He got up, lit cigarettes for both us, and told me that the Primus pilots go to the exhibition grounds in north Tel Aviv, by the place we’d reached in the boat, not far from the Yarkon estuary. They get bombs for their planes from a Mr. Wilenchuk, and they beg for more but he hasn’t got enough. Ari-nom-de-plume said, I followed this Wilenchuk, a nice man who crossed the Yarkon and there, in a deserted Arab mud hut, I saw him supervising the manufacture of the bombs. I hid in the trees and yelled, Air raid! Air raid! And there really was a raid right then, as if God was working for bastards like me and not for Beethovens like you, and that raid wasn’t far away, in Hawaii Park, and a few guys got killed. Everybody in that little factory are workers, they’re not in the Haganah, ordinary people who come to work, and they threw themselves onto the bombs to protect them, not themselves, only the bombs. I sneaked inside and borrowed ten bombs that Wilenchuk was about to hand over to the pilots.
I drove to the woods on the Yarkon where I used to fuck a girl called Heshkovitz, and I went to the poor pilots who were crying out for bombs but there weren’t enough, and I said, I’ll sell you these at five hundred mils each, and they got excited and hugged me and bought the bombs and flew off in their comical Primuses, and I stashed the money in my hiding place in the Shapira neighborhood that’s not far from here. And now what? We’re off to war? I heard there’s a lot of money in the Arab villages. Gold. The Arabs hide gold in clay jaras. There’ll be no more Caesarea with that moron of an officer. Arabs don’t believe in banks. All their money and gold is in jaras with snakes, to scare off guys like me who aren’t scared of anything.
As Ari-nom-de-plume was speaking the question-mark-less woman came along and gave out postcards and pencils, and everyone was told to write a card to his family. She said you can write anything except where you’ve been and where you are now. Ten minutes later she collected the cards and with a marker pen censored words she thought were dangerous. She found a few words to censor in my card too. In the end it looked like this: Shalom Mom, Dad, and Mira,… We’re going … see the … We’ll meet again when … I miss you … Regards to Amikam … Yours, Yoram. That was the only card my parents received from me until I came home for that one day in the middle of the war, when the two guys were shot inside the armored vehicle and we took Abba Eban to Tel Aviv.
The next day we were crowded onto trucks. Ari-nom-de-plume bought the seat next to the driver for twenty grush*. The officer came along to sit in the cab because he was in command, but Ari-nom-de-plume said he was already sitting there, and the officer got mad, and we could hear their raised voices, and another officer standing there said that this is the Palmach and there aren’t any privileges, and the first officer said, But this shit bought the seat and that isn’t exactly the Palmach either, and the driver said, What’s the matter with you, I’m not in the Palmach, I’m from the Histadrut.
We drove along a dirt road, and were thrown from side to side and fell all over one another. One guy spat, the guy who caught the spit hit the spitter, others sang “She’ll be wearing no pajamas,” and at the end of the road, tired, looking like cadavers — except for Ari-nom-de-plume who got down from the cab as fresh as a daisy and as happy as a clam — we went into a kibbutz they said was Kibbutz Hulda. We lay down somehow, I don’t remember where, it was raining lightly, and we cleaned our weapons. We were given bread and sardines and tomatoes and heard firing. We realized that the guys who’d left before us were in a battle not far away. We were told to come, go figure where to today, there was a wood and a hill with maybe a gravestone on it and a cypress that stuck in my memory, such a beautiful, noble cypress, it swept sharply into the sky that seemed low because of the mist. We got up and ran to the hill, we lay on top of dead bodies there. We heard more firing. There was no officer with us. Ari-nom-de-plume took charge and yelled at us to move this way and that, and we saw hundreds of Arabs streaming toward us, running and shooting and shouting, and Ari-nom-de-plume said that our planning and theirs is piss-poor because nobody knows what to do.
Meanwhile the fighting on the hill continued and there were still no communications between the two battles, ours and the one on the hill, and food trucks to Jerusalem fell apart on the road and armored vehicles were hit. Shouts could be heard from one of them, the firing was intense, I didn’t know how bullets whistle, I didn’t have time to be frightened because it all looked like a film at the community center, and then the officer from the armored vehicle, whose men had all been wounded, yelled that he can’t carry on, the blood’s flowing, some have been killed and the others wounded, and he won’t be taken prisoner because of the ill-treatment. And “Shalom comrades, over and out,” and the vehicle with its wounded blew up and a column of smoke rose and there was silence.
The Arabs withdrew to regroup. Some of our fighters came from agricultural training groups and had brought musical instruments that fell amid the shells. I heard a flute playing itself in contrast with something that was perhaps a machine gun. Afterward we slept like logs. It was cold. We slept on the grass. Each man and his rifle with its swastika clutched to him. The food trucks stood in the shade of the trees. There was noise. We had no food. They gave out a little water. Some guys had brought stuff from home but the officers took everything not needed for the fighting and said that at six after the war they’d get it all back in Mugrabi Square by the phone box.
We were issued twenty-five rounds. Moshe Katz said that this is a historic day and I remember thinking that ever since I joined the Palmach I’d been hearing that this is a historic day. I tried to walk and stumbled, and I saw Arabs streaming toward us. Some of our fighters were moved to fire from the other side of the wood and we went back to the burned-out armored vehicle.
The dead soldiers inside it were laid out in a line on the ground. They looked like slabs of meat in a butcher shop. Then we buried them. Some twenty people were killed. There was a profound sadness in the air. Two days later we started over. The convoy of armored vehicles and trucks stood in the dark waiting for the order, and it all sounded like a big locomotive warming up its motors. The officer came along and said he’d heard from my companions on Course No. 9 that I could see in the dark. I told him that was right. He said, Right now you’re going to do something for the nation, and he put me in front of the convoy. We were ordered to start moving. I marched along the ruined road as behind me a big convoy of trucks and armored vehicles moved quietly, and I’m there to make sure there aren’t any wires stretching from one side of the road to the other that are connected to mines. I found a few and pointed at them and people came right away and detonated the mines.
You’ve got to be a perfect idiot, more than perfect, to walk through a minefield and believe it’s for the nation, which I’d never met personally. When we got to wherever we were going, the officer came up to me, I don’t remember who he was, apart from the fact that he was killed a short time afterward, and said I’d been fine and he gave me a round cigarette, which were the best. Usually when there were cigarettes we’d get seven round ones or twenty flat Latif. It was nice to smoke the round cigarette with its Virginia tobacco.