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.