Khirbet Khizeh (7 page)

“Leave her alone,” said someone. “She'll be back.”

“
Khawaja
,” an old man stood up, apparently one of the most respected men of the village, and came forth from his people toward us, with one hand on his chest and the other extended in front of him in a gesture of courteous request, in a polite manner that both sides would surely recognize as the basis for dialogue, as appropriate to honored interlocutors, and advanced toward us looking among us for someone to open a discussion with. However the one he selected did not let him utter a single word but pointed to where he'd been sitting and said: “Stay in your place until you're called.”

The old man started to say something in response, or to rebuke him, thought better of it, shrugged his shoulders, and heavily returned to his place, aided by his cane and the several hands extended to him by those still seated. He sat down heavily and sighed: “
La illah ila Allah,
there is no god but God.” Something ancient and biblical once again flickered for a moment, until some other prophecy of doom took its place and hung in the air. Anyone who had forgotten how all this was bound to end knew again what was before him.

“What's this place called anyway?” said Shlomo.

“Khirbet Khizeh,” someone answered.

 

7

I
N THE MEANTIME
WE WERE CALLED
to lunch, and never had a midday break been more welcome. Not just to provide a respite from all that stuff down below, and to enjoy the little warm sunshine that remained of this day and think about other things (and we needed to!), but also, simply, because we were, as could be expected, hungry. Before we got there, Shlomo had already started:

“Its not okay what's going on down there. And there's gonna be more trouble.”

“E-nough!” Yehuda squawked like a chicken. “That trash is gonna make trouble for us? No way!”

“I just don't like all this,” Shlomo repeated.

“Whatever,” said Yehuda. “It's not the movies.”

“I just can't stop thinking about those old women sitting there, such fear!”

Since nobody took up the conversation, he continued on his own:

“It was just like the beginning, the first time I saw dead men, wounded men and blood. Do you remember? It was terrible. I thought then that it would haunt me forever. And now, corpses and blood and all that—it doesn't affect me at all.”

“You get used to it,” Yehuda replied laconically, nodding his head in mock sympathy.

We reached a field off to the side of the houses, next to a wide dirt track that connected this village to the main road, far away. Suddenly, for some reason, a thought crept into my mind, that this track compacted by thousands of feet over the generations would now grow grass, break up, bear fruit with no one passing by. Immediately the chords that had been moaning within me separated themselves, and a wave of bitterness washed through me. And I could sense that troublesome somebody inside me, grinding his teeth and clenching his fists.

We tried to maintain our indifference and shake off everything that had happened down there, like a goose coming out of the water. We distributed the ration tins and the biscuits noisily, with various juicy words, sprawling out on the rotting fallen leaves of a bare fig tree, trying to find something we could laugh about, but underneath it all there was something vague, accumulating in the air, which, despite its brightness, without any connection to what was going on here, had meanwhile become pale and vaguely murky, and white tatters of thickening mists or shimmering water vapor were gathering in the stainless azure, and it was clear that tomorrow or the day after the rain would return.

Shmulik, who was still grieving for his runaway colt, sought to engage Gaby in a very private, very friendly conversation, and said to him, turning his back to us, so as to mark out a separate circle for himself and his friend Gaby, and biting off some of the meat from the tin:

“You don't fancy her?”

“Who?” Gaby hissed dryly.

“Rivkele, you don't think that she's, how should I say, you know, kinda, well, let's just say she's not-like-other-girls.”

“She's exactly like other girls,” said Gaby.

“No, it's not like that,” said Shmulik. “She's kinda proud, don't you think?”

“Not at all,” said Gaby. “Or maybe she is, what do I care?”

“You don't care?” said Shmulik in amazement. “I sure would like to get to know her a bit better.”

“Just watch out,” Aryeh interjected, “that you don't end up the same way with her as you did with the horse.”

So there we were all smiling, eating, filling our bellies and passing the time, and we started to relax. If my ears didn't deceive me the word
home
was even mentioned here and there (and your heart within you leapt up then at such a wonderful possibility of a solution and a way out). And when we were peeling oranges and enjoying their flowing juice Gaby quizzed Moishe with his mouth full—what else do we have to do here, and he explained how much better it would be if we finished now and went back and left everything else for others to deal with, and so he added rolling his tongue and grinding his teeth—the gun also needs to be taken care of. But Moishe would have none of it. Moishe said to us as follows:

“First of all, we still have to check all the Arabs assembled below and identify any suspect youths. Second, when the trucks come we'll load them all on and leave the village empty. Third, we have to finish the burning and the demolition. After that we can go home.”

My innards clenched for some reason and I was disgusted with the food. I could sense that I was feeling sorry for myself and what awaited me. I don't know what others felt. Impatiently I waited for Gaby to go on grumbling and raisings objections as usual, so that I could get what I wanted as usual, and he didn't waste any time. What, demanded Gaby straightaway, what have we done today and what have the others done today? How far have we walked and how far have they walked? How far have we dragged the machine gun and the ammunition chests and how much have they sat under the sycamore messing around? And he also said that it was about time that we got to go home first for once, people were always taking advantage of us, and so on and so forth—which expressed more and more my own hidden, bursting desire to get up and leave and get out of here quickly before it started to happen for real. Because if it had to be done let others do it. If someone had to get filthy, let others soil their hands. I couldn't. Absolutely not. But immediately another voice started up inside me singing this song: bleeding heart, bleeding heart, bleeding heart. With increasing petulance and a psalm to the beautiful soul that left the dirty work to others, sanctimoniously shutting its eyes, averting them so as to save itself from anything that might upset it, with eyes too pure to behold evil, who has looked upon unbearable iniquity. And I hated the entirety of my being.

However, all Moishe saw fit to do in reply to Gaby's entire discourse was to say with more than laconic brevity:

“That's it.”

We gathered our equipment and went down to the makeshift prison by the sycamore tree. After debating with myself I gathered up the courage to say to Moishe:

“Do we really have to expel them? What more can these people do? Who can they hurt? After the young ones have already … what's the point…”

“Well,” Moishe said to me affectionately, “that's what it says in the operational orders.”

“But it's not right,” I protested, not knowing which of all the arguments and speeches that were fighting within me I should set before him as a decisive proof. And so I simply repeated: “It really isn't right.”

“So what do you want?” said Moishe, shrugging his shoulders. He left me. I would have chosen, for various reasons, not all due to moral strength, to remain silent myself, but since I'd started and since Yehuda was walking by my side, I turned to him and said:

“Why do we need to expel them?”

“For sure,” said Yehuda, “what are you gonna do with them? Would you assign a company to guard them?”

“What harm could they possibly do?”

“They can, and how. When they start laying mines on the roads, and stealing from the settlements, and spying everywhere—then you'll notice them, and how.”

“These people?”

“What do you mean? Are they too small, are they too virtuous? And apart from that there's always going to be two or three or more of them that you won't even know about.”

“It's just fantasies,” I said.

“So what do you suggest?” said Yehuda.

“I just don't know anymore…”

“If you don't know—then shut up,” said Yehuda.

And it seemed that this was the advice that I had preferred from the outset. But I was overburdened with words. And once I had started I didn't know how to stop. And since I had no one to argue with—I argued with myself. And this is what I said to myself: But this is a war! Well is it a war or isn't it? And if it's a war, well, all's fair in war. Second voice: War? Against who, these people? First voice (continuing as though he's heard nothing): Perfect saints they're not (but who is?). And even if our intentions are good and honest—you can't go into the water and not get wet (wonder of wonders!). To understand and agree that we've got to act—that's one thing, but to set out and harden your heart and do all sorts of things—that's always something else … What's more, who is it who has to be tough and harden his heart? Whoever happens to be tough, and indifferent, anyway. Short break. Immediately, with an apologetic fury that turned into a counterattack: And those villages that we took by storm in the war, were they any different? Or those who ran away of their own accord, frightened by their own shadows? Or villages full of bandits, for whom the fate of Sodom is too good, weren't they entirely different? But not this … not this … something was still unclear. Just a kind of bad feeling. Like being forced into a nightmare and not being allowed to wake up from it. You're caught up with several voices. You don't know what. Maybe the answer is to stand up and resist? But maybe, the opposite, to see and be and feel until the blood flows in order to … in order to what? Time is passing. Time is passing. Man. (Emotional pause.) You are so weak. (Another pause.) If you look you'll burst. (Bleeding heart, bleeding heart, bleeding heart!)

Beneath the sycamore the huddle had grown in the meantime. There were several dozen now sitting in a circle, maybe a hundred people altogether. If you glanced sideways and overlooked the circumstances you could have easily been misled into recalling those village market days, a birthday, the commemoration of some nabi or sheikh, when everyone gathered together in the same kind of huddle, under every green tree, in any puddle of shade, waiting in a festive heaving moving mass, like a lump of dough, not bothering about flies or smells or sweat or the crush and hubbub, so long as that thing, that festive thing they had been looking forward to, happened—but this silence left no room for such delusion, even when now you could hear a sort of buzzing like bees, a furtive rustling, seething, and swelling, in the shade of the great tree. One man, with a prodigious mustache, sat at the edge of the circle patiently rolling a cigarette in his dark peasant hands, transforming the lap of his robe into a tiny workshop for the purpose, gathering up the crumbs of tobacco and packing and tamping them in the trumpet of paper, tapping it this way and that, fussing with his flint and tinder until it finally produced a glow, which was nurtured with blowing and shielded with the cup of a hand, and lit it, raising for his enjoyment a pungent cloud of smoke, demonstrating the last scrap of freedom remaining in his possession, and also some hope for a future, a sort of everything-will-be-all-right that someone always kindled through wishful thinking, which he immediately believed in as though it were the first step toward salvation and even infected his neighbors with his good faith—such a fine quality, which was now made all the more pathetic and gullible since you (like the Lord in Heaven, as it were) knew what he did not know yet.

There was someone else right next to him, and this one was sketching in the sand, slanting, crossing, and winding lines, moving his finger in the paths of the sand with an absentmindedness that was a different form of concentration, but it was not hard to read what he'd drawn, the declaration of a broken man.

What if one of them were to stand up and say, We're not moving from here, villagers, take courage and be men!

My eyes roamed this way and that. I was ill at ease. Where did this sense come from that I was being accused of some crime. And what was it that was beginning to press upon me to look for excuses? My comrades' calm behavior only intensified my own sense of distress. Didn't they realize? Or were they just pretending not to know? They wouldn't even believe me if I told them, apart from the fact that I didn't know what to tell them, and if only I knew how to say what was inside me. I was uneasy. I needed something, something to grasp hold of. I clung to that famous phrase in the operational orders “operatives dispatched on hostile missions.” I conjured up before my eyes all the terrible outrages that the Arabs had committed against us. I recited the names of Hebron, Safed, Be'er Tuvia, and Hulda. I seized on necessity, the necessity of the moment, which with the passage of time, when everything was settled, would also be set straight. I once again contemplated the mass of people, seething indistinctly and innocently at my feet—and I found no comfort. I prayed at that moment that something would happen to seize me and take me away from here so I would not see what happened next.

At this very moment Moishe turned to me and told me to get on the jeep with the wireless operator and Shlomo and Yehuda and go check out the area. It was easy to understand how I leapt up and how we uprooted ourselves from where we were (with all eyes watching our actions) on the double, despite the narrow winding lanes. This filthy Khirbet Khizeh. This war. The whole business.