“Imagine that. Chief of military intelligence wasn’t important enough for Ruthie, hey?”
“That wasn’t it. Porfirio got posted to London as ambassador.” Porfirio had been the Colombian chargé d’affaires in Tel Aviv.
“Oh, I see. How convenient that she has a flat there.”
“Don’t be unkind. Ruthie’s really a mess. She and I won’t make it much longer, Yael.”
“I wish this plane would stop bouncing around, don’t you?”
“Look, I’ll come to Los Angeles. Where will you be staying?”
“I don’t know. Lee Bloom made the arrangements. Don’t bother on my account, it’s pointless. Sam, shut up or I’ll move. I’m tired.”
Silence. Plane motors murmuring, small bumps, then smooth flying. After a while the seat belt sign went off.
“Sam”—low voice, high charge—“you’ll need it at the State Department for shaking hands with diplomats. You don’t want it broken off. Last warning. No more! …That’s better.”
A baritone chuckle. “Sleep well.”
“Same to you.”
On a Sunday morning the Manhattan financial district looks not only shut down but plague-stricken, so deserted are the steep stone canyons. Yael and Pasternak got out of the Hertz car and their footsteps echoed as they walked along Broad Street, in white sunshine slanting steeply through the silent empty towers.
“My God,” said Yael, halting and pointing round-eyed at a block-lettered street sign, WALL STREET, white on blue.
“What about it?”
“Sam, when I was a kid in Nahalal, our teachers were socialists, Marxists. Wall Street was the evil center of the capitalist hell. Here it is. Wall Street!”
“Just a street, you see,” said Pasternak. “What we should do is go up on the Empire State Building. From there you’ll see it all.”
“But when’s your plane?”
“There are always planes to Washington.”
Yael shakily laughed. “Kishote once took me up on the Eiffel Tower and I got the horrors. Which is higher?”
“This is. But you won’t get the horrors.”
The wind was strong on the Empire State’s observation platform, so he took her to the glassed-in area. “There it is,” he said, with a grand gesture of one arm, “not only Manhattan. All of New York. There’s Long Island, there’s New Jersey, there’s Brooklyn. Exceptionally clear day. Sometimes it’s all muck and you can’t even see the Statue of Liberty. Looks like a toy down there, doesn’t it?”
She stared around, then pulled a silk scarf from her purse, tied up her hair, and walked out in the wind. “It all really exists, doesn’t it?” She seemed to be talking to herself. Following her, he had to strain to hear her. “It’s really here. It’s not a movie and it’s not a dream. Sam, why should anyone want to live anywhere in the world but here? What other place is like this? Paris is nothing.”
“Wait till you see Los Angeles.”
“It can’t compare.”
“You’re wrong. That’s the place New Yorkers move to. They either die, or they go to Los Angeles. I’ll see you there next week, then we’ll make comparisons.” He glanced at his watch, and raised his voice over the wail of the wind. “I’d better put you on your plane.”
As the elevator dropped he said, noting her bemused look, “Yael, I think you’re discovering America. Mrs. Columbus.”
She gave him a wry smile.
***
Yael’s bemusement deepened as she flew westward. Hours and hours of droning plane engines, more than enough to fly from Tel Aviv to Paris, and still they flew on! The descent to Chicago in a crashing electrical storm, with blue-white lightning zigzagging and cracking past her window, should have frightened her, as it obviously did the passengers around her. Children cried, people vomited, stewardesses scurried and staggered in the aisles, the lights went on and off, and Yael felt only drunken exaltation; Mrs. Columbus on the pitching deck of the Santa Maria, impervious to seasickness, sighting the New World.
She had to change planes in Chicago. All flights were delayed. Enjoying the mere vast size of the terminal and the variety of the shops, she wandered for hours amid disgruntled wet throngs. The sun was out again when her plane took off over high waves crashing and spraying against a shore lined with tall buildings. There was nothing beyond the shore but blue water, clear to the horizon; Lake Michigan, an inland Mediterranean Sea, and not even the largest of the Great Lakes! So it went, hour after hour; limitless panoramas of green farmland, splotches of big cities, more farmland as far as the eye could see through drifting clouds. The pilot made a full circle over the Grand Canyon. Oo-ah! A wadi, nothing else, but when America produced a wadi, it staggered the soul with its depth, its breadth, its majesty, its ragged meandering colossal frightening red bleakness. Mars on earth, tucked in a corner of one state with a beautiful name, Arizona…
A crayoned sign held by a short Oriental in a black chauffeur’s uniform standing at the plane gate read NITZAN. Yael was not expecting to be met. Had the free spender Lee Bloom ordered a car for her?
“I’m Mrs. Nitzan.”
“Yes, madame.”
He bobbed his head, showed great teeth in a smile and took her handbag, then helped get her luggage, and led her through automatic doors to a parked silver Rolls-Royce, out of which stepped a lean little man with close-cropped thin gray hair. “Welcome to Los Angeles, Yael.” A peculiar grin curled up his mouth in a U-shape. “I’m Sheva Leavis, Lee’s partner. I’m just off to Hong Kong. I’ll be back for Lee’s wedding. Wang will drive you into town.” His English was only slightly accented.
Utterly startled, hypnotized by the gleaming Rolls, Yael tried to act composed. “Why, thank you. How nice of you. Where will I be staying?”
“Well, that’s up to you. Lee has booked you into the Beverly Wilshire. But I have a little place here, and my wife’s in Vancouver, she’s not well, so nobody’s home at the moment. You’re welcome to stay in the guesthouse. Wang and his wife will take good care of you.”
“Mr. Leavis, I wouldn’t think of imposing. I’d better go to the hotel.”
“Madame, please come, it will give us pleasure,” spoke up the chauffeur, his l’s and r’s blurry. “My wife very good cook. All strictly kosher.”
Yael now wondered whether this was some elaborate practical joke of Lee Bloom’s. She had of course heard of Sheva Leavis, the Iraqi man of mystery. But he was never photographed, and this plain little fellow in slacks and a polo shirt was nothing like her idea of a tycoon. She glanced at him, and the strange smile came and went with sudden upsliding mouth corners. “You won’t be uncomfortable, Yael. Hotels are cold.”
It was the kind of decision Yael was apt to make, like going to Paris with Don Kishote. She held out her hand to Leavis, who shook it with a dry cool grip. “Okay, Mr. Leavis. I can hardly refuse.”
He opened the car door for her. “Excellent. I’ll see you on Friday. It will be nice to have company for Shabbat dinner. Wang will be with you shortly. How nice that we meet on such a happy occasion.” A sliding smile, and he closed the door and went off with the chauffeur, leaving Yael inhaling the rich odors of a Silver Cloud Rolls-Royce interior, marvelling at the inlaid wood trim and enjoying the caress of soft leather under her thighs.
The automobile rode, or rather floated, much like a cloud, through a fantastic forest of oil well derricks and on into a green palm-lined dreamland of mansions topping grounds like small parks, on a sharply curving highway called Sunset Boulevard. Wang turned off through a stone archway and wound up a knoll all smooth lawns and bright flowers, toward a sprawling structure with a red-tiled roof. Partway up the knoll, half-hidden by a hedge with immense red blooms, was a white cottage. “Here is the guesthouse, Madame.” Wang brought her bags inside, gave her keys, and inquired whether she would like a drink, perhaps a glass of champagne.
“Why, I guess champagne would be nice.”
Left alone, she sank into a pink plushy armchair, kicked off
her shoes, and peered around at her surroundings; a large living-dining room furnished in modern style, a rough-hewn stone fireplace with large real logs, unfamiliar paintings on the walls that were not reproductions, she could see the impasto ridges. Yael was no longer Mrs. Columbus. She was Dorothy in Oz.
***
Barak had a hard time starting a reply to Emily Cunningham’s letter #26. He considered leaving it unanswered, and letting the thing die off so. But he could not, and once he began writing, he wrote several pages late at night, after Nakhama and the children were asleep. When he read over the outpouring he knew he must either go back to his first idea, tear it up, and choke off the relationship at this point, or send it and plunge ahead into risky waters. The letter ended:
…and there you have it. You demanded an explanation, and now you know why I pulled out of the military procurement mission. In the army we always review an operation or a campaign to see where the mistakes were, where we did well, what we failed to foresee, and what new ideas or doctrines we can derive. I guess my mind is used to working that way. I’ve learned strange lessons from this experience. First and foremost, and hardest for me as yet to grasp, a man can really love two women, love them in completely different ways. Next, it seems that love between man and woman can fire up without sex or the possibility of sex, because there you are and have been for years, far around the bulge of the earth, and here I am, yet it’s happened.
So I find that mere letters can create love. It’s no illusion, that’s sure. I know what love is—far more than you do—because I’ve loved Nakhama for years and years, and you claim to have had only this one unfulfilled infatuation with a distant foreigner, if we don’t count old Hiroshima. Of the two of us, I now think I’m the crazier one. You have the excuse of your inexperience. I have no excuse. I’m just in love with you, and your ridiculously funny yet moving letters, and your eccentric sharp mind, and your darting hands, and your laughing eyes, and your lean figure that looks so sweet, even in those schoolmarmish pictures you send me. Good camouflage, but I see right through it to Emily, the charmer and the haunt.
Therefore, child, I will continue avoiding any assignment to Washington until you’re safely married. All right? Just be damned sure of that. Nakhama is not only the love of my life, the mother of my kids, she’s my best truest friend. You’re no siren by character or intent, but still you and I had better keep an ocean between us, or—as you threaten—we must axe this “luminous” and most unlikely relationship. Those are the terms. Have it your way. Either way. As we say here, zeh mah she’yaish. That’s it.
Wolfgang
He had never before signed his former name. Nor did he know why he did so now. He read the letter over and over, tucked it in a desk drawer, slept on it, and after breakfasting as usual in the morning with Nakhama, he stopped at the post office on the way to the Ministry of Defense, and mailed it.
26
Lee Bloom’s Wedding
Yael was almost gasping, so thick was the cigarette smoke in Herschel Rosenzweig’s apartment on Fairfax Avenue. It was hard to hear what her old school friend Osnat Friedkin was saying, because of the animated Hebrew talk in the crowded room. “Enjoying this? Everybody knows Herschel and Bluma, and we all drop in on Friday night.”
“I feel I’m back in Tel Aviv,” Yael shouted.
“You are,” said Osnat. She worked in a travel agency catering to Israelis arriving in or departing from Los Angeles, mostly arriving.
It was a far more familiar scene for Yael, in fact, than the Shabbat meal she had just eaten with Sheva Leavis, waited on by Wang in a white coat, at a long polished table where Leavis had invited her to light the candles and make the blessing. These people smoking cigarettes, drinking tea or soda, nibbling shrimps and crackers as they chatted or argued, were more her sort. Herschel Rosenzweig, a portly journalist with a grizzled beard, sat in a corner on a large armchair that commanded the room, feet up on the ottoman, smoking a long cigar, and expounding a familiar theme; to wit, that David Ben Gurion was a fascist dictator with a natural affinity for the Germans, and that Israel’s hope of creating a just socialist society, a light to the nations, had long since gone down the drain. Zionism had lost its soul, and the Arabs now held the moral high ground. People nearest him were listening, the others were all talking at once.
Green cards, from what Yael could overhear, were topic number one. These Israelis either had green cards, or were waiting for green cards, or had been refused green cards, or were riskily working without green cards. There was also much violent disputation about who was and who wasn’t a snob, and why. Osnat Friedkin had married her American dentist, had since divorced, but meantime had acquired two children and citizenship, so she did not need a green card.
“Hello there, Yael.” Rosenzweig had loudly greeted her, not stirring from his armchair when she and Osnat arrived. He was a Nahalal expatriate, and his yerida, “descent,” from Israel to Los Angeles, was still an embarrassment in the moshav; especially since he had once written fervent nationalist poetry, and his songs were still sung by soldiers on the march. “How’s your Don Kishote? I hear he’s a star in the armor. I was in the armor, you know.”
“Yossi is fine.”
“So! You’ve come for the big wedding, and you’re staying with old Sheva Leavis.” To that extent, thought Yael, Israeli Los Angeles was certainly like Tel Aviv; everybody tended to know everything about everybody else. Osnat had already filled her in with all the gossip, mainly deleterious, about the people in the room.
“That’s where I’m staying.”
“Well, Sheva is no snob. That’s all right. That brother-in-law of yours, now there’s a snob. Is it true that Frank Sinatra is coming to the wedding?”
“I have no idea.”
Yael had seen Lee Bloom just once, when he had visited her for a hurried half hour in the guesthouse, looking stout, sleek, and nervous. The first thing he had said, before he sat down, was that Frank Sinatra was coming to the wedding. A plane chartered by Lee would bring him from Las Vegas and return him there. Sinatra was appearing at one of the big hotels, and could not miss a performance. He planned to come to the temple, as well as to the reception at the Bel-Air Hotel. “Frank’s a great guy, good Catholic but very tolerant,” was Lee’s thumbnail sketch of the towering celebrity. Yael was well aware that Mary Macready at eighteen had been much photographed at parties and nightclubs with the great Sinatra. Weather forecasts for the weekend were still uncertain, said Lee, that was the only problem, but it was a four-motor plane and they were counting on Sinatra. He was a good friend of Mary’s and the weather was seldom bad this time of year.
Bluma Rosenzweig stopped passing soft drinks and canapés long enough to throw a cushion beside Yael’s chair and plop down to chat. A Nahalal farm girl a few years older than Yael, she had kept her muscular figure, and the charcoal American pants suit looked good on her. The makeup was still Israeli, too much green around the eyes, too much black on the eyebrows. She remarked on how well Yael looked and was explaining that she insisted on speaking Hebrew at home for the sake of the children, when Sam Pasternak appeared through the swirling smoke. Herschel Rosenzweig lumbered out of his chair.
“Sam, what a surprise!”
Talk of movies, parties, snobs, and green cards ceased, and in the fall of noise the room focussed on Pasternak. So Yael had seen an army conference room change from chaotic chatter to sharp attention to one arrival, when the arrival was Ben Gurion or Dayan. She felt herself the target of covert glances and of whispering behind hands. Those who didn’t already know she was the old girlfriend of the chief of military intelligence had been filled in, she could assume, by Osnat Friedkin.
“I figured I might find you here,” Pasternak managed to mutter to her, as Rosenzweig led him to the commanding armchair, where he asked for club soda. The Israelis clustered around him in a disorderly semicircle, pulling up chairs or standing, firing questions at him—about new terrorist border incursions, a bomb explosi
on in a Jerusalem marketplace, a reported fistfight of politicians in a committee room of the Knesset, the rumor that Ben Gurion might resign again—and over and over, “Mah b’emet ha’matzav?” (“What’s really the situation?”) The tumbling questions and his short answers went on until Rosenzweig’s rough voice cut through the others: “Sam, what about the Egyptian rockets?”
Abrupt quiet. Pasternak sipped soda, with the heavy-lidded look that was his trademark.
“What about them?” he responded after a pause, in the gravelly tone that was a warning not to press him.
“Nasser says—he said it on television and we all saw it—that those rockets can hit any target south of Beirut.”
Pasternak growled, “Nasser says a lot of things. Nasser suffers no shortage of mouth.”
“Is there any truth to it at all?” ventured Osnat Friedkin, perhaps bolder than the rest because she did not need a green card.
“You saw the movies of the rockets on TV,” said Pasternak. “There are rockets in Egypt. Whether the Egyptians can hit anything with them”—he shrugged his thick broad shoulders—“is the question. I mean, intentionally.” This brought an uneasy laugh in the room. “Well, rockets are nothing to laugh at, but let me just say we have bigger problems right now.”
“Like what?” inquired Bluma Rosenzweig.
Pasternak’s large head swung here and there, taking in the whole room. “Well, like yerida.” Thick silence. “Nothing personal, comrades, but the Arabs don’t really need rockets, do they? They need patience. They just have to wait while Israel gradually leaks away to America, with or without green cards.”
“Don’t look at me,” said a bushy-haired thin young man with a pencil mustache. “I finish my doctorate next June and I go home. My wife’s back there now with the kids.”
A burly red-faced man said, “I fought in two wars. When I got out of the army, no jobs. What was I supposed to do? Eat pictures of Herzl?”
“We all fought,” said an angry voice, “that’s no argument. And there are jobs back home. Only a dishwasher here makes more than a bank manager there. That’s the fact of it.”