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.