The Legacy (45 page)

“There's more outside,” the old man told him. “Now Dr. Leventhal wants to see you.”

There were six of them gathered in the hallway with Leventhal and a dirt-grimed, weary Israeli soldier. Leventhal himself appeared ready to drop from fatigue, his gown soaked with blood. He wasted no time. “You're all foreign students,” he said, “and you're all volunteers. We have enough nurses here now and we don't need you, but over on the Jordan side, where our troops have been fighting, the casualties among the medics are very heavy. We need medics. No pressure. Will any of you go?”

A moment's hesitation, then one by one, they nodded.

“Good. Your kits are made up. Pick them up on the way out. Don't be heroes and don't push. You follow the fighting, behind it. You have morphine and dressings. Deal with pain and bleeding. God bless you.”

Then he left them, and the soldier motioned for them to follow him. Sam was still confused; he felt that his mind was not keeping pace with his actions. He had volunteered for something for which he had no training and no inclination, and when he asked himself for an explanation there was none forthcoming. Two of the old men appeared with trays of cake, and he found himself stuffing sweet pastry into his mouth. He had to urinate desperately. “How about the bathroom?” he asked the soldier. The others joined in his request.

“Go ahead, kids. You'll wet your pants anyway, but go ahead.”

Afterwards, outside, they were given their kits and steel helmets with medic markings. Sam's was too tight. Then they climbed into an ambulance. As the ambulance pulled away, a shell exploded on the spot where it had stood. The ambulance drove slowly, without lights, for about ten minutes, and then it stopped, and they were told to get out. Even as they left the ambulance, wounded were moved into it. There was a curtain of sound all around them now, shells exploding, heavy machine-gun and small-arms fire.

“Follow me and stay close,” the soldier told them.

He led them into the darkness. Vaguely, Sam could make out the gap in the barrier that had separated the two sections of Jerusalem, the piles of barbed wire, the earth churned by the explosion of the bangalores that had been used to break the barrier, pieces of concrete tossed here and there. The soldier who led them carried a flashlight that he used occasionally, and they could see other flashlights. Stretcher-bearers passed them in the opposite direction. “Trench!” the soldier called out, lighting it for them to leap across. There were two bodies at the bottom of the trench. “Jordanians,” the soldier said. There was a high-pitched scream, familiar now. “Hit the dirt!” the soldier shouted. They flung themselves down and the shell passed overhead and exploded behind them. Sam's helmet fell off and rolled away. He tried to find it. “Keep going!” the soldier snapped.

Ahead of them, half a dozen flashlights and electric lanterns wove a crazy pattern, and as they approached, Sam realized that this was the casualty clearing station, a flat piece of ground where perhaps forty men lay, a few on stretchers, most of them on the bare ground. From the sound of gunfire, he guessed that the fighting was not much more than a few hundred yards away. A bloodstained man approached them, a doctor. Not even the wounded were that bloody.

“Medics,” the soldier told him. “Foreign students.”

“Thank you.” The soldier disappeared, and the doctor said to them, “We tirage in three ways, superficial there —” pointing to one cluster of the men on the ground, “serious there, and damned serious over there.” He spoke quickly. “We make mistakes. Look for vital signs and bleeding. Most of them have battlefield dressings. Check the dressings. Bandage. If they're in pain, use morphine. Do you have morphine and dressings?”

They nodded.

“There's a pile of flashlights over there with the supplies. There's no time to brief you. Just get going.”

The casualties were coming in as he spoke, men staggering, still ambulatory, clutching their wounds, men carrying others, stretcher-bearers. The three doctors and the handful of medics worked with desperate speed. Afterwards, Sam asked himself whether he had been afraid, and to that question there was no answer that made sense to him. Everything that happened was like an unending dream or nightmare, yet everything that happened was illuminated with a wild reality. He had passed into a state of euphoria. Finally and for the first time in his life, he was functioning without question or doubt or anger. It had all passed away. What made these wounds, what tore and lacerated the flesh no longer concerned him; all moral judgments, all intellectual arguments had disappeared. He was saving life; he was stopping blood; he was conquering pain. The wounded men were a part of him, as young as he was and younger, pink-cheeked, round Jewish faces, brown Jordanian faces, pain-racked, weeping, screaming in agony.

In a strangely controlled manner, Sam related; he was connected; he was untroubled by the blood, the open guts, the feces expelled from tortured bowels.

A doctor paused for a moment to watch him, praised him. “Good. You're doing well.”

“The hell with that,” he said to himself. “You don't know one damn bit what I'm feeling.”

He saw lying on the ground one of the young men who had sat in the jeep with him; the boy had a bullethole in his forehead. The boy's name was Ernesto, a Brazilian. Sam did not know how he could accept it without shouting in rage at the senselessness and stupidity of such death; yet accept it he did.

Dawn was beginning, the sky graying, a faint tint of pink in the east. There was a lull in the parade of wounded, a momentary hush in the firing, and then in the distance someone began to shout, “Medic! Medic! Medic!” The landscape changed as the light increased. Buildings became visible in the fighting area, to the north the Police School, to the south the cluster of buildings in the American colony, and still the agonizing cry, “Medic! Medic!”

A doctor touched Sam's shoulder. “We need someone out there,” pointing toward the sound. “Will you go?”

Sam checked his kit, adding supplies from the stores, morphine, bandages, antiseptic, and then he took off. He ran down a narrow road, crouching behind a broken wall as the firing suddenly picked up. The place was furrowed with trenches. He took shelter in one of them. The plea for a medic, weaker now, seemed to come from down the trench, echoing strangely from the trench walls. Sam started down the trench. He stepped over a dead Israeli paratrooper; then there were two dead Jordanians, then an Israeli with his head blown away, then another Israeli curled into a ball, clutching his stomach. Sam stopped, bent over him, and sought for vital signs. The boy was cold and dead. The plea for a medic had faded away. The trench curved, and Sam came across a Jordanian and an Israeli locked in a deadly embrace, both of them kneeling, clutching each other in death.

Then a faint cry for help came from close by, directly in front of him, and he found the wounded man he was looking for.

Half the man's leg was blown away, and somehow he had made himself a tourniquet and fastened it around his leg. Where had he found the strength to shout?

“All right now,” Sam told him. “Easy. We'll fix you up.”

The Israeli soldier, who couldn't have been much more than eighteen years old, suddenly began to scream hysterically. Sam gave him a shot of morphine, and the boy became quiet, tears replacing the screams of pain. Sam loosened the tourniquet and let the blood flow a moment, then reset the tourniquet. The boy screamed again as Sam applied antiseptic to the wound.

“Where are you?” a voice called.

Sam looked up and saw two stretcher-bearers peering over the edge of the trench. He managed somehow to lift the boy and with the help of the stretcher-bearers got him out of the trench and onto the stretcher. Then Sam stood leaning on the side of the trench as the stretcher-bearers disappeared in the morning mist. He lacked the strength or will to move.

Then he heard the crunch of a step and turned. Two Israeli soldiers were covering him with their Uzi guns.

“Medic!” he yelled. “I'm a medic!”

“Where's Zvi?”

“Who's Zvi?”

“The boy with the leg wound.”

“I gave him morphine. The stretcher-bearers took him away.”

“Was he all right?”

“He was alive.”

“Where's your unit?”

“God knows.”

“Stay with us. We need medics. Our medics are dead.”

Sam stared at them blankly.

“Wake up,
chevra.
You'll sleep later.”

They started down the trench, and after a moment, Sam followed them. What difference did it make? He had lost all sense of direction, and actually he had no unit. One place was no worse than another. They passed two dead Jordanian soldiers, and then the trench came to an end in a bunker. The bunker was a charnel house. They climbed out of the trench into the blazing light of the morning sun. The chatter of gunfire sounded from the distance. They walked down a street, a wall on one side, houses on the other. Suddenly chips flew from the wall in front of Sam, and both soldiers opened up with their Uzis. The firing from the house stopped; they ran down the street, which joined a larger road, and there they found a tank and a dozen more Israeli soldiers. The tank commander was leaning out of his hatch, and the two soldiers who had come with Sam told him about the firing from the house. The tank turned and lumbered up the street they had just left. The soldiers moved on, and Sam moved with them.

“What's this?” one of the soldiers who had joined them asked, pointing to Sam. It was a reasonable question. His clothes, his blue jeans and sneakers and sport shirt, were covered with dried blood, as were his hands and his face.

“Medic. He took care of Zvi.”

“Zvi is alive?”

“He says so.”

A soldier held out his arm. An ugly gash had been bound over with strips of his shirt. Sam removed the blood-soaked bandage, applied antiseptic, and bandaged it. Another soldier had a bullet-hole through his hand. They watched approvingly as Sam treated it.

An older man, apparently their commander, asked him who he was.

“Shmuel Cohen. I'm an American student.”

“Been at it all night?”

Sam nodded.

“Come with us. We're going to the museum. You can rest there.”

“What museum?”

“The Rockefeller Museum. This whole sector's cleared, right up to the wall of the old city.”

Sam began to laugh, almost hysterically.

“What's the joke?”

“The Rockefeller Museum,” Sam said. “The whole world's a joke.”

He opened his eyes, warm and snug in the blanket wrapped around him, a roof only two feet over his head, and from his point of view, the feet and legs of men. It took a moment to remember that he had crawled away to sleep under one of the specimen cases in the museum. Not that there had been too many places to choose from, with all the soldiers bedding down in the museum. Someone had given him a blanket. He was grateful for the blanket. Bit by bit, the parade of events fell in order in his sleep-drugged mind, being put to work in a room of the museum that had been turned into a first aid station — he existed in a world where everything and anything became an aid station — and then at last eating. What a luxury that had been, what an incredible feast! Groggy, barely able to remain on his feet, he had been steered into an improvised dining room, where the menu consisted of canned tuna fish, pita bread, and champagne. He had no idea where the food or the champagne had come from. The room was packed with dirty, unshaven Israeli soldiers who had fought through the night in the wild, bloody battle for East Jerusalem and who were exuberant in the realization that they were still alive and not only alive but victorious. Nothing Sam remembered eating had ever tasted so good. He ate and ate, washing the food down with tumblers of champagne that he learned had been liberated from one of the Jordanian hotels during the night, and then, quite drunk, stumbling through the place, he saw a pile of blankets. One was offered to him. He found his spot under the specimen case, and he fell asleep instantly.

He had no idea how long he had slept. Somewhere, he had lost a day, lost the sequence of events. He lay beneath the specimen case, listening to the voices of the men whose feet he saw, gathering from their conversation that they were Israeli archaeologists, checking and cataloguing the contents of the museum. Outside, the war must still be going on. Here, inside, it was quiet, even the voices of the archaeologists strangely muted.

He waited until they had moved on, and then he crawled out, stretched, folded his blanket, and walked through the museum until he found a heap of blankets, knapsacks, and guns. He added his blanket to the lot, convinced by now that he had been asleep for fourteen or fifteen hours. It was the morning of the following day; the museum was crowded with civilians as well as troops. Somewhere, he had lost his medical kit. Possibly he had lost his profession as well. He made his way out of the museum. Outside, in the street between the Rockefeller Museum and the walls of the Old City, Israeli troops were moving past in the direction of Herod's Gate. There was no sound of war, no gunfire, no explosion of shells.

“We've taken the Old City,” he said to himself. “We've taken all of Jerusalem.”

Even in his thoughts, it was the first time he had linked himself to what had happened here or accepted, as part of his hopes, the hopes of the people around him.

There were women in the street, serving hot coffee and pita sandwiches. “They're for the
chevra,
” a woman said.

“I'm a medic,” he told her. He still did not realize what he looked like, his clothes stiff with dried blood, his face and hands still unwashed.

The woman stared at him, then gave him coffee and a pita. Chewing the bread, drinking from the paper cup, he walked with the flow of people to Herod's Gate, through the gate, and down the narrow street that led to the Temple Mount. He had no idea where he was going, but they were all going this way, soldiers, civilians, Old Orthodox Jews in their long caftans, women, Jewish kids, Arab kids. He had never been in the Old City of Jerusalem before, the ancient city, locked away behind its high walls, forbidden to Jews on the pain of death. He stared with a tourist's curiosity at the narrow, filth-laden cross streets, the old, decaying houses, the Arab inhabitants of the Old City who watched silently as the Jewish throng poured toward the Temple Mount.