Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
He took a knife from the hiding place in the cowshed and went to the
nearby village. An old man for whom he had once carved the dead faces of his daughters told him: Go to Marar, you'll see a donkey with a damaged
saddle at the house of Abu-Hassein, and you'll know. Ebenezer climbed up
to the village. The inhabitants were hiding from the storm. His smell was
blended with the downpour and the dogs didn't smell him and didn't bark.
He came to Abu-Hassein's house, saw the donkey at the next house, examined the saddle and called the Arabs to come outside. They came out,
the old man started trembling, but Ebenezer whose hands were strong,
grabbed the young one, smelled Dana's odor on his clothes, and killed him
with two stabs. The old man started running away, men from the settlement ran up, and dragged Ebenezer back to the settlement. In the yard,
they washed the blood off Ebenezer. All night Ebenezer sat on the doorsill of Rebecca's house next to Dana's body and watched it. Rebecca looked
outside and saw her son and his dead wife and wanted to go to them, but
Ebenezer warned her not to come. The rain stopped, the sky cleared up,
and a fragrance of spring filled the air. There was no trace of the storm
except for the lightning damage, split tree trunks, and a lot of sand piled
up wet and sticky. The next day, the funeral was held, Rebecca stood on
the side, between the Captain and Mr. Klomin. Mr. Klomin, gazing, tried
to understand the meaning of the empty space that filled him. With his
great expertise in the charter and the illegality of the British Mandate, he
had never noticed how much he loved his daughter. Now when he felt love,
he didn't know what to do with it. At the open grave, Ebenezer told his
wife: You were a gift given to me and taken from me, this morning I looked
in the mirror, there was nobody there. And then the cantor recited the
prayer for the dead and they filled the grave with dirt and Roots grew by
one more corpse. He returned from Roots alone. He sat a long time and
looked at his son. He wanted to touch him, but he didn't. The child's eyes
were wide open. For a moment Ebenezer thought the child was smiling.
His eyes were mocking, and Ebenezer got up and slammed the door. He
stood next to his house, looked at the path where Dana had planted roses
and geraniums and at the pepper tree he had planted for her and at her
herb garden, and he yelled: Rebecca, I'm going to find who cursed us.
Rebecca approached the child and looked at him. Her son's bowed figure
was seen from the myrtle tree on the path. He was twenty-seven years old.
The year was nineteen twenty-seven. The month was April. The air was
drenched with the intoxicating smells of spring. The Captain moved to Ebenezer's house. The paths and flowers went on blooming every year.
The dried flowers in the books and the sweet smells in the jars and bottles
stayed where they were.
Forty years, Ebenezer Schneerson didn't see his mother.
Tape / -
Your blood Dana. Your Dana blood. Blood blood. Your blood Dana. Dana
Dana your blood. The blood of Dana. Dana. Blood blood blood Dana. Blood
of Dana, blood. Blood your blood Dana Dana. Your blood Dana. Your Dana
blood. Dana blood. Dana Dana. Your blood Dana. Blood.
They said I went to Marar to kill an Arab. I don't remember. I tell how
I went to kill an Arab in Marar and I don't remember. An empty space I
am. Stories of others or of others about me. Who am I? Forty years searching and don't know.
After forty years I came and saw him, and I said to him: Samuel! I was
so happy that Samuel was here. But that was Boaz. He was offended. What
do I know about Boaz?
Tape / -
Teacher Henkin met Boaz years after Menahem was killed. When he
retired, there was nobody to say good-bye to. The teachers had changed.
Damausz sat in his house and embroidered his old dreams over and over
again. Old Teacher Sarakh with her swollen legs didn't even bother to
come say good-bye to him. She grows silkworms and gazes at the sea getting blocked across from her house. Teacher Henkin bought a new overcoat and a broad-brimmed hat and every morning as usual, he went on
walking from his house on Deliverance Street to Mugrabi Square, which
had meanwhile been destroyed, and then back home again. "Grief of the
world," Teacher Obadiah Henkin would say to himself at the new hotels,
crushing the handsome hills at the seashore, the new houses, the discotheques, the banks popping up like mushrooms. Here and there, a few
veteran teachers still live, Histadrut members, who now add a second story
to their little houses and will soon sell the houses for accelerated development. Only the corner of Henkin's street remained lost between the new
building sites closing in on it. They're wiping out the sea, dammit, said the
baker's wife to Mr. Henkin, and he said, Yes, yes, too bad about Noga, thought Henkin, what's she doing? She lived with us, Hasha Masha and
she, like two conspirators. A bare bulb over my wife, the garden hasn't yet
been renewed, the paint is peeling. Unlike Hasha Masha, Teacher Henkin
doesn't know that relations between Noga and Menahem-what he privately called their engagement-ended a few weeks before Menahem fell.
How many years does Teacher Henkin walk in that set route? He
stopped counting. Ten, fifteen years? He's not sure anymore. The years are
accompanied by demonstrations of hesitation, partial juggling of retreat,
attempts to understand death from a new, unusual angle, getting to know
the bereaved parents, the Committee of Bereaved Parents, the Shimonis,
all that happened while he walked every single day, at the same time, on
Ben-Yehuda Street to Mugrabi Square and back. Later on, after he'd meet
Boaz, it became clear to Teacher Henkin that his son didn't fall in the
battle of Mount Radar, but in a battle that would stir heroic feelings in him
at first, that battle for the Old City. Teacher Henkin, who had had many
illusions shattered in his life, was angry about the battle in the Old City,
which might have been won if not for the order of Ben-Gurion, whom he
had once thought great. But he wouldn't get his son back in either case,
Hasha Masha will then say, and he'll stare at her, but then he won't be
angry anymore at her hostility.
And so he also learned the battle for the Old City: the weary fighters
of the Harel Brigade (and Menahem, he thought then, was one of them)
bombarded Mount Zion every night from Yemin Moshe whose residents
had previously been evacuated. And the mountain was captured. Menahem
was in the armored car that climbed the mountain from the Valley of
Hinnom. The fighters met in the Dormition Monastery, next to King David's
Tomb, near the place of the seder the Christians call the Last Supper.
After a short rest, the fighters were assembled in Bishop Gubat's school
next to the monastery, and in the shadow of Byzantine acacias, they ate
grape leaves stuffed with dry bread. From the other side of the narrow
path separating the mountain from the Old City, on the splendid Tower
of Suleiman sat the fighters of the Arab Legion commanded by British
Colonel Wood. Colonel Wood, who graduated with honors from Eton and
had a degree from Cambridge, had previously served in Europe, was one of
those who liberated Hathausen concentration camp, fought in the Pacific,
and then volunteered to help his old friend Glubb Pasha organize the army of the grandson of the Sharif of Mecca. Now he held a stick in his hand,
which once, when liberating the camp, he refused to hold.
In the besieged Jewish Quarter, a handful of Jews remained, whose
ammunition and food were running out. By order of Ben-Gurion, the governor of Jewish Jerusalem refused the offer of the rescue battle made by
the members of the Harel Brigade. The governor claimed he didn't have
reinforcements that the fighters of the Harel Brigade were exhausted and
a considerable part of their fighters were killed or wounded. The commander of the Harel force decided to carry out the operation despite the
governor's refusal, and that was a historical moment, thought Henkin excitedly. Ben-Gurion, who feared the rage of the fighters, approved the
operation but at the same time he ordered the governor not to assist it. We
need a historian, said Henkin, who will come and arrange the data, so that
battle can be summarized properly. The commander said: We have to
strike the enemy while he's stunned from the battle on the mountain. The
night before, a hole was made in the roof of the Dormition Church by a
Davidka shell that tried to hit a target far away from there and missed. The
enemy had tanks, armored cars, and artillery. Colonel Wood relied on his
weapons and his loyal soldiers. At dawn, an armored car approached the
wall of the Old City and poured fire on the nearby Jaffa Gate. Seven Iraqi
and British officers were taken prisoner. On Mount Zion sat Menahem
along with Boaz. He wasn't thinking of the international conspiracies, of
Ben-Gurion writhing in the torments of his decision, of the governor and
his struggle with the commander of Harel, he was waiting to finish the war,
go back home, live, then he got a cone of explosives and crawled toward
Zion Gate. Over the gate were two heavy machine guns, whose range covered the narrow path and you had to slip under it. The explosive was connected to a wire and to the cone, and you could push it with a pole under
the coil of the barbed war fence stretched there. At three twenty AM, on
the twentieth of May nineteen forty-eight, the cone burst the fences, a
mighty explosion was heard, shots were fired feverishly, and Zion Gate was
breached. In the smoke of shooting and explosions, Menahem and his comrades burst into the city that previously, in a brief and laconic but emotional ceremony, the commander had called the Eternal City. In the short
ceremony, the commander said in a restrained tone: One thousand eight
hundred seventy-seven years ago we were exiled from here, you are the first to climb the wall of the Eternal City, hold on and embrace it. When
Henkin will tell his wife about that, she will say to him: Is your pain less
because of that?
Ra'anana ran first, followed by the rest of the fighters. A soldier who had
laid explosives at the gate with Menahem lay wounded; later on they would
pick him up. Menahem ran behind Boaz, shooting at the wall on which Colonel Wood's terrified officers and soldiers were fighting boldly. The Armenians, in the winding street to the Jewish Quarter, watch in awe, the fighters
hold explosives, rifles, submachine guns, and food. The commander says on
the walkie-talkie: They're losing control, complete surprise, send fighters to
replace us, we're bleeding, if you send them fast, the Old City will be in our
hands by nightfall, over and out. From the other end, there was no answer.
Bearded, weary fighters burst out of the besieged Jewish Quarter. A brief but
joyous encounter. Shells land on all sides. White flags start flying over the
houses of the Old City. The Arab fighters are losing control and starting to
flee, Colonel Wood can't hold his fighters. They're fleeing. Havaja Wood,
they yell at him, nothing to be done, and he, stunned, waves the stick he's
holding. You have to learn from the enemy, he'll say later on, and he doesn't
mean Kramer, but Menahem Henkin.
Complete chaos. Menahem attacks, says Boaz, and then, during the
battle, he's wounded by a stray bullet. His brain is pierced and he dies
on the spot. If I had caught the bullet, it wouldn't have been a stray!
Menahem didn't suffer, Henkin ... The governor didn't heed the request
for help, the besieged people went back to the Jewish Quarter with food
and a little bit of ammunition. They found out that new fighters were coming to relieve Boaz and his companions. They pulled out with the dead and
wounded. The new ones who came were old men from the corps of elderly
who weren't fit to fight and didn't know why they were sent. The retreating Arabs saw the wheel turn, girded their loins, and drove out the old
men. The exhausted inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter surrendered by
waving a white flag. At the same time, Henkin discovered later, in the
headquarters on Schneller sat a hundred armed fighters who weren't sent.
Menahem fell for nothing, said Henkin to Hasha Masha. The liberation
of the Old City was postponed for nineteen years. Meanwhile, Menahem
came back and was killed in another battle, a battle that didn't get into the
history book.
Did my son fall for nothing? Henkin will ask.
Did he fall in an unknown battle there, or in the Old City?
He fell, says Hasha Masha, even if he died in a traffic accident, he didn't
return.
The merchants on Ben-Yehuda Street set their watches by Henkin.
They're building a new city around him, and only the sea remains stuck to
itself. And he doesn't know, they say. Henkin took down the mezuzah on
the second day of the Six-Day War, when the Chief Rabbi said that the
Israel Defense Forces won because of the will of God. Hasha Masha
thinks: Why did fate connect two such different people as Menahem and
his father? Menahem was impetuous, friendly, loved the sea, didn't believe
especially, didn't not believe, tied cats' tails, smoked in shelters, a simple
boy, I loved him, but Henkin needs a hero and a poet.
He searches for his son on Ben-Yehuda Street as if Menahem is no more
on Shenkin Street than on Ben-Yehuda Street. The Committee of Bereaved
Parents, what a feast they make there with the plastic vegetables. What does
Jordana who loves my son want from me? What an insane nation ...
Noga understands, knows, and only he, Obadiah, sets the watches of
those miserable merchants. Your devotion, Noga, is a noble trouble. I understand, know that you stopped loving Menahem and stayed with us, I don't
bear a grudge against you, but to love you for that I can't and you know
that. Let Henkin think what he wants, ponders Hasha Masha.
Years later, Hasha Masha will write to Renate:
My dear,
You asked how those years passed. They passed. I sat and
waited. For what? For nothing. Noga wrote Menahem a letter
telling him she had stopped loving him. He was killed before he
got the letter. She stayed with us. She rejected suitors out of
hand. Men don't understand death, Renate.