When a phrase grows trite it is, I suppose, usual enough that the fact behind the phrase should lose some of its reality. It is impossible for me not to feel for the Athenian who voted against Aristides because he tired of hearing him called “Aristides the Just.” I knew that the Israeli pioneers had drained swamps, had planted trees in the desert; I knew how wonderful it was, but I had simply heard it too often. I knew also, very well, the realities and difficulties of the “Ingathering of the Exiles” and the Israel melting pot. The return of a million Jews from the Diaspora is one of the wonders of history, truly a great thing, something marvelously real. But it is possible to tire of being so close, constantly, to reality. Although I have always been a heavy reader, in Israel I read more than ever, to escape reality; like my ancestors in the desert, I began to tire of all that manna, and I tried to recapture from books the taste of the fish, the leeks, the cucumbers, and the melons.
My research was interrupted by a request that I leave Haifa and proceed to Jaffa. There, near the old port where the prophet Jonah began his famous voyage (the significance of which is commonly lost in arid arguments over the dietetic capacities of whales), a man named Zvi, whose face I have forgotten, explained my assignment to me.
Near to the ruins of the ancient city of Ascalon were the ruins of the modem village of Jora. At hand to Jora was a non-ruined barracks of British build, and here the Israeli government intended to establish a lighthouse. A group of men were already living there to guard the place and I was now being sent to care for their health. I had found, to my surprise, that my three years in the U.S. Navy Hospital Corps impressed the Israelis far more than it impressed me.
“There are no doctors in the entire area,” Zvi said, with much more enthusiasm than I could feel the statement warranted. “The District Medical Officer pro-tem is a pharmacist, and he is five kilometers away.”
I reminded him that I had been only a Pharmacist’s Mate.
“Never mind,” Zvi said serenely.
The Israelis were always saying “Never mind.” It was all the English many of them had, and as they continued to say it in answer to my comments, requests, or complaints, I soon learned not to mind. Life can be simpler than most of us realize.
“Never mind,” Zvi said. “You leave in one hour.”
I objected. I said that I had things to get.
“What things? Here is your medical chest. It is from Burroughs, Wellcome Company—a British firm—very good chest. Sign, please, this chitty.”
I recognized the voice of the ex-British army sergeant-major. I signed, not caring to tread on the thin ice of “please.”
“Books,” I said, signing. “I must have time to get some books.” Jora, as far I knew, was in effect as remote as Point Barrow. My Hebrew was not good enough for diversional reading. I would sooner have gone without the chest than without English books. My “medical” experience in Israel had convinced me that “Never mind” could substitute for nine-tenths of the local pharmacopoeia, and that Rish-le-Zion brandy did for the remaining tenth; but for reading matter there was no proxy. I tried to explain this.
“There are books already in Jora,” said Zvi, “if you will wish to read them. British books. But there is such a beautiful beach there, also fishing, and the Commandant has a shotgun and perhaps will take you hunting for doves. If you are interested in antiquities, there is Ascalon. Many ruins and remains. But books?” He smiled, shrugged. “The British left us there an entire library with the barracks. They are such bahstards,” he said, fondly, “but at the same time—I must say it—gentlemen. Not only books and barracks they left us, but ports, ships, police stations. How many, many times I have been in those police stations in the old Haganah days! Good beatings they gave me, too. But—if we had had here the French, or the Russians, or even (if you will excuse me) the Americans, I do not know if we would have had so soon our own country and our own police in those stations, with the policemen’s wives hanging out the wash to dry in the courtyards.”
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Zvi then took me and introduced me to the man in charge of the lighthouse detail, a stocky, blue-eyed, fortyish man with grizzled hair: his name was Zvi, too. It is a very common name among Israeli men. So is Ari, Uzi, Uri, Ze’ev; these brisk syllables hold their own despite a fashion for more luxuriant Hebrew names: Avimelech, Yehoyakim, Elchanan. This Zvi looked at his watch and asked if the “chovesh” was ready. Chovesh is, literally, bandager, but English-speaking Israelis generally translate it as dresser or dispenser. I was not so much ready as resigned to leaving unready, so I shook hands with him and followed him into the street.
There was a truck there and attached to it was the light; I realized clearly for the first time that Jora or Ascalon was not going to be the scene of any Captain January type of living. A military anti-aircraft searchlight was what it was, of the kind which nightly pierce the Los Angeles sky, giving notice that a new delicatessen or bowling alley has been opened. The truck, as usual, was overloaded (all Israeli vehicles in the public service were overloaded, and private cars venturing outside the cities with empty seats were apt in those days to be stoned if they refused hitch-hikers), and we were unable to pick up any of the khaki-clad trampistim clustered at every crossroad. Now and then Zvi would order a halt to inspect the rope coupling of the light. His grunts of “Reg’echad!” (One minute) and “Sah!” (Go) punctuated the bumpy trip south.
We entered and left Majdal (anciently Migdal Gad) through gates guarded by military. The paved road gave way to sand, and the abandoned plantations to dunes. The men looked about with more alertness and loaded their weapons.
“Can you use a Czech rifle?” (Years later, when Slansky’s neck was cracked upon the garrote, I remembered those Czech rifles.) I told Zvi I couldn’t. I also admitted that I could not use a British rifle either, or a Sten gun or a Bren. I said I thought I might still remember how to use the type of carbine with which corpsmen serving in the Marines were supplied during the Japanese War. Zvi sighed.
“Well, you cannot go unarmed around here,” he said. “Last week three men were killed. Two Jews and an Arab. One of our Arabs, I mean.”
The truck lurched over another dune and we saw the barracks on the crest of the seashore—“the tideless, dolorous, midland sea”—I felt just like those words then. At some distance to the right and left were small Arab houses, their doors and narrow windows gaping emptily. A dory lay on its side on the strand, waves breaking over it. The barracks itself was a grim, unpainted building. A huge maze of barbed wire was dragged aside just enough to let the truck enter the yard. I unloaded my gear and went inside to look around. On the ground floor was an office and a vast squad room in which were set up a scant dozen wooden trestle beds with thin mattresses. At the back was another room, with an iron bedstead and a chest of drawers. High overhead was a window with a broken pane. This was both my sleeping quarters and the marpeah, or sick bay. I suppose it may have been a non-coms’ room in British days. Upstairs, besides a few rooms of nondescript character and indeterminate function, was a kitchen and mess hall, and a recreation room with a warped ping-pong table. There was also an armory and a washroom. An iron ladder led to the flat roof. The brightest color in the place was a dirty gray. Dispirited, I waited for a chance to ask about the library; meanwhile supper was cried by the Iraqi cook, a sallow, thin man with the clever face of a not-so-sad cynic who knows when to keep his mouth shut. We all went in.
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It was, now I think of it, a curious sup per. Stale bread, pickled olives the color of gunmetal, chunks of halvah, margarine (pale, despite there being no tax on colored—“Never mind”), marmalade, and porridge. All of these were also to appear for breakfast and dinner, often without the removal of what seemed the same dead flies; for dinner we would have soup as well, and fried corned beef hash loaf, a sort of kosher Spam, made in Winnipeg. Some fresh meat had come down from Jaffa, but as there was still a little ice left, the cook intended to save it for another day. There was a chipped black enamel kumkum of weak tea and a chipped white enamel one of—of—
“What is this?” I asked.
“Coffee surrogate,” said Zvi, pouring himself a mug. “Sometimes there is real coffee. Maybe tomorrow. Never mind.”
I never learned what the stuff was made of, but it was sweet, and sugar is scarce in Israel (the taste of saccharine clung to my tongue for weeks after I left), so I drank it.
The screens were punctured with bullet holes, and the flies buzzed around unmolested.
“Chovesh, you’re from America?” asked a plump, blond Teutonic type. “Are they beating the Jews in the streets of America now?” His name was Bustie; next to him was a redhead called Gingie. There was a Moroccan by the name of Abénshabbát whose eyes did not seem to focus, and who spent most of his time caring for his weapon. There was Menahem, an Irish-looking Turk of Judeo-Spanish descent; Abraham, an Armenian-looking Bulgar of the same stock; Anselm, a thin, preoccupied Algerian; a pock-marked Kurd; a sturdy Rumanian in his thirties (most of the men were in their teens); a Pole whose wife kept a tiny grocery in Jaffa for him while he was away; and a slender, tall sabra, or native son, with a long mustache which he constantly caressed. There were others. I can’t remember them.
But Bustie—when I told him that Jews were not being beaten in the streets in America on any large or systematic scale, I knew the next question would be: “Then why have you come here?” and I was tired of explaining—or trying to explain—so merely shrugged. As expected, also: Did I know Moysha the Pole’s uncle in Biookleen? The Turk’s cousin in Caracas, Venezuela? And: Yes, I’d been in Holavúd; no, I knew no movie stars. Yes, I’d seen—it seemed a thousand years ago—the film Tarzan, Baal Ha-Jungle, currently playing at the Mograbhi, Tel Aviv’s leading theater of kol-noah, or moving voice. Amid the constant crackle of pumpkin seeds the Israelis had sat, limp with pleasure, their eyes flickering from the main screen to the tiny side screen where the equivalent of “Me Tarzan” appeared in Hebrew script: thus they emancipated themselves from the Talmudic superstitions of their elders.
As the jam was being passed Abénshabbát uttered a wild and fearful shriek and fired his rifle out the window.
“Nal” he said, in a tone of satisfaction, and “Riba?” in a tone of inquiry. Someone passed him the jam. Anselm clicked his tongue once, otherwise no one paid any attention.
“In America,” Moysha asked, “how much does a workingman get for ‘black labor’ for a day, and what does a kilo of meat cost?”
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No one was ever sick the entire time I was there. I never had a single request for medications. Each month I drew on Jaffa for a large bottle of brandy; the absence of any pharmaceutical calls on it left me free to drink it slowly and moodily and congratulate myself that the times were past when I was obliged to use brandy for an external antiseptic after the peroxide ran out. As dust gathered on the supply chest, time gathered on my hands. I asked for the library. Zvi asked the sabra, his second-in-command. The sabra meditated. He consulted the Bulgar, who shrugged and murmured something.
“You know,” Zvi said, apologetically, “we have not yet any big factory for lavatory paper in Eretz Yisraël.”
“The men,” explained the sabra, “do not read English.”
Two fly leaves and half a title page was all that remained of the library. But one day the sabra, in a state of high excitement, brought me a book.
“Where did you get it?” I asked, after thanking him.
“Never mind.”
I unwrapped it from an Arab-language picture paper. It was a copy of Helpful Farm Hints For Every Day, published in Milwaukee in 1919. I read it through in twenty minutes, then read it again. And again. How to make headcheese. How to sharpen plow-points. How to spay sows. Two days later the sabra said, “When you have finished that book, I will get you another.”
“But where are the books?”
“Never mind.”
“I am finished with that one, anyway.”
“So soon?” But he gave me the other, and said he really had no more. The second one was a Penguin edition of Prince Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. I rationed myself: one chapter in the morning, one in the afternoon, one at night. Kropotkin wrote about societies, human, animal, insect; those which practiced mutual aid, those which—being “in decay”—did not. Most non-human species were in the first class. The only item I can recall about the second grouping was that certain kinds of falcons stole from one another.
“No one,” he wrote, “has ever seen a dung beetle quarreling with his fellow over the balls of dung which they gather.” I was not prepared to dispute the statement. I got the point.
Outdoor life? Zvi-of-Jaffa had mentioned hunting and fishing. Zvi-of-Jora did, indeed, take doves with his shotgun. While I did not engage in any spirit-wrestlings with him about this, the fact is I do not hunt. I have nothing against doves, and cannot eat them unless they have been killed according to religious law, and a shotgun is not a valid means to this end. Fishing. There was no fishing tackle around the place, yet I would sometimes see the sabra come from the beach with a clutch of fish dangling on a stick. Detonation charges, while illegal, were effective. One day he went to sell his catch in Majdal and I invited myself along. We drove in the jeep (“ha-jip”) with Abénshabbát and Moysha. There was some concern about the back axle (“ha-beck-ex‘”), but off we went anyway.
“Listen,” I said, as we passed an Arab doing something or other in a wet field with a camel, “do you suppose I could find some English books in Majdal?”
The sabra shrugged. Majdal was a town of one-story buildings made of dirty stone. The last big thing that had happened to it was its occupation by Mehemet Ali. It had, at the time of my visit, about 1,500 Arabs and perhaps half that many Jews. The Jews worked in the nearby abandoned plantations, trying to rehabilitate them. The remaining Arabs were mostly weavers. I could see them at their looms, the workshops open to the hot, dusty streets, or coming from the dye yards—its huge wooden gates half ajar—with skeins of brilliant cotton thread in their hands. A few fellaheen rode to or from the fields with wooden implements on their shoulders. While the sabra went to sell his fish and Moysha looked around for some apricots to buy for his grocery, I sat down for a cup of coffee.
The Arab boiled it up in the usual tiny copper pot (by this time I had learned that smuggled coffee and sugar were easily available here because of the nearby border), and his assistant—aged about eight, I would guess—got out the tiny china cup and the beaten-brass lid and the tall tumbler of water and the tray and the crackers or “bisqooeet.” I gazed around the market place. Some old men in baggy pantaloons came out of the mosque, followed by the most memorable figure I ever saw in Majdal. He was a huge Negro, as black as only few are, in a purple robe and the green turban and henna-red beard of the hadji; and he fingered his beads and muttered to himself in a voice like distance-muted thunder, his whole person breathing power.
The sabra sold his fish and bought green almonds and roasting ears and cigarettes. Moysha had gotten two crates of apricots for the little grocery in Jaffa.
“The books? The English books?”
We asked all through town and the answer was always the same: the single click of the tongue which is the Arab negative. (Israeli joke: Husband—“Was that Arab here after I warned you?” Wife—“Tsk!”)
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So I went back to the lighthouse where the light didn’t work (although it was toiled over the whole day every day), to the sick bay where no one was ever sick. I tried sleeping, but the flies were fierce, they bit, they stung. At night, I discovered, there were mosquitoes.
I began to polish two old bronze coins I’d found in the ruins. I went swimming. The days passed. Elsewhere in the land of Israel cities were springing up overnight; immigrants from China and Peru and eighty or ninety other countries were being deloused, indoctrinated, and disillusioned; a government decree regulating the shape of bread was discovered to have political overtones and round-loaf partisans battled long-loaf partisans and raided opposition bakeries; tourists went on conducted tours and returned, pronouncing everything ideal; trees were planted and swamps drained; the Prime Minister urged everyone to take as guides the books of Ezra and Nehemiah—and when “religious zealots” did so, rather literally, he denounced them with rage; factories were erected and began not only to produce but to export; there was a shortage of small change, and the bus cooperatives printed their own fractional currency which they gave out as change but declined to accept for fares; a Frenk murdered and disemboweled his aunt; two new Messiahs appeared in Jerusalem and announced conflicting revelations; everywhere, in short, things were happening—except at the Ascalon light.
One day at the table the sabra announced that there was a grapevine report from Gaza: a reward of £125 had been put upon Achmet’s head. Achmet was a little swarthy Arab with a shifty grinning mouth studded with gold teeth.
“What has Achmet done?” I asked. The men laughed without much amusement.
“He wants to kill everybody,” the sabra said. “He used to go on patrol against marauders and infiltrators from Gaza; but now the Military Governor doesn’t let him, because he kills them all.”
A squabble broke out between Menahem and the Rumanian. Menahem’s Hebrew grew too rapid, not only for me to follow, but for himself; he broke into Judeo-Spanish.
“Ah, Malta yok!” said the Rumanian.
At this, to me, mysterious word, the others laughed, this time lightheartedly. Menahem flushed a bit. I asked for an explanation. The story—said the sabra—was an old, old one, and indeed it must have been. During the days of Turkish imperialism an Ottoman admiral was sent out with a great fleet to invest the island of Malta. The admiral had been appointed for qualities other than proficiency in navigation, and he reappeared after a long absence with no sign of battle joined. To inquiries about Malta he had shrugged and answered, simply, “Malta yok—Malta isn’t there.” Menahem, as the only Turk, had inherited this crack.
“Malta yok,” repeated the Rumanian, snickering.
“Do you know the Haifa bus that goes to Khalissa, where the Rumanians live?” Menahem asked me. I did, I had often taken it to visit a beloved friend.
“Number zero?” I asked, innocently.
“And why is it zero? Because it had a number once, but the Rumanians are all thieves, and they stole it.”
The Rumanian had a mug in his hand and he struck Menahem with it above the ear. In another moment Zvi had knocked him down. I expected a riot to break out, but the Rumanian simply put his hand to lip, smeared away a tiny drop of blood, and got up and left. I followed him and said that I would put some ice on it. The cook, with his eternal semi-smile, said there was no ice, and the Rumanian growled that he needed no help. I went back to the table where Zvi was cautioning the men against insulting one another.
“Yehudim Anachnu—we are Jews,” he ended. But afterwards he said to me that he was beginning to have doubts about “the Ingathering of the Exile.”
“How hard we fought, how much we suffered, for this one principle, and are they appreciative? Are they willing to work as we worked? Ah, these Orientals.”
“But are the Rumanians, then, Orientals?”
“Of course they are!” He was more excited than I had ever before seen him. “Were you ever in Bucharest? No? Then you can’t realize. Listen, in every city there is vice, but in Bucharest one saw Asiatic vice, not European. It was like Port Said. Tell me, why do the American Jews not come? Ah, you shrug. You are too comfortable there, you have a w.c. in every flat. Wait! In Germany the Jews were comfortable, too.” And he smiled that grim smile with which Israelis indicate that they hourly expect news of a pogrom in Indianapolis or Omaha, and would be half-gratified to hear it.
“At least we fix our searchlights there,” I said.
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We parted without the cordiality that had always been between us. I tried to read Kropotkin. He was talking about the migration of the reindeer; I cannot remember details, but apparently the manner in which reindeers crossed rivers was a bright example of Mutual Aid and a rebuke to mankind. A timid knock on the door, and Anselm came in.
“Chovesh, you are not an Ashkenazi?” he asked. I should have liked to discuss with him the theory that the Biblical “Ashkenaz,” which later Jewish geographers located east of the Rhine and north of the Danube, was the same as the classical “Scythia,” but de-tided that Anselm was not the man for the subject. I said, Oh, but I was an Ashkenazi. “Ah, since you are of French expression, as we North African Jews are, I thought. . . .” The realization that he had very probably learned his French in school just as I did allowed me to swallow the compliment. He sighed. “Tell me, why do the Ashkenazim always mistreat the Sephardim?” I said I didn’t think they did, particularly. “What? But look at how the Rumanian gave poor Menahem such a blow!” I pointed out that Zvi, who had promptly defended Menahem by striking an even stronger blow, was an Ashkenazi too; but he refused comfort. The Kurd thrust in his head, murmured an apology, and withdrew. Anselm moved closer to me.
“I am afraid of that one,” he whispered. “They are savages, these Kurds; they carry knives, they practice witchcraft. Do you know Algiers, my friend? Ah, what you have missed! A city, Algiers! Well civilized and very beautiful.”
“The Kurds,” I said, “are they not also Sephardim?”
He got up and looked at me with obvious hurt. “So even you, even you,” he said. He left. After a while I finished the chapter and went for some water. On the steps was Moysha, who invited me, in his soft, drawling Yiddish, to sit for a while.
“How much does a watch cost in America?” he asked. “What is the price of a kilo of potatoes? Of oranges? Why do you always say you don’t know? If you don’t want to tell me, say so. Listen. You know I had a watch? A Swiss watch that cost me five English pounds. Do you know how hard I worked for it? A thief here took it. Some day I’ll find who, I’ll kill him. Zvi says I lost it. A laughter. A watch loses itself? And how is it Zvi always knows the time and yet he says he has no watch? He’s a Russian, and I don’t trust him. Fonya Goniff, we call the Russ. Cook them sweet, cook them sour: thieves.”
After some more of this (the government was bent on destroying the small merchants, the Americans had hearts like stone) he withdrew. I heard a sound from above and decided to climb the ladder to the roof. There I found the sabra smoking a cigarette (not the free issue, which tasted like the scrapings from a refinery furnace, but the most expensive local brand, bought with his fish money) and gazing out towards Majdal. Somewhere a fire burned and the smell of wood smoke drifted pungently past us and out to sea. In the plantations the jackals yelped and howled.
“What was Moysha saying?” he asked.
“Couldn’t you hear?”
“I can’t speak Yiddish,” he said, scornfully. “The only foreign languages I know are English and Arabic. He was complaining about me, wasn’t he? Ah, I know. Yes, he was. They are all the same, all these foreign-born, they are all jealous of us, the sabras, because we are the only ones who are free of the ghetto and the taint of the Exile—” and he went on, piling up his complaints. “. . . and they can’t even take orders properly,” he concluded, curling up his lip beneath the long mustache, and he leaned over the parapet and spat in the direction of the ravening jackals—the “foxes” of the King James Bible, which Samson had his cruel sport with, before the mill rasped and the temple fell in nearby Gaza.
“Listen,” he said, wiping the wings of his mustache; “we’ve got to get rid of all these sickly European ways that have corrupted this country since the days of the Greeks. Oh, yes, even the Arab is not clean; you know that? Either he squats in his own filth and won’t brush away the flies that eat his very eyes, or else he puts perfumed pomade on his hair and starts to talk French.”
At the far end of the roof two men climbed off the ladder and sat down, talking in low tones to one another in German. I recognized Bustie and Gingie.
“I know this,” Bustie was saying. “I came as soon as I heard the cook call, and when I got there everybody was already sitting down and there was no more meat in the serving bowl, only potatoes. And your plate had a piece of meat on it and you were chewing and I could see by the way you were chewing that it was meat and not potatoes: whose meat could it have been, if not mine? What a low, rotten, thieving trick! How often do we get meat?”
“It’s not so, there wasn’t enough meat to go around. Never mind what the cook says. I think he sells the meat to the Arabs, anyway.”
“Ah, this damned country. In Vienna, in the old days, who would fight about a piece of meat?”
The ululation of the jackals grew louder, then died away. I started to leave.
“We must return to the ways of the ancient Canaanim,” the sabra was saying. “Then we were really men: before the priests and the prophets corrupted us with their piety.”
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Breakfast the next morning was spent in silence broken only by Abénshabbát, who grunted and muttered to himself. Afterwards I tried to read more of Kropotkin, but the fierceness of the flies drove me out again, and I walked along the road. My eyes, cast down, focussed on the sandy ground. A troupe of insects passed along whose carapaces wore an odd design in red and black, like a Maori or Papuan ceremonial mask; and, even more baroque, they were joined in pairs, stern to stern, one scrabbling backward as the other went forward. Were we like that? was my thought. But if so, which of us were leading, and which being led? Passing back and forth, much larger than the Siamse twins, were glossy black insects. Here and there along the way, camels had left heaps of dung (dropped with a contemptuous lift of the tail, a lascivious cant of the hips, and an arrogant sway of the neck), quickly dried by the sun. Each heap was a center of the great black beetles. With their forelegs they rolled tiny balls of the strawy droppings, and these they pushed in front of them, rolled along as they walked more or less erect, until they disappeared past the margin of the road.
Camels came in frequent file, bearing sea sand from the beach, led by Arabs; the zif-zif was transferred to Jewish trucks and taken away for use in building. There seemed to be a supply of dung ample for all, but as I watched, I saw one beetle approach another and attempt to wrest its cargo from it. The first beetle at once attacked, flipping the second on its back; it struggled, righted itself, returned to the assault, only to be once more capsized. Twice again this was repeated, until finally the marauder gave up and went away. I cheered the victor, who paid no attention, but rolled his ball away.
Then I remembered Kropotkin, and I wondered. Could it be that the European dung beetle, which never “disputed possession,” had better social habits than the Israeli dung beetle? I doubted this. It seemed to me that the earnest Prince had created an idealized conception after his own image, that the Coöperative Dung Beetle was to him what the Noble Savage was to Rousseau.
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For some reason I felt much better. I looked about me. The sun had never seemed so brilliant, the scent of the sea so fresh and pure. The Arabs passing with their camels smiled and said, “Marhabaa” The Jews, waiting for the zif-zif, spat on their hands and picked up their shovels, too busy—for a wonder—to go through the usual catechistic greeting (Peace be upon you. From whence comes a Jew? What are you doing here? Married? Parents living? What does your father do? etc.). From the barracks, just over the next dune, I heard the voice of singing, of men singing. Although the words did not carry, the tune did, and I recognized it as set to a verse from the Song of Songs: “Return, return, O Shulamite,” they sang. I found them squatting in a semicircle in the yard. In between verses they ate apricots and played at seeing who could send the wet pits the farthest by squeezing them between thumb and forefinger. The Rumanian, his lip a bit swollen, had just beaten Zvi, and they were laughing together.
“We are going back to Jaffa,” they told me. “Tomorrow. All of us. Ascalon, goodbye!”
I gaped. For a moment I just stood there. Then I thought of Jaffa, of the tall clock-tower, of King George Boulevard, of cold beer and hot fellafel, of crowds of people, and fresh-baked bread, and synagogues. I thought of Tel Aviv, adjacent, of the Brooklyn Ice Cream Bar, and many book stores; of the dark and beautiful women in the Hatikvah quarter, of the blind Afghan or Pakistani who played deep music on a strange instrument in Allenby Street. Up and down the people went, to and fro: sabras and immigrants, Sephardim and Ashkenazim, unbelievers and faithful, “young men and maidens, elders and striplings.” Then I grew a bit angry.
“All this time,” I said; “all this effort, all these men: for what? To guard a light which never worked.”
They laughed. Zvi smiled at me. He handed over an apricot.
“Never mind,” he said.
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