We sat and smoked until an officer came and yelled, Caesarea is in our hands! — as if we’d beaten Herod and the Romans and the Germans as well. He sounded excited. I said to him, What’s this “in our hands”? What kind of “in our hands” is it? And somebody told him, You’re a man’s man! Kifaq hey! — Bravo! In the distance we could still see the column of refugees. They were wearing coats and hats and looked like ants chewing sand. At the tail of the column I saw a little girl wearing a green coat and clutching a doll. She was looking back and being dragged along by an Arab I identified as my father’s Bosnian friend, and I was saddened but didn’t do anything. What I saw didn’t yet have a name or a title. The man was a tiny movement in a landscape. There was also something aesthetic in that vast painting of the ruins of ancient walls, Greek marble columns, a mosque minaret half sunken in the heap of sand in front of it, and the human column.
(Years later I was in the United States at a party marking the publication of my book about a man whose mother was Jewish and father was Arab, and the struggle of the Arab in him against the Jew in him, and there was a woman there who came over to talk to me. She said her name was Inaya and introduced her husband, and said with a kind of nice straightforward contrariness that he’s a Jew. She was tall and good-looking and said she’d written a good review of the book and that she is a Palestinian. Where from? I asked, and she replied, Caesarea. She told how, when she was five years old, the Jews had come with warships and cannons, and there was a battle and the Jews took Caesarea with great force. I looked at the little girl with the coat and the doll, and didn’t tell her about the two rifles, one of which fired and the other that didn’t. She was so nice to me. Her husband told me a joke about a Jew, a Frenchman, and an Englishman, and I thought, Fifty years earlier that little girl was but a Bosnian speck in space.)
At Caesarea, on the day of the great conquest, which if I’m not mistaken was the first conquest of a village in the War of Independence, British police boats were seen searching for something, and Ari-nom-de-plume was sitting next to me and trying to press me into going into the museum again, which I’d been appointed to guard. An officer came out of the dunes in a jeep, a pistol on his belt, and put a padlock on the door. And five guys from Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael with a pistol and unarmed combat sticks came, and we left in boats for Sdot Yam. In the evening the commanding officer spoke about how we were fighting a war of no choice and how everything was as it should be. I said I don’t understand why we had to take Caesarea, which hadn’t fought against us, and the guy said that an illegal immigrant ship had been due to arrive and the villagers posed danger. I wondered where it was, and he said they’d probably spotted the British in the boats and set course for another beach.
Before supper we were called in by the CO. He said that money and gold had been stolen from the museum and that he knew who the thief was, and added that we were leaving the camp area for an hour, and someone, whoever it was (and I of course knew who but I’m fair and compassionate and I’m giving him a chance) will put the money in the girl from Lehi’s empty tent. We left. The CO came back an hour later and found the money and gold and didn’t say a word. Only he and me and Ari-nom-de-plume knew who the thief was.
I was walking along one of the kibbutz paths. I met a woman who said derisively that she was very proud that I’d taken Caesarea and that in blood and fire Judah fell; in blood and fire it will rise again. I said, That’s from the Etzel*, and she said, Today it’s all Etzel, and invited me to her room. She took out a cup and stuck an electrical heating element into the water and boiled it and poured two cups of weak tea and burst into tears. I asked her why she was crying. She said her name’s Tzila and she’s cold. I said, I’ll give you my battle-dress blouse. She said that’s not what would warm her. She asked, Did you know that the poet Hannah Senesh* once lived here? We used to cry together. It’s a good thing you took Caesarea from those Bosnian Nazis, according to the maps there’s an ancient Roman aqueduct and an amphitheater there, and we’re Jews, we’ll do something with it. Against who? I asked. She didn’t reply. I didn’t know what to do, I begged her pardon and left.
As if he’d been following me, Ari-nom-de-plume suddenly appeared. I asked him what he was doing there, and he said he’d been passing by and had heard that the girl I’d been with puts out, and thought I was screwing her. Even in the darkness I paled and said that we’d just been talking about the cold and tea and Hannah Senesh, and he said, You always were a sap and you always will be, and went inside. I stood there to wait for him and he yelled from inside, Get out of here, she’s cold, go and screw some Bosnians, and the pale light was switched off.
Afterward we came to blows. Ari-nom-de-plume went out searching for antiquities, and now and again I helped him. Sometimes he faked illness until Chana was sick of exempting him from duty. On the last night I went into the dunes on my own and inadvertently began turning over the sand. How clean and smooth that sand was, that most ancient of sands! Endless tracts of clear, pure gold. On it, bushes and shrubs, and at night the incessant howling of the jackals, and the sea sparkling as if it was combed lengthways. Not far from me a couple of lovers were groaning. My hand touched a blunt object. I dug deeper into the sand, and in the end came up with it. It was dark, and a guy who suddenly pulled himself up with a girl in his arms yelled at me that he was permitted to be alone, and that love was allowed even during these days of destruction, and I took off. Back in the hut I cleaned what I’d found. It was a small, chipped head of a woman, apparently Roman by the hairstyle. Ari-nom-de-plume examined it meticulously with a magnifying glass and flashlight, and asked how much I wanted. I’m not selling, I replied. Sell it, he said. Come on, sell it. He snatched the head, I ran after him. He started hitting me, and I retaliated. In the end I realized that if I wanted to live I should submit with dignity. He took the head I’d found, and somebody in the kibbutz snitched, and Ari-nom-de-plume faced charges in the dining hall, but before the trial got under way the Palyam CO arrived and announced that as of this moment the course had ended.
There was a commotion. We packed up. We put all our stuff into kit bags we’d been issued, which had been stolen from a British army camp, and we had a hasty parade. The CO was red-faced with excitement and drew his pistol and fired a shot into the air. We sang the Palmach anthem and boarded trucks. Some were taken to Haifa to set up the navy, and the rest of us were driven to take Givat Olga. The British could be seen in their fast boats, and Arabs from some village were running toward the hill. We fired at them, I don’t know who and from where, some could be seen fleeing, there was a short battle, and I fired too, my hand hurt, and we entered Givat Olga. I don’t and didn’t have any idea what we were doing there. We found packages of sharp-tasting British cheddar cheese and British biscuits, and drilled. We went back to Sdot Yam to sail our boats again, and a guy called Hasid and his buddy Hacham taught us what a cunning enemy was waiting for us at sea. Perhaps we also ate some fish that Ari-nom-de-plume caught.