The Hope

by Herman Wouk

  The lobby bell rang. “Time for more poetry,” said Poupko. Afterward when he took her home he did not explain, and she did not bring up the subject of Nitzan again. Alone in her flat, she buried her nose in the flowers by her bedside, then fell face down on the bed.

  ***

  The weather had something to do with Yael’s mood as she went through immigration in the terminal: gray, heavy, sticky, blowy, drizzly, the worst kind of Tel Aviv summer climate, when everybody who could do so went somewhere else. Also, the flight over the Mediterranean had been rocky, and the pilot, briefly her boyfriend in high school, had invited her into the cockpit and had bored her by boasting about his five children. The Lod terminal, after the airports in America, looked to Yael like a Nahalal cow shed. Almost, she could smell the cow manure, the confining depressing odor of childhood chores.

  “There you are! Aryeh, Aryeh!” The boy was running to her, and her spirits lifted as she lifted him. He looked brown as a soldier, and he was heavier than she remembered. Don Kishote came sauntering behind their son, and he too was a gladdening sight, this powerful bespectacled figure in uniform with the fetching grin. They kissed heartily.

  “Welcome!” he said. “I figured you’d come back from Los Angeles, but who can be sure?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  He drove his army car out of the terminal with her beside him, the boy on her lap. On the way to Ramat Gan she told him about Sheva Leavis’s estate, the wedding, and Sinatra; also a lot more about the Rosenzweig evening. Their phone talk had been hurried, for she had not wanted to run up a bill, even if to Leavis it would have been pennies. Yossi laughed a lot. “Well it was an adventure. Pasternak really let the yordim [emigrants] have it, eh?”

  “It rolled off them.”

  But Yael was thinking that the yordim had a point, as she encountered again the narrow asphalt roads full of potholes, after those smooth ten-lane California freeways. The few billboard signs on the weed-choked roadside were bleached by the sun, the frames blown askew by the wind. In the shopping streets of Ramat Gan, half the miserable little stores were closed, with dusty bedraggled window displays or TO LET signs, because of another mitun, recession. How tacky, how dreary, how familiar, how small, how altogether Israeli! She said abruptly as the car turned into their street, “I’m back in Lilliput.”

  He gave her a swift sharp glance. “So you are. Glad to be back?”

  Hugging her son, she said, switching to English, “Home, sweet home.”

  The yellow flowers caught her eye as they entered the flat; in a vase on the hall table, with a childishly printed Hebrew sign in three crayon colors on torn cardboard, WELCOME, MAMA.

  “Beautiful,” she said. “Thanks, Aryeh.”

  “We picked them coming back from Nahalal,” said Kishote.

  “Aunt Shayna didn’t pick many,” said Aryeh. “She’s lazy.”

  “Shayna?” Inquiring casual tone, as Yael smelled the flowers.

  “She’s marrying the son of Haifa’s chief rabbi,” said Kishote. “I brought her along to see Aryeh.”

  “Ah. How did she look?”

  “Hot.”

  Aryeh ran off to his room.

  “Did you meet her fellow?”

  “Yes. Big black beard, math genius, younger than she is. I liked him.”

  “Wildflowers don’t last. The scent’s gone.”

  “Well, get rid of them.”

  “Aryeh won’t like that. I’ll throw them out tomorrow.”

  Whatever her irritation, or perhaps it was cloudy jealousy, at this business of the wildflowers and Aunt Shayna, Yael had no cause to complain of her welcome in bed that night; for a long-married pair, there were happy doings. Yael was never quite sure whether this enigmatic man of hers had shmatas, so to say, or girlfriends; if so he was more discreet than she thought he could be. Of Shayna Matisdorf there was of course no question. Certainly Kishote now acted like a husband deprived, and gave her quite a workout.

  “What’s the matter? Still not sleepy?” he inquired, with a rub of a hairy leg on hers. “It’s after three.”

  She was sitting up in the gloom, her back against the headboard, deliciously aglow and exhausted. “In Los Angeles it’s mid-afternoon, or something. I’m all turned around.”

  “Have some wine.”

  “You know something, Yossi? We don’t have to live like this.”

  “Like what?”

  “This.” A hand circled in the air. “Two cramped bedrooms, one bathroom always full of Aryeh’s junk, no washing machine, and so on. This.”

  “What do we do about it?”

  “I have ideas. We can talk tomorrow.”

  “No, go ahead and talk now.”

  “Well, it’s nothing substantial, not yet. Sheva Leavis and your brother own a building in Beverly Hills on Wilshire Boulevard. Very fancy district. A bridal shop in it may go bankrupt, and they took me to have a look at it. Gorgeous shop, perfect location, terrific inventory, but two silly Frenchwomen are running it into the ground, and—”

  “You want us to move to California so you can take over that shop?”

  “Easy, dear, don’t snap like that. If I went there, just me, just for a couple of years, I know I could turn that shop into a moneymaker. I know it. Leavis said if I accomplished that I could put in a manager and come home with a part ownership. A steady income in dollars, Yossi.”

  “And Aryeh? What about him during those years? Does he do without a mother? Or does he go with you to Los Angeles and catch the virus, God forbid?”

  “Okay, okay. I didn’t say there weren’t problems, hamood. Let it go at that for now. I’ll try the wine.”

  28

  President Kennedy Will Deliver

  “Ben Gurion resigned not a day too soon. He should have resigned months ago,” said the Foreign Minister, peeling onions at her kitchen sink, a food-stained white apron over her housedress. “If he expects the Labor Party to beg him to come back this time, he can forget it. He’s finished, kaput, OUT! For good!” With a quick glance over her shoulder, Golda caught Barak and Pasternak exchanging wry looks as they sat drinking orange soda at the kitchen table. “Listen, it breaks my heart!” she exclaimed. “That I’ve been his strongest supporter, ever since I got dragged into politics—by him, and no one else—everybody knows.”

  Two dirt-streaked boys came tumbling into the kitchen, loudly arguing about who had won a leg-wrestle. They snatched handfuls of cookies from a jar and scurried out, still yelling at each other.

  “Oy, grandchildren! I’m just a sitter, while Menahem and his wife go to Salzburg for the Mozart Festival.” She dropped the onions into a pot on the stove. “Well, they’re darlings, but spoiled? Pioneers they aren’t. A new generation.”

  “Madame Minister, has the State Department finally agreed?” Pasternak asked cautiously. “And if so, when do we go?”

  “Agreed. The date isn’t set yet. October or November.” Golda hung the apron on a hook and shook her finger at Zev Barak. “Now listen, last year you backed out of the mission, I understand. This time you go. No nonsense! The Mossad has it from the CIA that you’re well regarded in Washington.”

  “Probably because I haven’t been there for years,” said Barak, thinking this must be Chris Cunningham’s doing.

  “Never mind. Yitzhak Rabin will head this mission. No fooling around, the Deputy Chief of Staff will be letting them know that we must have tanks. And President Kennedy will deliver the goods, you’ll see.” She sat down at the table and took a pear from the fruit bowl. “The pears are in season. Delicious! We can’t fight new Soviet tanks with patched-up surplus from World War II. I told Kennedy that in Florida. He listened. You’ve read the report of my meeting with him? It was amazing. It was historic. What he said to me, what he promised me, Ben Gurion never got from him. Not from any President. They all found him obnoxious, which he always has been, even at his best. David, King of Israel!” She bit into the pear. “So sweet, so juicy. Fruit of the land. He treat
ed me shabbily for six years, sending me off to Africa, Asia, God knows where, to keep me out of sight while he ran foreign affairs. For your information, gentlemen, the Foreign Ministry is now headed by the Foreign Minister.”

  Barak had heard about the tumultuous Labor Party meeting, where Golda had denounced Ben Gurion in the bitterest terms to his face, when he was already reeling from a flare-up of old political squabbles, and a new newspaper storm over leaked reports—only too true—that Israeli soldiers were in Germany, secretly training with advanced equipment. What choice did the army or Ben Gurion have, when only the Germans would sell Israel a few state-of-the-art systems? But the old lion was down, and they were all rending him. What disconcerted Barak was Golda’s part and pleasure in his fall.

  “It’s graven in my mind,” Golda went on, “what President Kennedy said to me.” She changed her voice to a grotesque caricature of Kennedy’s Harvard accent, quoting in English: “‘Madame Minister, the United States has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East, really comparable only to that which it has with Britain over a wide range of world affairs.’ You look again at the report, you’ll see I’ve got it word for word. What a declaration! What a change from Eisenhower rebuffing Ben Gurion!”

  “It will be a great day,” said Pasternak, “when you can declassify that report.”

  “Oh, not for years! The Arabs would raise a howl! What’s the difference? His advisers were there on the porch with us. So were mine. It’s all on the record in Washington.” She smiled a far-off smile, finishing the pear and wiping away juice with a handkerchief. “Have some fruit, gentlemen.”

  They both declined.

  “Yes, I can just see Kennedy there on his rocking chair, in his shirt sleeves, no tie, the ocean breaking on the sand…. He looks like a college boy, you know. I had to keep telling myself, ‘This is the President of the United States, with all that power!’” Golda abruptly laughed. “Maybe he had to keep telling himself, ‘This old yenta is a Foreign Minister.’”

  Turning serious, she again shook a finger at Barak. “Now while you’re there, you’re to stay in closest touch with our military attaché. Keep him in the picture. If you ask me, he’s our most important man in Washington. The ambassador just bangs his head against the State Department stone wall. The United States Army has respect for us. We get hints! I know what their military planners are starting to think. ‘Maybe little Israel, down there on NATO’s southern flank, can be useful to us one of these days!’ Even if Dulles deceived and betrayed us, that was a big gain from our Sinai victory.” She lit a cigarette and squinted at Barak through the smoke. “How would you feel about serving in that job one day?”

  “Since you ask me, I’d hate it, Madame Minister.”

  “You’re a fool. It’s a tremendous career leap, and you’d be right for it. But that’s far off. Well, I have to cook supper for those kids, they eat like wolves.” The officers jumped up. “So both of you work with Rabin and his staff on the agenda for the mission. I want to see it next week.”

  “Yes, Madame Minister,” said Pasternak.

  She put a thick arm around his shoulder. “See? This is what Kennedy did when I left. Just like this, Sam! And he said, ‘Mrs. Meir, don’t worry, nothing will happen to Israel!’ So earnest, so sincere! You must plan this mission right, present the facts, do a job. You won’t see or hear from the President, but he’ll know everything, and we’ll get the tanks.”

  Outside it was a cool clear Jerusalem afternoon, such as the Holy City can offer in August while Tel Aviv swelters in seacoast steam. “Well, she’s in the saddle again,” said Pasternak, “with a crash.”

  “Listen, Sam, if I go on the mission, what does that do to the October armor exercises?”

  “Why, what’s the problem? Nitzan can take over your brigade, can’t he? He’ll be fine.” Pasternak looked at his watch. “I have to meet my lawyer in Tel Aviv.”

  “I’ll come with you, if you won’t be too long. Then we can talk to Rabin.”

  “Gemacht!” (“It’s a deal!”)

  “Sorry about you and Ruth,” Barak said as they got into Pasternak’s car.

  “No choice. Look, I haven’t been an angel. She says this Colombian fellow wants to marry her.” He turned up his hands. “At least Amos is going into the army, so that’s that. About the girls, well, my guess is that in the end the guy will skedaddle back to Bogotá, and she’ll come home and throw her parties for her Tel Aviv bohemians again, and look for a new diplomat. She’s got all the Loeb money, no problem.”

  Barak let Pasternak thread his way through the thick traffic to the highway before he spoke again. “Look here, Golda gave me the horrors, Sam. Military attaché in Washington!”

  “It’s a top spot, Zev.”

  “It’s paper-pushing. Don’t tell me otherwise.”

  “Well, she was just talking. I understand you’re slated for deputy, Central Command.”

  “So I’ve heard, but you know the army. Sam, what’s Golda’s vindictiveness toward the Old Man all about?”

  A shrug and a sidelong look. “There are those who say it started in bed.” Few remarks on any Israeli subject could surprise Zev Barak, but this jolted an incredulous laugh from him. “Long ago, of course. Otherwise, you can take her at her word. He pulled her out of the Labor Ministry, which she loved, put her in the Foreign Ministry, which she didn’t want, and then sent her junketing to places like Burma and Liberia while he took over foreign relations.”

  Most cars they passed were rattling old European miniatures, gasping up the hills and racing down them, leaving contrails of black exhaust. Fifteen years after the Jerusalem siege the mountain road was still littered with wrecked vehicles from Kastel to Latrun, war memorials preserved with red primer paint. Down on the flat the two-lane highway took a tortuous bend around the Latrun fortress. “A bone in our throat,” said Pasternak, gesturing. “We should have captured it in 1948, and we could have.”

  “Ben Gurion couldn’t bear to shed any more Jewish blood,” Barak said, “and I’ve never blamed him.”

  ***

  The first lines in Emily’s latest note, which fell out of a letter of her father’s, were a surprise and a relief.

  Letter #33 (Right? Or am I losing track?)

  Old Wolf—

  I hasten to share big news in a quick scrawl which I’ll stick in a letter that Chris is about to mail to you. Nothing sneaky, natch, just haste. Come October first I’m off on a South Seas cruise with Hester! Christmas in Tahiti, back in January.

  So she would not be there… one concern (and one anticipation) less…

  Wangling a leave of absence from Foxdale took some doing, but in the end Fiona was gracious and helpful. She should be, I lied like a trooper at the school board inquiry into the matter of Reverend Went-worth’s groin. Perjured my soul (though I didn’t happily have to take my oath on a Bible) to assert that they were both pure as the driven snow. As her closest associate I was believed. The Reverend healed up, and now they are both enjoying gitchi-gitchi once more on odd Sundays. His intended new bride, no doubt put off by L’Affaire Groin, gave him the old heave-ho.

  Hester and hubby have booked on a Matson liner, and Hester invited me along. As she put it to me she does love him, he’s a dear, but he bores her into murderous insanity, and on a long cruise she would be bound on one dark night to throw him over the side. She doesn’t want to do that, it would be hard on their three kids. So be advised now that a silence between October and January will NOT signal any break in our bond. I’ll just be out of touch.

  My other piece of news, kiddo, is that I may be working around to the Jack Smith alternative. Surprised? Jealous? Overjoyed? I’m going to give that a long THINK in the South Seas. Jack and I have a strangely old-fashioned relationship, rather out of a Thackeray novel. I don’t know what if anything poor Jack does about gitchi-gitchi—he’s got no Nakhama, like a certain having-it-both-ways louse of my acquaintance—but he’s been waiting me out a long time now
and who knows, who knows? I’m getting on.

  Yours quand même,

  Emily

  Big news indeed! The cruise, not Jack Smith; that was mere Emily piffle. It would keep the great circle distance between Emily Cunningham and himself roughly the same while he was in Washington. He went into his tiny workroom and closed the door, to read Cunningham’s letter, which was long and strange. He sat in his threadbare armchair eating pistachios, a vice that was making his trousers tight; partly a nervous habit, but also he loved the damnably fattening green nuts from Persia. Then he started to write an answer to the CIA man, but his thoughts kept wandering back to Emily.

  He had dug himself in too deep with her. That was the nub of it. Writing affectionate letters had become a minor vice, an indulgence like pistachio nuts and even less advisable. Once the newlywed Nakhama had enjoyed such mush, and she still liked to be petted and complimented, but she was a no-nonsense woman; there was a time for everything, and the time for mush had ended with the birth of Noah. No doubt she was right. Blessings, therefore, thought Barak, on the blubbery Hester Laroche, and her South Seas cruise.

  His unguarded outpourings to Emily had paralleled a less frequent exchange with her father. What both relationships had in common was escape from the submarine-like quarters of Israel, as Barak sometimes thought of it, to the great surface world beyond. Father and daughter offered him two different escape hatches. Cunningham had an offbeat challenging mind, and writing to Emily took Barak out of a marriage happy enough, yet circumscribed by his wife’s interests and nature.

  Nakhama had never been one for European or American books, plays, poetry, or serious music. She knew very little English, and even her childhood French, acquired from immigrant Moroccan parents, had rusted with disuse. Unless outside literature was translated into Hebrew she was unaware of it, and no longer very interested. As the years passed she had narrowed her focus down to raising two girls and a boy, and keeping a decent household going on an Israeli army salary.