by Malka Marom
Yes, he’s a cabinet minister. Our Yehoshua, can you imagine, Arik? He quit his tin business soon after the Sinai War, got into politics, joined the opposition, and became such a shit-disturber—almost as if he couldn’t live with the thought that you had been wasted for nothing, as if he had vowed that mistakes like the war that claimed you, my Arik, won’t happen again, not if he could help it. Such a noise he made about any leader, general, or minister he believed to be negligent, unscrupulous, self-serving, or corrupt—people, inside and out of The Land, were saying he was irresponsible, or tunnel-visioned, or just plain dumb if he didn’t realize that his shit-disturbing was giving fodder to Jew-haters the world over. But Yehoshua kept at it in the opposition—and now in the coalition—without giving a damn what people said about him—even here, in this Land, where people give a hell of a damn what anyone, anywhere, says about them or any Jew.
You liked it, Arik, loved it that Yehoshua was like a wild card. But your brother hates him now more than ever. The Nation is in peril, your brother thinks, if one of our cabinet ministers is a man who offered to marry his best friend’s wife, war-widowed only a day.
That telegram of Yehoshua’s, or rather the story of it, was circulated over the years as a sort of a character reference, and it circled ever wider, the higher Yehoshua rose in prominence. Even in Canada you can see Yehoshua on TV and in magazines and newspapers. In person, I hadn’t seen him in years.
So imagine, on the eve of my departure to this forbidden compound, I get back to the hotel. And as I pass the terrace, perched on the cliffs sheltering the beach, I hear a man calling out my name. The voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place him. I shaded my eyes from the sun setting behind him, and I saw Yehoshua inviting me to join his table, just like he used to, with a wave of a wrist.
For a moment, I could almost touch you, Arik, by looking at him. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He looked better in person than on TV, and much better than in his younger years. He looks distinguished now, successful, happy—would you have aged like that? I wonder.
It took but a word, a gesture, a glance from Yehoshua to unleash the memories, tugging the past into the present, and spinning emotions up, down, sideways—as if it was only yesterday that his kid sister, Ya’el, and I were in Grade 5 at public school. And after completing our chores, we’d get together to do our homework and play at her parents’ apartment, or mine, in Tel Aviv at that time—where the back balcony faced the back of Ben-Gurion’s house. On evenings when it was too hot to close the shutters, Ya’el and I would watch Ben-Gurion doing his “homework,” as we called it, dressed in pyjamas, just like my father’s and Ya’el’s. And, like her mother and mine, Ben-Gurion’s wife, Paula, would give us hell whenever we got carried away by the energies of our innocence. “Be quiet . . . Ben-Gurion can’t think, can’t sleep!!!” Paula would yell from a back window, and we loved it that we had such power to serve The Nation by keeping quiet . . .
I don’t remember if it was Yehoshua, his wife, or Yehoshua’s host or guest—an American yachtsman—who insisted I sit down with them, for a cup of coffee at least.
“Leora is related to me—by marriage, you might say,” Yehoshua told the American yachtsman. “Leora’s first husband and I were closer than most brothers . . . We were classmates since kindergarten, till we graduated from the Technion with our degrees in architecture, when there was no milk and honey in this land of milk and honey, and when hundreds of thousands of newcomers expelled from Arab lands, and the survivors of the death camps, had to be housed. So, for free, my friend Arik went and designed a dream town to house them. But the civil servants, being civil servants, couldn’t believe that such a beautifully planned town could be built at such a low cost. And there was no convincing them. ‘Your town is a dream unattainable for years, if not decades,’ I told Arik. I urged him to quit architecture, as I had, and go into the tin business with me. Or to sign up to serve in the standing air force.”
“Arik was an ace pilot,” said Shoshana, Yehoshua’s wife—knows you from his stories, no doubt, which she must have heard umpteen times . . . The longer you don’t fly, my Arik, the better a pilot you become—such is the nature of nostalgia.
“Yes, but as much as Arik loved to fly, he hated even the thought of a permanent army or air force here in The Land,” Yehoshua went on. “The war would end any day, any day, Arik believed. So he continued to serve as a pilot in the reserves and earned his salary by teaching architecture. He and his students built a model of his dream town. Soon afterward, the Sinai War broke out and Arik fell—”
Shoshana interrupted Yehoshua to remind him friends were expecting them for dinner, and we dispersed; them to their lives, and me, back to limbo.
j
I had no idea what Tal would look like when I went to meet him next morning. (A week or ten days ago. Yesterday? A decade ago? Feels just the same.) Who was Tal among the men in the hotel lobby? The place was crowded with Israelis, wound up as if they had overslept. Ever since the bus was attacked on the coastal highway, only a few kilometres away, very few tourists had checked into this seaside hotel, even now, in August, the height of the tourist season. It was Sunday, the first working day of the week in The Land, and half the crowd was waiting, it seemed, for the other half to check out. I recognized not one face in that crowd, other than the hotel staff. As I stood there, I felt like a tourist myself.
I did remember Tal saying on the phone the night before that he was a kibbutznik. But that didn’t help; no man in that lobby looked like a kibbutznik, definitely not like any of the ones who used to assign me shit-duty in the border kibbutz where I was supposed to do army service. I also remembered Tal saying that he was Gingie’s former commander. But in a lobby filled with men drafted to serve regular and reserve duty from the age of eighteen to fifty-five, how could you tell, when no army has more commanders per soldiers than our defence force, and most, like Arik, look like they didn’t rank above private.
One man in the lobby seemed to wonder if I was looking for him. But he was standing in the corner, like a security man—a handsome security man. No, on second glance, he was not more handsome, or less so, than the next man. If he was a commander, his men would have followed him into the line of fire because he appeared to be so much like every man; they would think, if he can do it, so can I. Ah, but he exudes that certain something that you, my Arik, had; that unmistakable something of a man reclaimed by the reclamation of his land, by the gathering of his people, by the defence of his nation. He looked years older than Gingie, closer to my generation than to Gingie’s. Even a kibbutznik couldn’t take a week off to go to the desert on a minute’s notice from Gingie, I thought, he must have a wife, children, a job. His eyes travelled from me to the glass wall, behind, which sat the Jeep that Gingie had picked for me to purchase.
Parked there, next to the shiny, pristine luxury cars, my Jeep looked like a throwback to the days of austerity in The Land when you rarely saw a vehicle that didn’t look like it would conk out had it not been for the ingenuity, the prayers, and the sweat poured into maintaining the engine.
I was about to go outside, to wait by the Jeep, when the man from the corner walked over to me.
“Leora?”
“Yes. Tal?”
“Yes. Boker tov—good morning.”
“Boker Orr—morning bright.”
“Boker tov . . . boker orr, Leora,” chimed a couple behind me—Yehoshua and his wife, Shoshana, and a few feet behind them, Yehoshua’s bodyguard, wearing over his plainclothes the tell-tale safari jacket that bodyguards wear to hide their weapons. The guard was like a banner of office, announcing that Yehoshua was a cabinet minister.
“What are you doing up so early in the morning?” Yehoshua asked me. And I could almost taste the life I lost when I lost you, my love.
I was about to introduce Tal to Yehoshua and his wife when a hotel guest, who looked like the only sweat he broke
was on a tennis court, came to pay homage to Yehoshua.
“All Honour to you,” the tennis player said. “You were speaking for me, I must tell you, when you were saying, on TV, that we should pause to consider if it would not cost us the Promised Land to give Sinai to Egypt for a promise of peace. You took the words out of my mouth, upon my life, when you said that we should pause to remember how dearly we paid for giving Sinai to Egypt after the Sinai War, and what a buffer zone the Sinai desert was in the Yom-Kippur War—only five years ago and already all too many of us forget.”
“A people who forget the past won’t have a future,” pronounced Yehoshua.
“Oh, we won’t have a future. We’ll be finished in the next war, if we give Sinai to Egypt,” said the tennis player. “We can’t trust Egypt or America, or any country in the world. War after war, we see we can’t depend on anyone but ourselves. But, war after war, we forget . . .”
That xenophobic hawk was straining Tal’s patience and tolerance, I sensed. Tal was clearly itching to get going, to get away—from me?
He was evaluating my character now, I sensed, in the harsh light of this resort hotel, its guests, their shiny new cars, the tennis player, my friend the cabinet minister and his wife, their bodyguard, the security men in army uniform and in plainclothes—and that lobby. A new addition, it looked like it had been designed by a committee that couldn’t agree on the hotel’s location, half seeing it in the Middle East and half in Europe. On the walls behind the reception desk, a huge mosaic mural has been inlaid as a sort of invocation of the ancient ruins at Bet-Alpha and Kfar Nahum. Persian carpets, faded with dignity like in the old European hotels, were carefully scattered over floors of local marble. A jungle of tropical plants, in imitation ancient Roman and Greek fired-clay vessels, flourished by the glass wall facing west, toward the Mediterranean. The glass wall facing east, toward Jerusalem, looked over the parking lot.
Tal kept watching the Jeep beyond the glass wall, as if he feared that someone would steal it, or perhaps hoping someone would. It must have registered that though I am tall, taller than him, perhaps, I’m slender, with no muscle bulk—not a good bet to be much help if the Jeep rolls over in some deserted wadi, pinning us beneath it. Besides, Gingie must have told him that I don’t know the desert—where his life would depend on me, mine on him. As I watched his jaw clench, I was sure he was kicking himself for being all too quick to volunteer for this journey with a woman he had never met, in a dented old Jeep, with no safety bar, on roads-no-roads into which flash floods had swept mines from battlefields long buried under the sand . . . Then his eyes met mine, and we laughed, both of us only too aware that our lives would never be the same if we didn’t cancel this journey right now.
“Boker tov, boker orr,” the hotel manager chimed, having come over to us once the tennis player had left. “I hope you enjoyed your stay.” Addressing Yehoshua and Shoshana, the manager was textbook gracious.
“Oh, we did.” Yehoshua was as well. “The food, the service—everything was first rate. I feel like new after a weekend here. You run a first-class seaside resort, I must tell you.”
“Kills me to hear it.” The hotel manager was confessional now. “We are full only on weekends, you know, and only with Israelis. We spend a fortune on advertising all over the world, but after the latest terrorist attacks, the tourists stay away as if this hotel was in the middle of a war zone.”
“Next time we meet with the Egyptian delegation, we will hold the peace-talks at this hotel. Your reservation lines will be jammed after that,” Yehoshua said to the hotel manager. Then he looked at me as if I had made the mistake of my life in not responding to his wedding proposal.
I was bursting to ask: Will it be the mistake of my life if I give my consent to Arik’s only son—my Levi—to serve as combat pilot, like his father? Should I give my consent? Tell me, Yehoshua: What did you guys in the cabinet decide—to trade Sinai to Egypt for peace or to keep Sinai and brace for war?
“We better get going, Leora, or we won’t make it to the Gulf of Suez before nightfall.” Tal pulled me back to the present, just as the sands of the past and the future were dancing out from under me like in a desert storm.
“You can’t get to the Gulf of Suez without a military pass,” said Yehoshua, seeming to, once again, like in the days before Arik went, be like a big brother to me. “It wouldn’t take more than a phone call to get you a pass,” he added, his eyes searching for a phone.
“No need to phone,” muttered Tal. “We have all the required papers, permits, passes.”
“Are you sure?” said Yehoshua.
“Yes,” Tal replied.
“Meet Tal.” I finally introduced him.
Yehoshua and Shoshana introduced themselves by their first names, just like in the old days. But then, Tal, it seemed, skipped a beat in a refrain familiar to them when he didn’t acknowledge in any way Yehoshua’s powerful position. And now they disregarded him, as just another piece of luggage.
“You are not going to the Gulf of Suez hoping that Arik, like Jonah, will step from the belly of the great fish, are you?” Yehoshua asks, as if my life revolved around no one and nothing but Arik, even after all these years, decades, of widowhood; as if the more inconsolable, devastated, the war widow, the more of a man not only her husband is but every man defending The Nation.
I am going to Sinai to reclaim the woman buried in the rubble of widowhood, I wanted to say, but I knew it was way out of line.
“Yehoshua and my first husband who fell in the Sinai War, were friends, closer than most brothers,” I said to Tal, to bring him in from the periphery to which Yehoshua and Shoshana had banished him.
“Tal had the rank of commander in the Unit,” I told Yehoshua and Shoshana, hoping it wouldn’t impress them. But of course it did. After the rescue mission at Entebbe, the whole nation regarded the men of the Unit as a national treasure, albeit a top-secret one. Their names and faces were censored in all media coverage until they no longer served even reserve duty in the Unit—or until they died. Tal hadn’t mentioned the Unit on the phone the night before, only that he was Gingie’s former commander. But it didn’t seem to surprise him that I knew Gingie served in the Unit, or that I used the Unit to lend him credence. I saw in his eyes that one too many had done it, as if he had been defined by the Unit as I was by war-widowhood.
“What was your rank?” Yehoshua asked Tal, clearly accustomed to having classified information declassified for him.
“Major,” replied Tal, his face burning.
“Our finest all blush modest.” Yehoshua chuckled, beaming as if Tal were his favoured son. Turning to his wife, he added, “A major in the Unit is leadership material, you know . . . you will have plenty of time to stop in Yamit,” Yehoshua said to me.
“Very much like the model of Arik’s dream town, Yamit,” Shoshana explained to Tal.
Now, ask Yehoshua, I thought; your son’s life might depend on it. But it smacked of corruption, of self-serving favouritism, even to ask him if it was true that the government would rather Yamit be destroyed than hand it over with the rest of Sinai to Egypt in return for peace.
“The model that Arik and his students had built of his dream town is gathering dust in the archives of the Technion, you know,” I muttered instead. Yehoshua looked at me as if I had said that the Zionist dream was gathering dust—me, who dropped out of The Land, the Zionist dream.
“I’ll find a place to display the model of Arik’s dream town,” Yehoshua responded.
“Display? Why? His model is of an unattainable dream in those days of austerity, you had told Arik. But now—do you think it slipped through the cracks of time, it’s a thing of the past, an artefact of history, some quaint object to be displayed?” I said, a mad war widow barely able to suppress her demons.
“I’ll find a place to display the model of Arik’s dream town,” Yehoshua repeated.
“Yes, somewhere in the Ministry building . . .” Yehoshua lost me then; the next thing I knew he and his wife were saying their goodbyes.
“It was good to see you. Drive safely.”
“Somewhere in the Ministry building,” I heard myself muttering as Tal and I headed for the exit door. “Arik is finished. Gone. A relic of the past. He wouldn’t recognize Yehoshua now, his best friend . . . thinks he is doing me a favour by sticking a dream he shared with Arik in some glass box somewhere in the Ministry building . . .”
“He was okay in the opposition, but now he’s carrying it too far . . . if the latest is true,” said Tal.
“Carrying what? . . . What latest?” I said, my pulse pounding a requiem for you, my love, my Arik.
The soldiers guarding the entrance to the parking lot turned their eyes from mine as if I, like every other hotel guest, was aware that such cushy assignments as theirs went to soldier-boys who were cherished only sons—like our Levi—and whose parents refused to waive their exemptions from high-risk duty, or to those who barely passed their physical, psychological, or IQ tests.
If that is why Levi feels so pressed to get my written consent for him to serve as a combat pilot like his father, I would rather he guard abandoned luggage carts. And if his army record marks him for life, let him live and overcome it. I have had it with requiems.
“What’s this latest about Yehoshua?” My tone—obnoxious, demanding—I was grasping for anything to fill that perpetual hollow of my grief for Arik. Seven days and nights of this neediness would be hell, even in a populated area with plenty of distractions available; in a deserted wadi giving was called for, not demanding. Tal had his own powerful reason to go to the desert, or to get away, I knew then, when he let it slide.