Free Yasmine by Eli Amir Page A

you comfort the bereaved? Taking a deep breath, I pushed open the door. The living-room was packed. Levanah was surprised to see me and introduced me to her parents, her brother and two sisters. They were sitting on a low bed, not on the floor as we do. I mumbled something and sat down beside her. She passed me a photo album with pictures of a slim young man in his early twenties, smiling shyly.
    “How did it happen?” I asked.
    “After it was all over, someone fired a shot from the Old City wall, and…” She bit her lip. I didn’t know what to say. I took out my cigarettes, but quickly put them back in my pocket. Levanah doesn’t smoke and doesn’t like it when people light up near her.
    “It’s all right, you can smoke,” she said, nodding. “Did the Minister speak to you?” I said yes and thanked her, as I was pretty sure the appointment was her idea. I knew she had a lot of influence over him.
    “You’ve lost weight,” she said. “Take a few days off.”
    “I got the impression he wants me to start right away.”
    “What’s so urgent? Will the Arabs run away?”
    Two women came in and embraced her. Her face contorted as she tried not to burst into tears. When they let go I took her hand in both of mine and held it a long time.
     
    I remembered I had no money and went to the bank, then took a taxi to Zion Square, which was packed with young soldiers and reservists standing around in groups. Some were silent, others were talking at the top of their voices, telling stories about the war. Instead of Ze’ev, the affable cashier I was used to dealing with, there was a young woman with a beehive hairdo who was busy inspecting her fingernails.
    “Where is Ze’ev?”
    “On the Golan Heights,” she said without looking up. Finally she noticed the line stretching behind me and asked what I wanted. The army wages weren’t in my account yet, while the mortgage payment was due. I withdrew the one hundred and seventy-three lira in the account and left.
    The streets were livelier than ever. It seemed that overnight Jerusalem had acquired a whole new population. People walked around, stopped to talk to acquaintances, chatting or whispering, and the air held something new, something confused and unclear, a mixture of joy and sadness, hope and expectation, as well as the eternal Jewish question, “What’s going to happen?”
    I walked down Jaffa Road towards the centre of town. The roar of pneumatic drills made the ground tremble and deafened the ears. I walked on to see the concrete wall that separated the Old City, al-Quds as they call it, from our Jerusalem, but it wasn’t there! Heavy equipment crawled on thehilltop, smoothing over no-man’s-land. Clouds of dust settled thickly over everything, and all was noise and confusion, while hundreds of curious onlookers gathered to watch. I too stood there, hypnotised, realising that I had never imagined East Jerusalem would be opened to us.
    I was eager to see it, but the way was still blocked. Someone said we should try the Mandelbaum Gate. There a crowd gathered where only the other day Jordanian soldiers and UN observers had manned the gate, now replaced by Israeli soldiers and policemen. The old sign, “Stop! Border Ahead!” lay on the barbed wire fence, which had collapsed.
    I stood in line, gazing at the nearby Tourjeman post and chewing my lip, just like the last time when, nine years ago, I had crossed this border on the way to Mount Scopus. Good God, how the years had flown! I still remember the earnest expressions on the faces of my fellow squaddies.
    “We’re going abroad,” Sergeant Major Efroni had said when he briefed us. To impress us with the importance of the occasion, he lit an American cigarette and launched into an emotional speech: “Going up to the Mount we’ll be driving on the road where the convoy to Hadassah Hospital was ambushed in April 1948. This was just after Abd al-Kadr al-Husseini was killed on the Qastel, and four days