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.
Ten
Later, in the middle of the war, a tall, light-haired guy with clear blue eyes showed up at Kiryat Anavim, and in his eyes you could see the Baltic Sea, which I’d never seen, at best I knew Frishman Beach. He said he’d learned Hebrew on the boat and in the transit camp. I’ve no idea how he managed to get to us through the siege. I’d just been transferred to a different company, with the people who’d stayed alive, and he arrived sometime later. When two people from our tent were killed, he was given their clothes because his were falling to pieces. I liked him from the first minute. All we knew about him was that he’d been a partisan and to us he was Yashka the Partisan. He had Slavic features like those we’d seen in that Russian film A White Sail Gleams, a great film. I sang him the song from the film. We gave Yashka an old Austrian Schwarzlose because he knew about heavy machine guns, and we also gave one to somebody else, whose name I’ve forgotten, a Holocaust survivor who’d infiltrated the lines to get to us and was killed a week later in Siris. If I’m not mistaken we gave the other guy the Browning, because he too was a professional killer, and had been one in Russia, or so they said.
Yashka and I stood in line at the dining hall with the little chits we had to give to Shika at the door. I’d taught him to make a salad from mallow leaves, vine leaves, bread crumbs, and weeds whose names I’ve forgotten. Shika — who during the war called the British and American troops the British army or the American army, but always called the Russians “our forces”—admiringly called Yashka “comrade partisan.”
We were driving together one day and suddenly I felt a burning sensation. I looked down and saw a hole in my pants and then another, and at that moment I saw that he too was looking at his pants and in the mixture of Hebrew, Russian, and German we used, he said, Bullet come in undertrousers. A foreign, hostile, and stupid bullet had penetrated the area of our rumps and sailed from one pant leg to the other and out, but except for burns and holes in our pants it didn’t leave a mark. We laughed and he said that we were ass-kameraden.
He was quiet, daring, and fought like they said the Polish cavalry did, what years later would be called “exposed in the turret,” but back then we didn’t have a turret to be exposed in. It was 1948, the time of the Children’s Crusade.
On mornings after a battle we divided up the clothes of the dead. The evenings were cold and Yashka sang Russian songs. In battle he’d stand as he fired. He said he could see the enemy better if he stood. He had no fear and obviously loved shooting. The moment he went into battle he’d glow and speak in Russian and sing, and in one of our assaults on Siris — two had already failed — or perhaps it was Beit Iksa or another village, I’ve forgotten where exactly, we were left in a scorched hilly area, everybody except the two of us was asleep, and Yashka the Partisan sat and let out a shout of joy as if he were an animal. I moved over to him and he gave me a Strand Special cigarette, which were hard to come by, and tried to explain something to me. I didn’t understand everything but he spoke with a lot of hand gestures. He didn’t know Yiddish, and I knew only very little, and I’m not even sure he was Jewish, not that I cared. From what he told me I understood that he’d fought in Stalingrad as a boy. He said that the battle there had been the bitterest ever fought and thousands had been killed, and once he’d killed a German with a head-butt. He said, apparently, that there was hunger and cold and he loved (here he drew a heart in the sand with a twig) our war because the Jews deserved a country because in Stalingrad many Jews had fought and died and were not awarded a medal of honor, and after the fighting they’d been attacked and murdered because they were Jews, and his grandfather had been a religious Jew in Siberia, and what we were doing here was right and true but was like a children’s war, against Arabs who yelled and slaughtered and fled at the first shot. He’d never, so he told me, seen worse soldiers, but not the Jordanians who are excellent soldiers. But the Arabs are many and they’ve got weapons, and he kills as many of them as he can because if he doesn’t you won’t have a state here. Perhaps he said “we” but I’m not sure.
He started singing a Russian song in a whisper and it sounded like a Hebrew song, and he embraced me tightly and said, Just as long as we succeed. We’ve got to fight well. You’re a bit funny. You also want morals. There are no morals in war, he said in broken Hebrew that’s hard for me to reconstruct today, but I understood him, he meant me because I’d made a song and dance about what is permitted and what is forbidden. He said he’d once read books on philosophy and knew that morals were all right for professors, every animal kills other animals, every man fights for his life and kills if he wants to live, there are no moral wars. Do you wait for someone to kill you and then what? Only afterward you shoot at him? Someone like you, who was in Hashomer Hatzair and lay wounded says you’ve got to be right, but you’ve also got to be bad. Without the bad guys there are no wars, said Yashka the Partisan, and he chewed on a stalk of grass and laughed. He had a lovely clear and wise and open laugh, and sometimes he’d even fall asleep in the middle of laughing.