I left him and reached HQ. I think it was in the Schneller Compound. At the office door stood a toy soldier in a pressed uniform and I couldn’t even begin to imagine where it had come from. Because in Jerusalem there wasn’t yet a state and the Capital of Israel for All Eternity and a government, and these guys had already had uniforms made and even insignia on their shirt epaulets, and one of them saluted and I burst out laughing, and I was told that there’s a nice woman in Jerusalem who invented the rank stars. She lived in Nahlaot and had seen the rank insignia with the British when she used to sew shirts for their generals and mend their uniforms, and he told me that his commanding officer — the commander of Jerusalem whom I’d apparently come to see — had six stars sewed for him, just like the British who commanded the Jordanians.
I realized that this guy wasn’t a soldier like us but Shaltiel’s janitor. His uniform was pressed. Everyone there maintained distance from one another. Silence reigned and it was suffocating. I was taken in to Shaltiel who was dressed like a Mexican general complete with stars. Perhaps I’m confused and it was someone else on another occasion. Whoever he was, I laughed at the sight of him, and the Mexican general got to his feet and fixed me with an angry glare. I told him that where I’d come from there aren’t many live soldiers, and we hadn’t yet had uniforms made. Today I don’t remember either why I was there or my assignment, but that place, the room in the depths of the horror all around, the devastating arrogance of the moment, were puzzling. I evidently said something that offended the Mexican general and I was quickly shown out, after conveying a message whose content I don’t remember.
I walked to Talbieh, to the building that had housed the British military court and that had been evacuated several days earlier. Some of the guys came and collected me. We walked and sang with eyes closed from fatigue through the empty and sad and whipped and bleeding streets of Jerusalem. A small, funny, roly-poly elderly man who was transparent and sad, said in a German accent, Don’t sing because there’s shooting here, and if you sing they won’t be burying you in any Bab el-Wad but here, on Jaffa Road.
In the morning the cold hung over us and stung. There was a parade and we were divided into two groups. I was in the second one. We were allotted to homes for the Passover Seder. I waited until evening and set out for Beit Hama’alot. I poked around in the big military court building and found half a loaf of dry bread in the corner of one of the rooms; it apparently had belonged to a British soldier. I also found some mallow and vine leaves in a yard, and in a garden I found a flower dying for water, went on my way, and then climbed quite a lot of stairs to the family’s apartment, and all the time could hear shells falling. I reached the door and knocked — there was no electricity for a bell — the door was opened suspiciously and I gave the flower to a nice woman, who smiled, and I then gave her the dry bread, the mallow, and the leaves.
We were seated around the table. A nice yekke, German-origin, family. The man of the house told me that he knew Walter Katz, a good friend of my father’s who lived in Jerusalem. He also told me that he’d been a friend of theirs back in Munich, which he pronounced München. They were particularly pleased with the bread. The woman looked at it with unrestrained fondness and said, So what shall we do, close the windows tightly so as not let the Lord of Hosts peep in, and say that it’s matzo?
On the table was a plate with some sardines, one tired tomato, the bit of salad stuff I’d brought, and a cucumber their daughter had found in one of the yards. The flatware was beautiful. There was no water but there was a bottle of wine and a gramophone. It was playing a beautiful Brahms string sextet, which I found very touching amid the vortex of shame I was caught up in. I perhaps allowed myself to shed a tear and was amazed that I had any fluid in my eyes because I’d been drinking barely one cup of water a day. The thudding of the shells spoiled the music. Through the window I heard a prayer of yearning rising. I saw a bird on the window ledge and the husband said, A bird, it’s all right for a bird, it can also be in other places. The cold didn’t stop stinging. The wife asked how old I was and I said, Ten minutes to eighteen, and she laughed because perhaps she wanted to cry, and her husband said, You’re the youngest here, you’ll ask the four questions, and handed me a Haggadah*. There was hardly any light but I managed to read the questions because as I said earlier, I had excellent night vision. Just like at every Passover I laughed at what I thought was a meaningless riddle, and everybody sang the chorus, and a vast but restrained sorrow hung in the air, and we were lonely together facing an invisible and incomprehensible world behind shuttered windows.
The shells didn’t stop falling and endowed the tranquility enveloping us with a savage tom-tom-like leitmotiv. I thought, What are all these words of the Haggadah, what do they mean, perhaps they’re a code to fool the Romans. The loaf was passed from hand to hand and we each tore off a bit, and the husband blessed the bread and called it matzo, and said, God, don’t look. I heard a siren, people outside shouted, Be careful, God knows of what, a dog howled and the wife threw it a bit of her bread saying, Poor doggie.
I swallowed a rancid sardine but who noticed things like that, I drank some wine and thought what would happen if we had to go into battle and I’m here and didn’t know about it, but everything passed quietly. We sang Passover songs, they had Haggadahs from Germany with pages in which you could slide a piece of card and see Moses’s crib in the bulrushes. We sang what we remembered. They and I remembered the same tunes but not all the words.
Someone knocked on the door. A young man came in with the dog and moved from person to person kissing them, and he was apparently half blind because he kissed me too. From a satchel he carried he took a few biscuits and a bottle of water he’d picked up from a water seller on the way. The dog looked scared, its tail drooping, but a dim, wise hope flared in its eyes. The wife gave it half a biscuit and its tail pricked up and wagged and stroked us, it had hair as soft as cotton wool. A shell exploded not far away. The windows rattled but that did not stop our weeping. We sat and cried. We sang, “Who Knows One” with made-up mistakes; if God hadn’t died in Bergen-Belsen he’d have died on hearing the words. We sat reclining as it is written and wept on the rivers of Babylon in unbuilt Jerusalem. That was the most beautiful moment I experienced in that fucking war.
Fourteen
We lived in the barn at Kiryat Anavim for a while and afterward under the vast roof of the cowshed, which perhaps was empty but maybe not completely. I later lived in a big tent at the entrance to the kibbutz. Every now and then I’d find myself sitting in the dining hall opposite a jerk who kept a pack of Latif cigarettes in his shirt pocket. It opened from the top. Inside it he kept an Arab’s ear. Each time he was asked he said he’d harvested it in a different place. When he took the ear out in the dining hall to chew on it the way you chew gum, there were girls who fled and that way he got a bit more food. It wasn’t right for us not to reproach him but we were tired and hungry, and we went out to some battle every night, and we’d get one or two cups of water a day for drinking and washing, and there were some who even washed their clothes with one cup of water.
Once a truck with water arrived, I’ve no idea from where. We set up a field shower and it was crowded. The dirt that washed off people’s bodies looked like black stones and it moved like jelly. The smell was heavy. I tried to wash myself in the little water there was, and then we all stood naked looking for a sliver of soap, and because I can’t stand naked men or women near me, I hid inside myself. Even when I took a crap I didn’t go with everyone into a field but sat by myself and tried to hide, and the smell was pungent and hard. That’s the way it was.