by Herman Wouk
By the time he and his aviators have noisily and repeatedly raked the deep trenches screened by the pine trees, Yaffe’s battalion is formed up and moving along the ridge road, reenforced by tanks from a mechanized brigade to the north. Despite the air strike, heavy fire from the pine grove greets the advance. Super-cautious after Luria’s warning, the pilots have not hit churches, mosques, or Israelis, and have not wholly quenched the dug-in Jordanians, either. Kishote sits in Yaffe’s signal half-track, watching the tanks and troop carriers rumble by into the stinking black smoke of the napalm conflagration. Perched atop a passing carrier is Master Sergeant Shmulik, waving his good arm. “I’m back with my company, Colonel,” he yells, “and I’m going home! Thanks for getting me out of that lousy bed.”
“Keep your head down,” Kishote calls back. Shmulik laughs and drops down into the vehicle.
“Kishote, Kishote, Talmid speaking. Where are you?”
Talmid (Scholar) is Motta Gur. It is part of Motta’s luck or destiny, Kishote thinks, to have the perfect code name for the first Jewish commander to return to Jerusalem since Bar Kochba.
“Talmid, Kishote speaking. I’m in the dark cloud on Mount Scopus. Like Moses on Mount Sinai.”
“B’seder, Moses. My command group is on the way. Meet me on the Mount of Olives in fifteen minutes.”
“B’seder.”
The jeep in which Kishote sets out to meet Gur goes by burning vehicles and soldiers tending to the wounded. For all the smoke and gunfire, for all the distraction of loudspeakers blatting signal jargon, Don Kishote’s heart leaps when the jeep reaches the Mount of Olives and rolls out on a windy terrace cluttered with vehicles of Gur’s headquarters group. Gur is surveying through large binoculars the broad terrain that lies below in clear sunshine: the entire Old City inside its walls and battlements, the grassy Temple Mount and its two grandiose mosque domes, one gold, one silver; and outside the antique walls, green hills and valleys dotted with Arab villages, and far beyond them the urban sprawl of New Jerusalem. Israeli columns are moving on the outer roads.
“Kishote, you’re here! Good.” Gur holds out a marked map. “Take a look at this.”
“Have you got the order yet to go in?”
“No, but it’s coming. My nose tells me so. I have to be ready for it. Now, this is nothing like the staff attack plan or the war games. Nothing’s developed as anticipated.”
Amid artillery blasts, raucous signal cacophony, and the grumbling of tanks, his eyes stinging from smoke and dust, Kishote scans the sketch. At first glance it puzzles him extremely. Gur’s three paratroop battalions and a tank unit, their maneuver paths identified in different colors, will come at the Old City walls and gates in a peculiarly complicated attack. Since the few remaining Jordanian defenders face overwhelming force, why this swirl of military movement? But soon he understands—and smiles. Good old Motta! If politics delay the capture, if the order does not come in time, if the cease-fire takes effect with the Israelis occupying the ridge to the Mount of Olives, there Colonel Gur will be, on the Mount of Olives. If on the other hand, Motta’s Fifty-fifth Parachute Brigade is unleashed to enter the Old City, the four forces will approach in a tangled ballet of men and machines so that the first man through the Lions Gate, the first Jew to set foot on the Temple Mount, will be Motta Gur.
“Well, what do you think?” Gur inquires, as Kishote gives back the sketch.
“Motta, magiya l’kha [you’re entitled].”
Gur’s response is a wily side-glance and a humorous grunt.
Major Sharfman now drives up in a gun-mounting jeep. Kishote borrows his binoculars to peer down at a bridge in the valley where smashed and burned Israeli tanks and vehicles lie helter-skelter. “That’s the devil of a mess, Menakhem. What happened?”
“Terrible balagan. Reconnaissance guys took a wrong turn in the dark last night and piled up at the bridge. Jordanians shot them to pieces from the walls. A massacre. That place is what the Christians call Gethsemane.”
“Gethsemane. Gat shmanim [Oil press], no? And isn’t this spot where we’re standing the place where Jesus preached to a multitude? Right here on the Mount of Olives?”
“Right here.” Major Sharfman gestures at the arched facade of the Intercontinental Hotel directly behind them. “And where he preached, cocktails are served now from five to seven-thirty, with free canapés.”
Kishote frowns up at the hotel. “Who ever allowed that to be built there?”
“Who was to stop it? The British were gone and we were shut out. Anyway, look down there, and ask me who allowed that.”
Sharfman is gesturing at the slope below the terrace where they stand. The broad hillside looks like a quarry, acres and acres of broken stone and randomly scattered hewn slabs. Kishote recognizes the ancient cemetery from pictures he saw in boyhood, and he chokes up with rage.
A shout from the signal officer to Motta Gur: “Sir, Central Command! The general says he has good news.”
Gur strides to the microphone. His glad demeanor, as he listens, telegraphs what he is hearing. “Ken, ken. Mi’yad! [Yes, yes. At once!] We’re ready, and we go.” He turns to the signal officer. “I will speak to all battalion and company commanders.” The officer cuts in the circuits on his transmitter.
“Paratroop Brigade Fifty-five”—Gur in a burst of pride drops code names and speaks in the clear—“we stand on the ridge looking to the Old City. We are about to enter ancient Jerusalem, dreamed about, yearned for, down all the generations! We will be the first to go in. Tanks, move to the Lions Gate! Battalion Twenty-eight, Battalion Seventy-five, to the gate. Battalion Sixty-six, after them. Move, move. We hold our review parade on the Temple Mount!”
Now Gur’s crude map sketch begins to unfold as a reality. In drifting dust and smoke, the battalions roll down the Mount of Olives and along the valley roads, streaming toward the walls, from which gunfire still weakly pops. Gur’s command group in half-tracks and jeeps takes the road which circles down southward around the desecrated graveyard, and curves back north toward the Lions Gate. Watching the advance of the battalions through binoculars, Sharfman says hoarsely, “Is it all right for a Jewish soldier to cry?”
“You’ve forgotten your Psalms,” says Kishote. “‘When God returned us to Zion, we were as in a dream. Then were our mouths filled with laughter—’”
Sharfman completes the verse. “‘And our tongues with song.’ Okay. No crying.”
Kishote repeats, “As in a dream. As in a dream.” He points down at the thousands of broken rifled graves, over which he is seeing the Jewish army marching toward old Jerusalem. “And they are all watching, I tell you, Menakhem. Watching, and laughing, and singing. This is their resurrection. This is why they wanted to be buried here. So as to be here on the great day, the Day of the Lord, and see it with their eyes. This is their day.” He grips Sharfman’s arm hard.
“Amen,” says Sharfman, “but that’s my bad arm, Yossi, wounded in KADESH.”
With a laugh, Kishote lets go. “I’m out of my head and raving. Sorry.”
“Raving? Do you know how I felt, up in the Magnes Tower, looking at this graveyard year in and year out? Watching them down in there with their crowbars and sledgehammers?”
With a tank leading the way, Motta Gur’s command group far below is nearing the Lions Gate. A large flaming vehicle blocks the narrow road to the entrance arch. The tank shoves aside the burning machine and smashes through the massive wooden doors. Gur’s half-track follows the tank through the dust and rubble of the broken entrance.
“There they go.” Sharfman hands Don Kishote the binoculars. “Look. It’s happening!” He bursts out into rollicking laughter. “Kishote, we’re doing it. I’ve been staring at that gate for years from Mount Scopus. Now our boys are going in.”
“And by God, there goes Motta,” says Kishote. With the binoculars he can discern the burly figure of Colonel Gur running out on the broad plaza of the Temple Mount past the high golden Dome of the Rock, follo
wed by other soldiers at a trot. “There they are, Menakhem, our boys on Har Ha’bayit [the Temple Mount]!” Vehicles are pouring through the Lions Gate—tanks, half-tracks, troop carriers—and more and more soldiers, with guns at the ready, are running out on the broad level plaza between the two grandiose mosques.
“Unbelievable, unbelievable!” Major Sharfman’s voice is low and awed. “As in a dream!”
Yossi is murmuring the blessing on good news. Sharfman hears him and slaps his shoulder. “Amen and amen. By God, Don Kishote, your secret is out! You’re religious. Don’t deny it.”
“I was a yeshiva boy, Menakhem, and I’m a Jew.”
The major laughs, gesturing at the scene below of soldiers thronging on the Temple Mount. “Look at this, will you! When Nasser closed Sharm el Sheikh, little did he think that this would be the outcome!”
“Nasser couldn’t help himself,” says Kishote. “The hand of God was on him.”
Sharfman exclaims, peering through the binoculars, “Motta Gur is calling over a signal sergeant.” He darts to the jeep, turns up the volume of the portable receiver, and switches rapidly through the frequencies.
“Central Command, this is Talmid, speaking from inside the Old City. I’m standing on the plaza of the Dome of the Rock. HAR HA’BAYIT B’YADENU! [Temple Mount in our hands!] HAR HA’BAYIT B’YADENU! HAR HA’BAYIT B’YADENU!”
Voice of General Narkiss at Central Command: “I am coming there at once. All honor! All honor! Hundred percent!”
Don Kishote and the King of Mount Scopus hug and kiss each other. The mustache is scratchy on Yossi’s cheek, and Menakhem’s cheek is wet with tears, though he has agreed not to cry.
TEMPLE MOUNT IN OUR HANDS!
A flame leaps through the Jewish State from the Syrian border to the Red Sea, a sunburst of national joy and glory. Fathers and sons, mothers and children, wives and husbands, sweethearts, newlyweds, comrades in arms out on the battlefield, all are fused in a once-in-a-lifetime, once-in-a-millennium surge of the spirit. Everywhere in the Holy Land Jews embrace, dance, and sing: “This is the Day the Lord has made…”
Levi Eshkol puts down the telephone and turns gleaming eyes to Pasternak. “Har Ha’bayit b’yadenu! Let us go to Jerusalem.”
“The road will be jammed with army traffic,” says Pasternak. “I’ll order a police escort.”
“Never mind, no big tsimmes, we will get there.” The Prime Minister looks down at his wrinkled bulging khakis. “For this I’ll put on a coat and tie.”
The word reaches Benny Luria as he circles Tel Nof. The flight controller droning jargon in his earphones to clear his descent breaks into a boyish jubilant shout: “All aircraft, hear this. Har Ha’bayit b’yadenu!”
Benny glances around and with wild whoops whirls over and over in a victory roll.
“Aunt Shayna! Aunt Shayna!” Aryeh comes running out on the roof. “Imma says hurry downstairs!”
Shayna has been watching the smoke and fire over the Old City. Here and on nearby roofs people are crowding to observe the spectacle, their portable radios making a scratchy incomprehensible din.
Her mother says as she enters the door of the flat, “Ah, there you are! An important announcement coming from the army spokesman!” And almost at once a deep not-quite-calm military voice interrupts an American rock-and-roll record: “This is the army spokesman. The commander of Central Command has just reported ‘Har Ha’bayit b’yadenu!’”
They hug each other, and Aryeh dances around the room, shouting, “Abba was there! Abba was the first one on the Temple Mount!”
Laughing and crying, Shayna catches him in her arms. “By my life, you’re probably right.”
Yael hears it in her flat as she dresses after a nap. Exclaiming aloud, “Thank God I’m here!” she falls in a chair to think, but not for long. There is only one thing to do.
42
The Wall
Kishote jumps from a jeep he has commandeered, to jostle through vehicles and paratroopers jamming the Lions Gate. There above the stone archway are the legendary lions, all right, two facing moldering bas-reliefs of stiffly stylized big cats. Leopards, maybe. Pushing past the burned-out smoldering bus that still radiates heat and stink, half carried along by the rejoicing soldiers, Kishote enters the Old City.
VIA DOLOROSA, reads the street sign in the gloomy passage blocked by tanks. The paratroopers are streaming with him toward an opening in a high wooden barrier, and all at once he finds himself out on the grassy spacious plaza of the Temple Mount. The sense of being in a dream is strong on Don Kishote, and to wake up in a hospital bed would not surprise him. Right there is the grandiose blue-tiled Mosque of Omar with its huge golden dome high against the sky, and beside it unshaven rifle-slinging Israeli soldiers are clustering around the bareheaded Motta Gur. Scattered gunfire echoes below the Mount as Kishote pushes past the bobbing helmets. “Well, Motta, how does it feel to be immortal?”
Gur’s face is flushed, his eyes blaze. “Hi! The boys are still hunting down snipers, Kishote, clear to the Damascus Gate. It’s rotten to be taking casualties now, but the soldiers are glorious. You know what one of them just said to me? ‘Colonel, when do we settle with the Syrians?’ This is a kid from the company that took Ammunition Hill!”
“Speaking of ammunition—!” Kishote pokes a thumb toward the multitudinous crates heaped perhaps fifteen feet high against the Dome of the Rock mosque. Stencilled on them in Arabic and English are British army code marks; all manner of shells, grenades, mortar rounds, flares, machine gun magazines, even dynamite. With a cynical glance at the towering ammunition dump, Gur shrugs. “Kind of careless, that, no? Listen, Kishote, Eshkol is coming. It would be a help if you are at the Lions Gate when he arrives.” He gestures at Yossi’s bandages. “You have a heroic look, you’re picturesque, and anyway by God you are a hero. And you’re reliable. Major Shimon will be there with a security detail.”
“When will Eshkol arrive?”
“He’s on his way from Tel Aviv. The roads are clogged with army, so it’ll be a while.”
“I’m yours to command, but I’m dying to see the Wall.”
“You’ll be disappointed. As a kid I know I was, first time. It’s not much to look at. But go ahead, go down the staircase through that gate there.”
Kishote descends worn stone stairs and rickety wooden steps to a dark alleyway lined with shabby Arab houses. A few soldiers wearing phylacteries are there racing through the morning service, prayer shawls over their uniforms and guns slung on their shoulders, facing gigantic shadowy blocks of weathered Jerusalem stone, with green plants hanging from high crevices. The prayer leader is chanting.
Let us sanctify His Name in this world, as they sanctify it in the highest heavens. As it is written by your prophet,
AND THEY CALLED TO EACH OTHER AND SAID—
In a yeshiva-boy reflex Kishote stops where he is, puts his feet together, and joins the chorus of response:
HOLY, HOLY, HOLY, IS THE LORD OF HOSTS, THE WORLD IS FULL OF HIS GLORY.
Like all the soldiers he rises on tiptoe with each “holy,” to simulate the flight of angels. Mighty strange, to be trapped in this old Kedushah ritual in a chilly alley open to the sky! The last response frees him to move again.
MAY THE LORD REIGN FOREVER, YOUR GOD, O ZION, HALLELUJAH.
He goes to the Wall, leans on the cold stones, and kisses a projection of pinkish rock, trying to feel emotion and not succeeding when, with a swelling clatter on the stairs, into the alley bursts a short bearded figure in army uniform, carrying a velvet-covered scroll of the Law and a black ram’s horn. Close behind trample news photographers and soldiers with cameras, for this is the army’s chief chaplain. He kisses the Wall, puts the ram’s horn to his lips, and vigorously blows. Photo bulbs flash, but no sound comes out of the horn. He tries again, and produces only a sputtering squeaking noise. “The wrong shofar!” he fumes. “Such shleppers! I told them to give me the yellow one! Satan is in this horn, nobody can blow it
.”
Kishote steps forward. “Rabbi, let me try, I used to blow shofar in the yeshiva.”
“A yeshiva buk’her [lad]! Hundred percent, go ahead, try! Rip apart Satan!”
The wet mouthpiece is too narrow, Yossi sees. He blew just such a recalcitrant shofar in the Cyprus camp at the Rosh Hashanah service. He takes a deep breath, and blows a piercing shrill blast that makes the praying soldiers stop and stare, and sends a flock of birds wheeling and screaming off the wall overhead.
“Hundred percent! Health to you! Blow, blow, buk’her!”
The rabbi dances, singing the jubilant holiday song,
David, King of Israel,
Alive, alive, and abiding…
The soldiers pouring into the alley join in, ringing the dancing rabbi. “Blow, buk’her, keep blowing,” he shouts. Kishote sounds blast after blast, the rabbi whirls and capers with the Torah, and the soldiers dance and sing around him. In the distance sporadic gunfire still goes on. Overhead a helicopter circles, the rotor heavily thrashing.
***
“Aunt Shayna, I don’t know what the value of x is, and I don’t care!”
Aryeh is being unusually mulish. Shayna is trying to drill him in algebra, and he has a keen head for it, far advanced for his age, but today he can think only of Abba, and the Har Ha’bayit flash on the radio followed by “Hatikvah” and “Jerusalem the Golden.” At the double knock he jumps up and runs to the door, crying, “Abba, Abba!” It is a soldier, but not Abba; a paratrooper lieutenant, with a broad nose sunburned and peeling, and a four-day growth of red bristles.