Not Me (15 page)

As they sped southward, he sucked on an unlit cigarette and considered his options. He had been pulled back into the Negev Brigade a few hours earlier, thrown into an advance unit, and given command of a small squad
—
five men whom he had never seen before. They were now riding in a lorry crowded with twenty or thirty Palmachniks, but silence reigned. The weather had again changed, and now the Negev was hot and dry. A khamsin was blowing up from the south, smacking against the open truck bed and pelting the soldiers’ cheeks with sand, filling their mouths and forcing them to keep their eyes squeezed shut. Those who had them tied
kaffiyehs
over their noses and mouths, and the others turned their faces away, but the dust found them anyway. It was impossible to smoke, which made the gloom even more complete.

Heshel Rosenheim dug some sand out of his ears. Most of the men, he had noticed, were wearing their khaki shorts because of the heat, and now their legs were covered with red welts. He still preferred trousers as being somehow more military, though he did recall that Rommel’s Afrika Corps wore shorts. But that was different. They also had tanks. The Jews didn’t. No tanks, no artillery, no combat aircraft
—
virtually no heavy weapons at all. They were running down to face ten thousand Egyptians armed with several tank battalions, regiments of artillery, armored cars, many hundreds of Bren guns, innumerable mortars and rockets and fighter planes. It was ludicrous. He was just happy that some of his men had managed to get new boots. Heshel still wore his old ones, but by now they felt like he was born in them.

Someone tried to start a song, but it was quickly choked off by the wind and sand. They continued along in silence, their eyes shut tight. Even if they could have opened them and looked up, they would not have been able to see anything, not even the sun. It was utterly obliterated. But they were not without gratitude. The clouds of dust protected them from snipers.

It was May 15, 1948, one day after Independence. The Arab armies had already begun their invasions. From the north, the Lebanese and the Syrians. From the east, the Iraqis and the Arab Legion of Transjordan. And from the south
—
after first bombarding Tel Aviv the night before
—
the Egyptians. The situation had been made clear to Lieutenant Rosenheim when the junior officers were briefed by their commanders earlier that day. The objectives of the Egyptian army were two: to capture the Negev by driving through Bersheva to Hebron, where they would meet up with the Arab Legion, and simultaneously to advance straight up the coastal highway and take Tel Aviv in a matter of days. And what, Heshel wondered, was there to stop them? There was nothing between Gaza and Tel Aviv but a few small kibbutzim. Most of the Haganah and Palmach were defending Jerusalem. The rest would have to be diverted to fortify Tel Aviv, which was completely unprotected. If the Egyptians made a successful dash up the coast, all would be lost. It was up to the kibbutzim to hold off the Egyptians until Tel Aviv could be defended, and up to a few small units of the Negev Brigade to help them.

It was, Heshel knew, an impossible task. And yet he found himself volunteering. He was not exactly sure why, but it did occur to him how easy it would be to surrender his squad to an overwhelming Egyptian force, after which, having been taken a prisoner of war, he could reveal his true identity and offer his not inconsiderable talents to the Arab cause. It seemed a logical course of action.

Someone in the lorry again tried to rouse the men with song
—
this time it was a little fellow up forward, more protected by the cab. He managed a few lines from a tune they all knew about a young man coming upon a beautiful girl at a desert well
—
offering to draw water for her flock
—
one of those silly love songs that Heshel found so saccharine and somehow hopeless. A few of the boys tried to join in, but again the vortex of sand filled their mouths, and instead of singing, they were spitting and gagging. The wind was so loud anyway, they could barely hear the engine, and if anyone had to bark an order, it would have been too bad, because no one would hear. They probably wouldn’t even know if someone was shooting at them.

Heshel opened his eyes for a few seconds. Utter nothingness. Behind them were clouds of dust, in front of them clouds of dust, and they were driving along as if in a dream, when you suddenly realize you are nowhere, and there is nothing, and you are alone, and around you is only the dim suggestion of some former reality, some place to land. That’s usually when you wake up and see you are in bed, and everything is really as it should be, and you are really all right.

He snorted, blowing the sand out of his nose, and closed his eyes again.

All the days of his life he would remember this moment, when he had stepped out of the world, and out of time, and was reborn when the wind cleared.

But at that moment he did not know that, and all he thought to himself was: My one responsibility is to stay alive.

Which, had he thought about it, was exactly what the inmates at Majdanek said to themselves, lying in their own excrement, dreaming of their next scrap of bread.

At some point the truck could go no farther. The drivers had lost the road and the wheels had gotten stuck in deep sand. They pulled tarpaulins over the truck bed to make a tent, and camped within it as best they could, waiting for the wind to stop.

They crawled out like prairie dogs, sniffing the air.

The sky was still muddy, but the air was calm. Looking about, they could not see the road at all. They must have strayed by miles. The best they could do was head in a westerly direction until they ran into the highway. The commander cursed that they had lost a whole day. He ordered the men to push the truck out of the sand. The heat was ungodly, but it was much better to be doing something than hiding like rats under that miserable tarp. They gathered round the lorry, pushing and tugging, while others placed scraps of wood beneath the rear wheels. It was a desperate task. The lorry just sank deeper. They decided to rest the engine.

“What’s that?” someone said.

In the sudden silence they heard the distant grinding of another engine, and what seemed like shouting. They looked up. Those with binoculars searched the horizon.

“Look!” one of the commanders said. “They’re stuck worse than we are!”

It was a group of Egyptians. They had three Jeeps and a personnel carrier buried up to their headlamps, and they were running around just like the Jews had done.

“Hey!” one of the men called out in Arabic, waving his shirt. “Need help?”

“They can’t hear you,” someone said.

But apparently they could see them, because just then three Bren carriers appeared on the horizon. These had no trouble negotiating the sand dunes.

“Shit!” cried the commander. “You
—
set up a perimeter. The rest of you
—
get this fucking vehicle moving!”

But the Bren carriers didn’t advance. They just sat there, pointing their guns at the Jews.

“They’re afraid of us,” someone said.

“I doubt that,” Heshel replied. “They’re just waiting for something.”

Through his binoculars, Heshel could see the Arabs rushing about hysterically, trying to get their Jeeps moving. As he panned across to the Bren carriers, he could see an officer seated beside the gunner. He was drinking tea.

“On the contrary. I think they are very confident, indeed,” said Lieutenant Rosenheim.

It took a good half hour to extricate the lorry from the sand and get out of there. The poor Egyptians were still struggling, but they waved good-naturedly when the Israelis (as they now called themselves) drove off. One of Heshel’s men answered their wave with a salute of gunfire that rose harmlessly into the brown desert sky.

They arrived at Nir Am late in the afternoon, having missed two days of the war.

The Palmach had set up makeshift headquarters in the underground bunkers at Nir Am. Most of the men had never been in a bunker before, but Heshel had, and he knew the smell, the odd feeling of affinity one acquires with creatures like termites and moles, and the fear, almost worse than being out in the bombardment, of not knowing when the end might come, or who of your friends or loved ones were already without arms and legs. He knew, as well, that it would get much worse down there, that soon the stench would be unbearable and the emotions would boil over like scalded milk.

They gathered round a table that had maps laid out upon it, and the commander explained the situation. Two kibbutzim had already been assaulted by the Egyptians
—
Nirim, the one closest to the Egyptian border, and a religious settlement named Kfar Darom. Both miraculously repulsed the invasion. In the case of Nirim, which faced tank assaults and heavy artillery, they triumphed with two pistols, two mortars, seven Italian rifles, two Stens and one Bren gun. Half their eighty-odd people were killed or wounded, but not as many as the Egyptians suffered. The situation was similar at Kfar Darom.

The men cheered, but the commander remained ashen-faced. The Egyptians, he told them, were simply bypassing Nirim and Kfar Darom
—
wasting their time there had been sheer foolishness, he said, but good for us, since it gives us more time to prepare. The real battle would take place at Yad Mordechai, only a few miles from where they now sat cramped together in the dark of the bunker. Yad Mordechai was the key, he said, and it must be held at all costs. It sat directly in the path of the Egyptian advance. After that was only Naor and Ashdod, which was largely Arab anyway. Once taken, the road to Tel Aviv would be wide open, and then the war, and the dream of two thousand years, would most likely be over. But if Yad Mordechai could hold out, even a few days, defenses could be prepared for Tel Aviv. It would be no picnic, he told them. Not like Nirim. No, he said, the Egyptians won’t give up so easily this time.