Khirbet Khizeh (2 page)

“Jab the fucker in the backside! Get it moving! Get the bastard moving!”

That was what waiting had been like. But on this glorious winter morning, upon this luxuriant hill, when everything around was green and watered, it was nothing more than a picnic on a school outing, when all you had to do was be happy and celebrate the pleasant hours and then go home to your mom. We lay on our backs or on our bellies or on our sides, our legs spread out in every direction, our tongues wagging easily, chatting and chewing, everything that we had been ordered to do on this mission wasn't worth a thought, that village over there, the infiltrators within it, and whatever else the devil might put together here. We didn't owe anyone a thing, we didn't have to worry about a thing, and we didn't care about a thing.

Apart from all sorts of other things, all this might only be one further piece of evidence that this war had gone on long enough, as was commonly agreed, in fact too long, and the time had come, perhaps, for other children to come and continue the game, if it was impossible to do without it.

With the same ease and facility with which the prattle had sprung up previously out of the pleasantness of lying around and doing nothing it now died down quickly and stopped of its own accord—from what we might call, for short, aridity of the heart. We sprawled in silence. We knew so well who would say what, and what would be said by whom, and also how he would twist his lips when he said what he said, and even his manner of being silent, so that you'd rouse yourself and hurry to revive the chatter so as not to leave a silence, were it not for the laziness. Maybe that wasn't it, but as one lay idly about, thoughts would stealthily creep in, and we knew that when the thoughts came, troubles began; better not to start thinking. By the way, two or three of us had already, it turned out, really begun to nod off. Including one kid who had started singing a snatch of a tune under his breath for the third or fourth time, and had stopped because he didn't know any more or because that was all he wanted to say. Even the one who was amusing himself throwing small stones a short distance, and a moment before had begun to play the well-known game of throwing stones at his friends and feigning innocence, got bored with it, folded his hands under his head, sank back, and his gaze wandered up into the branches of the ancient jujube tree and the vast sky that swirled up directly from the summit of the green canopy and rose with a mighty rush to unfathomable heights (which he cared nothing about and paid no attention to), so much so that suddenly it was understood that it was all up with us. We would never succeed the way we once had. Once, not long ago. And something fundamentally different, and gloomy, had already been sown in our innermost being, and there was nothing to be done about it.

If this lying around continued, I feared that we would start to quarrel.

 

2

O
UR WIRELESS OPERATOR
, who had been granted a quarter-hour break, switched off his fizzling transmitter-receiver, came over to us, and immediately turned to Shmulik:

“Shmulik, you know what?”

Shmulik turned over on his side, looked at him with raised eyebrows, and uttered a single sentence: “Mmm.”

“Whadaya say about those donkeys, and their incredible vitality,” the operator said.

“What are you talking about?” said Shmulik.

“Yesterday I pumped three bullets into one and it didn't die.”

“Where'd you hit it?”

“One here in the neck. Another here in the head just beneath the ear and the third next to the eye.”

“And?”

“It didn't die, it just went on walking.”

“Come off it. That's impossible.”

“I swear! Yesterday, right by the camp. I'd just gone to check the equipment. I saw it wandering around by the fence. I blasted it right away.”

“At what range?”

“Up close. No more than ten yards or so.”

“And it didn't die?”

“No way! It just went on walking. Then it dropped.”

“Aha!”

“When it got hit in the neck, it lifted its head up and looked. Blood was already spurting out of it like a faucet. So what does this donkey do, it goes on munching grass. I got it below the ear, and it gave a start but went on standing there, looking. That was too much already. I shot it in the eye at closer range and it took a few steps farther in the grass, and then, really slowly, lazily, it dropped and sprawled over. What incredible vitality!”

“A bullet from an English rifle would have finished it on the spot, no problem. It's the bones they have—like iron.”

“But at such close range!”

“Once I shot a donkey from behind and it dropped right away. This great balloon came out of its behind, and it pushed its head into the sand and fell over.”

“It's amazing,” a third person joined in the conversation. “With a camel it's just one-two and it drops. It turns its head around and, bingo, it falls. So how come with a donkey it's different?”

The one who was singing from time to time under his breath, his turn came round yet again, and he started quietly intoning the only snatch of music he knew, and someone else joined him with a sonorous blast. Our Moishe, the company commander, turned his head toward him and said:

“Stop that screeching. Lie down and shut up.” He raised himself on his elbow so he could accompany his words with a glare. In the process he also glanced at his watch and said:

“What are they doing over there, when are we going to start?”

“What are you complaining about?” somebody replied drowsily without opening his eyes.

“I'd have fixed things here completely differently,” said Moishe, rising and sitting, and pointing around him with the first stalk that came to hand: “I'd have laid some mines for them.”

No one objected. Moishe the company commander warmed to his theme:

“That would have been great. Look: if the village is over there and they can't escape to it, where will they run to? First of all over there. Right. There we plant some jumping mines. One Ayrab flies up in the air and ten lie down. Immediately the others change course and come running this way, straight toward us, right into the range of this machine gun, and they're totally done for!”

“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

T
HE 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 signal for the other, fundamental fear to sally forth, that here-it-comes-for-real fear, after which everything was veiled in a drunken blur.)