Khirbet Khizeh (6 page)

The little crowd that was huddled there near the wall, men and women separate, was silent like a basket of freshly caught fish, still redolent of the sea. They looked at us in a kind of paralysis of despair, and yet with that same eighth-part of curiosity that bubbled up from fear, shame, despair, destruction, and the suddenness of a disaster that had just occurred. They seemed to imagine that now enigmas would be clarified to them and they could expect something special to happen.

Meanwhile our Moishe told the two boys to take this whole expectant crowd and convey them to the concentration point, and pass on the message that we were going to check out a few more places before we joined them, and he sent the jeep with them too. Immediately the boys started shouting and waving their hands and their rifles like gauchos in the pampas, ready to suppress and quell any trouble, but all the prisoners got going as soon as they heard the first cry, in an orderly, compact, obedient crowd without any protest, and all the hullabaloo that the boys made amounted to no more than pure heroics. Then one of the two took away somebody's stick, a stick with a round carved handle, and at once he shouldered his rifle, seized the confiscated stick and waved it around, pushing now one and now the other, knocking on every door, banging on every gate, hobbling along and leaning ostentatiously on the stick with a broad grin on his face. Then the jeep left, and then they turned in the winding lane and all went toward their fate.

 

6

W
E SET OFF DOWN A TWISTING LANE,
and as we snaked our way along it the village came to an end and there opened up before us a patch of grassy land fringed around with a few tamarisks, beyond which was the hedge of a plowed field. In the autumn, it seemed, the place had been a threshing floor, the lush after-growth of which now waved to and fro abundantly and evenly, as though no foot had trodden across it; moist down glistened on the slightly hairy leaves, washing the gentle sunlight that turned this whole space into a puddle of bright green fluttering with shallow sleepy breaths. We were so enchanted by the sight of this grassy plot that we didn't pay attention at first to a colt that stood in the far corner, completing the tranquillity of the picture, as it munched lazily on the luxuriant vegetation before it.

“What a beautiful colt, look!” said Shmulik, pointing to the roan foal, which raised its head quizzically and flicked its tail this way and that, raising a rear fetlock and kicking slightly as though brushing away some flies.

“He
is
a beauty,” said Gaby, “he's gorgeous!”

“It's like another world here!” said Shmulik.

“And he's not even tied up,” said Gaby. “He'll run away if we get close to him.”

“He won't run away, he must be used to people,” said Shmulik.

They advanced toward the colt step by step. Meanwhile the rest of us knelt in the shade of the wall and eyed them without saying anything. Shmulik bent down and plucked a handful of barley so as to tempt the creature, if not with the quality of the food, which was available in abundance all around, then by the style of his presentation, his attentiveness embellished with chirping sounds, paying no regard to how all the while his heavy boots were befouling the patch of green and leaving behind him a dirty furrow that revealed the mud.

“Come on, there, come on, there!” Shmulik entreated.

The foal whinnied with joy, stamping its front hooves in the direction of its new playmate, and gave some little leaps which revealed that its forelegs had been hobbled. At each caressing touch its skin rippled nervously, either from pleasure or revulsion, and it sniffed with moist nostrils that were black on the inside and adorned with a ring of white on the outside, its lips quivering over the barley in Shmulik's hand. Shmulik patted its neck and stroked its mane.

“Good boy, good boy,” he sang obsequiously.

Meanwhile Gaby arrived, cutting his own dirty furrow in the field, slapped the colt's hindquarters and said: “This here, this is what I would like to take back with me.” And then retreating a little way, he picked some grass and put it in his own mouth, chewed thoughtfully and mumbled: “I'd raise him to be a great horse.”

“Say whatever you want about them,” said Shmulik, “but they sure have horses, I'm telling ya!”

The colt, apparently drunk on flattery, decided to show off to us with a little dance in the dust, but as soon as it started prancing it got caught up in its hobble, something which soured its temper, and it made strange leaps, throwing its tail up and extending its neck as though trying to free itself from something, and showing the whites of its eyes.

“We've got to get those off him!” Shmulik said, stepping backward in alarm at the sight of the leaps.

“You'd better not touch him, or you'll get a kick,” Gaby said, suiting action to words and withdrawing to a safe distance.

“What wildness, what a rebel!” Shmulik marveled. “Let's get his ropes off him.”

“You'd better get back,” said Gaby.

“That's enough now, that's enough,” Shmulik chanted to the colt. And he tried to pacify it from a distance with a handful of grass. This time the colt didn't wait for the gift but danced a rebellious rope-dance with mounting anger, flailing ineffectively, its movements restrained by the hobble, all tangled up in itself, made frantic by the power of movements that had no range whatsoever.

“He'll break a leg!” shouted Gaby.

“We've gotta untie it for him,” Shmulik answered. “It can't go on like this.”

“He'll break a leg,” Gaby shouted again.

Boldly Shmulik approached, one hand extending the peace offering of grass and the other reaching out with the intention of stroking and gradually calming the colt; he chirped pacifically but at the same time maintained a kind of half-turn in readiness to leap backward. The colt stood still. Its neck was stretched out, its head forced downward ready to butt, its back arched like a bow, its tail flicked up, tense, its four legs set at an angle so that its fetlocks were close together and almost in the same spot, like a grasshopper about to leap, or a drawn bow before the arrow is released. It paused in this pose for a short while, steely, lithe, seething with restrained power that might burst forth at any moment with uncontrolled desire, with liberating joy, and the breath of distant places and wide-open spaces. Then it straightened out all at once and raised its neck while its head, with tiny ears pricked up, tilted slightly to one side, as though sniffing at the wind, all attention. At once it relaxed its muscles. With a mischievous movement it turned gracefully to face Shmulik and extended its baby-like lips toward the grass.

Triumphantly Shmulik approached the colt, patting its silky neck and quivering belly, its reddish gazelle-like hocks, and speaking soft, soothing words of affection.

“Good boy, good boy. There, there. That's good,” Shmulik said. And immediately he knelt down and drew his knife to cut through the hobble on the animal's forelegs. He thrust his head and most of his body between the four legs of the attentive colt.

“You'd better not stick your head down there,” said Gaby excitedly, and took one step forward. At that very moment the horse started and gave a great leap, spreading its tail like a peacock, its mane waving wildly. It gave another leap forward and with head extended broke into a mighty gallop, jumped the low hedge (with a bit of rope dangling from one of its forelegs), and appeared one last time at the end of the plowed field before vanishing from sight.

With gaping mouth and dim eyes Shmulik got up and turned toward us, holding the knife, amazed and stunned, the words wrenched from his mouth: “Wow … did you see that!… I'm telling tell you!”

Meanwhile Gaby opened his mouth wide and burst out laughing, laughing and coughing, laughing and slapping his knees, laughing and looking backward at us and forward toward Shmulik, as he tried to say something that was lost in the howls of his laughter, which infected us all, until there was a general uproar, screeching, mocking, that extracted all sorts of things that we hadn't said all day and brought them out into the open, freely, publicly, all at once, and then Aryeh said, with a fleeting hint of a smile (because he had never done more than smile in his life) to the poor guy: “There goes your fifty pounds!”

“Fuck your fifty pounds,” muttered Shmulik, reaching for his knife and returning it to its sheath, and turning away from us as he looked into the distance toward what had disappeared, while the field still throbbed with a wonderful echo of thundering hooves.

However, it was now clear that we had wasted too much time here. We got up unwillingly and returned to the alleys of the village. We checked the houses casually. We peered dutifully here and there, interpreting the sense of gloom that had fallen upon us as though it were merely a sign that it was lunchtime. Shmulik dejectedly trudged along in the rear, and when we tried to hurry him along he responded evasively and said to us, “What do you know about it! You don't see a horse like that every day!” and returned to his sad thoughts. In the meantime we also picked up a few Arabs, whom we gathered into a group and sent on ahead of us without paying any attention to how they looked or what they had to say or needed, nor to the occasional fit of weeping, and even the one who had for some reason prepared an impromptu white flag and approached us waving it and murmuring a formal address, as if he were the village headman and was holding the keys of surrender, even he aroused in us only feelings of boredom, inexplicable anger that gradually got the better of us and turned into an expression of resentment, meaning that they had defrauded us, they'd exploited us, but we were not about to give up, we would not hand anything over, though what it was we wouldn't hand over was not known.

Because who were we dealing with after all, apart from some women with babies in their arms (bleary-eyed driveling Arab babies wrapped in rags and good-luck charms) and a few other women clasping their hands and mumbling as they walked? There were also a few old men walking silently and solemnly as though toward Judgment Day. There were some middle-aged men there, too, who felt they weren't old enough yet to be safe from the impending wrath, and who also felt a need to explain and a rebellious urge that manifested itself from time to time in a look or two. There was a blind man led by a child, perhaps his grandson, who walked along looking around him in bewilderment and curiosity, oblivious to the hand on his shoulder or the trouble hanging over their heads, so that even when he stumbled occasionally he hardly stopped staring at us. And with all these blind, lame, old, and stumbling people, and the women and children all together like some place in the Bible that describes something like this, I don't remember where—in addition to this bit of the Bible, which was already weighing on our hearts, we now reached an open place in which there stood a wide-spreading sycamore tree under which we saw sitting in a huddle the entire population of the village, gathered in silence, a great dappled mass, all collected together, a single silent assembly following what was happening with their eyes, one of them occasionally sighing, “O dear God.”

Those whom we had brought along found themselves places of their own accord and gathered under the tree, men and women separately, and sat down heavily, so that at once you could no longer distinguish them from the others. There were many people gathered here, a larger catch than expected, with dark robes and white head-coverings (a scarf wound around a low tarbush for the men and a white embroidered kerchief for the women). Some of them sat swaying to and fro as if they were praying. Others ran their honey-colored amber or plain black worry-beads aimlessly through their fingers. Others folded their big wrinkled peasant arms across their chests, while still others crushed stalks of straw or blades of grass between their fingers just for something to do, and they were all watching us, clinging to our every movement, and not a word did they speak, apart from that occasional sigh, “O dear God.”

Among the women, meanwhile, a monotonous, almost incidental weeping started up, which occasionally mounted to a loud sobbing and was choked back. Some women bared a breast to their babies, some covered their faces with a veil, leaving only frightened eyes, some addressed broken phrases and reprimands to their children, whose patience had given out, and who had begun to fidget, approaching us, resting one bare foot upon the opposite knee, and devouring us with their glances, staring wide-eyed at the sight of our every move, as if it were a performance. Only rarely did a single cry burst forth and open the pent-up hearts and tears, and then a general weeping broke from the women, until one of the old men raised his voice and rebuked them, and they gradually controlled themselves.

However, when a stone house exploded with a deafening thunder and a tall column of dust—its roof, visible from where we were, floating peacefully, all spread out, intact, and suddenly splitting and breaking up high in the air and falling in a mass of debris, dust, and a hail of stones—a woman, whose house it apparently was, leapt up, burst into wild howling and started to run in that direction, holding a baby in her arms, while another wretched child who could already stand clutched the hem of her dress, and she screamed, pointed, talked, and choked, and now her friend got up, and another, and an old man stood up too, and other people rose to their feet as she began to run, while the child attached to the hem of her dress was dragged for a moment and stumbled to the ground and bawled, revealing a brown buttock. One of our boys moved forward and shouted at her to stand still. She stifled her words with a desperate shriek, beating her chest with her free hand. She had suddenly understood, it seemed, that it wasn't just about waiting under the sycamore tree to hear what the Jews wanted and then to go home, but that her home and her world had come to a full stop, and everything had turned dark and was collapsing; suddenly she had grasped something inconceivable, terrible, incredible, standing directly before her, real and cruel, body to body, and there was no going back. But the soldier grimaced as though he were tired of listening, and he shouted at her again to sit down with the others. However, the woman was already beyond warnings, she left him behind and started running heavily toward the site of the explosion. With a movement of his hand the boy grabbed her headscarf, and her hair was shamefully disheveled and exposed to view, something that startled everybody and enraged the woman herself. Snatching back her scarf with a wave of rebuke, in a single movement she covered her hair and wrapped up the child, who was bleating with all its tiny might, and hurriedly picked up the hem of her heavy dress and ran toward her ruined home.