“No, I haven’t.”
Yehiel held it out to me. “These are our boys. The enemy’s spreading it around.”
I glanced at it, and my blood froze. I felt like choking. Paralyzed. Our soldiers: a heap of naked bodies, their limbs cut off; a smashed white hand, fingers clenched, stuck into the air as if trying to grasp it; drops of clotting blood trickling over their pale skin. Our boys . . . The photograph shook in my hands. Heads bashed in, with ears cut off. Black splotches covered their faces. I looked desperately for their eyes, or at least for the place where the eyes should be, but they weren’t there. Instead I saw hollow black pits, dark caves. Their feet had also been cut off. Ropes were tied around their waists. “No, no,” The sight left my hands and feet trembling and gave me a feeling of weakness and slackness in my muscles.
“I’ve seen atrocity pictures before,” Arthur said. “Those shots of the German concentration camps. Naked bodies, gas chambers, rows of corpses lying in trenches. You must have seen them.”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s what war’s like. Perhaps it’s the symbol of fate. If you’d been in the camps, you might have been dead too. But you’re here, in Tel Aviv.”
“It’s all a question of luck,” Yehiel summed up. He took the photograph from me and stuffed it back in his pocket.
“It couldn’t happen to me,” I blurted out.
“Why not?” Arthur jeered. He took a pipe out of his shirt pocket, knocked it against his palm, and emptied out the stale tobacco. I was silent. A fatherly smile spread over his face, as if he wanted to say: “Really, my boy, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I coughed slightly, to indicate that I didn’t agree with him. “Well, I’ll be seeing you,” I said abruptly, strolling to the center of the camp.
Near the parade ground stood Old Ramrod, looking at the recruits passing by. He was staring at a group of greenhorns, standing next to the taps outside the dining room, who had just finished cleaning their messtins. “Hey, you there!” the OC shouted. “Don’t you intend to turn off these taps?” The greenhorns, who wore faded, threadbare clothes, stopped in their tracks, panic-stricken, and gazed at him like a flock of frightened ducks. “Is that how you behave at home, too?” he yelled. The recruits stood rooted to one spot, unable to move. “Well, hurry up and turn off those taps at once!” he roared impatiently. They hurried to the dripping taps, their boots spattering mud over their trousers as they closed them. Then they made for their huts, leaving trails of mud behind.
I came up to Ramrod. Suddenly he turned to me, in a movement that took me by surprise.
“Well?” he asked. “Want something?”
“I w-w-wanted to talk to you,” I stammered.
“Then come to my office at one,” he dismissed me.
—
At one o’clock I presented myself in his office. Ramrod was standing behind a broad desk. He gestured to a chair, and I sat down slowly.
“Well, what’s it all about?” he asked, fixing a stern eye on me.
His penetrating stare scattered all my thoughts, and I didn’t know how to begin.
“Well?” he encouraged me.
“You see, here in the camp . . .” The words stuck in my throat. I breathed deeply and raised my voice: “I want to go off to the front . . . to fight . . . like all the others . . . To leave the camp . . .”
His lips clenched in a worried expression. “Listen,” he growled in quite a kindly tone, “the war’s only just begun. There’s no need to hurry.” He stopped abruptly, leaned back in his chair, and went on in a soft voice: “And don’t think that our soldiers will always be in rags, as they are now, without proper uniforms, without enough arms. The day will come when all these things will change.”
“But . . . but . . .” I mumbled, confused and unsure of myself.
The OC cut me short: “I don’t intend to keep you against your will.” He went on in an angry voice: “Think about it until tomorrow, and then, if you still want to leave, you can go.” His voice hinted that our talk was over.
“Right,” I said. I got up from my chair like someone who had just had a tongue-lashing, and went outside.
Arthur was standing on the porch. “Well, did you see him?” he questioned me.
“Yes, I’ve just been there.”
“So?”
“I want to leave.”
A shadow of disappointment crossed his face. “You need this like a hole in your head,” he said, and stalked off.
I was more determined than ever to go—now that Old Ramrod and Arthur had both tried to persuade me to stay. As if I suspected they were trying to deprive me of a valuable and rare experience. It was true that the photograph Yehiel had shown me had put me off for a while. But its shocking effect was wearing off: the picture had become a collection of faded images, details that had no connection with one another, like a tune that one remembers vaguely but can’t hum from beginning to end although it rings in one’s ears.
Did I really want to go to the front? Was that really what I wanted? For a moment I almost changed my mind. After all, Old Ramrod was also against it. Could I go back to him and tell him I had decided to stay? I walked off to the fence at the end of the camp, thinking about this.
A group of soldiers walked past me quickly. Their clothes flapped as they marched, a collection of old clothes bought from a secondhand dealer. All different shades of khaki. And the hats . . . Each of them wore a different kind of knitted woolen cap. I looked at myself. Tight khaki trousers and a thin olive-green shirt. I had brought these clothes from home. That was two months ago, and I hadn’t been given a uniform yet. How much longer will this go on?
My thoughts were confused, and this made everything seem gloomy and miserable. The skies were overcast. The cool wind made my teeth chatter. The middle of winter—and I didn’t have a coat. Until then I hadn’t bothered much about things like that, despite the rain that had already fallen twice during outdoor training sessions. The recruits complained every time they were soaked by these sudden bursts of rain. I would open my shirt to the falling drops, as if I wanted to get soaked through to my bones, and call out: “That’s the way to get tough, boys!” As it grew colder, we ran in the rain, clothes stuck tight to our bodies, our teeth chattering. Although we wallowed in mud for hours on end, not a single man fell ill.
But now I felt the cold more than ever before. I could have asked for a short leave so that I could go to my parents’ home and fetch a coat. But wearing a civilian coat would have spoiled my military appearance—or so I thought. And then I imagined my parents’ puzzled looks if I arrived home in the dead of winter wearing light summer things.
“Why aren’t you wearing a coat?” they had asked me anxiously the last time I had been home.
To which I replied casually: “I have to get tough, to get used to little things like that.” And when I noticed their skeptical look, I went off to the bathroom to have a cold shower. “You see,” I called to them boastfully, coming out shivering with cold, “I’m getting used to it!”
But my father continued looking at me suspiciously. “Do you have enough clothes and food?” he asked.
“Of course, Dad,” I declared confidently. “What do you think?” His skeptical expression told me I had not succeeded in dispelling his suspicions. This prompted me to add: “You can see I’m getting used to suffering. Spartan education.”
“Why not take the coat, all the same?” my mother said in a tender voice, holding it out to me. I refused it with pretended annoyance, although inwardly I would have liked to have taken it.
“No,