Herman Wouk - The Glory

by The Glory(Lit)

  The memo wandered off into Cunningham's archaeology hobby, his religious notions, and the Communist threat. There was much about "the three Abrahamic faiths"-Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - and their common root in the land between the sea and the Euphrates. All modern boundaries in the region, Cunningham wrote, were tissue-paper fictions; either sanded-over former Ottoman border markers, or arbitrary lines drawn by the departed Europeans. In nature, in

  archaeology, and in religion it was all one land, God's dwelling place, the primal Eden. The brotherhood of man had first been prophesied in this land. The three Abrahamic faiths had spread the vision to half the earth. The Return of the Jews to the Temple Mount would signal that the Second Coming was at hand, when the vision of Abraham would go out to the rest of humankind, and usher in world peace.

  Then came the summing-up he had long ago mentioned to Barak.

  Conclusion: How It Will All End

  You asked me to write down, Admiral, what I said over brandy as we were talking the other night about the Suez War. I've tried to do so. The coming of the Messiah is not, as I say, the business of the Central Intelligence Agency. However, political trends in this volatile region, which contains the major reserves of the world's energy, are indeed a prime concern.

  The pacifying of the region can only come, I believe, on the religious basis of the oneness of the region, and the underlying Abrahamic bedrock. Christianity and Islam fought each other to a bloody standstill in the Middle Ages, while despising their teachers, Our Lord's people, the Jews, as a dry dead fossil of history. When those dry bones revive and stand again on Mount Zion, that will signal a new political time, an epochal if slow reconciliation, a digging down to the common bedrock, so as to defeat Marxist atheism and forestall the nuclear devastation of the planet. The Second Coming may be a matter of my personal belief. But I predict that when the clouds of polemic and ancient prejudice clear, the New Politics of the Sacred Region will emerge, with a burst of peace and prosperity beyond all present imagining.

  Christian Cunningham

  This was followed by a red-inked scribble: "Chris-You should only live so long. Redman."

  Cunningham had written in pencil underneath, in a wavering hand,

  January 12, 1979

  Zev Barak-You once said you'd like to read this. Here it is. After 23 years, I still think this is how it will all end. But then, I'm departing a believing Christian.

  Farewell from the far shore,

  Christian Cunningham

  The date was four days before his death. Barak's eyes smarted from reading the faded typescript in the cone of dim light from the overhead hole. He let the papers fall on his lap, musing for a long time on this strange farrago. A man of paradox, poor Cunningham: a devout believer in Jesus Christ, and as good a friend as the Jews had had in the labyrinth of American bureaucracy. Barak had never talked religion with him, but what could Chris have thought of a Pope who averted his eyes and kept silent while the Germans were massacring European Jewry? What had he made of the inquisitors who burned Jews in public squares, all in the name of his Savior, well, into the eighteenth century? Secretive, brilliant, obsessively suspicious, naively believing; Christian Cunningham was gone, taking his contradictions with him to the far shore. He had fathered Emily. Rest in peace, Chris.

  Under Cunningham's farewell Barak wrote one word in Hebrew, halevai, and- settled back to sleep.

  When President Carter came to Cairo and Jerusalem to iron out the last stubborn wrinkles in the treaty himself, Dayan did not consult Barak again. Nor did he invite him to Washington for the signing ceremony. Barak watched on TV the historic three-way handshake on the White House lawn, noting how different their demeanors were: Carter all smiles at a foreign policy triumph he badly needed, Sadat formidable and stiff, as though sensing the life-threatening danger of his move, and Begin genially stealing the show with a coup de theatre straight from the Yiddish stage, putting on a large black yarmulke to declaim Psalm 126 in Hebrew. Carter, Sadat, the VIPs and the media people listened uncomprehending; Barak

  of course understood the words, and why Begin had chosen this psalm.

  When the Lord returned us to lion, We were like dreamers. Then our mouths were filled with laughter, And our tongues with song...

  And so on, every word to the last.

  He who went forth weeping, Bearing sacks of seed, Will surely come rejoicing, Bringing in his sheaves.

  Was this the Prime Minister of Israel? This was an old skullcapped Polish Jewish tailor saying t'hilim, psalms; a Holocaust survivor, praising God for the confirmed miracle of the Return. It was a gesture at once awesome and faintly embarrassing, a final steamrollering of the old galut whisper, "What will the goyim say?"

  At a party in Jerusalem not long afterward, Eliakim met Barak and told him about the gala dinner that had followed, in a tent outside the White House. "The Night of the Big Givers," Eliakim jocosely called it. Fifteen hundred people sat at small tables in a deafening din of chatter and music, he said, mostly American Jewish leaders with a sprinkling of Washington notables, freezing in the March night air or roasting if too close to the electric heaters. Not knowing how kosher the kosher food was, Eliakim ate nothing and yearned to leave early, but he feared offending a Vermont senator and three UJA chairmen he sat with. When he saw Dayan get up from the table of Cyrus Vance and the President of Israel, he seized the excuse to follow his Foreign Minister, and walked with him through a bitter cold wind to their hotel. Dayan spoke not a word until in the elevator he invited Eliakim into his room. "What a balagan that was, eh?" he said as they came in. "Would you like to order something to eat? Sardines, cheese?"

  "I'm okay, Minister, thanks."

  Dayan rattled a box of Oreo cookies at him. "These are good. Have some."

  Though he avoided American packaged foods, not sure of what was in them, Eliakim took an Oreo, but did not eat it. Dayan ate several, staring out the window at Lafayette Square and the floodlit White House. From a pile of hardcover books on a table he picked up a copy with his smiling much younger face on the cover. "Eli, have you ever glanced at this?"

  "I've read it twice, Minister. It's a classic."

  "Don't exaggerate, it's just a plain story of my life. I had no time to be elegant. I have to sign these for ten big givers back there in that tent." He sat down and penned brief Hebrew on the flyleaf: To the good Jew Eliakim, from Moshe. "They'll get nine, and let them fight it out."

  "Thank you, Minister. I'll treasure this."

  "Well, good night." Dayan opened another copy of his life story, and as Eliakim left he was reading it and eating Oreos.

  Eliakim recounted all this to Barak on the narrow flower-lined terrace of a flat belonging to a Hebrew University professor, while behind them a stereo played Beethoven over the party talk, and from the apartment below rock-and-roll music blasted the Jerusalem night. "I still don't know just why," Eliakim added, "but I've never felt sorrier for anybody."

  "On television you hardly saw Dayan," Barak said. "It was all Begin."

  "Yes, I thought of that at the signing. Not the New Jew, the famed sabra warrior, the effacer of the Wandering Jew image," said Eliakirh. "Just an old shtetl Jew."

  Eliakim left Barak sitting alone on the terrace, thinking long melancholy thoughts about Moshe Dayan, and about the river of time swiftly flowing away. Amos Pasternak came out in a short-sleeved shirt, carrying a Pepsi-Cola. He dropped in a lounge chair, "Hi. Noisy in there."

  "Amos, tell me about Toulon."

  A nuclear reactor assembly that France was committed to ship to Iraq had been blown up in a warehouse outside the seaport. The incident was causing an international stir.

  "Well, Zev, you've heard the latest, haven't you? The French say every key item was destroyed by precise planting of plastic explosives. An inside job of some sort."

  "Did we have anything to do with it?"

  Amos's round face wrinkled in an innocent smile. "Why, an outfit nobody's heard of is claiming respons
ibility. 'The Group of French Ecologists.' "

  "And how much of a respite does this give us? A couple of years?"

  "Dubious. The French can replace the stuff out of their own reactor reserves. Saddam Hussein will grunt, 'Deliver, or no cut-rate oil.' They'll deliver."

  "A year, anyway?"

  "Well, a year, yes."

  "I tell you, Amos, Camp David or no Camp David, we are in great peril. This Iraqi reactor frightens me as I haven't been frightened since June '48."

  "What happened then?" inquired Amos. "I was three years old."

  "We were at the end of our rope. If the Arabs had kept going for one more week, they'd have overrun us and ended the whole thing then and there, for good and all. We caught our breath during the cease-fire, made it through the war, and here we are. But two atomic bombs exploding over Tel Aviv and Haifa would spell doomsday. Poor Golda used to call me Mr. Alarmist. By my life, I only try to see things as they are."

  Amos said soberly, "Well, this Toulon business puts off the day."

  "It's not a solution."

  "Not in the long run, no."

  Barak gestured toward the party. "Have you seen my Ruti? She came with Danny Luria."

  "No, I just got here."

  "Amos, just between the two of us, aren't you giving Ruti a hard time?"

  "I don't mean to."

  "If you didn't see her at all, that would be one thing. But you do."

  "I like her."

  "She more than likes you. Did she tell you that she intends to apply to the California Institute of Technology?"

  "Cal Tech? Oo-ah! No."

  "Well, she's out to live my dream that failed, and become a scientist. She's a math and physics whiz like my brother

  Michael, and amazingly ambitious. If she does go to California, will that end it?"

  A silence, then, "Zev, can you picture what it's like to be in love with a woman in another country, a woman you can only see rarely, a woman with kids, a love which won't die, which has nothing to do with casual romance, which is it? Can you picture something like that?"

  "Well, I'm getting on, but I can try," said the White Wolf. "So what?"

  "I'm up for operations officer, Northern Command, and-"

  "Why, that's tremendous, Amos."

  " -and I know I'm coming to a crossroads. It's tough."

  "Is this woman a widow?" Amos shook his head. "A divorcee?"

  "No. Married. A lot older than I am. Three children."

  "Alleh myless [All the attractions]," said Barak.

  It drew a sad laugh from Amos Pasternak. He stood up. "Ruti couldn't be sweeter or prettier or smarter. Cal Tech! I bet she gets in, too. Danny Luria is lucky."

  "Not while you're seeing Ruti, he isn't."

  "Are you telling me to stop seeing Ruti?"

  "Absolutely not."

  "Or to give up the lady?"

  "That only you can decide."

  "You're a big help," said Amos. "I appreciate your frankness. By your, leave, I'll now go and look for Ruti."

  "With my blessing," said her father. "It was just a quiet word."

  "Yes, I've got the idea."

  41

  Doomsday

  I

  THE PRIME MINISTER

  invites

  Major General & Mrs. Barak to the Weekly Tanakh Circle

  Topic

  Isaiah and Deutero-Isaiah: Contrasts in Style At The Residence November 27, 1979

  8 p.m. after Sabbath Please bring this card

  Nakhama showed the card to her husband. "Oy vavoi," she exclaimed. "It sounds stupefying. Do I have to go?"

  "No, but I'd better show up."

  "Why does he ask us to a thing like that, Zev?"

  "I have no idea." A fib for security reasons. This was about the reactor. The Tanakh Circle was an unobtrusive cover for the meeting to come afterward.

  The small scholarly audience listened raptly to three experts on the Book of Isaiah, while the few military men in mufti struggled against falling asleep. When the other guests left they gathered in Begin's office, where he laid aside the yarmulke he had worn for the Bible talk. "Rabotai [Gentlemen]," he said, "this is a secret informal consultation. No minutes will be taken."

  He nodded at the chief of the Mossad, a small man in a brown knitted sweater, who might have been another Isaiah savant by the look of him. He talked about the rapid progress of the reactor outside Baghdad since the Toulon setback. France and Italy were again supplying technicians and main components. The West Germans, perhaps ashamed of doing it openly, were selling elements to Brazil for resale to Iraq. The uranium was coming from France, Brazil, and Portugal, and Iraq had demanded and was receiving the uranium in certain chemical forms that most readily yielded plutonium, the bomb stuff. Building a reactor for electric power made no sense, Iraq was awash in oil. Barak's background in chemistry enabled him to follow all this in detail. The implied short time frame appalled him.

  Sunk in his chair, the Prime Minister listened with closed eyes. When he opened them, they were glazed and bloodshot. In a weak weary voice he said he saw only a few alternatives. Israel could try harder with diplomacy to stop the Europeans from rushing Iraq into a nuclear capability. Or it could hope with its superior air force to deter Iraq when it went nuclear. On the other hand, was an attack from the air feasible, to take out the whole complex? Or was a commando raid on the pattern of Entebbe the answer? He concluded, "I've asked the chief of planning branch to address the commando option."

  The graying Don Kishote stood up to give his somber report, and Barak had a memory flash of the lanky immigrant boy on a mule at Latrun. A far cry! To begin with, Yossi asserted, Entebbe and Baghdad were not comparable. At Entebbe the objective had been a civilian airport, defended only by a PLO terrorist gang and some local soldiery. The Iraqi complex was a hardened military target, heavily fortified, strongly guarded, ringed with antiaircraft and ground defense forces. A commando raid in brigade strength, with heavy

  vehicles and main battle tanks, might have a fifty-fifty chance of wiping out the complex, with a large cost in dead, wounded, and prisoners. The chance of a surprise success with such a raid was zero.

  Benny Luria spoke next about the air attack option, for he was in charge of the Etzion air base in Sinai near Eilat, whence an air strike would depart. In his full blond beard Benny looked much aged, and sad with good reason. He had been called out of retirement and given the mournful task of liquidating the base, perhaps the most advanced in the world, as part of the Camp David treaty; having been in on its construction, his job now was to demolish it so utterly.that the Egyptians could never use Etzion against Israel. None of the aircraft on hand, Luria said - Skyhawks, Kfirs, Phantoms, and F-15s - were right for the job. The Phantoms could be refueled in the air, but over enemy territory that was a high-risk gamble. As for the new small superplane, the F-16, it might not be delivered in time, and anyway the Americans gave its range as much too short.

  Begin nodded. "You're eliminating the air attack option,

  then."

  "Well, let me say, Prime Minister, that the Americans are cautious in stating range. Equipped with special fuel tanks, the F-16s might just make it, but without testing them we

  can't know."

  "Zev Barak." Begin turned abruptly to him. "What will the Americans do if we destroy the reactor?"

  "Prime Minister, the Americans admire venturesome boldness, the cowboy myth, but if it's a fiasco, with civilian deaths in Baghdad, we can expect bad trouble."

  "How bad?" Begin sounded a shade plaintive.

  "No support in the inevitable UN condemnation. Halting of F-16 deliveries. Cutoff of all aid for years, if not for good.''

  The bald head dipped slowly and tiredly, and Begin asked the rotund Sam Pasternak, markedly fattened by a happy marriage, what France would do if many French technicians were killed. "They'll break diplomatic relations, Prime Minister, and push hard in the UN for sanctions against Israel, maybe for our expulsion." Pa
sternak paused. "I don't believe they'll send their air force to punish us." This arid comment elicited wry grins all around.