And I cannot blame anybody, because A Dream in Black and Azure came out okay in the end. At least that’s what people told me, and to this day occasionally people grab me on the street, call me up, or send letters telling me things about it and about themselves from its pages. That book even won me a literary prize. I was invited to share the stage where none other than the prime minister, Mr. Yitzhak Rabin, was waiting for me. So Yitzhak shook my hand again and again, and then he turned from me to the microphone and said in his deep bass voice, “Iftach Spector surprises us again.”
And, all in all, it was really nice, although I couldn’t remember any previous surprises I had given Mr. Rabin. And in truth, it should have been Toledano standing there on the podium before that big audience and getting an award, not me. Because it was Toledano who had surprised the prime minister no less than he surprised me.
Days and years later, I have decided that there is still something special in the first person: it is mandatory. And over it, together with it, comes the special flavor of authenticity. Now I realize that it was with good reason that for the hardest of Odysseus’s tribulations, Homer gave him the mike, telling him to speak for himself. The dilemma is clear: How does the poet get inside the head of the man who tied himself to the mast and listened to the singing of the Sirens until he went mad? And who, except the one who dared to descend to the underworld, could imagine the emotions and the thoughts that flooded him when he met his dead mother there?
SO NOW, HAVING STARTED another session with blank pages, I recall Toledano and think that though the word “me” irritates, it still has one exclusive quality: this word is at least clear and binding. Surely it’s much easier to blur things; obscurity would have made the telling much easier on me, but I fear that compromises may damage the final product. Take A Dream in Black and Azure. With all the praise and the award, who remembers it now?
Well, for sure, one man—a high-ranking officer in the IDF does. He swore, after I declared I would refuse to take part in war crimes, that he was going to destroy and annihilate my book. Erase it from under the sun.
When I heard about him and his threat, I was astounded. Initially I thought there might have been some mistake in the last edition that somehow insulted him personally. So I checked in my copy, and the text was okay. On reflection, I decided that the book had nothing to do with him, and the important thing to this person was just the proclamation of its annihilation. I thought that probably his reward would be an invitation by his superiors for a macho pissing with the wind, a hell of a promotion. If this was really the case, I salute him. This officer must be practical, a man of action, and surely he has the “right stuff,” a man with a great future. I am glad my book helped him to get there.
SO THIS IS MY CONCLUSION after all these deliberations: I have decided that my small odyssey will be told by myself, under my own name. I shall not compromise anything intentionally.
NOW HERE WE ARE BACK IN THE EARLY 1960s, at the Scorpions.
Two months have passed since our arrival; I haven’t yet passed my flight test. Yak himself was invited from headquarters and came down to the Scorpions to check out the trainees on the Super Mystere in aerial combat, one on one, against him.
Now it was my turn.
“Turn out,” he ordered. We separated, turning away and preparing for battle. Then he reversed direction and turned back toward me. He came nearer and nearer, the master battle tactician, and—wham!
We passed each other head on, at supersonic speed.
I ignored his wake turbulence rocking my ship and pulled up hard on the stick. My aircraft climbed vertically to altitude. He climbed, too, and we met again, this time at low speed, joining aggressively.
My Super Mystere shook under me, exactly like the Harvard a year ago, but this time I was not a kid anymore and knew what to do. Yozef Salant had already prepared me for this test.
“Don’t give him an inch. Yak wants to see that you know how to be aggressive.” And he continued his lesson, “Be careful of Yak. He is cunning as a Greek. He’ll offer you his tail like a whore, but if you take it, he’ll throw you forward all the way to Baghdad.”
And so I almost smiled when Yak waggled his tail at me, and instead of jumping on it, I pulled up over his aircraft and caught “a good seat on the veranda” over his head. Yak changed tactics, climbed toward me, and we circled again like two mad dogs till the red fuel lamp came on with a beep. I sighed with relief; it was over, and I hadn’t lost.
Yak led me back to land. When we were back on the ground, my feet hovered an inch above the tarmac.
In the squadron briefing room, after a glass of cold water, Yak uttered only five words that I shall never forget: “You impressed me some today.” I blushed, and looked around to see if anybody else had heard it. Hell, where was Zorik? Why, on this day of all days, was he not here, eavesdropping, as usual?
ON FRIDAY NIGHT, WHEN ALL the kibbutz youth were singing and dancing in the main dining room, I gave Ali the eye to meet me in the corner. Would she come? She was not mine yet.
She came, curious. I told her I had had a dogfight with Yak.
“So?” She didn’t get it.
“Yak,” I told her excitedly, “the man who broke all the rules, who opened new vistas in aerial combat. It was Yak who taught the IAF how to split and fight independently, in a coordinated way, rather than in tight pairs, like that.”
I demonstrated the meaning of coordination with my hands, and knocked over a stack of china cups. And as we crawled together on the floor collecting the broken china I whispered, unable to hide a quiver of pride from my voice, “I was his equal today. We came out even.”
In the shade, below the table, I stole a fast sniff of her neck.
For long time after this special flight, I believed I knew the secret of how to win in aerial combat. The lesson I learned from that flight was that it was all about aggressive handling of the aircraft. Just fly it to the limit.
Big mistake. Yak had been testing me that first semester, and I thought it was the whole story.
BUT NOT ALL IS FLYING, and not just Super Mysteres, either. The time was young and rough, and wherever there are men there are women, too. And where there are men and women, things that are better kept secret happen. Even I was finally roused from my long sleep by a woman. When this was over, the shy courting of my delicate flower changed gear. The time was ripe for decisions. It all happened one afternoon on a summery Friday.
A lazy weekend dawned on Base Hatzor. Work was over, the roar of the jets silenced, and everybody scattered every which way to gulp lunch and grab a quick nap. Hush. No cow mooed, no donkey brayed, no bird chirped. The skies emptied, too, and the radar controllers slept before their screens. One Harvard waited silently at Hatzor.
I decided that this was the perfect time to seduce Ali away from the kibbutz to go with me for a trip to the Galilee. An aerial trip, to be sure. After all, this was what I had to offer.
I waited with a pounding heart. School was over. The sun set. Finally she showed up at the base entrance.
Our Harvard mooed like a bull as it grazed the corn and cotton fields in the Izreel Valley, twisting among trees and hopping over power lines. When we arrived at the old Crusader castle Belvoir, the Jordan Valley divided under our nine roaring cylinders, and we pulled up to five thousand feet. The Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, stretched before us gray-blue, its waters rough and opaque in the strong early evening wind. In the yellow light of the setting sun I lowered the landing gear, and instantly we landed at Mahanaim landing strip, a deserted old British runway made of cracked white asphalt, among gray thorn fields. This was my home, the Upper Galilee.
Down there my family from Hulatta was waiting. Oh, the joy of meeting my foster mother, Dvorah, my Uncle Aronchik. They already had two children.
Dvorah asked with a cunning smile, “Hey, you, so—are you two going to get married?”
Ali and I looked sideways at each other and blushed. I kept quiet—why say th
at she hadn’t said yes yet?
Ali stammered, “What an idea, of course not! I’m still in tenth grade; I have to finish school first, then two years in the army, and besides, who talks about stuff like this?” Her cheeks flamed.
A big laugh.
I took Dvorah for a spin in the Harvard to show her the kibbutz from the air. We toured the whole Hula Valley. The Harvard came close to the dark mountains of Syria. They held their fire.
When we finally landed, the family invited us for a late lunch at Gitt’l’s Restaurant in the nearby town of Rosh Pinna. But I had a problem: I couldn’t shut off the aircraft engine, since if I did, there would be no way to start it again. I had forgotten to bring the manual crank starter with me. But it was difficult to say no, and in the end we went to town and left the Harvard with the engine running and stones wedged under the wheels, sitting on the tarmac rattling, waiting for us to finish our business and return.
At night we returned, stuffed, and found our loyal Harvard waiting in total darkness, milling the air with its propeller. With faltering feet we climbed the slippery wing in the back draft of the propeller, stumbling and slipping, and finally got in the cockpit. I lit up the cockpit instrumentation and in the faint red light put the parachute on Ali’s shoulders and fastened the belts around her waist. Then I entered the front cockpit, and with a wave good-bye, pushed the throttle forward. We took off, swaying through occasional pools of light thrown by the car headlights on the darkened strip, and finally were airborne among the stars.
I thought, “Ali, you are going to be mine.”
THAT AFFECTIONATE NICKNAME, Ali, was my own invention.
Everybody else called her Aliza or “Lizchen.” Adella—her foster mother—called her lovingly “Lisyen.”
She was one of a multitude of small, almost invisible girls we bigger boys never paid attention to, but one day Miriam told me, “You don’t look where you should. Look down a little, look at the smaller girls.” Miriam and I, before we went into the military, used to talk about things while sitting on the stone fence of the dining room, after the evening activities of the Labor youth movement were over. We both were scoutmasters there.
I said to Miriam, “Those little ones? What, they don’t have any… ”
“They’ll grow,” she said with a laugh. “You should evaluate the potential.”
Miriam was a clever girl. She had a good head for math and used to listen to serious music, Bach and such. I took her seriously and began to look where she had suggested. Among them I found one with a gentle face and a light step. She was silent and introverted. Though an athlete and a fast runner, she moved silently, as if keeping a secret.
AT THE END OF 1958, all my classmates were drafted. First, the girls were scattered to IDF bases all over the country. Then Moishele and Zikky went to the paratroopers, Gabi to tanks; Daniel Vardon became the hero of the Golani infantry brigade. We missed each other and kept exchanging letters, which passed from hand to hand. Eventually we decided to distribute our letters among ourselves in the form of a monthly newsletter. So it turned out that in the rare weekend leaves from Tel Nof, I was collecting letters and editing them for publishing.
Then the newsletter had to be typed. This indeed was a chore. Somebody said there was a girl from the ninth grade, Lisyen, who knew how to type. So we sat together monthly on a Saturday night, in the deserted office center of the kibbutz, I reading the letters aloud to her and she typing them.
She was fifteen, a nice girl, and I was a soldier. We were very shy and cautious with each other. We didn’t speak much, and our eyes avoided contact. When she was done, late at night, she collected her things and vanished, and her scent went with her, and I was left alone to illustrate and decorate the folios smelling of stencil wax, and to smear the black, creamy ink and turn the handle of the mimeograph machine.
We really talked only once. I told her of the long hours on guard at the base’s fences. She offered me an unknown magic: a transistor radio—a plastic box she had gotten from her South African uncles. It was a working radio with a large, transparent broken dial. All the air cadets used her present in turn, until one of us was caught and the thing was confiscated. Listening to the radio was not allowed on guard duty.
SHE WAS NOT ONE of my own kind.
In the evening she went to Shlomo and Adella Dgani’s room. They were Yekes—immigrants from Germany. At first I thought Shlomo and Adella were her parents. Then I learned that they had taken her into their home when she was four, after Otto Samuel, her father, was killed in 1948, and her mother, Jenny, fell seriously ill.
Shlomo and Adella Dgani (Feldblum) were different from us and even from how their own children turned out. In the Middle East, the Yekes were a strange community with different habits and a different language. They had high cultural aspirations and a deep longing to be somewhere else, in another climate, under a different sun. Most German Jews didn’t leave their lethal fatherland. They stayed and died. Those who came to Palestine remained chained to the culture and the language of their murderers. Most of them never could adapt to the melting pot that was Palestine, soon to be Israel.
Being aware of this conflict, I took measures. When finally the delicate adoptee of Shlomo and Adella invited me to their place, I was on my best behavior. I even washed my feet before putting my sandals on.
And there, surrounded by Yekes, I first came to know that miraculous powder, instant coffee. With the sure smile of a man of the world, I loaded a full spoon of the powder into the boiling water in my china cup. The powder shrank immediately and consolidated into a black, sticky ball that floated on the surface. I redoubled my stirring, but the damn ball refused to melt. Puzzled, I tried once or twice to push it down to the bottom and crush it with the spoon, but it was agile and evasive and resurfaced. Suddenly I realized that everyone was watching me with raised eyebrows, sipping their coffee seriously. I had to do something, and soon.
I trapped the slippery rubber lump between the spoon and the side of the cup, and gulped it. It leaped up, and fastened to my upper palate like bitter toffee, but red hot. In agony, I pointed to the white china pot in the middle of the table.
Adella hurried to hand it over to me. “Schlack zane, bitte?” Some cream?
“Mein Gott, yes!”
I turned the pot over into my mouth, but the cursed milk stayed up there and never came out. It was the whipped cream they prepared for our five-o’clock meeting. Through a curtain of pain I saw the polite Yekes nodding at me gloomily. I replied with a stern nod of my own, my mouth tightly shut. Had I opened it even a crack, I would have breathed fire.
Sweet Ali and her brother Yair—he was the elder son of Shlomo and Adella—watched it all, bursting with cruel laughter. Those two enjoyed mostly slapstick humor, as when someone slipped on a banana peel and fell. I swallowed and ran out the door. Behind the house, among Shlomo’s well-groomed flowers, I found a hose and hurriedly put it in my mouth.
Yair Dgani was three years older than I. He was the best brother Ali could wish for, always looking after her, from the time she came to them from Tel Aviv. Yair was a hell of a guy. He played the clarinet, coached the girls’ basketball team, and later became a battalion commander in an armored division. Back in the kibbutz, he managed the carpentry shop. When we were children I used to give him a wide berth, for I feared his cynical humor.
Summer came. I arrived for a weekend, and Givat-Brenner was empty. It turned out she was sent for a summer program in another kibbutz. I heard a rumor she already had a boyfriend.
I TOOK COURAGE AND WROTE to her from the air base and asked if she would consider being my friend. After several long days a blue envelope came through the military mail. For two days I carried the envelope in my pocket unopened, and finally I tore its side bit by bit, like a girl plucking the leaves of a chrysanthemum. Somebody grinned above my shoulder. I turned around and saw ZBB; he knew beforehand.
THE FIRST ENGAGEMENT with enemy MiGs of our class’s graduates came very
early, exactly four months after our first flight on the Super Mystere.
On April 28, 1961, I was put on alert. Suddenly the first pair scrambled, and right afterward my section went aloft, too.
“South, full power! This is for real! No drill!”
We raced south at full speed, Shimon Ash, the new commander who had replaced Yak, leading, and me bringing up the rear with my sixty flight hours on the aircraft.
Flying supersonic and with guns switched on, we arrived in the arena on the Egyptian border, but the dogfight had just ended. In the distance I saw a tiny white MiG-17 spinning in the air down toward the dunes. Suddenly a parachute sprouted and the aircraft hit the ground.
And then I saw a Super Mystere spinning, too, not far from the MiG. This was also the first real mission for my friend and comrade ZBB. But Zur kept his cool and pulled out of the spin. So the four of us got together and circled the defeated Egyptian pilot, swinging beneath his parachute.
Finally Ron, the leader of the first pair, said on the radio, “I’m going in to take out the pilot.”
Zorik’s angry voice broke into the communication channel, coming from the transceiver of the squadron in Hatzor, “No way! Leave the parachutist alone. All of you back home, on the double!”
The radar controller—he was the voice of the air force commander—didn’t utter a word. Shimon Ash apparently chose to obey his vice commander’s order. We left the Egyptian parachutist twisting in the air and came back to base. On the ground, an argument started.
Major Ash said, “I am not sure we did the right thing when we left that pilot. Tomorrow we will have to face him again.”
Captain Zorik was certain of his position. His green eyes flared in his round, speckled face, and he stood firm against his new commander with a restrained, polite voice. “Shimon, there are laws in the world. And there are things that one simply doesn’t do. One doesn’t shoot at people in parachutes.”
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