The stewardess brought lunch trays. Amos bantered with her in French, her replies were perky, and when she swayed away Kishote said, “There’s a girl you might have fun with in Paris.”
“More trouble than it would be worth,” Amos said.
Kishote recalled seeing him hanging around one of the French wives at the Barak wedding. Was she awaiting him in Paris? That could prove far more trouble than it was worth. But the young man was not asking his advice. Yossi settled back in his chair and slept like a soldier in the field. In the airport he hurried off to make his Los Angeles connection, and Amos passed through customs behind the twin of the hijacker, who now seemed harmless enough, juggling luggage like everyone else.
At the front of the crowd outside the plane gate, Madame Fleg gave Amos a shy little wave. She wore a pale blue suit with a crisp white collar, a lily of diamonds as a shoulder pin, and a small gray hat and veil.
“Hi. This is for you, Irene.”
“Tiens! A present!” She began tearing the duty-free shop wrapping off the package.
“Wait, wait till you get home.”
“I never can … Oh, Amos!”
“It’s nothing. Just to replace the one that blew overboard.”
She whipped the pink chiffon scarf around her neck and kissed him, a quick cool brush of thin lips on his mouth. “Merci!”
“Where do we get a cab?”
“Come along.”
“My reservation is at the Hotel Feydeau.”
“Yes, you told me.” She led him deftly through the terminal throng, and out into a warm rainy afternoon. “Here we are.” To a wizened old chauffeur at a black Jaguar she said, “Take monsieur’s bags, Theodor. Hop in, Amos.”
In the back seat, while Theodor stowed the bags, Amos swept an arm around her. She pulled away with a warning smile, pointing at the chauffeur. As the car left the airport, she squeezed his hand hard against her wool-clad thigh. Amos kept wondering why to all the devils she had brought this decrepit driver. Couldn’t she drive a Jaguar herself? Puzzling lady, but fascinating, that bony face, those high cheeks. A few wrinkles at those slanted clever eyes, so what? He knew a dozen smooth-skinned prettier girls who bored him.
They turned into a dead-end alley in an old section of Paris and stopped. “Where are we, Irene? This isn’t the Feydeau.”
“This is our garage, chéri,” she said, as Theodor got out and opened a double wooden door. “The fact is, Armand insists that you stay with us.”
“Armand? You said he’d be in Italy.”
“Well, he got back early.”
“Look, it’s absurd, Irene, out of the question.”
“It’s done, chéri. Armand is a quiet man, but what he says, goes.”
They entered from the back a narrow town house, where children’s voices resounded as they went up many stairs. “We have a modest guest room for those who can climb three flights,” she said, panting a little.
“Call this modest?” There was a four-poster bed, hunting prints on the walls, and a red leather armchair and ottoman by a brick fireplace. He dropped the bags, seized the slender body of Irene Fleg and gave her a hungry kiss. “Look, Irene, I can’t stay in your house, you know it’s preposterous —”
She slipped from his arms, whispering, “Doucement, here’s Madeline.” In walked a tall uniformed maid with a square hairy face, carrying towels and bed linen. Behind her came the son wearing a natty school uniform, who snapped to attention and saluted. “Bonjour, le vrai héros!”
“Bonjour!” Saluting, Amos racked his brain for a way to get out of this trap. He had not flown to Paris for five days of bourgeois hospitality, to all the devils. Romance under the Fleg roof, with three children racketing around and servants popping in and out, was not to be thought of.
“Come, Anatole,” said Irene Fleg, “we’ll let the hero rest before dinner, and I’ll help you with your English lessons.”
In her son’s room she coached him through Poe’s “The Raven,” smiling about poor Amos up there in comic discomfiture. She had been unable to resist his telephoned offer to come to Paris. He would expect her to make love, she realized, vite, vite, on his arrival, no doubt in his hotel room; not her style, but she had agreed to his visit, leaving all to chance and impulse. Her husband’s early return had gotten her out of an awkward spot. End of problem, Amos was here for five days under her roof. Why look beyond that?
The dinner with the Flegs that night was not a comfortable experience for Amos. The salmon and the duck were delicious, the wines better than any he had yet tasted, the attentions of the gliding blank-faced manservant somewhat unnerving. The three children sat silent, eating with neat manners until Monsieur Fleg asked them questions about their schoolwork, when they answered up to his satisfaction, judging by his faint smiles and nods. Irene sat silent. Evidently the dinner table was Fleg’s domain. He talked about Israel’s economic problems with a grasp beyond Amos, sharp-focussed as Amos was on warfare, security, and his own advancement. And the pictures on the walls looked like a real Renoir and a real Modigliani, and the furniture was massive and gleaming, and the dishes and silver were obviously very costly, and it was all too much for Amos Pasternak. He was not intimidated, nothing could do that, but he felt at Monsieur Fleg’s table like a tamed bear sitting upright.
“I haven’t asked you to talk about the war, Amos,” said Fleg over a green cream dessert. “You didn’t come to Paris for that. Having you with us is an honor, and the house is yours.”
For the first time, the boy Anatole spoke without being spoken to. “I should like to talk to the hero about the war.”
“We will talk,” said Amos. “Maybe tomorrow.”
That night came a tap on his door, and Irene Fleg entered in a silvery silk robe over a white negligee. He was already in bed, wearing only shorts. He leaped out and embraced her, but she pushed him off. “Doucement” she said, “go back to your bed and let me tell you something.”
The command was gentle but serious. He obeyed. She sat down in the armchair and lit a cigarette. “Armand is not here tonight. He is undoubtedly with his mistress of some years, a dancer at the Opera, a Polish woman, pleasant enough. Since Françoise, my third child, was born we have slept in separate rooms.”
Pause, a long drag on the cigarette.
“I have no arrangement, so to say, with any gentleman, and I’m quite content with that state of things. That is, I was content until I agreed like a madwoman to go to Beirut. Since then I have been discontented. Stay where you are. You would be a very great fool, Amos Pasternak, to become involved with me in any way. I would be even sillier to allow it. It’s no good. I did agree to your coming to Paris, and that was as impulsive and foolish as my going to Beirut. Now be wise and send me back to my room.”
Amos got off the bed and pulled her to her feet. She touched his bare brown skin here and there. “Ah, such scars, such scars. Some not yet really healed —”
The robe slipped off.
“By God, you have an exquisite body, Irene.”
“Not since my childbearing. Useful mainly for skiing, for a long time now. Leave it at that, Amos, I advise you, I beg you.”
He did not, of course.
What followed were five days and nights not entirely of bourgeois hospitality. Amos Pasternak was no newcomer to lovemaking, nor to romantic passion, but those days and nights marked a sharp turn in his life. Although she never said so in her whispered endearments, he surmised that she was snared like himself in something powerful, that this was not an older woman merely enjoying herself with a young buck. Encountering Armand Fleg during those days, usually at dinner but twice at morning coffee, was very awkward for Amos. The free and easy ways of Israelis did not stretch to this sort of thing. But Monsieur Fleg was ever the genial bourgeois host, entertaining a war hero under his roof and considering it a privilege. He did convey to his guest, in a way too subtle for definition, that he was well aware of how far his hospitality was extending, and that it was quite
all right with him. In short, Amos was in civilized Europe.
On their last night together, their passion took on an edge of poignancy that forced from him, in the early hours of the morning, a cry from the heart. Was it unthinkable to Irene that she leave her husband and marry him? It would be difficult, but he was ready to do it, and how could they live without each other, after this? How could they endure long separations?
Irene Fleg was absolutely horrified. Sitting up naked, pulling a sheet over her slight breasts, she talked hard sense. What on earth was the point? How was it possible? Would he abandon his career in the army and come to Paris to live? Or did he expect her to give up her children, her home, her way of life, and come to Israel, where she could not even speak the language?
“Chéri, you move me to tears,” she said, looking not in the least tearful, “but you must forget this nonsense, now and forever. Mon Dieu, don’t you realize how lucky we are, how beautiful this is? We can meet whenever you’re free, and wherever we please. Rome, Madrid, Nice, Venice, all Europe is ours. We can ski. We can sail the Greek islands, there’s no end to the pleasure we can have together —”
“But, Irene —”
“Amos, look at that window, it’s growing light. Come here.”
35
“We Unbelievers”
The lecture appearance by Professor Max Roweh at a bat mitzvah in a Beverly Hills temple, which Don Kishote attended with Yael, happened in this way. The father of the bat mitzvah girl, one Lew Katzman, was a film mogul of the newer sort, the lean gray chairman of GAA, as everyone called the Great Artists Agency; a solid citizen, a supporter of Israel, and a temple trustee. For the Friday night forum of Tamara Katzman’s bat mitzvah weekend, her father told the rabbi he wanted the best Jewish lecturer in the world, money no object.
“The best in the world, Lew? Depends,” said the young rabbi. “If you’re talking fame, you want Elie Wiesel or Isaac Bashevis Singer. If you want substance, it’s Isaiah Berlin or Max Roweh, but Berlin won’t fly here from England. Roweh’s at Columbia.”
“Isn’t Roweh the guy who married a Rothschild, and heads some big foundations?”
“Well, nominally he does, but he has managers for that.”
“And did he write that book, The Fork in the Road, or whatever, that got such incredible reviews?”
“Vico and Descartes. Yes, that’s Roweh.”
“Real class. Get him.”
The rabbi beamed. “Great. He’s my mentor for the Ph.D. thesis I’m writing. I love Max.”
“What does he cost?”
“Ten bills.” The rabbi was picking up movie parlance. “The whole fee goes to his foundations. I warn you, he’ll talk over some people’s heads.”
“So what? In his field he’s a superstar. We’ll have a little dinner party at home for him afterward. I’ll put Tamara next to him. Maybe some of that brainpower will rub off on her.”
Roweh accepted, and when two weeks before the lecture the rabbi telephoned him to ask for the title, the professor said, “ ‘We Unbelievers.’ ” Silence from the rabbi. “That troubles you? I can also call it ‘Napoleon, Wingate, and Vice’s Theory of the Barbarism of Reflection.’ ”
“No, no. ‘We Unbelievers’ sounds fine, Max. Catchy. It’s a free forum. You won’t deny the existence of God, will you, Max? In my pulpit? There are limits.”
“I’ll leave the question open. How’s that?”
“I’m relieved.”
A professorial chuckle. “So is He, I daresay, if He exists and is listening.”
So Don Kishote stood at a full-length mirror in Yael’s apartment that Friday night, contemplating himself in a tuxedo, the first time in his entire life that he had put one on. The rented suit fitted well, but to him it seemed a getup like a Robin Hood or Hamlet costume. “I look grotesque,” he said.
“You look fine,” said Yael, coming in from her bedroom in a new long Givenchy dress, putting on diamond earrings.
He pointed to the invitation on a table. “Yael, what kind of a title is that for a temple lecture, ‘We Unbelievers’?”
“It’s pure Max.”
“Is he an atheist? And if so, why have they got him to lecture at a big bat mitzvah?”
“Listen and you’ll learn something. Will you tuck Eva into bed?”
“With pleasure.”
Yossi dressed his daughter in pajamas while she prattled in Hebrew and English. For a while he sat with her over a picture book, loving the touch of her hand on his. When this elf put both hands to his face and said “Abba,” or when she danced and sang for him, Los Angeles did not seem such a bad place after all. If only he still felt anything for Yael, he thought, he would certainly stay here for a while, then press her to come home with Eva. But he could not fake it.
Yael looked in. “Ready, Yossi? I am.”
“Let’s go.”
Every seat in the temple, accommodating two thousand, was taken when they got there, except for the first three center rows roped off for the Katzmans’ black-tie dinner guests. The temple was popular, Lew Katzman had a wide acquaintance, and besides, there was the sure prospect of a lavish bat mitzvah buffet. Max Roweh was also a draw. Most of the audience had read reviews of his books, and reviewers lavished praise on Max Roweh; none ventured to cry the emperor had no clothes, for fear that he might in fact be royally robed. How could they tell? When his fellow philosophers argued with him in small journals, they used jargon as remote from plain English as Swahili. So far as this audience knew, Max Roweh was a big-name intellectual, a classy ornament for Tamara Katzman’s bat mitzvah.
Katzman’s celebrity clients like Faye Dunaway and Dustin Hoffman caused ripples of talk as they took seats in the reserved section, but the others did not: family members, the Israeli consul-general, the Nitzans, and close business associates like Sheva Leavis and Lee Bloom. To Don Kishote this first glimpse of a big American temple was mind-boggling. What could it have cost to build? Millions and millions! Sitting next to him was the famous film comedian Cookie Freeman, in his trademark horn-rimmed eye-glasses, and beside Freeman was nobody less than Meryl Streep! Quite a change, altogether, from the bunkers of Tasa.
Max Roweh was a convincing professorial presence at the podium: badly needing a haircut, his dinner jacket baggy and wrinkled, his black tie crooked. “We unbelievers,” Roweh began, after a cordial greeting to the Katzman family and a mild joke about the rabbi’s half-finished thesis, “we unbelievers, I say, are confronted with a large perplexity in recent history.” He paused, beaming around at the audience through thick glasses. Those were the last words he spoke at normal speed. Thereafter the speech came in machine-gun bursts of words, with quick jerky hand gestures.
“Since next Sunday is Israel’s Independence Day, that perplexity will be my theme. I shall argue that the Return of the Jews to the Promised Land, though possibly the most remarkable event of modern times, is no support whatever for the notion of divine intervention in human history” — he glanced over at the purple-robed rabbi in his ornate chair — “a notion no doubt regularly promulgated from this pulpit.”
In the audience, slight titters, nods, and nudges among the regular worshippers.
“We unbelievers hold, you see, that our majestic old Hebrew faith is a naive if long-lived and splendid dream, extinct as believable truth since, let us say, the year 1687, when Newton published his Principia, or even earlier, when Descartes wrote On Method. Since these two giants and the other luminaries in the galaxy of the Enlightenment — Hobbes, Galileo, Copernicus, Spinoza, Hume — battered down the immense gloomy walls of dogma which imprisoned man’s intelligence, and let the sunlight of naturalism into the human condition, most well-educated men can no longer take the Bible literally and believe, as our fathers did, in the old Jewish God. Instead our knowledge of the measurable realities in deep time and deep space, however incomplete, has become our poor ersatz Book of Genesis; sadly inferior as poetry and profound vision to the scriptural Genesis, but displacing it a
s fact. We do not have to assert with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra that God is dead. We unbelievers rather hold with Comte’s view of God; and I much appreciate your forbearance, and that of your rabbi, in giving ear to an unbeliever, in this magnificent shrine to what Comte called ‘an unnecessary hypothesis.’ ”
Audible rustlings and murmurs in the audience. Roweh flipped over several small sheets and rattled on.
“Now for our perplexity. We unbelievers have to face up to the striking chain of events and accidents of recent history, leading — almost as though by the will of Providence, I readily grant — to the fantastic Return of the Jews, a historical anomaly nearly as unlikely, to the mind of a naturalist, as the resurrection of the dead. I shall very briefly trace this chain, before going further.
“One must, of course, start with Napoleon.”
Another rustle, and something like a collective sigh, went through the enormous auditorium, as the audience perceived that it was in for a long wait before the buffet. But Yossi Nitzan found himself captivated by Roweh’s amiable effrontery, as step by step he traced the extraordinary origins of Zionism, at each step denying that God had had anything to do with it. Roweh’s general theme was that the major powers of the world, without any intent whatever to promote the interests of the Jews — in fact, sometimes with the opposite purpose — had each forwarded the most unlikely historical process that had created Israel.
Treating each power at some length but with express speed, he started with France because, as he said, Napoleon’s campaigns in Egypt and Syria had opened the Middle East to modern times, and his spreading by armed force of the French Revolution’s ideas of liberalism and equality had freed the Jews of Europe. When Roweh spoke of Russia, his rapid-fire delivery became tinged with passion. He stemmed from Russian Jewry, he said, and the pogroms of 1881 were a family memory. They had convinced millions of Russian Jews that they had no future under the Czar, so they had gone into the socialist underground, or to America like his own parents, or to Palestine. Zionism in its true beginnings was sparked by anti-Semitic Russian hooligans. Herzl and ideology came later.