Herman Wouk - The Glory

by The Glory(Lit)

  and the classes, too. But she loved to eat, and loathed the giggles of the bony little girls at the way her bosom bounced. So much for ballet. Now she was writing pieces for tourist handout magazines, which at least paid something. But ceramics seemed so exciting, molding works of art worth money out of muck! So she scrawled a note:

  Dear Dov - Sorry, I just can't face it. Shimon Shimon is showing me his studio this morning, and I may actually make a start at ceramics! He charges a fortune to teach, he's the best, but he said never mind money, let's find out first if you have talent. Nobody will miss me at that wedding. If they do say I dropped dead from boredom at the thought of it. Daff.

  She crayoned a heavy red DOV on the envelope - he was supposed to pick her up and take her there - and jammed the disingenuous scribble into the crack of the door as she left. Daphna knew that two Berkowitz relatives would miss her badly, Noah and Dzecki, and she was just as glad not to be caught between them. She was especially sore at Noah, since their blowup at the Jericho Cafe over the Independence Day military parade.

  It had been her mistake, perhaps, to take him after the parade to the night spot where her crowd hung out, drinking Gold Star beer and eating olives at a big wooden table. Donna had introduced her long since to these exciting people: longhaired bearded fellows, girls in jeans with crazy bouffant hairdos or unkempt heads, all-night smokers, talkers, and beer-sippers. They were fun, different, hip. Shouting over the rock group belting out American, Hebrew, European, and South American songs, they discussed writers like Camus, Sartre, Brecht, and Faulkner, they dissected the new Hebrew novels, films, and plays, they gossipped about painters and actors, they made acid jokes about Israeli politicians, and they were passionate on all sides of the Arab question.

  Naturally, watching the evening news on the cafe's TV, they had made sarcastic cracks about the military parade. Noah had not been amused, countering with banalities about the danger Israel still was in despite the cease-fire. A real bore! He had even spouted some serious Zionism, a theme

  more old-hat, ridiculous, and taboo in this company than God. The scene had turned ugly when General Motta Gur appeared on the TV, and Yoram Sarak, the star of the Jericho Cafe crowd, exclaimed, "Ah, the Angel of Death!" A career cynic at thirty, with a lean choleric look, overgrown hair, and dark glasses to match, Sarak wrote an acerb column in a rowdy leftist weekly.

  Noah spoke up sharply, "He's only the man who liberated Jerusalem."

  "Yes, yes, 'The Temple Mount is in our hands,'" Sarak sneered. "Thirty-six guys died on Ammunition Hill, my friend, and that battle should never have been fought. If Motta Gur hadn't been so hot to reach the Temple Mount first, Uri Ben Ari's tanks would have arrived from the north and wiped out the whole enemy force on the hill with cannon fire in ten minutes, and with no casualties."

  "Is that so?" Noah barked. Ammunition Hill was an enshrined legend of Six-Day War heroism. "And how do you know all that?"

  "Because I fought on Ammunition Hill, my friend, and two of my pals got killed. Paratroop Battalion Sixty-six." Noah was silenced. "And I'll tell you something else, Admiral." Sarak snapped open a beer can. "This whole country is one big Ammunition Hill."

  "Yes? In what way?"

  "A bloody story of futile deaths of too many great guys, for the glory of a lot of old fuckups and nonentities."

  "Look here, Sarak, why don't you just pick up and go to Los Angeles?"

  "And let the country fall into hands like yours, Admiral? I'm not that sour on it yet."

  At that point Noah stood up and dragged Daphna protesting out of the Jericho Cafe, telling her as they went that if they remained he would have to knock Sarak on his ass. On a park bench under a lamp they had had the fight of their lives, and had not really reconciled since. She loved and admired him, but she was not letting him force her back into the old mode; not him, not her father, and not her go-go air force brothers, now that she had struggled free. Anyway, with Sadat throwing out the Russians, how important were the armed forces, really? How could there be another war?

  Shortly after that fiasco, she had brought Dzecki to the Jericho as a sort of litmus test of his character. In uniform on a weekend pass, he came with her to the cafe willingly. Her friends rode him hard about leaving America for the glamorous life of an IDF draftee, and of course about the Porsche. He took it all with a good-humored grin and mild repartee in passable Hebrew slang. So they forgot him and went on with lively talk about new-wave movies ("the answer to Hollywood"), Leonard Bernstein ("a sentimental phony"), Gunter Grass, Samuel Beckett, Arthur Miller, and so on, salted with inside talk on topics like the latest bank scandal and politicians' mistresses. Afterward Dzecki remarked, "They're okay, just ten or fifteen years behind New York." Understandable, coming from an American, if annoying. Dzecki was in. Her friends' needling was a rough well-deserved Israeli tribute. There was something to Dzecki! With three months to go in the army, he was already looking into real estate projects in Haifa. He had showed her an old Arab waterfront warehouse he and his father might buy and renovate. He even kept that battered Porsche going, though two Israeli drivers and an Egged bus had hit it. No garage in Israel could maintain a Porsche as he did.

  And at least he did not consider her Jericho Cafe crowd traitors and scum, as Noah seemed to. Noah's attitude was intolerable. All her friends had served in the IDF. All still did their reserve duty. Most scrounged their livings by working at two or three jobs. Some had fought in the Six-Day War, several had been wounded. Daphna knew the military life all too well; knew pilots who had died, knew their widows and orphans. The air force was great, but so what? She had endured childhood nightmares of her father crashing in flames, and now she had to worry about Dov, and even her baby brother Danny was applying for flight training. Meantime the politicians schemed and lied to keep their jobs, wars broke out every few years, the generals screwed up, and the boys paid with their lives, or their legs, eyes, and arms. That was the plain Jericho Cafe truth about Israel, not the threadbare Zionist myth that Noah was still trying to live up to.

  Such were Daphna's ruminations as she rode a bus to Rashi Street, and climbed dark creaky stairs to Shimon Shimon's studio. A dirty skylight on the top floor showed the ceramic

  doorplate with his name, black flames on gold: shimon shi-mon. She tentatively knocked. No answer. Louder knock. Nothing. She pressed the doorbell, and its raucous ring made her jump. Heavy treads approaching, sliding of a lock, a muttered Arabic obscenity, door opening. In droopy underwear, the ceramicist peered at her, scratching his red beard with one hand and his hairy belly with the other. "Hello. Am I early? I can come back later." "You're who? Oh, yes, you're Daphna, aren't you? Right, right, Daphna. No, no, come right in." He grabbed a bathrobe from a hook. Daphna went inside, and Shimon Shimon closed the door.

  Noah's missile boat was docking about then. He had been working since dawn on an automatic gun-loader that had jammed, for an exec had to be everywhere and do anything. He hurried to his quarters to get out of his greased-up coveralls, and dress for the wedding. At last a chance to see Daphna and smooth things over! He had not seen her since their quarrel. The navy had to keep constant watch for seaborne terrorists, and the nights on patrol were long and monotonous. Noah had much time to think, looking at the black waves, the crowding stars, and the lights of home sending up a glow on distant clouds. What to do about that provoking Daphna? In the draggy hours on watch, visions and sensations of their lovemaking haunted him, but she had drifted into that disgusting Jericho Cafe set. A vexing problem, for he remained infatuated with her.

  A letter from Cherbourg lay on his cot. A picture of Julie Levinson slid out of the envelope, and to his surprise, the writing was in childish large-lettered Hebrew.

  Dear Noah,

  These are the first words I have ever written in Hebrew besides exercises!

  You remember Shmulik Tannenbaum, your navy supply officer who came back to Cherbourg and married my friend Yvonne? They now have two babies, and Shmulik is giv
ing Hebrew lessons to make extra money. Our class is small, five girls counting me, and two fellows. All the others plan to make aliya.

  (It has taken me half an hour to write this much! I have to keep looking up words in my French-Hebrew dictionary, which is not very good.)

  I and my parents will visit Israel right after Yom Kippur, only three months from now. I talk better than I write, so you can talk to me then in Hebrew to test me! (A joke.) You probably have forgotten how I look, so I enclose a picture (my verb forms are awful, I know).

  We will only stay three weeks, but it will be nice to see you again. I have a boyfriend but he is not Jewish, he works in a bank. I think that is why my parents are taking me to Israel. But don't worry, they don't hope to match up you and me. Anyway by now you must have married Daphna! If so I hope you are happy and I would like to meet her.

  Your friend, Julie Levinson

  P.S. - Time, 2'/2 hours!

  In the picture she wore a jogging suit and a soft cap. Her face was thinner, hard to recognize. This was Julie's first letter in a long time. Noah could not write easily in French, he hated to make the slightest error, and once he saw Daphna again he had let the correspondence dwindle and lapse. He dropped the letter and picture in a drawer. Poor Julie!

  As he dressed, Noah heard on the radio a roundtable of experts disputing about Sadat's move, mainly throwing up gassy clouds of bafflement and verbiage. He was baffled, too. L'Azazel! Could Egypt really be giving up the fight? Was Israel no longer in peril, after a quarter-century of cliff-hanging? Egypt was the powerhouse of Arab enmity. Without Egypt the front was broken, and without the Soviets the Egyptians were helpless. Chasing down those terrorists in rubber boats was no career for a man; would he never have a chance to fight in a war? He set out for the wedding in a fresh uniform, hoping he could take Daphna somewhere afterward. The damned Jericho Cafe was a good two hours away, thank God. Perhaps she would even come

  to the Dan Hotel for the night. That was the way of ways to put a fight behind them.

  Daphna's Aunt Yael also ran a dissatisfied eye over her more extensive wardrobe, wondering what to wear for a mid-July strictly religious wedding; which, however, she was not about to miss. The sleeveless pink shantung would be coolest, but Elohim, no! The Ezrakh was officiating, the great Talmud scholar Benny so much admired, and to such holy men bare arms and bare breasts were all one. The blue pima cotton then, with sleeves below the elbow. If naked wrists were too immodest, haval! She was not coming to Shayna Matisdorf's nuptials looking like a pious frump. That was the bride's game.

  Despite the hold she had on Yossi in their two children, Yael never quite shrugged off the sense of that religious old maid as a threat. Of course sneaked meetings with Kishote, even surreptitious telephone calls, were much beyond that goodie-goodie, though they were routine to the shmatas (loose women) he fooled with. But most men in the long run needed love, not shmatas, and that was the standing menace of Shayna. Yael was sleeping alone these days. The flame was out. She had not tricked him with Eva, and he knew that. Still, he clearly wanted no more children, at least with her, and he was employing the one unfailing contraceptive, cool distance. Otherwise she could hardly complain. He was good-humored, he seemed reconciled to things as they were, and how much time did other army wives get to spend with their husbands, anyway? Nevertheless, seeing with her own eyes Shayna Matisdorf removed from circulation was well worth killing a business day.

  "Got to wash off the desert dust, first thing," Kishote said, coming in with a clatter of tankist black boots, as she was affixing a gold lion pin to the pima cotton. "How are you, Yael? You look elegant." He was unbuttoning his green blouse, omitting any kiss or hug, though he had not been home for weeks. "Where are the kids?"

  "Aryeh's dressing up. Eva's in kindergarten. We won't bring her. There's a pressed uniform in your closet."

  "I'll wear a shirt and slacks." He kicked off the boots.

  "So, Shayna gets married at last," she ventured. He nod-

  ded without a word, stripping down to sweat-soaked briefs, a muscular glistening figure. "Yossi, what about Sadat?"

  "Sadat? Good question." He ran a hand over his face. "I suppose I should shave."

  "Have things changed at the Canal at all?"

  "Dead quiet, but there's always plenty to do."

  "Is it serious, his expelling the Russians?"

  "Very serious." He went into the bathroom.

  In the car heading up the coastal highway Aryeh, now a lanky fifteen but still beardless, sat beside the driver, turning around to look and listen as his parents discussed Sadat's move. "Sharon called a staff meeting that same night," his father said, "to exchange ideas about it. We were still talking when the sun came up. Five explanations emerged, or should I say survived."

  "Let's hear."

  "Well, one, the Russians were denying him first-line armaments, or charging too high a price."

  "Oversimple."

  "Maybe, but just like the Soviets. Two, the Egyptian people, especially the army, hate the Soviet presence. The crude Russians treat them like dirt, even their senior officers. We know that's true. Three, Sadat had to do something bold and popular after bluffing and doing nothing in 1971."

  "That's more like it," said Yael. "It's what I think."

  "Well, Sharon thinks it's none of those. The last two are bad, and one's worse than the other. Four, Sadat's decided to tilt his foreign policy to America, because Washington's where he can get the most leverage against Israel. Five, the Russians wouldn't let him plan to attack Israel, because that would end detente and might drag them into nuclear war with America. He kicked them out to free his hands for war."

  At this Aryeh opened wide eyes.

  "Oo-wah," exclaimed Yael. "Sharon's the pessimist, as usual."

  "Abba, what do you think?" Aryeh said.

  Kishote looked at him with affection. "Me, think? When I'm ordered, I fight."

  The ceremony began as soon as Benny Luria arrived at Michael's apartment with the Ezrakh, the aged scholar famed

  for his grasp of Torah law, and for never having set foot outside the Holy Land; hence his sobriquet, which meant "the Native." Benny had met him years ago, through the bereaved parents of a pilot lost in a training accident, and they had struck up an unlikely but continuing friendship. Shayna had known the Ezrakh all her life, and that he would conduct her wedding was taken for granted.

  Chanting the blessings under the canopy, the Ezrakh looked and sounded no older than he had five years ago at Reuven's circumcision in this same room, in the same rusty black hat and ankle-length threadbare black coat. His voice was weak, yet the hand that held the cup of wine was steady. Yael saw the ring go on Shayna's finger. Michael Berkowitz missed the glass on the first stamp, then crunch] The thing was done. "Mazel tov! Mazel tov!" cried the guests crowding the small flat.

  But there was no outburst of song. Vibrations of romance or erotic excitement were not in the air of this stooped skull-capped professor's second marriage, to his associate in her thirties. Stepping out from under the canopy, Shayna embraced Reuven, leaning on his crutch nearby. She was adopting the crippled boy, Yael thought, and the handiest way to do it was to move in with the professor. Well, anyhow that was that, Shayna was locked away.

  But the next thing Shayna did was to kiss Don Kishote! This struck Yael as not only unladylike, but against the religion. Shayna strode to Yossi through the relatives, neighbors, and friends in her plain gray dress, the white veil thrown back on her head, and planting a kiss on his lips, murmured something to him. Then she and her limping groom went off to a bedroom for the yikhud. Kishote looked after her with an expression that Yael had seen him direct at Aryeh in his baby years, and nowadays at little Eva, but never at her; a wistful tenderness that quite smoothed away his half-humorous half-menacing look. Shayna was disappearing into that bedroom and from his life, Yael perceived, but not to make room for her. The professor's wife would just leave a hole.

  The yikhud cu
stom required the bride and groom to absent themselves in a room, with witnesses to observe that they were sequestered inside long enough - in theory, of course - to consummate the marriage. Meanwhile, all in a

  congenial tumult, the guests divided for the wedding repast by generations; parents at one long table, sons and daughters at the other. "Where to all the devils is Daphna?" Noah asked Dov Luria, who had arrived in uniform just as the ceremony began. It was doctrine in the Luria household that Noah Barak remained the main hope to keep Daphna from going entirely to the dogs. Dov calmly lied that she had a cold. He meant to track Daphna down right after this dowdy affair, to give her hell; and that Shimon Shimon too, if any funny business was going on.

  "She told me she was coming," said Dzecki, "but I figured she would duck out. Too many girls she knows are getting married. Weddings depress her."

  Galia Barak spoke up. "I haven't seen Daphna Luria forever, not since I went to America. Is she still so beautiful?"