We tried to sleep during the day. There was no food or water, and when we were in Jerusalem itself, after or before the battles, we went to see the only film showing in the city, Fiesta. The owner of the only cinema open at the time had a generator. He was madly in love with the cinema and it was said he’d sell his wife and children for one new film, but there weren’t any, all he had was this one, Fiesta, with Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban. He’d watch it every day and when somebody came into the darkness he’d yell, Shalom folks, it’s two mils for the Jewish National Fund, and continue watching. Ricardo, wearing a silvery suit, sang in Spanish, which I thought was Mexican, and the blond Esther with the terrific body would dive into a pool filled with girls who looked like fish in their lustrous swimsuits, and the water sprayed in glorious Technicolor, and we’d sit with him in the dark and sing the theme song together. Yashka learned the song from us and maybe thought it was in Hebrew.
I remember becoming apathetic. I waited for death so I could rest awhile. I was tired. I recalled the monks at Latrun, to whom my father would take me when he went to read The City of God with them, a book that he loved. They didn’t speak and mumbled memento mori all day, remember death. And now the bullets whistled in my sleep too, and I remembered death. Even in my dreams. I tried to meet Death but it laughed at me and decided to give me a miss.
We went up to Jerusalem with its windows closed in fear and sang as we marched, and Death that had given me a miss applauded us. The brigade suffered so many dead, and we were all kids, bad and good. I tried to learn things from Yashka, for instance how the partisans fought, but his explanations were in Russian and I didn’t always understand. Now and then we wanted to ask him details about himself, where he was from, had he really been a partisan, how did he get to Palestine, on an illegal immigrant ship? But we were busy and tired and it was postponed. We wanted water. But instead we listened to records we’d taken as booty from Arab villages, tangos in Arabic. Abdel Wahab, Layla Murad, who they said was Jewish. I thought, Tomorrow I’ll ask what his surname is, but I didn’t. I was almost eighteen. He was about twenty. A girl I met on the lawn in the kibbutz said he’s a hell of a guy and looked at him admiringly. Maybe I was envious and maybe not. And then one night he was killed. That wasn’t out of the ordinary. We usually buried boys like him as “Unknown,” which is less appropriate than the “Known only to God” they wrote on graves from the riots of the 1920s and ’30s. Known only to God — powerful words.
He was killed beside me but I don’t remember where it happened. We were on the ground. I suddenly saw him writhing in pain. I cradled his head in my arms and wished him to live. Fuck it, he had to live. When he started to breathe quietly I was happy. I tried to think about how to get him someplace where there was a medic, and suddenly he began choking, then he stopped and breathed easily, and he took a deep breath and I could see how the air entered his lungs and I was sure he was safe but the air didn’t come out. He didn’t exhale. With that deep breath he died. The air didn’t want to come out.
I went up to Pension Fefferman and asked to speak to Yitzhak Rabin. They let me in and I told him that a true hero had been killed and perhaps we could write “Yashka the Partisan” on the temporary grave marker. Rabin thought about it and approved. The dead were buried each morning, and when his turn came, the body was placed in the grave. We were usually too tired to attend the burials but this time we came, it was uncharacteristic, but we said, Poor guy, he’s got nobody else. As if the rest of us had. But he didn’t have parents in a village or city. We filled in the grave and stuck in the marker on which we’d written “Yashka the Partisan.”
In the cemetery at Kiryat Anavim, where I thought Yitzhak Rabin would be buried beside his dead soldiers and comrades, where my comrades rest, Menachem the friend of my youth and others, today there is no headstone bearing the name Rabin, but there isn’t one bearing the name Yashka the Partisan either. I could have inquired at the kibbutz whether they’d forgotten or perhaps they’d learned his real name and found relatives who’d taken his body, and perhaps he’d been buried someplace else under his full name or transferred to another cemetery or that the pit was full and they didn’t see and he disappeared. It says in Psalms 6, “For in death there is no remembrance of Thee; in the netherworld who will give Thee thanks?”
Yashka the Partisan was a Jew even if perhaps he wasn’t. If his dead body had been transferred elsewhere or the rabbinate had discovered his grave and checked if his mother was Jewish, and perhaps she’d tried to have him circumcised postmortem, he remained where he was buried even if they’d moved him. In an eternal heaven absent of God there is Yashka the Partisan, whatever his name might have been.
Eleven
A few months earlier at Kibbutz Sdot Yam, a short time after the girl from Lehi disappeared, we were told we were going to take Caesarea, which was sunken in the sand with only the minaret of the mosque and the jetty protruding from it. The jetty was supported by light-colored marble columns that Lady Hester Stanhope — of whom it was said that she thought Palestine an erotic country — had brought from Ashkelon in the previous century. When I was a boy my father would take me to visit the Bosnian who’d established a small museum on the jetty at Caesarea. He’d send a car to pick us up from the main road. A sweet roly-poly man with a childlike smile, who had lots of coins, icons, and jars. We’d sit with him on the jetty facing the sea and he’d bring out two nargilehs, a boy would fill them with coals and spread the ash and light them, and the man and my father would smoke and talk in German about their student days in Heidelberg.
Now we’d been told we were going to take Caesarea because an illegal immigrant ship was due, and the Arabs would make trouble. I said that they’re not Arabs but Bosnians. They said, An Arab’s an Arab even if he’s a Basunian. Bosnian, I said. Whatever, they replied. They said that there mustn’t be a lot of Arabs there who’d make trouble, and what the hell are Bosnians? They’re all Arabs. One of us was sent to observe the town and draw a map and first thing the next morning we went out. It was dark. We went in two boats, the Dov and the Tirzah. We rowed out, not under sail, with six oarsmen on each side. We had two rifles, one that fired and another that was taken from the cache and cleaned. We reached the edge of the bay. Ari-nom-de-plume and Haim-and-a-half fired, one rifle worked, the other didn’t. They tried the other one again and the cartridge, that had sand stuck to it, got jammed in the barrel, and the barrel bent and a miserable bullet was ejected and hung in the air, and immediately afterward fell, looking like a drop of an old man’s sperm.
We landed on the beach and saw the Bosnians escaping. They walked slowly. They didn’t appear to be frightened or retreating. They walked in majesty. They carried their belongings with a kind of proper pride. Mishka banged on a can so there’d be more noise, and a Haganah Primus aircraft passed slowly overhead, lost altitude, and tried to drop a bomb, but the bomb exploded in the air and its pieces fell into the dunes. The Primus was buffeted by the blast and climbed like some Yiddisher cowboy. The Bosnians were deep in the dunes and I saw how they were still walking calmly. Perhaps their sadness was in their walk, which I didn’t understand then but do today. I asked Ari-nom-de-plume who they were bothering and he said, They’re bothering my ass, we’ve just got to make sure there aren’t any Arabs here and that’s why we’re expelling them. I went to the museum, from where my father’s friend had managed to rescue some of the rarer antiquities and take them with him, and Ari-nom-de-plume came up behind me and tried to go inside. I stopped him and asked him not to take anything. He shoved me with compassionate friendliness and went inside for a moment, I ran after him, he evaded me and went outside, raised his hands, and said, Look, they’re clean!