N. was such a good storyteller, he was the shaman of an ancient tribe, and smart, and everybody laughed and called me Jamil, and to this day there are some who meet me in the street, and say, Ahlan ya, Jamil—Hey there Jamil, and they hug me.
Afterwards we carried on singing. Nobody from the platoon, including N., ever told which of us had killed the boy at Beit Yuba. And I didn’t want to remember. I asked those who came out alive what had happened and they said, Enough, Jamil, nothing happened, and it’s expressly written that “Thou shalt not kill an infant,” and if the patriarch Moses says so, why would anyone kill?
After the war that child became an icon for me. N. told me, That’s not the important thing, Yoram Kaniuk — that’s what he always called me. What is important is that there’s a state and we established it in blood, and yes, there were some difficult moments but we were as full of holes as Swiss cheese, and d’you know how they make Swiss cheese? They take holes and wrap them in cheese. And who were we? The living dead, we were the holes in bagels and the holes in cheese. A kid, not a kid, so what?
But I killed him, I said, and he replied, That’s not certain. So who killed the boy? The Prophet Elijah? He said, You’ve shed enough blood, you took a couple of bullets, enjoy being alive. After all, your poet Alterman wrote, “Do not say from dust I came / From the living who fell before you, you came.”
I have related this stark event dozens of times; I did not tell about the warm, mournful smell that was there. Or the smell of blood. Or the shame. Not about the sweetness of squashed figs. Not about the misty morning with its scent of jasmine. I have not told about how, immediately afterward, I shaved my head with an old razor blade that left furrows in my scalp, and not one of the guys said a word about my unsightly baldness. What they knew, they kept to themselves. And I, too, kept quiet.
Thirteen
Afterward there were more battles, there was no time to sleep. As I write these lines I am very old and my mind is empty. I am the hole in the bagel. I do not remember more than what I write here, and perhaps I have invented some of my memories with the passing of the years. I know I fought at Siris, Beit Makhsir, the Castel, Nabi Samwil, Qaluniyya, Mount Zion, Saint Simeon’s Monastery, and in other places, I’m sure I was there, inside my closed eyes I can see those battles, but I can’t see myself in them. Did I really see what I saw? And where was the “me” who is present today, with all those days that I locked away inside me? And could have I dreamed it all?
I recall how one morning we’d come back from someplace whose name I’ve forgotten, and a cold wind was blowing. We walked through Jerusalem. Jordanian shells that came from the hills to the south of the city were falling all the time. People today don’t know the extent of Jerusalem’s suffering back then. In Rehavia, two people standing in line for water, behind a cart harnessed to a whinnying horse, were killed. The water spilled onto the sidewalk from the tanks on the cart and the horse took fright and overturned the cart, and people tried to soak up the water from the sidewalk with their headscarves and squeeze it out into their mouths, and a child licked the paving stones. The windows of the houses were darkened. We walked by a house whose wall bore an advertisement for the dancer Rina Nikova, and it said that she would be appearing at the Zion Cinema and that the audience should bring candles.
I was then sent to the headquarters of David Shaltiel, the Haganah commander in Jerusalem. On the way, by Notre Dame, I was accosted by a fat monk. He looked at me with jovial Christian compassion and said, You speak Hebrew good, you are fighting losing war, only Jesus will reign in Jerusalem, and he gave me a book called Light and Happiness so I’d see the light. I laughed because who’s the kid who’d want to see lights from monks. Laughing wasn’t very nice of me, the man looked pitiful because his God had got stuck here in a Valley of the Shadow of Death that had nothing to do with Him. I quoted Heine to him, who’d written, “The defeated Judah wrought a terrible vengeance on Rome and set Christianity against it, and its imperial battle cry sank to the praying whimper of priests and the trilling of eunuchs,” or so my father used to say.
He listened and was silent, and then he said that thousands of Jews had already seen the light. He told me that a young Jewish soldier had by chance been present at a Christian ritual and had suddenly found God, seen the light, and he’d wept and asked to join the church, and he was baptized here in Notre Dame and received Communion, and the next day he was killed in battle, not of the church but yours, and he was found not far from the Mount of Olives with Jesus on his lips and a cross in his hand, and his story was told to his family and they accepted the cross and converted to Christianity. I smiled at this sweet, rotund man, this solitary man who on the way to Hell would convert people, and who somehow knew I wouldn’t be easy prey, but if you’ve got God on your side why not try anyway. The fact is that his attempt was only halfhearted. I told him that Heine left his estate to his wife on the condition that she remarried, for that way, he wrote, there would be at least one man who regretted his death. The fat monk smiled and said, Come if you want. The church is waiting. I again quoted my father, who quoted Rabbi Huna, who said that if a man commits a transgression punishable by death, what must he do to live? If he is taught to read one page, he will read two, and if he is taught to study one chapter he will study two, and if he is not taught to read and study, what must he do to live? He will become the leader of the congregation and collector of alms and he will live.
The monk said, It’s probably hard to fight, isn’t it? I told him that a few days earlier I’d seen the head of one of our people stuck on a pole, and with things like that it really isn’t easy fighting, God wasn’t around, neither yours nor ours. And I said that when the French king’s army attacked the Cathars the commander of the army told the king that he couldn’t destroy the city because there were Catholics in it too, and the king said, Kill them all and God will do the selection afterward. I told him I’d read that in one of the stranger-than-fiction books I loved to read. He seemed surprised.
Shells exploded nearby, shots could be heard, a woman shouted or cried, and the monk evidently felt apologetic for his God and said, He’s the same God, and I told him, Ours can’t bear a son. He looked at me sadly, perhaps with compassion, for that’s what Jesus wanted, and he flushed and said, that poor man stranded in the land of wars and hatred, Jesus spoke with the lame and the halt and the rejected that the superior Jews forbade to enter the temple, for that was his power.