Early the next morning, at four or five, Benny Marshak loomed out of the mist, and we noticed that he looked like he’d shed two thousand years plus a few days. Suddenly he was young, dauntless, and laughing, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills, and singing, and for a moment I thought that even his odor of ancient sweat had dissipated. But he carried on, not even noticing the sliced boy on the ground covered with greatcoats. He stood to attention and stood at ease, his hair tangled, and he tried to sing “Hatikva” and what came out was the hoarseness of an Eretz Yisrael generation which thought that the louder you shout the righter you are. Standing steadfastly, planted in the soil, barely moving, he began dancing a clumsy, heavy-footed hora they’d brought with them from the Diaspora, a hora of Hasidim, and he danced in threadbare khaki pants with a Parabellum-Pistole strapped to his waist, because back then you only trusted God with a gun in your hand, and it was a hora of one man multiplied by two thousand years plus a few days, and he leapt and swayed and yelled, “God will build Galilee / God will build Galilee”; and we told him, We’re in Jerusalem, and one of us, still asleep, suddenly began declaiming the poem: “Man was born to die / The horse was born to foal / If you’ve climbed a pole / Then you’re bound to fall.” And Benny Marshak yells, Insolent rascals, what are you thinking of? This is a historic moment! The most historic moment in two thousand years! And then he suddenly starts crying and we get up and join him. I don’t want to, I’m tired, but Benny is begging and grabs me with a hand that’s strong from forty years in the kibbutz, and in the middle of nowhere, at four or five in the morning, in the asshole of the world, next to a body that had begun to stink, on a pissant hilltop, amid the firing, a few young idiots are dancing and yelling “God will build Galilee” in Jerusalem that had never seen Galilee, yelling “A Jewish state, a Jewish state,” and as we dance I start trembling, my eyes close, I stick matches between my eyebrows and cheeks but fall asleep as I dance, and Benny runs off to tell some other guys. Afterward we carried the sliced guy to Kiryat Anavim*, handed him over to the kibbutz oldsters who were in charge of burials, and slept a while. When we were awakened we were sent off to fight another battle and again we forgot why, and that was the funniest thing that happened to me in that war, that I established a state while asleep and dancing the hora next to an unknown comrade who’d been sliced into two.
Two
A few nights later we were marching through the hills singing “We’re walking like dead men,” which as far as I know wasn’t written by our national poet Chaim Nachman Bialik, and we sang, “When all the girls are bottles / The boys will be the stoppers / We’ll screw and screw and screw” which was not written by Tschernichovsky. And Jerusalem is empty, shells are falling on the Eternal City, its residents hiding in the stone buildings, hungry and thirsty. And booms all the time, and people are being killed in the street and the houses and the schools and in the middle of the songs. After some godforsaken battle that took place and I don’t remember where, I heard that five of the seven boys who’d danced with Benny Marshak and me at the absurd celebration on the hilltop had been killed, and that the two who hadn’t been killed had been transferred to another company. So of the whole gang that had fought together since the battle at Hulda, I was the only one left. I sat on the grass in Kiryat Anavim with my bundle beside me and waited. I wanted water but there wasn’t any. Somebody, who would be killed a day later, came along and asked where the guys were, and I told him that five were dead and two had been transferred to Dado’s company, and he said, Join our armored vehicle, you’re on your own and we’ve got a job for you.
I remember that we had to get Major Even, who was Abba Eban — and perhaps it was even someone else — back to Tel Aviv. And Jerusalem was cut off. Abu Hajar, as Ezer Weizmann was to call him later, who spoke with a soft British accent, looked at us admiringly and it seemed that he trusted us, which I wouldn’t have done in his shoes. After a night of jouncing on a winding drive along back roads and wadis*, behind enemy lines and almost inside them — after being shot at because we couldn’t be clearly identified, and after we fired back here and there not knowing exactly at whom, and we were told that one of us had killed a donkey but apart from me nobody was sorry for the poor Arab beast — we reached Tel Aviv in the early morning. We went into town and the air-raid siren sounded. Egyptian planes were bombing the city and people were scurrying for the shelters. We got down from the armored vehicle by the central bus station, from a distance we saw people wounded and ran to help them, and then more bombs fell and we saw the German aircraft in the sky, flying slowly and making a terrible racket, but we were tired, and there were already a lot of people who had come to treat the wounded, so we stretched while standing and loosened up because we’d been sitting for eight hours, crowded into that fucking armored vehicle, and Abba Eban went into the nearest shelter and more booms were heard and I walked to my parents’ home.
The streets were empty and it was quiet, except for sporadic antiaircraft fire, and I saw old people of my father’s generation wearing black berets with the Civil Guard insignia on them. I heard their whistles and their cries of Kindly switch that light off, even though it was already morning and it wasn’t dark anyway, but the oldsters were confused and tired and carried gas masks slung over their shoulders and shouted, Kindly go down to the shelters, kindly switch that light off, and who says “kindly” today? That ancient verbal beauty had remained in Berlin, which was only renting a place in Tel Aviv at the time.
I looked at the houses that were so deeply planted in the streets I knew and in which I’d grown up. I envied the people unseen in the street, who perhaps I’d dreamed about as if through opaque glass. I thought of my father who, when the Italians bombed Tel Aviv in the big war, would not go down into the shelter because according to the statistics, he explained, the odds against a person being hit in Tel Aviv were five million to one. So he sat in his room on the fourth floor facing the sea and the jackals that wandered by the Muslim cemetery at night, and read Jean-Paul or Heine, until one day he went down into the shelter. Everyone was surprised and asked him, Moshe, what about your statistics? He replied that he’d heard on the BBC that in Moscow there was a zoo in which only one elephant remained, and in an air raid the day before yesterday the elephant had been killed.
Before I reached our apartment at 129 Ben-Yehuda Street, some bombs fell not far away, in Arlosoroff Street, I think. On entering the building I saw the neighbors wrapped in blankets in the lobby that had been turned into a shelter with a wall of white bricks to protect them from shrapnel, and they apparently said hello and apparently were surprised to see me because they knew I was away. I nodded, I didn’t have the words, and I climbed the stairs and went into the apartment. My mother ran after me. She later told me that I’d come in and didn’t say hello and didn’t say a word and hurried into my sister, Mira’s, room, who was seven at the time, and I slammed the door behind me and didn’t come out for a long time. I didn’t eat. I didn’t drink. For hours and hours I drew with colored crayons I found in my desk drawer. I apparently moved the desk and stood on it to draw on the ceiling. I drew monstrous drawings: I drew a vulture, I drew an eagle with a human eye in its beak, I drew Holocaust survivors who were already to be seen on the streets, I drew roofs, especially one from which I apparently thought I wanted to jump. I didn’t let anybody in. After the war, when I saw the drawings again, I cleaned them off with detergent.