1948 by Yoram Kaniuk

Author:Yoram Kaniuk [Kaniuk, Yoram]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-648-1
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

Twelve

Beit Yuba—an alternative name (and in the interest of good taste and the love I had for the man I’m going to tell you about, I’m changing his name too and I’ll call him N.). There was a vast gentleness in the village, which was set in an Eretz Yisrael landscape that no longer exists, on a hillside shaded by soft tamarisks and jujubes and thickly foliaged pines. It was a village that had witnessed bitter fighting that was now over. In our war there, after the wars of the Romans and the Crusaders who had faded away from our land, we had triumphed.

One of ours, whom I knew but whose name I don’t remember, was hanging from a tree, cut to ribbons and bound with ropes, his member stuck into his mouth. N. stood facing his mutilated comrade and his features contorted with rage. His wild hair stood on end, matted with dirt, his clothes torn, his feet in boots of different colors because they’d been taken from two different corpses—and he apparently cried out but we didn’t hear, and perhaps we’d already walked into the village and lay tired in the shade of a house under a fig tree, and were cleaning Stens and rifles, and searching for Arab records to take, and perhaps we heard the shouts but didn’t really care.

Earlier we’d climbed the hill shooting and singing. We sang “We are ascending and firing,” and a guy with a megaphone called to the Arabs to evacuate the village. The officers who’d sent us weren’t there. They were apparently sleeping at Pension Fefferman on the way to Ma’aleh HaHamisha, and perhaps they’d been listening to songs on the records we’d brought a few days earlier.

In the background Jerusalem broke through the mist that shrouded the whole mountain. In the big house next to which we sprawled we saw an old Arab sitting cross-legged on a torn blanket and covering his fly-infested body with his robes. In his eyes was a tiny smile, a kind of painful challenging disdain, or perhaps he felt betrayed by his splendidly dressed officers who had played the big hero but had already taken to their heels. He was evidently a man on his own trying to win a war with a disdainful smile. N. had yelled, We’ve got to kill everybody in the village, even the cats here are Arabs. Except for the bullet hole in the body that lay there, we didn’t see much.

N. drove off the crows that had gathered around the tree and looked for a while at the young man who’d been his close friend and was now hanging there with his dick in his mouth. He removed the young man’s boots, tried them on, and the Arab sitting cross-legged got up and started running. N. threw the boots at the crows, which had come fat and sated from a battle that had taken place not far from us, and from which we’d seen smoke rising and we realized that there, too, there were dead.

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