As I drew I remember the smell of burned sausage coming from the kitchen, which wafted through the window above my sister’s bed. I dragged myself to the kitchen and wolfed down the sausage, and I dimly remember the kerosene stove and the Primus on which a pot of goulash stood waiting for me in vain. I heard my mother’s weeping and somehow I remember, as if in a dream, going out onto the balcony and staring at my sea, which was more of a home to me than any other home I ever lived in, and whose deep blue beauty on winter evenings was my secret life, and I heard the sad howling of the jackals near the Muslim cemetery, and I remember the music of the gutters in the rain that hit me, and the sun slicing the sea, and all of this apparently imbued me with a kind of confidence.
My father and mother, so they told me later, understood and didn’t ask. They didn’t even know that I’d come from Jerusalem. After a night and half a day I went out of the house and walked to the central bus station, which was almost destroyed. I ran part of the way. The armored vehicle was waiting there with some guys who’d come and seemed to be asleep on their feet. A plane passed overhead. A fat man gave me a Simon Arzt Egyptian cigarette with a gold mouthpiece of the kind not seen in Palestine. I stood with them. We didn’t say hello. I don’t remember the start of the journey, only that the day was at its height and the light full, big, and when we reached Bab el-Wad we were identified and a massive fusillade began. We fired back through the slits we slid open, and when I moved back to change the magazine a round came through the open slit and ricocheted from side to side. It sounded like a steel bee, its banging on the metal sides feeble. We had nowhere to hide. We saw passing darts of flame and we were imprisoned and the bullet flew and flew and flew, and in the air hung a smell more of wonderment than of fear because we hadn’t been prepared for such a situation. The bullet could only be detected by the tracers of dim light it left in its wake, and two of our number fell onto our legs. They moved slightly, yelled, and suddenly fell silent and their blood flowed onto our feet. The bullet continued to fly until its force was spent. When it fell, Mishka grabbed it and threw it out as if he wanted to exact vengeance. The bodies at our feet, saliva drooling from their mouths, we continued on our way.
I’ve been trying to write about this for fifty-nine years. In 1949, when I was a deckhand aboard the SS Pan York and took part in bringing Holocaust survivors to Israel, I wrote a book I called “Benny’s Comrades”—Benny Marshak, that is. A beautiful woman from the village of Kfar Yehoshua copied the manuscript but no one wanted it and it was lost.
I’m not sure what I actually remember since I do not rely on memory, it is sly and does not possess a one and only truth. And what’s really all that important? A lie that comes from seeking truth can be more genuine than truth itself. You think, and a moment later you remember only what you want to. I was a seventeen-and-half-year-old youth, a nice Tel Avivan boy in the middle of a bloodbath. I’m trying to fish myself out of what seem to be memories, but perhaps I was someplace else? Years later, a serious man told me that the story about the bullet in the armored vehicle didn’t take place in Bab el-Wad but on Mount Zion — maybe he’s right. So what? Perhaps for five months I was lying under a down quilt in the magnificent palace belonging to my late grandfather Yankele Hariri, who was an aristocratic Jew in Venezuela, and I dreamed all these things.
Exactly who was I back then? What exactly did I do?
Did I go to the toilet? Did we even have toilets? Did I ever brush my teeth? Did I have a toothbrush? And if I did brush my teeth like every nice boy in Eretz Yisrael, where did I get toothpaste? And what did I do between the battles? Who was I, what did I think about, apart from the few occasions that I remember thinking? And what is memory? Memory is what I write is memory.
I’m old, ailing, thinking about the new state that Ben-Gurion established, sixty years old now, its parents no longer with us and its heirs are idiots, fools, robbers, wicked people who’ve forgotten where they came from. For remembering is difficult for anyone who wasn’t there and didn’t see how good people made mistakes and didn’t make mistakes, who made puzzling but also daring decisions. To remember, and very soon those who were there with me will no longer be here, even though I see that today there are more than there were then. They’ve reproduced postmortem. Today there’s a Palmach House that’s bigger than the whole Palmach when there was a Palmach, and there’s a Palmach generation that makes Palmach films and organizes Palmach conventions and appoints Palmach commemoration committees, and they award Palmach prizes and rewrite Palmach history — they’ve founded an enterprise for the misrepresentation of the Palmach memory! The real Palmach was terminated in 1948 on the orders of Ben-Gurion, who with his brutal zealotry realized that the political parties’ private armies — of which the Palmach was one — must be disbanded, and it made no difference how much blood it spilled and how much happiness it brought in the end, and how with a few other battalions it established a state out of nothing. At a sad assembly in Tel Aviv they shouted, “The Moor has done his duty, the Moor may go.” After its death the Palmach became a big army with a huge palace where ninety percent of those frequenting it weren’t even in the Palmach back then, when it was fighting. There’s life after death, as the saying goes, at least when it concerns the Israeli underground movements.
Israel. Judah. A Hebrew state. Jewish. Israeli. Maybe it’s nothing but a new Canaan, the land of the Amorites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, the State of the Jews. Instead of teachers we had oratorical prophets who wanted us to bring them salvation, that we beat the Nazis, may their name be erased. “We,” except for me, since my father was indifferent to new states in the Middle East and read books in German and listened to Beethoven quartets and Monteverdi’s music and dreamed in German about Berlin, but most of my friends had parents who spoke Yiddish or Romanian or Hungarian, and when we started to sense that war was approaching, they became very frightened because they had only just heard that their families, which they had left when they emigrated to Palestine, had perished in the recently ended Holocaust. They enthusiastically sent us to establish a state for their families that had perished, to establish a state for their dead, and they didn’t know that the state would be a sort of lunatic asylum in the desert, strewn with the bonemeal of the Jews who didn’t make it here alive.
Israel is indeed a state of the dead. It was established for the dead. It is a remembrance of the fact that perhaps they might not have died had we established it fifty years earlier. How can a Jewish state live with the historic glue of the kind of Almighty, blessed be He, who matter-of-factly, indifferently, murdered one-third of its people? Behind us stood old, melancholy revolutionaries. A few of them were flamboyant, small of stature, and zealots, beautiful in their fervor and love of history that gave their children the right to exact vengeance on their behalf, and perhaps they were even noble in the ill-fated sense of the word, and they saw us for one moment in the history of Israel, the Eternal People, an ancient people that for two thousand years had wanted to live with dignity and didn’t know how, a people that loves yearning more than living, that was born in the desert and left their homeland, their father’s house, to wander and be downtrodden, but not to do anything valiant with those yearnings. Our teachers thought that we would resurrect our ancient land, our national home, and avenge Jewish history, avenge the pogroms. They wanted us to undertake a vast reprisal operation against Jewish history, as in “The Lesson” by Haim Hazaz, which we all learned by heart. They wanted us to start creating a new, manly Jewish history of our own and no longer live by the grace of someone else’s history. We were to bring honor to the humiliated nation that had been attacked in order to annihilate it, and we went off to establish a state against Chmelnitsky and his pogroms and the Cossacks and the Germans, and all we found facing us were Arabs, who we’d known from the time they fired on us in the 1930s when we traveled to Gedera, and from the donkeys, and the market in Jaffa, and from the shouts of “Itbakh al-Yahud” (Kill the Jews), from the tasty tahini, the coffee with cardamom, from the Khayyat Beach that belonged to the aristocratic Arab my father liked to visit in his palace in Haifa, from the stories about Hanita and Major-General Wingate and the killing and the rage and the struggle from 1920 onward.