The Critical Offer

by Yitzhak Nir

  “Dahlia!” His cold, blue gaze met hers, “Is Ze’evik Carmon in his office yet?”

  “Chief, your eager second-in-command leaves the Shamirim settlement, as you know, at precisely zero-six-hundred hours every morning so as to be the very first to arrive at the office,” she replied with mock pathos. “He should have been in by seven.”

  “Well, is he in or isn’t he? I want to leave; I can’t go if Ze’evik isn’t here as backup. “

  “Don’t worry, Chief. I’m here twenty-four seven… as far as I’m concerned, you can all leave.” she flashed him her reassuring smile. “Just don’t forget to be back by twelve for the budget meeting!”

  “You know I love you, Dahlia, but this isn’t a joke. Make sure he stays in his office until I’m back.” His piercing eyes regarded hers once more, and he got up from his chair and headed toward the restroom. “And tell him not to hand over anything to the head of the Shin Bet that he doesn’t absolutely have to. Please tell Shauli and Guy to get the cars ready. I’m going out to get some air. Let me know if they reschedule the meeting from this morning. I’ll be at the usual place, and I’ll be available. And back on time…” he added with some resignation, his voice lacking its usual authority.

  He then closed the door of the restroom behind him to apply his other face.

  “I assume you’ll be at Adam Ben-Ami’s?” she raised her voice.

  “Correct!” he called back through the door.

  “Be safe, Chief...” she whispered.

  Outside Kid

  The director of the Mossad left his office, donning his new identity, and got into the back seat of a Skoda Superb that stood waiting in the pesky rain with its engine running.

  “Shauli, head to Adam’s. I’ll get off at the corner of Jabotinsky and Ben Yehuda and walk the rest of the way. I’m dying for some air.”

  “Sir!” Shauli, his personal bodyguard, smiled and crushed the butt of his cigarette into the ashtray. Guy, his other bodyguard, asked, “Everything okay, sir?”

  “Everything’s under control. I’m hungry, guys, let’s get out of here. I’m short on time.” He then casually asked if they’d eaten but didn’t expect a reply. A glistening brown paper bag smelling of fry oil answered for them.

  “I have to get me one of those. Stop by Momo’s Falafel. Nothing beats Momo’s, huh, guys?” he tried, briefly, to sound as young as they were. “And when are you finally quitting those cigarettes, Shauli?”

  “Tomorrow, sir. Definitely quitting tomorrow…”

  They headed west toward Highway 2, the black Chevrolet Savannah close on their tail, on their way to northern Tel Aviv. He stretched back in his seat, trying to block out the world behind the thick, black curtains, but the pain in his back would not abate.

  He began, absently, to think about Adam Ben-Ami: Born in the kibbutz, fatherless and noble, raised so differently than I was...He was never asked to prove anything and yet excelled at everything he touched...and so proud of his dead father, with everyone staring venerably on the IDF Memorial Days with the sad songs playing. It was always so different for me. Being an Outside Kid hardly child’s play back then. Especially for a kid like me...

  * * *

  Gershon was seven years old, dazed from the dazzling victory of the Six-Day War, when he first dreamed of being a pilot. At twelve he was building balsa wood airplanes and zealously reading the colorful air force magazines they sold at the kiosk.

  His parents, who had emigrated from Poland to Israel several years prior, informed him out of the blue that he was leaving their apartment in Netanya and moving, on his own, to live at a kibbutz.

  “What are you talking about, kibbutz? All my friends are here. You can’t just make this decision for me!” he protested. “Besides, which kibbutz? I’m not going to be a communist like you two!”

  His father delved into a long explanation, “It is a kibbutz associated with Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist-Zionist Jewish youth movement from Eastern Europe, which prepared thousands of young Jews to immigrate to Israel.”

  “And why do I care? Why should I leave my home for that?”

  “Gershon, my son… the people who established the kibbutzim, they are the true Halutzim - pioneers. This kibbutz, Giv’on, is one of many that they had founded in Israel - since even before the Declaration of Independence. They played a crucial role in the early years of this country. Now is your chance to join this great national endeavor!”

  “Join it yourselves!”

  But his father just went on, his voice low: “There are no exams at the kibbutz, but the school is supposed to be excellent, good enough to qualify you for work after you graduate. If you can’t work, you can’t provide,” he attempted a different angle of persuasion. “This is hard for us, too, Gershon, but we don’t have a choice. We are too old, too tired to move again. And my salary just isn’t enough…” He droned on, convincing neither his son nor himself.

  Gershon remembered his father’s terrible breath when he spoke to him in his “serious tone,” and his mother, looking at him plaintively, her eyes red and swollen, full of victimhood and brimming with tears.

  Anger surged inside of him.

  “No exams? Great! Who even goes there? What was the name - Giv’on? Was it Giv’on?” he asked bitterly, trying to absorb what his father was saying, still skeptical.

  His parents fled from Poland to Russia during the first days of the war. They barely survived the hard winters in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, to which they migrated like many other Jews, returning to Poland only after the war. His father completed his accounting degree in Warsaw, and his mother never returned to mathematics, in which she excelled back in the Lvov gymnasium. He was born many years after his elder brother, who died during birth, and remained their only child.

  Neshka, his mother, was a stout, spirited woman. Neither lipstick nor perfume had ever graced her skin. She ran the Stauber Sewing Workshop with an iron fist and at a meager salary. They made rough mattresses from surplus military fabric and stuffed them with seaweed for the beds that the Jewish Agency provided for the immigrants.

  She was thirty-one years old when she was diagnosed with lupus. The disease ravaged her. Her soft, flowing, brown curls slowly gave way to sores and bald spots.

  “One time, when I was four or five years old,” he would tell Adam Ben-Ami many years later, “we went down to the beach on a Friday afternoon. Dad carried me on his shoulders. He pointed at the sun as it set, disappearing into the gray-purple horizon. It might have been the warm sand and the red sun, or maybe the sea wind and the smell of seaweed, but I was laughing. She tried to pull me into her arms, smiling, and a small gold tooth peeked out of her mouth. I might have resisted, it’s hard to remember, I was very young… I must’ve tried to stay balanced and grabbed her hair for support. And suddenly, her hair -it was dragged down onto her forehead! The balding back of her neck was exposed, and she flinched away from me…” Gershon fell silent and stared at the street, his gaze unfocused. “Papa Dejo, as I called him back then, did some damage control, tried to distract me: he pointed again at the sun touching the water, told of whales and sharks, but nothing helped. I was haunted by that memory for years, and in my nightmares, the kids from Sharet Elementary would chase me around, yelling, ‘Your mommy is a baldy! Your mommy is a baldy!’” He imitated their mocking voices.

  “Even now, when I look at those yellowing photos of an optimistic young student with dark, flowing hair, I barely recognize her. At least, not like I remember her. My love for her, Adam, was full of both shame and compassion.”

  “And your father?”

  “My father, Yezhov, who smoked two packs of Dubek Dafna a day. I loved him, but… from afar. He had wise eyes, gray and wistful, and these thick, purple lips. But whenever he came near me, I could smell the stench of burned tobacco and tooth decay. I think he may have had some Gypsy or Tatar blood in him.” Gershon gr
inned. “When I’d look at their old photos from the Uzbek diaspora, I’d always wondered how I managed to grow to six feet and some inches, and where the hell I got my blond hair which eventually turned brown and today is pretty much gone altogether…” He smiled again, slightly embarrassed, as if caught taking something that didn’t belong to him.

  “His right leg was shorter than his left. He’d walk that way, limping, feeling no need to straighten his posture. He worked for years as an accountant at the old “Egged Buses” branch at the Central Bus Station, up Herzl Street, just before the cliffs.”

  “But what was he like, your father?”

  “I liked visiting him at the office. It made me proud, seeing him armed with his glasses, with his hair combed back in the old Polish style, carrying a mysterious slide rule and notebooks of graph paper filled with square, penciled numbers, precisely written, like they’d been printed… And he had this fountain pen with that golden eagle, the symbol of prewar Poland. He saved it for signing reports and official documents. I still have that pen. But even as a kid, I loathed the Netanya Central Bus Station. The noise, the exhaust fumes from the buses, the people running between platforms, the shouts of vendors - it disgusted me. You know, they always said I was an aesthetic little bastard.”

  “Wasn’t any part of it fun for you? Even a little?”

  “Maybe, a little… I loved the ice cream my father used to buy me sometimes, when I walked home with him after work. There was an old man there with a dirty apron and one of those flat caps the new immigrants used to wear. He’d bury his strange metal spoon in the tin, summon up a huge scoop, and place it on top of a waffle cone. Papa Dejo would hold it for me, and I’d lick with the eagerness of a child. I couldn’t understand why my tongue always seemed to knock the ice cream off the cone… and when he grew tired of this wasteful ritual, he started shoving the scoop in with his thumb so it would be entirely lodged in the cone. He would mutter as he did this, exasperated Polish words that I couldn’t understand. But his anger - that I understood very well...The sight of it was insulting and pitiful, even back then… Well, I stopped knocking ice cream off cones after that.”

  Adam smiled at the ancient anecdote. He’d heard it before, but this time he asked, “Gersh, why are you still carrying this childish insult?”

  “Maybe, Adam, it’s been carrying me.”

  With no real choice in the matter, fourteen-year-old Gershon packed a small suitcase, boarded a bus at the central station, and was carried off to Afula, on the way to Kibbutz Giv’on in Jezreel Valley, his heart exploding with umbrage. The image of his weeping mother, a scarf securing her toupee to her head, slowly vanished from his life. His father watched their farewell through his dusty office window from the height of his accounting throne.

  ...He was probably smoking, grasping that slide rule with nicotine-stained fingers...He would sometimes muse during his long stretches of solitude at the kibbutz.

  His time as an Outside Kid ended at the twelfth grade. His anger, resentment, and painful absence of his now divorced parents had all been abandoned in favor of a passionate love of airplanes. In his new life, they alone were all powerful and mysterious, beautiful and unsullied by memories.

  He devoured the air force magazines, which were a rare commodity at the kibbutz reading room, visualizing dogfights in his mind, drawn as if by magic to the stories of the pilots, his heroes. They filled his heart and imagination in those long, lonely after-school hours, when he had no parent-room to go to. And every time Chayim Telem, the leader of Erez class, would taunt him: “Gershon doesn’t have a parent-room! Poor little Outside Kid...” He would saunter off to the tractor shed and thunder away in the green John Deere, cutting through the kibbutz’s vast corn and cotton fields, up the dirt road leading to the mountain of Givat Ha-More, yelling, “I’ll show you! I’ll fly over this shithole and I’ll show you the meaning of mud, arrogant kibbutznik motherfuckers!”

  “Be honest, Gershon - didn’t you have it pretty good there? Was there no one to look after you? How did you spend the time there after your classes and your irrigation work, back in those mixed-sex kibbutz dorm rooms you slept in, if I’m not mistaken, all the way to twelfth grade?” Adam drawled, enviously mocking.

  “Look, Adam, I honestly had different things on my mind back then. Girls didn’t come into consideration until much later. It didn’t take me long to find out about the junior air force training center near the old railway station in Afula. I’d walk there, returning only late at night; and that was my life, pretty much. I didn’t ask the kibbutz for any favors, and I learned a thing or two about planes. Eventually I impressed them enough to let me fly, for the first time in my life, in the back seat of a military Piper Cub!”

  That first flight had spelled his doom.

  As he looked past Uri, the pilot’s broad back at the Piper’s inflated rubber tire accelerating along the runway, detaching and climbing away from the earth, his stomach sinking, the world had been changed forever - suddenly and irrevocably. There was no going back.

  He would never forget the browns, greens, and yellows of the fields, and the houses of Giv’on lay some five hundred feet below, the earth sloping sideways when the pilot banked the plane for a tight turn. His soul soared to the heavens along with the slow ascent of the light plane into the skies. His childish smile grew wider the higher they went, the longer they were up there. It was then, above Emek Jezreel Valley, that his unfounded longing for airplanes crystallized into a true love of flying. There was no fear then. The fear didn’t come until years later.

  And one July morning, just before he enlisted, Hanch’ka, the house matron, woke him quietly, taking care not to wake his two roommates. She patiently waited as he put on his shorts, his sweat-soaked undershirt, and his sandals and silently led him to the bench in front of their shack. He felt that something grand and solemn was about to take place.

  “Sit down, Gershon. We need to talk.”

  She was dressed as she always was, in a faded blue dress, a pressed white apron, and a huge wide-brimmed hat, as immaculate as her apron. Her short legs were in white work shoes, which were white-washed every morning before she came to wake up Erez class. She was a thickset, amiable woman, with perpetually half-lidded eyes and a small mouth, which habitually hummed ambiguous melodies in an off-key soprano, generating infinite attempts at impersonation.

  “I’m listening, Hanch’ka. What’s going on?”

  “At five in the morning the duty shift in the kibbutz office received a phone call from Laniado Hospital in Netanya. They asked if we know where your mother is. We know now that your parents had gotten back together, but yesterday she was in Jerusalem, and your father was alone in the apartment.”

  “And then what? Why it’s so important?”

  “Your father was found lying in the hallway. He’d apparently been banging on the neighbors’ doors.”

  “When? At five in the morning, you said?”

  “No, this was at three. He was suffering from terrible chest pain. The neighbors called an ambulance, and he was taken to Laniado. His condition was quite bad.”

  “Then what?!” He felt the ground leaving him once more. “Did he make it?”

  “I’m afraid not. He died an hour later, at the hospital.”

  “Why didn’t they save him?!”

  “They said there was no oxygen, and the spare tank was empty. That’s what they said. They gave him all sorts of pills, but none of the clueless interns they had there knew anything helpful.”

  “Bastards! He just lay there, in pain, until he died?”

  “That seems likely. Such a tragedy. You may cry now. There’s no one watching,” she said, tears falling from her own eyes, as Gershon’s gaze turned upward, following a pair of crows.

  Hardly any people came to the funeral, and so he was forced to provide his mother with love and support. No eulogy was given, and he didn’
t cry. Years later, when he returned to their old apartment to collect her belongings as well, he absently flipped though the heavy, green Hebrew encyclopedia. He was just about to throw it in the trash when his eyes caught the entry “Angina pectoris,” circled and underscored with his father’s golden Polish fountain pen. That pen had a place in the drawer of every office he’d had since.

  So he knew, my Papa Dejo... He knew and suffered, and said nothing...

  A Smell of Home

  Dreams rarely come true, especially when they are desperately wanted. And so, his hopes of getting into a flight course were shattered not long after he stepped foot into the recruitment office. They found an oversized heart, a very weak pulse, and a faint murmur. The kibbutz doctor’s explanations to the doctors in the recruitment center were all in vain. They maintained their diagnosis, and he was left with nothing but his indignation and bitter disappointment.

  Once again he felt that he had been exiled from his home and from his dreams.

  And all that time, he had been in love with the beautiful and oblivious Ayelet, who unwittingly rejected his clumsy courtship - an Outside Kid, now a graceless, spotted adolescent, without a parent-room…

  Fatherless and detached from his mother, in love, frustrated yet determined, he joined the paratrooper’s brigade. On the day of his enlistment, he packed some underwear, some toiletries, and The Catcher in the Rye and hitchhiked to the recruitment office.

  “So I’m not built to be a pilot, huh? Bastards…” He muttered to himself on the truck that shipped them to the basic training camp, leaving behind both his youth and his dream to be a pilot and finally show them all.

  He ground away through the grueling months of basic training, refusing to accept his fate. “Then why the fuck is it me down here, sprinting on this godforsaken hill in full ceramics and gear?!” he swore as a fighter jet formation thundered above them, while he, down in the dirt of a platoon-scale training exercise, conquered another mound of rocks.