Herman Wouk - The Glory

by The Glory(Lit)

  Amid a pile of government mail on his desk lay a letter from his brother. He read it first.

  Dear Zev:

  I'll send this via the diplomatic pouch because there's news about the Gabriel seaborne missile, which you may not learn otherwise. Since the loss of the Eilat and the disappearance of the submarine Dakar put the navy command in such a rotten light, their obsession about secrecy approaches paranoia. But this Gabriel program has been going forward for many years despite all setbacks. It's now at a make-or-break point, and you may find a big job thrust on you one of these days. As you know, I've been involved right along.

  Marine technology and weapons design are a far cry from high-energy physics, but if I can't fight, I can at least serve in this way...

  Barak blinked when he read this. Michael, a congenital cripple, almost never referred to his handicap, though Zev thought it explained almost everything about him: his strange religiosity, his low self-esteem, and his marriage problems, especially since the couple's one child had been born with the same crippling muscle defect.

  Some people found it hard to believe they were brothers, they were so different. In their Vienna boyhood they had both had a little yeshiva training, a concession of their irreligious socialist father to his Orthodox parents. The family's move to Palestine, barely ahead of Hitler's march into Vienna, had ended all that for Zev. His father had risen high in Labor Party circles, and Zev had gone the usual route of Zionist elite children, secular schools and then the army. Michael had diverged - or according to his appalled agnostic father, regressed- into a sort of shtetl orthodoxy, while flashing ahead as a mathematician and physicist of extraordinary brilliance. Zev admired his younger brother, though he was always somewhat baffled by him. The letter went on:

  ... Apropos, I've received a letter about my article in Nature (which you said you couldn't make head or tail of) from Richard Feynman, a very great Cal Tech physicist. It's an argumentative mess of equations, but then he ends by saying that my paper gives me a leg up on a Nobel Prize. Very nice, but I don't think he's right because (a) I'm an Israeli, and (b) I've put in far too much time and brainpower on stupid weaponry. No regrets, Israel's survival comes first.

  Anyway, what has evolved is a small vessel fast and powerful enough to take on and sink the Soviet missile boats, and even their capital ships if they threaten our existence. Twelve of these boats (ex weapons, of course) were built in Cherbourg for us by the French, on a German design improved by our people, and we've used and upgraded materiel from all over Europe. Seven boats have been delivered and are now berthed in Haifa getting their weaponry installed.

  However, De Gaulle recently slapped an embargo on the last five, although we've already paid for them. If the final test of the Gabriel succeeds, those five boats will become crucial to Israel's future. Maybe American pressure can get De Gaulle to release the boats, and it's worth a try, but Monsieur seems to be almost as sore at

  America as at Israel. The navy has other quasi-legal ideas to free those boats, which may bring you in directly -

  Desk buzzer. "General, are you in to a Mrs. Halliday?"

  Queenie? "Yes, put her on."

  "Old Wolf? Hope I'm not disturbing your work." Emily sounded feeble, hoarse, yet exhilarated. "Guess what, chum, it's twin girls. About three hours old, and beautiful as daffodils. Only bright red."

  "Why, good God, that's marvellous, Emily. And you're okay?"

  "I suppose so. Just a bit broken on the wheel. You're the first to know, because Bud's off in Japan. If it had been a boy, I'd have called Chris first, but Bud and I will just have to try again. How are you, dear? Read any Plutarch lately?"

  "Queenie, congratulations! My God, I'm terrifically happy for you. And for General Halliday, and for your father, too. He'll be ecstatic, I'm sure."

  "Well, I guess he won't mind too much once he sees them. They're so pretty! I'll phone him next" - Emily's voice was weakening - "before the dope takes hold again. All well with you and the girls and Nakhama?"

  "Couldn't be better."

  "Bye, Zev, you rascal, it's partly your doing, you know. Don't tell Nakhama, she'll get a proper announcement."

  "God bless you, Queenie."

  "Oh, he has, he has, darling."

  The roiling emotions that this call evoked made it hard to get back to Michael's letter. There was much more about the five Cherbourg boats, and some brief personal words at the end.

  Thank you, by the way, for intervening in the matter of my former assistant's lost passport. Shayna's a remarkable mathematician, and there's a slot in my Technion department awaiting her return. Ever since that lowlife you call Don Kishote jilted her years ago - which I thought at the time was lucky for her - she's been half-alive. A bedeviled lady, and helping her to return home was a real mitzvah.

  Lena and I have been having our own troubles, as I've reported, but now there's hope. I'll write you separately about that.

  Love, Michael

  The last words were heartening. Michael's marriage to a kibbutznik atheist had always seemed to Barak a desperate business, what with Michael being crippled, and his wife so opinionated and far from pretty. They had made bizarre compromises, such as separate cooking by each one, kosher and unkosher sets of dishes and cutlery, Michael lighting the Shabbat candles, and so on; a shaky arrangement at best, but for a few years they had appeared to be in love and happy. Lately, however, Michael had been writing about a separation. If they could stay together after all, Zev thought, that would be best by far. Whatever Lena's drawbacks, Michael had a life with her. Not many desirable women would be eager to marry a pious divorced cripple, even one eminent in his field.

  A shot of adrenaline flushed hotly through Yael Nitzan's nerves, as a comely black-haired woman of thirty or so walked into the El Al gate area at Kennedy airport. Surely this was Shayna, from whom she had stolen Don Kishote! Yael sat there with Sheva Leavis waiting to fly back to Tel Aviv, boarding time was only five minutes off, and here came Shayna Matisdorf, of all people.

  For years after Yael had caused their split-up, this devout academic, a most unsuited match for the wild Yossi - at least in Yael's view - had languished in a single state; then, shortly after the Six-Day War, she had taken her broken heart to Toronto, there to mend it by marrying a rich Orthodox real estate developer. That was the last Yael had heard of her. If this was Shayna she seemed much older, she was not dressed like a rich man's wife, and she had an ashen woebegone look.

  Why not go over and say hello, and find out something about her? Their relationship was coldly cordial, for during Yael's years in California Don Kishote had sometimes entrusted Aryeh to Shayna's care, and the boy adored "Aunt Shayna." Yael was slightly jealous of her on both accounts,

  husband and son. With Yossi's second child kicking around inside her, Yael had little to fear from the pallid woman sitting a few rows away, but she had never ceased regarding Shayna as a standing if remote threat. Yael was drifting along with Kishote much as Ruth Pasternak was doing with Sam, hanging on to a good thing as long as there was no urgent cause for a break. Next question: Was Shayna married? If so, why was she travelling to Israel alone? And if she was not married, why not?

  "Are you all right? You look as though you've seen a ghost," said Sheva Leavis, startling her. He had been absorbed in the Wall Street Journal

  She patted her stomach. "This little no-good is giving me a hard time."

  Leavis's eyes flicked around at the passengers, his glance rested on Shayna, and he gave Yael his peculiar smile, thin lips sliding up in a U-shape, conveying irony rather than mirth. It was uncanny, almost scary, for he had never met the woman. This natty little man with close-cropped gray hair, who looked like a nobody unless one could recognize a Savile Row suit, missed absolutely nothing.

  When the flight was called Yael moved close to the woman in the queue of passengers. On the slim fingers of her left hand holding the boarding pass there were no rings. "Hello, Shayna."

  Lustrous melancholy
brown eyes rounded at her in amazement. "Yes? Is this Yael?"

  "Have I changed that much in a year and a half?"

  Shayna Matisdorf shook her head, as though to clear a mental fog. "Of course it's you. Sorry, but-"

  "Oh, listen, I'm so bloated I shock myself when I look in a mirror. Coming back for a visit?"

  "Well, not exactly a visit, no. How is Aryeh? I'm dying to see him."

  "Why not? Anytime."

  On the plane Yael preceded Sheva Leavis into the almost empty first class. As they settled into the commodious seats, Leavis said, "You really seem perturbed."

  "I'm fine, thank you."

  "And you're sure you haven't seen a ghost?"

  "Sheva, let me alone, I'm very tired."

  A sliding smile, as he accepted a Ma'ariv from the flight attendant and laid aside the Wall Street Journal.

  In tourist class Shayna was sealed into a narrow window seat by a fat kerchiefed Hassidic woman with a squalling baby on her lap, and a big red-bearded husband beside her. As the plane took off Shayna resigned herself to a long night of misery. The glimpse of Yael Luria was reviving buried half-forgotten horrors, and when the woman familiarly thrust the baby in her lap, asking her in Yiddish to hold it while she went to the toilet, Shayna was glad of the distraction. The husband was immersed in a religious book, and had to be nudged to make way. The baby, quiet now, regarded Shayna with crinkling little eyes in a big red face. It was far from cute, but Shayna didn't care, she loved babies. That Yael should show up pregnant seemed somehow inevitable, given her role in Shayna's haunting misfortunes.

  The start of them all had been her own fault, maybe. One small decision, right or wrong, can shape an entire life, and such had been her refusal to go to Paris with Don Kishote, when she was nineteen and finishing university, and they had been about to become engaged. Long before that, during the siege of Jerusalem, she had encountered him as a little girl. He had then been a crazy boyish stringbean of a soldier, a new refugee from Cyprus, and she had soon forgotten all about him. But years later they had met again, and an unlikely passion had blazed up between them.

  Shayna's circle of friends in Jerusalem and at Hebrew University, strictly Orthodox like herself, had all disapproved of this Don Kishote fellow, a veteran paratrooper of raffish reputation, and her parents too had looked askance at him. But she had braved it out until the Paris episode had blasted everything. Yossi's rich brother Lee, associated with the millionaire Sheva Leavis, had come from Paris to Israel on business, and had offered Yossi a birthday present of a trip to Paris with his girlfriend, not imagining that any Israeli girl would hesitate about jumping at such a treat. But Shayna's friends had been shocked at the idea, her parents had forbade her to go, and she had had to defy them all or anger Kishote.

  What a dilemma, even in retrospect, it still seemed to her! Moral scruples aside, she had at that time never been out of

  Israel, she had no clothes suited to Paris, she had never eaten nonkosher food in her life, and the whole thing loomed as a scary plunge into the unknown. So she had backed out, and it might have passed as a minor lovers' dispute, except that Yael Luria had volunteered to go with Kishote instead; and in his irritation at Shayna he had taken her up on it. Months later had come his confession, which had stunned and almost destroyed Shayna, that in Paris he had gotten Yael pregnant, and on finding this out, had felt compelled to marry her.

  And then, after ten long years, during the Six-Day War, a second smashing blow from Yael, who by that time was established in Los Angeles, making money hand over fist working with Sheva Leavis. Kishote had given Aryeh into Shayna's care while the war was on, and he had returned wounded to her Jerusalem apartment, on the very day the army was recapturing the Temple Mount. That day he had declared his unchanged love for her; and for a rainbow hour or two, Shayna had hoped that happiness might be dawning in her life. But Yael had arrived like a thunderbolt, returning because of the war, sweeping into Shayna's apartment glamorous as a movie star; and with bland irresistible self-assurance, she had then and there reclaimed her son and her husband. Gone, the rainbow, gone, the brief vision that joy might yet be possible for Shayna Matisdorf.

  And now there Yael was again, up in first class, pregnant with Don Kishote's second child...

  "Thank you. Was he good?" asked the woman, squeezing past her husband into her seat, and taking back the baby. She felt its bottom. "Ah, nice and dry."

  "He's sweet. I envy you."

  "We have five more in Passaic," said the woman. "This one was too young to leave behind. The oldest girl takes care of the rest. She's eleven."

  "You could have left him home, too," said the husband, not looking up from the book. "Malka's a better mother than you are."

  "Maybe, but she doesn't give milk."

  "When she does she'll give gallons," said the husband, turning the page.

  "Malka's his favorite," the woman amiably said to Shayna. "She knows the Book of Psalms by heart."

  "So do I," said Shayna.

  The husband squinted at her. "You do? Recite Psalm 94."

  Shayna recited it.

  "You can't be an American."

  "Did I say I was?"

  Running through Psalms was one way to get to sleep. "Happy is the man who walketh not in the way of the sinners," she began, and recited psalm after psalm to herself, her lips barely moving. She seldom got far, even on a bad night, without drifting into slumber. But the plane bounced, the baby whimpered, and she reached the last line of Psalm 150, "All that have breath praise the Lord, Hallelujah," wide awake and not much comforted. Yael Luria would go on travelling first class through life, she was thinking, and for Shayna Matisdorf in tourist class nothing would ever go right. The Book of Job was the last word, there was no justice in God's world, not as the human mind understood justice. The wicked flourished like the green bay tree. ' 'Happy is the man who walketh not in the way of the sinners"... Ha!

  On this firm foundation of unyielding despair, Shayna at last dozed off.

  Behind the thick glass barrier walling off the baggage area Don Kishote stood amid a throng of waving, shouting relatives and friends, looking for his wife. She had surely flown first class, so why wasn't she heading that stream of arriving passengers? Mulish woman, flying abroad in her eighth month on some stupid film business, in which she had even managed to involve him...

  "Abba, there's Aunt Shayna! Look, it's her!" Aryeh clutched at his father's uniform with one hand, pointing. "And there's Imma now, next to that little man in gray." Indeed, here came Yael with Sheva Leavis. All men were briefly equal in Lod airport, so the multimillionaire was pushing a baggage cart. Yael was waddling rather than walking, otherwise she seemed all right. But Shayna! What was Shayna doing, coming to Israel alone? His old love looked preoccupied and worn, yet there she certainly was, and after retrieving one suitcase, she was already on her way out, while Leavis and Yael still were looking for their luggage.

  "Let's go, Aryeh, we'll try to say hello to Aunt Shayna."

  At twelve the boy was too dignified to dance and caper, but he pulled his father by the hand in his eagerness to get to the terminal exit. Coming outside, they saw Shayna get into a car, a dusty blue Porsche. Aryeh groaned as it drove off.

  "Haval [Too bad]," said Kishote. "Well, I promise that you'll see her while she's here."

  Leavis and Yael soon appeared, followed by a laden porter. Aryeh ran to his mother and embraced her. "Hi, there," she said to Kishote, as he sauntered up and gave her a kiss. "This boy seems to grow by the week."

  "So do you. Are you okay?"

  "Perfect, thanks."

  Peering here and there, Leavis said, "Mr. Greengrass is supposed to meet us with a car and driver."

  "Greengrass telephoned me last night," Yossi said to Yael. "That's how I knew what flight you were coming on."

  "What did he want of you?" Leavis asked.

  "Well, with Golda becoming Prime Minister that whole film deal of yours seems to have gone on hold. He
wanted to be sure that my tank units are still available."

  Yossi's brother Lee had persuaded Leavis to invest in a movie about the Six-Day War, and Yossi was to assist in the tank battle scenes, if the project came off.

  "Are they?" inquired Leavis.

  "Depends. I may be getting reassigned myself."

  "I hope this thing isn't unravelling," Yael said to Leavis.

  "So? It wouldn't be my first deal to do that."