Twenty-one
One evening in Ramla, while we were waiting for something that nobody knew about, an officer came along and told us that we were going to be the spearhead of a new unit to be called the Palmach Tenth Battalion. He said we’d be leaving for Abu Ghosh in the morning. Since we’d come into possession of a few more jeeps, which we’d lifted from other units, we drove in a convoy up the Burma Road to Abu Ghosh. With us was a column of trucks taking food into Jerusalem. Some of us climbed onto the moving trucks and handed down eggs and bread and pickled herring and I don’t remember what else, and drove into the big village. The houses were abandoned but they emitted a different smell than that in Ramla, the smell of betrayal. The smell of a village that should have remained because its inhabitants were the only ones in the area who had helped the Jews.
We hid the jeeps in the olive trees and settled ourselves into a few empty houses. More soldiers I didn’t know arrived, refugees from other units that had been almost destroyed. There was one guy in a yarmulke who read the festival prayer book. He went off to look for something to eat and I leafed through it. When I was young I’d read it every so often, and I came to the line “The hill of our roots, rejected yet by the builders.” It stuck in my mind. I didn’t understand it but it embraced me from a hidden place. The guy also had a Bible, and as I leafed through it I came to Ezekiel, and read “In thy blood, live; yea. I said unto thee: In thy blood, live,” and I felt a kind of great sadness. For myself. For us. For the Tenth Battalion, some of whose men would soon die.
Somebody once said that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. The days in Abu Ghosh were empty with fullness. Benny Marshak brought a quartet to play for the men. He sent one violinist to another battalion, a second violinist and a cellist to another one. I told him that a quartet is an instrumental ensemble that plays together as a single entity, but he said he hadn’t got time for the wonders of music and that a recital isn’t the Pentateuch. He also found records of Beethoven’s Fifth, six records in all, and he sent two to here, two there, and the rest to another platoon.
We sat and waited. The shock of the nothingness was great. The waiting was difficult. Why had we expelled the villagers? Finally an officer came along and said that Ben-Gurion’s aide had demanded the return of the residents of Abu Ghosh, and that a callous act had been perpetrated against them, and the Arabs started to come back and we dispersed. I was sent to an NCO course at Ju’ara, where I fainted and they discovered that my leg was still in bad condition and I was sent home.
The first thing I did on my return home was what we’d talked about a lot during the war. I went to Mugrabi Square and stood by the phone box we’d joked about, saying that after the fighting all the survivors could gather inside it, and a few more of us actually appeared and we all crowded into the small booth.
Then began a confused, terrible, and amusing period. I underwent a series of treatments at the clinic, I listened to music and hobbled around the city looking for friends, most of whom had died. There was a birthday party for one of them and I got up onto a table and delivered a ghastly, hideous, and aggressive speech against everything, I was what was called swimming against the current, and when I’d finished I found myself standing on my own, everybody had vanished, the birthday boy had gone inside, and I wept.
A few days later in Herzl Street, I was stopped by a man who said he was a military policeman — something I’d never heard of — and another guy came by, and since neither of us had an army ID, he arrested us. By chance, a police officer came along and witnessed the arrest, our laughter, and the military policeman who looked like a cartoon soldier, and remembered us from the war. He released us, and advised us to go to Allenby Street near Herbert Samuel Square, where there was an office dealing with soldiers who’d left the army outside of their own accord.
It was crowded. Everybody was looking for their own files, which were torn and falling to pieces. I found mine right away. When it was my turn, a recently enlisted young guy looked at the papers and said, I’ve got to reenlist you. I said, Into which army? The Israel Defense Forces, he replied. Is that our army? I inquired. Yes, he said. Well, I said, it’s time I swore allegiance to the State of Israel. At the conclusion of the swearing in, he discharged me from the Israel Defense Forces and I was given a certificate to that effect, and I realized that I’d enlisted and been discharged in the same half hour, and I liked it.
I told the guy that it was quite nice being discharged from an army I hadn’t served in, and that I’d served in the one we’d had previously. He stood up, and in the middle of that big room crowded with soldiers and youngsters who’d been caught without documents, saluted me. It was ridiculous but touching. I tried to return his salute but didn’t know how. He gave me a six-pound payment, and I attested that I, the undersigned, had been discharged and received payment for six months of service, and I went back to Mugrabi Square. I went to the hot-dog seller, who recognized me, and had to tell him that Goethe was greater than Shakespeare, and after all those years he varied his response and said, And Schiller too. I said that in any event I trusted his judgment.
I walked to Café Piltz where I met friends, we drank Spitfires, and they sang the idiotic song that was a big hit at the time, “In the Negev Desert,” as someone played the accordion and I got drunk. It was the first time I’d drunk brandy — and not washed in it — except for the time I’d lain under the iron hands of Eskimo, the colonel for the use of force, when he’d tried to knock me out with a bottle of brandy. Without prior warning I stood up and sang, the cast on my leg hurt, but I was evidently happy for a moment.
We were a band of lost soldiers hanging around the city; in the mornings we’d sit in Café Nussbaum on the old promenade, and we listened to the Beethoven septet over and over. We dreamed about going to drain the Amazon in Brazil but there wasn’t a ship to take us. With us was Buba, the sweetest whore in the country. Buba gained fame as the one who, from the promenade railings, had seen a blond man lying naked on his back on the sand, and went to check him out, the way a doctor does, came back and said, He’s not from here. And when she saw a guy doing push-ups she’d yell, Hey! Where’s the girl gone?
One poor guy came past with watches on both arms and gold teeth and Players cigarettes, shouting in Yiddish, and somebody got up and called him “Soap,” and I, who’d never hit anybody except for a Yugoslavian who’d come at me with a knife in Qaluniyya, grabbed the guy who’d called the man a soap and beat the shit out of him. He yelled, “What d’you want? What, he’s not a soap?” The beating continued until they dragged me away and poured cold water over me.
We laughed a lot and were sad and lost. The war continued in the Negev. We’d walk from the promenade to Geula Street and Allenby and have lunch at the Yemenite’s, and from there we’d walk slowly to Dizengoff Street and sit in Café Pinati on the corner of Frishman, and a few hours later we’d go to Café Kassit and finish off the night. There was a big guy with us called Parser, who spoke in a kind of hoarse growl and would show us what a big man he was, and we noticed that he’d sometimes disappear, and once we followed him and saw this sham tough guy standing in Frug Street, beneath a balcony, calling in a soft, childish, pleading voice, “Tsippi! Tsippi!” because he loved the red-headed Tsippi. We envied him for loving her and her for apparently loving him back. She played hard to get, which was quite common back then, because you had to conquer a woman like any Arab village, and indeed, they later married. They were together all their lives. He became a truck driver, a courteous man who’d sing “Shoshana, Shoshana, Shoshana” in an almost lyrical voice.