His office was on the second floor of the police station at Yehuda Halevi 6. From the outside, the building was an architectural gem, with arched windows, a heavy metal gate, balconies supported on columns, and a wide courtyard. On the inside were frescoes and decorative floor tiles, but it still felt like any other police station I'd been in. Grimy, cramped, loud, and smelling of cigarettes, bad coffee, and body odor. The only differences between it and police stations in Budapest were that there were no mud tracks on the floor and that the air was dry and hot instead of damp and cold.
The policeman at the desk gave me the once-over when I told him my business. Apparently, I still possessed the look of a policeman, because the officer simply nodded and told me to go ahead upstairs. I took the stairs two at a time, turned right, and walked down the hall to Reuben's office.
It was a small office made even smaller by three filing cabinets that took up one wall and the simple metal desk behind which Reuben sat. The desk was piled high with papers, and Reuben was busy scribbling with a pencil on one of them. I stood in the doorway, waiting until he had ceased writing, then said, "Hello, Ant."
He raised his head and gave me a smile. Reuben's smiles were as wide as his heart was big. They radiated light as bright as a flashbulb. I sometimes wondered how a man who had seen the horrors of war could conjure such smiles. I certainly couldn't.
He had received the nickname "Ant" for saving my life. It had happened in October 1948, during Operation Yoav, when we fought the Egyptian Army in the Negev desert in the south of Israel. We were both infantrymen, and on that day our unit found itself pinned down by fire from an Egyptian machine-gun position. Four of our men had already died, and our unit was unable to advance. To this day, I'm not sure what came over me, but suddenly I found myself sprinting forward, zigging and zagging while a hail of bullets chewed into the desert sand at my feet. After what seemed like an hour, but what was actually less than thirty seconds, I made it to the foot of the small dune on which the gun position perched and lobbed two grenades into it.
The explosions silenced the Egyptian fire. I clambered up the dune, peered into the firing position, and saw two mangled bodies beside the blood-drenched Browning M1919 machine gun. I was about to signal the rest of my unit to advance when I heard a loud pop and felt a searing pain in my belly. A third Egyptian soldier had survived the grenades unscathed by cowering behind some crates at the far end of the gun position. He had shot me and was about to do so again. I raised my rifle and we fired simultaneously. I saw a spurt of red where his left eye had been and felt a massive punch to my chest. The force of the blow knocked me backwards, and I rolled down the side of the dune to the soft desert sand below. There I lay, unconscious, bleeding from two bullet wounds.
I would have died that day were it not for Reuben Tzanani. He had lifted me on his back and carried me over a kilometer to the rear of our lines, where I received the emergency treatment that saved my life. I heard all this much later, after I'd regained consciousness in the hospital in Tel Aviv. At first, the doctors thought I would not survive; then they feared I would be permanently handicapped. But I recovered fully, and, in five weeks minus two days, was discharged.
Reuben's actions that day were made all the more remarkable by the discrepancy in our physiques. I was six foot three, while he was five foot four with army boots on. I also outweighed him by forty pounds at least. For being able to carry more than his body weight, and for saving my life, he received the nickname "Ant." For my actions that day, I received a medal, the rank of sergeant, and was celebrated as a hero in the newspapers and on the radio. I'd always felt that, of the two of us, Reuben was the true hero.
Reuben was a slight, gentle man, who seldom raised his voice. But his tender appearance hid a rock-solid interior. He was one of the bravest soldiers I'd fought alongside of and one of the finest, most honest men I'd ever met. The latter, I suspected, was why he had not made it far on the police force and why he was given an office job instead of a street assignment. The ugly truth was that to get ahead in the police, you couldn't be as pure as a lily. You had to have some dirt on you.
"Adam," he said, "come in. Come in. Clear that chair and sit down. Want me to get you some coffee?"
The second chair—the one not currently occupied by Reuben—was laden with a tall stack of papers. Reuben motioned me to set the papers on the floor, which I did. Sitting down, I said, "No coffee for me, Reuben. I know what police station coffee is like."
He laughed. Then his face turned serious as he picked up a slim brown folder from his desk. He looked from the folder to me.
"I peeked at it. It's pretty brutal."
