by Mark Helprin
The General remembered Lydia, and, of course, Frederick recognized Marshall, who seized the opportunity to speak on equal terms with senior officers. He looked at Arieh Ben Barak, who had been busy making the tea, and saw eyes as diffuse and brown as his own. In fact, the General had a striking resemblance to this soldier far down in his command. But for their ages their coloring would have been the same, and there was much else which made them alike—even their teeth—though no one noticed.
Marshall presented a careful, well-analyzed case to support his point of view that the Arabs were preparing a big war for which Israel was not ready. He listed at least fifty signs that he had seen of laxness, overconfidence, poor planning, and lack of preparation. He spoke in phrases that ran together well because they had occurred to him repeatedly for many months, and the two high-ranking officers did not once interrupt. Sometimes they appeared concerned; sometimes they seemed to disagree; sometimes they toyed with their badges of rank.
At the end of his lecture, or plea, they said nothing and he began to go weak in the knees because he still harbored a considerable fear of officers. As long as he was a private on active duty he would be influenced by memories of the majors at Bakum and in the Fourth Daughter. He knew that Arieh Ben Barak could make him spend two months scrubbing pots in Afoola as easily as he could say one sentence to a deputy.
But the man with the soft brown eyes thought of the maps in the sand, looked up, and smiled.
“I’m interested to hear that you have given this problem some thought. When you finish your period of conscription...”
“Two months from now.”
“...come to see me. I’ll look over your record, and if there is a place on my staff, we’ll see ... for reserve duty, that is. I would have to make you an officer. Would you object?”
Marshall barely managed to say, “Not at all ... I’d be happy to be an officer, if it’s possible.”
“I don’t promise anything. We’ll see.”
Lydia took advantage of the need to change the subject, and made a graceful transition to the Battle of Ain Jalut, explaining the inevitability of the Mongols’ defeat. “They could have been stopped by the Ismailies in the mountains, but the Ismailies were in disarray.” And then she gave an historico-military analysis which was so well done that Arieh Ben Barak, who knew nothing of the topic, joined in a spirited discussion of the failure of Rukn-a-Din to stem the Mongol invasion, and how Baybars the Mamluk had finally accomplished it. Afterward, at home, Marshall could not get to sleep.
He paced the balcony. By 2:30 he was in command of the Israeli Army. By three he was wild-eyed, but Lydia was up with him and she understood that the hot tea had stirred him to trances and splendors.
“Come’re,” she said affectionately, patting her knee. He strode over to her in large heroic steps. His heart was beating like a ton of bricks. He stared out to sea as battles criss-crossed his imagination.
“Sit here,” she said, indicating her knee. He looked at her as if from a throne. “Even generals can sit on their wife’s knee.” He sat on her knee, eager to resume his pacing conquests. She began to stroke his forehead, which burned—her hand was cool. “You know what? You’re crazy, and you’ll never get to sleep if you keep marching across Macedonia. Just think of where we are,” she whispered slowly. “It’s a beautiful night. Come back to me.”
He looked in her eyes and was no longer a general leading armies. Ambition was not even a thimble. The stars ceased their blistering and became soft, and the moon came up and whitened the sky and hills. They heard the wind rushing over the dunes and through the heather. It was warm and peaceful, and they lay fused together in the straight cool moonlight, gentle as the wind and the night birds on the slopes of Carmel. When finally the moon began to set behind Adit, the villagers’ fires were already flickering across the dark hill.
20
MARSHALL ALREADY had the alert and gentle hart on one arm, and the patch of the Mountain Brigade on the other, a white line of mountains with a II hovering above them in the azure blue. After the commando course at Tira, he was issued a pair of crossed swords in gold to pin over his left breast pocket. Arieh Ben Barak’s deputy, Steimatzky, had been waiting early one morning at the circle of tents. When Marshall arrived he was shocked to find that he had been made a first lieutenant. Steimatzky explained. Thinking of Marshall, the General had ordered Steimatzky to check his records and (if they were satisfactory) to promote him. “Arieh said that this was a crisis, and that he was moving rashly, as in a crisis. I told him that you were due out on Eight October...”
“Eight October? It’s the twenty-second, not the eighth.”
“No. You’re all to get a two-week present. But he said, ‘Let him take charge of the commandos at Fortress Six for a month until the new captain gets there.’ You were promoted to first lieutenant, because several of the commandos at Six are lieutenants, and we could not put you in charge unless you had rank.”
He gave Marshall a box in which were several sets of insignia. Marshall was stunned. The fifteen commandos at Six would not take kindly to his apotheosis, but it would be only for a month, and he would be cautious and kind. His heavily accented Hebrew was not particularly incongruent with his new station. Even Arieh Ben Barak had a noticeable accent.
Perhaps his changed station had stimulated a review, but for whatever reason, one day in the hotel Marshall and Lydia made their decision. They sat on the hotel terrace at dusk. Before hopping into the Carmelit to go down the hill to eat in a Rumanian restaurant and then see an Austrian mystery, they had stopped to look over the sea and have tea in the pine garden. “You see that ship in the middle, Brigham Victory? It has the black superstructure.”
“That one?”
“That’s right. Today we tried to capture it. We haven’t had much trouble before. You know that I like scaling the anchor chains and storming the bridge. It’s fun to climb while the wind whips the green water below. If you fall, nothing happens. But today when we got to the top we had a surprise. The Brigham Victory is an American ship, chartered out to the Navy. As I climbed over the rail, four men closed in on me with shotguns and pistols. They had me. All the other ships have been pushovers. I looked at their faces. They were the faces of plains farmers. They put down their guns and we talked. After all, I was in a bathing suit. What I want to say is that I was much more than proud. It was different and better than being proud. I felt drawn to the plains, the Rockies, Columbine—where we started. I seem always to be on the other side of the fence, but I’d like to go back to Columbine, and stay.
“We can never be what they are, the plainsmen, and we can never be like the Israelis either (maybe its fine just to be whatever we are). But I want to make a home with you in Columbine. That’s where I was happiest. If I belong anywhere, I belong in that valley. We could grow wheat, as we had thought—almost twenty years ago.”
“That’s what I want to do,” said Lydia. “That’s what I always wanted to do, what we’re supposed to do. I was waiting for you to come around.”
“Then we’ll do it.”
They yearned for the image and vision of Columbine. Even within the dream of childhood, it had been their dream.
“We’ll go to Washington, to the Department of Agriculture, and get as much information as we can about the area. It’s cold up there, and the growing season must be short. But I would imagine that you can grow spring wheat in the valleys. We’ll check on taxation, mortgages, and the rest. Then, when we’re ready, we’ll go to Union Station and get on a train for Denver. And then we’ll go north into the country. If there’s a college nearby, maybe you can teach in it. I’ll grow wheat.”
“I’ll grow wheat too,” Lydia said. “I want to be a farmer.”
As they watched the lights and the ships they talked about their plans. “We can have a little apartment in San Francisco,” she said, knowing that it was true and that Marshall thought she was marching through Macedonia.
21
&nb
sp; EARLY IN September, Marshall returned to Fortress Six. He was just getting used to being an officer and times seemed easy, though he suspected that a shock lay ahead. He guessed that war would come in the winter, since the Israeli Air Force did not have allweather fighters, and thus would be neutralized to an extent favorable to the Arabs—who, also unable to fly in bad weather, would be spared the agony of air combat with the Israelis. Because winter in the Middle East has always discouraged war, Israel tended to let down its guard, but the Arabs’ Soviet equipment was suited to mud and cold. Had Marshall been in command of the opposing forces, he would have insisted upon a winter war.
Marshall took Lydia to the Bet Shan bus, through the barred windows of which he kissed her as dozens of North African women watched. Standing on a railing at the bus queue, he was a strange sight in his colorful uniform as he grasped her through the light aluminum bars and, from most angles, appeared to be kissing and stroking the bus itself. Then the bus backed out of the bay and Marshall jumped to the ground, waved to Lydia, and walked off in the direction of a motor pool in Bat Gallim, from which he got a ride to the fortress on Mt. Canaan above Sfat.
Sfat is in the mountains, and looks into valleys and depressions with much the same tranquillity as Delphi. There are terraces along the main street, and many quiet courtyards, and in fall the weather is unparalleled, being cool, clear, and dry. He found a room in a luxury hotel, and at evening he went to a restaurant on an open terrace cantilevered over a steep green precipice. Colored lights and paper lanterns were strung across the dining area and they swung in the breeze. There were many geraniums in carved stone boxes. The valleys, Lake Kinneret, and Tiveria were in dusk.
Marshall put his hat down and waited for a menu. A lieutenant with insignia of the First Mountain Brigade asked if he could join Marshall, who was pleased to have his company, but who had to ask him to speak slowly. They both ordered steaks, and Marshall told the story of how he had gotten his rank. The other lieutenant didn’t resent Marshall’s rapid rise, for he was young, and he too had risen rapidly. He was going home to Tel Aviv for a week. It was pitch dark when they started on their ice cream and tea.
“You wont recognize it up there,” said the other lieutenant, who was from a strongpoint down the line.
“What do you mean?” asked Marshall, stirring his glass of hot tea.
“Don’t you know? I suppose not, if you’ve been away. The Syrians must have brought in all but a few of their tanks, though they have recently thinned them out. Really, there are hundreds and hundreds, and all the support vehicles, APC’s, and the rest, to go with them.”
“You mean they’re just sitting there on the plain?” Marshall was honestly astounded, and put down his spoon even as the tea continued to swirl seductively in an orange maelstrom.
“I suppose it’s more of a shock if you haven’t been there in a long time. They’ve built up slowly. They’re defensively positioned, hull-down and dug-in—against our aircraft. It’s a purely defensive deployment.”
“Tell me something.”
“What is that?”
“How many seconds does it take for a tank to lift itself out of its trench?”
“That’s not the point. Their intentions are obviously defensive.”
“How many seconds?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Just tell me. How many seconds?”
“Okay, thirty.”
Marshall began to spoon his chocolate ice cream into his tea. It looked horrible, and it overflowed.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know what I’m doing, but when you’re in Tel Aviv, enjoy yourself. Eat well and see lots of movies. When you get back, were all going to be fucked.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Neither does anyone else. Maybe I’ll see you up there.”
Marshall decided to leave right away. He did not get out until 2:30 and arrived at Fortress Six as dawn was beginning to break. Climbing to the highest observation point, he surveyed the plain while the sun arose far behind Damascus, looking as if it were cradled in a fiery pit somewhere in Iraq. As usual, a tiny red sliver churned and bent on the land horizon like molten metal. The shadows of the hills grew severe, and green strips appeared to the northeast. The plain below was still a collection of dark crags. But then the sun came up and its blood red became yellow and blazing white. It was round and hot, and, as it climbed, Marshall thought he saw the surflike lashing of its corona.
A few lights and fires dotting the half-dark below faded or went out as the sun got higher. Someone in the fortress tuned a radio to the dawn chimes of the Army station. A sentry yawned and threw off his gray blanket. With the light he pulled the clip from his rifle and slung the weapon over his shoulder. He would wait an hour and then go back to bed, or to a shower.
When the sun was high enough for Marshall to make out colors and textures in the distance, he swung a pair of tremendous military binoculars on their tripod to scan valley and plain. At first he saw nothing unusual—boulders, rocky terrain, ditches, roads, an emplacement or two. But then his muscles twitched and he felt a surge of electricity run down his back. For in places usually empty of the Syrian Army he saw tank after tank after tank, rows of artillery, netting in so many places that it looked like Verdun, and what seemed like thousands and thousands of trucks, new emplacements, new cuts in the earth, and troops who had begun to get up and mill about in hundreds of camps.
He pivoted over to view the Israeli line. It hadn’t changed. Marshall closed his eyes and imagined how the vast Syrian columns must have looked rumbling past Damascus on their way to the armed camp below, which burst into life in the suns ascent and seemed to have a will of its own, as if it were a living creature spawned from steel.
22
LYDIA TOO was up at dawn, wandering about carrying a notebook and a leaky fountain pen. Though they did not intend their primary instrument in Columbine to be recollection of the kibbutz (but rather remembrance of what they had envisioned long before), she thought anyway to take notes on agriculture at Kfar Yona. What they did right, they did beautifully.
She was full of early morning energy and lightheartedness, and she was happy. So that when the sun swept over the escarpment from Jordan and Iraq, instead of taking notes she found herself sketching the cows and chickens as they frolicked in front of her. Taken up as in the slow rhythmic ease of a float trip, she walked about for hours doing renditions of the hollow-brained chickens.
When she and Marshall had married, she had felt as if she were starting a new life. Riding in the helicopter to the Royal George had been much the same, as had the sudden inertia and Easternness of Tel Aviv, and the thick agricultural abundance of the Jordan Valley. And when, with a foolish grin, Marshall had come out onto the balcony above the sea, suddenly a lieutenant in a rakish hat, she had moved through another gate. As the gates opened and shut, each frame had about it the satisfaction of a good painting, and the engine clicked on in strokes of color.
When Marshall had returned from the Fourth Daughter, she felt as if she were suffering with him the privations of an Ottoman soldier. At the kibbutz she was generally content—and lonely. Then they went to Tira, where she became lost in a world of books and she and Marshall dashed through warm shallow waters undulating with smooth fishlike waves. Yet another picture awaited them in Columbine. Unlike Marshall, she knew that it might not last as long as they thought. They could well move on to something else. Most important was the energy of transit—for which it was worthwhile even to be driven in a breathless life.
At Kfar Yona, the cows thrust their thick padded heads through the round iron rails of the pens in continual efforts to reach the other side. Both sides were flaccid mud, but it was the crossing-over which magnetized them. She noted in her sketchbook that they looked as distrustful as bears, and could be smelled for miles.
Yossi Merzl, the secretary of the kibbutz, came by on his tractor and stopped the motor. “Hello Lydia,” h
e said. “We’ll miss you.”
“Marshall and I are going to have a wheat farm, in America.”
“I heard this. The capital! Can you do it?”
“Yes.” She shook her head affirmatively, and smiled sadly when she thought of leaving them under siege and in danger. Yossi Merzl knew exactly what she was thinking, and dismounted from his huge tractor to sit beside her on the iron rail. He had wild white hair, and a face with so many places written into it that he could have been a gazetteer.
It was hot. There were flies. The valley almost burned, and a warm wind pushed through the trees, as loud as a freight train. “I want to tell you something,” he said. “You may not understand, but...
“It was very nice of you to garden in the cemetery. Everyone appreciated it. But, you know, we left it untended almost on purpose. It’s hard to explain. I’ll try.
“When I was younger I lived in Poland. To make a very long story very short, the Nazis came. I went to the ghetto in Lodz. I was put in a camp. I escaped. I was in a camp in Cyprus. I escaped. I was skillful at escaping, but so what if I could walk around? Inside, I was dead.
“Then I came to Palestine. For many of us it was better than a new life, and even at the pier you could see people being reborn. They laughed, they cried, they even kissed the ground. But not me. I wondered if ever I too would emerge as had many of my friends. They had been broken and weak. Their selves had caved in. And suddenly, they came by one day and you saw that they were different, full of enthusiasm, as if their hearts had been replaced and they had taken new souls.
“Not me. I didn’t understand. Would I always be bitter and unhappy? Nothing worked. I loved Kfar Yona, I loved to see it grow, but I was still a smashed-up Jew from a ghetto in Poland. Then the Arabs made the war against us in forty-eight, and I went with the others to fight. The war lasted for a long time. I did dangerous things. Many people died, people I loved.