To Yael, nursing her cognac and her mood at the bar, the world for the moment seemed all babies, wives, and fresh-faced girls under twenty like that religious Jerusalem kid who had hooked Don Kishote. Not that she envied Shayna her conquest. As a paratrooper leader he was said to be fearless and able, if a bit crazy, but immigrants seldom rose in the army the way the sabras did; unless, like Pasternak and Zev Barak, they had been brought to Palestine as children long ago.
Two brilliant sabra officers, a kibbutznik and a Jerusalemite, had courted Yael while she had been dallying with Pasternak; hesitating between them and him for a couple of years, she had lost them both. Now they were on the climb like her brother, like him married and producing babies, and she was Pasternak’s aide and girlfriend. But she knew Sam’s passion for her, she knew plenty about Ruth Pasternak, and she thought—and planned—that despite the three children she would one day rope him. Meantime here was Ruth Pasternak in a New York original, looking vexingly slim again after the third baby, another girl.
“That’s a grim frown, Yael,” Zev Barak said, coming to the bar and ordering orange soda.
“It’s a grim party.”
“Agreed.”
He went off with his soda and stood with his back to the wall. Because he knew so much of what was happening, he was taking no part in the repetitious Hebrew and English babble about the Suez crisis. Barak had gnawing reservations about Operation KADESH; also, about Lee Bloom. He knew, because Pasternak had told him, that Bloom’s record with Zahal was clear. He was not sure how that had come about. He had not asked. In his mind Lee Bloom was still Leopold Blumenthal, the insouciant deserter in the Los Angeles airport. Gold purifies bastards, the proverb went, and for Barak that was the theme of this gathering. The pretense that it celebrated a good paratrooper’s birthday was ludicrous.
“Come along, Zevi,” said Ruthie Pasternak, approaching Barak and diffusing expensive scent. “Why are you being such a snob?” She linked an arm in his. “Lee Bloom is going to toast his brother.”
“I can hear him from here,” said Barak, but he allowed himself to be led toward the circle of guests forming at the other end of the room.
“Where’s Nakhama?”
“She’s not well, you know, Ruthie. And she hates to leave the baby.”
“Oh, so do I! Sam dragged me out.”
Barak let that pass. Circulation in the party scene was Ruthie’s delight, as everyone knew. Almost as open as Pasternak’s relationship with Yael was Ruthie’s involvement with a minor foreign ambassador. In Israel’s small pressure-cooker society, liaisons could not be long hidden. There was no place to go, and everybody talked about everybody else. By common courtesy, therefore, “friendships” between men and women, often married to other men and women, were more or less accepted, and in fact relished as topics of small talk along with war, politics, and rising prices. Ruthie Pasternak, like her husband, had been in and out of a couple of such friendships, though nothing like his love affair with Yael Luria.
Lee Bloom was already starting his toast as Ruthie and Barak came into the group around him; buoyant flowery talk about his pride in his brother which made Barak cringe. Didn’t the fellow know when to leave well enough alone? But the toast brought calls of “L’hayim!” and some hand-clapping. Kishote raised both hands for quiet so that he could respond.
“I have to thank two people,” he said, speaking English because the American ambassador stood close by. “First of all my brother Leopold, I mean Lee, of course”—that brought chuckles—“for this nice party, and even more for my birthday present, a round-trip on El Al first class to Paris, for me and my girl.” He put an arm around Shayna. Amid the excited comments, and the curious glances at her, she did her best not to look appalled. “Second, my company commander, Ari Cohen, who went to my battalion commander, and then my brigade commander, and got me leave for four days. Thanks, Ari!”
He gestured to a burly officer, who responded in Hebrew, in a deep rough voice, “Be ready to come back at an hour’s notice, or it’s my ass.” Barks of laughter from the army men.
“Well,” said the El Al manager to Shayna, almost at her elbow, “El Al will give you both the royal treatment. That I promise you.”
Shayna exclaimed, “But I’m not going.”
Yossi turned on her in ludicrous stupefaction, pushing his glasses up on his nose. “You’re WHAT?”
“I have this exam,” she said. “I can’t get out of it.”
“An exam? Are you crazy?”
Already regretting her naive blurt before a roomful of onlookers, she rattled at him in swift Hebrew, “Please, please, drop it for now, will you? We’ll talk about it later. I’m honestly sorry, but I just can’t make it.”
He angrily muttered, “The devil you can’t. Tell them that you were joking. Quickly!”
Undertone: “I can’t, I can’t, Yossi.”
Same: “Do you realize what you’re doing?”
“Translation, please,” called the American ambassador, and the gathering broke into laughter.
“Not necessary,” said Yossi, unsmiling. He turned to his brother. “Well, I guess you just return those tickets.”
The El Al man put in jocosely, “And there goes our year’s profit.”
More laughter.
Lee knew what the working of his brother’s jaw muscles meant. Touchy moment! “Look, Yossi, she has an exam. That’s that, and she’s quite right. You come anyway.”
“What, without a girl,” said Kishote, “in Gay Paree? No thanks!”
A sweet voice called out, “I volunteer.” Yael Luria stepped out of the group with a demure little smile. “That is, if I’ll do.”
Kishote peered at her through pushed-up glasses, and said in Hebrew, forcing a grin, “Well, Yael, let’s have a talk about that later. Just you and me.”
“Translation, please.” The ambassador got a second laugh, and this time Yael coyly translated.
“Why, there’s a happy ending,” the ambassador said, and the pleasantry broke up the scene, with nobody knowing, least of all Shayna, whether either Yael or Kishote had really meant it.
***
The luminous dial on Yael’s bedside clock showed half-past two when the telephone woke her. Her immediate thought, knowing all she did as Pasternak’s aide, was that this could be mobilization for war. But it was only Don Kishote, sounding brusque and tired. “Yael? Sorry to disturb you. Were you serious?”
“About what? Oh, Paris? Well, hardly. It was a joke.” She yawned and added, “Maybe half serious. Why? Surely she can get that exam postponed! She’d be crazy not to go.”
“Well, we’ve been having a little disagreement about just that. A five-hour disagreement, with weeping and hair-tearing, the whole exercise. El Al flight 43, seven-thirty Sunday morning. Will you come?”
“Look, can’t this wait until the morning?” Yael’s mind was clicking into gear. El Al, first class! Paris! Give Pasternak a bone to choke on! Yossi was nobody to take seriously, but he was fun in his loony way.
“Come on, will you? Will Pasternak let you go?”
It was just the right prod in the tender spot. Wide-awake, Yael said, “I suppose it’s cold in Paris?”
“No colder than Jerusalem, Lee says.”
“Well, I don’t know. Call me at the office in the morning. I’ve never been to Paris. Rome, Athens, not Paris. Suppose Shayna changes her mind?”
“Not in the picture. I’ll call you at nine.”
Yael lay open-eyed thinking about clothes, and how to handle Pasternak, and the Paris of movies and books. Then she went back to sleep; a steady-nerved sort, not given to undue worry or excitement. She had added it all up and decided she might as well do it.
She had not, however, added in one factor. David Ben Gurion was making an ultra-secret trip to Paris, and his small entourage included Pasternak. She knew almost everything about Pasternak’s schedule, but not that.
***
All Nakhama knew was that Zev wa
s going abroad, because she had had to dig out his passport, unused since his tour of duty in a French command school at Saint-Cyr. That it was serious business she gathered from his abstracted air when they met with Noah’s teacher. The boy was studious enough, the woman said, but given to pranks like bringing frogs into class and hiding them in girls’ desks. “Zev, you have to give him a talking-to,” she said as they drove home.
“Let that be his worst offense.”
In their apartment his brother Michael was drinking tea and working on papers at the dining room table. He now had a teaching job at Hebrew University and was living with the Baraks while looking for digs. Michael had allowed his hair to grow out in a great brown bush, and looked more like the violinist he had once wanted to be than the mathematician he had become. He moved aside his canes and poured Zev a cup of tea. “Nakhama says you’re leaving?”
“Well, I may. Incidentally, you got the Matisdorf girl into plenty of trouble.”
“Me? How could I? She’s number one in the class.”
“Trouble with her boyfriend.” As Barak sipped tea and recounted the episode at Lee Bloom’s party, Michael looked more and more puzzled.
“But she asked to take the exam a few days late, and I agreed.”
“You did?”
“Why not? Whenever she sits down to it, she’ll whip through it in an hour. I didn’t know she wanted to go to Paris. It’s all news to me.”
“Well, he’s taking another girl, or at least I think so, and it’s a mess.”
“Is he that big paratrooper I’ve seen her with? The one with glasses they call Don Kishote?”
“That’s him.”
“She’s better off not going to Paris with that one.”
“I know him well. I think you’re wrong. Anyway, she blamed your exam.”
“Okay with me. She’s a modest nice girl, very religious. She’ll go places as an engineer, if she follows that track. I think she should be a mathematician, and one thing’s sure, she doesn’t need a paratrooper complicating her life. Good riddance.”
“I didn’t say they’d broken off. That’s a heavy love affair.” Barak smiled at his brother. “And your love life? Any hope?”
Michael Berkowitz adjusted his small knitted skullcap, which had a precarious purchase on his thicket of hair. “It’s not going to work out.” Barak’s glance at the canes was involuntary. “Nothing to do with that. Lena’s been wonderful about my problem. The thing is, she really, deeply doesn’t believe in God, Zev. She wants no part of Yiddishkeit. Born and grew up on a Mapam kibbutz. Loves music. She’ll get her Ph.D. in Russian literature without question.” Michael threw up his hands. “But she’s inflexible. She isn’t angry at God, or rebellious, or anything. She just thinks it’s all nonsense. Primitive mumbo-jumbo. She feels totally Jewish, she says, without it. We’ve talked about this for weeks. We’re on opposite sides of a line that can’t be crossed.”
“I like Lena. Too bad.”
“I love her,” said Michael mournfully. “It was so great at first, and I don’t attract many women.”
“You’ll attract one that’ll put up with God. Or let’s say God will send you one.”
“All I ask of God,” said Michael, “is to go to work on Lena.”
“Don’t. If he’s in the mood to work miracles, Israel needs them all.”
Nakhama was banging around in the kitchen, and by the sound of the impacts not in the friendliest of humors. He went in there, disarmed her of two frying pans, and embraced her. She did not respond at first, then she did, grudgingly.
“It won’t be for long, hamoodah [darling]. It can’t be. I have to return to my brigade.”
“Oh? Good to know. The army’s bad enough. These mystery trips, let me tell you, I can do without.”
***
The airplane thrumming through black night was like none Barak had ever flown in. President Truman had presented it to De Gaulle, the story went, as a victory gift after the war, and now that De Gaulle sulked in retirement writing memoirs, it was a French government plane; fitted up for ministerial journeys with beds, galley, and a darkened conference area where the Israelis were relaxing, while their French hosts sat up late over wine at the table up front.
“Anyway,” Dayan had remarked to Barak when they came aboard, “it doesn’t smell of horses. We’re making slow progress.” Pasternak, Dayan, and other officials were now stretched out asleep. Ben Gurion was reading a thick volume in a cone of light, and Barak was rapidly scrawling Hebrew hen tracks on a pad.
October 21, 1956
Paris Meeting—Analysis
(Sorting out my thoughts on this grotesque Suez “scenario,” as the British call it, in case B.G. turns to me and asks for an opinion.)
A. The British-French Proposal
1. Israel invades Sinai and threatens the Suez Canal.
2. It is assumed that Nasser mobilizes his army to defend the Canal.
3. The British and French issue an ultimatum “to both sides” to withdraw armed forces from the Canal area. It is assumed that Nasser will refuse. Whereupon they land troops in the Canal Zone to “restore peace.”
4. Once there, they march to Cairo and get rid of Nasser. Reduced to bare bones, that is it.
B. Colonel Nasser
A flamboyant revolutionary nationalist. What the Americans call a “tinhorn,” that is, a noisy bluffer, yet to us he’s a real threat. He can’t destroy France or England, but in that bombastic book of his, The Philosophy of the Revolution, he proclaims that he’ll unite the Arabs in one great nation, revenge their defeat in 1948, and wipe out “the Zionist entity” once for all, as soon as…
“Zev! Come here.” Ben Gurion calling with a wide-awake smile at one in the morning. “See what this fellow writes.”
Barak laid aside his pad. B.G.’s book was a Victorian edition with dense double-columned small print, and looking over his shoulder Barak could hardly make out the words the thick forefinger indicated. “Isn’t Sharm el Sheikh your brigade’s objective, if I go ahead with KADESH?”
“Yes, Prime Minister.”
“Well, just look here. Yotvat! That’s the Bible name for the main island in the Straits of Tiran, and he says it was a Jewish settlement! That’s how far back in history we belong at Sharm el Sheikh. This is Procopius, writing in early Byzantine times, around the year 500—nearly fifteen hundred years ago. A century before Mohammed was even born! So much for Arab claims that it’s always been theirs.”
The big bald head bent again over the book, and Barak returned to his seat. It was just like the Old Man to be reading ancient history on the way to a meeting that could shape modern history, and possibly lead to World War III. To Barak the outcome of this venturesome show of force was absolutely unknowable, and at best not promising.
He picked up the pad and went on with his scrawling for well over an hour, then tried to sleep; but he could not, so he showed Sam Pasternak his many pages of notes. Pasternak read them with care, now and then wryly grinning, and handed them back without a word. Barak waited, and when Pasternak yawned and closed his eyes he snapped, “Well?”
“Well, what? Waste of time. He’s already decided to do it, or we wouldn’t be on this plane. The rest is haggling.”
14
Les Folies-Bergère
In the crowded ladies’ cloakroom of Les Folies-Bergère, at a big mirror amid swirls of cigarette smoke and a twittering din in French, Yael and Isobel Connors were freshening their makeup between the acts, side by side. Lee Bloom’s girlfriend was a stylish redhead half a head taller than Yael, with a perfectly shaped Hollywood face—high cheekbones, sunken cheeks, wide-apart eyes, and a slightly pouting mouth. Yael judged her to be past thirty and somewhat worn by the film life; she had never heard of the actress, but believed Lee’s assertion that she had played big parts and had once been nominated for an Oscar. So she was suitably impressed, and becoming glad after all that she had accompanied Kishote to Paris, mostly to burn up Sam Pasternak.
On the long bumpy plane ride, through most of which Kishote had slept, Yael had been having glum second thoughts about this wayward excursion. Pasternak had nastily growled at her about it, and that had been satisfying. Still, at heart she was afraid of him, and especially afraid of losing him. Don Kishote was no replacement, younger than she was and hardly a great catch, and anyway he loved that little Jerusalem prude. Yael was not enjoying the show much; she was desperately tired, and Kishote too had kept yawning despite all the nude cavorters of the Folies-Bergère. He did not promise to be much fun, but Paris might still be. The Champs Élysées was stunning in its blaze of light, and this naughty Folies-Bergère would make a good story back home, and so would Isobel Connors.
“How do you like the Folies so far?” The actress looked at Yael in the mirror. Her voice was husky, almost hoarse; she was one of many replicas of Marlene Dietrich floating around the movie business.
“Well, the costumes and the sets are unbelievable. Such extravagance! I guess the men enjoy all the naked girls running around. Maybe I don’t exactly follow the skits, with all the slang, but aren’t they very dirty?”
Isobel Connors’s lips curled in a salacious grin. “Which ones, dear?”
“For instance, that scene in the tailor shop. The tailor fixing the comedian’s zipper. All that stuff. The audience was howling and howling, and if I got it, it was really dirty.”
“You got it,” said the actress, uttering a laugh right out of The Blue Angel. “Say, that brother of Lee’s is cute, but he can’t seem to stay awake.”
“We had a bad plane trip, and the army’s been working him hard. He’s a paratrooper.”
“So Lee told me. I think that’s terrific. Ready? Let’s get back to the boys.” As they strolled among the lobby promenaders Isobel Connors said, with a slantwise glance at Yael, “You’re a soldier too, aren’t you?”