Most of the time we were taken outside, and those who were able crawled on the lawn. The thunder of shellfire could be heard here too. There was a haze of smoke. We were secondhand, but in bad condition. Not worth a lot. We could no longer be fighters. The nation didn’t need half-dead wounded on its head back then. What we wanted was a fresh tomato, a watermelon, not dry leaves and bread crusts and an emaciated, smelly cucumber. We lay on lawns that had yellowed and that pricked us because they hadn’t been watered for weeks, though it was nice to lie in a cloud of early-morning dew. The sun came out later and dried the nettles but the birds no longer came, they scorned and detested us for not being able to feed them. Not one officer, soldier, mayor, or Palmach functionary came to visit us. About a hundred of us were separated not only from our homes but also from our comrades, who were still fighting.
It’s hard for me to recall exactly what we did there. I only remember the harsh and bitter grief that penetrated my very bones. I was in a cast. I needed help to get out to the lawn, and there was nobody to offer it, everybody was wounded, and in any other place and at any other time they would have been hospitalized. The Pension Bikel staff did all they could to make our time as pleasant as possible at that temporary hospital, which was a little temple without a god and without drugs, except for the penicillin injections every three hours.
From the nurses we heard about the cease-fire that had broken out. The shelling suddenly stopped. We saw soldiers smoking in the street outside the pension. Excessively dressed-up people could be seen walking scrawny, yapping dogs, all the time looking up to make sure that all was still quiet. Slowly we were returned to our cities, villages, and kibbutzim. An ambulance came to take me and five other wounded. We were given a little of the water that had begun to reach the city, the nurses checked our dressings, and off we went. We were told we’d be taking the Burma Road* that had recently been opened.
The ambulance jounced. The route was confusing and bumpy. I banged my head on the roof each time the vehicle bounced. We drove for six hours, and my watch now stopped too, and time drew out into an eternity. It was hot in the ambulance. There were no nurses with us and we were strapped in. We passed rocks that seemed as if they’d just been blown up. The landscape seemed mutilated. We sang “Yama yama yama shorba,” and “Samara hop hop hop,” and “Get being last right out of your mind,” and mainly “Gentlemen, history repeats itself,” and “On June sixteenth nineteen forty-four,” and we came to a stop and were taken out.
We lay in the sun on stretchers from the ambulance. Facing us was a deep, wide wadi, and there were jeeps carrying wounded from one end to the other. We waited our turn. Three of us were loaded onto a jeep that traversed the wadi, jouncing in a way that made what we’d already experienced feel like driving on cotton wool. Waiting at the other end were more ambulances and armored vehicles, we were loaded onto them and reached Sarafand.
We were taken into a big room with tables loaded with salads, fruit, hard-boiled eggs, jugs of water, fruit juices, cold coffee, rolls, and cigarettes. Who’d seen stuff like this over the last few months? How did we know what we were actually seeing? We looked at the bounty before us and our gastric juices churned, but we didn’t move. There was a kind of collective moan that simultaneously came from the bellies of some two hundred men.
Around the table we saw some women we didn’t know, who ran around and called to us to eat right away and drink already, but we couldn’t. We were stunned. We slowly approached the tables and started to move our lips and laughed, we gave an appalling, terrible laugh and began gulping air, and after a few gulps and rumbles from my stomach that rose into my mouth, we began eating and drinking. Our bellies swelled but we didn’t stop. I remember chewing a fresh cucumber in one corner of my mouth and a slice of fresh caraway bread in the other, and I do remember that it was caraway. We stood there stuffing ourselves until we began to drop. We started to convulse. The women took fright and ran to call the doctors and nurses, and they ducked our heads into the baths there so we could throw up, and we vomited up our guts, and tried to sing, and we were hurting, sated, and ashamed, and I’ve no idea how it all ended.
Later, I was transferred to the Donolo Hospital in Jaffa, where I was examined, had my cast changed, was injected and cleaned up. With a nurse supporting me lest I fall, I was put into a shower stall, and that was the first shower I’d had since the one in the yard at Kiryat Anavim, and I let myself take off. I was soaped, my wild hair was cut, I was shaved, and a few days later, once my stomach stopped troubling me, I was put into an ambulance and taken to my parents’ home. I got there in the morning. In the street the rumor had spread that I was coming home. People stood on their balconies and showered me with sweets and flowers, but my parents and sister weren’t there. My mother was teaching at her school and my father was at the museum. They all surrounded me in incredulity, but not one of them remembered that my parents weren’t there. Once the first wave of enthusiasm subsided, they all went about their business. I slowly climbed to the third floor and waited. My sister, Mira, came home from school and very excitedly let me in, as my parents, who had apparently been told, came running. The boy had come home from the war.
Twenty
After a few days at home I was taken back to Donolo Hospital on the Jaffa seashore. In only a few weeks the cast had been taken off and I was practicing walking. I doggedly wanted to get back to the fighting that was about to start up again after the cease-fire. Gavrush came to see me and asked how I was doing. Making progress, I said. He said, I hear you want to come back. Yes, I replied. He asked me to join some fighters from the Harel Brigade who hadn’t been killed, and said we had to report to the town of Ramla to set up the brigade’s commando unit. He said I should report to the Opera building where they’d set up the navy headquarters, and we’d take their jeep and drive to Ramla.
I broke out of the hospital that night. I met two guys who were waiting for me, we reached the headquarters, which had two sentries at the gate. We told them we’d come for their jeep because we needed it in Jerusalem. They didn’t understand Hebrew and there was a hullabaloo. We overpowered those newly enlisted young lads and drove to Ramla in the jeep.
Ramla was empty and encircled by barbed wire. In their haste the Arab residents, who had fled or been driven out, had left behind smells, clothing, furniture. Their absence took the form of a massive presence. Ramla, capital of the sand dunes, Ramla, the vibrant town whose houses were so imposing, whose streets were so wide, whose thickly — foliaged acacias and sycamores were planted along its lovely avenues. But it was empty. Ramla, gleaming in the burning summer noonday sun, looked as if a tornado had passed through it, leaving only the houses. The town was separated from the other parts of the country. It was encircled by concertinas of barbed wire. It was guarded by soldiers, most of whom were new immigrants who didn’t speak Hebrew. Stray donkeys brayed in the deserted streets. A camel ruminated pensively as if it couldn’t understand where its owner had gone among the date palms and hedges of prickly pear and the smell of charred food. Inside the houses we saw tables laid for a meal; food congealing on plates. Scrawny, hungry dogs nosed impatiently through piles of garbage, their barks resounding in the echo of the void.