stooping, as if unaware of the bullets flying around. There he found Fatima, lying on her side, bleeding from a bullet wound.
Shmuel waited for him. What else could he do? You can’t just leave a comrade behind, even when he has taken leave of his senses. And so Eli jumped back onto the jeep, with Fatima in his arms and her blood dripping on the machine gun.
* * *
It was Menashke who told me this story. Usually I was rather skeptical about his stories. Experience had taught me to discount 50% of everything he said. But this story was somehow convincing. Hadn’t I seen the wounded dog with my own eyes? And the strange eyes of the machine gunner, this giant with a facial expression all his own, sadly resolute? The expression of a lonely person ...
31 July 1948
Jaladiyya
The soldier at home
When a frontline soldier says "I would like to be back home again," it is not clear what he means.
If it is spoken during combat operations, it means his forward base, a trench six feet long and two feet wide, laboriously dug near a tree in the forlorn hope of some shade. If at the forward base, it probably means the base camp with its tents or barracks. And if he is at the base, it means his real home - his parents, his wife, his fam-ily. The domestic instinct comes to the surface in the most unlikely places.
Say a unit reaches its forward position, a great wide field with a scattering of trees. The commander distributes the squads: from this tree to that one - squad number one, from here to there - squad number two and so on. The soldier dumps his things on the ground, wanders around a bit, visits his friends, and already he feels like going "home," to that tree which is no different from the other trees.
* * *
In the training camp there was no room for expressions of individu-ality. On the long rows of beds, things were positioned on the mat-tresses in the specified arrangement - and that was your home. Every