That evening an operation was cancelled and the whole battalion was called to the cowshed basement. That’s where, every now and again, we’d hear greetings from home on a battery-powered radio. We all sat quietly. Dado, David Elazar, who was the best-loved of all the commanders, ordered us to keep quiet. The radio broadcast all kinds of greetings, we were all tense, and then the announcer said: “For Yoram Kaniuk, somewhere in Eretz Yisrael. On your eighteenth birthday your parents send their congratulations and would like us to play the record you loved as a child.” And then, in the deepest silence imaginable, they were forced to listen once more to my little fugue.
That was perhaps the best thing that has ever happened to me on any birthday. It was a sweet revenge. An embrace from my parents and sister.
Fifteen
The battle at Nabi Samwil was one of the bitterest and one of the stupidest in the War of Independence. I was not part of the assault on the hill overlooking the road to Jerusalem — we were sent in four armored vehicles with a Davidka mortar, which sometimes fired too, as a diversion from the rear. We drove in the direction of Beit Iksa, close to the British radar station, on an operation we didn’t exactly know much about. Everything I write now is not completely clear to me. I’d forgotten the battle. For more than thirty years it lay quenched inside me.
One day, thirty years after, I drove in my poor old Simca 1000 to the Sidna Ali beach and gazed at the water and it was beautiful and calm, and below I saw youngsters swimming naked and laughing aloud, and a woman shouted in a foreign language and looked like a dolphin, perhaps she was a volunteer from Finland, and from the water a memory surfaced, as good as new, which had been hidden away inside me and had refused to come out. I looked at it the way you watch a film. I drove home and wrote what I’d remembered. But what I wrote is not necessarily what happened.
I remembered that our commander kept the operation order to himself. I was in the vehicle with the Davidka, which when we fired it made more noise than it caused damage, but it was all we had. On the way we were ambushed. Mines overturned three of the vehicles. We extricated ourselves and took the Davidka and its huge shells. The fourth vehicle wasn’t hit. Gavrush, the driver of the fourth vehicle’s commander and the Harel Brigade’s greatest exponent of the art of driving, managed to turn the vehicle around. We were already under fire and there were wounded. The officer who was in the vehicle said he was going back to Ma’aleh HaHamisha to get help. We told him that there was nobody there who could come because they were all taking part in the big attack with Puza, who we didn’t know had already been killed, and we pleaded with him not to go, but if he was going and leaving us then at least he should tell us what we were supposed to do and take some of the wounded with him. He looked stressed and angry and said that he’s in a hurry to call help, which he would of course find, and can’t stop now and he’ll soon be back with reinforcements. I’m still waiting for him to come back.
We remained in the open under heavy fire. We didn’t know what to do. Did we really take off our shirts to bandage the wounded? Did we really run out of shirts? Were there really crows in the sky dancing like God’s clowns, little bastards that looked like toy Hasidim or converted penguins, lacking the magnificence of an eagle or the vulture that settled deep in the sky and regarded us with contempt, us, the not yet dead. The living were of no interest to it, it swooped down onto a corpse but not onto the wounded.
The crows put on a show, perhaps to entertain the vulture, but it scorned them too, and we’d run out of ammunition and fired the Davidka and the shell fell into the no-man’s-land between us and the enemy and didn’t explode. Where was I exactly? I once asked Uri Bogin, a true hero who died a long time ago and was born in Kfar Malal, and he said we were lying behind terraces. I asked him if he remembered us playing dead and he said he didn’t. He was a strong man. A farmer. The scene I had in my mind wasn’t in his. He was older than me. I asked him if the Arabs didn’t dare to touch the Davidka shell because we used to scratch all kinds of dials on the huge shells, and we’d heard them talking on the radio about an atomic bomb and they waited for the Jordanians to blow it up.
Uri said perhaps that was true but he doesn’t remember exactly if there’d actually been a Davidka shell there. I remembered that there’d been nowhere to run to. The sky above us was vast, spread out, and ugly with all the glints of the screaming crows, and I remember that we played dead because the enemy was above us and could see us, they saw each and every one of us precisely, and we were all lying by ourselves and trying to find cover. I remember that next to me was the friend of my youth, Menachem, who went to school with me, and my mother was his teacher, and I’m not at all sure that he liked me particularly, perhaps because I was a year younger and the son of his teacher and the museum director, but I liked him and we lay there close to each other. Uri said he thinks that Menachem was farther away and that somebody else was lying next to me, and he said I was exposed and didn’t have the sense to find cover and that’s why I think I played dead. The terror in that place was indeed great.
I remember that we were afraid to move; we realized that they could see the whites of our eyes so we shut them. We heard them laughing. That was the decisive moment in the history of the Davidka, which by not exploding had done its job and saved us from slaughter.
Through my closed eyes I saw them brewing coffee over a fire, the wind carried the smoke toward us, and there was much gaiety there. They were in no hurry, and sang, and got bored and fired at us even though they thought we were dead, and they shouted in Hebrew because maybe they thought that dead Jews understood Hebrew. They shouted, “We’re killing the dead yahud,” and it sounded like a poem, “We’re Killing Dead Jews,” and all the time the sham dead were being wounded and so were the already wounded, and we couldn’t move. I felt something warm oozing onto my right hand, and through the slits of my eyes I saw the vulture gliding like some god over Menachem. I realized that what I’d felt oozing onto my hand was Menachem’s blood. It oozed slowly, I didn’t hear a sound. Perhaps Uri’s right and Menachem bled someplace else, but for me he died next to me. And the crows danced to entertain the vulture and the sun was mantled in a shroud of mist, and I wanted to shout but I had no voice. I heard they said that Menachem had blown himself up with a grenade. If that’s the case then it wasn’t Menachem who died beside me, but the dead don’t care about being mixed up.
After about three, maybe four hours, I straightened up. Something horrifying made me dare, as if I’d decided to commit suicide, I couldn’t carry on getting shot at every few minutes — we could hear the bullets exiting the rifle muzzles and we heard the whistle of the shots and we waited for death and didn’t die, those who weren’t dead, that is. I knew that in the end one of those bullets would hit me. Through my shut eyes I saw the rifle muzzles of the people firing at us by the campfire, and without asking anyone we suddenly became three who stood up, and separately but together we started running up the hill toward Ma’aleh HaHamisha.
At first the enemy didn’t grasp what was happening. When they did they started shooting again. They fired like maniacs but apparently because of the surprise their aim was off and we managed to reach a coppice and were swallowed up among the trees. Feeling helpless, half dead, tired, thirsty, and hungry we reached headquarters at Pension Fefferman. There was nobody there except for a frightened nurse who looked at us like we were shadows. She’d apparently seen the battle from the hill and perhaps she was frightened because we looked like dead men. She bandaged us and perhaps even gave us some clothing, my memory has been erased here, and we took off to find the commander who’d fled. One of us, whose name I think was Mizrachi, ran to find him and kill him, but he was told that he’d been flown in a Primus to the fighting in the Negev.