Free Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar

huddle had grown in the meantime. There were several dozen now sitting in a circle, maybe a hundred people altogether. If you glanced sideways and overlooked the circumstances you could have easily been misled into recalling those village market days, a birthday, the commemoration of some nabi or sheikh, when everyone gathered together in the same kind of huddle, under every green tree, in any puddle of shade, waiting in a festive heaving moving mass, like a lump of dough, not bothering about flies or smells or sweat or the crush and hubbub, so long as that thing, that festive thing they had been looking forward to, happened—but this silence left no room for such delusion, even when now you could hear a sort of buzzing like bees, a furtive rustling, seething, and swelling, in the shade of the great tree. One man, with a prodigious mustache, sat at the edge of the circle patiently rolling a cigarette in his dark peasant hands, transforming the lap of his robe into a tiny workshop for the purpose, gathering up the crumbs of tobacco and packing and tamping them in the trumpet of paper, tapping it this way and that, fussing with his flint and tinder until it finally produced a glow, which was nurtured with blowing and shielded with the cup of a hand, and lit it, raising for his enjoyment a pungent cloud of smoke, demonstrating the last scrap of freedom remaining in his possession, and also some hope for a future, a sort of everything-will-be-all-right that someone always kindled through wishful thinking, which he immediately believed in as though it were the first step toward salvation and even infected his neighbors with his good faith—such a fine quality, which was now made all the more pathetic and gullible since you (like the Lord in Heaven, as it were) knew what he did not know yet.
    There was someone else right next to him, and this one was sketching in the sand, slanting, crossing, and winding lines, moving his finger in the paths of the sand with an absentmindedness that was a different form of concentration, but it was not hard to read what he’d drawn, the declaration of a broken man.
    What if one of them were to stand up and say, We’re not moving from here, villagers, take courage and be men!
    My eyes roamed this way and that. I was ill at ease. Where did this sense come from that I was being accused of some crime. And what was it that was beginning to press upon me to look for excuses? My comrades’ calm behavior only intensified my own sense of distress. Didn’t they realize? Or were they just pretending not to know? They wouldn’t even believe me if I told them, apart from the fact that I didn’t know what to tell them, and if only I knew how to say what was inside me. I was uneasy. I needed something, something to grasp hold of. I clung to that famous phrase in the operational orders “operatives dispatched on hostile missions.” I conjured up before my eyes all the terrible outrages that the Arabs had committed against us. I recited the names of Hebron, Safed, Be’er Tuvia, and Hulda. I seized on necessity, the necessity of the moment, which with the passage of time, when everything was settled, would also be set straight. I once again contemplated the mass of people, seething indistinctly and innocently at my feet—and I found no comfort. I prayed at that moment that something would happen to seize me and take me away from here so I would not see what happened next.
    At this very moment Moishe turned to me and told me to get on the jeep with the wireless operator and Shlomo and Yehuda and go check out the area. It was easy to understand how I leapt up and how we uprooted ourselves from where we were (with all eyes watching our actions) on the double, despite the narrow winding lanes. This filthy Khirbet Khizeh. This war. The whole business.
    We climbed the slope of a hill, which had never even in its dreams seen anything driving over it with such dizzying