When the youngest of the four brothers, Shaike, fell in action in the Negev in 1948, I was told that the then-popular song “In the Plains of the Negev” was written about the two Spector brothers. I was proud of the family I came from, and used to hum the second verse to myself, where the mythological mother sums up the situation like this: “I mourned my first in the depths of the sea, and I raised you, the second, to defend the nation.”
THERE WAS ONE MOMENT in my life, a crazy, unforgettable moment, when Zvi seemed to have returned.
It happened one morning in 1947. As usual I was playing on the flat roof. My mother was in her room. I heard the noise at the door and ran to open it.
A man was standing on the stairs. He opened his arms and lifted me up in the air and stuck his nose in my chest. I heard Mother ask, “Who’s there?” and suddenly she made a strange sound. She flew right past me and fell on this man’s neck, laughing and weeping, and if he hadn’t caught the railing they would both have rolled down the stairs. I stood beside them, pressed between them and the wall, and watched them hugging, trembling with excitement. A pipe protruded from the man’s pocket, and this was the final, absolute sign.
When they noticed me again, Shosh introduced me to Maccabi Mutzeri, a good friend and “Rachel’s husband.” Rachel was my mother’s friend and neighbor. Then I realized he was also the father of my friends Oded and Alona, with whom I played in the sandbox.
Shosh and Maccabi had a long talk over coffee, and I listened. Maccabi talked about Europe. He had just returned after a long time away from home. When World War II broke out he had joined the Jewish brigade and was sent to Europe. There he fought the Nazis, and after the victory remained as an agent for the Haganah, to organize illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine. Now he was back.
In the coming months the connections between our families grew stronger. As he became involved in Palmach operations, Maccabi also began to be away more and more. The War for Independence had begun, and the roads were interdicted by Arab snipers. Word of Maccabi’s fall reached my mother in the morning. I was at home, and suddenly I saw her weeping bitterly on the bed. I asked her and asked again and didn’t stop until finally she told me: Maccabi had been wounded in the abdomen near Shaar Hagay, in a battle to open the road to Jerusalem. On the way to the hospital he bled to death. We both wept.
Then she got up decisively, dressed us both, and we went to see Rachel, who opened the door and immediately knew. The women sent the three of us children to play downstairs. The kids grilled me, and I told them what had happened in spite of being told not to. Oded ran upstairs. Little Alona and I stayed in the sandbox, and when we got tired of making fierce faces, we began to dramatize some scenes of Maccabi’s last battle. As the fatal bullet struck, his hands went up and he cried out, “I’m hit!” and then, at the dramatic moment, “It is good to die for our country.”
Years later I learned that in his dying moments Maccabi had really said, “This had to happen sometime. Go ahead, I wish you luck.” He died in April 1948, on his thirty-fourth birthday. The operation to open the road to Jerusalem was named Operation Maccabi, for him.
MY MOTHER DIDN’T TALK about my father, but the books were more generous. “Zvi was not a muscular guy,” wrote Yitzhak Sade, who himself was a big man and a famous wrestler. “On the contrary, his body was slight and delicate. But when he needed to, he showed unusual physical strength. I once saw him carry a wounded friend on his back over rocky terrain in the mountains for several kilometers. Where did he get this strength?” I internalized this, and went back to it in moments of physical stress.
And Sade concluded, “There was a streak of cruelty in him, a non-Jewish attribute. He had no hesitation about pulling the trigger. Still, justice was his guiding star. He kept this attribute inside himself, like a very dangerous weapon to be taken out of its holster only in time of absolute need—for justice.” I kept these things also in my memory.
YITZHAK SADE, “THE OLD MAN,” the father of the Palmach, and its first commander, was the one who sent the boat on her way. The Jews of Palestine were torn at the time in two opposite directions: on one hand, the struggle against the British Mandate government, and on the other, the need to cooperate with the British armed forces against the Nazis. The Brits were looking for “natives” to do special operations; at the same time, the Haganah was seeking legitimacy and arms. Their interests coincided. Sade gave the order, and the Sea Lion with the Twenty-three was sent on her dangerous mission. Three weeks after her loss, the British army attacked and conquered Syria and Lebanon and caused the loss of the boat to be unnecessary.
The timeline of those events made many people suspicious, and some interpreted the boat operation as a nasty plot of the British to damage the Haganah and remove its next generation of commanders. Some denounced Sade’s part in the affair, called him naive, or worse—and never forgave him. But my mother never bore a grudge against him. She saw the operation of the Twenty-three as part of the struggle of the Jewish people, and knew that in such struggles mistakes are inevitable and losses occur. She appreciated Yitzhak Sade, and continued to work under his command in the Palmach, first underground and later in the War of Independence.
AFTER THE END OF THE WAR, Sade invited us both for several days at his home in Jaffa. This was an old Arab house that stood on top of a limestone cliff overlooking the sea, and Sade’s son Yoram lives there to this day. I sensed the affection and the admiration that Shoshana felt for this cumbersome, bearded man, who used to go down to the beach early in the morning to jog on the gray, coarse sand and lift weights.
In those few days we spent with him—this was on our way to settle in Givat-Brenner—Yitzhak was very pleasant to me, too, and talked to me a lot. He took me with him down to the beach to do his gymnastics, and once we went for a long walk in the Muslim cemetery, among the rows of tombstones. There we sat, and he told me stories of his own life. At home he opened interesting books and showed me strange pictures, translating the titles from Russian. One evening he talked to me at length about my father. I was ten by then, and I fell asleep on the sofa near him while he talked. Sade had known Zvi well and loved him, and probably he tried to pass something of him to me so I wouldn’t forget. I do not remember much, only his distant, awkward voice. I do not remember if it was he, or perhaps Abdu, who told me about that night in the Jerusalem Wanderers unit, when the Arab sniping at the settlement of Kiriyat Anavim intensified.
Zvi suddenly left his guard post and began crawling among the rocks in the direction of the snipers. When he came close, he began shouting at them (he knew perfect Arabic), “You cowardly sons of bitches, you are afraid to come to us, just hiding in your holes and shooting, not aiming and hitting nothing. All you do is make a lot of noise!” When he came back he was asked why he had endangered himself for nothing. He answered, “What do you mean for nothing? I stopped their shooting, didn’t I?”
I wonder why this young man, who didn’t need to seek adventure, for adventure sought him, volunteered to command that boat to Lebanon. Was it just for the love of danger, for “nothing?” The original commander of the operation, who had trained the crew for the mission and was slated to go, refused at the last moment, just two days before the departure date. He argued that the operation was too dangerous, with no reasonable chance of success. Perhaps he was right. No doubt Zvi, who was an experienced fighter, understood it, too. And more: “Nobody expected Zvi to take this mission,” Yitzhak Sade tried to comfort himself. “Recently Zvi had been injured in a motorcycle accident. His broken leg was still in a cast.” But Zvi Spector needed no order to take it on. He always rose with danger, like oil on water. “Even lame,” said Sade, “it was hard to imagine a better commander. And the group was worthy of a commander of his caliber.” He took command, and they went out and were lost in the sea.
ALL MY LIFE I HAD FOLLOWED this man, searched to find more about him, and after many years—this was after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, I was thirty-four already—a
stranger told me the end of his story. This happened in the oddest place, on the road, on my way from air force headquarters to my home in Ramat-HaSharon. Suddenly a voice came from the radio, high-pitched and tortured, calling to me in English, “Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made.”
I was shocked. I stopped the car on the shoulder and sat frozen. Outside was a dark, rainy evening. A lonely child lies on a faraway, deserted seashore. A clown is bent over him, telling him the news in a choked, hoarse voice. In this way, from Shakespeare’s “Sea Dirge,” I learned the end of my father and his twenty-three comrades. “Full fathom five thy father lies,” said the shrill voice, in an unbelievable lullaby or ancient legend. “Of his bones are coral made; those are pearls that were his eyes; nothing of him that does fade, but doth suffer a sea-change, into something rich and strange.”
Children are the loneliest creatures in the world. A child is weak, poor, and ignorant. He is yet to find his only true friend; himself. With no spine of experience, no power, he wanders about in an unknown land like a lost prince, waiting for his father, the king, to come and take him back under his wing, to the light and the warmth. Instead, that horrible joker whispers in his ear, “Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell: Hark! Now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.” Now I knew he was gone. And when I couldn’t hold it in anymore, I wept there in the car, on the side of the road, for the first time in my life.
But when it had all sunk in, Shakespeare’s language had lifted the tragedy of my childhood and immersed it in a larger story. I sat there crying for my lost father and for my lost friends.
ZVI SPECTOR, TOLEDANO, grew in my mind until he became a saint. I saw my mother’s eyes examine me, criticizing, comparing. Around me, the large kibbutz of Givat-Brenner was full of fair-haired boys who ran faster than I, jumped higher, and knew how to whirl the girls around in the big dining hall at the Friday night parties, and then take them out on the grass. I became a closed young man with a moody streak, and became more serious the more I grew up.
The traumas of adolescence drove me farther from my mother. Perhaps she guessed my problem—that being a living person she could not compete with a saint—but we both were weak and had no tools to find a way out of the thicket. I was an innocent boy, a virgin, and the discovery that she had her own sex life, without any intention of marriage and with no love or future, shocked me.
As an adolescent I was very confused, torn between high ideals and low self-esteem. I clung to one rule of life I had learned from my mother, “All inside,” and it protected me. Whenever people approached, I would become silent, turn my back, and hide. Time and again I reminded myself that I was not transparent, that as long as I didn’t open a window, nobody could see what I kept inside me. I decided that only I would decide whom to let in, and Shosh was especially not included. Never again did I let her into my life.
I volunteered for military service as early as I could, at age seventeen and a half. She signed my permission for pilot training with her lips tightly clenched. Afterward she snapped, “An orphan is not handicapped.”
Chapter
11
From Inside
AFTER THE SIX-DAY WAR, even as the terrible strain on Israel was lifted, the burden on our shoulders, the soldiers and fighter pilots, increased. The Egyptians and the Syrians started a war of attrition on our new borders, which had suddenly become much longer and farther away. Our country wasn’t a small piece of land anymore that a Mirage could cover from one end to the other in a few minutes. We found ourselves scrambled for missions, or patrolling at long distances, burning flight time.
The war over the Suez Canal flared up, and the air force command deployed a forward fighter station in the formerly Egyptian airfield at Bir-Gafgafa, in western Sinai. The name of the airfield had been changed by somebody to Refidim, after some obscure location from the Book of Exodus. In the following years we, the Mirage pilots, were held in constant readiness at Refidim for weeks at a time.
The workload was enormous, but it got my motor going. The more the pressure, the more momentum I developed. Work was abundant, but I asked for more. I didn’t notice I was neglecting my family, that Ali and little Etay were leading a life of their own, without my involvement, a life I knew almost nothing about. I left early in the morning and returned late at night. I hung out in Refidim for weeks on end, not understanding why my gentle girl was changing, becoming cool to me, snapping sarcastic remarks, demanding, and getting angry. What was going on? I worked so hard, and whenever I came home I took off my flight boots and tried so hard to be nice. Ali was becoming thinner and thinner, and I didn’t know why. I even liked it, and used to call her jokingly “my skeletal friend.”
One evening, when I came back from Refidim after a long absence, I found my four-year-old son, Etay, sitting on the outside stairs. I stepped over him, not noticing the bowl full of wet sand with dry canes he tried to show me, and went in. I didn’t even imagine that this was a “bouquet of flowers” he had worked hard over for my twenty-eighth birthday. I hadn’t even remembered it was my birthday.
In the squadron I had found my own separate world. A great love and a deep trust grew between me and the Mirage, this gray, skinny iron triangle, light of movement and graceful as a coquettish girl, as lethal and loyal to me as Jonathan to David. Through the development of these new, intimate relations, which worked by physical touch, the Mirage taught me to court her every hour of every day. I found myself speaking to the Mirage sometimes in the masculine, but mostly I thought of her in the feminine.
The more I knew about her I realized that the Mirage could not be forced, and it was no use pushing her. All you had to do was ask, but ask in the proper way, politely. Just think first, don’t try to hustle her with hurried, hysterical demands. If you prepared her in a nice way and gave her time to warm up, she would go all the way with you, ready and hot, and cut like magic any way you wanted. Thus the Mirage taught me gradually to think things out first, and not just react after the fact.
AND IT CANNOT BE DENIED: there always was the other side, the dark side of our profession, the shadow hanging over our lives. This demon was there, too, hiding like a horror inside me, terrifying, since that aerial collision I had four years before.
I screwed up badly. My Ouragan, an old French attack plane, was rolling slowly on its back, listlessly, and I was hanging head down in my straps. Just then another aircraft hit me. There was a loud bang. I was thrown forward in the cockpit, and my head smashed into the instrument panel.
Somehow I didn’t lose consciousness. What I remember was the wind that suddenly tore in all over me, my ears deafened from its screams, the skin of my face torn, and the cloth of my flight suit shaving my cheeks and whipping abruptly into my eyes.
THE AIRCRAFT SIMPLY STOPPED in the air, and strong braking forces hit and then bent me forward like a jackknife. With my head between my knees, I gazed vacantly for a time. Shocked and dumbfounded, I saw a strange spectacle: swarms of clear glass fragments, shining like diamonds, rose from my lap and took off from the floor below my legs, then flew up and were taken away in the rush of the wind to disappear over my shoulders. I didn’t think much, but I certainly remember that a feeling of guilt, like sharp fragments, was already there. What had I done? How could this happen to me?
This went on for some undefined time.
Then suddenly something awoke in me, a wild sense of danger. I forced myself to raise my head from my knees, clutched the sides of the cockpit, and with difficulty surveyed the scene with narrowed eyes. My Ouragan was rolling left wildly, and at the same time it was looping forward in the air. The control stick thrashed in my hand uselessly, soft as a dead fish. I looked left and saw that a wing was missing. It just wasn’t there, torn away. And still I didn’t do anything, till the roar of the wind changed abruptly. Another voice, deeper, joined the whining choir. I saw stains of red light up all the glass. A long tongue of fire slithered from the root of the plucked-out wing below me, wound itself
around the body of the aircraft, and came in to lick at me. I smelled kerosene and tar. The fire burned my face. Only then did I act.
Get out of here, punch out, fast! Like an automaton, eyes shut because of the wind and fire, I performed a series of well-rehearsed steps. Sit erect. My left hand pushed a handle, and the metal frame of my broken canopy flew off. Legs back. Throttle all the way forward, to spare my left knee as I went out. Both hands up in the punishing wind, groping to catch the ejection ring handle. A hard pull.
Black canvas covered my face. Well? But nothing else happened. This was not good.
A second pull, harder, with all your strength!
A heavy kick in the ass. Then fast rolling. Heat became cold. The noises changed. Well then, I must be out.
I threw the canvas off my face and opened my eyes. I found myself sitting, tied to my ejection seat, as in an armchair, rolling fast in the air. To my amazement, I was not alone. Around me circled a threatening crowd of broken pieces and torn sheet metal, small and large pieces. I was falling in a cloud of junk. These pieces were all spinning around me and rolling together with me in a vortex, like a swarm of angry bees. I watched and waited for the automatic sequence to come in, open my chute, and stabilize my fall, but nothing happened. The Earth and the sky rolled around me in a nauseating whirl, going blue-yellow-blue, and the heap of trash in a mad dance around me.
Loud and Clear Page 18