No Medals Today

by Shlomi Tal

  “As regards the dirty bomb, I need more details.”

  “JJ, my friend, as I explained, we heard about it by chance, and we are not dealing with it here. I beg you to be patient. Give me a few hours to check it out with the person who deals with such matters, and as soon as I have information for you, I will call you and ask you to come here or send Yiftach to you with the details.”

  “Thank you, Monsieur Herzl. And thank you, Monsieur Cohen. Forgive me that I cannot pronounce your first name; it’s foreign and tricky for me to say. I will keep in contact with you and wait to hear from you when you have more information about that bomb. I will be delighted to deal with those criminals. Thank you also for your candor and openness. I would just like to ask you to take care and not step up what you are doing. We will have a severe problem if any of it is leaked to the press. Know that you have acquired a loyal friend at the SDECE. Thank you!”

  I escort Jean-Jacques out and return immediately.

  “You have gone off the rails completely, Herzl! Why are you selling him a tall story? When they catch those Nigerians smuggling the uranium and the smugglers tell the police that it’s destined for Iraq, that it is going through Marseilles en route by chance, what will you say to your friend from the SDECE? That you tricked him?”

  “Calm down, Yiftach! Until that shipment reaches Marseilles, we will have earned three or four more days of peace and quiet, right? And we can assume that if they do discover the truth, that will also take several days, won’t it? We can always extricate ourselves by saying that we heard about it and passed it on to them without investigating it because it doesn’t concern us directly. You know as well as I do that we know exactly which members of the Nigerian elite are involved. I gave Jean-Jacques the information so that he would get off our backs, and he understood it exactly like that. And you should know that if he wants to, our ‘friend from the SDECE’ (as you call him) can get them to admit to anything, because it will be good for him. So what’s the worst that can happen? We made a mistake! We were given incorrect information! It’s happened in the past and it will happen again in the future! We weren’t looking for it; we found it by chance, and we passed on what we heard. And what if the truth is what we heard and not what you, our friend from the SDECE, heard from them? Why shouldn’t they believe a respectable diplomat, the head of the embassy’s security department, who wears a suit and a tie? Instead they should trust two or three terrorists from Africa? You and I know the facts. Jean-Jacques will arrange those facts to suit himself. And you ask, justifiably, what this will give us: A week to ten days of peace and quiet to get on with our job. Isn’t that worth it? Now, I have to persuade the deputy head of the Mossad, who is coming tomorrow, to cooperate. What you don’t know, Yiftach, is that goods have accumulated here that we have to dispatch without delay, and there aren’t enough cargo planes. We have to send a ship. That demands a different operation. We have gotten rid of one problem; at least we won’t have trouble from the SDECE for a few days, and we have to take advantage of that. Now, start thinking, and fast—how are we going to load a whole ship? At which port? How do we do this without inspection?”

  “When is this planned for?”

  “If possible, tonight.”

  “Be serious for once, Herzl, please!”

  “Fine, if you can’t do it tonight, then will tomorrow at six in the morning be better?”

  “I get it, Herzl. Can I brainstorm with Emi about this?”

  “With Emi, yes, that yeshiva boy has a good head. At least he’s unflappable and not wild like you. But only with Emi—no one else. Remember, you’re actually a Mossad man, and Emi is from the Foreign Office. I don’t want too many people involved because it will leak out in the end.”

  Before I reach the door, Herzl calls me to come back: “For your information, the radar station reached Israel safely. They already had one like it, so it took them a mere six hours or so to assemble it, and it’s been operational somewhere in Sinai since yesterday evening. The IAF thanked us. Now go, I have a lot of work here.”

  I am flooded with a deep sense of satisfaction. It’s the first time I have been shown appreciation for what’s being done here. Now I feel that while we are all, indeed, sweating hard, someone is acknowledging our efforts.

  As I run down the stairs instead of waiting for the slow elevator, I think, Will I get to see Chantal today? I must! I want to know more about her pregnancy. I don’t want her to think, for even a moment, that I am dropping her because of it.

  ***

  After meeting with the CDSE, I return to my department. Activity at its height. People are sorting all the material that arrived in the morning from Tel Aviv and preparing it for forwarding on, while readying a shipment to Israel of all the urgently required items. But everything is urgent. The problems will begin when there is no more space for cargo on the plane. Emi sits waiting for my return, paging through yesterday’s newspapers that arrived in this morning’s DIP.

  “I took the liberty of opening your envelope of newspapers to catch up on what’s going on in Israel,” Emi declares without raising his eyes from Haaretz. “Just from reading yesterday’s paper, I discovered that today is actually Sukkot. I can’t believe it! I haven’t even put up a sukkah. Last year, I made a beautiful one. Remember? You came with Tzipi and the children. This is the first time in my life that I am treating this holiday like any other day. I believe that if I were still religiously observant, I would be doing the same thing—with the possible exception of my irresponsibility when it comes to food.”

  “Let’s get back to reality. Leave the newspapers, Emi, we have work to do now. Come, let’s huddle up in a vacant office. We’ll leave all the others here to get on with the routine tasks.”

  On our way up to the third floor in search of a vacant office, Emi updates me on the news he read in the newspapers while I was meeting with the CDSE. Then I give him the lowdown on what we have to do, “Emi, a big task has fallen on our shoulders. We have to find a solution for shipping about four hundred tons of cargo—almost twenty full airplane loads. There are no available cargo planes, and we are under pressure of time, so we have to find a ship. I checked it out already, and the only port that makes sense is Marseilles. French ports on the Atlantic are too far away, for us and for the ship; it would require an extra day and a half for it to sail around Spain and Portugal. We can’t use Italian ports because I have no idea how we can transfer four hundred tons of freight across the French-Italian border without the goods being detected. When checked it out, I found, among other things, that all the stevedores and most of the administrative personnel at the Marseilles port are North African—in other words, Arabs, from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. Only a handful of real Frenchmen work there, and all of them are in administrative positions. I presume there are some Jews there, but I didn’t actually seek them out. Do you have any ideas?”

  “How much time does it take to load a ship like this?”

  “Three to four hours, without disturbances.”

  “Does the port work around the clock, or does it have dead hours? Why not ask Eddy, the customs broker? He must know. He probably also has connections in Marseilles from his work. What do you say, Yiftach, shall we invite him to have lunch with us?”

  “That’s not a bad idea, except that I wanted to escape for an hour or so to meet Chantal.” Emi doesn’t need to know yet about the pregnancy scare.

  “I will reply in the language you use: If she can’t wait until the war is over, find someone else. We have a war to run, and everything, as we know, is unpredictable.”

  “Do you know what, Emi? With all due respect to the war, we are also living, breathing human beings. I have not neglected a thing, and I don’t make light of even the most trivial tasks. You are my witness. I don’t want to look for someone else, I want Chantal, and don’t ask me why because I don’t have an unequivocal answer to that. Forgive me for the long monologue. I know your opinion on the subject and respect you a lot. I hav
e never asked you to agree or approve of what I do or say, about women in general or about Chantal in particular. I just ask that you understand me. I care for her a lot. She is important to me. Don’t bring Tzipi into the discussion now. She is even more important to me, and not only because she is the mother of my children.”

  “Leave it, Yiftach, it’s a pointless argument. I won’t be able to persuade you, and there is no chance in the world that you will convince me. Come, let’s agree to disagree on the subject. Now, let’s get back to running the war: how do you suggest we transport the cargo?”

  “Okay, Emi, thanks. Let’s do this. I’ll call Eddy now, and if he can come, we’ll go out for lunch with him. If not, I will go to Chantal. Agreed?”

  “Agreed. Come on, make the call.”

  I call Eddy’s office, and his secretary tells me that he is with the administrative officer of the embassy right now.

  “Do you see, Yiftach? Providence is against your relationship with Chantal.”

  “I actually see it as providence helping our efforts and God providing us with a gift for Sukkot. I hope that divine intervention will help us in this war instead of being busy with marginal matters like my relationship with Chantal.”

  Eddy Benayoun, who dealt with the administrative officer to organize the transport to Israel of the returning equipment from the consulates that closed down in Africa, joins us willingly for lunch at a restaurant close to the embassy, where we can find a quiet corner. Emi, a formerly strictly observant Jew, is still cautious about what he eats, especially during the Sukkot festival. Eddy briefly explains how things are run at the Marseilles port.

  “You should understand,” he explains slowly, “that the port of Marseilles is the base of the communist, pro-Arab CGT[12] labor union. Loading a ship is not feasible. It takes a very long time and involves a lot of people. Let’s consider using a ferry on which we can load truck trailers. It will require some ten to fifteen trailers, which can be brought on board the ferry by trucks. Loading them on the ferry will take from a half an hour to forty minutes. That’s the simplest way. We have to solve two problems. First is to get the trailers; I can handle that—we can rent them, but we have to return them. Or we could purchase them; trailers can be bought cheaply on their way to the scrapyard, and they wouldn’t have to be returned. Buying those takes more time, though, and I understand that we don’t have time. The second problem is what we can do to ensure that there won’t be too many general port workers in the area—they are intensely anti-Israeli. We have to get them out of the way somehow. We can sort out the documentation relatively quickly. We’ll address it to a random name we choose and mark the destination as the Port of Genoa in Italy. I have an acquaintance there who can handle the paperwork for the rest of the way without the ferry having to actually dock at Genoa.”

  “So let’s sum up, Eddy. We have to arrange three things: decide about the trailers, get a ferry, and find a way to avoid the presence of too many dockworkers at the port. Have I got it right?”

  “Exactly. That’s what has to be done. Then the rest is really simple.”

  “And if I have solved these problems, how long will it take you to load the ferry and dispatch it?”

  “That isn’t an issue anymore. Within less than two hours if it is during the morning or evening shifts, and up to six hours if it’s during the night shift. The night shift isn’t suitable—only important things are dispatched then, and that draws attention.”

  “I understand, and I will call you when I have the answer.”

  “Just remember, Yiftach, today is Thursday. We can manage on Saturday. Sunday isn’t a good day to ship things from Marseilles because that will attract unnecessary attention.”

  We part company with Eddy, who insists on picking up the tab for lunch. On the way back to the CDSE’s office, I burst out, “Emi, let’s see you enlist some divine intervention to help us now. I have absolutely no idea how to empty the port of its hostile workers or how to obtain trailers. In normal times, I would say that I also have no idea how to arrange for such a ferry within a few days, but in the current circumstances, that actually looks like the easiest of the tasks I am facing.”

  ***

  Immediately on entering the embassy, I receive a message saying, “Call home urgently.”

  “Hi, Tzipi, what happened?” I ask as soon as my call is answered.

  “Hi Yiftach, this is Irit, Tzipi is sitting here and crying because—”

  “What happened? Let me talk to her!”

  “Her mother called from Israel. Her brother, Zvika, hasn’t called home in two days. It’s not like him, and she’s anxious. As usual, Tzipi sees only the dark side… just a second, here she is.”

  “Yiftach, I don’t know what to think,” Tzipi chokes out as she weeps. “Zvika knows how much Mom worries, and he calls her every day or two now. It’s been three days since he called last. Do me a favor—ask Yossi Ben-David to speak to his sources. I am desperately worried.” Tzipi bursts into tears again. I try to calm her fears, without success. When Tzipi finally hangs up because she can’t stop crying, I call the attaché’s office, and Yael tells me that Yossi is on his way to the embassy and will arrive in half an hour.

  The CDSE receives our report on our conversation with Eddy calmly, and he immediately promises that when the time comes he will give us his decision about shipping the boat full of “goodies,” as he put it, right under the noses of the customs officials in Marseilles, openly contravening the embargo. The CDSE invites us to a meeting to sum up the events at the airport on Wednesday. The meeting will take place later in the evening, after the dispatch of the daily El Al flight. But I promised Chantal I would come to her tonight!

  I retreat to my office and call Chantal with some trepidation at having to explain that I won’t be able to come to her. I explain that I have to participate in a special meeting that has just been called. Chantal listens to me quietly, doesn’t react and finally, says, “I understand. Actually, I don’t, though I very much want to. Will you swear to me that you don’t have someone else?”

  I am quite astounded! Does she fear I have abandoned her? She really doesn’t understand anything!

  “Chérie, my love, if you were beside me I would embrace you close to my heart and show you how much I miss you. It seems you don’t understand what trouble my country is in, and all that we have to do here. I promise I will explain it all to you. I yearn to be with you, but I have my duty to my country, and I am forced to neglect you a little. It’s all for my motherland, and there is certainly no other woman involved. There is no one like you. No one! Besides that, I love only you!” I say that, and although I feel that I planned to lie, somehow I’m actually telling the truth.

  When I hang up, it occurs to me that Chantal hasn’t said a word about her pregnancy. Has she, perhaps, already done something about it?

  Friday, October 12

  I decide that today I must find time to meet Chantal. Of course, I won’t be able to spend a whole evening with her, but I have to make it possible for us to have lunch together, or at least a cup of coffee. I want to hug her and feel her close to me. I find it difficult to explain the desire I feel to be with her. Is it, perhaps, because of her pregnancy? I wonder momentarily if it’s about sex, but I immediately reject the idea. It’s not just about sex—it is something beyond that. What on earth do I feel? I usually understand my gut feelings. I know how to explain to myself why I am in one mood or another and why I am attracted or not drawn to something. This time, my emotions are clouded. Is it because of not knowing and being concerned about the fate of Zvika, Tzipi’s brother? Is it because of the sense of being cut off from what is happening in Israel, and especially from any knowledge of how my two brothers are faring in the war? What of my parents in Israel? How are they coping with this awful war? Am I repressing something? Is this my way of escaping reality?

  I have to get back to the pressing demands of cold reality. We have challenging duties to meet and obligation
s to fulfill that seem endless, and there is no time for indecisive mind games.

  The regular tasks are being handled routinely. The phone rings at four o’clock in the morning, the DIP arrives, more diplomats have been expelled from Africa, and there is more equipment to obtain and send to Israel, in particular for the air force. We are living through a soul-destroying wartime routine. Will we succeed in living up to what is expected of us? Is it truly within our power to help, as they tell us all the time?

  At eleven I call Chantal and arrange to come and have lunch with her at the little bistro near her office. There is something awful in her voice, as if her world is in ruins. She is the only person who doesn’t belong to this war that’s raging around me, and I hope to hear a kind word from her, something that will warm my heart a little. She doesn’t help me in my effort to escape reality. My heart aches as I hang up the phone gently. I look at the telephone for several seconds, as if waiting for it to suddenly say to me, “Just teasing you! I’m waiting for you and look forward to seeing you! Don’t be late!”

  Emi returns from a short trip with Udi; they have brought equipment for the ordnance corps that must be dispatched this evening. Now we have to begin fighting for space on the plane for everything that has to be sent to Israel. Have I already mentioned that everything is urgent? Emi starts. “Listen to this, Yiftach, we received the bags for blood infusions that Magen David ordered. You won’t believe this, but yesterday, at one of the gatherings that the ambassador’s wife hosts at the embassy, the wife of the owner of a plant that produces such blood bags was one of her contributors. Their gift of fifteen thousand bags will arrive here today. We have to arrange to send them to Israel immediately.”

  “Okay. I have to meet Chantal for lunch. I think that I can disappear for an hour and a half at noon. Emi, you can manage without me, can’t you?”

  Emi notices my burned-out expression and my quiet voice, so he doesn’t attack me as usual, but only asks calmly, “Do I have to cover for you again? This time are you running away from Tzipi? How is she feeling? Has she heard from her brother?”