shifted over here, to stop them fouling the air around our positions. Some unit will have to be brought over here to bury them. We are certainly not going to do it.
Why do we go and look at the dead? We could have walked around the field. Our stomachs feel weak, but we have to have a look. We are like little monkeys, hypnotized by a snake. They know that the snake will eat them, but the monkeys still cannot resist. The dead are lying in various poses. One is covering his face, as if to avoid seeing the dag-ger thrust into him. Another is rolled up like a hedgehog.
These corpses will not be shown in the movie theater. What you see on the screen are living people who don’t move. The dead look different from the living. The dead don’t look like people at all. Something is missing. Religion knows it as the "soul." "They returned their souls to the Lord... " This sentence suddenly occurs to me. If that is so, then the Lord surely has strange methods of recover-ing what he himself has created.
"What is that?" cries Bambi in horror.
Something is moving among the dead. For a second the dark shadow of an old fairytale brushes over me. But it isn’t a ghost. Joker gets up off the ground. His face is red and it is easy to see his discom-fort. In his hand he is holding a knife.
"Are you crazy?" Bambi’s face shows clearly that she thinks he has gone mad. "What are you doing here with the dead?"
"I... I... I..." he stutters.
Now I can see. He had begun to operate on the fat Egyptian.
"Let’s get away from here. I can explain." Joker walks off fast. We go a few hundred yards. We feel bad. We like Joker and can’t under-stand what has got into him. He would be the last of us to torture someone, still less kill them in cold blood.
"So," he stutters his explanation, "I don’t know whether I ever told you. In Romania I began to study medicine.... that... that was a long time ago. Before the Germans came. I wanted to be a doctor. My fam-ily was well off. You understand... then the Nazis came and I escaped ... I was with the partisans ... then with the Red Army ... later with the Jewish Brigade, which smuggled me to Palestine ... of course I didn’t have the money to continue studying ... and also I couldn’t speak Hebrew. That is why I am an unskilled worker. Carry things in a factory ... But sometimes ... I dream about studying again ... and