I told a man dancing next to me that we’re fighting for him too, and he spat and said that we’re bringing down disaster upon them, and I thought about my father’s cousin who’d been killed at the Haifa refineries, about my grandfather who’d built a synagogue in Tel Aviv when he’d come from Tarnopol, a few months after my father had rescued him from the slaughter he knew was coming. He’d call me “Yoiram” and ask, Holekhsa kvar lebeis haknessess? (You’re going to the synagogue already?) After that I don’t remember a thing except for what I perhaps invented and didn’t actually happen, or perhaps did — but I do remember a little girl hiding in the stairwell and smiling at me, and my smiling back and thinking I’d like to hug her, but she disappeared.
Nineteen
At this point in what I’ve been writing over and over, there is — amid the heat and the noise and distress and wonderment — the problem of memory. What I’ve written so far could be condensed into a two-week period: Siris, Beit Makhsir, Deir Ayyoub, Nabi Samwil, the Old City, the Castel, and a few more places like Qaluniyya. But I’m writing about five months. I can see in my mind’s eye people falling like toys; an illogical movement of young bodies. They fall, and I can’t grasp when they died and began falling, or vice versa. In my mind’s ear I can hear the tangos on the records we took from the Arab villages, and see a column of Arab and Jordanian prisoners of war being led away by the Jerusalem force.
I remember two different things. Both are clear in the depths of my mind. One is apparently erroneous, but I’ve no idea what actually happened. I remember being shot at in the assault on Zion Gate. First we took Mount Zion. I fired the Davidka and wounded the monastery dome, and the scar remained there for many years. I’d go to Jerusalem and say to the people with me, See? It was me who hit that roof. Big deal! Big hero that I was. I hit a roof far more beautiful than I’d ever be.
The enemy fled and we had to wait until morning. I don’t know why we waited. Dawn broke and it began to get hot. We fell in and it seems to me that Dado said that this was a historic moment, after two thousand years we were returning to Temple Mount, the rock of our existence, the Old City, the City of David. We charged toward Zion Gate, and two bullets hit me, giving me a zipper in my leg, and I fell onto my back facing the city walls.
The pain was terrible and I couldn’t move. My comrades didn’t notice and went on running forward. Maybe there were two other wounded men with me but the sunlight blinded me. When I opened my eyes I saw on the wall a man wearing the red kaffiyeh of the Arab Legion aiming his rifle, or maybe a submachine gun, at me. The light became even clearer. I saw one eye fixed on me. The second was apparently looking at me through the sight of the weapon aimed at me. I was wearing my British sailor’s white shirt, and realized, I don’t know how, that the man was British, so he had to be an officer.
He didn’t shout. He didn’t say a word. We were about twenty meters apart and I knew that this was the end. He fired and missed my death, and now he was going to correct it. That’s what a soldier does. A soldier kills. I concentrated, or so I think, on the gaping maw of the muzzle. I remember it being far bigger than it could possibly be. I waited. That’s all I could do. Blood was still flowing from my leg. When a young man is awaiting death it’s not the same as when you’re old.
Almost sixty years later I awaited another death, which came but did not vanquish me, and I felt it was the end but I enjoyed the thought of not returning to my miserable life. But back then in the war, in my youth, I was still in diapers. I had only a future and there was no present apart from death. Then I didn’t know what endings were. I knew quotations from Shlonsky, Bialik, Spinoza, and Dostoyevsky, which I’d been taught by Tony Halle. Back then I didn’t understand what the death awaiting me in another moment was. I had a head filled with sawdust.
I knew I had only another moment or two to live and I remember, as if it’s happening right now, I remember my plea to the muzzle that it come already, a sort of expectation that it would be over and I would wait no longer, I remember my body longing that it be over. I saw my blood oozing and the wall gleaming in the bright sunlight, and I saw the colors playing on it, and the man’s eyes, and perhaps I wanted to shout to him, but I had no voice. I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t see the end, and I wasn’t afraid anymore. I’ve kept that fear with me throughout my life, whenever I awoke again and again over decades of bad dreams, sweating, and seeing the muzzle, and it’s not there.
I pressed my hands to my eyes, and truly, I didn’t have the time to wait, and perhaps I thought, perhaps, perhaps I didn’t think, perhaps I thought in advance, that I shouldn’t feel how the waiting bullet penetrates my skull, and how, for a few seconds, I’ll be alive on the way to my death, and then, I’ve absolutely no idea how much time passed, I opened my eyes and there was wonderment. There was no death. No fresh blood. The pain remained where it had been earlier. There was no barrel aimed at me, no kaffiyeh, the man had simply vanished.
That was the most incomprehensible moment I’ve ever experienced. What am I doing here? The pain I feel is me. I am the death that wandered from me to Bab el-Wad and the ground beneath me. The sun illuminated me, I fell illumined, and only years later would I know who that man was.
He contacted me when I was in Paris in 1950. He was indeed an Englishman in the service of His Majesty King Abdullah. He told me that at the time I seemed to him like an angel, because of the light and the white shirt. I was lying like Jesus with my arms spread. He saw the blood flowing from my wound and thought I was the crucified Christ. He told me on the phone, Perhaps I’d had too much to drink the night before, when you took Mount Zion. I looked at you and knew I’d aimed at you but I’d only hit you in the leg. I should have finished the job and killed you, you were facing me, lying there like a little white rug, but I couldn’t. I tried to kill you but I also saved you. I loved you and hated you. I thought you’d died and said, I’ve killed a boy by the gate, and was told they hadn’t seen a body and that the Jews had probably taken you away.
In the 1970s, I went to Los Angeles to work on a screenplay. When I reached the airport, the producer who’d sent me had left me a note on a rental car telling me to drive to the Intercontinental Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. The director I was to work with didn’t know exactly when I was due to arrive or to which hotel I’d been sent. I was supposed to call him in the morning. I got to the enormous hotel. The first five floors were for parking. As I waited to check in I changed my mind and said to myself, I haven’t come to Los Angeles to live in a concrete monster. Next to the hotel I saw a little motel like in the movies, pink and surrounded by palms, and I checked in there, was given a room, and I sat on the bed, tired from the flight, when suddenly the phone rang, I picked up, and the British officer was on the line.
He welcomed me to the city, and said that many years ago, in the room I was in, the daughter of film star Lana Turner, who’d been married only eight times, had killed her mother’s lover, one Johnny Stompanato, and was found to have acted in self-defense. It was strange being in that room, when down below in the pool were aspiring young actresses who’d come to Hollywood to be discovered.
The last time we spoke he was at death’s door, and wanted to tell me who he was but was unable to, and a woman, maybe his wife, shouted in a choked voice, Tell him already, but he didn’t, and I never heard from him again. May his memory be blessed.
But there’s another version. A man I met not long ago told me he remembered that we’d fought together on Mount Zion, and how we’d charged up the hill together. He recalled details about me that I couldn’t remember, and told me I’d been wounded just as the soldiers were listening to the commander’s speech and readying themselves for the assault on the Old City. He didn’t remember who the commander was, but in his dramatic address the officer said (and I’m sure it was Dado), After 1,800 years we are entering the Old City, passing through the wall, and reaching Temple Mount. He said I was lying in pain when we were fired on from the walls, and I wanted to rejoin the platoon but couldn’t move, and the guys lying there didn’t want to go on. He remembered that in the end Dado asked for volunteers, and there were a few, there was a bitter battle, they blew up Zion Gate, and the wounded were evacuated with me, said the man, who was the driver of the armored vehicle to the monastery or something, and a medic tried to bandage me but I wouldn’t let him, and the medic said, so this man told me, that I wanted to die because I hadn’t conquered the mount.