Khirbet Khizeh (9 page)

Next some more people went past saying nothing and not looking at us, and their appearance made us feel like worthless idlers and mischievous hoodlums. Then a cripple passed by digging little holes in the wet sand with his wooden leg. He smiled at us apologetically for some reason, and hopped into the puddle, when a fleeting thought suggested that he should really have been asked to go round it or that he should simply be left behind. A short, stocky man passed, and when he reached us he tried to shout, breathing heavily and sucking up his saliva, either to spit it at us or to make room to shout, but he made do with vigorous gestures intended to explain, to threaten, to demand or ask, then sighed deeply, sighed again, and went on his way. Next came four blind men each holding the shoulder of the one in front, and groping with a stick in their free hand, their eye sockets turned slightly upward and more to the side than was necessary, as though their ears were going first, and over and above the special attentiveness that blind people have and a fear of stumbling at the next step, they suffered from a great and general fear that came from not knowing anything about where they were going or what there was in the place they were going to or what the others were doing. So they groped their way along (it was amazing how they had managed to find one another and form a group), and when they reached the puddle, somebody came to them and took the hand of the first one, who nodded his sparsely bearded head toward him, straining his senses even more intensely, and said:
Uq'adu hon
—sit here. And they turned back to the embankment of the road and sprawled where they had stood, wondering what this was all about. They seated an old man who was bent double beside them. We felt a mood of beggary, pus, and leprosy, and all that was lacking was the sound of dirges and
charity saveth from death
.

“Ugh, revolting!” said Shlomo.

“Better they should die!” said Yehuda.

“How many blind people and cripples do they have in this village!” said Shlomo.

“The others fled, and they left them here for us,” said Yehuda. “But now the rope will follow the bucket, and they'll return to their owners.”

“But why do we have to deal with all this?” burst from my mouth, with greater vehemence than I had expected.

“Right,” Shlomo agreed. “I'd rather have ten battles than this business!”

“What's the matter with you!” grumbled Yehuda, scratching at the layers of solidified mud with his fingernails. “What are we doing to them? Are we killing them? We're taking them to their side. Let them sit there and wait. It's very decent of us. There's no other place in the world where they'd have been treated as well as this. Anyway, no one asked them to start with us.” He paused for a moment and on reflection added: “What'll happen to them over there? Let them ask their beloved leaders. What will they eat or drink? They should have thought of that before they started all this!”

“Started what?” I said.

“Don't you make yourself out to be a saint!” Yehuda said furiously. “Now at last we've established some order in these parts!”

But Shlomo continued as he'd begun: “When you go to a place where you might die that's one thing, but when you go to a place where other people are liable to die and you just stand and watch them, that's something quite different. At least that's what I think.”

“You're another one!” shouted Yehuda. “Stop thinking so much. And if that's the way you feel, you can go with them, where they're going. If that's the way you feel!”

“Don't shout at me!” shouted Shlomo. “And I'm not asking you where I should go,” he said and walked away from us.

“So excitable!” Yehuda said to the world in general rather than to any one person in particular. “I'd like to see
them
, with Arabs conquering
them
, in
their
village, where
they
live!”

“That's just why,” I started to say.

“What do you mean that's just why, nobody asked them to start these wars and things. Such great saints. Too much of our own blood has been spilled because of them! Those nothings! Let them eat what they've cooked!”

Then we saw a woman who was walking in a group of three or four other women. She was holding the hand of a child about seven years old. There was something special about her. She seemed stern, self-controlled, austere in her sorrow. Tears, which hardly seemed to be her own, rolled down her cheeks. And the child too was sobbing a kind of stiff-lipped “what-have-you-done-to-us.” It suddenly seemed as if she were the only one who knew exactly what was happening. So much so that I felt ashamed in her presence and lowered my eyes. It was as though there were an outcry in their gait, a kind of sullen accusation: Damn you. We also saw that she was too proud to pay us the least attention. We understood that she was a lioness, and we saw that the lines of her face had hardened with furrows of self-restraint and a determination to endure her suffering with courage, and how now, when her world had fallen into ruins, she did not want to break down before us. Exalted in their pain and sorrow above our—wicked—existence they went on their way and we could also see how something was happening in the heart of the boy, something that, when he grew up, could only become a viper inside him, that same thing that was now the weeping of a helpless child.

Something struck me like lightning. All at once everything seemed to mean something different, more precisely: exile. This was exile. This was what exile was like. This was what exile looked like.

I couldn't stay where I was. The place itself couldn't bear me. I went round to the other side. There the blind people were sitting. I hastily skirted round them. I went through the gap into the field that was bounded by the cactus hedge. Things were piling up inside me.

I had never been in the Diaspora—I said to myself— I had never known what it was like … but people had spoken to me, told me, taught me, and repeatedly recited to me, from every direction, in books and newspapers, everywhere: exile. They had played on all my nerves. Our nation's protest to the world: exile! It had entered me, apparently, with my mother's milk. What, in fact, had we perpetrated here today?

There was nowhere to wander or to distance myself. I went down and mingled with them like someone looking for something.

Words rang in my ears. I did not know where from. I passed among them all, among those weeping aloud, among those silently grinding their teeth, those feeling sorry for themselves and for what they were leaving behind, those who railed at their destiny and those who quietly submitted to it, those ashamed of themselves and their disgrace, those already making plans to sort themselves out somehow, those weeping for the fields that would be desolate, and those silenced by exhaustion, eaten away by hunger and fear. I wanted to discover if among all these people there was a single Jeremiah mourning and burning, forging a mouth of fury in his heart, crying out in stifled tones to the old God in Heaven, atop the trucks of exile …

The puddle on the road was in the shade now, and passing ripples on its surface subsided to caress the reflection of the sky. I sought an explanation for the tremors running through me, and where this echo had come from, an echo of tramping feet ringing in my ears, an echo of the feet of other exiles, dim, distant, almost mythical, but wrathful, like a jeremiad, rolling like thunder, distant and menacing, a harbinger of gloom, beyond which, an echo carrying dread—I couldn't bear it any longer …

 

8

I
BUMPED INTO
M
OISHE.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” said Moishe.

“This is a filthy war,” I said to him in a choked voice.

“
Dahilak
,
please,” said Moishe. “So what do you want?”

And there was something I really did want. I had something I wanted to say. I just didn't know how to say anything that would be practical wisdom rather than merely emotion. Somehow I had to shake him. Quickly and immediately I had to bring him face-to-face with the seriousness of the situation.

Instead of which Moishe pushed his cap back away from his forehead, like someone exhausted from too much work, like a man talking to his friend, scrabbling in his pockets after cigarettes and matches and trying to clothe in words something that had just occurred to him, and answered me:

“Just you listen to what I'm saying.” Moishe's eyes sought mine as he spoke. “Immigrants of ours will come to this Khirbet what's-its-name, you hear me, and they'll take this land and work it and it'll be beautiful here!”

Of course. Absolutely. Why hadn't I realized it from the outset? Our very own Khirbet Khizeh. Questions of housing, and problems of absorption. And hooray, we'd house and absorb—and how! We'd open a cooperative store, establish a school, maybe even a synagogue. There would be political parties here. They'd debate all sorts of things. They would plow fields, and sow, and reap, and do great things. Long live Hebrew Khizeh! Who, then, would ever imagine that once there had been some Khirbet Khizeh that we emptied out and took for ourselves. We came, we shot, we burned; we blew up, expelled, drove out, and sent into exile.

What in God's name were we doing in this place!

My eyes darted to and fro and couldn't fix on anything. Behind me the village was already beginning to fall silent, its houses gathered on the slope of the hill, bounded here and there with treetops, from which the sun, behind them, forged silent shadows, which were sunk in contemplation, knowing much more than we did and surveying the silence of the village, that same silence which, more and more, was conspiring to create an atmosphere of its own, a realization of abandonment, an oppressive grief of separation, of an empty home, a deserted shore, wave upon wave, and a bare horizon. And that same strange silence as though of a corpse. And why not? It was nothing. A single day of discomfort and then
our people
would strike root here for many years. Like a tree planted by streams of water. Yes. On the other hand, what of the wicked … But they were already there on the trucks, and soon they'd be nothing more than a page that had been finished and turned. Certainly, wasn't it our right? Hadn't we conquered it today?

I felt that I was on the verge of slipping. I managed to pull myself together. My guts cried out. Colonizers, they shouted. Lies, my guts shouted. Khirbet Khizeh is not ours. The Spandau gun never gave us any rights. Oh, my guts screamed. What hadn't they told us about refugees. Everything, everything was for the refugees, their welfare, their rescue … our refugees, naturally. Those we were driving out—that was a totally different matter. Wait. Two thousand years of exile. The whole story. Jews being killed. Europe. We were the masters now.

The people who would live in this village—wouldn't the walls cry out in their ears? Those sights, screams that were screamed and that were not screamed, the confused innocence of dazed sheep, the submissiveness of the weak, and their heroism, that unique heroism of the weak who didn't know what to do and were unable to do anything, the silenced weak—would the new settlers not sense that the air here was heavy with shades, voices, and stares?

I wanted to do something. I knew I wouldn't cry out. Why the devil was I the only one here who was getting excited? From what clay was I formed? This time I'd become entangled. There was something in me that wanted to rebel, something destructive, heretical, something that felt like cursing everything. Who could I speak to? Who would listen? They would just laugh at me. I felt a terrifying collapse inside me. I had a single, set idea, like a hammered nail, that I could never be reconciled to anything, so long as the tears of a weeping child still glistened as he walked along with his mother, who furiously fought back her soundless tears, on his way into exile, bearing with him a roar of injustice and such a scream that—it was impossible that no one in the world would gather that scream in when the moment came—and then I said to Moishe: “We have no right, Moishe, to kick them out of here!” I didn't want my voice to tremble.

And Moishe said to me: “You're starting with that again!”

And I realized that nothing would come of it.

It seemed such a shame, such a crying shame.

The first transport had already moved off without my noticing and was climbing the big dirt track. (If only I could go from one to the next and whisper to them, come back, come back tonight, we're leaving here tonight and the village will be empty. Come back! Don't leave the village empty!) At once the second transport moved off too, the one with the women, who decorated the truck with the blue of their dresses and the white of their headscarves, and a single wail rose aloft, and was inserted into the sobbing of the heavy truck that grated and grabbed its way in the wet sand. (And the blind men would surely be forgotten here by the roadside.) It was the afternoon. Against the tranquillity of the sky leapt the anger of the wind that darkened the day and foretold new rain, tomorrow or the day after. Here and there in the village there rose a trail of white smoke from damp materials that refused to burn, and refused to go out, and would go on smoking like this, half-burning, for a few days, until suddenly a wall or roof would collapse. A cow bellowed somewhere.

When they reached their place of exile night would already have fallen. Their clothing would be their only bedding. Fine. What could be done? The third truck began to rumble. Had some astrologer already seen in the conjuncture of the stars in the sky over the village or in some horoscope how things would turn out here? And what indifference there was in us, as if we had never been anything but peddlers of exile, and our hearts had coarsened in the process. But this was not the point either.

And how does it end?

The valley was calm. Somebody started talking about supper. Far away on the dirt track, close to what appeared to be its end, a distant, darkening, swaying truck, in the manner of heavy trucks laden with fruit or produce or something, was gradually being swallowed up. Tomorrow, both painful humiliation and helpless rage would turn into a kind of casual irritation, shameful but fading fast. Everything was suddenly so open. So big, so very big. And we had all become so small and insignificant. Soon a time would arise in the world when it would be good to come home from work, to return exhausted, to meet someone, or walk alone, to walk saying nothing. All around silence was falling, and very soon it would close upon the last circle. And when silence had closed in on everything and no man disturbed the stillness, which yearned noiselessly for what was beyond silence—then God would come forth and descend to roam the valley, and see whether all was according to the cry that had reached him.