The former Wolfgang Berkowitz’s trouble as the Israeli Zev Barak—such was his self-analysis—was that he remained enough of a Middle European to see more than one point of view. Begin was not wholly wrong, and Ben Gurion was far from wholly right. They were a pair of East European ghetto politicians contending for a tiny imperilled new country. After nineteen centuries of dispersion the Jews were back home. The Jewish State, Herzl’s dream, had existed for only five weeks, and with the enemy at the gates, Jews had Jews in their gunsights! It was too much for him. Let Ben Gurion handle it, as he handled everything down to army uniform buttons.
A buzzer on the desk sounded. He went to the cabinet room door and knocked. “Come in!” The Prime Minister sat at a table with eight middle-aged or elderly Zionists, all in open-collar shirts except for one rabbi in a black suit and tie. Barak knew them all. Some nodded to him unsmiling. Weighty silence in the room. Sadness, foreboding, fear on the drawn pale faces around the table, all except Ben Gurion’s. “Our good Mr. Begin has gone stark mad,” he rasped, his color good, his mien pugnacious. “The issue on the table here is whether Allon is to use his howitzer if the situation continues to deteriorate. In that case, Zev, you will handle the press without further reference to me. Understood? You know the picture.”
“Yes, Prime Minister.”
He heard Ben Gurion say, before he closed the door going out, “Let’s be clear that taking action means killing Jews. If that’s the decision of the Provisional Government, very well, but I want a vote, and I want it now—”
Driving back to the waterfront, he had to maneuver the jeep through honking cars and a horde of pedestrians hurrying the other way. A policeman told Barak that the neighborhoods near the beach were being evacuated. Barak could see numbers of soldiers shouldering against the mob toward the beach; Irgun deserters from the army, coming to fight for that damned gunrunning LST.
***
When the pandemonium of gunshots erupted all over the harbor without warning, balcony onlookers came scrambling inside the restaurant. Waiters and diners dived for the floor. Saul Schreiber, the Los Angeles Times reporter, had joined St. John Robley at his table, and they both kept their seats, watching the heavily loaded second launch zigzag through a thick spray of bullet splashes. They saw it lurch onto the shallows off the water’s edge and stop; saw the men in it returning fire, saw the wounded being dragged to the beach by people who waded out to help.
“This is as fantastic a spectacle,” remarked the Englishman, “as I have seen in my life, and I have covered a lot of war.”
“Brother against brother,” said Schreiber sadly. “Sheer lunacy.”
The barrages slackened. The people on the floor in the restaurant sheepishly got up and dusted themselves. The arms remained in the abandoned half-sunken launch. On the waterfront, an oppressive protracted calm ensued. The sun was declining, casting a long glitter on the sea, when an army lieutenant came in and announced, “Gentlemen, a press representative of the government is on the way.” Journalists and UN people crowded in from the balcony.
“Well, Major Barak should have some hard news for us,” Schreiber said to Robley, but Yael Luria appeared instead, in a form-fitting uniform and fresh makeup. She threw them a bright smile of recognition, so Schreiber shouldered to her through the crowd and helped her up on a chair. Stammering at first but steadying as she went, Yael read from a sheet:
“The Israel Defense Force announces that the ship Altalena has asked for and been granted a cease-fire, so as to evacuate the wounded. A peaceful end to the crisis is being urgently negotiated. Under no circumstances will the illegal arms be landed in Israel, in defiance of the truce and the government’s orders.”
Questions shot at her from all sides, but with a helpless gesture she shouted, “That’s all I have. There will be a detailed briefing very soon by Major Zev Barak.”
Schreiber darted after the departing Yael. Canny of Major Barak to stall the press with that blond eyeful; but she must know a lot more than that, and a Jewish reporter might get it out of her. But she was not in the lobby, nor in the quiet avenue outside. Gone. Damn!
***
Never had Yael seen Tel Aviv streets so deserted, and—despite sporadic rattle of guns—so quiet. At a new crude roadblock of oil drums near the Red House, armed Irgunists in street clothes stopped her, and one who looked like her brother Benny brusquely asked to see her papers. Yael produced them at gunpoint, feeling exceedingly strange. These fellows were joking among themselves in her own Hebrew army slang, but she was being treated like an Arab. The Irgunist gave back her papers with a friendly smile that she did not return. Hurrying back to the Red House, she came on a platoon of disarmed soldiers outside a school building, guarded by others with submachine guns. One prisoner waved at her. “Hi there, Yael,” he called in English. “I’m under arrest. We all are.”
After a moment she recognized Don Kishote’s brother, Leopold, who seemed in surprisingly good spirits, unlike the rest of his hangdog platoon. “Hello there!” she called. “What’s happened to you?” An armed guard, puzzled and irritated by the English talk, growled at her. She ignored him. “What did you do wrong?”
“We refused to shoot! I was the first one to say I wouldn’t. I threw down my gun, then the whole platoon did. I said I didn’t come to Palestine to kill Jews, I saw enough Jews killed in Poland.”
“Asur l’daber! [No talking!]” snarled the guard.
A scared-looking woman opened the school door. The guards began to march the prisoners inside.
“Tell Yossi,” Leopold called.
“I will.”
He shouted, as he went through the door, “See you in Los Angeles!”
Volleys of gunfire once more broke the silence, this time followed by the booming of a cannon. Sliding against the sides of buildings, Yael edged her way to the waterfront. Peeping out at the harbor, she was struck sick with horror. The LST was on fire. Men were throwing rafts over the side, jumping overboard, or climbing down ropes and nets. A ragged white flag waved on the mast, hardly visible through the smoke and the leaping flames.
“Oh God.” The words broke from her. “We’re finished! Israel is finished, Zionism is finished. It’s all over.”
***
It was the best duck dinner he had had in his life, Barak thought, and Nakhama had been at pains to look beautiful. Or was that an effect of the candlelight? Noah downed two helpings like a tiger cub, then fell asleep at the table. Nakhama carried him off to bed, and Barak sighed with pleasure. What a treat! Perfect dinner, lovely wife, great kid, warm home, wonderful refuge from the melancholy Altalena disaster and its all-day aftershocks. Crisis blown over as fast as it had boiled up; shut it out! The worst had been averted today, there would be no civil war. Question: tell Nakhama or not about his impending trip to America? Disclosure now might cause trouble and chill the night’s promised delights. Then again, whenever he did have to leave the barbed query would come. “So! Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Time for the news,” said Nakhama, marching in and snapping on the battery radio. First item, Begin had instructed and exhorted his troops to return to their posts and obey army orders. Direct quotes from his talk on an Irgun command network: “We will not engage in fratricidal warfare, our enemy is not the Israeli army, but the Arabs….” Nakhama nodded approval. Like most Moroccans, who knew the Arabs well, she was a tacit Irgunist. At that moment Zev decided against telling her now. Why spoil the magic of the duck dinner? She was smiling as she cleared the dishes, and the candle flames were sparkling in her eyes. “You’ve had a hard time, Zevi. Early to bed.”
“Definitely, motek,” he said.
***
From the final paragraph in St. John Robley’s featured analysis for Reuters on “the Altalena affair”:
…Of course the Ben Gurion government had the firepower and won out, but Mr. Begin created a martyrology and a legend. He was last off the burning vessel, and he had to be dragged off. Then he rose to
the moment by ordering the Irgun units to go back to their posts and obey the orders of Ben Gurion’s army. He thus averted a civil war, and he was the only man in Israel who could have done it. If the victory was David Ben Gurion’s, the laurel was Menachem Begin’s. It was diamond cut diamond.
7
America
“Statue of Liberty,” shouted the pilot over the engine roar, pointing down at the little green figure with upraised arm, on an island in the sparkling harbor where many ships crawled.
“I see it,” said Barak. What a vision ahead, those tall, tall Manhattan towers between two shining rivers, and what rivers! The Jordan was a trickle, even the Danube just a stream, compared to those rivers. America!
Grating voice on the cockpit loudspeaker: “One-six-five Jig Baker, cleared for landing. Immigration and customs officials on hand with all clearance papers. Notify General Dayan. Out.”
In the plane’s malodorous cargo area, Moshe Dayan still slept on a mattress beside the flag-draped coffin, secured to deck rings which were there to restrain racehorses. In the cockpit too one breathed stable smells. No other plane had been obtainable, and this one only at exorbitant charter and insurance fees. Zev Barak could only hope that Israel’s escorts of the fallen American would not arrive diffusing too rich an aroma of horse manure.
“Moshe, we’re coming down.” Barak touched Dayan’s shoulder. The good eye opened, bright and alert. “Entry documents are all set.”
“Excellent.” Dayan nodded, yawned, and glanced at his watch. “Long ride.”
The plane landed and rolled to a stop. Through an opened side port, sunshine flooded the fuselage as three young officers in beribboned army uniforms, bristle-headed and stiff-backed, leaped in and saluted the Israelis. Reverently they removed the flag from the coffin. Two of them draped over the box an enormous Stars and Stripes, while the third folded the Star of David flag and handed it to Barak. He could see on the tarmac, under large American and Israeli flags flapping in the brisk wind, a long line of black limousines. An honor guard of policemen in dress blues—at least a hundred, Barak estimated—snapped salutes as the coffin was handed out of the plane, for Mickey Marcus had once been New York’s commissioner of correction. Dayan and Barak also received a mass salute, emerging in the gaudy dress uniforms dreamed up overnight by Tel Aviv tailors at B.G.’s orders, much to Dayan’s amused disgust: dark green jackets with epaulettes and gold buttons, ornamented black berets, and gleaming Sam Browne belts. Behind them an officer carried their bags.
A gray-haired army colonel approached, saluted, and shook hands. “Mrs. Marcus would like Colonel Marcus’s aide to ride with her. It will be an honor, General,” he added to Dayan, “if you will share my car.”
From the back seat of the leading limousine a strong-faced pretty woman in her forties, in a black suit and a large black straw hat, held out her hand to Barak. “You’re Zev,” she said drily as he got in. “My husband wrote to me about you.” Her glance at the flag was so frigid that he laid it aside without a word.
The cortege formed up, headlights burning, and wound through Brooklyn streets lined with onlookers to an immense crowded temple. After a brief memorial service there by a blue-robed rabbi and a white-robed choir, the procession rolled across the famous Brooklyn Bridge, which Barak recognized from movies and picture books, and past a reviewing stand at City Hall; where rows of dignitaries stood with hats over their hearts, more huge flags fluttered, more policemen saluted, and ranks of soldiers and sailors saluted too. All that time the widow was silent and dry-eyed. Barak’s ears still buzzed from the plane noise, and he was awed and numbed by the magnitude of it all: the temple, the vast bridges, the river, the canyons of skyscrapers. The widow’s silence chilled him. The grandiose pomp astounded him. It was like newsreels of President Roosevelt’s funeral. All this, for poor Colonel Stone!
Along the wide Hudson’s cliff-lined waters, the sixty limousines rolled to West Point. Mrs. Marcus did not speak, staring white-faced out at the river. Despite the newness of all this, and the rich green beauty of the Hudson valley, Barak had to fight off a tendency to doze, for he had slept little since leaving Israel and had traversed several time zones. The Academy superintendent, a resplendent three-star general, waited at the door of an imposing chapel, flanked by two civilians, the tall gloomy former Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, and the short perky Governor Dewey of New York; Mrs. Marcus spoke up to tell Barak who they were, and said no more. Ten pallbearers from Marcus’s West Point class, all colonels or generals in full-dress uniform with medals, carried the coffin to the grave site. Hard put to it to keep his voice steady, Barak read aloud the Israeli army citation and Ben Gurion’s cable of sympathy to the widow. Dayan, standing beside him, then delivered a brief tribute in Hebrew, which he translated for the somber gathering.
And so farewell, Mickey Marcus, gone because he went out in the night at Abu Ghosh to piss and couldn’t talk Hebrew; how wise of the Old Man to suppress the truth! The Americans wanted to honor a hero of war, not to pity a victim of Israeli balagan. And who was to say, Barak thought as the coffin sank into the earth to the piercing bugle notes of taps and the echoing thunder of a twelve-gun salute, that—balagan or no balagan—this hero’s farewell was not the real thing? Yes, it was smart politics for that governor to be here; he was running against President Truman, and New York had a big Jewish vote. Truman was no fool either, sending here Roosevelt’s famous Jewish cabinet member. All that took nothing away from Colonel Stone. He had died in the field, an American volunteer in the Jewish fight for Palestine. Death was death, however it came.
Mrs. Marcus sat staring straight ahead, clasping the folded American flag in her lap, as the cortege headed back south along the Hudson. “Look Zev,” she said abruptly, “you can help me if you will.”
“Anything you say, Mrs. Marcus.”
“Thank you. The wife of one of Mickey’s best friends is the New York chairman of Hadassah. They have a big-givers’ parlor meeting today, to raise emergency funds for the hospital in Jerusalem. I agreed to attend as guest of honor before—” She paused and bit her lip. “—Well, I can’t go. They realize that. But they couldn’t call it off, it’s too late. Will you go there, and read that message from Ben Gurion and the citation? Maybe say just a few words too?”
Big givers… Zev Barak, performing beggar…
“Of course I’ll do it, Mrs. Marcus.”
“Emma.” She touched an icy hand on his. “You’re kind. It’ll be a hen party, not another man in sight. Sure you’re up to it?”
“Well, in our army we get these tough assignments off and on.”
She managed a wintry smile. “Mickey was fond of you. I see why.”
Barak took a plunge. “Can I say something, Emma?”
She turned glittery eyes at him and nodded.
“Colonel Marcus once quoted Rupert Brooke to me—‘…There is a corner of some foreign field that is forever England.’”
“Mickey was always quoting poetry.” The eyes slightly softened. “He loved that one, yes.”
“Emma, there’s a corner of West Point that is forever Israel.”
She tightened her mouth and did not cry, but pointed to the blue-and-white flag on the seat and held out her hand. He gave the flag to her. When she left him off at a tall apartment building on Central Park West, she was holding both flags close to her.
***
From his Vienna boyhood onward, Barak had eaten and relished all manner of cream pastries, but the elephantine layer cakes at the parlor meeting were a novelty. In Israel two would have fed a large wedding party, but here there were ten cakes for about twenty women, all dressed to the nines, all in big modish hats. Slim or stout, they consumed the cakes ravenously, chatting in low tones, with shy glances at the handsome Israeli officer who stood aside at a window, devouring his thick slice and looking out in wonder at the grand rectangle of green park and its spiky borders of skyscrapers. One of the older women, plump but comely, with g
ray-streaked hair under a plumed hat like a hussar’s, kept smiling at him. Uncertainly he smiled back, whereupon she came to him, almost at a trot. “So you do recognize me! You’ve only seen pictures.”
“Well—is this Aunt Lydia?”
“Lydia Barkowe. That’s me, Wolfgang! I mean Zev, of course.” She laughed, seized his hand and pecked his cheek. “What a surprise when Emma phoned you were coming in her place! Your father’s staying with us, you know. I’ll take you home to dinner.”
“I didn’t know my father was with you, Aunt Lydia, I thought the mission rented a place near the UN.”
“Yes, but he’s visiting us to get away from Lake Success, for a breather. He’s fine. Your uncle will be thrilled to see you. My kids too, they’re all home. Kids, listen to me! One a father, the others twenty-one and seventeen!” Her eyes gleamed at him. “You look so dashing, you know?”
The women sat down in folding chairs to hear him. Their chairman, a buxom lady in a tailored suit, introduced him with a few brisk excited words, clearly delighted, as were all these shiny-eyed matrons, at his transforming a lugubrious fund-raiser with his dazzling martial presence. His aunt in the front row was beaming at him, and it was a long time since he had felt so boyish, so self-conscious, and so phony.
But as he read the tributes and saw the women’s eyes cloud with sadness, those feelings faded. He was moved to say something about Marcus and the Jerusalem front, and how the Burma Road had broken the siege. He said whatever came to mind. He found himself talking about the whole war, the truce, the hazardous geography of Israel, and the bravery of the soldiers in victory and defeat. He heard gasps as he described the march of the untrained immigrants from Cyprus into the fire at Latrun. When he figured he had gone on too long he broke off lamely and randomly, and was astounded when they jumped to their feet applauding.