Khirbet Khizeh Page 2

  “That’s right,” the sleepy one sat up. “Well, why not?”

  “I dunno. They’ve decided to turn vegetarian. They’ll get them up in the hills and that’s all. Tomorrow they’ll be back again. The day after we’ll kick them out again. Finally we’ll cut a deal: three days they’re here, three days they’re in the hills, and we’ll see who gets fed up with the game first.”

  “This here, this isn’t a war, it’s a children’s game,” the one who had been dozing declared, stretching himself out full length; he was a young guy with nice hair and a blond mustache, a red-and-white keffiyeh knotted casually around his neck; you could see at once that only a couple of months ago his mother would have told him off in no uncertain terms when he came home late.

  “Whatever happened to the good old days?” said a skinny guy. Gaby, one of those who had grown up around here somewhere, freckles on his nose, with uncombed hair and an unwashed face, and a bit of snot always dangling down repeatedly being sniffed back until his fingers and the whole length of his sleeve came to the rescue, always tinkering with some bit of machinery (this time he was the machine gunner), waved dismissively as he spoke, like someone throwing some trifling thing over his shoulder. And what was he referring to except that only a month or two ago, after all, we were sprawled just like this in the shade of cactus hedges waiting to move off. And the silence then was a rather different silence, in case some sound gave us away, in case the fear escaped and shouted out and bound our hands and feet, in case the thing got out and word spread that no one could promise, however insincerely, that the luck which had thus far saved you would not let you down this time, and up to now it had just been playing around with you—a humiliating, shameful silence before the action, small devious ruses to deny it—how nice and pleasant it was to sit here and casually say: “Whatever happened to the good old days?” as if to say: “Oh, for the great days of yore.”

  Of course we didn’t bother with different explanations. We didn’t even start. We didn’t hear what he said, just “What’s the good of sitting around uselessly,” something with which our explicit agreement was signaled by the way we all looked at our man Moishe, the only trouble being that he was still lying on his back, munching on a biscuit and squinting up at the bright sky, so our glances were wasted. Suddenly it was clear that nothing was pressing. It was also apparent that life would go on one way or another. Whoever got lucky lay on his back blissfully; as for the unlucky one, no one owed him anything. And what a lovely day it was. And this valley before us. Suddenly our minds turned to this valley, and we surveyed it contentedly, as one assesses a thoroughbred colt.

  “How many dunams are there here?” said Gaby.

  “Thousands,” they answered him, “and thousands.” And immediately we began generously estimating its dimensions, expertly and easily dealing with thousands and tens of thousands of dunams one way or the other, making expansive gestures all around. Already we were dredging up from our memories and sharing things about heavy soils, semiheavy soils, nazzaz and salag soils, drainage, irrigation, and what have you. Someone even posited that somewhere there was a marsh, and that in that marsh there were ducks, and you could hunt ducks, wring their necks, pluck them, and roast them on a spit, and with some coffee and a few girls we could have a sing-along and a good time. And below, divided with hedges into squares, some large and some small, dotted here and there with patches of dark vegetation, or with spherical green canopies, or with hills yellowed with a profusion of groundsel, and plowed fields here and there, the valley sprawled peacefully, there was no cause for shame and not a human soul to be seen in the land, and the song of the luxuriant land rustled in blue, yellow, brown, and green, and everything between them, warming itself in the after-rain sun, gazing in total silence toward the light and the gold, throbbing.

  “The devil take them,” said Gaby, “what beautiful places they have.”

  “Had,” answered the operator. “It’s already ours.”

  “Our boys,” said Gaby, “for a place like this, we would fight like I don’t know what, and they’re running away, they don’t even put up a fight!”

  “Forget these Ayrabs—they’re not even human,” answered the operator.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Gaby, “you see how beautiful it is now when it’s theirs—when we take over it’s gonna be a thousand times better, trust me!”

  “Wow! Our old-timers used to break their backs for any strip of land, and today we just walk in and take it!” said the operator, and returned to his receiver, brooding apparently and thinking about things, and snatches of things.

  The sun grew hotter and the day strengthened its pleasant hold upon the valley. I don’t know why a feeling of loneliness suddenly thickened in me. The right thing would be to leave all this now and go home. We were sick of missions, operations, and objectives. And all these stinking Arabs, sneaking back to eke out their miserable existence in their godforsaken villages—they were disgusting, infuriatingly disgusting—what did we have to do with them, what did our young, fleeting lives have to do with their flea-bitten desolate suffocating villages? If we still had to fight, we should fight and get it over with. If the fighting was over then we should go home. It was unbearable to be doing neither one nor the other. These empty, godforsaken villages were already getting on our nerves. Once villages were something you attacked and took by storm. Today they were nothing but gaping emptiness screaming out with a silence that was at once evil and sad.

  These bare villages, the day was coming when they would begin to cry out. As you went through them, all of a sudden, without knowing where from, you found yourself silently followed by invisible eyes of walls, courtyards, and alleyways. Desolate abandoned silence. Your guts clenched. And suddenly, in the middle of the afternoon or at dusk the village that a moment ago was nothing more than a heap of wretched hovels, harsh orphaned silence, and heart-wrenching threnody, this large, sullen village, burst into a song of things whose soul had left them; a song of human deeds that had returned to their raw state and gone wild; a song that brought tidings of sudden crushing calamity that had frozen and remained like a kind of curse that would not pass the lips, and fear, God-in-Heaven, terrifying fear screamed from there, and flashed, here and there, like a flash of revenge, a summons to fight, the God-of-Vengeance has shown himself!… These bare villages … As though you were actually to blame for anything here? Massive shadows of things whose death yesterday was still unimaginable, intertwining, silencing, stooping and clinging, some kind of question that posed itself of its own accord, or a kind of aside, that must be said, something about something that was not this, like this but not it, that left an unpleasant sourness, like pity for a beggar or a revolting cripple, which merely irritated and pestered the soul, and the best thing to do was to rid oneself of it, assume a furious glance and fix it upon that very village, what was its name, the one in front of us, and to translate the glance into a out-and-out curse, which, at the end of the day, when all was said, was the only thing that would be heard, and with such manifest enjoyment that everyone who heard it would taste the flavor of his own individual enjoyment, because, as was well known, a good curse was always in demand.

  3

  THE ORDER TO START ARRIVED. Our company was to open fire on the bottom of the village and the tall houses visible to us, the covering company to our rear was to open fire in its own sector, and the third company was to climb up and establish its base at the top of the village and dominate it from there. Our machine gun opened with a few calm, seemingly innocuous rounds, as though at a rifle range. At first it rattled the windows of a plastered house (pale blue Arab plaster) with green shutters, then it beat a tattoo on a tall clay house, and immediately the fire fell along an open alley, then sprayed over the fences and walls and among trees that the sun was starting to bathe even inside their dense canopy. (And this time was so different from other times, when your machine gun opened fire and momentarily stilled the earlier fears, so as to give the s
ignal for the other, fundamental fear to sally forth, that here-it-comes-for-real fear, after which everything was veiled in a drunken blur.)

  We finished one belt and started another. No one responded. Our sprays of fire cut the air, which poured aside, parting in their wake with a sharp rustling sound, then dulled and returned to its silence; there was no way of telling if the fire had hit home. Our man Moishe picked up his binoculars to check what had happened.

  “That’s good,” said Moishe. “We really startled them. Push it a bit to the right. At those houses. Good morning ya jama’a. Yahud have come for a visit in the village!” said Moishe with relish. “The Jews are here.”

  We were lying on our stomachs watching the scene with enjoyment, and getting more and more excited both by Gaby’s hits and by Moishe’s wisecracks, looking around to see if we couldn’t find some gainful employment for ourselves as well.

  Now we could also hear the shots of the covering company beyond. And then, there was fabulous “cross fire” as it’s called. “That’ll tickle their tummies, ha,” someone said. All unawares I had a fleeting recollection of how it had been for us, at home, only a short time ago, and a long time, and a very long time, and even beyond the threshold of the distant twilight of youth, when there were sudden shots, shots from the border, shots from beyond the citrus groves, shots from the distant hills, shots in the night, or shots at dawn, and rumors, and the blackout, and something huge, serious, threatening, and worrisome, and running, and whispering, and strained listening, and shadowy figures setting out with rifles, figures at once strange and solemn, running down the road, excited voices and somebody insisting on silence, and at once, in the same association apparently, came a precise and certain image, how in that same white-and-blue plastered house with the green shutter somebody had stood up from what he was doing in sudden terror, how in the mud-brick house somebody had stopped eating, how somebody in the cluster of houses to the right had silenced whoever was speaking at the moment—shots!—feverish shivering, guts clenched, a mother frightened to death coming out to gather her children in almost-heart-stopping panic. The sudden hushed silence, the well-known “pray-God-it-isn’t-us, dear God,” how for an instant the prayer hung in space, a long drawn out, ancient, mysterious instant, peering out here and there before it was determined. Inside every single heart and inside the heart of all as one the pounding of a primeval drumbeat that cried out: danger, danger, danger! And they wanted not to know, were forced to reconsider and quickly make a frantic decision, while the whistling of bullets decisively declared: it’s started!

  “It’d be a good idea now to lob over a few mortar shells,” said Shmulik, in whom the spark of battle had been kindled and who was ready to set it on fire; you could see in his face that he could already hear the howl of the shell as it flew through the air and the dusty thunder of its explosion. Without wasting a word Moishe quelled this bellicose suggestion with a slight shake of the head and a raised eyebrow. But Shmulik wouldn’t back down. He asked for the binoculars and took a look around, turning the focus screws this way and that.

  “Can’t see a thing there,” he said. “It’ll turn out in the end we’re attacking an empty village.”

  “Gimme the binoculars,” Moishe replied without a further word. And Shmulik folded his hands around his knees and looked among his friends to find someone more affable.

  “Hey Gaby,” Shmulik suddenly said leaning toward the operator who was bending over his equipment.

  “Whadaya got?” Gaby said.

  “Nothing. It’s a pity Rivkele’s not here.”

  “You miss her?”

  “You bet.”

  And he stroked the air with his hand as though hastily caressing a pretty neck, over which a cascade of sweet-smelling hair tumbled, tickling and radiating warmth, and, picking up the packet with his filthy fingers, he shook it to extract a single cigarette through the little hole that had been torn at the top, and lit it pensively in a cloud of smoke.

  “Ahlan,” Shmulik suddenly called, as the cloud of smoke dissolved, “look over there, they’re running away!” gesturing toward the cultivated plots near the hills, whose lower fringes were hemmed with orchards. With difficulty, because of the rugged terrain and the striated background of the hills, we made out, continuing the line of his outstretched finger, a few frantic figures disappearing into the bushes.

  “They’re running away already? So soon? Without a single shot?”

  “You can be sure that the first ones to run away are the biggest bastards.”

  “I’ll blast ’em,” said Gaby. Even though the plan was actually to let them go, because the more they left of their own accord, the less trouble we would have when we went into the village, and it would reduce the dirty work of getting them out.

  “They’re running … not even a single shot, bastards! Get ’em!” said Shmulik, growing more and more excited.

  So Gaby swiveled the machine gun and fired several rounds. Moishe looked through the binoculars and gave him the range. We were all focused on that empty plot of land beyond which on one side were the hills and on the other clumps of bushes that grew thicker the farther away they were. Another group of figures appeared. Shadowy figures that moved in the open, and seemed to be in a hurry, but their haste was negated by the scale of the terrain; it was like the meaningless writhing of a worm.

  “Get ’em,” said Shmulik. “A little to the right.”

  “You missed,” said Moishe from inside the binoculars. “Farther to the right and up a bit. Now! Fire!”

  We were getting excited. The thrill of the hunt that lurks inside every man had taken firm hold of us.

  “Over there, too,” roared somebody, pointing to another field where, like ants, many figures were running, their jerky haste swallowed up by the larger field. I asked for the binoculars and saw them, group after group, or maybe family after family, or maybe bands of equivalent strength as they fled, four or five or six, or single individuals—women, too—easily recognizable by their white kerchiefs over their black robes, and their running, because they were exhausted and short of breath, apparently, slowed for a moment to a walking pace, and then growing faster and faster until it settled back into a heavy run, which contained not so much speed as a concentration of all strength and breath to prove that everything was being done so that there should be running, so that they might be saved from their fate. That instant a group of three was clearly seen racing up a hill.

  “Right there,” I roared pointing them out to Gaby. “Range twelve hundred, to the right of that solitary tree. You’ve got a good shot at them!” And at that instant I shuddered for some reason, and with my hands still pointing with drunken excitement toward the runaways I’d spotted I felt somebody was shouting something else inside me, like a wounded bird, and while I was still feeling startled by these two voices, Gaby emptied several rounds there, and Moishe said, “To hell with you! You don’t know how to shoot at all!” Surprised, I felt some kind of relief, maybe like this: “Let him miss, oh, let him miss them!” I quickly looked around to make sure that no one had seen me in what felt like my moment of shame. Immediately and uncomfortably, I went back to scanning that ditch in the field and tracking the panic-stricken figures that were floundering and trying to get out of it, but the earth could not contain them, unless they managed to get beyond those hills, beyond the horizon.

  “I got ’em,” shouted Gaby.

  “Like hell you did,” sharp-eyed Shmulik con-tradicted him, “gimme the gun a sec. Moishe—tell him to gimme the gun!”

  “Those ones over there I can hit with a rifle!” said someone, Aryeh, who dropped to his knees, carefully aimed his rifle, and deafened us with an unexpected bolt of thunder. Meanwhile he jumped up and fired again. And the hunt was on, in full cry. Until Moishe stood up and said:

  “Stop with that noise. You’re such heroes, you. You shoot like my granny. Enough already.”

  Then Aryeh said: “Sure, just give me the machine gun for a minut
e and you’ll see!”

  Shmulik said the same, and Gaby was furious. Shouting broke out and they called the whole world to witness. The angle of the sun in the sky, the zeroing of the equipment, the color of the hills, the vegetation of the fields, the fact that the target was moving, the estimate of the range, which was somewhere between twelve hundred and nine hundred, and they reminded each other, and jabbed fingers in the air, once upward and once straight ahead—mocking, denying, being professional, and with enthusiasm for the one great justice—as a result of which Aryeh knelt and lay down by the gun, and everyone got out of the way, grumbling and insisting on their opinions, and made room, and Moishe picked out with the binoculars a group of four men who had just at that moment reached the angle of the hills and stood out beautifully with their dark clothes.

  “Come on, this is it,” said Moishe, “five rounds and you’ll get at least one of them,” and put his binoculars to his eyes. And we too screwed up our eyes in anticipation of the first shot. And those four opposite, whose strength gave way at that very moment and who slowed their running into a heavy stooping walk, went down one after the other into the dip of a little wadi, and one by one they came out again, and when the last one emerged the first round rattled out and the four were seen falling. Then three of them stood up and started running and skittering toward the cover of the nearby bushes.

  “One–nothing!” shouted Shmulik, bowing politely to Gaby.

  At that moment the fourth one stood up and ran after his friends.

  “Istanna ya qdish,” said Gaby to Shmulik with a slight bow.

  Then a second round rattled out, followed at once by the third. The four people in the distance all dropped. Someone inside me choked. Time stood still for a moment and everything was unimportant. We craned our necks to see better, to get a better view. Moishe said nothing. Suddenly two of them got up and ran, and before we knew what had happened they had leapt into the bushes and vanished. Then another one got up and ran. And when the fourth one got up, the fourth round poured out, the man bent over for a moment, waited, then rose—a fifth round. He didn’t run but he walked. Then apparently he decided to crawl. Suddenly he began to roll along and was swallowed up in the grass. There was no point in shooting anymore. The contest had been indecisive. The whole thing had become tainted and there was no more will left to fight. I felt that it was impossible for me not to say something so I said: