17
Rumbles
Pasternak was at his Swedish modern desk one morning in late September, in a big office with picture windows looking out over uptown Tel Aviv and the sunny sea, when a building guard rang from the lobby, reporting that an army major wanted to see him, claiming to be his son.
Amos not in Sinai? Now what? “Tell him to come up.”
“Only the service elevator is running, sir.”
“So let him use that.”
Like the government and most Tel Aviv businesses, the Kivshan Building was shut down. The season of holy days was upon Israel; tonight at sundown Rosh Hashanah, ten days later Yom Kippur, then Sukkot — the annual three-week lull of rituals for pious Jews, and beachgoing or travel for others. Pasternak was alone on the executive top floor, no secretaries, not even a cleaning woman. In field uniform, briefcase in hand, Amos walked in and dropped letters on the desk. “Your mail, I stopped at the flat first. I’ve been ordered to the north. Why are you working today?”
Pasternak recognized Yael’s handwriting on the top letter. High time. “To the north? That’s sudden. What’s happening?”
“The Golan’s getting warm. I’m bringing up two companies and my command HQ. Know anything about it, Abba?”
Pasternak’s response was guarded. It was still inside intelligence that the Arabs were massing and maneuvering again, north and south, in a virtual replay of BLUE/WHITE. “Well, after shooting down all those planes of theirs we had to expect some kind of reaction.” In mid-September Syrian MiGs had scrambled to pursue an Israeli reconnaissance flight, and in an extended dogfight with its air cover had lost twelve aircraft to Israel’s none.
“Abba, that was an encounter that got out of hand on both sides.”
“I know. Still, they ended up with a big public black eye. Some sort of limited reprisal may well be in the wind.”
“No, Yanosh thinks it’s a lot more serious than that.” Colonel Yanosh Ben Gal, Amos’s hawk-faced brigade commander, in peace was something of a cynical womanizer, which to Pasternak was no great black mark against him, and in war he was a resourceful stubborn fighting man. “Yanosh expects the whole brigade will be moved up. There are seven Syrian divisions on the Golan by now, and we have only one brigade there, he says.”
“Probably right,” said the father wryly. “Peacetime deployment.”
“Well, that’s a monstrous asymmetry, Abba, twenty-one brigades to one! It’s been a balagan, calling my troops back from holiday leave, deciding who goes north and who stays in Sinai. Come on. Will there really be war this time? Do you know? Maybe we should get it over with. All these false alarms —”
“Yanosh is wrong. They won’t dare, Amos. It’s more of the old bluff to keep us on edge. Not pleasant, of course, while it lasts.” Pasternak felt a stir of disquiet. He was sure that the concepzia was sound, and that it was just a BLUE/WHITE feint again. Yet, if a Syrian reprisal for the air incident did occur, his son would be in the hot spot. “Good luck, son.”
“I need luck at the supply depot up there,” Amos grinned. “They’re fighting with my deputy about releasing the reserve tanks.”
Pasternak pulled open a drawer and fished a letter from his Soon file. “I don’t think this is important, but here it is. Some lady brought it, I think a Frenchwoman, on the day of the parade. It got buried, what with moving my office and all.” The father saw no point in mentioning that the woman was the elusive blonde of the Beirut raid. Let her stay elusive.
“Thanks.” Amos slipped the blue envelope into his briefcase. Frenchwoman! Hmm. “Well, if things cool down, maybe Yanosh will let me come and join you for Yom Kippur.”
“Sounds good. Now what about that rolling bridge? If your brigade’s in the north and there’s trouble down south, how does it get to the Canal?”
“Not up to me, Abba. I hope somebody’s thought about that.”
Pasternak resisted the notion of embracing Amos; too heavy a gesture for what was happening, so far. “Okay. If you can get to a telephone up there, call me. Shana tova [A good New Year], Amos.”
“Shana tova, Abba.” Amos threw him an ironic salute and left. The desk drawer was still open. It occurred to Pasternak that the best place for Yael’s letter was the Soon file. The intense mood of the dinner at Shimshon’s was fading, after weeks of searching his mail for word from her, and waiting for a phone call, at least. Nothing. Nothing! Who could tell, with First Sergeant Luria? To the Soon file with her! So he thought. But he reached for the paper cutter and slit open the letter. What to all the devils was she up to now?
No way of knowing, from the single sheet of warm bright chatter; the sound of Los Angeles and of pure devious Yael. He dashed off one rapid sheet in reply.
KIVSHAN
TEL AVIV
26 September 1973
Erev Rosh Hashanah
Dear First Sergeant —
Amos just brought your letter, which is three weeks old. He picked it up at the flat on his way to the Golan Heights. His battalion has been transferred there from Sinai, a funny business. Our air force tangled with the Syrians two weeks ago and shot down twelve planes, so Dode Moshe may anticipate a reprisal attack.
I was giving up on you when our post office snails finally crawled up with your short billet-doux. So you’re busy now with that film foolishness and happy to be back in the expatriate paradise. Good luck to you. I envy Sheva Leavis your services as adviser and troubleshooter. I could use them. Business is bound to bring me to the USA one of these days. I’ll let you know when I come, and maybe we can pick up where we left off at Shimshon’s. Meantime enjoy Eden, don’t eat the wrong apples, and shana tova.
Avoiding the Rosh Hashanah eve highway traffic, Amos’s driver tried to speed north through shortcuts and byways, but it was slow going here, too. Vehicles were few on the farmland back roads, but people cluttered them in holiday best, walking to the villages or to relatives’ homes. Up on the wild green Heights the Rosh Hashanah feeling dimmed in the ambience of crossroads guarded by bored soldiers, fenced-off Zahal camps flying the Star of David, and many armed jeep patrols. At the local brigade headquarters Colonel Ben Shoham greeted him with something like wartime briskness. “Pasternak, as soon as you’ve drawn your tanks and supplies put your battalion here.” He fingered a red circle on a wall map. “Be ready by morning for all eventualities. You’ll be my counterstrike force.”
“What’s the situation, sir?”
“Not clear. Not so good.” The bushy-haired officer sounded unafraid, but he had the grim weary look of a field commander with a single brigade, holding a front against seven enemy divisions.
“My deputy’s been having trouble drawing tanks.”
“That’s all cleared up. Yanosh’s troops have top priority on everything.”
Near sunset the bulk of Amos’s men arrived in a long convoy of busses. They swarmed into the supply depot to draw tanks out of storage; to test engines, bore-sight guns, load shells, magazines, and signal equipment, and grab up the thousand items of tank kits, all in a great noisy chaos. Here Rosh Hashanah ceased to exist, except for a small knot of soldiers in knitted skullcaps off in a corner of the depot with prayer books, rushing through a New Year service. Amos and his junior officers kept watching and checking far into the night, to ensure having at sunrise a counterstrike force of thirty-five working tanks. At 3 A.M. he went to snatch a little sleep in a bleak tin-roofed officers’ hut. Piling coarse blankets on a cot, for it was very cold, he pulled off his boots, and glanced again at his orders. The envelope his father had given him fell out of his despatch case: square, pale blue, no stamp. Inside was a single sheet.
Mon cher Pasternak fils:
My husband and I are here for the Independence Day Parade. I have been troubled to think that in our recent adventure I may have been unnecessarily rude or evasive. You asked my name. It is Irene Fleg. In “real life” I am a happily married woman living in Paris, the mother of three children. My husband is M. Armand Fleg, a bus
inessman active in the Alliance. If you happen to be in Paris one day, we will be pleased to see you. Meantime let me thank with less coyness the brave lady with the wet stockings who brought off a great exploit for Israel, and made me feel safe in a very foolhardy escapade. I was approached, felt challenged, and volunteered. Thanks in part to your cool courage, I came out with a whole skin. Never again!
Irene Fleg
Pasternak fils had more pressing things on his mind now than the tanned blond lady, but he had been long in the field and he had no steady girlfriend. As he slipped under the blankets in his heavy tank coveralls he was reflecting that this was an oblique sort of come-on letter. A Parisienne with three children and a husband active in the Alliance, therefore probably rich; out of the question, and not his style anyway. Still, how peculiarly seductive she had seemed. … Maybe one day when all this cooled down … He fell asleep indulging in these weary fantasies.
Dov Luria had a very different Rosh Hashanah eve. At midday he was flying at forty thousand feet over the Golan, photographing Syrian tanks and artillery, massed for miles on miles right up to the Purple Line of the cease-fire; and before sundown, dressed in a stiff new civilian suit, he was walking arm in arm with Galia Barak to the Ezrakh’s synagogue in Jerusalem. A bizarre transition, but such was an aviator’s life. The Baraks had invited him and his parents for holiday dinner, and his father had told him to bring Galia to the Ezrakh’s services first. Dov was mildly tolerant of his father’s drift to religion, and Galia was not about to object to anything suggested by Dov’s famous father. She was dizzy with tension, awaiting a serious word from Dov. She wore a costly red wool dress bought for her in Tel Aviv by her mother, just for this dinner, after they had shopped vainly for two days in Jerusalem.
As for Dov, he was more than ready to speak the serious word, but this fighter pilot was plain scared. Galia Barak baffled him. Did she really like him? She now seemed to him the unmatchable girl among girls, her dark eyes a fathomless mystery, her body a tall sweet flame, her every word charming and witty, her every motion full of grace, her relatively shy and chaste kisses the tantalizing essence of undeclared love. He hoped she cared for him, but on the other hand he had heard she was also seeing a very tall paratrooper. Dov was uncomfortable about his short stature, for Galia was half an inch taller. Girls! Suppose she turned him down?
They were walking in the pedestrian stream filling the street, for in the Holy City, auto traffic was down to zero. Friends greeted her and gave Dov sharp-eyed looks which warmed her heart. That Galia was going with a Phantom pilot was known all through Jerusalem’s teenage set, though at the moment he was in mufti and complaining about it. “The tie chokes me,” he said. “My father had this religious grandmother. She once told him that in the old country a new suit for Rosh Hashanah was a must. So last week he dragged me out and bought me this getup.”
“I love it,” said Galia. It was a checkered brown suit which the Hebrew label called “Scotch tweed,” and for Israeli ersatz it fit well enough. Services were already droning inside the Ezrakh’s little synagogue on a side street, and Benny Luria was waiting by an open worm-eaten wooden door hanging askew on its hinges.
“You go in the women’s section,” he said to Galia.
“I know, I know.” She slipped away, laughing. A bearded gabbai led them to reserved front seats in the packed plaster-walled shul. Deep in prayer by the Holy Ark, the Ezrakh did not glance around at them, though General Luria’s uniform was causing a stir. Without explanation, the Ezrakh had told him to wear it.
For Dov the service was a bore. The standings, sittings, and chantings confused him, and he passed the time reading the quaint Hebrew of the liturgy, all new to him. When the Ezrakh gave a brief talk, Dov was surprised at his clear colloquial Hebrew. He was half expecting Yiddish.
“K’tiva v’hateema tova!” the Ezrakh began in his high weak voice. (“A good decree, written and sealed, to you all!”) “This greeting, dear friends, should not be used at services tomorrow, on the second night of our holiday. Tonight, as we are taught, the righteous and the wicked receive their final decree. But bainonim [mediocrities] have the ten days until Yom Kippur to review their deeds, and true remorse can still change the outcome.” He stroked his long white beard, glancing around with a little smile. “So you see, if tomorrow night you wish your neighbor a good decree, you imply he is not righteous, but a mediocrity! Yet how can you be sure? We must judge every man on the side of merit. All the same, my friends, I give you permission to wish me a good decree tomorrow night, because to my pain, I am a mediocrity of mediocrities, and I thank the Creator for the Ten Days of Repentance.”
Dov asked Galia, when they came out amid the chattering congregants, “How was it in purdah?” The women were all staring at his father.
“Oh, b’seder, but I sure got funny looks. Mostly old ladies in there. I guess the young ones are home making dinner.” The first stars were out in the clear violet Jerusalem sky, and a cool breeze was blowing. “General, I told Mama that Dov and I would walk to the Wall after services. So enjoy dinner, and we’ll be back later.”
“Shana tova,” he said, with a paternal wistful smile. Those two could skip dinner or do what they pleased. The world was theirs.
Hand in hand they walked downhill, across a valley and up the slope to the Old City. More tense than he had been while flying over Syria, Dov wondered how to speak a serious word, meantime telling Galia about a tank column that had broken through here to the Jaffa Gate in the Six-Day War. He had learned this in an army tour of battle sites for recruits. The route was unmarked, just so many hilly streets and vacant weed-choked lots.
“We were in Washington then,” she said. “We missed it all.”
“I was here, all right. My father led the air strike that won the war.”
“Oh, who doesn’t know that? He’s a great hero.”
“Well, he heard Dayan say that your father was more important to the war in Washington than two brigades on the battlefield.”
“I was twelve,” Galia said. “What did I know? I just knew I didn’t like America. I missed my friends.”
“As soon as the war was over,” Dov said, “my father brought us to the Wall. All this here” — he gestured back at the valley — “was no-man’s-land. Ruins, barbed wire, minefields, booby traps. It’s hard to imagine now.” They walked in silence, intertwined fingers tightening. After a while he said, “Could you hear the Ezrakh?”
“Barely. Why?”
“Are we supposed to believe all that? Decrees, repentance? A book in heaven where everybody’s deeds are recorded, and a judgment is written down for next year — who lives, who dies, who by fire, who by water, and so on? I figure it’s all metaphorical, don’t you? My father’s going in for religion lately.”
“My mother’s getting back to it, too.”
“You know, Galia, I talked to the pilots who knocked down the Syrians in that dogfight. They say that going into battle you’re too busy to pray, but coming out of it you sure thank God, whether you’re religious or not.”
Once inside the Old City walls, Galia led him by the hand through gloomy narrow alleys and deserted little streets, moving always downhill. “You’re at home here, aren’t you?” he said.
“Oh, there’s nothing to do in Jerusalem on Shabbat, so we come here, my friends and I. You can explore the Old City forever. There’s good shopping, too.”
“And the Arabs?”
“Some are nice, others not so nice. Naturally they all wish we’d drop dead.”
They came out on a terrace above a wide plaza, where the floodlit Wall was mobbed by turbulent worshippers. “There’s always a huge crowd on holidays,” she said.
Dov said, “You know, the Wall used to be in a long dark alley. You couldn’t see it till you got right up to it. That’s how I first saw it.”
“It already looked like this,” she said, “when we came home.”
Descending a long flight of stone steps to the plaza, they
could hear discordant chants rising from half a dozen services going on at once, clustered around different reading stands and prayer leaders. “This section’s for the men,” she said. “Want to push in, up to the Wall? Some people make a point to kiss the stones.”
“No thanks.” He was staring over the people’s heads at the Wall. “This makes me think, though.”
“Of what?”
“Abba brought us here right after the war. Me, Daphna, Danny. He told us Jews used to spend their life savings, just to travel to see the Wall once before they died. Some even came on foot, thousands of miles. Galia, in six years this is the second time I’ve been here.”
“It’s too easy now,” said Galia. She added with a laugh, “See? We girls have to watch out for that.”
Dov did not react to her teasing at all. “You know something? From the air at reconnaissance altitude, Galia, you’re looking down, through the clouds, at mountains, valleys, rivers, lakes, farmland, and the sea. Just the earth as it is — brown, green, gray, and then the big blue stretch of the Mediterranean. There’s no Syria, no Iraq, no Jordan, no Egypt, no Israel. It’s all of a piece, all the same. No Promised Land. Zionism looks a lot different from up there.” He grunted. “Still, returning to base, you sure look for that little Promised Land.”
“Come.”
“Where to?”
“You’ll see.” She led him through more alleys, up dark staircases, along stone parapets, and under ancient arches. They climbed and climbed, and arrived atop a rough windswept stone tower under black sky crowded with stars. Below, lights twinkled on all sides, as far as they could see. “Now here’s a view of Jerusalem few people know about,” said Galia, leaning against him. “Three hundred sixty degrees. Chilly, though.”
He put an arm around her. “I’m not cold. I’ve got on my Rosh Hashanah suit.”
“So you have. It feels rough, but nice.”
They were both oddly short of breath. “Who wants to kiss stones?” the Phantom pilot said, and he seized her and went to full throttle, which had been Galia’s idea, conceivably.