The Hope

by Herman Wouk

  Slight pause. “Well, Moshe, a fact can be a bluff, too.”

  Pasternak was hanging up. “Hi, Zev. I just got hold of Christian Cunningham. Luckily he was at home. I told him Weizman’s version of the dogfight. He wrote it all down and read it back to me, and he promised that the State Department and the White House will have it right away.”

  “This CIA man has such high connections?” Dayan asked incredulously. “This Cunningham? I’ve never heard of him.”

  Pasternak shook his head. “You wouldn’t have. He knows the right staff people. That’s how Washington works.”

  “He’s a friend, then,” said Dayan.

  “We’ll see.” Pasternak’s face lightened in a grin at Barak. “Actually he was having tea with that daughter of his when I called. It’s four in the afternoon there. She wants to know whether Wolf Lightning received her poem.”

  “What poem? I never got a poem.”

  “She sent you a poem about a firefly or something.”

  Dayan’s eye lit up and he crookedly smiled. “Wolf Lightning? A firefly? Just how old is this daughter, Zev?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Maybe she’s ten, twelve.”

  “They grow up,” said Pasternak.

  “Zev, get on that plane, get down there and report compliance to B.G.,” said Dayan. “Any time of the night, just call him! Understood?”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Dayan walked out. Pasternak said soberly, “Nasty, the last British note.”

  “But they can’t really intervene, can they, Sam, at this point? It’s unreal.” Barak was still clinging to the hope that the Rafah junction could be captured “by mistake”; as Guderian had dashed to the Channel in 1940 “by mistake,” forced the French to surrender, and driven the British into the sea at Dunkirk.

  “Why unreal? Their troops are at our borders right now,” returned Pasternak somberly. “In force.”

  “Look, just think about it! Surely the British public won’t put up with more casualties in Palestine. That’s why they had to give up the Mandate! The Attlee government would fall.”

  “You’re talking common sense. Attlee’s got a mad bull of a Foreign Minister, that Bevin, and Bevin’s furious enough at us for surviving and winning to do something very stupid. Attlee can’t control him. That’s what B.G.’s gut is warning him, Zev, and he’s the boss.”

  Barak raced home, and found Nakhama in an unlooked-for cheery mood, having just retrieved Noah from a neighbor and put him to bed. He peeped in on the sleeping boy, then told her he was off to Sinai again. She shrugged, laughed, and stroked his face. “You’re so lean and brown now. Ah, well, I guess peace will come before we’re too old to fulfill that commandment.” It was the old Jewish euphemism for marital sex, God’s command to Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful and multiply.”

  “There’s peace now, Nakhama. An armistice, anyway. Ben Gurion’s nerves are shot, that’s all. He’s won a great victory and he’s desperate to secure it at any price. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

  “Well, as you say, it’s the dog leash again. But how he relies on you! You’ll be the Chief of Staff one day. Remember I said it.”

  “Nakhama, when and how did you learn to do the Highland fling?”

  Her look turned sly. “Why do you ask, my love?”

  “Well, it was quite unexpected.”

  “Oh? Do you think you and Sam were the first soldiers who ever came to Papa’s place to eat? Some British Tommies also liked our cooking.”

  “Interesting! You’ll have to tell me more.”

  “That’s all you’ll ever know,” said Nakhama with mischievous pleasure, “about the Highland fling. If you like, I’ll teach it to you. Do you want to eat something? Have you time?”

  “I’d better go. I have to pick up my crazy driver.”

  ***

  By the harsh light of naked bulbs in a chandelier over the dining table, he found his brother Michael helping Shayna with her homework, though it was near midnight. She was so intent on solving an equation, dark hair falling about her face, that she did not glance up as he walked in. Kishote was curled in a morris chair, fast asleep.

  “Wolfgang! Ma nishma?” his brother exclaimed. “Is the war really over?”

  “For the moment, Michael, yes.”

  The brother adjusted the skullcap on his bushy hair, and made the blessing on good news.

  “Amen,” said Barak, and Shayna echoed him, not ceasing her work.

  Michael Berkowitz was in every way so different from his desert-bronzed army brother that people sometimes had trouble connecting the two. Michael was slight, pale, with thick glasses and a studious stoop, and he usually dressed in faded jeans and an old sweater. His two canes leaned on a chair, for he was a congenital cripple. Younger than Zev, he was the sole religious Berkowitz, the “white sheep,” as their joke went, in a hard-bitten socialist family. At twelve he had requested a bar mitzvah, because a friend was having one, and the teacher had instilled in him a love for Talmud and ritual. At sixteen he had been admitted to the Technion, a prodigy in mathematics and physics. He sometimes came to Jerusalem to attend advanced seminars and lectures, so Barak had told him to look up Reb Shmuel, and Michael now and then studied Talmud with the old tailor.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you,” Barak said to his brother. “Her homework’s important. I’m just here to pick up this sleeping warrior.”

  “I’m finished,” said Shayna, jumping up, “and I promised the sleeping fool some supper.” She went off into the kitchen. Kishote slept on, oblivious.

  “What are you helping her with?”

  “Calculus.”

  “That little girl? Is she that bright?”

  “Mathematically, very! She also has a broad outlook and an inquiring mind. I don’t know how she got that way in the Old City. However, she also has a razor tongue.”

  “Amen,” put in Yossi, without opening his eyes.

  “Kishote, we’re leaving by plane soon.”

  No response.

  Michael said, “I have a letter from Mama. Father is better, but he’s not going back to the UN until February. Doctor’s orders.” He recounted the letter, and they talked about their parents’ problems. Meyer Berkowitz had suffered a stroke in an angry exchange at the UN with the Saudi representative. “They’ve taken an apartment in Manhattan for the time being,” Michael said, “and she’s crazy about it. Almost as cultured as Vienna, she writes.”

  “Well, that’s Mama. She may never come back.”

  “What’s the real word on this armistice, Zev? Can it lead to peace?”

  “No, not now. We’ve beaten them off again, that’s all. Stalemate without gunfire for a while. That’s my view. I’m considered a pessimist.”

  “No hope for peace at all, ever?”

  “Oh, yes. Two hopes, Michael. Long range, the Arabs get tired of losing lives to no purpose and decide to leave us alone. Short range, the powers let us finish a war, just once, and convince the Arabs that we’re here to stay.”

  “Wake up, fool,” said Shayna, walking in with a plate of smoking potato pancakes, and prodding Kishote with an elbow, “if you really want to eat.”

  He sat up brightly. “Shiga’on!”

  Barak said, “We have to get going, Yossi.”

  “No time for some pancakes, sir? She made them special for me.”

  “I certainly did not,” said Shayna. “Dr. Berkowitz and I were hungry, and you happened to be here.”

  “Didn’t I ask her to make them”—Kishote appealed to Michael—“because they were so good on Hanukkah?”

  Michael grinned and said nothing.

  “I had the potatoes anyway. They were getting spoiled, sprouting eyes,” said Shayna. “It’s a sin to throw food away.”

  “Well, those pancakes do smell good,” said Barak, pulling up a chair.

  “Imagine, flying off God knows where in the middle of the night!” exclaimed Shayna, dishing out pancakes for them. “What a crazy life! Now that ther
e’s peace, you’ll have to find some way to make yourself useful, Kishote. Maybe collect Jerusalem’s garbage…. Just a minute! Make a blessing before you eat that pancake.” Kishote clapped a hand to his hair. She struck his shoulder. “None of that. With a hat!”

  Meekly he put on his army beret, made the blessing, and ate. “Mm, excellent,” he said. “Peace will make no difference to me, Shayna, I’m a soldier.”

  “You mean that’s what you’re going to do? Be a soldier? A regular soldier?”

  “A regular soldier, and why are you making such a funny face?”

  The girl was in fact grimacing like a gargoyle.

  “A goyishe parnosseh!” (“A gentile trade!”) Nose in the air, she marched out, leaving them looking at each other over pancakes.

  “You heard her, Zev,” said Michael. “Better go back to chemistry.”

  “Not me, Michael. That’s finished. The gentile trade for me. For good.”

  “Truly? Kol ha’kavod,” said Michael.

  ***

  The Weizman version of the air battle prevailed. President Truman issued a sharp note criticizing the British for venturing combat aircraft into a war zone and blaming Israel for their loss. In the House of Commons the Attlee government took a storm of criticism and backed off from its threats. So the War of Independence ended, the guns falling silent early in January 1949, though disengagement talks went on for months. Israel existed, and all the Arab invaders one by one signed armistice agreements with the country that, they stoutly maintained, wasn’t there.

  PART TWO

  Suez

  12

  Lee Bloom

  In the four years that followed the war, the country that wasn’t there had a hard struggle continuing not to be there.

  Those years from 1949 to 1953 were the worst of times, Moshe Dayan writes in his memoirs. The army more or less fell apart. The scratched-together force of incompatible militias plus reservists, draftees, immigrants, and foreign volunteers could cope better with Arabs than with victory. Though impotent to fight on, the Arab governments would consider no treaty with the invisible country. Armistice brought not peace but siege. Terrorists called fedayeen crossed ill-guarded borders to derail trains, burn busses, blow up buildings, and murder unwary civilians. Housing, cars, clothes, food, and fuel were scarce. Life was shabby and precarious. Israelis left in droves for places like Canada and Los Angeles. In 1953 Dayan was appointed Army Chief of Staff, and he writes that then things began to improve.

  Those same four years, 1949 to 1953, were the best of times, Ben Gurion writes in his memoirs; Israel’s heroic years, “the greatest years in our history since the Maccabee victory over the Greeks, 2,300 years ago,” because in those four years the Jewish population of Israel more than doubled. The wondrous Return, the Ingathering of the Exiles, the radiant core vision of Zionism, began to come true. All around the Mediterranean the frustrated Arab governments turned on their Jews and drove them out, and the beleaguered new Jewish State of 600,000 took in 700,000 Jewish refugees! This happening, perhaps unprecedented in the history of the world, caused the shortages, the empty treasury, the black market, the rationing, and the disillusionment of the fainthearted. Israel nevertheless survived and even flourished, until in 1953 Ben Gurion resigned as Prime Minister and Minister of Defense. Then, he writes, things began to deteriorate. They deteriorated so badly, in fact, that late in 1955 the people had to recall him to power, and none too soon.

  For within the year the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, infuriating the British and the French governments, and once again the Middle East was on the front pages. Israel was barred by Egypt from using the Canal anyway, but the possibility of another all-out war sent a seismic shudder through the region.

  ***

  Christian Cunningham had noticed the young man on the New York-to-Paris Stratocruiser, sitting alone in the crowded lower-deck bar, reading a magazine and taking no part in the drunken joking as the huge plane jolted through a North Atlantic October thunderstorm. On the El Al flight from Paris to Tel Aviv two days later, there he was again; same gray flannel trousers and natty blue blazer, reading reports and magazines from the same calfskin case. He ate little, drank club soda, and did not banter with the stewardess. He conducted himself, in fact, much as Cunningham himself did on long flights. Air passengers were time users or time killers, and this fellow was a time user. A Hollywood type, Cunningham would have guessed from his modish dress, heavy gold jewelry, and full wavy black hair, except that the magazines he read were about aviation, armaments, and real estate.

  For his part Don Kishote’s brother was wondering about the gaunt gentile in a three-piece suit who had showed up again on the El Al flight, watch chain across the vest and all, reading the Journal of Biblical Archaeology. The two men had the first-class section to themselves. The crowd in tourist class were mostly Israelis, for tourism was way down, and Lee Bloom—as he was now known—wondered at an archaeologist venturing to visit Israel in this tense time. After a while the watch-chain man drifted off to sleep, horn-rimmed glasses pushed up on his forehead. Lee Bloom took out and reviewed Sheva Leavis’s handwritten memorandum, went over and over it, then in the lavatory tore it up and stuffed the pieces in the towel disposal.

  The pilot’s grating announcement in harsh Hebrew and awkward English woke them both, and Cunningham spoke first, peering out the window. “Well, there’s the Holy Land at last.”

  Lee Bloom craned his neck to glance ahead. The descent through broken clouds offered glimpses of a gray jagged urban sprawl along the blue sea. “Doesn’t look all that holy, does it? Amazing how it’s been built up.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “Once, for a short while.” Lee Bloom gestured at the magazine on the other man’s lap. “Does archaeology go on during a war?”

  “There’s always trouble in this region. The digging is done where it’s quiet. You think there’ll be a war?”

  “Well, how can the French and British sit still and let this Nasser fellow get away with grabbing the Canal?”

  “Nationalizing it, you mean.”

  “Same difference, sir.”

  “What can they do about it?”

  “Land troops and take the Canal back. I think they’ll do it, too. Just a question of time.”

  “And the Russians?”

  “It should all be over in forty-eight hours. Then the Russians can make all the nasty noises they want to in the UN. It won’t amount to a hill of beans.”

  Lee Bloom’s English was only faintly accented, but he said “a hill of beans” with the quote marks of a foreigner.

  “You may well be right.” Cunningham opened the archaeology magazine. Kishote’s brother made no effort to prolong the conversation. Upper-class goy, he surmised, not California, maybe East Coast.

  At the gate to the baggage area of the grimy chilly little terminal of Lydda airport, now Hebraized to Lod, Lee Bloom recognized Zev Barak waiting in uniform, somewhat heavier, his hair prematurely dusted with gray. “Adon Barak!” he hailed him with a touch of irony.

  Barak stared, trying to fit this dapper figure to the scrawny deserter he had left in the Los Angeles airport eight years before. “Is this Blumenthal?” Leopold grinned and they shook hands. “Sam,” Barak said to Pasternak, who was beside him peering into the passport queue, “meet Lee Bloom. I guess you’ve read about him.”

  “Lee Bloom? Hi there, who hasn’t? I understand you and Sheva Leavis between you own half of Los Angeles.”

  “Ha! Three buildings. The papers here really write crazy stories.” Lee Bloom scanned the people beyond the barrier, who were waving and calling to the passengers. “My brother said he’d meet me, but—oh, there he is. Joe! Yossi!”

  Kishote was coming in through the police entrance, and as the brothers embraced, Barak noted how much bigger he was than Leopold. His long lean frame had filled out, and his paratrooper boots added more height. Leopold by contrast was thin and a
bit stooped.

  “Okay, Zev, there comes Cunningham.” Pasternak strode to greet the CIA man. “Hello, Chris. You remember Zev Barak?”

  “Well, well. Wolf Lightning! Hello!” Cunningham gave Barak a brief bony grip. “Now where do I pick up my bags?”

  “Come with me,” said Barak.

  Pasternak approached Lee Bloom, and despite the echoing passenger clamor and flight announcements, spoke very quietly. “Blumenthal, that problem of yours that Sheva Leavis phoned me about from Paris—”

  “Yes?” Leopold turned alert and anxious.

  “I’ve looked into it. I was going to call you at your hotel, but here you are, so…” He pulled a card from a pocket and handed it to Yossi. “Kishote, you know where to find this guy? Manpower Section, Kirya?”

  “Sure,” Yossi said at a glance.

  “Take your brother straight there from here.” Pasternak smiled at Leopold. “That’s that. Now, is Sheva bluffing about the rolling mill, or is there something to it?” Though Pasternak was now Dayan’s deputy chief of intelligence, military procurement in gray zones of legality remained a province of his.

  Leopold responded, all business, “It’s for real. There’s this Jewish firm in Canton, Ohio. Four brothers. Their father started in the junk business, now they’re in iron and steel. They’ve got the finance, and the production experience. That’s clear. They’re very tough negotiators, and they’re no Zionists. We could have a deal if the tax picture here is on the up and up. They think it sounds too good, and therefore must have a big catch. I’m here to check that, among other things.”

  “Let me know if I can help. And Yossi, call me if you hit a snag at Manpower.” He went off to join Cunningham.

  Lee Bloom hefted the despatch case and a valise. “This is all I brought, Yossi. I left the rest in Paris.”

  “Then let’s go. How long will you stay here?”

  “Depends.” Leopold followed him through the crowd. “Three or four days, the most. You’ve put on thirty pounds, haven’t you? All muscle, looks like.”