At ten minutes after two in the morning, Yonatan woke from a troubled sleep. A bloody, faceless corpse had been brought into the tractor shed on an army stretcher. It’s your father, buddy, the corps commander said, tapping Yonatan on the shoulder. He’s been hacked to death with a dagger by two-legged beasts. But my father is a sick old man, protested Yonatan, trying to talk or bargain his way out of the truth. Your father was butchered with biblical cruelty, barked the corps commander. Instead of just standing there answering back, why don’t you get off your ass and try to patch him together.
The words “biblical cruelty” struck Yonatan with a frothlike fury, as if he had been spat on in disgust. He shrank back, murmuring, okay, okay, dad, just don’t be annoyed, you know I’m doing my best. The prostrate Yolek ignored this plea. His voice rang out like a gong. You evil seed! You generation of vipers! You degenerate race of Tatars! You will counterattack and retake Sheikh Dahr this very hour regardless of losses. You’ve got to get it through your thick skulls that this is a life-and-death battle. If we lose, not only you but the entire Jewish people will die like dogs. But if they do, you boys must see to it that this time we take the whole wicked world down with us. Remember, we’re counting on you. I’m sorry to have to say this, dad, said Yonatan, but aren’t you dead? At that, the bloody, faceless corpse leaped from the stretcher and advanced on Yonatan with arms open to embrace him.
Dressed in his undershorts and a gray T-shirt, Yonatan rose with a start from the living-room couch he had been sleeping on. His head weighed a ton. He gasped for breath from all the cigarettes he had smoked. Once, in a movie, he had seen condemned men led from their cells to the scaffold in the middle of the night. Now, frozen and only half-awake, he felt almost without regret that his time too had come.
He went to the bathroom barefoot to pee and missed the bowl, wetting not only the seat but the floor around it. Idiot! he thought, what got into you to drink all that whisky and blab your head off? And how the hell did you end up sleeping like a stiff on the couch?
Through the open bedroom door, by the bathroom light, he could see Rimona asleep on her back and their young guest on the rug at her feet, curled in a fetal position, his head buried deep under a pillow. You son-of-a-bitch, you! What a fucking whorehouse! Yonatan struggled into his khaki army pants and shirt, began to fight his way into his patched work sweater, confused the sleeves, and had to fight his way out of the tangle and start all over again. He stepped out on the porch to breathe the clean night air. Tia followed him. In the wet, black hush Yonatan lit a cigarette.
Downhill, around each of the perimeter lights, shimmering circles of mist gave off a strange, sickly glow. A frog croaked in a puddle and then broke off. A barren sea breeze blew through the shadowy branches of the pine trees. Yonatan Lifshitz silently began to drink it all in. The vastness of the waiting night. The terrifying spaces that stretched darkly away, devoid of a human presence. The emptiness of the bunkers, the trenches, the fortified positions, the mine fields, the burned-out armor, the no-man’s-land, the border posts left unguarded. And the earth itself conspiring slowly upward in the soft swell of its hillocks, in the humps of its hills, in its jagged faults that thrust skyward until it suddenly writhes in a spasm of mountains, range after range, chains of wild peaks, cliffs, canyons, ravines, tunneled gorges flooded by darkness—and beyond these the first desert plunging down to the long Jordan Rift, with yet more mountains on its other side, the high peaks of Edom, of Moab, of Gilead, of the Golan, the Hauran, and the Bashan, and fast upon them great tablelands of desert again, wilderness upon wilderness of sand and stone, a huge, dark stillness over all—here and there a lone rock, and another, and yet another, and on and on and on, for no purpose, for no person, untouched by human hand since the beginning of time and to be touched by none until its end, an illimitable wasteland consigned to howling winds. And after that still more mountains, their snow-capped summits eternally lashed by storms, with slopes where no foot has ever trod, gullies where no man has ever gone, gulches ripped by cascades, beneath monstrous outcroppings of basalt and pillars of granite. And beyond these the endless uninhabited prairies; the huge rivers coursing stilly in the darkness, tearing out their banks as if with fangs; the age-old rain forests, their ferny mosses twining up the tangled boughs of massive trees; the broad, unpopulated valleys; the empty brushland; the steppe after steppe stretching forever in the breathless wind; and finally the enormity of ocean, the cold, befogged, writhing seas and all their dark, indifferent waters. Behold the whole wide world—upon whose fullness a molten biblical wrath once upon a primeval time spilled like a geyser of lava.
And now all is over but the silence, brooding, as if in the presence of an unspoken illness, over a planet that bristles like a crouching beast to which nothing matters any more, not ourselves, not our homes, not our women, not our children, not our thoughts, not our words, not our never-ending wars of life-and-death. All is the same to the immense indifferent earth beast, the sleeping soundless earth corpse, devoid of hate, devoid of love, forever estranged from human suffering and from man’s own estrangement. And over it a sky that is just as indifferent, without one living, sensate thing as far as the farthest galaxy in the lockers of space. One would have to be worse than a fool to go looking in all this cold nothingness for some sign of intimacy or warmth, much less for the magic of Chad. It will all be in vain. For even if there are other worlds, how will they differ from the one that starts at this porch? In them, too, death will skulk, like a sleeping mastiff.
“Well, that’s the end of this one, Tia. Let’s go inside. It’s time to hit the road.” Yonatan threw the burning butt into the bushes, muttered an Arabic curse, spun wildly around as if caught in a crossfire, and stepped back into the house.
Carefully climbing on a stool so as not to wake the sleepers, he took down a pair of battered paratrooper boots with thick rubber soles from the closet above the shower, then clumsily began stuffing his army knapsack with underwear, handkerchiefs, socks, and a leather folder with 1:20,000 maps. Two army shirts, a large flashlight, his army dogtag, and a compass were next. And last, a sealed, sterile army bandage left over from a stint of reserve duty.
He went to the bathroom and gathered up his toilet articles and allergy pills, taking care not to disturb Azariah’s shaving gear or Rimona’s almond soap and lemon shampoo. The face that stared out at him from the mirror gave him a start—a thin, dark, unshaven visage with gray bags beneath squinty red eyes, in which flickered a glint of pent-up violence, above them a wild shock of hair springing forward like the horn of a charging animal.
He left the bathroom to rummage through the closet, gritting his teeth until he found the old windbreaker that was coming apart at the sleeves and tore it savagely from its hanger. Into its pockets he stuffed a pair of leather gloves, an odd-looking woolen hat, a switchblade, a roll of flannel strips for cleaning his rifle, and a wad of toilet paper. From a small drawer he took an imitation-leather wallet that Rimona had given him the year before and took it to the bathroom to check its contents by the light. His identity pass, its pages slipping from their tattered binding. His reserve officer’s passbook. A photograph of himself and his brother Amos as small boys, their hair slicked back, and dressed in their day-in-the-big-city outfits of pressed white shirts and shorts with suspenders. A faded snapshot of himself in army uniform, clipped from a yellowing page of the army magazine. In the money pocket he found some small change and sixty-odd pounds. He jammed the wallet into his back pocket.
His last foray was to open a locked metal chest at the bottom of the closet. From this he took a captured Russian Kalashnikov rifle, three bullet clips, and a bayonet and stacked them on his knapsack. Feeling tired and out-of-breath, he stirred some raspberry squash into a glass of water, gulped it down, and wiped his lips with the back of his sleeve.
One last glance at the two sleepers. The young man on the rug at the woman’s feet, her blond halo of hair like a ripple of gold in the pale light on her pillow. The little mechanic curled up in a ball like a wet puppy, his head out of sight.
Yonatan winced. His flesh crawled and he shuddered, trying to fight down the memory of the free-for-all in the big double bed a few hours ago. The sweat, the sordidness, the anger, the relentless sperm, the shout torn from his chest, the boyish sobs, the soft beating of fists, the silent submission of the woman, like earth giving way to the plow.
A wave of burning revulsion. A biblical abhorrence of uncleanliness. The voice of his father Yolek welling up to stick in his throat. And the voices of all his dead forebears, coming to barrage him with a storm of stones.
All it takes to blow the two of them to pieces, and myself, and this whole stinking cesspool, is one little burst from the Klash. Tak-tak-tak-tak-tak.
“Get set,” he said to Tia in a whisper. “We’re off.”
He bent over and petted her roughly, against the lay of her fur, then slapped her twice on the back. If I’m not going to get rid of them, I might at least leave them a note.
But what could it possibly say? Never mind. Let’s just say I was suddenly killed.
He bent over to shoulder his knapsack and gun, adjusted the straps, then spoke to Tia again, this time almost gently, “All right, we’re really off this time. Not you, Tia. Just me.”
Goodbye, Azuva daughter of Shilhi. Goodbye, baby fink. Yonatan’s finally picked up and gone. His life is about to begin. What he needs most now is to be serious. From now on that’s what he’s going to be.
There was a first glimmer in the sky, a misty light from the horizon beyond the eastern hills. The little cottages, the gardens, the winter-stricken lawns, the bare trees, the tile roofs, the chrysanthemum beds, the rock gardens, the porches, the laundry lines, the bushes—all were coated more brightly each passing minute with a fine, merciful radiance that was as pure as a wish. A cold wave of delicious night air rinsed Yonatan’s lungs. He gulped deeply and cut across the kibbutz with long, gangling strides, slightly bent beneath his load, hunching his right shoulder, which carried his bulging knapsack and his rifle from a frayed strap.
On reaching his parents’ house, he paused, ran his free hand through his mop of hair, and started to scratch. A bird chirped briefly, its song melting the darkness. A dog growled from its refuge beneath a porch, began to bark, then thought better of it. From the direction of the cowshed came the faint plaint of the cows and the rattle of the milking machine.
Father. Mother. Goodbye. Forever. I’ll never forget that you meant well. From the time I was an infant you were so good and so horrible to me. You dressed yourselves in rags, and ate dry bread with olives, and worked like coolies all day long, and sang yourselves hoarse every night, and lived in an ecstatic trance, and gave me a white, white room with a housemother in a white, white apron who fed me white, white cream to make me a clean, honest, hard-working Jewish boy with a soul of forged steel.
You poor, suffering heroes, you miserable messiahs of the Jews, you tame-souled tamers of the wilderness, you crazy saviors of Israel, you fucking maniacs, you tyrants with diarrhea of the mouth! Your souls are seared into me like a branding iron, but I am not one of you. You gave me everything and took back twice as much, like loan sharks. Call me no good. Call me a traitor. Call me a deserter. Whatever you call me must be true because you’ve tamed the truth as you tamed the wilderness. It, too, eats right out of your hands. May you suffer no more, my good people, my monsters of redemption. Just let me clear the hell out of here in peace. Don’t try to restrain me. Don’t haunt me to the ends of the earth like avenging angels. What’s it to you if there’s one less scumbag around here, one less filthy stain on your snow-white honor. From your loving son who can’t go on any more, farewell.
Yonatan.
Who’s there. What’s going on.
It’s your father. Come over here at once!
What do you want.
Come here, I said. You look a sight. That’s the latest thing, I suppose. May I ask where you’re bound?
Outward.
What’s the latest?
It’s of a personal nature.
Eh?
Of a personal nature. Something strictly private.
Meaning?
That I’m hitting the road.
Well, good morning, my genius. I take it we’re not good enough for you here.
Father. Hear me out for once. Everything here is just fine. I have no complaints. Hats off to all of you. You’re the glory of the human race. You built this land out of nothing with your bare hands and saved the Jewish people in the bargain. Agreed. It’s just that I—
You? You’ll kindly shut up and get back to work. What, may I ask, will become of us if every mixed-up young fellow around here decides to take off whenever he feels like it?
Get out of my way, father. Get out of my way quick before I put a clip in this rifle and do what you taught me to do with it. Just do me the favor of dying peacefully, and I’ll run like a zombie to trash Sheikh Dahr all over again, or grab a hoe and root out every weed and clump of crab grass from Lebanon to Egypt until not a blade remains. I’ll throw myself like a madman on any patch of wilderness. I’ll plant all the trees you want. I’ll marry Jewish girls from the four corners of the earth to enrich the national gene pool. I’ll make you twenty grandsons, each tougher than nails. I’ll plow the rocks and then the sea, anything you say. If only you were already dead and could watch me take charge, during an assault, say, when the officers have all been killed and some shitass squad leader turns into the big hero and saves the day. Take my word for it, father. Everything will be just as you planned. I guarantee it. Just do me the favor of dying first so your son can start to live.
Yonatan turned his back on the sleeping cottage, stooped to pick up one of his father’s stocking caps that had fallen to the ground, rehung it on the laundry line, and moved on. Near the bakery, he turned left to take the muddy shortcut leading to the front gate.
On reaching the bus stop just outside the kibbutz, he realized he had forgotten his cigarettes. Well, who needs them? As of this minute I’ve stopped smoking. Enough. No looking back.
Yonatan stood by the roadside for some twenty minutes, waiting for an early riser in a car, truck, or army vehicle to give him a lift. The first full rays of sunlight dawned over the hill of Sheikh Dahr. He swung his rifle to the east to mow down the sun with a hail of bullets the minute it dared lift its fiery head. A cocka-doodle of roosters broke out in a rah-rah chorus of joy over the coming of the new day, the new day, the new day. “Shut the fuck up!” snapped Yonatan out loud, and laughed. Shut the fuck up, dear comrades, we’ve heard enough out of you. Morning bells are ringing, ding dong ding. Whoever’s good and washes after weewee will get a cup of hot chocolate. And who is not here today, boys and girls? Little John is not, teacher. Little John went to bed with his stockings on. One shoe off, one shoe on. And now he’s gone. Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John.
When, as in a child’s drawing, the sun finally poked its head over the hills, Yonatan did not shoot. He bowed low in mocking obeisance instead and politely inquired if he might be of help.
Morning bells were indeed ringing out, on a lovely, rosy-cheeked winter’s day. The owl, the raven, and the bat were coming off the night shift at Sheikh Dahr. Foxes were heading home to hit the sack in their crannies, caves, or holes. The ghosts who ruled the ruin by night were beating a hasty retreat. A few last tatters of fog were being put to flight by the bracing cold wind. Sleep tight, little foxes. Sleep tight, dear owls. Sleep tight, sweet ghosts. Yonatan’s off to the races at last.
What qualm now kept him from taking one last glance at the place where he had been born and raised? At the commune his parents had built on a godforsaken rocky hill and turned into a demi-Eden snuggled by greenery and woods? Nearly all its members were asleep. Let them sleep. In kibbutzim everywhere, dear comrades were still in bed—virtuous housemothers, balding, good-natured organizers, middle-aged field hands, chicken growers, gardeners, shepherds, men and women from a thousand remote shtetls who had come here to turn all things upside down, themselves included, and build a new world. And elsewhere, too, all over this country. How gentle they all are when they sleep. Like my former wife, who was always gentle because she was never awake.
The best thing about sleep is that it allows everyone to be off by himself at last, a million miles away from all others, even the sleeper at his side. No committees to attend, no jobs to be done, no pressing calls to duty, no challenges to be met. The law that demands you love your neighbor is suspended. Everyone is secure in a world of his own. Those in need of love get just as much as they require. Those who need to be left alone are left alone. Those who deserve to be worried, regretful, or punished are punished and will toss for it. The oldest, most arthritic, hemorrhoid-ridden geezer with a stroke or two to his debit is free to be a young cavalier again or even momma’s little boy. Whoever craves pleasure is rewarded, and those who crave pain may suffer without ceasing. The sky’s the limit. If you want your past back, you can have it. If you long for a place you’ve already been or have never been able to visit, you’re transported in a trice, all expenses paid. If you’re frightened of death, you get it in small doses every night to build up your resistance. If you want a war, you get one de luxe. If you pine for the dead, just whistle, and they’ll appear.
In fact, maybe I should go back right now, wake up Azariah, and shout out, hey, pal, I’ve got the answer to the question your Spinoza and his Right Honorable Hugo Buxhall and all your head-in-the-cloud philosophers have been asking forever—the one about is there any justice in the world and where can you find it? Top of the morning, Azariah, get up! And you too, Rimona, put the kettle on! Because I’ve been up and around, and, lo and behold, I’ve found justice. It’s all in our dreams. Justice for everybody, more than enough to go around, to each according to his abilities and needs, the land of the true kibbutz. Not even a general can tell me what to do in my sleep because he can’t tell himself what to do in his. He sleeps like a pussycat, without bars, without stripes, without medals, blanketed in his private justice. So go to sleep, comrades, if you want justice, because that’s the only way you’ll ever get it.
As for me, I intend to stay up all by myself and have fun. Because I’m not looking for justice. I’m looking for life—which is the exact opposite. I’ve slept my fill, and now I stay awake. I’m through with crazy old men, with their looniness, with their dreams. I’m through with their wacky utopias and their creeping justice. Let them sleep all they want, bless their souls. I’m awake as I can be and about to get on board a vessel of my own.
It was only then that Yonatan turned to take one last look at the place he had once called home. The perimeter lights had gone out. The kibbutz seemed to float on a cushion of milky gray mist—the water tower twined with green ivy, the hayrack, the cowshed, the teenagers’ and children’s houses, the spires of the cypress trees around the white dining hall, the little red-roofed cottages with their blinds still shut, the hillside above the swimming pool, the basketball court, the sheep pen, the old guardhouse, the auxiliary shacks.
Yonatan’s sleepy, bloodshot eyes narrowed, like those of a small animal sensing the approach of hunters. Stop it. Stop it. Don’t fall into it, pal. It’s a trap. The cunning of nets fine as a spider’s. Just because I sat singing here on this lawn all night long, propped against a friend or a girl. Just because here I was loved and kissed and scolded and taught to drive a cow and a tractor. Just because here good people live who will come to my aid if any harm befalls me, who, even if I steal or commit murder, even if I were a quadruple amputee, would take turns standing watch in the jail or hospital to guard me day and night. Don’t fall into it, pal. The posse is already hot on your heels and you’ve not yet flown the coop.
How many minutes have passed? I’m still stuck here. What if someone sees me? The light on those hills is strange—blue, pink, and gray all at once. And nothings coming but that freight train traveling south, its engine bleating for dear life. Those barking dogs inside the fence must think I’m the enemy. I am. One burst, tak-tak-tak, and they’ve had it.
But something was coming down the road. A truck. An old Dodge. And stopping. The driver was a portly, middle-aged man with cherubic cheeks and amiably glittering glasses.
“Hop in, young fellow. Where to?”
“It doesn’t matter. Anywhere will do.”
“But which way are you heading?”
“More or less south.”
“Good! Just shut the door tight. Slam it. And press down that button next to you. Maybe you got hit with a reserve call-up, eh?”
“You could say that.”
“Okay, okay, I’m not asking you to give away any secrets. Might you be a paratrooper?”
“Something like that. In reconnaissance.”
“And you’ve got some little operation in the works, huh?”
“I couldn’t tell you. Maybe. Why not?”
“Did you say you were heading south?”
“More or less.”
“Right you are! You don’t have to tell me a thing. Why risk it? Although let me tell you, I’ve been a Labor Party member for twenty years and a regional defense head for two, and I know how to button my lip. I also happen to know secrets I bet you’ve never dreamed of. That was south you said?”
“If it isn’t going out of your way.”
“May I ask your final destination?”
“I have no idea.”
“Listen here, young fellow. Secrecy, shmecrecy, that’s all very well, but there’s a limit. Back in the days of the underground, there used to be a joke about Sha’ul Avigur, who was a big shot in the Haganah and a great stickler for security. Once, when his driver came to pick him up—would you mind wiping the windshield a little? That’s the ticket, thank you—Avigur said to him, ‘Step on it, I’m in a hurry!’ ‘Where to?’ asked the driver. ‘Sorry, that’s confidential,’ answered Avigur and wouldn’t say another word. Maybe you’ve already heard this one. Never mind. As long as the bastards get it in the balls, and then some, and you all come home safe and sound. I don’t mind telling you we get a big bang out of you boys today when we compare you with what we were then. What we paraded around and sounded off about at the top of our lungs, you do with your little pinky and no fuss. Moshe Dayan couldn’t have put it any better when he said that all our operations in the underground didn’t amount to what one squad in the regular army can do today. God bless you all! Maybe you’ll at least agree to tell me where you want to be let off?”
“The farther south, the better.”
“Eilat? Ethiopia? Capetown? Don’t mind me. I’m only joking. Couldn’t you whisper into just one of my ears where you’re going to let them have it tonight? I promise to forget it instantly.”
Yonatan smiled and said nothing. The blue of the sky that grew deeper by the minute, the low hills about to turn verdant, the soft light of the wheat fields with their promised ears of grain, the secretive light of the citrus groves, the bare light of the orchards, the flocks of sheep with their shepherds in khaki and visored caps—peaceful and lovely the country lay before him, sprinkled with white villages, crisscrossed by footpaths through the fields, embraced by the shadows of mountains, cooled by the chill sea breeze—lovely and yearning for his feet to tread on. We have to love and to forgive, thought Yonatan. We have to be good. And if I leave all this, let it be without forgetting and without the fear of the nets of longing. Only where to, goddamn it? Where am I running to?
“You dozing off there, young fellow?”
“Not at all. I’m awake as hell.”
“Are you from Kibbutz Granot?”
“You bet.”
“How are things there?”
“Terrific. Fantastic. The magic of Chad.”
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing. It’s not important. Just some verse I happened to remember from the Bible.”
“Take a look on the seat between us. Have some coffee from my thermos and go on reciting the rest of the Bible for me. You’re not by any chance a wilderness buff, are you?”
“Am I? I might be. Why the hell not? Thanks for this coffee. It’s damn good.”
Just then, as swiftly as flame, a flash of piercing joy shot through him such as he had not felt since he was wounded in the raid on Hirbet Tawfik—a wild, exquisite joy that percolated through every cell of his body to its very nerve endings, that made him feel a sweet tremor in his knees, a warm lump in his throat, a transfixing dilation in his chest, and an allergy of tears in his eyes—for at that exact moment he understood at last where he was going, and what it was that was waiting for him, and why he had taken his gun and was heading south to that place beyond the mountains from which legend had it no one had ever come back alive, and that he would be the first to do so, not only alive but flushed with triumph. And having done the thing that he had to do because it summoned him from the depths of his soul, he would take to the skies and cross the seas. Why hadn’t he done it long ago? Crossed the southeastern border al! by himself, slipped past the Jordanian patrols, eluded the rapacious Bedouin of Wadi Musa, and reached the rose-red cliffs of Petra, the city half as old as time.