Herman Wouk - The Glory

by The Glory(Lit)

  She pressed Barak's hand hard, and left. "Okay, Zev," said Cunningham. "What about the Soviet pilots?"

  Barak did not hesitate. This was a friend, and nobody was better at keeping a secret. "It's quite true."

  "Bravo!" Cunningham sank back on his pillows, and closed his eyes. "Don't go. I'm just a bit tired. My saying you'd miss Nasser puzzled you."

  "Baffled me."

  "Think, Zev! Think! Didn't Nasser frighten you quarrelsome Jews into hanging together? Otherwise the factions would have torn your fragile new country apart long ago." Cunningham opened his eyes to see how Barak was taking this. "But that's not all. By closing the Straits of Tiran in 1967, sending his army into the Sinai, whipping up the Arab masses into a televised blood frenzy, he made the world briefly sympathetic to Israel. And that gave you your chance in the Six-Day War."

  Barak shook his head. "Nonsense. He was bent on our destruction, period."

  "Zev, the God of history loves irony. Nasser kept you united and on your toes. When he found he couldn't beat you, he sold himself out to the Russians, and it was the Russians who killed him. Used him to penetrate the Arab world and flank NATO from the south. Made him send his people to die by the thousands, rode him to death like an overdriven horse. What will happen with this Sadat, I don't know. Watch out for him, and pour me some more creme de menthe, there's a good fellow."

  Barak was walking out through the hospital lobby when a cockney streetwalker twang came from behind a post. "Hi sigh there, guv'nor, could you buy a girl a cup of coffee?" Hands on hips, Emily appeared with a sexy sway, grinning. "There's a ghastly canteen downstairs for the staff."

  "Pleasure, Queenie. Lead on."

  "Lovely. Then I've got to pick up my babies in McLean. First time you've seen Chris since he was felled?"

  "Yes."

  "What do you think?"

  "Shockingly weak, but the mind's all there."

  In the dismal cellar canteen there were only coin dispensers of hot drinks, soft drinks, and cakes in dusty cellophane. "We can just sit and talk, too," she said. "The coffee's vile."

  "I'll have some anyway."

  At a small plastic-topped table she put a hand over his. "Guess what? Old Queenie's pregnant again. Finally!"

  "Em! That's wonderful."

  "Yes, and it had better be a boy! This is it. I'm a drying-up hag."

  "I agree."

  "Curse you. How's Nakhama?"

  Barak paused before answering, "Nakhama's not quite herself. She has these spells, and pulls out of them. I think she's homesick. What are the babies doing in McLean?"

  "Nanny's straightening up Chris's house. Say, know what? Run me out there and see my girls. You never have done. Got the time?"

  "By all means."

  The Belgian nanny, a severe gray-headed woman in black, was feeding the twins in the kitchen. The girls were prattling, alike as mirror images. When Emily and Barak came in they fell silent, stopped eating, and regarded him with large solemn blue eyes.

  "They freeze at strangers, like rabbits at headlights," said Emily. "Kim's on the left, Sally on the right. I can tell them apart, but even Bud gets them wrong. Mind if I finish feeding them?"

  "Of course not."

  "Go down on the terrace, dear, and I'll join you."

  Outside, the leaves on many trees were starting to turn, some were falling, and grandiose sunset clouds streaked the sky. Barak had not been on this leaf-strewn terrace in years, and bittersweet memories assailed him: Emily as a precocious twelve-year old, bringing him out here to see the fireflies and flirting girlishly with him; Emily on that November day many years later, which the smell of the leaves brought back poignantly, when their long correspondence had flashed into unwise compelling passion...

  "Too windy out here, Zev?" She came trotting down the brick stairs. "Want a drink?"

  "No, I'm fine, it's perfect."

  "Not quite perfect. No fireflies."

  "Too late. Firefly season's over, Queenie."

  "Alas, yes. Nice while it lasted, hey old Wolf? And the leaves were further along the day Kennedy was killed."

  "Oh-ho. Thinking of that, you too? Yes, the rain had pretty well beaten them off the trees."

  "Do you like my girls?"

  "Baby-food advertisements. Seraphs."

  "Seraphs! They have their devilish moments, I assure you. How are your girls? All grown up, are they?"

  "Galia's fifteen, and making problems. She rebelled at going back to the Hebrew high school here. Said the kids were all - I don't know - something not good. Schoolgirl term."

  "Ah, my former specialty. Creeps? Twerps?" He shook his head. "Goons?"

  "Not goons."

  "Wimps? Clods? Geeks? Dorks? Nerds? Drips? Smears? Dweebs?"

  "Slow down. Fourth from the last, again?"

  "Nerds."

  "That's it. Nerds. All nerds. So we put her in a private school. Ruti's still at the Hebrew school, but Nakhama wants to take them both back to Israel."

  Long pause. "I wish it were possible for me to be friends with Nakhama."

  "It isn't."

  "Will you go back soon?"

  "I've begged for reassignment. For most jobs that are open, I'm too senior. For the General Staff, I'm not distinguished enough."

  "I don't believe that."

  "Well, what the army says is that I'm irreplaceable here."

  "That sounds right."

  "No. Nobody's irreplaceable."

  He got up and sat beside her on the wrought-iron glider. They swung gently together. "It's such a strange kind of happiness," Emily said, her face pink with sunset glow.

  "What is?"

  "Oh, this surge of well-being, of rejoicing in existence, just because somebody's there with you."

  "It's called love," said Barak.

  She turned brilliant eyes at him. "Is that it? How dense of me."

  The mood was glum in the Barak household at dinner. Galia sulked, eyes on her plate, mouth pulled down. "I can't stand liver," she said, then ate a lot of it. Ruti too was quiet. Usually vivacious, though still the ugly duckling at ten, she was chilled by her sister's ill humor. The girls cleared away the meal and disappeared into their rooms. Nakhama settled into an armchair, put on black-rimmed glasses, and read a Hebrew newspaper. Barak worked on industrial reports at a desk. The atmosphere seemed to him as heavy as in a buttoned-up tank. He laid aside an article on missile electronics. "Nakhama, what is it?"

  She took off her glasses and beckoned him into their bedroom, where she pulled open a drawer. "I found this in Galia's room." It was an open pack of Kools.

  Well, thought Barak, standard crisis, she's fifteen. "I'll speak to her. Or will you?" Nakhama did the feminine talking-to's, but this might call for fatherly gruffness.

  "I'm not finished. Last week, when you were at Fort Knox, she went to the movies with that Freddie from her new school. Not even Jewish. With the long greasy hair in back, and the pimples. I woke up and went to the kitchen for a drink, and there they were on the parlor sofa, on top of each other."

  After an embarrassed pause, Barak inquired, "Who was on top of whom?"

  "What kind of question is that?" A ragged-nerved snap. "Does it matter? All right, she was on top."

  "So this Freddie wasn't wholly to blame."

  "Zev, you're being an animal. That school is full of degenerates. I'm not going on with this. The girls have learned English. They've learned altogether too much, to all the devils. God knows what else Galia has picked up in that school with no nerds! Ruti so far is fine. They have to go home, both of them."

  "The Ramatkhal wants me here one more year."

  "Then I'll take them home. Enough America for my girls! If you have to stay here, I don't."

  "Nakhama, there are boys in Israel, and now and then they lie on top of the girls. Also the other way around."

  Nakhama walked out of the bedroom. He gave her a few minutes to cool off, then went to the parlor. She was reading her paper again. "So, how's Emily Cunn
ingham?" she said in a wholly pleasant tone.

  He was startled into a witless echo. "Emily Cunningham? You mean Mrs. Halliday? Why?"

  "Oh, yes, Mrs. Halliday. I visited Miriam Kress in the Georgetown Hospital, and I saw you both getting intp your car. I waved, but you didn't wave back."

  "I didn't see you, Nakhama. Her father's in that hospital, recovering from a bad heart attack. We happened to meet when I visited him."

  "Ah."

  "She's pregnant."

  "Ah. That's nice."

  "I gave her a lift to her father's house, where her kids were staying."

  Nakhama nodded, and resumed reading. Heavy silence. When Barak could no longer stand it, he said, "Nakhama, I haven't seen Mrs. Halliday for months, or maybe a year, I don't even remember."

  "Who asked you?" Nakhama removed her glasses and looked him straight in the face. "Zev, I'm not American, I'm not a shiksa, and my education is very limited. I'm not trying to make trouble. I just know that when I take the girls home, one way or another you won't be unbearably lonesome."

  Within the week Nakhama and the girls were gone.

  Emily Halliday had a boy, to the great rejoicing of her father and the marked approval of her husband. General Halliday was appointed commander of an air base in Florida, his wife and children went with him, and the Queenie-Wolf correspondence sporadically resumed. Barak talked now and then by telephone with Nakhama and the girls. He managed brief returns to Israel, always finding the people more prosperous, construction more hectic, automobile traffic more frightening, and tourism still on the rise. He came there with gladness and

  departed with an ache, trying each time for a transfer back home, but in the zigzags of internal army politics his chance at a sector command kept receding. When Dado Elazar became Ramatkhal he all but despaired; not that Dado had anything against him, but rather that he had been too long out of sight to ride the wave of new appointments.

  Anwar Sadat came on as a weak colorless successor to the fire-eating Nasser, and a relaxed frame of mind began to prevail at the embassy. Announcing that 1971 would be "the year of decision," when Egypt would regain its honor and the Sinai by force of arms, the new fellow let the year go by with nothing happening. The superpowers kept pushing a wobbly UN peace initiative called the Jarring Mission, trying to get Israel to offer greater and greater slices of the Sinai in a peace settlement, and to persuade Egypt to talk to the Jews on any terms whatever; while quietly the Nixon administration let the Israelis know that keeping the Canal closed, thus denying the Russians a short sea route to Vietnam, was not the worst possible thing that could be happening in the Middle East.

  Early in 1972 Barak began receiving increasingly urgent letters from the army engineering corps, asking for U.S. bids to supply a huge number of steel cylinders six feet in diameter and eighty feet long, with no hint of what they were for. The steel firms naturally wanted to know the purpose of these giant objects, advising Barak that they would have to be custom-made at high cost, and that even shipping would be a problem, but to his inquiries the army engineers remained mum. So the whole business was hanging fire, when a letter from Don Kishote shed some light.

  SOUTHERN COMMAND Chief of Staff Top Secret

  10 July 1972 By Pouch Dear Zev:

  Arik is after me about "the cylinders." They're not my job, but you know Arik. The bull charges and everyone runs for the fence.

  I'm not surprised that Bethlehem Steel can't figure out the purpose, nor that the engineers won't tell you,

  but here goes. You know about our bridging problem. Carry the battle to the enemy's territory is doctrine, so to win any war Egypt starts we must cross the Canal. The bridging equipment we've got is from European junkyards. Trying to cross on those French amphibious rafts (crocodiles, we call them) or the British pontoons would be suicidal. As you've found out, the Americans won't sell us mobile bridges because they're not "defensive." We can forget the Europeans, Arab oil has them crawling.

  Well, the cylinders are rollers for a bridge more than 600 feet long that will be towed to the Canal and pushed across by tanks, hence, no exposure of engineers to gunfire. Once in the water, the rollers become giant pontoons. That's the trick. Built in sections, it will be flexible enough to traverse the hills and dunes of Sinai. I recently watched a miniature prototype perform for the high brass on a sand table. Weird to see it crawling along on the level, humping itself over the obstacles, and slithering down into the mock-up Canal! The budget for the roller bridges means steep cuts in other hardware, and some muttering goes on in high places about "Tallik's monstrosity." But General Tal's number two to Dado, so several of these behemoths will be built. So please obtain a decent bid on those rollers and get Arik off my back. Producing them in Israel would strain our steelmaking capacity, though it's feasible. A few have been made here for a full-scale prototype of one section.

  Arik assumes we'll have a war with Egypt as soon as Sadat is ready to go, and we've been extending the network of military roads in Sinai for a rapid war of movement. We keep hardening up the Bar-Lev Line too, though he questions the whole concept. He makes enemies the way a steamboat makes waves. I know how you feel about him, but the soldiers will follow him anywhere. That's something. His energy is awesome, and if war comes I'll not be sorry that he's OC Southern Command.

  Yours, Yossi

  Barak was still working on the procurement of the cylinders and not getting far, when at last he was relieved of the extended attache duty and ordered back to Israel for reassignment. At once he called his brother Michael in Haifa to say that he would be returning in time for his wedding to Shayna Matisdorf. He notified Nakhama, who sounded reasonably joyful, and he took bitter pleasure in packing up and getting out of the small furnished apartment off Wisconsin Avenue in which he had spent too much lonely and unrewarding time after his family's departure. Last-minute official duties delayed his detachment, forcing him to miss Michael's wedding, after all; a bleak end to a bleak tenure.

  The morning of his departure was a whirl of trivia - landlord, bank, dentist, and so on. When he stopped his taxi at the embassy en route to the airport to make his farewells, Ambassador Rabin jolted him with a few slow dry words. "So, what do you think of Sadat now?"

  "Sadat? What about Sadat? What's happened, Ambassador?"

  "You haven't heard?" Rabin squinted at him, shook his head, and a characteristic quick half-smile came and went. "Well, you're anxious to get home. It's the big news this morning. He's expelling the Russians, giving them a week to leave Egypt - all seventeen thousand of them - and he's nationalizing the Soviet installations and military equipment."

  After a dumbfounded silence Barak said, "What do you make of it, sir?"

  "I don't know."

  From the ambassador down, Barak gathered as he said goodbye to the embassy staff, nobody knew quite what to make of this grand stroke, this international thunderclap, launched by a man rated low if not laughed at by experienced diplomats, Israeli and otherwise. The general sense was that the move was very good news, reducing the threat of war, for surely the Egyptians could not venture into battle against Israel without close Soviet guidance and support. Perhaps because of his chronic gloom at being marooned in Washington, Barak's first guess was that it could be an elaborate charade played by both Sadat and the Soviets, to lull Israel into exactly the sense of relief prevailing in the embassy. In any case it was not necessarily good news.

  13

  Shayna's Wedding

  Daphna was puzzled by the invitation from Professor Berko-witz and Shayna Matisdorf to their wedding, but she knew her parents had been asked, so perhaps she was being included out of courtesy, or possibly Noah had seen to it, and was hoping to patch things up with her there. So she had accepted; but on the day, after a glance into her tiny closet, she decided to skip it. Three dresses, one tackier than the next. She and her roommate Donna, both being from military families and both, after their compulsory army service, in a state of anarchic revolt, wore only j
eans day and night, preferably American jeans, preferably from San Francisco. Putting on a dress for a stupid wedding in Haifa was just too much. Besides, she had something better to do today.

  A few nights ago, at a party of artists and writers at the Jericho Cafe, the haunt of Tel Aviv's bohemia, she had intrigued the famous ceramicist Shimon Shimon with bright questions about his art, and he had invited her to visit his studio. Since then she had been reading everything about ceramics she could find. Maybe that was a way to go, for the ballet dancing had long ago proved a dead end. Apparently she was too zaftig for ballet. She would have to starve down to stringiness, she had been told, and start in classes with twelve-year-olds and younger. Daphna had tried the starving,