I got onto the Haifa bus, which as usual stopped in Hadera. Like everyone else I went to the kiosk and bought a glass of soda water for five mils. I looked around and checked out the area and made myself transparent and walked quickly to the toilets at the rear. I saw two drivers smoking by a planter with wilted flowers and hurried away and did another diversion and trod on some couch grass. There was a beautiful solitary anemone there and I moved surreptitiously between sycamore and cypress, and all the thickly foliaged eucalyptuses shaded me as I walked, and I sank into the sand. It wasn’t too cold. The sand was enormous. The bushes were damp and spread onto the sand. It was clear and November and you could see the glint of the distant sea. I was tired and sat down atop a hummock. I felt elation and like a prophet declaimed: “Thy beauty, O Israel, upon thy high places is slain! How are the mighty fallen.” That’s the kind of schmucks we were back then. Suddenly a couple emerged who looked like penguins glistening in the sun. They were wet and she was big and her eyes were blue and she looked at me smilingly, and the man got angry in an unfamiliar language. She said, Young man. She knew that word in Hebrew. The man, still dripping water, got mad at her in their language, she laughed and hugged him, and he said to me in his best biblical Hebrew, Piss off, can’t you see what’s happening here?
I carried on walking and reached the kibbutz gate, tired from the difficult trudge through the damp sand. The man at the gate asked, Are you the new guy? Yes, I said. Are you for the course? he asked. Yes, I said. He said, Don’t dare say that aloud again. I said I was thirsty from the walk and perhaps he had a glass of water for me. He said, Look son, first of all you report to Chana. I asked, Who’s Chana? He said, You don’t ask questions like that here. I said, If I’d asked where’s the woman you call Chana, what would you have said? He didn’t fall into the trap and said, You don’t look for Chana, you find her. You’ll get some water only after Chana says you’re okay.
I walked along the paths of the small kibbutz and saw a young woman and I was scared to ask her, and then a grumpy elderly man passed me wheeling a bicycle and I asked him about Chana, and he said that she’s a snake charmer and everybody’s scared of her but she’s a lovely person, and he directed me to a hut not far away. I went into what was an office, and a huge woman gave me a glass of water and said that here I’d have to obey orders because I’d sworn on the Bible. My name’s Chana, and you don’t ask questions, I’ve got a heroic boyfriend who’s defending you right now, and this is also a kind of clinic. She pointed at a shelf and said, There’s black ointment for cuts and iodine and bandages. The white pills are for sore throats, earache, and fever. The red pills at the side are for stomachache and broken legs and arms. I asked, What if I get bitten by a snake? Nonsense, she replied. I said, Last year at the youth movement camp at Hefzibah I was bitten by a viper, and they put me in a hammock, and someone sucked out the venom, and there weren’t any drugs, and the pain was unbearable. The white ones are also good for snakebites, she said. Did you know that the Arabs have got lots of names for the camel and only one for all the snakes? Did you know that ants have got five noses? I didn’t. She showed me the way to a big boat shed, and from there somebody showed me the way to a big corrugated iron hut.
I went inside and there was nobody there. There were forty beds, twenty on each side, and I began looking for a place for my stuff. In my knapsack I’d brought a set of colored pencils and I drew undisturbed for about two hours and I stuck the picture on the wall above me. Some young guys came in and yelled, What’s your name, and some told me their name, and they all sat down on their beds, and one lay down on the bed opposite me and fell asleep. My neighbor to the left said, The one who’s asleep is Michael, he’s an illegal immigrant, he doesn’t eat lettuce, he thinks it’s cow fodder. Michael woke up and saw the drawing and started shouting, Germans, Germans, and somebody took down the drawing and ripped it up. Afterward he told me that he’d done it not only for Michael’s sake but because here you’re a grown-up guy. Grown-up guys don’t draw. My little brother Moishele draws, you’re in the navy now and you don’t do kid’s crap.
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.