Adjusting Sights by Haim Sabato

It had been a bar mitzvah present from Mr. Babani. Everyone else had brought me books and Babani came with a cypress tree. I planted it that same day with Mr. Revach, the liturgy and gardening teacher at the Yeshurun Elementary School. Every month I measured my height against it.

Whoever I passed on the path said, “Shalom.”

“Shalom, shalom,” said my two guardian angels, the pair given me according to the verse, For He shall give His angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. I parted with them at the front door. Rest here in peace, angels of peace, angels of the Most High. Blessed be He who requiteth the unworthy with His goodness, for He hath requited me only with good.

I knocked and entered. I had pictured this moment so many times that it almost seemed that it had already taken place. My mother, too excited to show her emotion, greeted me as matterof- factly as if I had come home from the Talmud Torah in Bayit ve-Gan. I knew what a river of tears was hiding behind her calm, waiting to overflow. I went to kiss my father’s hands. How proud he had been on the day I became a soldier and on the day I had come home on my first leave in a uniform with the initials of the Israel Defense Force. Who thought about wars then? Now he was tense and restrained.

He, too, needed all the strength he could muster to retain the composure that was betrayed only by his lips murmuring Psalms. I could practically guess which ones they were.

I looked longingly at my set of the Talmud, which stood on the shelf in its reddish- brown covers that I had lovingly fitted with plastic dust jackets, tractate by tractate. Seeing them gave me a warm feeling. I was home.

And yet, what was happening? Why did I also see gray mud huts on stony black earth, and ammunition holds with camouflage nets, and metal boxes of machine gun bullets being handed by me, two at a time, to Eli stacking them in the tank? Why did my fingers feel the cool, slick dew gleaming on the metal mount of the bazooka? From where did I get a heady whiff of the Turkish coffee with cardamon being boiled by Tzion on the tank engine as it warmed, mingled with the sweet smell of machine gun oil and the grease smeared on my overalls? And what made me taste the sour bitterness of grapefruit sections taken from a can pried open with a gunner’s screwdriver and passed back and forth among the four of us?

I refocused on my mother, who kept running her eyes over me to make sure I was really there. She hovered about me, looking for words.