I BUMPED INTO MOISHE.
“What are you looking at me like that for?” said Moishe.
“This is a filthy war,” I said to him in a choked voice.
“Dahilak, please,” said Moishe. “So what do you want?”
And there was something I really did want. I had something I wanted to say. I just didn’t know how to say anything that would be practical wisdom rather than merely emotion. Somehow I had to shake him. Quickly and immediately I had to bring him face-to-face with the seriousness of the situation.
Instead of which Moishe pushed his cap back away from his forehead, like someone exhausted from too much work, like a man talking to his friend, scrabbling in his pockets after cigarettes and matches and trying to clothe in words something that had just occurred to him, and answered me:
“Just you listen to what I’m saying.” Moishe’s eyes sought mine as he spoke. “Immigrants of ours will come to this Khirbet what’s-its-name, you hear me, and they’ll take this land and work it and it’ll be beautiful here!”
Of course. Absolutely. Why hadn’t I realized it from the outset? Our very own Khirbet Khizeh. Questions of housing, and problems of absorption. And hooray, we’d house and absorb—and how! We’d open a cooperative store, establish a school, maybe even a synagogue. There would be political parties here. They’d debate all sorts of things. They would plow fields, and sow, and reap, and do great things. Long live Hebrew Khizeh! Who, then, would ever imagine that once there had been some Khirbet Khizeh that we emptied out and took for ourselves. We came, we shot, we burned; we blew up, expelled, drove out, and sent into exile.
What in God’s name were we doing in this place!
My eyes darted to and fro and couldn’t fix on anything. Behind me the village was already beginning to fall silent, its houses gathered on the slope of the hill, bounded here and there with treetops, from which the sun, behind them, forged silent shadows, which were sunk in contemplation, knowing much more than we did and surveying the silence of the village, that same silence which, more and more, was conspiring to create an atmosphere of its own, a realization of abandonment, an oppressive grief of separation, of an empty home, a deserted shore, wave upon wave, and a bare horizon. And that same strange silence as though of a corpse. And why not? It was nothing. A single day of discomfort and then our people would strike root here for many years. Like a tree planted by streams of water. Yes. On the other hand, what of the wicked … But they were already there on the trucks, and soon they’d be nothing more than a page that had been finished and turned. Certainly, wasn’t it our right? Hadn’t we conquered it today?
I felt that I was on the verge of slipping. I managed to pull myself together. My guts cried out. Colonizers, they shouted. Lies, my guts shouted. Khirbet Khizeh is not ours. The Spandau gun never gave us any rights. Oh, my guts screamed. What hadn’t they told us about refugees. Everything, everything was for the refugees, their welfare, their rescue … our refugees, naturally. Those we were driving out—that was a totally different matter. Wait. Two thousand years of exile. The whole story. Jews being killed. Europe. We were the masters now.
The people who would live in this village—wouldn’t the walls cry out in their ears? Those sights, screams that were screamed and that were not screamed, the confused innocence of dazed sheep, the submissiveness of the weak, and their heroism, that unique heroism of the weak who didn’t know what to do and were unable to do anything, the silenced weak—would the new settlers not sense that the air here was heavy with shades, voices, and stares?
I wanted to do something. I knew I wouldn’t cry out. Why the devil was I the only one here who was getting excited? From what clay was I formed? This time I’d become entangled. There was something in me that wanted to rebel, something destructive, heretical, something that felt like cursing everything. Who could I speak to? Who would listen? They would just laugh at me. I felt a terrifying collapse inside me. I had a single, set idea, like a hammered nail, that I could never be reconciled to anything, so long as the tears of a weeping child still glistened as he walked along with his mother, who furiously fought back her soundless tears, on his way into exile, bearing with him a roar of injustice and such a scream that—it was impossible that no one in the world would gather that scream in when the moment came—and then I said to Moishe: “We have no right, Moishe, to kick them out of here!” I didn’t want my voice to tremble.
And Moishe said to me: “You’re starting with that again!”
And I realized that nothing would come of it.
It seemed such a shame, such a crying shame.
The first transport had already moved off without my noticing and was climbing the big dirt track. (If only I could go from one to the next and whisper to them, come back, come back tonight, we’re leaving here tonight and the village will be empty. Come back! Don’t leave the village empty!) At once the second transport moved off too, the one with the women, who decorated the truck with the blue of their dresses and the white of their headscarves, and a single wail rose aloft, and was inserted into the sobbing of the heavy truck that grated and grabbed its way in the wet sand. (And the blind men would surely be forgotten here by the roadside.) It was the afternoon. Against the tranquillity of the sky leapt the anger of the wind that darkened the day and foretold new rain, tomorrow or the day after. Here and there in the village there rose a trail of white smoke from damp materials that refused to burn, and refused to go out, and would go on smoking like this, half-burning, for a few days, until suddenly a wall or roof would collapse. A cow bellowed somewhere.
When they reached their place of exile night would already have fallen. Their clothing would be their only bedding. Fine. What could be done? The third truck began to rumble. Had some astrologer already seen in the conjuncture of the stars in the sky over the village or in some horoscope how things would turn out here? And what indifference there was in us, as if we had never been anything but peddlers of exile, and our hearts had coarsened in the process. But this was not the point either.
And how does it end?
The valley was calm. Somebody started talking about supper. Far away on the dirt track, close to what appeared to be its end, a distant, darkening, swaying truck, in the manner of heavy trucks laden with fruit or produce or something, was gradually being swallowed up. Tomorrow, both painful humiliation and helpless rage would turn into a kind of casual irritation, shameful but fading fast. Everything was suddenly so open. So big, so very big. And we had all become so small and insignificant. Soon a time would arise in the world when it would be good to come home from work, to return exhausted, to meet someone, or walk alone, to walk saying nothing. All around silence was falling, and very soon it would close upon the last circle. And when silence had closed in on everything and no man disturbed the stillness, which yearned noiselessly for what was beyond silence—then God would come forth and descend to roam the valley, and see whether all was according to the cry that had reached him.
May 1949