Loud and Clear

by Iftach Spector

  IT TOOK ME YEARS TO BE ABLE to explain in logical terms how he had done it. Life taught me also, gradually, how to fill in the missing pieces in the puzzles put before me. First it happened in aerial combat and then in commanding men. Time and again I was faced with situations where the facts available to me were only part of a larger whole, and some of them were questionable, too. Still, these were the premises upon which I had to decide and act. Under pressure, I learned to see—that is, to infer and create a complete picture. It was necessary to do it that way, though it was a delicate and even dangerous act. In combat flight, which is—like playing jazz—a fast performing art form based on deep culture and improvisation in varying situations—the necessary base for creativity and invention is the ability to collect diverse pieces of information and fill the missing parts with imagination and association, to create a multidimensional mental picture. This is the meaning of seeing. Finally I came to realize that seeing does not come just from the outside. A major part of it wells up from the inside. Zur knew how to see.

  Only after this event did I get up enough courage to propose friendship to this girl. Ali, in her direct way, answered with a short note that ended, “Yes, I accept.”

  YES, ZBB WAS BOTH SCARY and attractive.

  What made it easier for me in his company was this clumsy and anxious body of his that caused him so much suffering. He trembled when we were about to train at being taken prisoner by the enemy. This is the toughest part of the training in the flying school. We knew we were going for a hike in the mountains, that we were to try to hide and escape, but there was no chance. Somewhere along the way, we would be caught and taken to an unknown location, where interrogators would exert physical and mental pressure to extract information from us. Zur was pitiably frightened of this. He felt he would be unable to stand the physical pressures and the abuse, and believed he was going to bring shame on himself and on his father, Itamar, who was a high-ranking and respected officer in the reserves. So he began to try to toughen up. He wanted me to box with him and to punch him in the face. I didn’t want to do it, so he pushed me by banging his head into a light pole.

  After we finished wrestling, he dragged me to the base swimming pool and demanded that I teach him to dive from the highest board. He shook with terror. Again and again he walked to the edge with trembling legs, stopped, and sat down to think it over, unable to take the plunge. Eventually he climbed down, in despair. Those sweet guys in our class, mainly the veterans such as Umsh, Goldie, and Yakir, scorned him. They changed his nickname from ZBB, Zur Ben-Barak, to RBB—Run, Bloody Bastard.

  But he passed the prisoner survival training with flying colors, and after that I saw him break the fear barrier.

  It began with an accident. We already were flying Stearman biplane trainers, and one day ZBB taxied his plane a little too fast. He saw the other plane a little too late and was a little too slow to brake and crashed into it. The airplanes crunched together, their propellers flailing and sending cloth and pieces of wood flying. This was an unforgivable screwup, and nobody doubted that this was the end of ZBB’s career in the air force.

  Saturday passed with fraying nerves. Zur hid in a corner under his blanket for the whole weekend, refusing to taste the food I brought him from the dining room. Suddenly he got up, pulled me to the swimming pool, climbed to the top springboard, closed his eyes, rolled in the air, and did a belly flop on the water. I understood; he wanted to die.

  Next morning he was summoned to see the commander. He was judged and punished but not washed out. Later, because of his talents and strong character, he stood out more and more, and when we got our wings, Zur Ben-Barak was already known as a winner.

  MY TURN CAME. I ROSE TO MY FEET and faced them all, blushing.

  I was of medium height, very thin, and suffered a lot because of my round and childish face. I didn’t like myself. My hair especially irritated me: it was black and curly. Elderly ladies loved to pat it, so in protest I shaved my head. I most hated my eyes, inherited from my mother, Shosh, who got them from her father, Nathaniel. My younger daughter, Ella, looks at me with these same eyes. When I saw these eyes in the mirror, light-colored and vulnerable, they made me feel restless.

  And now, exposed before Yak and all the Scorpions, I had difficulty saying anything. I was never the kind who found speaking easy. I always found the right words, but later, after time had passed.

  At least I had a hero to remember: the amputee Soviet fighter pilot Alexei Merseyev. Many times I have dreamed of the moment when they all were waiting for his return from the fight for the motherland, against the Nazi Messerschmitts. I imagined the squadron commander spitting, “Enough. Merseyev is out of fuel. He is not coming back. Let’s go.” And right then, in total silence like a shadow, Merseyev’s aircraft arrived, gliding down, down, his propeller stopped. His airplane clipped the birch treetops and touched down on the first meter of the runway. But this was neither the place nor the audience to blab my dreams to. And I had no way to tell that like Merseyev within just a few short years, I would come back from air combat, my fuel tanks dry, dead-stick landing like a leaf on the first meter of a far-off runway. When I took my helmet off, two cuts would drip blood from where I had bitten through my lower lip.

  Here I was, a mere second lieutenant, the new kid in school. My mother had taught me that things should be kept inside. One does not hang one’s laundry out in public. I chose to limit myself to absolute basics: name, rank, and serial number.

  Zorik watched me, waiting. I added something in a low voice.

  “What did you say? Give us something on you, Spector! And speak up!”

  I repeated, “I came here to defend our country.”

  They thought this was really funny. In the healthy roar of the laughter the investigation was all but forgotten. I flushed as I stooped to collect my file and hurried back to dive in among my friends. I dug into the box and found in it a notebook, a pencil, and two books: Aerial Combat by Yak Nevo, and Air Gunnery by David Ivry. This was the top wisdom of the air force, and for me—two worlds of knowledge, heroism and battle experience I had to make my own.

  When I looked up again, I found those two figures themselves, bent over the table, watching me intently. Yak’s eyes were brown and pensive; Ivry’s pale blue, large and stern. Opposite them, Sam Khetz made a face and winked.

  Then I relaxed. I passed the examination, and all would be well. And most important, everything had been kept inside.

  Chapter

  3

  Palmach

  Palmach (assault platoons): The strike force of the Hagana (Defense) organization.

  Established in 1941, under threat of Nazi conquest of the Middle East. In the beginning Palmach was supported by the British Mandate government of Palestine, but later on it fought against it. During the covert years, Palmach boys and girls trained for half a month and worked in kibbutzim in the other half. Palmach emerged from the clandestine struggle as a commando force with clear battle doctrines and set values like love of the fatherland, comradeship, and purity of arms.

  After the UN partition resolution of November 29, 1947, when the War of Independence broke out, the Palmach was the first force ready to fight the enemy. In the war, Palmach operated three brigades—Iftach, Harel, and Negev. Of the five thousand who served in Palmach, more than a thousand men and women fell. In November 1948 Ben-Gurion decided to dismantle Palmach, a controversial decision. Some of IDF’s chiefs of staff were former Palmach members, including Yitzhak Rabin, Haim Barlev, David Elazar, Mordechai (Mota) Gur, and Raphael (Raful) Eitan. The first commander of Palmach was Yitzhak Sade. When he was nominated chief of the Hagana, his deputy, Yigal Allon, replaced him. His vice was Uri Brenner. The adjutant officer of Palmach was Shoshana Spector.

  THE EYES: THE FIRST THINGS you would have noticed when looking at Shoshana Spector. They were terrific eyes, bright and extremely intelligent. The wide pupils were surrounded with bright green, almost yellow irises, and the colored area a
ll plowed with miniature labyrinths like tree-root systems, and speckled with tiny marks.

  She lost me at Kibbutz Givat-Brenner.

  She arrived at that big kibbutz in the autumn of 1951, three years after the War of Independence had ended. The struggle for the revival of the Jewish state was over—at least so they thought at the time—and the time was right to settle old scores. My mother, the number one woman in the Palmach, was sent for a year of study in America (she had hoped to establish a rehabilitation plan for handicapped veterans), and when she returned, she was fired. Apparently the newly organized Israel Defense Force didn’t need her and all the knowledge she’d accumulated. Like some of her comrades, she decided to try a new life in a kibbutz. This is how she showed up at Givat-Brenner, dragging behind her an eleven-year-old boy she didn’t really know.

  Later she used to blame me, half seriously, for this decision. “The boy wanted to live on kibbutz,” she would complain, spreading her arms sideways, grinning as if hiding something. Perhaps she knew that the truth was that I did want to live on a kibbutz, but on a different one, Hulatta, which was on the other side of the country, where I had other parents.

  HER MEMORIES FROM HER CHILDHOOD in Jaffa were sharp and colorful.

  She liked to remember herself as a barefoot urchin running around the Arab market, cheeky and dirty, with two wild braids, which, when not washed with kerosene, were crawling with lice. In the winter, hot sahlab (a Middle Eastern pudding) was sold from a container carried on the back of the seller and poured out over his shoulder into a cup. In summertime there were cold, sour drinks such as suss and tamar hindi. All her life she longed for that Jaffa market that disappeared after the 1948 War of Independence, and she sought it in other markets. Sometimes she pulled me after her to the Carmel Market in South Tel Aviv, where she would pry and bargain and snoop into all the stalls, an olive here and a piece of salt fish there, and I shrank with shame hearing the vulgar language that suddenly came from this smart, sophisticated woman and the replies of the vendors. For her, this was romantic, although she herself was not romantic. Her Arabic, anyway, was always strong and convincing.

  In her childhood in the twenties, there were not many Jewish families living in Jaffa. Her father, Nathaniel Tatar, wrote in his diary, “I was almost the only Jew who lived among the Arabs.” Shoshana was sent to school at the Christian mission. There she was taught in Arabic and English. To show me her mastery of the languages and to amuse me, she used to recite all sorts of poetry she had been required to memorize in both languages, and would preach to me in forceful Arabic, “Rach A Shitta, Jaa Seif” (the winter has gone, spring has come). Sometimes she would sing off-key, “Di Yea Ken John Peel” or “Elsie Marley, the wife that sells the barley honey” and Shakespeare’s “the hei and the ho and the hei.” I especially enjoyed when she taught me a song she called a ditty, and to this day I remember part of it:

  Master Bullfrog, grave and stern,

  Called the classes each in turn;

  Sitting there upon a log,

  Taught them how to say “Ker-chog.”

  ACTUALLY, SHE DISCONNECTED herself from her family, and saw her parents—in comparison with her friends from the Palmach—as “provincial.” Even when she took me to the north, she didn’t stop to see them, and they didn’t visit us and never called or wrote.

  Her connection with her past existed only in her stories, not in the reality I saw as a child. Even her weird family name, Tatar, didn’t connect to anything I knew. Shosh seemed to me some force of nature, existing by itself and with no origin.

  ONLY ONCE DID I SPEND the night at her parents’ house, and then I realized that they really existed. I was about five years old then.

  It was close to the end of World War II, perhaps in mid-1945. I don’t know what caused their daughter, Shosh, to visit them on that day and leave me there for the night, but the memory remains sharp and clear.

  A heavy summer heat hung over the Izreel Valley. My grandparents—they were about sixty—had a small house and a small farm on the outskirts of the provincial township of Afula in the valley. The house had two rooms. Both doors opened to a veranda in front. The veranda was closed in, and served as foyer and guest room. Bracha’s kitchen was a cubicle at the right side of the veranda, and inside were two kerosene stoves coated with gray enamel. Blue flames shone behind two little glass doors, and two large aluminum pots stood on them, boiling, full of laundry and food. The floor’s cement tiles had sunk, and Grandpa used the cool dents under the bed to store watermelons. I squeezed in there and lay down on the clean floor. My grandfather pulled me out, stuck a book in my hand, and ordered me to leaf through it.

  Nathaniel Tatar was a sinewy man in his undershirt, and his eyes were bright and hard like my mother’s. His face was dark and furrowed. When he found out that I knew how to read, he tested what I could understand, his stiff finger moving along the lines of the book. Grandma Bracha, in cotton dress and apron, hurried to save me from him. She brought hot tea in glasses, and dry biscuits. She looked small and shriveled near her husband, and her Hebrew—in contrast to his—was poor and distorted, and suffered from a heavy Russian accent. I once heard Shosh, my mother, calling her “the hen.”

  “Ess, ess, Yingale,” the hen told me by the table, and when I didn’t understand she explained, “Eat, eat. No horror.”

  My mother left and went about her business, and I was left with the old folks.

  The smell of kerosene filled the entire house from Grandma’s tiny kitchen. At noontime another smell joined it, the DDT she sprayed from a pump, to keep the flies and gnats away. I liked the smell, which hovered like a cloud of tiny, cool particles. After lunch, which was chicken guts (she taught as she fed me: “belly button,” in Russian, is “pupik”), she closed the windows against the hot wind, lowered the curtains, and sent me to their bed for a forced noontime nap. When I opened my eyes she was sitting at the corner of my bed, sailing into a long and vague story about the city of Bukhara, and then she passed somehow to anecdotes from the life of the Bedouins. Most of what she said I couldn’t understand. Grandfather was out at work, and my mother hadn’t returned yet. Grandma dressed me and sent me to shred fresh clover with a bladed wheel (“You kerfooyl, kerfooyl!”). I scattered the cut clover around for the chickens and they came running over to me, croaking and pecking. I tried to touch them, but the colored rooster drove me away. The excrement stuck between my toes. At last Grandma washed my feet, fed me a soft-boiled egg, and lay me down again, this time on the sofa in the second room.

  There was still light in the window, and I couldn’t fall asleep. Grandfather came in, dug in the glassed-in bookshelf above me, found what he was looking for, and put a notebook before me.

  “Read it,” he pleaded. His face was different this time, soft and supplicatory. When he left, I opened the notebook and found handwritten script, in blue ink. At my age handwriting was still not easy to read, and only the many strange names attracted me. Kusseima, Suez, they sounded like magic words as I muttered them. Most of all I was fascinated by a name that sounded as if out of the Arabian One Thousand and One Nights, and I rehearsed it time and again, whispering, “Darb El Hajj.” Finally Grandma came and put out the lamp. Across from my couch a big radio hissed and muttered. It was made of wood, and had a round window coated with cloth like straw. The radio sported a lit frequency dial, and had a green indicator and a green eye that flickered all the time, opening and closing. It hypnotized me.

  When I woke, mosquitoes sang. Yellow, vibrating electric light and jets of cigarette smoke entered through the slit of the door, mixed with the jingling of glasses and the screeching of chairs. Spoons rang on saucers. There were guests in the entrance room. They argued about something, my mother’s voice rising above all of them with a strident tone. From time to time there were long periods of silence and then I heard the old man grunt, and the sounds of sipping of tea. Sometimes Grandma Bracha squeaked, her voice cajoling. I understood that she was trying to f
ind a compromise among the hard people of her life.

  Suddenly the radio near me began the tones indicating a news broadcast. The chairs in the next room scraped the floor. The door opened carefully, and they all came in on tiptoe. My mother sat on the couch, near me. The narrator spoke in a low, deliberate voice. She spoke words I knew already: Allies. Nazis. Jews. Russia.

  That evening, when everybody had gone and my mother arranged to sleep near me, I learned that I was a Jew too. I listened with a lot of interest to the Nazi plan to kill all the Jews. Before I fell asleep I thought about it a long time, a little surprised and proud of the fact that the Nazis—creatures I knew nothing about—knew about me and were interested in me. When my mother pulled up the blanket and turned over, before dozing took me over, I asked her silently what “Darb El Hajj” was. The Road of the Celebrators, she told me, and suddenly asked, “What, he already stuck you with his notebook? Oh, that bookkeeper, what does he hope to accomplish with that?”

  NATHANIEL TATAR, A BITTER, hard person, left behind him thirteen pages written with a scratchy pen in blue ink, in basic, sometimes archaic Hebrew. In this notebook I found buried a vanished world.

  My mother’s parents began their journey to the land of Israel (there was no country then, just the land) in the township of Rezina, near Kishinev, in Moldova. Nathaniel was a veteran of the tsar of Russia’s army. His odd name, Tatar, had an alien sound, and he was formally registered as a Christian. One can assume that he came from one of the Mongol-Tatarian communities of Eastern Europe. On the other hand, his twenty-three-year-old bride, Bracha (blessing), had a good Jewish name. They married through a matchmaker and settled down in Rezina. Nathaniel managed an agricultural farm for its owners.