by Mark Helprin
“The officials jumped in the cars and fled. Of course, Israel is a small country—beautiful, but small. Everyone knew within an hour.
“But it is past noon and I must soon see my mistress. I asked you here for one reason. You must not go into the Army. This I know. You will be killed.”
“How do you know?”
“I know,” Lamarel screamed, “because I have ridden with the god of war.”
“Was it a nice ride?” asked Marshall. “I may be drunk, you may be drunk...”
“And you may not realize it,” said Lamarel as he began to slip into the past, “but I am the same fool as you, or at least I was, until I learned.
“In Egypt, we continued to regard ourselves as French. Though I was as Egyptian as I could have been, there was a touchstone in my heart for France, which I loved as a man loves a woman. I was loyal in absentia, and, in walking the streets of Cairo and Alexandria, I put my feet down on the plan of Paris. Little did I know that had I stayed in Cairo and continued to imagine Paris I could have lived richly in my imagination forever. It was only when I proudly decided to fuse my life with my dreams that I came in for trouble. Dreams are stronger. How could I not have known that, in Alexandria—lost in layered light.
“At the beginning of the First War, I went to Paris and volunteered for the Army. Can you understand how stupid that was? I crossed the Mediterranean from corner to corner and traveled hundreds of kilometers so that I could be put in a dead man’s coat and be made to live in the mud like a cold damp pig—and what is worse about the Army, we were totally forgotten, as if we had fallen into hell.
“We went on a boat in a river, about a hundred of us, in the heavy coats from the dead, and we lay on the metal deck in a ring like a necklace of men and arms. Though it was raining, there was a slight overhang and only our legs and boots were wet. Dry from the knees up, we tried to sleep. It was daylight, and we were quite warm, even hot, in those heavy coats. I was leaning against a wall, my hand on my rifle (if it were stolen, a month in prison). We moved through a light mist; the steam pistons echoed off the banks; and then a German plane came from over the trees like a kite or a bird.
“Most of us had never seen a plane. It left and came back, shooting its machine guns. There was nothing to hide behind and we didn’t want to go in the water, so we sat there and loaded our rifles, and when I say ‘we,’ it is with a sense of remembered fraternité, although I hated them and they hated me.
“The plane would go away, and come back again shooting. But there were a hundred of us firing at it. I was terrified, but paralyzed with laughter; no sound, but my legs and lungs were numb. Weak with this silent laughter, I had great difficulty loading my rifle. But I was pleased by the copper cartridges and the sound they made as I put them in the magazine, when I snapped the bolt, and when they were ejected to the deck.
“I aimed at the plane and shot. We all did. Not one stood or changed position. There was no talk. This went on for at least an hour. We saw the paths of bullets in the water, which sometimes looked as if it were boiling. The bullets hit the plates of the ship, but they never hit us.
“The Captain sat in a glass wheelhouse, and was drinking from a mug. Every few minutes he turned and looked at us, smiling in slow motion, his face glowing from behind a blue jacket and cap. The sky cleared; cold winds arose; and the plane kept returning. It was freezing outside, but a current of heat came from the wheelhouse and we were warm and happy, conscious of the clicking of the brass, the closing of the barrels, the cavitousness of a cartridge once it has been fired, and the sound of it empty falling to the deck.
“The Captains wheelhouse continued to grow lighter and lighter until the glass was like a construction of clear rainbows. The plane had gone, never to return. Our rifles lay by our sides, and we were frozen into one position staring at the wheelhouse, from which a higher and higher heat was coming—rushing air warming just the tops of our bodies; our legs in our boots were frozen. It was painful and yet pleasant. Our eyes riveted upon the Captain, we saw that the blue wool of his suit and cap contained glowing waves which moved up and down as if in molten metal.
“When he turned and smiled, his teeth were so white that they stretched our necks even farther forward. We were paralyzed in pain and pleasure for hours. Darkness fell and beams of white came from the pilot house, as solid and massive as the blackest of any beams on a great iron bridge. We moved through the night, and the next thing we knew, we had arrived at our destination. We were cold and wet, surrounded by spent cartridges. The wheelhouse was dark, and as we marched off the boat, over rain-soaked boards which did not bend under our weight, we said nothing. It was never mentioned, not even once. There was nothing to say. We had been plumbed to our depths, and we went through the war like dead men ... like dead men. Do you understand?”
Marshall could hardly keep his wits about him. His hands were pale and bloodless, so hard did he grip the wooden table. Swaying to and fro, he looked around him. The sulfurous smoke from the charcoal cooking pits was thick and intolerable. Most of the Indians had taken off their shirts. Their eyes glowed, and their skin was leathern. Marshall surveyed them in many-tiered balconies above him, perched with their chins resting on their hands. They seemed to ascend into the blackness and smoke as far as the eye could see. “Lamarel Foa! Lamarel Foa!” Marshall said before he fainted. “This is only a one-story building! Who are you?”
Lamarel Foa laughed in a terrible, dreadful, hideous, frightening way, and Marshall dropped to the floor like a rock.
7
ONE OCTOBER morning three days before the conclusion of the language program, a military messenger on a quicksand-colored motorcycle roared into the compound. There does not exist in the world of men a creature more alarming than the military messenger. The ne plus ultra of bad news and excitement, he carries in his locked leather pouch ordinations of life and death, sentences of power, the fate of armies, the future of civil populations. His arrival at camp is an electrification.
This one had rushed down from Northern Command at seventy miles an hour through choked streets, by jumping sidewalks and driving his old British military motorcycle down steps, through gardens, and along the track bed—in a race with the Tel Aviv train. He had sergeants stripes, a sidearm, dust goggles pushed onto his brow, and a military police armband. The license tag on the motorcycle was white with red numbers. He had a siren and a guidon flag, and the civilian police wouldn’t touch him.
Upon arrival of this fire-hot moon calf, the language students exited their classes and pressed to the rails of promenades, galleries, and porches. The Russians in particular were concerned and alarmed: they were always overly impressed by anything to do with the state. The messenger checked out the girls as he unlocked his pouch and removed several envelopes, which he scanned and shuffled. In a practiced manner, he faced ahead and shouted above the sound of his idling motorcycle, “Pearl! Marshall! Forward!”
Marshall ran down the steps. The messenger collected his signature, gave him an envelope, put on the dust glasses, and mounted his motorcycle, driving it right through the shallow duck pond and scattering the ducks. His acceleration was heard until he hit the South Road and buzzed away at 120 mph.
Marshall went upstairs and handed the envelope to Leah, their teacher, the dark-eyed daughter of a Greek stevedore. The intermediate class of nurses, engineers, liberal arts graduates, girls who wanted husbands, and boys with serious character flaws which led them to gain weight and speculate in West Bank real estate, settled back to hear the communication. Leah read it in Hebrew, explaining in Hebrew the words that the students did not know.
“It says: ‘Northern Command, Second Mountain Brigade, Headquarters Detachment, Haifa.’” Like a stewardess demonstrating a lifejacket, she held the envelope before her. Then she opened it and read. “H.Q./Class four order/Direct/8 October, 1972/Z.H.L. 191—4372. Pearl, Marshall: HaAliyah 71, Haifa. Notice of conscription. Report to Lishcat HaGiyoos, 22 October, 1972, for assignme
nt to training prior to service in Second Mountain Brigade active cadre. General Arieh Ben Barak, Commander, Second Mountain Brigade.”
Knowing that in two weeks Marshall would leave for the Army, they moved on, this time to the Emek Bet Shan, a valley of the Mountains of Gilboa—hills which flanked the midlands of the desert before the Jordan escarpment. During Marshall’s year in the Army, Lydia would stay at Kfar Yona. With luck, he would come home to her at least five days a month, and she would farm, work in the kitchen, or teach in the school—there was no way to tell. The kibbutz was famous for the many officers it had sent to the Army, and for the dates, wheat, and olives it grew on the bone-white floor of the valley. Half of the time, this valley was so hot and dry that it seemed to be the intercross of hell and terrycloth. But sometimes, it was said, the humidity was very great and the farmers went fishing in the air through which swam lost and startled prawns and other smallish crustaceans. (In the very beginning, the pioneers had thought that these were flying scorpions.)
Marshall and Lydia arrived at sunset and walked east from Bet Shan through the groves of olives and dates, past abandoned fortresses, down a narrow road which led through fields carpeted with crops as white and smooth as linen. New stone walls had just been completed at the road’s edge, and the master masons had carefully smeared the joints with potted gallium and limonite. A linesman with a rifle worked alone near the top of a pole. It was quiet enough for the crickets and frogs to sound like a human multitude, and the high royal palms were no less elegant than their counterparts on the Riviera. But here were vultures, and great distances, and hawks which crossed from the Jordanian mountains to prey on creatures of the field. Israel sent back its own hawks, made of metal. In their approaches to the Golan, flying low by the Jordan to evade enemy radar, the Phantoms, Skyhawks, and Mirages from Ramat David often passed over Kfar Yona and other settlements in the valley. They came within twenty feet of the lookout towers and they scared the animals. The secretaries of the kibbutzim complained to the Air Force, but not very vigorously. Though the fighters spooked the cattle and the chickens, the people of the kibbutzim felt their hearts shake with pride as the planes ripped about.
Marshall and Lydia walked toward the ring of towers which marked the kibbutz—a grove of tall trees among which some red roofs glowed in the setting sun. As it darkened, crows lifted above the date palms; a cold wind pressed down the sine of the mountains; and the perimeter lights of Kfar Yona came on like a string of shining porcelains.
“It’s beautiful,” said Lydia.
“It is beautiful,” answered Marshall, “especially in light of the fact that it’s an armed settlement.”
Lydia looked puzzled. “Who said it was an armed settlement? It doesn’t look armed to me.”
It IS.
“Oh it is not. Ever since you found out that you’re due for the Army, you’ve become a general. But you’re only going to be in for one year; you’ll be a private; you’ll be home for five days a month; and there’s not likely to be a big war.”
“What does that have to do with Kfar Yona?”
“A lot.”
“What?”
“Just don’t take any chances, if you don’t have to. You’re not going to find your father by being in the Army, but by looking after you get out, and to get out, you have to stay alive.”
“Do you know what logic is, Lydia?”
“Certainly.”
“Then why don’t you ever resort to it?”
“I do.”
“Stop.” He walked behind her, put his hands up against the sides of her head, and directed her sight like a mounted searchlight. “Look,” he said, pointing toward the settlement, “guard towers...”
“Oh, is that what those are?”
“...deep perimeter fencing, fire fields, arc lights.” The lights had just begun to sweep over the crops, like dancing stilts. “Look.” He turned her head, touching her gently, so that she could feel his compensatory surrender for each point that he won—their custom in disputes.
“A halftrack, see? I count five soldiers inside.”
“Oh! I thought it was a storage tank.”
He wheeled her around until she stared into the darkness between the date palms. “There.”
“What?”
“Look hard.” Then she saw three soldiers standing in the trees. They were armed to the teeth, and, perhaps appropriately, they were smiling. They were the archetypal soldiers who need almost not be described, except that they were very dark of skin, and they had vacuum bottles slung over their shoulders for the night of patrol among the trees.
A corporal approached without a sound, for despite his rank he was practiced at being bodiless in the silent groves. “Good night, friends,” he said in English. “Where you going?”
“Kfar Yona.”
“Kfar Yona is there.” He pointed. “Just a kilometer. On the right. On the left is other kibbutz. He is Kfar Tsofar. Kfar Yona is better, better food, very pretty, more peoples. There are in the Army, many peoples from there. His name is like ... a dove.”
X. REFINER’S FIRE
1
THE COURTYARD of the Lishcat HaGiyoos was filled with several hundred new recruits, who stood in groups according to the unit for which they were destined. Each group was addressed by officers from its future command, and then ushered out to waiting trucks. Finally, only those hundred and fifty or two hundred attached to the First, Second, and Third Mountain Brigades were left. Marshall had found two other Americans, with whom he sat on hard benches freed by the departure of an elite armor unit’s new men.
One of the Americans was named Robert. He was a physical education instructor from Brooklyn, six feet seven inches tall, perhaps the strongest man in the world. The other was named Lenny; he had been a washing machine repairman in Los Angeles; he was very handsome, and he had a trim beard. They consulted, quickly discovering that they had a limited command of Hebrew and that Robert and Lenny were veterans of the American Army—where Robert had been an instructor in hand-to-hand combat, and Lenny had been a weapons specialist and sharpshooter. Robert was married. He often looked in his wallet at a picture of his wife. Lenny had never had a wife.
They immediately sensed a strong affinity, communicated in a certain nervous irony common to those with similar backgrounds together in a strange place. Though in America they would have been strikingly diverse, in Israel, by virtue of being Americans, they were practically clones.
They speculated on the character of the training, but their primary concern was where they would be stationed. All three were from kibbutzim, and dreamed of being sent to a base near home. This often happened, and it was said that the assignment officers did what they could for older and married men. They discovered that they were only-sons, which meant that, excepting all-out war, they would be held back from combat zones as much as possible. There was fighting on the Golan and on the Lebanese border, and they surmised that the only-sons of Northern Command would fall to the bottom, on a line running roughly from Haifa to Bet Shan—a line near which they lived. They would have speculated themselves into generalships and Mercedes limousines driven by buxom girl privates, had not an officious captain screamed, “Le kol ahshev!”which means, roughly, “Attention!”
They did not know how to come to attention properly. Instead, they stiffened and blinked, and their hearts beat faster. Most of the recruits were young and very frightened. Some were peasant farmboys; a few were Druse Arabs; many wore gaudy flared clothing—tight pants, jewelry, pimps’ shirts with pictures of pineapples and fish. But they all became completely silent when a general walked in and stood on a raised platform before them. He spoke as if he were subjecting his words to a critique at the very moment they sounded, trying not to say the unnecessary, to compress his message, to be uninfluenced by the great gap of power and experience which lay between him and the new soldiers. He knew well that a few of them might eventually rise far above him, and that more than a few were already happy and
had loving families—something which had eluded him. Though he spoke with great dignity and authority, he spoke with respect for those he addressed.
“Good morning,” he said. “I am Arieh Ben Barak, Commander of the Second Mountain Brigade. Today, you enter the Army of Israel. I cannot remember the day I did so myself. It is surrounded in confusion, for in those times everyone was in the Army and no one was in the Army. But anyway, you will soon be joining me in my command, or in the neighboring commands of the First and Third.
“Our job is to protect the northern approaches to the heart of Israel. There are far too many Syrian soldiers, and they are well armed. But, as you will see, the terrain is on our side, and the Air Force helps us immeasurably. You may ask: ‘Which Air Force?’ I can tell you: our Air Force, because it is so good; and their Air Force, because it is so bad. Though many of you will be with us for only a year, you will always return to the Mountain Brigades for your reserve duty. Now you are to be given infantry training. Pay close attention. We run tight brigades, and you must know what you are doing at every moment. Though it is difficult to live in this way—you will see what I mean—it is not unpleasant; especially in that time goes very fast for a man who does his job well. I guarantee you this. I know, because I have become an immodest old man in the snap” (he snapped his fingers) “of my fingers.”
They laughed.
“Now go and learn, and when you come back, you will learn more. Shalom.” He walked off the platform and vanished into the corridors of the fortress.
The General had a quick sensitive face; they had been impressed by the way in which he carried himself, and by the intelligence of his voice. Already, he had begun to build their morale—because they sensed that he would guide them properly and well.
They raced in an Army truck down the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway, often sighting the sea, rolling past a thick green belt of canefields and groves, heading for the induction center at Tel HaShomer—a place called Bakum. Whenever Marshall had passed beautiful landscape, or ridden fast in a half-open truck, or seen the sea vanish and appear from behind dunes and hills, his soul had arisen. But despite the scent of new-fallen cane, of oranges, despite the excitement of the moment and the passage of October sun across the beginning of his first day in a crack army besieged on all sides, in a small country in Asia, despite his natural fear, he was quiet and calm, and unafraid, and happy. He felt like a man-angel, as if nothing in the world could upset him, as if his heart—usually exposed and alert—were safe within a fortress. He was surprised to feel for the first time in his life just like everyone else.