by Herman Wouk
“Ha!” She leaned over him, her breasts brushing his chest, her scented hair falling on his face. “I’ve got you, and I’ve got Aryeh, and tough for Shayna. Want to stay the night in this bed? You’re welcome, but it’s close quarters.”
“Let’s give it a try.”
She lay back, hesitated, then permitted herself to say it. “Shayna should have gone to Paris.”
“Enough about Shayna, all right?” said Don Kishote, carefully rolling over.
24
Missions to America
A very little thing decided Zev Barak to withdraw, if he could, from a mission to Washington with Pasternak.
He was sitting at the small desk in his den at 1 A.M., with a late moon wanly shining through his black window, trying to finish a letter to Emily Cunningham before Sam picked him up for a visit to an armor exercise in the Negev. Propped against the desk lamp was the last snapshot Emily had sent him; inscription on the back, “New assistant headmistress of Foxdale School, with beloved friend Zev.” Zev was a big red horse. In brown baggy riding clothes and glasses, Emily Cunningham was an unglamorous figure, lean and almost plain. The second page of his letter ran so:
…You give me hell, Emily dearest, whenever I bring up marriage again, but I swear I worry about you. What a fooler that photograph is! Just a spinster assistant headmistress, to the life. You’re burning away in secret, consuming yourself. Not only could you make a man very happy with your power to love, you’d find out for the first time what happiness can be. The ultimate joy in life is children, but the ultimate sweet part is passionate love, and since your upbringing or your fastidiousness, I’m not sure which, won’t let you have casual relationships, you must put up with my nagging. Remember how Shakespeare in the sonnets keeps telling that mysterious handsome friend of his to get married and have children? So many of those lines apply to you, and “the bird of time is on the wing.” The other day, I can’t tell you why, I read the Rubaiyat again—it only takes ten minutes, you know—and my eyes were dropping tears when I finished. And I kept thinking of you…
He had written all that the night before with Nakhama sitting near him, reading a new Hebrew novel by the same floor lamp. She knew about the correspondence. He had shown her, as they came in over the years, snapshots of the peculiar girl who had once briefly visited her. Nakhama had long since apparently accepted his story that the CIA man’s daughter had had a schoolgirl crush on him, and that it had evolved into an interesting letter-friendship. She genially said she saw nothing wrong with it. In truth there was nothing wrong, except that of late Barak was falling in love with the school-teacherish creature who wrote the letters. He was still trying to puzzle through this bizarre development, which he could no longer laugh off or put from mind, and meantime here was the letter to finish.
And I kept thinking of you, no doubt because you wrote me last year that your father had read the Rubaiyat aloud to you, and said it was a rhymed version of the Book of Ecclesiastes. That parallel has occurred to me, but I’ve never read it anywhere or heard anyone else point it out. Your father…
“What will you have for breakfast?” Nakhama startled him, standing there at his side in a woolen robe.
“Oh, you’re up? I didn’t think I woke you.”
“I guess your desk lamp did. It doesn’t matter.” She peered at the propped-up photograph. “Your friend is really losing her looks, isn’t she? How old is she now?”
“Twenty-three, twenty-four.”
“She should get married.”
He gestured at his letter. “I keep writing her exactly that. She has a sort of complex, I think, about her brilliant father. Probably no fellow her age compares to him. Can I have some hot cereal and tea? It’s a long way to Sde Boker.”
“Sde Boker? Aren’t you going to armor maneuvers?”
“Ben Gurion wants to observe them.”
“Okay, oatmeal, tea, and I’ll make you toast.”
He snatched the photograph when she left, and tossed it with his pages in a drawer, feeling rotten for no reason traceable to any word, tone, or act of his wife. Whatever problem existed, it could only be in his own mind. What was going on?
All right, he decided as he put on his uniform, it was no great mystery. Between the army and his family, and in the confines of little Israel, he lived a straitjacketed life. Emily was an escape, a daydream; but also a living woman beyond the broad ocean, and that was the reason he was hesitating about going to Washington. Emily Cunningham sometimes called herself his pen pal, and that was her niche. The transoceanic paper romance was a poignant delight, and he wanted to keep it unpoisoned. He had had one extramarital affair long ago, and had felt rotten then. When he saw Sam, he would ask out. He had enough on his mind.
***
Hours later, after flying down to Beersheba together, Barak and Pasternak sat in the back seat of a command car speeding to the Sde Boker kibbutz in a chilly dawn. Wide awake, his mind in a churn, Barak thought Pasternak was dozing until he said abruptly, “Zev, why don’t you want to go with me to Washington?”
“Have I refused?”
“You haven’t agreed.” Pasternak looked out at the hills reddening in the dawn, and gestured toward the narrow tarred strip cutting through the empty Negev desert ahead. “Remember when this was a dirt track, and we needed a machine gun jeep as escort? KADESH accomplished that much, at least. The Negev is safe.”
“KADESH accomplished plenty.”
“Did it?” Pasternak yawned. “I had dinner with Dayan last night. He still thinks we didn’t have to leave Sharm el Sheikh. Not without a peace treaty.”
“Easy to say now, by hindsight.”
“Maybe. His view is that the Russians were bluffing, and Eisenhower and Dulles wouldn’t have pushed through sanctions and a blockade. The Congress would have stopped it. The Old Man got trembly in the knees.”
“Moshe didn’t have the responsibility. The Old Man did.”
“Why does Ben Gurion want to watch this tank exercise, Zev? Isn’t it routine?”
“Well, he’s down at Sde Boker anyway, and he likes to visit the soldiers,” said Barak. “And since you’ve brought it up, Sam, please take someone else with you to Washington if you can.”
“Aha. There you go. Why? You’re great with Americans, and you know more about tanks than I do.”
“Just let me out of it.” Barak spoke in low hard tones.
Pasternak gave a noncommittal shrug, but he thought Barak was acting strangely. Zev Barak was now deputy chief of the armored corps, and the unending army speculation already had him marked for eventual command of the Northern or Central Front, a crucial upward leap on the maslul, the career path. The promotion pyramid was steeply narrowing for colonels, and so far Zev was holding his own. Unfriendly gossip ascribed Barak’s rise to favoritism by Ben Gurion and by Dayan, a straight Ben Gurion man, but Pasternak considered him a sound and brainy officer; no ruthless flashy charger like Arik or Raful, but a solid candidate for general rank, if he played the game right and had no very bad luck.
“Okay, but you surprise me. I thought you’d enjoy a trip to Washington.” Short pause. “Just a change.”
The tone was level, no trace of insinuation; but a troubling notion crossed Barak’s mind: namely, that Pasternak, now chief of military intelligence, might know of his correspondence with Emily Cunningham. There was no reason for intelligence to have intercepted the letters. He had made no effort at concealment. Still, the contents were far from casual, and not for other eyes. Pointless anxiety, no doubt.
“Look, Sam, we’re doing an armor doctrine review, and I want to stay with it. Also Noah’s coming home for the summer break. You’re the negotiator. We have plenty of tank experts, you can take your pick.”
“We’ll see.”
***
In the khakis tailored for him, David Ben Gurion stood waiting outside his cottage on the kibbutz grounds. A red sun giving no warmth was poking over the mountains of Moab in Jordan, lighting up th
e green fields and orchards of Sde Boker and the stone-strewn sands stretching all around to far horizons.
Here were the Old Man’s dream and reality, thought Zev Barak, contrasted in stark morning light and long shadows. With awesome willpower he had tried to make the desert bloom, and to bring the world’s Jews back to Zion. So far he had achieved small watered patches like this in the desert wastes, and most of the Jews were outside Zion, with every apparent intention of remaining there. Ben Gurion looked old and worn. Instead of thinning he was becoming paunchier. In army khaki his short stature and bulging waistline made him a funny figure. He tried to compensate, when he remembered, by sucking in his stomach and looking fierce. But Ben Gurion’s fierceness came out in small committee meetings, where he broke men and turned political tides.
He said with no greeting, “Sam, how does it stand with your mission to Washington?”
“We leave Sunday.”
“Then we must talk.” He turned to Barak. “When will the exercise be over?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“We’ll come back then to Sde Boker.” Ben Gurion settled down in his seat and dozed off.
He climbed nimbly enough to the top of a hill overlooking the war game area, where the broad-shouldered chief of armor, David “Dado” Elazar, waited for them, a brisk wind tousling his thick black hair. An extensive simulated Egyptian strongpoint was laid out on the gray-brown sands below: belts of antitank ditches, marked minefields, zigzagging interlocking trenches, stone breastworks, sandbagged artillery emplacements on high ground, and dug-in tanks barely showing gun muzzles; all strictly according to Soviet doctrine. Inside the fortifications, the machines defending the “Blue Force” were crawling about, and foot soldiers en masse were moving into the trenches. An attack by the “Red Force,” Elazar told the Prime Minister, would soon come from the north.
The Prime Minister squinted around in the bright sunlight, looking very dissatisfied. “So, Dado, what’s going on down there?” B.G. tapped Elazar’s shoulder and pointed to a dust cloud to the southeast, directly under the sun.
“What the devil!” Elazar turned on Barak, who was peering through large German binoculars at the cloud. “That can’t be the Red Force.”
“But it is,” said Barak.
Standing up in the turret, recognizable through the fog of dust and exhaust by his stature and the sun glint on his glasses, Yossi Nitzan was leading his battalion to the attack; coming from a direction not only unscheduled but unreachable, given his starting point and the range of his British Centurion tanks. Ben Gurion asked for the binoculars, and stared through them. “So where are the tanks?” Only four tanks were visible in the oncoming formation, followed by many jeeps and half-tracks. The Blue defenders below also had only four tanks. “I thought this was to be a tank battle!”
“Skeletal exercise,” said Dado Elazar. “We can’t accept the wear and tear on tanks and tank carriers in games. We don’t have enough, and they’re too old, and the breakdown rate is too high. We have to conserve and maintain them for war.”
Barak added, “The depot is months behind now on repairs. Especially to Centurions.”
“This is no good. The Egyptians won’t attack you with a skeletal force,” said Ben Gurion. “They have more Russian tanks than they know what to do with.”
“Exactly, Prime Minister, they don’t know what to do with them,” Pasternak said. “We rate their tank crews as ill-trained, and their maneuvers as chaotic.”
“But they have plenty of tanks for their chaotic maneuvers, hah?”
Dado Elazar was on the wireless, suspending the exercise until the umpires could rule on Don Kishote’s unauthorized maneuver. Ben Gurion interrupted Elazar’s stream of jargon. “Who’s this fellow, Don Kishote, you’re talking about?”
“He’s commanding the Red Force, sir,” said Elazar.
“Order him up here.”
“I’ve done that.”
“What’s the matter with him, Dado? Is he irresponsible?”
“Well, he’s a fine officer, Prime Minister.” Dado glanced at Barak. “A bit of a nonconformist, one might say.”
“A bit meshuga, one might say,” Barak growled. Kishote was a protégé of his, and he was very annoyed. As the Prime Minister watched with a grim expression, Yossi Nitzan came bounding up the rocky slope.
“You’ve disobeyed orders, Nitzan,” Dado greeted him, barely returning his salute, “and thrown off the whole exercise.”
“Sir, direction of approach was left up to me.”
“Yes, within parameters of range.”
“Sir, my Centurions carried sufficient additional fuel for this approach.”
“Loaded outside the tank?”
“Why, yes. No room inside, sir.”
“Then you led into hostile territory a force of moving torches waiting to be lit. The umpires will rule you’ve lost the battle before it starts.”
“Sir, we consumed all interior fuel outside enemy gunfire range. We refueled from the jerricans in black night. The exercise stipulates no enemy night air activity.”
Barak, Elazar, and the Old Man glanced at each other. Ben Gurion seemed faintly amused.
“Kishote, what’s the point of these kuntzen [tricks]?” snapped Barak.
“Training in tactical surprise, Colonel. For my battalion, and for them.” He gestured down at the Blue Force, where despite the order to suspend, frantic redeployment was going on from north to southeast.
Three army umpires, bald older officers, arrived on the hilltop to consult with Dado and Barak. As they argued, Ben Gurion asked Nitzan, “Why are you called Don Kishote? Do you fight windmills?”
“Living in this land, Prime Minister, who doesn’t?”
“True enough.” Ben Gurion gave him a tired wise smile. “What are we but a collective Don Kishote, hah, young fellow?” The smile faded. He wanted to know what country Yossi was from, whether he was married, and to whom. “Yael Luria? Her father’s a great Zionist. Her brother may head the air force one day. You married well.”
The umpires concluded that Nitzan’s surprise approach was fair. The war game proceeded, raising a great fog of dust and causing a reverberating motor racket in the hills as jeeps and half-tracks roared here and there. But no live ammunition was being used, and a sense of unreal confusion pervaded. Even for Barak, who had been through many such exercises, the make-believe fight was hard to follow. That was up to the umpires, he figured. At least the tank captains and unit leaders were being pressed to think in field combat conditions, however abstractly the game was played. Ben Gurion was sitting on a rough low reddish rock, yawning and paying scant attention. “Well worth seeing,” he remarked to Barak, holding out a hand to be helped to his feet. “Now we go back. Come, Sam.” In the car he said, “That Don Kishote, Zev, tell me about him.”
“He transferred from paratroopers, Prime Minister, took the required courses, and inside of a year he had the best battalion in the armored corps. Very tough on maintenance, very hard driller, rain or shine. The men follow him, because he does everything, however tough, that he asks them to do.”
Sam Pasternak sat silent through this talk about Yael’s husband. Ben Gurion tilted his head at him, with a sly look. “Somehow I never heard that Yael Luria got married. And to a fellow who came in from Cyprus!”
“Yes, and they have a son,” said Pasternak, in a tone that closed the topic.
When they came into the Sde Boker cottage, Paula emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a gray apron over her long black dress. “They’re killing the chickens now. You’ll stay for lunch, both of you,” she said to Barak and Pasternak. “When did you last taste fresh-killed chicken? Really fresh-killed?”
Pasternak glanced uneasily at the Old Man. “I have a conference in Beersheba at noon, Paula. A helicopter’s coming for me.”
“And I have to get back to the war game,” Barak said, “for the debriefings.”
Paula flipped a scornful hand. “You both work like
dogs, you deserve a treat. You’ll stay. Fresh-killed!”
“Argue with her,” said Ben Gurion. He went into the bathroom.
She looked at them with a changed expression. “He’s not well. He doesn’t sleep. He’s losing his appetite. So stay! Please! Maybe he’ll eat a good lunch. And then tell me when you last ate such chicken. I make it with paprika.”
Ben Gurion took them into his study, and sank wearily into the seat at a desk stacked higgledy-piggledy with newspapers, magazines, and correspondence. Behind him was a solid wall of books, and there were books on other shelves and on the floor. He gestured them to chairs and looked from one to the other in a long silence.
“I’m frightened,” he said at last. “Skeleton exercises! We won’t fight skeleton wars.”
Another silence. He picked up a book from his desk. “Plato. It’s a month since I read any Greek. I promised myself to read some Greek every day. A man who can’t manage his time is in trouble.”
Paula came in with three glasses of tea. Her husband scowled, and she left without a word.
“I met with President Kennedy last year,” B.G. said, sipping tea. “I also met him before, when he was a senator. He has a new skin now. Impressive. No Eisenhower yet, no De Gaulle. No Adenauer, even. Those are great men, you only have to be in a room with one and you know. Kennedy, well, I wondered when he was elected how such a boy could become the American President. But he’s the President, and we have to convince him to supply us with tanks.” He turned to Pasternak. “What’s the word from Abe Harman about your mission?” This was the ambassador in Washington. “Will the Secretary of Defense receive you?”
“No. In that respect, Prime Minister, no change from the Eisenhower policy. They’ll give us a meeting with State Department and intelligence people, to discuss minor weapons of defense only, and no weapons new to the region. For major supplies we have to look to Europe. No financial aid. The main difference, Abe reports, is that these Kennedy people seem more willing to talk to us.”