The Hope

by Herman Wouk

  By contrast Emily Cunningham consumed books old and new, made weekend forays to New York to take in plays, concerts, and art shows, and she commented amusingly on these. She stimulated him. For a year they had written back and forth about Sartre. One cold desert night, out on a field exercise and sitting up on a tank, Barak had scrawled by flashlight a disenchanted outburst; Sartre was after all an adroit eclectic with nothing new to say, a borrower and a self-promoter, whose “existentialism” was mainly a gimmick cribbed from Heidegger and other Germans. Emily’s quick admiring concurrence had warmed his heart. To Nakhama, even in Hebrew translation, Sartre would be as opaque as Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  He tore up Emily’s note, and set about finishing his answer to her father.

  ….Now as a Jew of course, I’m moved by your view of this century’s travails as “the thundering tread of Gog and Magog,” and our return to the Holy Land as “the new Beginning in history, the Hope, the first faint sounding of the Great Horn heralding the Messiah.” Halevai, we say in Hebrew; would it were so!

  But to me it’s all the tread of a passing monstrosity, totalitarianism. Once the old regimes fell apart freedom seemed in sight, Chris, but bad men grabbed power and seized on all the new technology to clamp fear and stunned obedience on their people. That’s Leninism, that’s Hitlerism, that’s Maoism. But I think the people will take heart and throw off the new kings and dukes in their disguise of cloth caps and Mao collars. Maybe even in our lifetimes.

  Unlike you, Chris, I’ve never seen Marxism as an apocalyptic new faith menacing the West. It has no great prophetic figure. Marx was a bourgeois self-indulgent curmudgeon, and Lenin, the nearest thing to their ikon, was a self-righteous slaughterer, a Slav Robespierre. As it wanes, I imagine Marxism will remain the status quo where the reds have got the government and the guns; and where they haven’t, a rationale for upheavals to confiscate and redistribute wealth, if governments are shortsighted or rotten.

  But yes, you’re dead right about the Soviets as the real threat to Israel’s existence. They’ll keep encouraging the Arabs to wipe us out, simply because it suits their book to penetrate the region. They’ll keep sending deluded young Arabs to their deaths maybe for half a century before the Arabs get wise, and stop playing expendable Russian pawns in the old Great Game. That is all quite irrelevant to Marxism. And meantime we have to hang on, hence our desperate ongoing quest for arms. Our young fighters are as good as the best in the world, and they’re highly motivated. But there’s no contest between spears and artillery. It’s not that one-sided yet, but it’s tending that way. We really need tanks, Chris!

  I share your concern about Ben Gurion’s fall. You’re right about that, too. Though in form he resigned, he was deposed. His successor, Eshkol, is not in his mold. He’s as gray as a cloudy day. He lacks world vision. Israel’s a small place, but it happens to be at the fulcrum of a giant world happening, the facedown between America and Russia. Ben Gurion knew that. Eshkol knows about pipelines and electric plants. He’s a Labor Party man from year one, and he’s quietly done many crucial things in building the country, so maybe he’ll work out…

  As he wrote, Barak could hear Nakhama coming in, and then one after another the girls, aged eight and three, both merry today, he was glad to hear. The usual afternoon sounds included much bickering and some sharp motherly commands. A rap at his door, and Nakhama’s voice: “Zev, supper!”

  “All right.”

  Well, down to earth from world visions. I’m called to the table. There’s a lot more I could tell you about the new Eshkol government. Was it Churchill who said that democracy is a terrible system, worse than all others except those that have been tried? Something like that. Anyway, the Israeli system is no damn good, that’s for certain, but we’re like people in a leaky boat in a storm. If we take the time to fix the leaks we’ll sink. We just have to bail and bail and keep bailing until the storm passes…

  When Barak came into the kitchen and sat down Nakhama was at the stove, peculiarly smiling. The girls were seated around the table, all titters and side-glances at one chair that remained vacant. “So who’s this for?” Barak inquired.

  “For me,” said Noah, entering in uniform, tall as his father but leaner, the boyish face stern and serious, then breaking into a grin at Barak’s amazement. “Navy recruits sign in early.”

  Zev Barak jumped up and embraced his son. Noah’s grip around his shoulders was hard and prolonged. “Then it’s the navy, after all.”

  “I know you wanted me to go into armor.”

  Barak held his son at arm’s length, savoring the joy and the faint fear of seeing him in fighting dress. All services wore the Zahal uniform, the differences were in caps and emblems. “You’re the man who has to serve. Serve where you want to, and where you can.”

  “He arrived while you were in there, working.” Nakhama’s plump face was radiant, and tears stood in her eyes. “I almost fainted, I thought he was still in Haifa.”

  “Noah is handsomer than Abba,” said Galia, the eight-year-old.

  Noah sat down. “I’m starved,” he said in his old boyish tones, “and nobody’s handsomer than Abba.”

  ***

  “You know,” Barak said that night in their bedroom, “Galia’s right. I’m a fat old workhorse. Once I could have gotten into that uniform of his. No more!” He was sitting up in bed, reading with glasses, his first pair. He had told the optometrist that he could see perfectly well, only his eyes felt tired at night. The optometrist had nodded and put glasses on him, and suddenly print looked twice as black and the optometrist had red veins in his nose.

  “Don’t talk fat to me.” Nakhama in a bathrobe was brushing out her hair. “I’m a hippopotamus.” She had put on a few pounds.

  “I have to stop eating pistachio nuts.”

  “I have to stop eating.”

  Barak told her about the mission to Washington. “It’s not till October or November, and I won’t be gone more than ten days, if that.” He closed the Evelyn Waugh novel and took off his glasses. “Nakhama, Golda talked about my going there as military attaché. Not now, of course, but she has it in her mind.”

  Nakhama stopped brushing to glance at him. “Would you want that?”

  “Would you?”

  Pursing of lips, Nakhama’s hard-thinking mannerism. “It might be valuable for the girls. They’d pick up good English once for all. Even Noah’s isn’t very good, and I’m just a dummy. It’s terrible. I’d work on it if we went.”

  “But Sam thinks I have a chance at Central Command. So do I.”

  Central Command confronted Jordan, weak and quiescent ever since the expulsion of its British army officers during the Suez fiasco. It was the junior of the three sector commands, with its back to the Mediterranean and its front running through divided Jerusalem, along the jagged armistice line—the “Green Line”—which in places was in sight of Tel Aviv and the sea. Northern Command faced Syria, Southern Command held down the front with Egypt; star assignments for future chiefs of staff. He was not yet on that level, but he had fought up and down the central sector in his youth, he knew every stone, and it was the post he aspired to next.

  Nakhama got into bed, and they talked as they often did about his competitors for general rank and sector command: all veterans of 1948, all decorated and steadily advancing, all with intensely scrutinized abilities, defects, and positioning in army politics. Maybe he was too thoughtful and a shade too fatalistic, Barak sometimes felt, to be a really fierce career charger. Sam Pasternak had once remarked that he was possibly a shade too civilized. If so, he couldn’t change what he was.

  As she turned out the light Nakhama said, “Well, then, you go to Washington in October or November for a week or so, eh? I guess you’ll see your friend Emily there.”

  “No. She’ll be on a cruise in the South Pacific. Sort of a sabbatical from her job.”

  “Oh? Too bad.” Nakhama’s voice in the dark had no trace of guile, relief, or indeed any feeling
. “It’s not a honeymoon, is it?”

  “No. It ought to be. She’s an old maid, just about.”

  Pause. “When I saw Noah today, Zev, I remembered you, coming into Papa’s food shop in your British uniform. Noah looks the way you did then.” She leaned over to give him a gentle kiss. “He’s not handsomer than you. Go on eating pistachio nuts. You work hard. You’re entitled.”

  ***

  Dusk falling, the first stars showing. On a dark ridge, shadowy Centurion tanks, jeeps, and armored carriers lined up. The sentry stopped Barak’s car at rifle point, then saluted and directed him to Kishote’s tent. Before leaving for Washington, Barak was paying a last visit to his brigade. He stepped out into crunching snow and icy wind for which he was ill clad, having driven up from Jerusalem in a sunny temperate afternoon. The snowfall here in November was freakishly early, but what was not freakish in Israel these days?

  Chaim Poupko, in grease-streaked fatigues, was saying as Barak entered the tent, “The slope gives you the derivative, sir, you see.” He stood before Don Kishote, who sat at a plank table under the harsh light of a naked bulb, studying a graph on plotting paper.

  “Zev! You’re off to America?” Kishote got up. Poupko snapped to attention and saluted. In uniform the mathematician looked thinner and decidedly odd, with the skullcap and untrimmed beard.

  “So Poupko,” said Barak, “you’re an armor man, after all. Doing what?”

  “Sir, in training for tank driver.” Awkward soldierly deference.

  “I’m trying a self-study course in calculus,” said Kishote, pointing at the graph. “As long as I’ve got a math whiz in the brigade, I have him check my work.”

  Barak smiled at the rabbi’s son. “How’s the lieutenant colonel doing?”

  “Straight A’s, sir.”

  “A diplomat,” said Kishote.

  Barak inquired, “Are you eating well?”

  “No problem, sir.”

  At a nod from Kishote, Poupko saluted them both and went out. “He’s surviving on hard-boiled eggs and baked potatoes,” said Kishote. “His big treat is sardines. Shayna brings them to him, also fresh vegetables, and now and then a cooked chicken. He’ll eat what she cooks.”

  “They didn’t get married, Michael told me.”

  “Well, it seems to be off, at least for now.” Kishote’s tone went flat. “I’m not sure. You’re leaving when?”

  “Sunday. How’s the exercise going?”

  A female soldier in a heavy green sweater, baggy lined pants, and earmuffs brought them mugs of coffee and meat sandwiches. Kishote told him a skeletal force was acting as the Syrians in a war game of the Northern Command. The extremely unseasonal cold snap and snowfall were a great break. Maneuvers in subzero temperature and snow had shown up real problems in these units transferred from the southern desert: gun sights icing up, lubricants thickening so that motors failed to start, and so on. “A lucky learning experience,” said Kishote. “How do we know we won’t be pulled up north in an emergency? It’s opened my eyes, Zev. We’re going to have to prepare a complete freezing-conditions doctrine.”

  “Good. Make a start on it. Why calculus, by the way?”

  “Oh, I keep running into calculus when I try to check R&D reports, weapons specifications, even game theory analysis. You know calculus?”

  “I learned it. It comes down to a few mechanical operations that aren’t hard.”

  “Once you know what you’re doing, maybe.”

  They went out and walked among the machines in the snow, talking about brigade problems: performance of officers, changes of personnel, equipment deficiencies, training schedules, and the like. Barak had long since noted how tough and unrelenting Kishote was about these nuts-and-bolts matters. However erratic in his personal life, Yossi Nitzan had another face as a soldier. Barak was confidently leaving the brigade to him, and meant to recommend him as its next commander.

  They came on Poupko, joking with the others in his crew as they worked on a track they had removed from the wheels and flattened in the snow. Barak climbed up and dropped into the tank for a surprise inspection. Maintenance excellent, to the eye; no rubbish, equipment clean, stowage in order, and the cramped space, the whiffs of diesel oil, metal, and electronics, gave him a nostalgic twinge. The field, the field! Damn Washington.

  “I’ll be off,” he said, back in the tent. “Long ride to Jerusalem.”

  Kishote made a rapid scribble on a despatch form. “Look, here’s Yael’s telephone number and address in Los Angeles. Give her a ring, will you?”

  “Sure.” Barak scanned the form. “How long will she be there?”

  “Not definite. She’s looking into a business proposition. Another thing, ask to talk to Aryeh. He knows you. He likes Uncle Zev.” Kishote hesitated. “You can tell a lot by the sound of a child’s voice.”

  “Okay, I’ll talk to Aryeh.”

  Kishote gratefully stuck out his hand. As they walked out to the car in moonlight the thin layer of glittery dry snow squeaked under their boots. “Don’t come back without four hundred tanks,” he said.

  ***

  In Washington too, a freakish November snow was falling, snarling the evening traffic. The Washington Monument loomed through the fluttering flakes, the top out of sight in glowing mist. Barak had last glimpsed this great obelisk right after the march on Sharm el Sheikh. If Dulles had snatched away the fruits of victory, a victory it had been, after all; yet seven years later the struggle went on and on, and here he was in Washington to beg for arms.

  “Not a bad first meeting,” said Pasternak. The taxi was taking them from the State Department to Christian Cunningham’s home in McLean, its progress across the jammed slushy Potomac bridge very slow. “At least we were talking to soldiers as well as cookie-pushers.”

  “No commitments,” said Barak. “Zero.”

  Pasternak held up a palm. “I’m talking atmosphere. Tone. You weren’t along last time. Deep freeze! Rabin is doing well. We’re going to make progress.”

  The loudspeaker in the cupola over Cunningham’s porch responded sepulchrally to the doorbell. “Would that be Colonel Pasternak?”

  “Hello, Chris.”

  Another voice, a young woman’s: “And would that be the Gray Wolf?”

  29

  Queenie

  “What the hell?” murmured Barak to Emily in the foyer, halting her by the elbow at her garish portrait while Pasternak went on into the library with Cunningham. “Why aren’t you in Samoa or Bali-Bali?”

  “My God, Zev, you’re getting gray! But it’s nice. Distinguished.” She wore a dark tailored suit and a frilled blue shirtwaist, with a gold wolf’s-head pin on her shoulder. A new stylish Emily! When he had last seen her seven years ago, she had still been doing the sloppy college girl; and in the snapshots she had sent since, the dowdy schoolmistress.

  “Emily, come on, what’s happened?”

  “I’ll explain, I’ll explain.” She was breathless, radiant, and laughing. “We’ve got to meet and talk.”

  “Okay, when? Where?”

  “The Lincoln Memorial. Tonight.”

  “Tonight? Are you crazy? And why the Lincoln Memorial?”

  “It’s lovely in snow. Be there, Wolf. Ten o’clock. By the statue. Don’t you dare disappoint me. Come along, sherry time.”

  “Now look, Emily—” but she was darting off into the library.

  During dinner Barak had trouble concentrating on what Christian Cunningham had to say about their mission. The CIA man already knew that General Rabin, in his opening presentation at the State Department, had talked of a range of new weaponry as well as tanks. “It won’t fly, gentlemen,” Cunningham said. “This isn’t a bargaining situation where you ask for the moon and settle for a crescent. You can end up with nothing at all, you know.”

  Emily appeared to be listening, but Barak knew better. He caught the subtle swift shifts of her eyes at him, and could only hope that the others did not. Pasternak seemed oblivious. Cunningham
as always was inscrutable, with his cold lean countenance and thick glasses. He disconcerted Barak by turning on him. “And that was pretty ridiculous, Zev, that last letter of yours. Artillery versus spears, indeed! Don’t talk that way in the meetings. You Israelis spoil your case by overstating it.”

  “Figure of speech, you know.”

  “Way off the mark. We rate you as still militarily equal to the Arabs, or slightly superior.”

  “First of all that’s wrong, Chris,” said Pasternak, “on plain count of weapons. Most of all, tanks. On that we can produce hard intelligence. In any case, an equal balance is for us very dangerous.”

  “I don’t follow that,” said Emily. After her father’s reproach to Barak she was paying attention. “Am I being dense?”

  “In a war in our region, Emily,” Pasternak said patiently, “the available munitions tend to get shot off, burned up, put out of action in a short time.”

  “True enough,” she said. “So?”

  “So, the Arabs have an infinite ready reserve close by in Russia, you see. Planes, tanks, shells, artillery, all they need, deliverable overnight. We have exactly one source, the French. Now that they’ve lost Algeria, we’re less important to them. Resupply from them is seaborne and slow. And subject to strong Arab pressures and changeable French politics, especially with De Gaulle back in the picture.”

  Emily looked to her father, who gave a short sober nod.

  “Sam’s talking facts, and that was my point,” Barak said to him. “After the blow-off of what’s on hand, it can in fact become spears versus artillery for us. You know that, Chris.”

  “You’d better win the war during the blow-off, then,” said Cunningham.

  “We live and plan by that rule. The Arabs can lose ten wars, but we can’t wipe them out. They not only can wipe us out, it’s their openly stated war aim. We have to be too strong for them to try it.”

  “Well, that’s clear, Zev,” said Emily, smoothing her chin with a gesture that pantomimed Abraham Lincoln’s beard. Barak made the briefest possible frowning head shake at her.