by Herman Wouk
Ben Gurion heavily sighed. “KADESH was good, in that Israel is now regarded as a serious state. It was bad in that De Gaulle could tell me that no matter what superiority the Arabs acquire in weapons, Israel is invincible. He said that to my face when I visited him. Whether he believes it is another matter. The message I heard was that French supplies can’t be counted on anymore.”
He stared at them, and held out a stubby palm.
“I shook hands with Adenauer in New York. I did that. The Prime Minister of Israel shook the hand of the German Prime Minister. Ever since, I’ve been hearing about the Jewish blood on this hand.” He clenched it to a fist, and let it fall on the table. “That handshake meant half a billion dollars in aid, when the reparations were running out. When I get to the next world, I’ll try to explain to the European Jews why I shook the German’s hand. I have to think about the living Jews, and the Jewish State. Maybe in that world they already understand.” A pause, and a keen look at Pasternak. “I’m still awaiting the army’s word on the Egyptian rockets. Are German scientists involved, or aren’t they? The Mossad report says flat out that Germans are building and test-firing them.”
Pasternak moved his lips, as though rehearsing an answer to himself. “Indications, yes, Prime Minister. Proof, not yet. The test-fired missiles were inaccurate, our people report, and there have been misfires.”
“If German scientists are doing it, and the story comes out,” said Ben Gurion, “my German policy will be in ruins. I’ll fall.”
Impulsively Barak said, “You will not fall, B.G. There’s nobody else.”
The Old Man shook his head and tightened his mouth in an expressive skeptical gesture. He sipped tea in silence, his look faraway and sad. “So. What equipment will you discuss with the Americans?”
“Not tanks. They’re ruled out as being offensive weapons,” said Pasternak.
“Never mind, discuss them! Say the words, at least. Don’t we need tanks to defend ourselves from invading tanks? Now let’s see.”
He found a paper amid the pile on his desk, and read off his priority list of weapons. Meantime, he said, combing of the scrap steel market for junked tanks had to be intensified. There were thousands rusting around the world. Israel would have to fix them up and make do with them, until a breakthrough came with at least one great power, as a reliable supplier of new tanks.
“We are surrounded,” he said. “We have not one ally. Nasser is arousing the Arab masses, and Russia is arming him. De Gaulle said to me, ‘I will not let Israel be annihilated.’ Eisenhower said the same thing when he turned me down on tanks. I told De Gaulle, ‘By the time you fine gentlemen decide we’re being annihilated, it may be a little late to do anything about it.’”
For all this gloomy talk, Barak saw that Ben Gurion livened up as he talked, and his filmy eyes cleared. Delicious odors were wafting in from the kitchen as the Old Man gave Pasternak his emphatic final instruction about the Washington visit. The Kennedy people had reluctantly agreed to sell Israel the Hawk antiaircraft missile system, but now they were pressuring him to accept instead a British missile, the Bloodhound.
“The answer is no. We hold them to the Hawk!” B.G. struck the desk with the hand that had shaken Adenauer’s. “It’s all a dodging game, to let the other fellow offend the Arabs. We need the Hawk to defend against Ilyushin bombers, don’t we? We need it even more to get the Americans to supply us with one serious weapon, and break the ice.” He stared hard at Pasternak, then at Barak. “Do you both understand that?”
Pasternak said, “Zev has asked to be let out of this mission.”
The Old Man turned an inquiring look to Barak.
“Family reasons, Prime Minister.”
“Is Nakhama all right? And the children?”
“They’re all right.”
Ben Gurion waited for him to elaborate, but he said no more. “Well, Sam, get someone else, then. There will be other missions, more important yet.”
“You’ve never tasted such chicken in your life,” said Paula through the door. “Come!”
“The fact is, I’m starved,” said the Prime Minister, jumping up.
Zev Barak was experiencing surprise at his own reaction to being released from going to Washington. Regret! Belated irrational regret. He was also relieved, his decision had been sensible, but he wished he had not propped that damned snapshot of that damned Emily where Nakhama had seen it.
Paula Ben Gurion slipped her arm through Barak’s. “You see, Zev? It did him good that you stayed. He could talk out his heart.” She patted her shapeless bodice. “He carries the whole country right in here.”
***
“You really don’t mind if I go to the wedding?” said Yael. “By myself?”
“Well, Aryeh will be taken care of, as you say, and what else matters?”
Yael would have preferred a different response; a protest, an argument, even a masterful turndown. She was clearing away the plates of a late supper. Still in a dusty uniform, Kishote was writing on a clipboard, with the mimeographed exercise order out on the kitchen table, turned to a middle page. Beside it lay the invitation, and a picture of Lee Bloom’s bride-to-be.
“We’ve never been to America, either of us,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be nice to go together? All expenses paid, Yossi!”
“Not possible. Go ahead, enjoy yourself.”
“The thing is”—her tone sharpened a bit—“once I’m in California, I wouldn’t want to rush back. There’s so much to see!”
“God, I was starved.” Kishote put aside the clipboard and stood up. “Now a shower.”
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?”
Yossi picked up the photograph, a studio glamor shot, and wrinkled his nose over it. “How old does he say she is, nineteen? She doesn’t even look that.” He read from the thick creamy wedding announcement engraved in lace-thin italics, “Mary Macready. Hm. Old Hassidic name.”
“He says her mother’s Jewish. They’re getting married in a temple, anyway.”
“Lee is a fool.” He dropped the picture as though discarding a playing card.
“Worth how many million dollars now?”
“Yes, he can afford her.” Kishote went into Aryeh’s room to look at the boy asleep. Soon the shower noisily gushed.
Yael undressed with some haste and threw on a peach satin negligee from Paris, damaged in her shop and bought cheap. At a mirror she gave herself a hard looking-over. Nothing wrong with what she saw. Most men she knew would want that, some of them pretty badly. Some still approached her. This Don Kishote, after five years of married life, baffled Yael. He could make love or not when he came home, more or less as she pleased. If invited by gesture, look, or word, sure; otherwise even after a week or two in the field he would go to sleep, or read, or work on army papers. Would he take the negligee as an invitation? She slapped on perfume. “The question is,” he emerged from the hallway in a bathrobe, drying his head, “whether Aryeh won’t tear Nahalal apart. Does Benny know what he’d be taking on? Does Irit? Does the moshav council?”
“Irit handles whole nurseries. Aryeh won’t be so wild when he has all those moshav children to play with.”
“Maybe not.”
“Why can’t you come? It’s been ages since you’ve had leave.”
“My unit was a disgrace in the exercise. I have to drill their heads off and make staff changes.”
Yael hesitated. Then, as he got the clipboard and sat down in an armchair, she said very casually, “Why, Sam Pasternak told me you were the star of the war game. Said that even Ben Gurion commended you.”
The shot at least grazed him. He did look up, eyebrows raised. “Sam? You talked to Sam Pasternak? When? How come?”
“Well, it was quite accidental.” Yael sat, crossing her shapely legs so that the satin skirt fell away. “I was in the El Al office, checking on reservations to Los Angeles. It’s a mess. You have to keep changing airlines.”
Full stop.
He said after
a moment, “And Sam Pasternak?”
“Oh yes. Sam. He’s going to Washington soon. No details, of course. You know Sam. He was getting his ticket. Anyway, your unit did extremely well, he said.”
“The others were worse, that’s all. Pretty nightgown.”
“This thing? Shopworn.”
“Let’s go to bed.”
“You have work to do, don’t you?” He put aside the clipboard, pulled her to her feet, and swept a hard muscular arm around her shoulders. She added, “And you must be dead tired.”
“Come quietly,” he said. “Don’t wake Aryeh.”
The lovemaking was always satisfying; different from Sam Pasternak’s rough ways, which she could not forget, and which had often shocked and roused her to her very bones. Their bed experience really continued their first encounter in the Georges Cinq; fun and games between two people who did not love each other, but enjoyed uncomplicated sex. Yael’s trouble was that for her it was getting complicated.
Not for her husband. He openly joked about their marriage even to others, calling it, “Raise Aryeh Incorporated.” Don Kishote was capable of the deepest feeling. That, she knew. He adored the boy, and instinct told her, though she had no way to prove it, that he had adored that prudish mathematician, Shayna Matisdorf, and perhaps still did. He never talked about Shayna. So far as Yael knew, he had not seen her since her one visit to their briefly Turkish flat, in which they still lived.
“Are you sure of this?” she whispered, as Kishote reached for her after a while in the dark, and pulled her close. “You don’t have to impress me. I’m impressed.” Now what had done this, Yael wondered, as she yielded. That negligee? Good investment, if so, at thirty-nine lira! The mention of Sam Pasternak? The prospect of her going off to California? How could she know?
He was whispering the right endearments, doing all the right things, it was lively fun with this husband of hers. And yet, wrapped in her arms and legs, sweetly excitingly loving her, Don Kishote remained—in a way impossible to accuse him of—unattached, inscrutable, not hers. They kissed and said goodnight. He was soon asleep. Yael lay wide awake, thinking with some resentment of a trip to America by herself; and feeling, as she too often felt, like a married shmata.
25
Dorothy in Oz
In her office overlooking the field where green-bloomered summer session girls were playing hockey with screams, squeals, and ferocious clacking of sticks, Emily Cunningham contemplated the picture of Zev Barak which she customarily set on the desk when she wrote to him. Taken for an army journal on his promotion to colonel two years ago, it showed some gray in his thick hair, but otherwise the strong-chinned round face and the wise faintly worried brown eyes had not changed since the famous night of the fireflies.
FOXDALE SCHOOL MIDDLEBURG, VIRGINIA
Letter #26
Wolf! You wretched Gray Wolf!
Did you imagine that I wouldn’t find out?! Do you think that I’m the daughter of the greatest intelligence man in the USA for nothing? You could have come to Washington, you were ordered to come, and you begged off! I must have an explanation, full, convincing, and grovelling, or this correspondence—this entire peculiarly luminous and enchanting friendship of ours—gets the axe. I mean this, I’m dead serious. I will not be dodged. I will not be scorned. And I will know—why? Why did you pass up the chance to see me?
Having vented her disappointment she was unsure how to proceed, and thought of a brusque sign-off with Yours, Emily. But writing to Zev Barak was a joy, like receiving a letter from him or cantering alone through cool woods in autumn. So after a pause to take thought, she went on:
Okay, I choke off my wrath for old times’ sake, and await your excuse. My news is that, incredible as it seems, I may become headmistress here soon, though I’m ridiculously young and unsuited! Our headmistress, Fiona Salmeter, is an excellent educator and administrator, wonderful with girls and parents alike, and genuinely religious, which is important in a school supposedly nondenominational but really Christian through and through, with regular chapel and such. Our star visiting minister has been the Reverend Wentworth, a splendid speaker, a serious Old Testament scholar. He’s published many articles on the Book of Amos.
Well, Fiona seems to have shot Reverend Wentworth in the groin. They’ve been having a discreet affair for about fifteen years. Now the Reverend Wentworth has been trying to break it off, because he was recently widowed, and he wants to marry again, and his new lady doesn’t approve of Fiona. His late wife Millicent didn’t mind Fiona at all. They used to ride the trails together a lot, and play knock rummy at night and drink Kahlúa. Millicent was an atheist at heart and not too happy about being married to Reverend Wentworth, though she didn’t dislike him, exactly. She was just glad that Fiona did for him, as you might say, in certain ways. I knew this Millicent and liked her, if her religious obtuseness somewhat put me off. She loved poetry, especially by women. Sometimes she and I would read Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Elinor Wylie to each other. When Fiona didn’t play knock rummy with Millicent, she played gitchi-gitchi with Reverend Wentworth, and then Millie and I would read poetry. That’s what Hester and I called hanky-panky at college, gitchi-gitchi. It’s interesting that in all the years the English language has been evolving since Beowulf, no polite usage has ever emerged for that simple business. As a career virgin I’m unlikely to improvise one, so I’ll make do with gitchi-gitchi. Anyway, the Reverend Wentworth is in no danger, but for some time he will not be interested in gitchi-gitchi. The story he and Fiona have told the sheriff and the school board is that she asked him to clean her gun, and he inadvertently peppered himself in the groin. Since it happened in her bedroom the tale is faintly fishy, and all that is up in the air right now.
What else? Oh, Hester’s show in that New York gallery was a surprising success. Did I write you that she developed her own way of abstract painting, in the vein of Jackson Pollock? She makes holes in the sides of closed fresh paint tubes, and so when she squeezes a tube the paint squirts on the canvas in utterly random ways. Hester calls this “Stochastic Holism.” There was a big article in the New York Times making elephantine fun of stochastic holism, but as a result Hester Laroche was news, and collectors started to come and buy. Modest prices, but the stuff sold. People put bets on new painters, you know. Long-shot horses. I went to the opening, and there was old Hester in a Buster Brown haircut and a pink satin tent dress, and her husband in a tuxedo looking proud and baffled. Hester may never go back to Eugene, Oregon. Unlike these smart New Yorkers, those squares in Eugene don’t appreciate stochastic holism.
So much and no more. You deserve no more! Remember hereafter, you wretched Gray Wolf, that Christian Cunningham knows everything that is happening everywhere in the world, and about Israel he knows absolutely everything. Assume that and you won’t be caught out again. No lovey-dovey sign-off, I am angry with you. For what it’s worth, CC thinks the world of Sam Pasternak and expects the mission to have some success. You were a fool to pull out. Why, why? Will I eat you?
Your outraged
Emily
The Air France plane was thrumming smoothly over the black ocean. The lights had just been turned off after the movie, and moonlight shone through the small square window on Yael’s face.
“Sam, don’t be ridiculous.” Yael took the familiar hairy hand off her thigh and dropped it back in his lap.
Sam spoke genially from the darkness beside her. “Aren’t we friends?”
“What a stupid movie,” Yael said. “I should have gone to sleep. You, too.”
“Yael, I’m thinking of jumping to Los Angeles for that wedding. I was invited, you know.”
“And your business in Washington?”
“It’s the weekend. The State Department shuts down every Saturday and Sunday, the way we do for Yom Kippur. Even stricter.”
“Suit yourself.”
Silence. Darkness makes for intimate conversation, and after a while Sam said, “That husband of yours i
s quite a guy, that Don Kishote.”
“I think so.”
“He’s going places.”
No response.
“You’re happy?”
“Very. Sam, if you’re not sleepy, I am.”
“How is it you don’t have more kids, then, just the one? Do you have a problem?”
“Me? Certainly not. He doesn’t want more.”
“Funny. Ruth and I don’t get along, never have, but we’ve got three. It happens.” No response. “You know, Yael, I’m not much of a believer, but I do believe marriages are made in heaven.”
Yael was piqued. “You do?”
“Absolutely. Such botches have to be the work of a Jewish bureaucracy.”
Despite herself she burst out laughing, too loudly for a darkened plane. She put a hand to her mouth, then said, “Well, hamood, sticking to Ruth—for five very long years, friend, while I was around—was your idea.”
“I know, I know.” Heavy bump of the airplane. Louder engine noise, flash of seat belt sign. He said, fastening his belt, “Incidentally, I spent last weekend in Tiberias. Just a breather before this trip. The Pension Geffen is gone, Yael, did you know that? All torn down, and they’re building a big hotel there.”
“Well, nothing lasts forever, Sam. That’s a choice waterfront spot.”
“Some things last. Memories.”
“They fade, too.”
“Do they?” He took her hand. “You mean to tell me you don’t remember the Geffen? St. Peter’s fish for breakfast with a bottle of Carmel hock? Rowing on the Sea of Galilee?”
“I certainly remember that you made me do the rowing, you monster.”
“Your superior officer. Besides, I’d had a rough night.”
She snatched away her hand and hit him with it. “All right, that’ll do. Did Ruthie go with you to Tiberias?”
“Ruthie’s back in her London flat, didn’t you know that?”
“How should I?”
“Well, she is. Amos and Ilana are staying with me. She took Leah.”