Adama, page 15
‘Take cover!’
Dov ducked behind a rock. The enemy were few and ill prepared, but they were still a threat. Dov saw a figure moving, took aim, fired. The man dropped down. Dov ran to the next rock. A shell hit the village’s water well. A small kid ran out into the open. A frantic woman ran after him. Dov took aim, fired over her at a man he spotted in a window. The man vanished from sight, the woman scooped up the kid and ran for safety.
‘Just run,’ Dov said.
They encountered little resistance when they entered the village. Houses lay in ruins. Corpses lay on the ground. The survivors raised their arms when they saw the soldiers.
‘Women and children to one side!’ the commander barked. Dov saw the kid from earlier, the mother with her three other children. The men they went through one by one. The young defiant, angry. They got tied up. Old folks got sent to the other side. One old man stood alone.
‘You’re the mukhtar?’ the commander said.
‘Yes.’
‘Go with the women and children,’ the commander said. ‘You know where to go?’
‘Yes,’ the mukhtar said.
‘Good. Then get going.’
‘What about the boys?’ the mukhtar said.
‘Prisoners,’ the commander said. ‘Nothing bad will happen to them.’
‘Something bad has already happened to them,’ the mukhtar said. But he went to his people, and started to lead them away. They streamed out of the village, out of their homes and their lives: women, children, the old and the infirm. They knew where to go – somewhere, anywhere, as long as it was far from here.
The fighters were put on the trucks. The commander gave the order and the destruction of the village began. The bombers placed explosives in the still-standing homes. Dov hummed Chaim Chefer’s ‘The Bombers’ Song’.
It was good stuff. Good for morale. They marched on. The next village lay five kilometres away. They knew they were coming now. It would be a harder battle without the element of surprise. The hills crawled with Arab militiamen. Complete savages, out for Jewish blood. The next village came into view after a long hard march. The mortars spoke louder than words ever could. Dov and the rest of the regular troops stormed the village. They were met with bullets. Took cover. Dov threw a grenade. Dust everywhere, it was hard to see. The commander ordered ‘Attack!’
Dov ran into the dust, shooting.
*
It hurt so much. He blinked sweat from his eyes. The sun overhead and the damned vultures circling. If it weren’t for the snipers still filling up the corpses with holes the birds would have been down by now. But vultures were patient. They liked their meat to settle before they settled down to eat. By night the field would be crawling with them. Dov didn’t want to become a vulture’s supper. He had so much to live for. He didn’t want some bird shitting out his liver. Not that he had much of a choice. He had two bullets in him and he was losing blood fast.
Forget the cleansing of the hills, then. That was just a run-of-the-mill operation – and they blew up the Arabs’ old flour mills while they were at it, just for good measure. It was a terrific success, as far as an operation ever goes – no casualties on their end, around twenty dead Arabs, a cache of captured weapons and ammunition, and five villages cleared. The rest got the message.
He blinked sweat. The birds circled. Somewhere above him a bored sniper fired shots at the corpses. Making sure no one only pretended to be dead. Dov didn’t even know if it was an Arab or a Jew who was doing the shooting. He didn’t know who won and who lost. It was just his bad luck wandering into the middle of this particular battle.
*
This war to come was much on Dov’s mind when the British sent him to prison in Cyprus at the tail end of ’46. Everyone knew it had to come. Everyone knew the British position in Palestine was untenable. Sooner or later they’d have to fuck off. And when they did, Palestine would be left up for grabs.
He was in good spirits at first on the ship out of Haifa. A calm day, and seagulls circled. He liked the smell of the sea, but the sight of the shore receding from view reminded him he was an exile now. The British soldiers guarding the prisoners let them on deck to watch. They weren’t going to run off anywhere.
He watched Palestine recede from sight. Then there was just the open sea, or rather the hold where they kept the prisoners. Big Moysh beat off in the dark when he thought no one was looking. Yoskeh had got hold of a bottle of grog from one of the more sympathetic sailors and was drinking like his life depended on it. Without it he got the shakes. He was himself a sailor, one of the guys bringing in refugees on the ships, only he got caught. Shorty Shmulik, who had one leg shorter than the other, played cards with Dan – they were both part of Yoskeh’s crew. Got busted together on the Susannah sailing out of Metaponto in Italy. They seemed happy enough.
‘Relax, Dov,’ Yoskeh said. ‘Sit down, have a drink.’
‘How can you be so calm?’ Dov said. ‘We’re prisoners. We’re useless here. We’ll be even more useless in Cyprus.’
‘A sailor is never useless, so long as he’s at sea,’ Yoskeh said. He had the jollity of the habitual drunk.
‘Susannah Susannah Susannah!’ Big Moysh screamed. He zipped up his pants and came back to join them. ‘Someone should write a song like that,’ he said. ‘You should have seen us, Dov. The sea was stormy and the flagpole groaned, the masthead of the ship was all but gone. But Yoskeh had it all well in hand. We were just about to raise another glass to the sea—’
Yoskeh took a swig from the bottle.
‘I’ll drink to that!’ he said.
‘When the enemy’s ships suddenly appeared,’ Big Moysh said. ‘And, well, here we are.’
‘Here we are,’ Yoskeh said and hiccupped.
‘Raise you twenty,’ Dan said.
‘I fold,’ Shorty said.
Dan swept matchsticks onto his pile. Shorty started shuffling the cards.
Dov stared at them.
He thought they were all mad, mad down to a man.
*
He saw her for the first time when he tried to get a pair of thick socks from the supplies officer. She must have been a new arrival. She stood at the barbed wire fence and looked out to sea. He only saw her from behind, but there was something so familiar about her, and for a moment he couldn’t, for the life of him, say what it was.
Then she screamed, ‘Fuuuuck!’ and a flock of seagulls, startled, took to the air and the guards in the watchtower turned to look, then looked away uninterested.
Dov came closer. She turned then, hearing his feet on the gravel.
‘What do you want!’ she said.
He saw her face. Saw Ruth, somehow, looking back at him. A little younger. A little different. Her eyes were softer and her mouth curved as though she wanted to smile even when she was angry. When Ruth was angry there was no smile and you knew to stay well away.
‘Nothing,’ Dov said. Mumbled, really. He was kind of shocked. ‘I heard you shout.’
‘Yes, well, that’s why I didn’t whisper, did I,’ the woman said.
‘I’m Dov,’ Dov said. ‘Do you… You don’t like it here?’
She looked at him like he was mad, and he realised how idiotic he sounded. He felt his face go red.
‘Like it?’ the woman said. ‘It’s just like where I left, only worse somehow. One camp, another camp, what difference does it make?’
‘I’m Dov,’ Dov said again.
‘I’m Shosh.’
‘You look an awful lot like someone I know,’ he told her.
Suddenly she was there right in front of him. She grabbed him by the shirt. Her fingers were long and she was strong.
‘Who?’ she said.
‘Her name is Ruth,’ he said, and he saw the stillness that overtook Shosh then, and she looked into his face like she was studying some foreign map and trying to make sense of it.
‘Ruth?’ she said. ‘You know my sister? Where is she? How is she!’
He took her hands. Removed them gently from his chest, held them as he told her Ruth was well. ‘She is in Palestine, she is a valued member of our kibbutz community, a real pioneer—’
‘What?’ Shosh said. ‘What the fuck are you talking about!’
Then she was crying, and he was holding her, and the sun slowly set over the sea behind the barbed wire fence; gulls cried overhead and the guards in the watchtower watched as they smoked their lit cigarettes.
It was, Dov thought, kind of romantic.
*
He put a ring on her finger two weeks later. It was that quick. Love forged behind a barbed wire fence was all the more urgent, and neither of them knew how long they had left. Babies were born all over the Dhekelia camp.
‘I want a baby,’ Shosh said.
‘With this ring you are sanctified to me as my wife under the faith of Moses and Israel,’ Dov said, and with that it was done. Their friends cheered as Dov broke the glass. He smashed it with the heel of his shoe. Then he kissed his new wife, lifting her veil, and she returned the kiss passionately, but nobody cared.
That night they made love in the tin hut that was left empty for them on this wedding night. The tin huts were boiling in summer and freezing in winter, and why Dov went looking for thick socks in the first place on the day he met Shosh. Usually he shared the hut with three others. But for tonight, at least, there was only Shosh.
They made love and Shosh’s voice was soft against his fevered skin. When they were done he lit them both cigarettes and she reclined on the bedroll and watched him and said, ‘In Germany I killed someone.’
She was so like her sister that he almost laughed, and she batted at him fiercely and said, ‘What!’
‘I’m sure he deserved it,’ Dov said, and Shosh nodded, very seriously, and said, ‘She did. I think.’ She looked into his eyes.
‘You have to have a moral code,’ she said.
Dov didn’t know much about Shosh. She seemed private to him. But he believed she would be happy in Palestine, happy on the kibbutz. He could picture her working in the new sheep pens or helping with the children, and they would have their own children to contribute to the pool of the kibbutz, new sons and daughters, sabras all. He couldn’t wait to take her there.
‘Do you love me?’ he said.
She watched him through the smoke.
‘I love you,’ she said, ‘you funny little man.’
He jumped on her and she laughed, and then their arms closed around each other’s bodies and the night was theirs and theirs alone.
*
He was drifting in and out of consciousness now. Dark shapes moving in the sky above, and the field he lay in was so still, so still with only him and the dead.
‘Sir? I want to be of help.’
He was only a kid then. Barely fifteen. At school, before the kibbutz, before he met Ruth. And the commander was tall and strong, his moustache reddish-black, the colour of the juice bleeding from a pomegranate.
‘You know what we do, kid?’ the commander said.
‘Fight for the homeland,’ Dov said.
‘You know what fighting means?’
Dov didn’t. Of course he didn’t. But he nodded all the same.
‘I want to shoot an Arab,’ he said.
‘Oh?’ the commander said. ‘And why is that?’
‘I’m underage,’ Dov said. ‘The British will hang you but they can’t hang me.’
He was pretty proud of his logic. And the commander laughed.
‘Six o’clock Wednesday night after school, in the gymnasium,’ he told him. ‘We’ll see how you do then.’
So that was his time. Every week after school, a group of them kids gathered in secret. He learned how to disassemble and put together a gun, how to load it, how to fire. He learned how to observe and how to report. He learned codes. Mostly, he learned to do what he was told without asking questions.
*
Dov got his wish. ‘Tomorrow at oh six hundred hours,’ the commander said. ‘On the corner of the market in Hadar. You see an Arab you jump on your bicycle and let the shooters know.’
Oh six hundred hours he was standing there as the market opened up and traders came from the adjoining villages and from the upper and lower Carmel. Dov was the spotter. The shooters were two, men in their late twenties, standing by the cinema. A gun mole behind them – a girl in a flower-print dress. After the shooting her job was to pick up the guns and put them in her purse. Then everyone was to head off in different directions.
An easy job. He stood there, watching. Israel was spotter number two, on the corner across. Dov waited, tense. He tried to look casual. His palms sweated. His heart beat fast.
A Ford taxi went past. A British patrolman strolled past, eating an apple. A cart carrying tomatoes to market went past. Then he saw one. Had to be an Arab, Dov thought. Dressed in that Turkish fez and a long robe, had to be – but what if he wasn’t? Could be a Jew, plenty of them, like Dov’s father even, still dressed like the Turks. Dov couldn’t decide. The man gave him a friendly look, looked away.
Dov let him pass.
A few minutes later he heard bang! Bang! Bang!
He ran to see. He was just a kid. Was it his Arab? The shooters were gone, the girl too. Dov saw a man and a donkey, the man on the ground, blood sprouting out of his throat. The donkey was wounded, it cried out in pain. Someone needed to put a bullet in that donkey’s head. Someone needed to help that donkey. A woman screamed. Dov stared at the corpse on the ground. It was the first body he ever saw.
The police were going to come. Dov ran.
He met up with Israel later. ‘It was my one!’ Israel said. ‘I gave them the signal, I saw them shoot him!’
Israel’s eyes were very bright.
‘It’s us or them,’ he said.
They went down to the harbour together. They found a hut that sold arak to sailors. They got drunk. It was the first time Dov ever got drunk. He was a good boy until then. There were whores. Dov and Israel went with the whores. It was very quick when it happened. Dov threw up in the place where people fucked and people pissed. It made no difference to the smell there, with the ships docked in the harbour, with the moonlight on the waves.
A lot of new things: first body first drink first sex.
They found a doorway and slept there the night. In the morning the shopkeeper kicked them out. Dov staggered into the bright sunlight of a new day. He didn’t make it back to school that morning.
*
‘Fuck you! Fuck you, Dov, you awful little man!’
The whole kibbutz could hear her. Pregnant and miserable with it. Her hands callused from the work in the fields. She blamed him for that. She blamed him for everything. He stepped out into the night, wanting to end this, how everyone would talk.
‘Shosh, please,’ he said.
‘Fuck you!’ She smashed a plate. He couldn’t let her do that, it was communal, it belonged to the kibbutz.
‘Shosh, please, calm down!’ he said. ‘The baby—’
‘Is that what I am to you? Someone to carry your precious baby?’
‘That’s not what I—’
‘Get out.’
He left. He went to Israel and Ruth’s room. Israel met him outside, a bottle of brandy medicinal and two cups in his hands.
‘It will pass,’ he said. He poured them both a drink. Dov downed his and Israel refilled it.
‘I don’t know, Israel.’
‘She loves you. It’s a hard pregnancy, is all.’
He poured again. Dov sipped this time. Ruth was inside somewhere. But she wasn’t coming out. She had lost her last baby. So many babies were lost. Dov worried.
Ruth chose Israel, in the end, and that was all right. Now Dov had Shosh. Maybe it would all work out, he thought. Maybe it will work out fine in the end.
*
Dov lay in the sun and stared at the vultures. A daughter or a son? They had got out of Cyprus eventually, went back to Palestine. Shosh was already pregnant by then.
Then the war, just like he knew it would come. And he and Israel picked up their guns and went to fight. So that was that.
And here he was.
All because Shosh was right.
You had to have a moral code.
27
THE VILLAGE WAS SOMEWHERE IN THE UPPER GALILEE AND AT first everything went according to plan. The village was heavily fortified by Arab Liberation Army forces. They were a ragtag bunch of volunteers and deserters from across the Middle East, nothing like the British-trained and run Arab Legion who operated out of Transjordan and were fighting for Jerusalem. But the ALA were heavily armed and they fought to the death all the same.
There were several large villages close together and the Israeli forces had to go slowly. They fired mortar shells and tried to destroy the ALA’s base but the ALA shelled them back and Dov’s company had to keep moving.
They took over an outlying village and made their base in what was left of the mukhtar’s house, it being the largest in the village. The sound of shells whistling overhead and the sound of explosions shook the ground. Dov kept his helmet on. He crouched by the window and looked out at the night lit up with bombs.
Avi and Danny Becker sat with their backs to the wall and shared a cigarette. Their friend Shulman stood with the commander at the kitchen table, studying a hand-drawn map of the area. Dov didn’t know any of them well. It was a new unit, hastily put together, part of Operation Broomstick, to sweep away the Arab presence in the Galilee. It wasn’t long before they were given their orders. They marched out into the night. The shelling continued and they went on foot, in the dark, sneaking their way to the largest village where the ALA had their base.
They must have been marching over fields, Dov realised. After school was finished, at some point he moved away from the tenets of the Revisionist movement and the allure of the Stern Gang lost its pull. He went to agricultural school and joined with others who wanted to work the land, not plant bombs on crowded buses. When they built the first fence-and-tower post of their new kibbutz he felt as though his life was finally beginning. He had loved Ruth just as Israel did, but they were never jealous of each other. They believed in sharing – land, crops, property and love. The kibbutz was going to be a new way of life, Dov believed in that. No more jealousy and no more ownership of things, but somewhere things could be finally different.
