We went back to Tel Aviv and went home and my mother cried because she’d heard that I’d almost fallen off Masada. I was a bit in love with the girl who gave me her hand but by the time I realized I loved her, she’d fallen in love with somebody else. In Tel Aviv we’d swim in the sea, practice unarmed combat by the Yarkon River, hit one another in Hadassah Garden, and swim in the round pool, and we’d dance the hora and the krakowiak and talk about free immigration and the struggle against the British and agricultural training and self-realization, and we had heart-to-heart talks about Jewish destiny that we were supposed to resist and rebel against, as our poor teacher Gedalyahu Ben-Horin told us, who wanted to rebel against Perfidious Albion himself. We wanted to rebel without really understanding what exactly we were rebelling against. We read Plekhanov’s On the Role of the Individual in History. We argued about whether history creates leaders or vice versa. We read Turgenev’s Rudin and held a big trial in which I defended nihilism as opposed to the liberal dreams and trends of Turgenev’s time. Perhaps I won although I think I was actually soundly defeated, for who wanted a nihilistic revolution back then instead of a secular Hebrew kingdom, or more precisely, a socialist-Zionist revolution.
We sang “Katz’s Dad / Katz’s Mom / Yama yama shorba” and “She’s got a screw-on leg and her head’s about to fall / And at night she hangs her head right there up on the wall.” Everybody loved coming to my house and standing on our balcony and watching Miss Gross shaving on the adjacent balcony and peering over the sea through her binoculars to see Berlin. She’d smile and say, It’s all right for you, you’re sabras, and we told her that we haven’t got prickles, and she’d laugh and say, But I have, and we could see them growing on her cheeks. And we read Panfilov’s Men over and over, which became our Bible, and Memories of the House of David, about the travails of exile and the wonders of the Jews in Spain, and I recited Ibn Ezra, which made girls like me: “I am a prisoner and with me is a man / He will not break away, he will not depart / Without a sword, he is the death of me / Without plague, he will cause my death / What am I to do? A Sisera has come / But there is no Jael of the House of Heber / Hurry and come to my defense / As did Abraham to Shemever.”
Five
One fine day in October 1947 the sea was as smooth as silk and a few of us went to the American Bar in Herbert Samuel Square to have a special sundae. Suddenly we were fired on from the Hassan Bek Mosque in Jaffa. The people in the American Bar seemed scared and wanted to see where the shots were coming from, and my friends apparently took off and I remained standing by what is today the Opera building, and shots were heard again and I saw a window shatter and at the same time saw a man running from the direction of the Manshiye neighborhood. A Jewish policeman who saw the frightened man yelled, That’s the Araboosh who fired. Then he ran to take cover in the doorway of my uncle Henio’s photography shop, who for twenty years had been photographing idiots who wanted to look handsome against a backdrop of paper jungles he’d hang behind them, but who for his soul had for twenty years photographed the sunsets on the same beach and at the same hour and not one of those photographs was preserved.
The Arab stood nailed to the spot and was caught by a huge, wild-haired woman who threw away an almost full ice-cream cone so she’d be able to move freely and she spat at him and yelled in Romanian that he’d never again shoot from Hassan Bek. She repeated her shouts in German so he’d understand her better. He pleaded and cried and said in Hebrew that it wasn’t him who’d fired and he was there by mistake, and I believed him, he looked wretched, confused, and miserable, but they didn’t want to believe him. They had a real enemy in their hands. Other people came too, they threw their ice creams onto the sidewalk and began hitting the Arab and stomping on him. He was wailing and they were hitting him for everything he’d done to them in the Diaspora, and I tried to lie on top of him to shield him and I felt how he was trembling and quivering and blood was oozing from his nose and I was hit and cursed, by the Jewish policeman too, who had emerged from his hiding place and come over. He shoved me and yelled at me to leave the fucking Arab alone because he’d come to kill me and they’d been born to kill us, and I told him that I hadn’t seen that he was coming to kill me, and the policeman slapped me and yelled, What, didn’t you see the people who fell dead here? What kind of a schmuck are you? They went on hitting him and laughed at me for kissing the Araboosh’s ass but I didn’t give up. The Arab’s breathing rasped and for the first time in my life I saw how somebody died. I saw how the Arab’s life came out of his mouth and from his eyes that were opaque, eyes that no longer saw a thing and protruded, and how he finished wheezing and died.
I went home. I was drenched with the blood of the first dead man I’d seen, a poor Arab, wretched but also valiant. I later killed quite a few Arabs and saw blood in war, but he was the first dead man and he was killed for nothing. They probably thought they’d smitten Amalek. You could have filled the Sea of Galilee with that Arab’s blood. I went home hurt. My mother, Sarah, took care of me and consoled me, and my father, Moshe, said, It’s savage here, that’s how it is in Palestine. I went out onto the balcony. A ship moved slowly toward Tel Aviv Port. From the area below wafted the smell of a bonfire. The image of my father’s cousin mingled with the dead Arab and pain welled inside me, and more than pain, sorrow. I became fertile soil for the preaching of Aviva from my class, who influenced me to leave the Hamachanot Ha’olim* youth movement and join Hashomer Hatzair* because of the idea of a binational state it espoused and to prevent what I’d told her about the dead Arab.
One time on our way home from Tichon Hadash, which was on Hayarkon Street, we met a friend who liked Aviva and tried to gain her affections through me. He was a tall boy called Nahum. There was something deep-rooted about him that I never possessed, something connected with the soil, he wasn’t arrogant and didn’t shout and didn’t make political statements and hated sentimentality, but while we were all in high school he worked in the port to support his family.
One day he asked me to go the port. Everything was locked. Barbed wire. Lights off in daytime. British soldiers on guard. Machine guns aimed in every direction. He got a pass for me and I was meticulously checked by a short, stocky British policeman and with Nahum I boarded one of the tugs that brought the barges laden with cargo and passengers from the ships to the jetty and back. It was the first time in my life I’d traveled abroad. There was a foreign smell. We climbed the gangway to the deck of a cargo ship. There was an unfamiliar atmosphere there. Smells I didn’t understand. People were wearing strange hats and moved back and forth, some looked dark and wore heavy coats. There was a mist and the sounds of foreign languages were heard. A youngish man, perhaps French, offered me a packet of Craven A and in a fraction of a second lit the cigarette I’d taken with one hand, and put the long match between his lips to extinguish it. He smiled and said in English, which I barely spoke, It’s good for you, that’s what he said. I stood there; perhaps for the first time in my life I was feeling a sense of freedom. The sea was there but it was a different sea. Infinite on its three sides, and on the fourth side my home, shrouded in mist and invisible. It was a whole sea, with no borders, without distance, without deck chairs, without beach paddles, without popsicles, without lifeguards’ surfboards, and without soda pop. I smelled it. I knew the smell from our balcony but from this sea came a kind of fragrance of power, of anything goes. Afterward I told my father, I was in your abroad, and he laughed but beyond the laugh he understood me and said, It’s terrible that they won’t allow Jews to come, but it will be all right. It was strange to hear from someone that it will be all right and from my father, Moshe, yet. Up to that moment my whole life had moved between it will be bad and it will get worse.