My eyes glide over the books. I bought them one after the other and have read them all. To save the money for them I did without new clothes or trips to the movies.
The books are ordered according to size and subject. The two top sections include the political books. And politics is revolution: Machiavelli, Marx, Lenin, Gandhi, Stalin, Hitler. The section beneath has books about the history of war and military leadership.
I am sixteen years old. Not all the books could be understood eas-ily. Some of them I read two or three times before I believed I had understood the content. The authors are my teachers.
Poems, music, painting, or other beautiful things are unimportant for me. I was born just when Mussolini was marching on Rome. When I was ten, Hitler came to power. And when I was thirteen the disturbances started here and the war in Abyssinia.
We were not brought up to seek the beautiful or the sublime. Certainly we were taught songs. They were not songs about beauty but national songs. They taught us to sacrifice ourselves for the motherland. The interest of our teachers didn’t extend any further than this. "It is good to die for the motherland." That was the essence of our education. That replaced music, painting, aesthetics, and the poetry of world literature.
My parents work from dawn to dusk. They have no time to look after me. And if they had the time - what would that change? None of us is pampered in our parents’ lap. The gap between the generations is too wide. As children we already turned away from our parents.
* * *
Between the books there are some packages. They look like books wrapped in paper. There are six of them - pistols! Our group’s weapon store!
I open one of the packages. A shining German Luger. It comes apart easily. Lovingly I wipe off the oil, lubricate the parts, and reassemble the weapon. Actually, that is not permitted. The weapons are stored at my place. But only Joram, our group leader, is allowed to use them. There is something attractive about them, hypnotic. Or maybe it is just the knowledge that any one of these weapons can land you in Acre5 for many years.
I clean all six weapons - one after the other. The Luger, which I particularly like for its handiness and beauty, the German Mauser,