I remember being taken to the Italian monastery. I remember being laid down on a white sheet, the first one I’d seen in four months. An elderly, sad-eyed nun gave me half a glass of water, and they stanched the flow of blood and gave me an injection for the pain. I lay in bed and the ceiling was very high. Painted on it were pale angels. A nun ran to get me a dressing. I looked at the beautiful ceiling, after all that time it was so pleasant to be lying in a bed on a sheet, with a ceiling, a floor, the smell of antiseptic. There was an explosion and the ceiling fell in on us, and the nurses and nuns serving as nurses ran in and took us to the cellar. There were dozens of wounded there, some groaning, others weeping; there were some who’d evidently died during the move. I apparently had a high fever and I started to burn up.
In the cellar pain and stench reigned. The ceiling was circular. There was a bedpan next to each tattered mattress. On the wall facing me hung a painting of the Christ child and his mother. One of the nuns examined me and I was taken to another room that looked like an abattoir. Blood was flowing in there. The wounded were being cut. They screamed. They cried for their mothers. They moaned. Blood-spattered doctors were working frantically. One came over to me, told me his name, and said they’d found the first signs of gangrene in my leg and they’d have to amputate it. He added that they’d already amputated the legs of Uri and Margolin who’d been with me in the armored vehicle. Now it was my turn and there were no anesthetics. The soldiers were so tired that they accepted everything, just give us some water. Give us hope, just a little hope, which was in short supply for the men twisting in pain.
I lay there trembling with fear, I didn’t want to lose my leg. Today I’ve no idea how I managed to persuade someone to call a distant relative who was a doctor at Hadassah Hospital. They knew who he was and he came. He didn’t remember what I looked like but he liked my mother and told me she’s a wonderful, courageous woman, and then there was a vociferous argument, and in the meantime I saw them amputating a leg as the soldier screamed, and the blood that spurted from it sprayed me. My relative said that they didn’t have the penicillin that would halt the curse, as he called gangrene, and that for two days the Primus pilots had been trying to drop drugs, but the parachute drop had failed due to high winds.
Today I don’t know why they took pity on me, or perhaps they thought I was going to die anyway. They lay me on a narrow bed, bound me with restraints, and they brought in Eskimo, who was the brigade’s biggest bullyboy and who years later would be promoted to the rank of colonel for the use of force. Eskimo came in with another soldier who held a bottle, I was dazed with pain, and Eskimo, with a hand of iron, shoved the bottle containing some fiery liquid, which I afterward realized was cognac, into my mouth. He didn’t let me vomit it out, I swallowed half the bottle before I choked.
Eskimo started punching me. I could dimly see two doctors opening up my leg and extracting the one bullet still embedded in it. The second had exited. Eskimo carried on pummeling me, and I remember a big cloud in his eyes, that bastard, he hit me and hit me and I wasn’t there, I was flying. I woke up later and I think I vomited my heart out. I was taken into a side room and laid down, and they told me that my relative had come and gone and said he’d be back to see me, and that I should be strong and of good courage. For a whole day I lay there semiconscious. A doctor came in and said that one of the pilots had managed to drop a batch of penicillin.
I was taken back to the big room and every three hours was given a penicillin injection in my ass, which rapidly began to look like a sieve. I gradually began to feel things and sense my body, and the pain subsided a little. On the mattress next to me they lay a man without eyes and legs and who was punctured with shrapnel. Before me I saw a young man crumbling on a reddening mattress. He was crying. I’d never seen anybody without eyes cry. The boy was a human carcass, and all the time he mumbled “Shoot me, shoot me.”
There was sometimes another young man with him who they said was his brother, and he was wounded too, but lightly, and he said he’d shoot his brother if he didn’t get any better, and what kind of a life would he have anyway, and I felt close to the half-dead young man. Perhaps I was envious that he was so seriously wounded. I tried to touch him but couldn’t reach him with my hand. He felt me and turned his blinded eyes toward me and it seemed that I saw a smile in his blindness. I was told that he used to be called the King of Jerusalem.
My wounds started to heal. We heard the constant thud of exploding shells. We heard shouting all around. We hardly spoke to each other. We all lay there in a bubble of pain. We were given one glass of water a day. Some schmuck with a guitar came along. A dim-witted old man who sang an idiotic song about “Tomorrow at Seven I’ll Be Waiting, Elisheva,” and “War Is a Dream Soaked in Blood and Tears,” and then put down the guitar, and started telling jokes about an Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Jew in a whorehouse, and more like them. He carried on telling lead-balloon jokes and finally fell silent and glared at us. Angrily, he asked, Why can’t you at least clap, I’m doing this for free and just for you, but we couldn’t laugh and he yelled, Clap, you bastards, I’m going and I won’t be back. I told him that was great news, and he looked at me and said, Haven’t you got even a little pity for somebody who works so hard? I go from place to place, and it’s hard for me, seeing all this pain, and I want to make things a bit easier for you, why won’t you laugh for me or at least clap? Somebody at the far end of the room shouted, Mister, we’re not clapping for you because we haven’t got hands, and the King of Jerusalem gurgled “Shoot me, shoot me.” The comedian left sadly, although I have to say that one of the nuns laughed until she cried and one of the doctors said that he’s terribly funny. Afterward I was taken away and I found myself in the operating room. Anesthetics had arrived, my leg was opened up again, and I fell asleep and awoke on a mattress next to the King of Jerusalem, and once again time began to move slowly.
One night a few doctors came in together and looked at us. We pretended to be asleep, or maybe we were, and we woke up in the middle of a kind of tiny noise of something going on. We heard later that together they’d given the King of Jerusalem a lethal injection. His brother fired his pistol in the air and shouted in memory of the King and cried, and a nurse came along with an injection for me, and a day passed, maybe longer, and I found myself in an armored vehicle in the middle of a city locked in by shelling and devoid of human presence, being taken to Pension Bikel in the Beit Hakerem neighborhood.
It had probably been a pleasant place once upon a time, but with scores of wounded, nurses, overworked and stinking toilets, with no water and food fit for rats, it was something like a slaughterhouse but with soap. The place reeked of the delicate soaps of rest homes, remnants of that now-defunct institution. But what do you do with sweet-smelling soap without water? It was used to freshen the air in the toilets.