An Improbable Friendship

by Anthony David

  In one scene in the novel, which begs for Freudian exegesis, the female protagonist, a soldier, lies in bed with two long guns. “I could feel them through my pajamas, where I could warm them and get used to them.” Upon waking, she is holding the weapons in her hands “so tightly that they hurt . . . I thought it easier to believe in Father’s hardness than in his love for me, so I ignored the love . . . And you, Mother, it was easy to believe you to be weak and in need of me.” Yael knew about her father’s womanizing; she also knew that her mother was employing more people than any of the large companies in Israel. Still, the mother character comes off as an emotional wreck alternating between fits of hysteria and racing off to assist the next band of helpless immigrants: just the kind of woman Yael was determined not to be.

  Shortly after the novel appeared, a scandal broke out surrounding one of Moshe’s mistresses, and in his political-erotic tabloid Uri Avnery covered the story in all its pornographic details. Ruth, lips pressed tight in a grim stoicism, refused to answer the swarms of journalists that followed her. Yael’s response to the lurid revelations wasn’t to judge her father morally or question the way he fled behind what she described as a “solid shell of superior indifference”; it was his taste in mistresses that she found “appalling.” If she was critical of anyone, it was of Ruth, as if it were she who was at fault that Moshe went off, looking for someone else.

  Eleven-year-old Assi told Ruth to “leave the bastard.” From that point onward, Ruth and Assi formed a coalition against the competing alignment of Yael and Moshe.

  22

  Reverence for Life

  1960 was a turning point for the most famous dynasty in Israel. Ruth and Moshe were living separate lives, joined by a common roof and not much else. Twenty-one-year-old Yael moved in with the Greek-Cyprian director Michael Cacoyannis. She did the public relations for his film Electra, suitably based on the ancient Greek myth of matricide. In many circles, her book made her more famous than her father. “I dress up—it can be Pucci or Gucci or Ricci; I give an interview to Elle or Vogue . . . I answer fan mail and phone calls. I go out, dinner or a club, or theater . . . with writers, artists, publishers, film people, or just rich people who like to be surrounded by artists.”

  Ruth and Assi took a ship to Athens to visit Yael, and the three drove her sleek-bodied Citroën DS to Delphi. It was there that Assi decided to embark on an acting career. The oracle came from friends of Yael’s who had him act out a sex scene, and he did it so well that they declared him to be the future Brando.

  Not long afterward, Ruth set off on an adventure. After years of putting on a brave face, enduring humiliations with fatalistic dignity, she needed to fly the coop. To escape, Ruth’s South African friend Clara Urquhart, a staunch opponent of apartheid, took her into what most people considered the heart of darkness to meet the Nobel Prize laureate for peace, Albert Schweitzer.

  As a world-famous doctor, scholar, organist, and humanitarian, with his fifty years of working in the jungle along with his campaign against nuclear bombs, Schweitzer had a number of zealous disciples; and of these, few were more zealous than Clara, who journeyed to the shores of the Ogowe River each year to volunteer.

  The regulars of Cafe California predicted Ruth would get to Schweitzer’s humanistic redoubt and stay for good. If she couldn’t do much to change Moshe or get back to Gaza to help the refugees, she could give her empathetic love to the Africans.

  Ruth and Clara took a rattletrap prop plane—a “flying sardine can”—to the capital of Gabon, and from the landing strip it was by dugout canoe. A handful of half-naked oarsmen loaded them and their luggage into the canoe, and with accompanying songs began to paddle upstream through steaming jungle. The exotic sounds from the jungle and the oppressive stickiness in the air made Ruth imagine herself as Katherine Hepburn’s character in the African Queen.

  As they approached Lambaréné, she noticed a huddle of people dressed in white waiting for them at the landing. “Welcome,” said Dr. Schweitzer, who had a shock of white hair and a jackdaw perched on his shoulder. “We have been waiting for you and I am glad you are here.” Frail, tiny Clara disappeared into the old man’s embraces while Ruth got a polite handshake and a gentlemanly bow.

  Among the first things she noticed about Schweitzer’s compound was the rotting stench that pervaded everything, and the cultic behavior of some of his followers. With the stultifying heat and afternoon downpours, the living, dying, decomposing vegetation, and the merciless struggle for existence—part of the compound was a leper colony—she realized that only the hardiest and most idealistic of followers, or the looniest, could hack it. One doctor walked around with a monkey in his pocket, and a nurse shared her shack with a wildcat. Outside Ruth’s hut, and next to the TB ward, sat a witch doctor casting evil spells against Schweitzer and his team for taking away his business. A highlight of the trip for Ruth was a Nativity play put on by the denizens of the Leper Village. The Grand Docteur built the village with the money he got from his Nobel Prize.

  Ruth spent most of her time working in the orphanage with abandoned babies. (According to the local beliefs at the time, identical twins brought bad luck and were pitched into the forest.) Her bed was a narrow army cot, she read at night with a kerosene lamp, and the shower—it was in back of the dining hall and hung from a rope—was a big bucket with nail holes on the bottom. She went to sleep accompanied by cicadas and bullfrogs, and sometimes tom-toms.

  She also did her best not to be lured in by the doctor—she had learned her lesson about being sucked into the orbit of a strong man’s charisma. The weeks she spent in the primeval wilderness gave Ruth ample time to observe Schweitzer from up close, quirks and all. She likened the nightly dinner scene around the table to the tea party the mad-hatter gave in Alice in Wonderland, with Schweitzer in the role of the mad-hatter. While he went native in some things—his opposition to flush toilets, for instance—when he sat down for a plate of crocodile fillets prepared in the German sauerbraten tradition, he spread a freshly laundered linen napkin on his lap, and carved the fillet on Alsatian china. Following the meal, everyone gathered in a room decorated with a cuckoo clock to sing Lutheran hymns. He played Bach toccatas on a warped, out-of-tune organ.

  Another of his quirks was a pantheistic nature worship he called “reverence for life.” Ruth saw him nearly swat a new arrival, Maria Preminger, for killing a mosquito as it was sucking her blood. (Her husband Otto had just come out with the movie The Exodus.) “There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life,” he announced. “Music and cats.” His greatest spiritual breakthrough in life wasn’t healing people or playing Bach’s fugues. It was watching hippos in the Ogowe River, caring for their young.

  Odd though he undoubtedly was—with amazement she watched him tiptoeing to avoid stepping on bugs—he was immensely kind. Schweitzer racked up a wall full of degrees in philosophy, theology, and medicine and nevertheless decided to give up the good life of a professor in Wilhelmine, Germany, and headed to the rainforest to serve people that self-defined civilized Europeans dismissed as poor savages, the precise opposite approach to life of Moshe’s ego-driven will-to-power and worship of money. The secular saint was a counter figure to Moshe. Here was a charismatic genius using his powers to preserve life, at all cost.

  The leftist bohemians at California Café weren’t far off the mark with their prediction that Ruth would stay. She thought about it mostly because the human closeness and Spartan dedication brought back memories of her days on the farm, and it reinforced her aversion to materialism, and the mad scramble for wealth that was already then making inroads into Israeli society. An additional factor that tempted her into staying was the reigning pacifism of the hospital. No one there, and especially not Schweitzer, deferred to her as the wife of the general.

  Shortly after Ruth’s return to Israel, she received a letter from a woman she had met at Schweitzer’s hospital camp. The woman told her about a deadly epidemic racing through the orphanag
e, and she expressed her gratitude to her new friend for her “gentleness of spirit, purity of heart, modesty of soul.” Ruth was able to care for the children because she too understood “suffering.”23

  23

  A Man Problem

  Ruth and Moshe still took trips abroad together, often under false names and with a squadron of bodyguards. On Joab Street, she hosted foreign dignitaries passing through. Ruth took one guest, Eleanor Roosevelt, to meet the Yemenite Jews. She also invited Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir for lunch. She wasn’t so impressed with him, a “funny-looking little man with those thick glasses that made him look like a turtle.” Simone de Beauvoir was something else. She got a signed copy of The Second Sex out of the visit.

  In the years leading up to the Six Day War in 1967, Yael the jet-setter ran around in the liveliest circles in Europe. Her parents visited her on the island of Crete where Michael Cacoyannis was filming his masterpiece Zorba the Greek. Besides drinking ouzo with Anthony Quinn, she wrote her next novel, Death Had Two Sons, a romanticized contrast between the life experiences of a vital, virile kibbutznik and his father, a Holocaust survivor wasting away of cancer.

  If Moshe was the ur-kibbutznik, the “first born of redemption,” Assi was the pot-smoking anti-hero. Yonatan Geffen, Moshe’s nephew, moved in with the Dayan family following his mother Aviva’s suicide and his father’s abandonment. Yonatan and Assi became inseparable. It was an attachment Moshe wasn’t crazy about because they sat around at home, got high whenever they could, read Freud, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, and, inspired by Arthur Rimbaud, the two wrote existentialist poetry to the loud accompaniment of Dylan’s protest ballads. The quiet sanctuary of the home in Zahala was interrupted by loud howls of “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Dylan’s legendary album boiling over with rage at racism, poverty, and war. Moshe was beginning to think that Assi was a good-for-nothing when his youngest child made no bones about his hatred of the military. In basic training, he went AWOL and wound up in the stockades for thirty days.

  Over on the other side of the fortified border, intellectuals were up in arms to hear about Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s visit to Israel. Raymonda felt especially betrayed, as if the two had stood her up on a date.

  She was finally catching up to Yael in her reading. Bored and desperate, feeling suffocated by chauvinistic Arab society and caged in by her own home and a conservative husband, she soaked up every book foreigners brought over the border to King Hussein’s desert kingdom. Her mother’s example of American-style liberation coupled with summer trips to Beirut, an open, free city considered the Paris of the Middle East, gave the restless wife the courage to wiggle free of tradition by rebelling against her expected role as docile wife and mother. If she couldn’t return home to Acre and couldn’t fulfill her “mission,” at least she could breathe some life into Nablus’s stultifying patriarchy.

  The impetus came through reading Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and seeing herself in the character of Nora, the pretty, pampered, and enslaved child-wife who, in a journey of self-discovery and out of rebellion against male domination, left her husband and children. While Raymonda wasn’t about to do that, what she did was enough to become a center of scandal. People questioned her respectability for driving a car on her own: in those days, the West Bank was almost like puritanical Saudi Arabia, and she was the first woman to do it. And she liked driving fast.

  She raised far more eyebrows among the Nablus elite, and approbation from Daoud, by inviting an eighty-player jazz ensemble from Indiana to perform in the city. Nablus was split between pro and anti jazz factions. Opponents didn’t like the idea of so many Americans, all nicely dressed boys in suits and dark narrow ties like the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show, descending on their well-ordered, conservative town. The fact a housewife could play the impresario for such a large and unprecedented event got the rumor mill going that she was a CIA spy.

  Daoud took a lot of ribbing about her madcap idea. Ignoring the sniping and his spirited but futile approbation of her “shameless behavior,” she took on the role of a Parisian salon hostess during the Age of Voltaire by opening up her home as a gathering place, or refuge, for the local intelligentsia and members of foreign consulates from East Jerusalem, where the denizens of the salon discussed Nasser and feminism and other seditious subjects. She read and translated long, dramatic passages from Madame Bovary and A Doll’s House to a room filled with people uncomfortably shifting in their chairs.

  Friends of her banker husband ramped up the pressure on him to bring her to heel when she starting writing articles in the liberal newspaper Jerusalem Star, articles sprinkled liberally with citations from The Second Sex: “Just as in America there is no Negro problem, but rather a white problem; just as anti-Semitism is not a Jewish problem, it is our problem; so the woman problem has always been a man problem.”

  She ignored Daoud’s remonstrations and demands that she act like the other respectable wives in town. She had given him her youth and now three children, and she wasn’t going to sacrifice her dreams.

  Far more of a problem for Raymonda than Daoud was King Hussein. In his British officer’s uniform and wearing a kaffiah, the monarch brooked no dissent. Bedouin soldiers, with canine loyalty, conducted house searches in Nablus, looking for “subversive” materials by communists, Nasserites, and Palestinian nationalists. She hid two dangerous books in a safe spot: Madame Bovary and The Second Sex. She had practically memorized them by now, with each fresh reading prompting long diary entries about the panicked sensation of being strangled and her desperate search for love and freedom. Wiping away the tears, she burned her beloved volume of Bialik in the garden. Yael’s book ended up in the safe hands of a visiting diplomat’s wife.

  In 1963, Raymonda was back at Mandelbaum Gate for her annual Christmas meeting with her mother. There she stood, pregnant with her fourth child, waiting for what seemed like hours. Where was she? Had something happened? A Catholic priest approached Raymonda and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder, “Your dear mother has passed away.” Chronic stress had broken Christmas down, and she died of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight. The priest, seeing the anguish on her face, said, “You look like the sad Madonna. The tragedy of the Palestinians is imprinted on your face.” This time, unlike the rumors of her death she had heard as a child, she knew her mother was gone, that she would never see her again. Feelings of shame for having followed her father’s desires and leaving her mother returned. The only thing that pulled her from a crippling depression was the new child growing inside.

  Months later she was in labor and Daoud drove her to Jerusalem in their Buick Electra with fins. It was dark, rainy, and cold. The contractions were becoming stronger and stronger, and with each curve they took through the two-lane mountain roads of northern Palestine, Raymonda gripped the car seat and moaned. Faster! She was afraid of delivering the baby in the front seat. Daoud picked up the speed. “Why do I always give in to your idiotic whims?” he asked her, exasperated. “Why do you insist on having the child in Jerusalem? Don’t we have hospitals in Nablus? Of course we do. Why can’t you be like everyone else?”

  But she wasn’t like the others. Jerusalem was the symbol of a city where, like Acre, Jews, Christians, and Arabs once lived together in tangled, Crusader-era quarters. Because of that and because of the nuns from Raymonda’s old school on the Street of the Prophets, she had to give birth in Jerusalem.

  Suha was born in the French hospital on Mount Scopus. Friends brought large silver platters of Nablus’s famous cheese dish covered with almonds, pine nuts, and pistachios. The French nuns decorated her room with exquisite embroidered pillows. “I looked at my beautiful child and felt overwhelmed by God’s precious gift. From out of the window I saw the rising sun to the east brightening the walls of Jerusalem into a light pink. In my three previous births a French nun had smuggled a letter from Mother across Mandelbaum Gate. Now there was nothing.”

  The next year, in 1964, Habib got permiss
ion from the Israeli and Jordanian authorities to spend a week with Raymonda in Nablus. He was already suffering from the cancer that would kill him. After a week, an ambulance took the Syrian prince back to the border, and from there he wound up in a hospital in Tel Aviv where he died alone and was buried in a mausoleum in the ancestral family cemetery in Acre.

  24

  The Women’s Strike

  In 1966 Yael was finishing up Dust, her latest novel about an immigrant town situated in what she portrays as barren wilderness and built by young, starry-eyed pioneers under the thrall of Zionist “dreams that are thousands of years old.”

  Though she never made it back to the shores of the Ogowe River—Schweitzer died in 1965—Ruth followed Clara’s clandestine work for the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa.24 She also kept up her frenetic schedule with Maskit, working mainly with Arab women and flying back and forth to Europe and America for fashion shows. On one longer trip to Asia on behalf of Maskit, she flew into Saigon on a last-ditch effort to breathe life into her marriage. Moshe’s book on the 1956 war was so good that an Israeli newspaper commissioned him to trudge off to the jungles to report on the American war in Vietnam. One of the iconic images from the trip comes from Time. The spread it did describes Moshe as “knee-deep in mud” and “pushing doggedly ahead into Vietcong territory . . . moving like a worm in hot ashes.”

  Without telling him, Ruth packed a small gun, the kind that the saloon owners carry in the Westerns, threw her things in a bag, and headed out to find him.

  Saigon was in the middle of war. Already in the airport Ruth saw only soldiers, and she could hear the sound of bombs from the incessant Vietcong attacks. The driver who took her to a run-down hotel on the outskirts of town, where the electricity had been cut off by a recent guerrilla attack, told her to keep the window of the car open in case someone tossed in a grenade. Just pick it up, he instructed her, and lob it back. “Be quickie, quickie, or we deadie, deadie!” The same driver told her she wouldn’t be able to visit the villages where much of the best handicraft came from because they were under Vietcong control. The rebels would kill him if he drove her there, and take her hostage.