I think that afterward, or very soon beforehand, we went out on a few small operations that didn’t go down in history, and Ari-nom-de-plume sold the head and wanted to pay me, and I told him to leave me alone, and I think that for a few hours we took a semi-abandoned village at the mouth of Wadi Ara and left. At night I dreamed about girls but I didn’t know how you dream about naked girls because I’d never seen one.
The order came to move out, we packed our gear and were driven to Sarona. Sarona, which in my childhood was a verdant German Templar settlement, had become an army camp after the Germans were expelled by the British. Now the British had left for Australia and we liberated it for the Jewish people. In my childhood we’d bought butter and sour cream there. They made good wine and olive oil, and were magnificent in their knowledge, and some of them became Nazis. When we lived in Kiryat Meir, in what was then a wilderness, we held marches, and the Arabs of Sumeil village came dressed up as Germans. The British had just left. Their pungent odor still hung in the beautiful German houses. Ari-nom-de-plume found some what we called “candoms,” which today are called condoms. As soon as he was able, Ari-nom-de-plume sold them at a high price and told everybody they’re a bargain because they’re from England and aren’t like the condoms in Palestine which are sacred — that is, “holy.”
We were put into a beautiful old house built in the German style and then into a barn with a tiled roof, close to the ancient oil press. We sat in a hall with a beamed ceiling, and trucks began arriving with crates. The crates contained weapons and ammunition. They had arrived that morning on the Nora. They were Czech arms that had been manufactured for the Wermacht but after the war ended they lay in warehouses, and the Russians, who were the first to support the establishment of a Jewish state, ordered that they be shipped to Palestine. They were shipped illegally and we later realized that if the Nora hadn’t been dispatched we would have lost the war in Jerusalem. The ship carried some ten thousand rifles and lots of ammunition, a few machine guns, and a considerable quantity of submachine guns.
We sat in the barn disassembling the weapons. We cleaned off the grease with benzene. Our heads were bursting from the acrid smell and the cloud of benzene vapor that enveloped us. We went to get something to eat. A young man in a suit and tie appeared and said he’d been sent to us, and that his name is Yehoshua but he’s called Shimon for short, and it was said he’d sung tangos at the Bat Galim casino, where he’d found a girl and said he wanted to screw her, but in the middle she said that she had to marry him, and he was flying high and went off and married her because every fuck has got to be followed by a wedding, and she gave him a son. I was with him one day and listened to him crying over his marriage, and I found an old tattered doll that had apparently belonged to a German girl, and it had gleaming yellow eyes. I was suddenly sad for the Germans who had lived here for so many years, for the Arabs of Sumeil who held Nazi parades with their German masters in Kiryat Meir, who had all been expelled, and I felt a kind of bitter choking sensation before I fell asleep.
We cleaned weapons for three days. So as not to fall asleep we sang “She’ll be wearing no pajamas when she comes, she’ll be wearing no pajamas when she comes” and “She’s got a screw-on leg and her head’s about to fall / And at night she hangs her head right there up on the wall.” And “For centuries we ate pita and drank from finjans / Till the arrival of the Ben-Gurions and the Shertoks and the Weizmanns / And they said that Palestine was theirs alone / And we should start walking to Arabia on our own.”
We calibrated the weapons according to the orders of someone they said was an officer and looked like a youth a bit older than me, and took them outside. It was a rainy day, from the citrus groves came a pleasing fragrance, and in the rain we heard the faint sound of weeping, and some princess in short pants walked by and said, So, you’re the great fighters, who are you to be fighters, who do you think you are, and we didn’t know what she was saying because she didn’t use question marks or exclamation marks. In those days question marks were a sign of intelligence. The newspaper headlines didn’t provide news but asked questions, “Will War Break Out?” “Will America Support Us?” And she said, You’re all your mothers’ sweeties, a terrible war is starting, and you’re not prepared, and so — and this is an order — you’re going to the blue building by the lemon trees and each of you will be issued a rifle, an ammunition pouch, and you don’t play around with your weapons, and you’ll go to sleep like mama’s boys, and you’ll be shipped out the day after tomorrow.
In the morning I noticed that Ari-nom-de-plume had disappeared. I’d already learned not to ask about what he was up to. I got up to go to an old building where somebody from the course was making omelets and brewing coffee, I think he was from the senior intake at Sdot Yam, the one from which not one member would be alive a couple of months later, including that one of blessed memory, whose name was perhaps Naftuli. In my coat pocket I found a note, “Don’t Worry. Don’t ask. I’ll be back. Not a word about me, Ari.”
We got together in the evening, and a new guy appeared who said he’s our battalion commander, and it’s the Fourth Battalion, and we are part of it because the Palyam has been part of this battalion for a long time, and it’s a renowned battalion. I didn’t know what it was renowned for. The guy spoke about war and attrition and killing and retaliation and the purity of arms and how he’d castrated an Arab by the River Jordan, and young people who’d already been killed on the road to Jerusalem, and that is where — and this is how he said it — we are bound.
I couldn’t sleep that night. Ari-nom-de-plume hadn’t come back to protect me. I was a kid. Suddenly I was disassembling rifles and counting bullets and cleaning mirrors and muzzles, and I missed my bed at home, which was a fifteen-minute walk from Sarona. I looked out the window at the lights of Tel Aviv and Ari-nom-de-plume suddenly materialized out of nowhere. It was the teacher Blich who’d taught me maftzia, the high-register Hebrew for “materialized.” He gave me a “satisfactory” in composition, and my mother, who taught at the same school, told me to embellish a bit, and I learned words from the dictionary. With the maftzia he gave me a “very good.” And Ari-nom-de-plume maftzia and says, Yalla, I’m here. I was glad, because he’d interpret those moments for me when I didn’t know who I am and what I’m doing in this grown-up place where they talk about shooting and death and warfare.
We went together to an empty green building where we were to meet before our departure. There was British army office furniture in it. Ari-nom-de-plume took a wad of bills from his pocket and said, I’ve made some money. I asked him how. He said, It’s for both of us. I said, Ari, I’ve told you a thousand times, don’t make money for me. Make it for yourself. He laughed and then turned serious and almost whispering he said, You’re spoiled. You’ve been given everything. Your father with his Beethoven and the museum and all the records and you with your Shlonsky and Tchernichovsky and all that, and your teacher mother, afternoon coffee, I grew up in the gutter, and I know how to sniff things out, and I laugh at someone like you, but you know, when I first met you I hated you because you were a goody-goody from Tel Aviv but I won’t forget you in the boat that capsized, with your Youth Encyclopedia, and how frightened you were but brave as well. It hurt you to see the Arabs fleeing from Caesarea. Look, listen to me, nothing will come of you. You’re not hungry enough to live in this world. I used to drive down Allenby Street at night in my father’s cart and he’d steal piping from the new houses that were going up, and I stole bottles of eau de cologne from locked shops and sold them to the whores at Bereleh’s on Chelouche Street, and you, what have you done? Beethoven.