"Ma feesh, ya khawaja!"4 moaned the old woman in a whiny voice.
"Fi! Fi!" Nachshe shouted angrily and fired four bullets into the old woman. The shots threw her body upwards, as if she was jump-ing, then she fell dead into the same position we had first seen her in - leaning against the door frame.
Now Nachshe felt ashamed and didn’t want to be reminded of what he had done. It’s always like that with him. He can’t simply kill for pleasure and then feel like a hero the way Kebab can. Whenever he has killed a Fellah or a prisoner, he tries to forget about it and gets annoyed if you remind him.
Kebab won’t leave him alone. Nachshe is a member of the "intelli-gentsia" and has a big office. Kebab finds this murder reassuring. Because if a person like Nachshe is allowed to kill Fellaheen, then he himself, who is just an unskilled worker, can also be counted as a respectable person.
Actually you can’t hold it against Nachshe. It is not his fault. Homicidal urges come on him like an illness. He can’t do anything about it. Besides that he is a nice fellow. He would never abandon a wounded comrade in the field. At Position 125, did he not get out of his jeep at the worst moment and right between the Egyptian posi-tions, in order to recover Nino’s body? I am not so sure about Kebab. I wouldn’t be very keen to find myself on patrol behind enemy lines with him.
"What’s the matter?" Kebab asks. "Are you ashamed that you fin-ished off this stinking Arab woman?"
"That’s enough! Don’t you spend your whole day dreaming of Arab women?" Tarzan says in support of Nachshe.
"What has it got to do with you?" Kebab turns on him. "You are not brave enough to finish off just one Arab!" The truth, of course, is that Tarzan cannot kill an Arab, except in battle. Despite his enor-mous physical power he has a gentle soul, which he finds very embar-rassing.
"Do you still remember," Kebab recalls in a dreamy voice, "when we captured Abu-Shubak? No, you weren’t there. That was when I was still in the first company. We were supposed to finish off all the men over fifteen. The stupid Arabs didn’t even run away. They didn’t know us yet. I went into a house and brought out a man