killing. There is a primordial instinct in man, we were born to kill in order to live, to be hunters, to protect our families. I remember that in between, between pain and nothingness, I loved the moments of battle. We all loved them. Every fighting soldier loves to shoot and kill. He’s got an enemy. And the enemy leaves no need for philosophizing about morals and things like that. In battle we are human beasts. Bloodthirsty.

At the birthday party I mentioned earlier in this book, I stood on the green lawn of a little house that has since been supplanted by a four-story building, and ranted about death. About the happiness in death. About the beauty of death. About my part in the sacrifice, and about having no regrets. Afterward I did regret it. Afterward I criticized myself. But not then. And not now that I’ve grown old.

I’ve written that I killed a child. But everyone who was in that battle knows that it wasn’t me who killed him. Guilt etched a deep incision. Only today do I realize what a punishment I imposed upon myself when I wrote that I killed a child. And now it’s noon on Friday, August 6, the hottest day yet until Saturday, and Yechezkiel remains there to escape what I have suffered all my life; he remains there, and he has no guilt or self-examination or remorse. He is still in the almost, waiting for the bullet that will kill him.