Death Had Two Sons Read online

  Black satin of night engulfed the human débris and hid the blood, the amputated limbs and the mangled bodies. Night covered tears in the eyes of the older soldiers and revengeful anger in the eyes of the young boys and when Daniel fell asleep Yoram remembered the child he had rescued and the long trip from Bari on an unseaworthy Greek boat. The night was cold and blankets taken out and if someone hummed a song it was not a happy one. There was no moon in the sky, a complete blackness was on the hills and spoken words sounded false and out of place. The vehicles were covered with mud and looked like the harmless toys of a giant’s children.

  Two hours after midnight the captain suggested a reconnaissance patrol to the bridge over the wadi. If the bridge was not guarded or mined they might cross it and check the condition of the road to the canal. Daniel was about to leave with two other soldiers when Yoram stopped him.

  ‘Where to?’ Yoram asked.

  ‘Oh, just a morning walk around the hills. Do you want to come along?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Yoram jumped up and again they were walking like they did along the banks of the Jordan, but in the middle of the Sinai. The two soldiers behind were armed and suspicious and when they reached a plateau from which they could see the road and the wadi Daniel ordered them to keep cover and he advanced with Yoram towards the silhouette of the bridge. The pebbles in the wadi shone white and the road was black and covered with wandering dunes. They were under the bridge now and couldn’t see any signs of life. Daniel said:

  ‘Wait here and I’ll go up and check. If there’s a guard he’s either asleep or single. Otherwise we would have heard some conversation.’

  Yoram grabbed his arm.

  ‘Please, I’ll do it. Good for my morale. I’ve been riding a jeep until now as if going to a wedding. It’ll only take a few minutes and I’ll be back.’

  He looked at his watch and remembered it was Daniel’s, but crawled away holding on to his submachine-gun.

  Daniel did not mind. Many times he had felt like doing something instead of a friend and since Yoram was his senior, he couldn’t very well tell him to obey orders. There was no danger in the air, it was a clear night and a bright polar star was taking ursa minor for a night stroll. He was absorbed in his thoughts when he heard Yoram’s voice.

  ‘It looks deserted all right, what now?’

  ‘We’ll go back and they’ll send someone with a mine detector. Let’s go.’

  What followed took only a few seconds. Yoram walked several steps along the bridge meaning to jump down to where Daniel was. Then an explosion, footsteps of the soldiers running towards them and the sight of Yoram holding his belly and moaning. Daniel bent to him pale and unbelieving.

  ‘It was a mine,’ he said and tried to find the wound.

  Both his legs were crushed and the rest of his body was covered with blood. With two guns and battle-dresses they improvised a stretcher and began the long walk back.

  ‘Mother,’ Yoram groaned.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ Daniel said automatically, still in a state of shock.

  ‘You never know,’ Yoram said.

  ‘Don’t talk, we’ll be at the camp soon.’

  Yoram was sighing and his body felt heavier and heavier as the crust of the desert gave way and their heavy boots sank into it. Suddenly he cried out. He was in uncontrollable pain and Daniel told the boys to lower the stretcher and bring the medic over. He was left alone with Yoram and he could say nothing.

  ‘I should never have let you go.’

  Yoram opened his eyes. They held the usual smile, and he was trying to say something amusing, as always. He searched for Daniel’s hand and held it tight, folding it up in pain.

  ‘Water,’ he said.

  ‘Not yet.’ Daniel had to refuse, suspecting stomach wounds.

  ‘My legs,’ he sighed.

  ‘It will be all right.’

  Yoram’s face was cruelly lit by the dawn. It was gray and distorted. From the waist down Daniel could see nothing but blood and bone and flesh. The medic arrived with a few soldiers.

  ‘What’s he doing here?’ he asked, pointing to Yoram and bending down to tend to him.

  ‘He came along with me, it was a mine.’

  ‘He’s not from your unit.’

  ‘He’s a reserve soldier. We thought we would do it together.’

  The medic began muttering, and when the white bandages soaked immediately with blood he looked up again at Daniel.

  ‘He has to be taken away. He should be operated on so we’d better order a helicopter.’

  ‘He’s not going to die.’ Daniel grabbed the medic by the arm.

  ‘Not if his stomach is put together again. There’s nothing more we can do here.’

  ‘He can’t die!’ Daniel screamed.

  Two soldiers took Yoram, who was now unconscious, away on a stretcher and Daniel was left behind, unable to move. Somewhere between his gullet and his stomach emptiness settled and his hands were frozen. The blood was drained from his veins and when the medic returned he found him still standing there gazing vaguely ahead.

  ‘Come on, I’ll give you an injection. Is it the first time you’ve seen blood?’

  ‘It was my fault. I should never have let him go. I don’t need an injection and I’ve seen more dead friends than anybody would want to have in a lifetime.’

  He began to regain his composure, and started walking towards the camp.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘He was taken away. They will drive him on to the next camp where there are some other injured soldiers already waiting in a helicopter. He should be operated on in a few hours in Beer-Sheba and you’ll see him when you get back. The captain asked to see you.’

  He told the captain the story and received the conventional comforting speech – ‘It happens to all of us, he’ll be all right.’ Daniel asked to be sent back as soon as possible.

  ‘It depends on our next mission. If I don’t need you I’ll treat it as a special case but don’t forget we’re in the middle of a war.’

  It meant nothing now. He was used to night-raids which terminated with sunrise, and now war was a long wait. War was dirty socks and the supply-car being late, the itching stubble on his face and the sound of aeroplanes occasionally. War became a list of people lost in the canyon and the gouts of Yoram’s blood this arid soil had swallowed. A few enemy officers were taken prisoners, they were pathetic and yielding and he had no hatred for them. He wondered whether Yoram’s mother knew he was injured, and Rina, and how he could face any of them. He felt he had to go back and again ask to be transferred. Two days later most of the peninsula was in Israeli hands and civilians could be seen taking sightseeing tours of the desert their ancestors took forty years to cross. Daniel left for Beer-Sheba by plane and he was allowed to do so not because of his rank but because it seemed useless to keep him there guarding Egyptian prisoners and waiting for orders. When he got to the hospital he did not have to ask for Yoram. In the corridor like the chorus of tragedy sat his parents and Rina, who burst into tears when she saw him.

  ‘He asked for you,’ said the father.

  ‘Can I see him?’

  ‘Not now. He was worse tonight and they’re operating again.’

  Rina couldn’t talk and when they crossed the road to the café and were alone she said:

  ‘Tell me what happened.’

  Daniel did and she begged him not to tell the parents.

  ‘Say he was sent with you and there was a mine on the bridge. There’s no need to take the blame or present it as a childish useless accident.’

  ‘What do the doctors say? Is he going to recover?’

  ‘They amputated both legs,’ she said and was crying now.

  The redness of her eyes matched her face and her hair.

  ‘He lost a lot of blood and there were complications.’

  In the waiting room in front of the stove Yoram’s mother was holding a handkerchief. In it were her son’s personal belongings
and Daniel’s watch was still counting the seconds. All Kibbutz watches were the same, he thought, knowing this to be his, they wouldn’t be able to tell. Yoram’s mother was a brave woman and a hardworking one and she stared at Daniel with a demanding look. Was she thinking that motherless boys ought to take priority in death, so there is less hurt in the world?

  ‘I’ll be back,’ he said and motioned to Rina not to follow him.

  When Nechama opened the door she was startled. Only after he washed up he realized what he had looked like, but didn’t care. She didn’t know about Yoram and when he told her, her eyes were hard, almost cruel, as if a presentiment of hers had come true.

  ‘What a way to die,’ she said.

  ‘He’s not dead!’ He grabbed her and hurt her arm and let go.

  ‘I’m sorry. There isn’t a good way and a bad way to die and there’s no need to talk like that.’

  ‘He took your watch,’ she said, softer now.

  ‘I know, his mother has it.’

  ‘We’ve won the war. There will be peace now.’

  ‘Until the next one.’

  A terrible suspicion crossed his mind. He thought she waited for death and fed on it. He thought he heard regret in her voice when she mentioned peace as if everything that made her exist would disappear suddenly. He got up to leave.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said.

  ‘I have to go back to the hospital. I have to talk to him.’

  He pushed her away and he ran, breathing heavily, until he reached the hospital entrance.

  ‘Not yet,’ Rina said. ‘They need some blood, we gave some to the blood bank.’

  Daniel went to the first floor and gave his name and rank, and blood type.

  He lay on a hard bed and his arm was smeared with alcohol, before the needle pierced the skin and settled in the blood stream. The glass jar hanging above him was filling up at a maddeningly slow pace and he could not feel the needle any more.

  Did he ever pray? Was he praying now? He wanted the blood to continue dripping into the glass container, more and more of it, and be injected into Yoram’s arteries. He wanted his own legs to be amputated and grafted to Yoram’s chopped thighs so he could walk with Rina on the road from Gilad to Shimron and play with the children. He did not notice his tears but when the nurse came to check the needle she wiped his eyes. She pulled the needle out and took his blood away, saying without turning:

  ‘Please don’t get up yet, you can rest where you are for a few minutes.’

  He closed his eyes and once again they were under the bridge.

  ‘Careful with the pebbles,’ Yoram told him, and it was all so simple, like deciding who would have a shower first in the Kibbutz shower-room.

  He remembered there was no tension or dangerous silence. Yoram wanted to climb up and check the bridge and he let him go and then he heard the explosion – did he ever stop hearing the explosion? – and now Yoram had stubs instead of legs and a pulp of intestines instead of a stomach and his mother was downstairs waiting for news. He opened his eyes and noticed his own legs – long and healthy and suddenly fatigue took over and he felt the bed swaying like the waves under the ship in Bari. When he opened his eyes he felt nausea and Rina’s freckled hand was on his arm.

  This was ten years ago and he wondered now which room he had been in, and whether there was a window? It didn’t matter really though, since he had learned to shed sentimental memories. A street corner, a dry flower in a box, old letters and even photographs, all were dismissed and forgotten. Memories of a tune or a voice, old clothes, unit emblems were all folded and put away, with the yesterdays and the tomorrows. Suppose Isaac had had to sacrifice his father, would it have held as much meaning, he wondered and pulled the chair to the window.

  Kalinsky was in pain. He had experienced pain before, but this was different. Somehow it did not contain the promise of an eventual climax and then the letting go. Like an odious obtrusive guest it was there to stay, he felt, with its dull sensation of pressure. He had to accommodate it somehow and it felt like a permanent addition to his bodily sensations. From now on, he knew, there would be fatigue, and hunger at times, and the need for natural relief and this pain. He asked the nurse to push the bed to the window and prop him up. Across the road in the distance were the dune hills. He hated the desert sand and the dust. He hated taking off his shoes and socks to find that grains of sand had settled between his toes. There was dust in Dora’s hair and grains of sand on her body and he longed for smooth surfaces. Why did someone tell him he would like the desert? He did not find it majestic or imposing or pure or spacious. He felt trapped in its space and the monotony of yellow bored him. It mocked his tight collars and soft skin. Between his window and the dunes the city stretched under-developed fingers in all directions. Each row of houses simply disappeared where the sands took over and a few trees could be seen struggling beyond them. The buildings looked small and insignificant and although the city was growing it seemed to shrink whenever the southerly wind brought gifts of dust to cover the asphalt, the pavements and the car tracks. The city could never become home, he knew, but he was tied to it by ropes of wind and yellow chilling grains meaninglessly and uselessly.

  In the corner of his window, between himself and the city, the sun laughed. It was an alien sun. The sun he liked was the one which appeared at the end of a cold winter, friendly, welcome, kindly, melting the snows and throwing gentle light on the pear trees in the garden. He knew the sun one could bask in, without the need to protect oneself, without fear, on his own terms. This one was a red devil. This sun was his enemy from the first day and he was doomed to renew the exhausting battle daily knowing that sunset was not really his own victory. He woke up every morning with this enemy above him and all day long the battle continued. Every evening Kalinsky experienced a rebirth, but by then he was fatigued and drained out and needed his few hours of sleep to be able to face the satanic beams of sunrise.

  He looked down to the street. He saw Lipsky in the café and for a second he wished Lipsky’s café was on the second floor. He could talk to him across the road. He liked Lipsky from a distance, he was even curious about Lipsky. They shared the secret knowledge of things as they should be – real wide streets, a real river, city traffic and rush hours. They conversed in Yiddish and although it was never stated in so many words, they both wanted to be sitting once again in a smoky café in Warsaw or in Bucharest, being nobodies in a comfortable way and enjoying the familiar routine of a dash of fear, a tinge of suspicion, anonymity, avoidance of exposure and, at times, limited success in some small-scale business. A few Bedouins were squatting in front of the hospital. His feelings about them ranged from distrust and suspicion to indifference. Miriam told him they were hospitable and loyal but all he could see were black robes and thick dark skin, a foreign language and strange customs. He did not feel superior, but they were simply not his equals.

  Daniel was south, Miriam had said, but it was impossible to look south from his window and the pain in his chest was soaring. He called the nurse. He liked ringing for the nurse. When the pain was not so strong he almost waited for it to reach a pitch which would justify ringing for the nurse. Whenever one of the three other patients in the room was attended by the nurse he always watched carefully trying to convince himself that they were not treated with the same attention and warmth as he was. He had to exhaust all the privileges of the very ill. He enjoyed complaining about the food. He waited every day at eleven for the young nurse to come and change his bed sheets and pyjamas and he felt his body for new aches wishing the doctors would stay longer near his bed on their daily round. He also knew he was going to die. So what mattered now was not the great issues of life and death but the stale taste of cold mashed potatoes. He was not preoccupied with summing up his life or wondering about the next world but with the snoring of the other patients and the thinness of the bath towels. Defying death had to do with a ripe and juicy apple and the softness of the mattress. Self-pity dared not touc
h the growth in his lungs and concentrated fully and stubbornly on a cut on his cheek while shaving, a back-ache he developed from lying in bed without moving and the fact that Dora was leaving earlier than the other visitors.

  The nurse came in, patient and smiling. She was Yemenite and her skin was dark. Kalinsky felt sorry for the dark-skinned Jews and there, in Beer-Sheba, he was slightly envious of them as they were at home, he thought. But then Beer-Sheba should be populated by the dark-skinned and he should have been given a house in the north, in a large city, the kind he was used to. They never had it better, he thought, and they should be grateful, but at his age he deserved an easier life. The nurse’s name was Rachel and she pronounced it with a Yemenite accent which lent it an exotic and special touch. He always thought that dark skin must be coarse and unpleasant to touch and was rather surprised when she placed her hand on his forehead to find it smooth and feminine. She gave him some bitter yellow medicine which he swallowed in one gulp and promised to check again later. There was something insolent about her happy smile. It was not a professional smile and it had hope, and he knew she knew he was dying and how could she bear to smile.

  Dora did not smile. Dora arrived every day after five and pulled the oil-painted wooden chair from under the bed. It was an uncomfortable chair and her bulky thighs spilled over it. Every day after five she sat on it with a sigh and placed her handbag on the floor. Nu, Haim, she said and he proceeded to tell her what he had been doing during the day. She listened carefully, very seldom interrupting for more details. If he said, ‘the nurse said’, she would ask ‘Rachel?’ and add ‘a good girl’, at times repeating the sentence. Haim told her about his pains, the small pains of discomfort. He did not tell her about the big pain. He told her about his small thoughts and often asked her to come nearer to him and whispered something in her ear about one of the other patients. When he was through, and there was not much to tell she would pull out of her hand a paper bag with something for him: fruit or chocolates which he did not touch, a piece of cake or a strudel. He smiled faintly, thanking her, and asked for news and she would say, ‘the same’, at times adding a few words about the shop she now ran on her own or about Miriam and Shmuel. Miriam was pregnant and was not feeling well and when she could come and visit she did, but the smell of the ward and the sight of her sick father made her feel worse and Haim understood it. Dora brought him the Polish newspaper every day and he never looked at it while she was still there, as much as he wanted to.