Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar

Author:S. Yizhar
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780374713850
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

7

IN 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.

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