Later we reached the junction. Dawn “became manifest,” the way the teacher Blich liked it, and I got into one of the armored vehicles and we drove in a convoy toward Jerusalem. We came under fire on the way. We fired back. Perhaps I hadn’t yet digested that earlier on the road I’d been a dead man walking so that others would live. We reached the lower pumping station in Bab el-Wad and rested. There was more shooting. This time we ran up the hill and fired at a gang that left behind cigarettes, which we collected, and one of us was wounded. On one of the dead Arabs we found a map of Kiryat Anavim drawn with a pen. Somebody said, I didn’t know that Arabs knew how to draw. Yes, he was told, but in Arabic. What Arabic? he said. You speak Arabic, you don’t draw in it.
We went back down and the convoy continued on its way. I was put onto a food truck and was told that I was now an escort. I sat between two sacks of flour and there was shooting here and there but nothing special. We unloaded part of the load at Kiryat Anavim and carried on toward Jerusalem. The road was narrow and wretched. On the seven bends at Motza the truck groaned. The driver was killed by sniper fire from Qaluniyya and the truck began rocking from side to side. Somebody ran and jumped into the cab, stood on the brakes, lifted the dead driver onto our flour sacks, and was killed by a bullet. There was nobody who knew how to drive, and a guy who was with us on Course No. 9 said that Yoram drove stolen cars with Ari-nom-de-plume. I didn’t have time to explain that I’d never driven a car, that it was Ari-nom-de-plume, and I got into the cab. I remembered that you had to release the hand brake, I pressed down on the clutch, the truck groaned, I held on to the big steering wheel, the truck shivered because two of its tires had been blown out, and I drove on the wheel rims. We drove for an hour, maybe an hour and a half. I don’t know how. We were taking fire all the time, and a bullet smashed the left wing mirror so I couldn’t see what was behind me because the big mirror above the wheel was smashed too. At Qaluniyya by the seven bends I drove slowly. I’ve no idea how I knew how to drive. I had no contact with the guys in back because of the smashed mirrors but I knew they were firing and I heard a yelp from someone who’d apparently been hit. I suddenly realized that the so respectable and so gentle yelp had come from the beautiful daughter of Ernst, my father’s bosom friend, who I later visited in hospital in Jerusalem before I was wounded too and hospitalized. Ruth, that sweet blond girl I’d loved as a child, limped for the rest of her life.
We reached Jerusalem on a Saturday. We didn’t know what day it was. The city was starving. The people clapped for us. In the ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods they raised white flags and threw stones at us. I was angry. I went with Ari-nom-de-plume, who got down from the second truck, and we beat up a few of the stone throwers. They cursed us in Yiddish and shouted “Shabbess, Shabbess. No driving on the Sabbath!” Ari-nom-de-plume gave one of them a punch that flattened him against a wall and said, That’ll teach you what Shabbess is.
Twelve
Beit Yuba — an alternative name (and in the interest of good taste and the love I had for the man I’m going to tell you about, I’m changing his name too and I’ll call him N.). There was a vast gentleness in the village, which was set in an Eretz Yisrael landscape that no longer exists, on a hillside shaded by soft tamarisks and jujubes and thickly foliaged pines. It was a village that had witnessed bitter fighting that was now over. In our war there, after the wars of the Romans and the Crusaders who had faded away from our land, we had triumphed.
One of ours, whom I knew but whose name I don’t remember, was hanging from a tree, cut to ribbons and bound with ropes, his member stuck into his mouth. N. stood facing his mutilated comrade and his features contorted with rage. His wild hair stood on end, matted with dirt, his clothes torn, his feet in boots of different colors because they’d been taken from two different corpses — and he apparently cried out but we didn’t hear, and perhaps we’d already walked into the village and lay tired in the shade of a house under a fig tree, and were cleaning Stens and rifles, and searching for Arab records to take, and perhaps we heard the shouts but didn’t really care.
Earlier we’d climbed the hill shooting and singing. We sang “We are ascending and firing,” and a guy with a megaphone called to the Arabs to evacuate the village. The officers who’d sent us weren’t there. They were apparently sleeping at Pension Fefferman on the way to Ma’aleh HaHamisha, and perhaps they’d been listening to songs on the records we’d brought a few days earlier.
In the background Jerusalem broke through the mist that shrouded the whole mountain. In the big house next to which we sprawled we saw an old Arab sitting cross-legged on a torn blanket and covering his fly-infested body with his robes. In his eyes was a tiny smile, a kind of painful challenging disdain, or perhaps he felt betrayed by his splendidly dressed officers who had played the big hero but had already taken to their heels. He was evidently a man on his own trying to win a war with a disdainful smile. N. had yelled, We’ve got to kill everybody in the village, even the cats here are Arabs. Except for the bullet hole in the body that lay there, we didn’t see much.
N. drove off the crows that had gathered around the tree and looked for a while at the young man who’d been his close friend and was now hanging there with his dick in his mouth. He removed the young man’s boots, tried them on, and the Arab sitting cross-legged got up and started running. N. threw the boots at the crows, which had come fat and sated from a battle that had taken place not far from us, and from which we’d seen smoke rising and we realized that there, too, there were dead. The smell of the distant battle mingled with the smell of death here, and we fired at the fleeing Arab but missed. A crow hopped to our tree and one of the guys lying beneath the fig tree killed it.
I didn’t have a Sten but an American Thompson submachine gun I’d “borrowed” from a Jordanian soldier who’d been killed with a little help from me. We’d gone to blow up a house with five bags of TNT, and when it detonated the house collapsed in a graceful pirouette, the man was killed, and that’s where I found the weapon. I took it and asked what kind of ammunition you need for a Thompson and I was told we had it, and it became my personal weapon, and I gave my Sten to somebody else.
I went back to the yard and saw N. go into the house. He climbed in through a window and I suddenly saw somebody else, who looked as if he’d shrunk into himself. N. was incandescent with animosity, a terrible, almost divine hatred, it was impossible to see him through the loathing that clouded his face and moved over him, crawled on him, and cloaked even his arms and legs.
I stood outside the house by the window and was joined by a few of the guys, and we saw, in a shadowy corner, the body that the Arab had covered earlier, before he fled. Now, from some hiding place an Arab woman of about forty, maybe less, wearing a glittering Bedouin dress ran out. She was covered with black blood, the way blood is in real life, and she knelt the way Arab women know how to kneel, and intermittently wept and wailed half-swallowed words. N. stood silently, his mouth clamped shut, and his eyes were almost closed. He lowered his Sten and saw us standing by the window and smiled.
The Arab woman who knelt there he hated in a terrible silence because, he said, you can’t trust Arabs, even dead ones. Somebody yelled that dead Arabs come back with murder in their eyes, and the woman wept bitterly, and then into the big room came a withered old woman, her skin tattooed with blue lines and wrinkled from the sun. Her expression was one of wonderment. Her eyes were deeply sunken in their sockets. She blurted a few grating syllables and looked like a statue of a woman with a latticed face, scarred with blue lines. She looked out from her deep-sunken eyes with a questioning expression and grunted.