Our daily schedule begins with exercise and running. Breakfast at seven. Tsila, our cook, prepares the meals with the help of older people who are not fighters. The morning menu: semolina or corn porridge, a slice of bread with jam, coffee or tea. Our menu is modest yet filling.
At eight o’clock we go out to train. Kamil insists on a neat appearance and clean weapons. It wasn’t easy to get the first rifles. We now have ten rifles, twelve pistols, and grenades. These weapons are insufficient for directly confronting hostile patrols, so we lie in ambush and sometimes manage to surprise them. A while ago we surprised a patrol. Two of them were killed, and the rest ran away, leaving behind six rifles and many cartridges. Our arsenal thus grew all at once, and in honor of the victory and the booty, we celebrated that night.
Once or sometimes twice a week we raid the houses of farmers. Truth be told, this is not pleasant work. In the summer we would raid fields and orchards and bring fruits and vegetables to the base. But in this season the fields are barren and gray. There is nothing to be found. With no alternative, we raid houses, plunder the food and clothing, and look forward to days when more fighters will join us and we can raid military camps.
Meanwhile, our shared lives, the drills and the raids, have forged us into a unit. If not for Kamil, who insists on sharp performance, our days would slip into blind routine. Kamil is not religious in the common meaning of the word but an enthusiast in every sense: sometimes it’s a plant or flower that inspires him, sometimes a word. When Kamil reads from the Book of Psalms, it gives you goose bumps. His orders are simple and clear, but at times he utters a rhythmic sentence that seems transmitted from the distant past.
Kamil wanted to organize evenings of study, but it’s hard to do so without texts. For years books were our mainstay, and suddenly we were cut off from them. It was odd how we got accustomed, in so short a time, to living without them. Sometimes, mostly in late afternoon, I imagine that I have a book in my hands. I look around and remember that at this hour I would hold a book and read. I read Crime and Punishment before it was assigned for school. Its sentences swept me away like rushing waters. Now we lived without books and notebooks, pencils and pens, as if stripped of our insides. If not for one small volume of psalms, brought by one fighter, we would have no physical claim on a world we lived in yesterday.
Books, books, where are they? As if they never were, I sometimes hear, not a lone voice but a collective moan arising from within. Books, in truth, are what separate our lives then from our lives now. One of the fighters, a sensitive young man, delivered his opinion with subtle, tight-lipped irony: “We have returned to nature. In two or three months we’ll be like cavemen. We won’t talk; we’ll howl, laugh, and bark, and maybe that’s better.”
Kamil heard this and reacted immediately. “We have not come here for that. We will maintain our humanity even here, and we will not let evil deface us. The study evenings will take place at first without texts, but don’t worry; we will find books somehow.”