1948

Nine

We’d be woken up at five in the morning by loud banging on the corrugated iron, we ran to the sea in swimming trunks, shivering with cold, and we swam. At first three kilometers and later five, and then we’d do fifteen minutes of backbreaking physical exercises, still in our wet swimming trunks, then shower in cold water, dress quickly, and run to the dining hall. We’d have a little bread, eggplant, white cheese, drink lukewarm chicory coffee, and chew a dry cookie. After that we’d rest for half an hour and smoke, and then training would begin. When a storm came up at night we’d be woken up and run down to the beach. It was cold and wet. We’d pull the boats out of the water and chant in time, Fuck you, Bevin, and not one of us had the faintest idea why. The illegal immigrants who’d come on the ships didn’t manage to reach the shore, and no Palyam boat was waiting for them. The Palyam guys worked on the ships as escorts not deckhands, and many of them didn’t even know how to swim. Back then the immigrants were brought to the foreign ports through the mountains and the snow, and most of the time the sea was rough.

We were given lectures on navigation, sails, and sailing, and we trained by running and carrying stick rifles with improvised bayonets. And Chana — who could move a house without breaking a sweat, who beat all the heroes of the Palmach at arm wrestling, and who cried only once in her life when a woman from “there” told her about an aktion—shouted at us as we ran with fixed bayonets, I want to see a smile on your faces when you stick those Germans. I asked her if I’d have to smile in the war as I ran with my bayonet to kill the enemy, and she asked the commanding officer to give me a pep talk.

The commanding officer had very few words in his repertoire but he was known as a man who almost got killed bringing immigrants ashore and he really knew how to shout. In his hoarse voice he tried to explain to me about the struggle and the need to vanquish the enemy, and I said that I accept all that but why have we got to smile when running with our bayonets. He didn’t reply, and Chana, who’d forgotten she was mad at me, took us out to the sand dunes. An officer I didn’t know brought a pistol and fifty rounds, and each of us fired his first and last shot on the course with live ammunition, before the battles that lay ahead. When I fired my hand was shaking, my arm hurt, and Chana gave me a red pill and said that it looked like I had a stomachache. I explained that I didn’t, and she said it was already too late and in any case she didn’t have any other pills and if you do get a stomachache, she said, the pill will help anyway, and if not, it won’t do any harm.

In the ideological talks on cold and rainy winter evenings, as we sat in the boathouse that was built of tin that amplified the sound of the raindrops, we were taught what life was like in the Jewish army, and we said that we’d volunteered for the Palmach, partisans and not an army, and we were told that it’s just like an army and orders must be obeyed because the Jewish Yishuv* expected us to be prepared for any mission.

One day we were taken deep into the dunes. It was already dusk. We had a parade. It wasn’t raining. The wind sighed. We practiced concealment. Chana bellowed at every one of us to try and crawl but we had no idea about how to get deeper into the sand. On the way back I got a thorn in my foot. I sat alone facing the sea and smoked. I recalled one of father’s stories: A man held a bar mitzvah celebration for his son and invited guests, and they came to celebrate and drink and he asked his son to climb up into the loft and bring down a cask of wine, and the boy climbed up, was bitten by a snake, and didn’t return. The man climbed up to see what had happened and saw his son lying dead, and he climbed down and ate and drank with his guests and they praised the boy and in the end asked, When is the celebration? You came to celebrate, he said, and now you are mourners. My father liked that story and the pain in my foot was appropriate to the memory. I missed the smoke from my father’s pipe. I missed the sea from our balcony. There was only the sea at Caesarea.

On the course — half of whose participants would later be killed, and they wouldn’t be killed in boats but on the way to Jerusalem, at Saris, the Castel, and Nabi Samwil — was a small, painfully thin young woman, who looked like a leaf on the wind and was foreign to us, as if she’d come from nowhere. It was said she’d been a member of Lehi, that she’d killed a British sergeant, and it was also said she’d had a fling with him beforehand or maybe later, and then killed him. They said it was nothing, but for me it was the first time I’d thought about the splendor of betrayal. I thought that perhaps there was no true love unless it was for someone who’d died.

When I was a kid I was madly in love with a mysterious friend of my father’s, someone from Berlin, whom I’d seen in the only remaining photo of her that was taken ten years before I was born. She was sitting in a boat on a river in Germany and was wearing a white dress, and my father was standing beside her in a white suit and it looked as if he’d been poling while standing, and his face seemed so soft looking at her.

The girl from Lehi lived in her own tent but rowed with us. She was locked in an aura of mystery. When she said something to somebody it seemed like she was talking to herself. She looked like someone who’d escaped from a remote and beautiful castle or someone who’d come up out of a drain and prettied herself up.

Lunch was a thin vegetable soup, a little fish, lettuce, potatoes, compote, and hard black bread. I gave my compote to anybody prepared to give up his soup, and they stood in line. Ari-nom-de-plume — who in contrast with the rest of us said that the war was the most wonderful thing that had happened to him in his life, and who would die an idiotic death at Saint Simeon’s Monastery when the last round fired in the battle would hit him, and he would fall dead on his face, charred by the flames — organized the compote line and got one for free, and he managed my trading as if it were his own. I’d loved him right from the start. He had a white face. Reddish-brown hair. He had the charm of a film pirate. The Robin Hood of our sad sand dunes. The Palyam’s own Gary Cooper. He was a clever devil. He knew everything. He came from great poverty, his father died lugging a refrigerator up to the fourth floor, and it fell on him and killed him. He didn’t have any family because his mother died of grief and his brother either committed suicide or went to America. He was a loyal friend.

We trained in boats for something of which there was no need, certainly not for repelling the enemy on the road to Jerusalem. We practiced knots and fucking seamanship, and one night the senior intake had enough of me talking their ears off about the need to fight instead of this crappy training, and all kinds of what’s right and what’s not, and that the enemy isn’t only an enemy, and they got ratty, one of them broke off a shower fitting and hit someone on the head with it, and he took off yelling and there was a huge hullabaloo, and then they came over and hit me. It was raining and there were lots of them and I was beaten quite easily. The commanding officer turned up and I saw he was smiling, he didn’t like me very much, what with the Shlonsky poems I was always quoting, “With a hint of thunder-flashes the tempest cautions them, with a fiery acrostic — Omens, omens, omens!” He said that this happens on the courses because youngsters whose heads are filled with stupid poems have to vent their anger, and also because they give us sodium bicarbonate against the sex drive, and until we finish establishing a state we had to hit out now and again. He said I shouldn’t take it personally and I should take my knocks gracefully.

There was a flagstaff on which we’d raise the flag, while a few us made sure that the British weren’t coming. I found quite a big stone around the flagstaff, I crawled to it and climbed the flagstaff quickly, angrily, painfully. I tied the stone to the end of the lanyard, let it drop, and thought, Gustav’s Fichte should see me now, and I began swinging around on the lanyard, and the stone tied to it flew around in circles, and one or two people got hit. I was given a punishment, spending a night alone in the hills tied to a concrete slab. I was scared at first. I could hear the jackals. The sea roared. But it was beautiful and filled with splendor. I was alone facing the most ancient of seas. I felt as if I were facing my Tel Aviv sea, which resided on our balcony. The silence was the only sound I could hear. My heart stopped racing. I loved those moments because they were something beyond fear, they were me and the sea and the sand. Perhaps I dozed. In the morning there was a biting chill and torrential rain began falling. Ari-nom-de-plume came along and told me he’d seen how I’d fought and had liked it. We sat and I drank rainwater I collected in my cupped palm, and then they came to release me and bring me back, and I laughed at them and they were upset. That one’s crazy, they said.

Ari-nom-de-plume was a kind of lovable rogue, which is how a young woman kibbutznik who served us in the dining hall described him, and he said she was in love with him. We didn’t talk about stuff like that back then but he said whatever he pleased. Ari-nom-de-plume and I started rowing side by side in the boat, and he told me that he came from the Shapira neighborhood and how his father who was a refrigerator porter died and how his mother was a whore. People were scared of him. He had boxer’s hands and knew how to stare at people until they got frightened. To me he looked like someone who knew a thing or two about life.

We went out in the boat and hauled up the sails, set course, Ari-nom-de-plume was at the tiller. They said they’d seen how I was such a good climber, so I climbed the mast to unfurl a sail, and suddenly, like a gust from a bellows, a strong wind came up that got savagely stronger. At first we didn’t understand exactly where the wind was blowing from because it was so unexpected. The waves heightened and the boat started to bounce. From atop the mast, to which I was clinging like a monkey, the guys below looked like dolls inside a peel in a vast sea, which looked like huge hills rising and falling and dancing. When I got back down, with great difficulty, almost falling, I saw that the commander was panicky and with the aid of a compass was trying to understand where we were sailing to. It didn’t help because the sea rose ever higher, and in the thick fog that had come down and in the heavy rain, we lost our way.

After a while we managed to see a strip of coastline in the distance, but the fog and the waves impeded our vision and we didn’t know which coast it was, and the British were still on parts of the coastline, and the commander was concerned about going too close, and what’s more, rocks could rip out the bottom of the boat. A strong gust of wind snapped the mast, the sails flew every which way and billowed with a kind of roar, and everybody had to yell at his neighbor. Ari-nom-de-plume looked at me and said, You said you’re a coward and you’re the only one who isn’t scared. I yelled back that I’m only scared until something happens, but when something does I’m not scared.

The commander threw up, the oars were swept away, and I yelled to Ari-nom-de-plume; I read in the Youth Encyclopedia that wooden boats don’t sink. Amid the tumult and the stinging rain and the whistling wind and the looming waves Ari-nom-de-plume yelled back that he hoped the boat read the encyclopedia too. We were apparently off Givat Olga and the British radar station. We heard a siren and for a moment through the fog and rain we glimpsed a British motorboat trying to forge its way toward us and it fired a few rounds but couldn’t make it through the waves. The motorboat was carried so high that it came down with a tremendous crash, and I yelled to Ari-nom-de-plume, as I swallowed seawater, that according to what I’d read in the encyclopedia, a metal boat like the British one would sink but a wooden one like ours would float, and we should hold on to the sides and the main thing is not to get too close to the shoreline because a boat’s speed increases in a storm and there are big rocks on the Netanya and Herzliya coastline.

The commander recovered from the faintness that had gripped him and he heard me and said he thinks I’m right. The boat filled with water and capsized, but just like the Youth Encyclopedia said it didn’t sink. We clutched the sides and swam with it for about six hours. Swimming for hours in winter, in freezing water, without food or drink, put us in the grip of dizziness, and because we had nothing else to do we sang stupid songs. “Get being last right out of your mind, as for being first, you’re always behind,” and “Samara hop hop, with the white-winged gull,” and “A fisherman his net did haul, zum zum zum, then he found he’d lost his balls,” and “Every wave a memento bears.” My head was spinning, my arms were like lumps of lead. Ari-nom-de-plume was swimming next to me. There was a moment when I lost consciousness and he grabbed me. He had terrible strength in his hands. We knew that this might be the end of us. One cried Mama, Mama, but she didn’t hear, and when he realized that nothing could help him, he stopped.

At the end of that chaotic sail we reached the Yarkon estuary. Headquarters at Sdot Yam had heard what had happened to us, and sailors went out searching for us in the heightening storm and found us off the estuary. Young members of Hapoel Yam jumped into the water and dragged us one by one, frozen and exhausted, into the Hapoel Yam hut and gave us blankets and dried us off. They put us into a hot shower and gave us dry clothes. They gave us water and sandwiches and said that we should all go home and those not from Tel Aviv should come to the Palmach tents by the Yona camp, which had already been taken from the British. Ari-nom-de-plume and I set off toward home through the exhibition grounds, where today they sell faucets and ice cream. The buildings were shattered and the crooked statue of the Hebrew worker stood there. We wore battle dress and gray flannel pants, which they used to issue to the Aliya Bet illegal immigration people for trips to Europe, warm shirts and sweaters, and we were wearing new shoes. Three of my friends who were youth leaders in Hashomer Hatzair were standing by the statue. Each had a bicycle. They were wearing shorts. They weren’t wearing jackets. They looked at me and my flannel pants and shoes and sneered and said angrily that I should be ashamed of myself because I’d become a capitalist and an imperialist and an oppressor of the workers and had run off to kill Arabs, and all because of the gray pants. Salt was still stuck to my eyelashes and I couldn’t tell them where I’d been and anyway I had no inclination to tell them what six hours in the freezing sea means. We were the Palmach. I went home and went to sleep.

I woke up the next morning and my hands were rigid and I couldn’t move my fingers and even under the blankets I was shivering. My mother wanted to know what had happened but we were forbidden to say where we’d been. Later, Ari-nom-de-plume, who looked like new, came over and said that the order is to lift a car from by the sycamore at Silicate. I said I didn’t know how to drive and Ari-nom-de-plume said I had nothing to worry about. We went to Silicate and looked left and right. The rain was bucketing down, there wasn’t a soul in the street and he got into the car, bent down, connected wires under the dashboard, and told me to jump in. A man in pajamas appeared from the doorway of one of the buildings and ran after us in the rain, and Ari-nom-de-plume shouted, Don’t worry, mister, the car will be waiting for you in Hadera. We got to Hadera and Ari-nom-de-plume left the car by the bus station and we walked through the sand dunes for an hour to get to the camp.

One of the kibbutzniks bought provisions from Hamashbir and said he’d seen seven cars parked in a field by the Hadera bus station, and Ari-nom-de-plume said, It’s because they sow them, and with a drop of rain and dung they’ll grow into a forest.

One afternoon all the instructors vanished — perhaps they’d been called out on an operation — and we did as we pleased, we played cards, and the senior intake passed the culture hour by blowing out candles with farts. I went to the sand dunes with Ari-nom-de-plume and we sat there among the thorny bushes. Suddenly Ari-nom-de-plume punched a rock and yelled something, I didn’t understand what, his words were confused, and then in a soft voice he started to tell me about his mother and father, how they had no money to bury his father, and how once, before he went back to portering and died, he’d started bringing girls home. Then he bought a Harley-Davidson to do the haulage, and had been killed when driving behind a truck and the motorcycle overturned. The girls snatched the money, jumped off, and fled, and he remained dead on his own, and Ari-nom-de-plume was taken to identify him and he told me that he looked like a meat patty.

He laughed and then said, I was only kidding, you mama’s boy, your dad’s sweetie, with his pipe and the Germans on his gramophone. He wanted me to know, and then we suddenly saw — blurred at first by the flying sand, and then much more clearly — a young man with a burned face walking in the sand, his hair ash, a basket in his hand. As we moved closer to him we saw there was a human head in it.

Ari-nom-de-plume said, You see? That’s what my father looked like, Hello Dad, and he gave the saddest laugh I can remember. We spoke to the man with the basket but he was evidently dumb and also couldn’t hear. The head in the basket was ugly but it also had a kind of deep beauty like the head of Jesus in the altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald in Colmar, a work my father loved. The man tried to speak, his mouth gaped. He seemed horror-stricken. The words would not come and he fell. Ari-nom-de-plume ran back to the camp, and I sat staring at the two heads because the man with the basket also looked like a dead man and blood flowed from his mouth. Ari-nom-de-plume brought an officer I didn’t know, maybe he was just visiting, a short guy who seemed determined and gave the impression that he knew who the man was and what to do. He examined him and said, He’s dead! I said, But there aren’t any signs of violence. He was silent and checked the man’s clothes, I searched with him and there were no documents on him. The officer checked his private parts and discovered that his genitals were mutilated. He looked here and there and told us not to move. He went off. We waited. Ari-nom-de-plume and I sat there and smoked. It was cold. The officer, who suddenly had a name, Kuti, returned about an hour later. Kuti who? He said, It doesn’t matter, friend. I’m not your friend. You’re an insolent young pup.

A police jeep from Hadera arrived. They checked out the man. They examined the head. A doctor had come with them. They were looking for something. They seemed worried. They took shovels from the jeep and the four of us had to dig a deep pit where the soil was soft beneath a scar of sand, and we buried the man with the head in the basket. Kuti made us swear we’d seen nothing.

Two days later we heard that Kuti had been wounded and nobody knew which hospital he was in. We didn’t know the names of the policemen who’d been with him. We asked, and in turn we were asked what we had to do with Kuti, and what did we want, and then we realized we had to keep quiet.

Ari-nom-de-plume went to see the young woman kibbutznik, who perhaps really was in love with him. He’d always claimed that they love to submit to him. He talked to her and learned the secret. He invented a story, that Kuti was actually a traitor and evidently wouldn’t be coming back, and that nobody knows who the man we buried was and who the head belonged to.

One day we were told that a woman married to a senior Palmach member was coming to give us a lecture on Y. H. Brenner, the author whose words “Blessed is he who dies in such awareness — with Tel-Hai before his eyes” were inscribed in bold black on a wooden board in the doorway of our hut. The senior intake and the woman from Lehi, who was sometimes rude and at other times tender, said that this lecturer had a son who was killed and that they’d heard the lecture more than once. They said she spoke passionately, went hysterical when she talked about Brenner, and then she smoothed her dress over her ass. One of them said, Yeah, six times. The woman from Lehi suddenly became talkative and said she smoothed her dress eight times. Yossi, who was also in that intake and came from Givatayim and knew everybody from Yaffa Yarkoni’s Café Tslil, whose husband was a legendary Haganah commander, said that his friend from Ramat Gan told him that he’d heard her speaking with excitement bordering on hysteria because the dead Brenner was her lover, or so they said, and when she spoke she smoothed her dress over her ass at least ten times.

They started yelling about how many times she smoothes it, and then they decided to take bets on it. It was to be a national wager. Somebody persuaded the kibbutz Haganah commander to let him have his walkie-talkie for a few hours and he contacted all kinds of settlements and kibbutzim, and then the whole course attended the lecture. The woman was surprised by the large number of volunteers who’d come to hear her, since until then she’d spoken to closed eyes. She spoke emotionally about Brenner and his slain comrades and with her right hand smoothed her dress over her ass (I was evidently the only one who heard the lecture, all the rest were busy counting), and she became excited, almost shouting, and her face was red with weeping over the death of that wonderful man, and all around me I could hear excited whispering: One. Two. Three … She smoothed her dress eleven times, and over the walkie-talkie we heard counting and strangled shouts from Ramat Rachel, Ein Harod, Hanita, and excitement was rife.

The officers, who due to the shortage of girls were in love with our female instructors, used the lecture time to make out in the damp sand dunes and didn’t see the great wager. Torrential rain came down again, but who cared. Ari-nom-de-plume was the big winner, of course.

One evening, a few days later, Benny Marshak showed up and gave us an hour-long lecture on the national situation and the war and that we didn’t have any weapons but we’d fight with our bare hands, teeth, fists, bellies, backs, and smite the bitter enemy and conquer the Land of Israel, and we’d triumph, and everybody was tired and fell asleep but Benny was shortsighted and couldn’t see that he was all fired up just for me and two new immigrants, who didn’t know a word of Hebrew but were amazed by his screaming abilities and the belief that squirted from his eyes and his mouth dripping saliva. All the rest woke up and took off to the sand dunes.

Benny got hold of me and said that I’m a cultured boy and that he wants me to organize a Friday-night party. I didn’t know how it was done, I’d had enough of blowing out candles with farts, and anyway, Benny forbade it. Somebody from the senior intake heard me lamenting about what to do for culture, and arranged with Yossi from Givatayim that he bring to the camp two whores from Tel Aviv. The whores were happy to be with Jewish soldiers and he divided them among the guys, and Ari-nom-de-plume did a deal with the guys and collected a penny a bang, and owed me big-time for not saying a word. Afterward everyone sat on boxes and the wrecked boats that were there, and somebody brought a piano, I don’t remember where from, it wasn’t tuned and looked pretty awful, but wonder of wonders, it was a real piano.

The senior intake also brought the singer Yaffa Yarkoni from Givatayim, who sat erect, beautiful, and sexy at the piano, crossed her legs, and sang about war, that it’s a dream dipped in blood and tears, and how Elisheva would be waiting tomorrow for her soldier at seven. Benny Marshak appeared and was enraged by the sight of Yaffa Yarkoni sitting like that and he remembered me and said, Come here, where are you, who sent Shlonsky a poem. He went on to say that since I’d almost completed high school, what about a real cultural evening, not this garbage.

Friday came and we all gathered. Sabbath eve in the sand dunes, somebody said, and the commanding officer sat there, and studied everyone with a tough expression on his face and said they had to listen. I spoke as if I really understood what I was talking about. I spoke about Bialik and Shlonsky and Tschernichovsky. Everybody pretended to be awake but they were asleep with their eyes open, and I got carried away by my own enthusiasm and talked about poems and recited Bialik’s “Take me under your wing,” which my mother had sung to me when I was a child, and I fell asleep as I was talking and remained sitting there asleep. When I woke up there was nobody there, the rain was whipping at the tin roof.

Haim-and-a-half came to tell us that the woman from Lehi had disappeared. An officer we didn’t know came in and asked questions and we asked about her, and he suddenly seemed tired and sad and said that she wouldn’t be coming back. An hour later, Ze’evik, the senior intake’s leader, came out of their tent. He was tall, with tough black eyes and reddish-brown hair and muscles he could move like a yo-yo. He was always angry. He got up, stretched, stood outside the woman from Lehi’s little tent, and seemed to be shrouded in a terrible sorrow. We all went over, stood around him, me too, and there was a kind of sanctity in that moment, and it frightened us. He went on standing there to attention. After a time the guys got tired and went off to sleep, the senior intake didn’t sleep in tin huts like us but in a big tent, and I remained standing with him. He didn’t move from there the whole night. He fixed the empty tent with a penetrating gaze and didn’t take his eyes from it and all the time stood tensely to attention in memory of the woman they said had been his great love and who didn’t even know it.

Amos the Jerk came out of the senior intake tent and laughed at the sight. Ze’evik hit him but even as he did he didn’t budge from his cast-iron stance. Toward morning I fell asleep. It was cold and I wrapped myself in a smelly greatcoat and a storm blew up, then the whistles blew and we stripped off and ran to the sea half naked, and in the freezing weather dragged the boats onto the sand with shouts against that bastard Bevin. After we’d secured the boats on the beach we ran to dry off and sleep awhile.

A few days later Ari-nom-de-plume and I went off to answer a call of nature separately, because I didn’t like exposing myself in front of others like everyone else, who used to piss in a circle and also put out campfires that way. I always stood to one side, embarrassed.

It was afternoon and the sun was shining. Ari-nom-de-plume was digging in the sand and suddenly yelled. I thought he’d been stung by a scorpion. I went over, he said, Quick, wipe your ass with a stone, and I said I had, and it’d scratched. I stood there. Ari-nom-de-plume opened his hands and sand flowed slowly between his fingers and when it stopped I saw green coins. Afterward Ari-nom-de-plume would teach me how to clean off the rust of two thousand years and reveal smooth and beautiful Roman coins.

In the evening, when we went for a walk on the beach, Ari-nom-de-plume said there’s nothing more beautiful than war. Look at how I won the bet, and now this, I’m going to get rich from those coins. Then he said he was in terrible pain and he was shuddering, and threw up, and Chana was alarmed and he asked to go to the doctor in Hadera. Chana said he knows how to lie like Jascha Heifetz knows how to play the violin, but she had no choice because of the high fever he was suddenly running, so they drove him, burning up, into Hadera. After the people who’d accompanied him had left the clinic, he came out and lifted — in the Palmach they lifted, not stole — a car that had previously been lifted in Tel Aviv by some officer, and he drove it to Tel Aviv and parked it where the officer had found it, on Ahad Ha’am Street near the Great Synagogue, where there was a shop that sold antiques and souvenirs where my father used to buy stuff.

Ari-nom-de-plume showed the coins to the shopkeeper, and told me afterward that the guy’s eyes lit up and tears flowed from them, and he looked like he’d gone crazy and said, These are rare Roman coins and one of them is even a Hebrew coin from the period of the Bar-Kokhba Revolt*, with a relief of a seven-branched menorah, and he asked where they’d come from. Ari-nom-de-plume told him that if he didn’t ask too many questions and if he accepted that they weren’t stolen and if there were no problems, he’d bring more. He got twenty Palestinian pounds.

The next day we were sent home for the weekend. I went for a walk. The Red House had become Palmach headquarters. Next to it I saw two girls who were perhaps guarding it. They looked innocent. Beautiful. I approached them. I wanted to say something and they looked at me and said, What’s the matter, pal, and I said, You look like the light of a shadow, and they laughed and said, You’re a strange one, what’s the light of a shadow? I said, The opposite of the opposite. That’s what they once said about a man who had three dogs and he called them and one came, one didn’t, and the third either did or didn’t. One of the girls said, Do you actually understand what you’re saying? All at once their magic dissipated. Now they looked how their mothers would look in another ten years, and I said, Yes, I don’t understand.

I left. Evening fell. I went to a club on the beach near Café Piltz, to see the great Shimon Rudi. There was a girl there who jumped through a burning hoop, and everyone got excited because they wanted to see her get burned. I liked how Shimon Rudi rippled his muscles and how he made them jump and the girls he threw into the air, and I thought to myself then that he’s a man who lives apart. Man shall dwell alone within his muscles.

In the morning Ari-nom-de-plume was waiting for me by Silicate. We walked to Bograshov Street, he lifted a car, and we drove to Hadera. We left it in the same lot and went back to Sdot Yam, and as we were getting dressed we were called out on an operation.