1948

Seven

Some time later I was sitting by a well in some village. Maybe Beit Zurif. I don’t remember. I drank cool water from a clay jara and ate wood sorrel and the sight of the slaughtered bodies remained inside me. I thought, What had they come for? Twenty-three of the best had come to rescue how many? Six, seven, maybe eight. Who would ever understand what had really taken place in that Valley of the Shadow of Death, and I thought — I remember how I suddenly thought, perhaps for the first or second time in that entire war — why twenty-three people had come to defend six, why twenty-three who were the very best, far better than me in establishing states, better than all my shithead friends, and who were we? Did we have a future? Those dead had a future. They could have been violinists. Artists. Scientists. Military commanders. Who of us would be somebody in the future that had been taken from them?

Twenty-three people went up that hill, each and every one a legend of a man, who had already brought us honor, who had already proved himself, led by Nahum Arieli, a striking man, who sang beautifully, and he came to protect me — the noble man came to rescue the piddling clown that I was, and I’m thinking what will happen tomorrow, the day after, they’ll talk about it as a lever, Look, they’ll say, see how the Palmach protected its own. Today I know that it was in that battle that the “follow me” legend was born, the “follow me” ethos of the Israeli army, because of which the best of the best would be killed, and is it worthwhile? Is it wise? Did someone smarter and more intelligent and older than me have to stand over me in that avenue of death, to fall, to die in front of me, to be slaughtered just so that I, who was my mother’s darling, would stay alive? What kind of a life can you live after that whole story?

Then I was able to think that without Nahum Arieli and his comrades a state would not come about, that with them the force that was supposed to fight after us had been destroyed. And now, as I write this and I am old, ailing, I think that the “follow me” ethos is wonderful and noble, but misguided. A myth should never have been created from the “follow me” on the Castel. The best are always worth more. They could have contributed what I would be unable to contribute. Nahum Arieli would have become Chief of the General Staff or Minister of Defense, and I remained with a torn-off limb, sitting in my home and writing about what I never was and who I didn’t become, and about my life in contrast with the lives of Nahum Arieli and Shimon Alfassi, the hero among men who uttered those terrible words, Privates retreat. Commanders cover them, and died. And they all died, to the last man.

I don’t know. I stayed alive. I was shot. They missed. They didn’t miss, but my life is nothing but the vanity of a weak man. What is a war without tanks, without aircraft, just a few small ramshackle Auster planes, or “Primuses” as we called them, in the sky, without weapons, without food, without water, without artillery, without a change of clothes, without anything, Jerusalem under siege, whipped, shells falling constantly, people being killed standing in line for water and kerosene. How do you explain to the young soldiers of today, who will die in other wars, with equipment and training, how do you explain the Palmach spirit to them? What the human spirit is. What a vision is. What it is to dream. What do you dream about? I don’t know. Perhaps it was all in vain.

After I got back home half dead and the country was filled with Holocaust survivors, who our nice guys referred to as “soaps” and who were a thousand times stronger than us, I realized that it had been worthwhile. But even then, how do you explain to a boy on the Pan York, a boy who at age twelve in Auschwitz had searched for diamonds in his dead parents’ rectums so he could sell them to the SS, how do you explain what happened on the Castel to him? The Castel was a nice children’s story compared with the little that this boy told me and then kept silent for sixty years.

One day, many years later, walking down Allenby Street and minding my own business, I passed what had once been the Allenby Cinema, and suddenly a silver-haired, very thin man stopped in front of me, with a little girl in his arms, his granddaughter perhaps, so pretty, delicate, frightened by the strange man I was for her in the middle of a busy street, and behind him was his wife, and he stared at me in astonishment and I’m sure I recognized him, but from where? And he said, You’re Yoram, and I said, Yes, and he said, Don’t you remember me, and burst out laughing, and I laughed with him and suddenly I recognized him, his eyes had remained inside me, deep behind all the onion skins with which we all encase ourselves. We exchanged a few words, I said something to him, he was moved, I was moved, and then there were no more words. His life and mine had not stayed the same. We had a memory from one day aboard a ship, when he was a young, scarred, and angry boy who had sold his dead parents’ diamonds to the SS, and now he’s an adult introducing me to his wife and daughter or granddaughter, I don’t remember. We remained silent for a few moments and went our separate ways because we didn’t have anything to say to each other, the memories exchanged glances and sentences, but we didn’t have the words to talk about them.