Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

  “No. I want us to live together as man and wife—I, to be the father to your children; you, the mother to mine.”

  “Gossip doesn’t disturb me. We’re free people, Moshe.”

  “You amaze me.” He sat down on the side of her bed. “I’m supposed to be the worldly one. I used to think you—this girl from Bet Hakerem and I—the big-city man from Paris. Now the tables are turned. You’re the one who doesn’t care how people talk.”

  “Let them talk, Moshe. I’m in love with you. We don’t owe these gossips anything. The only ones I’m concerned about are our children.”

  “So am I. That’s the very reason we ought to get married.”

  “I don’t think the children are ready. I’m sure my boys aren’t; frankly, I don’t think your girls are, either.”

  “Nonsense, Raquela. We’d be doing our kids a favor by marrying. My girls hang around the house too much; they’re always worrying about me. In fact, Jenny’s forever telling me I’m alone too much, that I should get married.”

  The cold Jerusalem night filled the bedroom, but Raquela’s hands were hot and damp.

  “Moshe,” she said. “I’m afraid Amnon and Rafi would hate any man who would try to take Arik’s place. Even if it’s subconscious—they could feel such anger, at the same time such guilt and conflict—they could make our lives miserable.”

  “We could overcome that, Raquela. I love your boys, and I think they love me. They’re now, what—fifteen and ten? They need a father figure. You know there’s a danger in boys’ growing up with only a strong mother. You want them to be real men, don’t you?”

  “Of course, Moshe.”

  “And as for my daughters, if we marry, it would free them to begin living their own lives.”

  He stood up and looked down at her. “I’m sick of sneaking around. I can’t keep crawling out of here late at night. I hate it when you have to drive home from my house. Those games we played—sure, they were fun for a while. But it’s enough. We have to make a decision.”

  She lay back on her pillow. “I’m happy with what we have, Moshe. I can give you what you need—this way—if you let me.”

  His lips were drawn tight.

  “We have to make a decision, Raquela. Tonight.”

  “Yes?” She hid her hands under the blanket lest he see them tremble.

  “Let’s have a trial separation.”

  Pain gripped her stomach.

  He was pacing the bedroom. “Jerusalem is a very small city. Like a fish tank. Everybody knows what’s going on. Let’s not meet for three or four months.”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “I want it. I want to see if we can live without each other. It’s no good this way.”

  He kissed her. “Don’t get up. I’ll close the door on my way out.”

  She heard his footsteps go down the hall, then the door—cautiously locked. She put her head in the pillow and wept.

  Sometime in the middle of the night she finally fell asleep, dreaming the phone was ringing. She jumped up, reaching for the telephone. There was only a buzz.

  At six, she waited for his morning call. None came.

  At seven, unable to eat breakfast, she drove to her office on the campus, and somehow managed to get through the morning hours.

  By noon, she thought she was going mad. In the late afternoon her associates left. She stayed on alone, trying to concentrate on the papers and huge record books spread out neatly on her desk. Over and over she read the words: “ Table 1. Jerusalem district population, sex, ethnic origin, fertility rates.” The words danced in front of her. She gave up and drove home.

  Suppertime. She fed Amnon and Rafi; they went to their rooms to do their homework. They kissed her goodnight. She sat on the sofa in the sunken living room, looking through the French doors at Papa’s tropical, jungle-green plants.

  The phone was silent. Why had he decided on this trial by separation? Why was a man as sophisticated as Moshe concerned about what people said or thought? Didn’t they have a right to be happy? Hadn’t they both suffered enough? He was entitled to happiness. Why was he so sensitive to the evil-minded, foul-mouthed gossips? They were both adults. What, for God’s sake, was wrong with two mature people’s living together until they were both absolutely sure they wanted marriage?

  Raquela stood up restlessly. She took out her knitting bag and began a soft, woolly green and white sweater for a friend’s baby.

  Had she lost him forever? Would some other woman grab him? Marry him the minute he asked? With his looks, his charm, his position of power, he could probably have any woman he wanted—in any land. He exuded sex appeal. He had touched parts of her that had been dead, reawakened her to the joys of being a woman.

  She was filled with despair. Loneliness swept over her.

  The telephone rang. “Raquela, I’m coming over to get you and bring you to my apartment.”

  She flew to the bathroom, showered, and dressed in the green suede suit. He brought her to his apartment on Balfour Street.

  He helped her into a chair in the living room. The lights were low. He poured wine, and they sat, drinking it slowly.

  “Isn’t this nice?” he said, as though nothing had happened.

  “Very nice,” she agreed.

  “Let’s make a promise,” he said. “We’ll never have such a long separation again, for the rest of our lives—like these twenty-four hours.”

  They spent their honeymoon traveling for two months.

  Moshe, vice-president of the Hebrew University, was invited to be the guest speaker at conferences and banquets, to describe Israel’s work in aiding developing countries.

  They went to Teheran, New Delhi, Bangkok, Tokyo, Kyoto, Honolulu, San Francisco, New York, and back to Jerusalem.

  It was January 1967.

  * * *

  *It is the Prywes family whom Isaac Bashevis Singer fictionalized in his novel The Family Moskat.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  APRIL 1967

  “I’VE called you together to give out assignments. We’ve got to I prepare.”

  Dr. Kalman Jacob Mann, the Jerusalem-born director general of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, stood before the entire staff. His smooth-shaved face was agitated. The hospital light seemed to bounce off his troubled eyes.

  “Kibbutz Gadot has just been attacked by the Syrians. We’ve had word the Syrians have already lobbed in some three hundred fifty shells. They’re using powerful Soviet cannons. The crops are burning; homes have been destroyed. The kindergarten and two of the children’s nurseries have been reduced to rubble.”

  “Casualties?” Moshe interrupted. He sat in the front row, facing Dr. Mann, Raquela beside him.

  Dr. Mann turned to Moshe. “With the first sound of fire, all the people—there are eighty adults and eighty children—jumped into the trenches and raced down to the bomb-proof shelters. So far we’ve heard that only one person was injured, a Christian tourist from Switzerland who received a minor injury in his foot.”

  He paused. “Let me read you this dispatch I just received from army headquarters.

  “‘Syrians have shelled two more kibbutzim on the Sea of Galilee—Ein Gev and Tel Katzir. Israel Air Force silenced Syrian guns. Russian MIGS attacked our planes. We shot down six MIGS. Syrians retreated.’”

  The hall filled with whispers. Many had relatives and friends in these kibbutzim. Raquela could see Ein Gev, one of the most beautiful kibbutzim in Israel, with pomegranates and apple blossoms and tropical flowers; each year she had attended the music festival in Ein Gev, had heard Israeli and visiting musicians—Isaac Stern, Alexander Schneider, Leonard Bernstein. The lovely green lawns had been gouged with trenches, like scars on a man’s face. She had watched air-raid drills. Little children were taught to jump into the nearest trench or descend into the closest shelter calmly, without panic, the moment an air-raid alarm went off.

  “Do you think it means war?” Raquela whispered to Moshe.

&nbs
p; “He’s preparing us anyway.”

  Like all of Israel’s large hospitals, Hadassah served a dual purpose—civilian and military. Even Tel Hashomer, where Raquela had served as an army nurse, treated both soldiers and civilians.

  Dr. Mann was now assigning specific duties to members of the staff. Raquela watched as the energetic, fifty-five-year-old kind-faced physician called out familiar names. She had known Dr. Mann and his attractive wife, Sylvia, a well-known writer, from the day he became Hadassah’s sixth director, in 1951. She had delivered their fourth son.

  Dr. Mann was now talking to Moshe. “As my deputy,” he said, “your duties will include maintaining constant and direct contact with the front. Get information such as number of wounded, types of injuries. Pass it on to our medical teams immediately, so the moment the casualties are flown in here by helicopter they can go right to the proper departments.”

  “And Raquela”—he turned his full gaze on her—“I want you to organize five satellite hospitals that will be under the Army-Hadassah command. As soon as this meeting ends, the army will contact you to help you select the best locations.”

  The assignments continued. But Raquela was already planning possible sites. An hour later she was in her car with an army captain, driving around Jerusalem. They entered hotels, studying the facilities; they visited schools and institutions and college dormitories.

  The hotels were almost empty; tourists, sensing the tension in the air, were fleeing the country. Others, afraid to enter, canceled their reservations.

  Raquela selected the King’s Hotel and the President, in the center of town, and the Holy Land Hotel on the outskirts—a hilltop garden spot.

  The fourth satellite was a dormitory on the campus of the Hebrew University. The fifth, which she made her headquarters, was a convalescent home in Motza, in the Hills of Judea, the scene of the 1929 massacre.

  In early May, Israel seemed listless and vulnerable. The country was deep in an economic depression, euphemistically called a “slowdown.” Morale was low. Unemployment was mounting.

  Israel’s nineteenth birthday was celebrated on May 15, 1967. Amnon and Rafi marched with the other eleven- and sixteen-year-olds in the annual Independence Day parade. Raquela and Moshe stood on the street as the soldiers marched and the leaders of the government took the salute. Because Israel was not eager to create new furor in the Arab capitals, there were no planes maneuvering overhead, no tanks rumbling down the streets.

  At dusk, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was called to the telephone. “Egyptian troops in vast numbers are moving through Cairo. Some have already reached the Sinai Peninsula.”

  Eshkol was caught by surprise. His advisers had assured him Egypt would not be ready for aggression before 1970.

  They based their estimates on Nasser’s own words—that he was not yet ready for all-out war. He was facing defeat in Yemen, where his armies were busy attempting to overthrow the Imam. German scientists, many of them former Nazis, were building rockets outside Cairo that could penetrate Israel within minutes. But the rocket program was still not completed. Egypt’s population was exploding. There was starvation in the land. Nasser’s charisma was wearing thin. What made him choose Israel’s Independence Day to flaunt his troop movements?

  Driving to her headquarters in Motza, Raquela listened to Nasser’s voice on Radio Cairo: “All Egypt is now prepared to plunge into total war which will put an end to Israel.”

  Did Nasser believe his own rhetoric?

  The next day, Eshkol ordered a limited mobilization.

  Nasser was moving fast.

  On May 18, 1967, he demanded that U Thant, secretary general of the UN, remove UNEF (United Nations Emergency Force) troops from the Egyptian-Israeli border—from Gaza to Eilat.

  Before U Thant even replied, Nasser sent Egyptian troops to reoccupy Sharm el Sheikh.

  U Thant capitulated to the ultimatum and withdrew the UNEF troops. The Palestine Liberation Army instantly moved into the vacated positions in the Gaza Strip.

  On May 22 Nasser addressed his pilots at the air force base of Abu Suweir: “The Gulf of Aqaba is closed to Israelis.” He imposed a total blockade of all Israeli ships, and stopped all foreign vessels carrying matériel to Israel.

  Setting up the satellite hospital in the Holy Land Hotel, Raquela discussed Nasser’s latest moves with an army medic, a young red-haired kibbutznik from the desert.

  “It means war,” the medic said. “Closing our waterways is an overt act of war.”

  “But there’s still hope for peace,” she said, to calm her own fears. “Eban’s running around the world right now. Talking to all the leaders. Seventeen countries—in addition to the UN—guaranteed our right to sail into and out of the Red Sea. England, France, the United States, even Russia, guaranteed our survival. Surely they’ll stand by their commitments.”

  Eban began his shuttle.

  In Paris, President Charles de Gaulle, once Israel’s great friend, told Eban the days of their cooperation were over. France, now out of Algeria, had turned to the Arabs. Even the arms which Israel had ordered and paid for were not to be delivered, de Gaulle said, “to prevent Israel from starting a war.”

  Eban flew across the Channel to London.

  Prime Minister Harold Wilson acknowledged England’s commitment. He recommended patience and restraint. His foreign minister, George Brown, flew to Moscow and proposed to Alexei Kosygin that the Big Four convince the UN to return UNEF to the borders and to get Nasser to withdraw his troops from Sharm el Sheikh. “Do you want a second Suez?” Kosygin demanded.

  Brown retreated. Eban flew to Washington.

  President Lyndon Johnson agreed that Nasser must be stopped; the blockade must be lifted; Israel’s survival was at stake. Johnson had a brilliant idea. He would ask all the nations who guaranteed Israel’s integrity to send ships to the Red Sea. An international flotilla would sail through the Straits of Tiran, flying their flags, escorting an Israeli vessel.

  Not one country sent even a rowboat.

  Amnon and Rafi, their schools closed, filled sandbags.

  In teams of teenage boys and girls, they dug bomb-proof shelters in gardens and parks in Jerusalem.

  They helped run the post office and delivered the mail.

  Women drove the milk trucks, and bakers worked around the clock; at least there would be milk and bread—if war came.

  The army prepared coffins which could hold bodies for a year in case there was no time for burial. Hassidim in black silk caftans joined bare-legged youngsters digging graves in the parks. Tel Aviv was prepared for forty thousand deaths.

  The men and women of Haga—the civil defense—patrolled the cities’ streets, carrying white gas masks made, of all places, in Germany. Intelligence warned that the Egyptians, who had already used poison gas in Yemen, were planning to use gas in Israel.

  Kol Israel told women throughout the country how to prepare for enemy bombers:

  • Tape your windows, to prevent them from splintering.

  • Get blackout material. Black out at least one room, so you can have a light in one room in your apartment.

  • Fill your sandbags, and pile them at the entrances of your house.

  • Inside your apartment, put sandbags around the butane-gas metal tanks near your stoves. If tanks get a direct hit, they will ignite.

  • Get first-aid materials. Every pharmacy has kits already made up.

  • Disconnect electrical appliances whenever possible.

  • Keep a small bag of clothing ready to take into an air-raid shelter.

  • Prepare water in cans and in the bathtub, so you have enough water for each member of the household.

  • Stock up with a week’s supply of food.

  Raquela, apprehensive, tried to calm her own fears. She blacked out the windows in the house and in the satellite hospitals, put sandbags at the entrances, kept small bags of clothing ready, filled the bathtub with water, stocked the pantry.

  In the littl
e frontier towns where the Jewish immigrants from Arab lands had put down roots, women were bewildered. Their sons and husbands in the army were somewhere in the desert or the mountains. The government sent the women money; at least there was food in the house to feed the children. But they had lived through so much—fleeing the Arabs back home, the strange land, the new tongue, the children going to school, learning all these new ways—and now this: tape your windows! It was almost too much to absorb.

  During the last weeks of May, bells began ringing in people’s homes. Messengers scurried about the country, bringing sealed envelopes. Notices were slipped under doors or handed to people in factories, in universities, in hospitals, and in the fields.

  Some dashed home for their uniforms; others telephoned their homes or offices—“This is it!”—and rushed to join their groups. Red-lettered notices were posted on doors. It was total mobilization.

  Every able-bodied man—teacher, taxicab driver, doctor, bartender, banker, street cleaner—up to the age of forty-nine was called up. They had been practicing for years; the whole army could be mobilized within twenty-four hours and placed in the field twenty-four hours later. Enlisted men, long after their regular stint in the army, had been serving a month each year; officers, five or six weeks a year.

  Normally, married women with children were not expected to be called up; but some of the married women with certain essential skills—doctors, nurses, computer and radio operators, intelligence officers—were mobilized before their husbands, and the telephone wires in Colonel Stella Levy’s office at the headquarters of CHEN were hot with angry husbands demanding to know why they weren’t called up first. Why should their wives be given this privilege? What kind of reverse sex discrimination was this?

  Survival was the imperative—survival against the Arabs, as once it had been survival against the Germans. This time there was a land in which to fight, and an army to do the fighting. This time there were planes and armor and men superbly skilled in mobility and flexibility. The people turned to the army to save them, and in this army of reservists—who made up eighty percent of the total forces—the army was the people.