Three Weeks in October

by Yaël Dayan

It was rather irregular. For all we knew, the man in the coffin could be someone else. The autopsy didn’t disclose much, and the service only confirmed there was an Eric Berkov working for them. They wouldn’t give details, they would go into it next week or later. The man in charge was himself wounded and in the hospital.

  It occurred to me that nobody bothered to find out whether he was Jewish. The name was Jewish, all right, or could be, but these were not ordinary days.

  “Does it matter?” the young doctor said. “He was killed in our war. He had no business fighting in the Sinai if he wasn’t Jewish. There are no relatives or friends, and if one day this turns out to be an error, he can be transferred. We are not burning him or dissecting him, just letting him rest in peace with honors reserved to dead soldiers.”

  The command car moved and we followed, slowly and patiently. Not since Amnon’s burial had I been to the cemetery. I bought flowers at the gate and we parked the car. I felt numb, as if it was all a bad dream or a surrealistic movie. The ceremony was short, and I could hear the words echo back from other graves and other groups of mourners. I laid the flowers next to the provisory sign saying “Arik Berkov” and we walked back to the car to listen to radio news. I don’t know what made me say it but I did. “My husband is in Suez.”

  “What brigade is he with?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a feeling I had, that’s all.”

  “Try a healthier one.”

  “Do you know any girls’ names beginning with ‘O’?”

  “Why? Are you expecting a baby daughter?”

  “This Arik Berkov. There is a girl in his diary. She lives in Beer-Sheba, he calls her ‘O.’ He was somewhere abroad and returned here to be with her.”

  “Put an ad in the paper. Could be Orna or Olga or Ophina or Ofra or Osnat.”

  “I once knew a girl called Ohela,” the other doctor volunteered.

  “I’ll wait for my husband, he may know more.”

  “What else was there in the diary?”

  “Not much. Apologetic mostly. Full of clues to someone who knows and almost meaningless otherwise.”

  Back in the ward I did some errands for the head nurse, and drove home in time to prepare lunch for the boys. My neighbor’s husband was home on a twenty-four-hour leave. She asked me in to share a cake. She looked pretty and young and I felt happy for her. And jealous. I was beginning to understand something profound. Something I had ignored or taken for granted, about myself and Daniel, the family and the depth of feelings and dependence.

  My mother came over, but I was impatient with her. She took the boys out for a walk and I sat at the desk with Berkov’s diary again.

  He had to see “O,” he wrote. If he had a strong feeling for her, and if it were mutual, nothing else mattered. What’s more, there was nothing much in what he called “the water business,” and no signs of a crisis that should prevent him from taking a few days off. A theory followed, about the space his work took in his life, or could, should it ever change. Were there “right” proportions, percentages that should be devoted to a job, a family, a country, friends, pleasures? What happened when the proportions changed unexpectedly? How flexible could one be and allow infiltration of one element into the space of another?

  This all was in the last few pages. The last entry was carefully written, well spaced and short.

  “After all, I am not where I am supposed to be, and should be. ‘O’ is the only one who may understand it. The others may rightly feel I let them down and failed. There are no excuses other than the complexity of the human heart. For myself, I shall join the fight and give it the little I have.”

  He gave it his life, which to him wasn’t much in the first part of the diary. Only the last few pages indicated a desire to be more than a tool, to dare to have an emotional life and fulfill himself other than within “the water business.”

  My mother brought the children back and had to leave. The sun was setting and I closed the shutters and windows.

  “Is father coming home tonight?” Ofer asked.

  “I doubt it. We may hear from him though. If he calls, I’ll wake you up.”

  I fed them, watched them in the bath and tucked them in bed. Ofer wanted a sad story with a happy ending. I knew so many happy stories with a sad end, as many as the gravestones in the cemeteries and the beds in the hospitals. Only the summing-up of these sad ends, if the national history could be personified into “Once upon a time there lived a sad young man called Israel,” could produce the sad story with the happy end he wanted.

  We settled for Cinderella, my own version of it, and they were soon asleep.

  And so was I when the phone rang.

  Instinctively I looked at my watch. It was midnight.

  “Is that Amalia?” a voice I couldn’t place asked.

  I think I didn’t answer right away. Then I managed, “Something happened to Daniel!”

  “Not to worry. He was wounded. No vital organs hurt. I’m taking him to Faid now, and he’ll be flown to a hospital.”

  “Who are you? Is he alive?”

  “I am David. Brigade commander. I had the pleasure of his company and the displeasure of his participation in the Suez battle. He is only wounded. That’s the truth. We don’t announce death on the phone these days.”

  “Please, can he be brought to the central military hospital, now?”

  “I can try. I am a bad travel agent and it isn’t up to me, but I’ll try.”

  “You are telling me the truth, aren’t you? Is it a head or spine wound?”

  “No. And he is conscious and functioning. We’ve all seen much worse, so consider yourself lucky.”

  “I do. Thank you.”

  He hung up. The only thought in my head was Daniel is alive. He is coming home. The rest was mechanical. I tried to call Beni, but he wasn’t there. I called the hospital’s emergency ward.

  Yes, they were expecting some helicopters, but weren’t sure when. Not before an hour or so.

  I put on my uniform and combed my hair. I called my mother.

  “No, don’t come over. The children will be all right. No, I don’t know where he was wounded. Yes, he was conscious. No, I don’t know what he was doing there. What does anyone do in a battlefield?”

  Hell, I felt she was so scientific and cold. Void of hatred but not exactly flowing with love.

  I touched Ofer’s shoulder. He was a light sleeper.

  “Listen, son, your father was wounded. He will be all right, and he is being flown to the hospital. Go back to sleep now. I’m going to meet him and return quickly. Take care of your brother.”

  “Will you be here in the morning?”

  “Yes. Long before you wake up, and we’ll visit father together tomorrow.”

  I doubted that it was wise of me to leave him with the anxiety and ignorance, but I was confident he could cope.

  I stared in the mirror in the corridor. If Daniel were conscious and awake, I had to look my best. My eyes were shining, fully awake, but my face was drawn and pale. I applied the lightest touch of makeup to my cheeks and tried a cheerful smile. It didn’t belong and I pulled a face and walked out.

  Daniel was alive, and I could figure out now the process we all went through. We did expect the worst, and when it happened we were almost ready for it. Next to it everything was a valued gift, a safe return. Wounded, burnt, deformed—we’ve somehow been there in our subconscious, built up defenses, learned to live with it long before it happened.

  I knew better than many others what injuries involved. I’d witnessed the pain, the despair, the shame and the pride. I knew the patience one needed until a total recovery was achieved, or adjustments were made to a lifetime handicap. Rina lost Amnon and watched her son, Uri, recuperate; Nadav’s family slowly adjusted to his deformity, watched when the bandages were removed and were grateful to have him alive. The head and spine wounds were something else. More despair hung over the brain and head wounds ward than anywhere else. The fear of change in
personality, of the unknown in the labyrinth of the gray matter, couldn’t be easily overcome by patient doctors and kind nurses. Relatives of men shot in the head envied the amputees and the burnt. Even bad luck and misery had their degrees.

  There was no activity in the landing site. It was a clear night, cold and moonless. In the little wooden hut a row of stretchers on wheels awaited the next landings and several youths were playing backgammon in a corner. They were high school students, doing their bit at night and studying during the day. Soon they too would be drafted and would believe that it could never happen to them. The miracle of healthy repression.

  “I thought you were working days now,” a doctor I knew greeted me.

  “My husband was hurt. He may be flown here tonight.”

  “Suez, I suppose. What a bloody battle. About two hundred casualties, eighty or so dead. Is he badly hurt?”

  “I don’t know. They said he was conscious, we’ll soon see.”

  “That’s why you look so pretty tonight.”

  I blushed. It sounded horrible. Women should dress up for dates, to go dancing or romancing in the moonlight. Girls should pretty themselves to celebrate, to attract, to share a joy with someone. Here I was, my hair washed and eyes bright as if expecting a proposal, to welcome an injured man on a stretcher, attached to infusion tubes, bloodstained and defeated.

  But he was alive, I kept saying to myself, and what can be a better, more elementary cause for celebration than the knowledge that it’s a hospital bed and not a grave he is coming home to. Two senior doctors joined us.

  “Two helicopters left Refidim half an hour ago. They won’t be long. Surgery is at standby, but we don’t have a list. Head wounds were flown to Hadassah in Jerusalem, so I suppose we’ll get the burns and orthopedic cases.”

  There was no use speculating. Daniel would soon be here and into surgery and all my unasked questions would be answered.

  “You worked in Ward L?” the senior doctor asked me.

  “I still do, but I am waiting for my husband here.”

  “I see. What happened to the unidentified case you had?”

  “He died yesterday. We think we know who he was, though.”

  “Is Leibowitz still with you?”

  “Left today, I think. Back to his New York practice.”

  “An excellent surgeon he was. Could use him in peacetime, too.”

  They chatted and sipped coffee until we heard the familiar sound of the circling and landing aircraft.

  The teen-agers pushed the stretchers, turning their heads away from the gust of wind the rotors produced. The junior doctors followed, and I stood behind a couple of nurses, as close as I could without pushing my way to the stairs that touched the asphalt.

  Two soldiers stepped down supporting each other and smiling. They walked into the hut and the next case was brought down with great care. It wasn’t Daniel, though I couldn’t see the bandaged face well.

  The following stretcher was carried out and laid on the mobile one. The limp left hand was hanging and the right part of the body was tightly bandaged. A blanket covered his body but the face was there, Daniel’s face, unshaven and gray and tired, but the youthful eyes met mine and he even managed a smile.

  I let them carry him in and I followed. I kissed his forehead and touched his lips.

  “It’s nothing,” he whispered. “You. needn’t worry.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “Not unbearable. You are beautiful. How are the boys?”

  “Waiting for you. They’ll take you to surgery now. I’ll wait until you are out and into a ward, then go home to them. You’ll be asleep, and I’ll be there when you wake up.”

  “You talk like a regular nurse.” He smiled.

  There was too much to say, so we said nothing more. The doctor examined him, almost casually, and he was wheeled on to surgery.

  “The bullet has to be removed. Lucky to have it just where he did, above the vital organs.”

  I entered the surgery unit and sat in the waiting room. The strong neon light bothered me and I shut my eyes. It could have been a road accident, it was that unexpected. War was on, but mostly over, and Daniel was still at home two days ago, frustrated and tense. Everything that had happened before, happened to other people, not to us, and here I was, in the surgery waiting room and Daniel’s chest had to be opened and an Egyptian bullet extracted from it.

  Half an hour later an overtired surgeon I knew told me it was over. Daniel was given a blood transfusion, and would be in the general surgery ward by morning. There was nothing more I could do there.

  A pale dawn light was a good change from the neon light. The air was soft as feathers gently brushing against my cheeks. Everything seemed so precious. The new grass, the amber-colored leaves on the path, the chirping of sparrows. It’s ridiculous, I thought. Now that my husband is in the hospital, has seen, once again, the horrors and felt the agony of another battle, I am at peace. Somehow I felt that ends met, that I had come to terms with our predicament. I wasn’t “proud of him,” I just felt that he had preserved his integrity in a way I could well understand. He wasn’t careless with his life. The commitment he had was integrally bound with love for us. I wondered if the same could be said for Arik Berkov.

  CHAPTER

  14

  Daniel didn’t wake fully until late in the afternoon. My mother resumed her voluntary grandmotherly duty, and I sat in Ward N watching Daniel toss and turn in his sleep. All the intimacy in the world can’t remove a slight sense of guilt when watching someone who isn’t aware of being watched. Even more guilt when the person is Daniel who was always, I felt, a little bit on guard, never caught unprepared, never short of an answer, very careful at being as faultless as humanly possible. Here he lay, pale and unshaven, muttering in his sleep, moaning whenever a wrong turn hurt his shoulder, attached to a drip bottle and helpless.

  He would have been happier to wake up alone, and I thought of leaving and waiting elsewhere. I never felt this way in Ward L. They were patients. Wounded soldiers who needed care or attention or urine bottles, and I was one of the girls in white. Most of them I would never see again.

  Ward N was larger than L and less sterile. People were coming and going, and one of the rooms was reserved for civilians who couldn’t wait for their ailments till the war was over.

  When the nurse arrived with the afternoon tea, Daniel opened his eyes.

  When did I last look at his eyes so closely? On our wedding day, in the maternity ward when Ofer was born, when this war started …

  His dry lips held a smile, but the eyes were sad and void of luster. All the things I wanted to say seemed flat and trite or melodramatic and uncalled for, so I touched his good hand and burst into tears.

  He watched me cry and watched me relax and wipe my eyes. I tried to smile and cried again.

  The surgeon walked in, and I composed myself. He looked at the chart attached to the bed in the small single room and wrote something on it.

  “You’ll need a lot of rest. Don’t try to do anything you don’t have to. The pain should recede in a couple of days.”

  “How long do I have to be here?”

  “Are you in a hurry? We don’t know yet. The bullet by miracle missed the lung but the chest is a sensitive area. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  The doctor left, and Daniel was relieved.

  “I wonder how much they really know. So much seems guesswork and general trust. They are always so hopeful and optimistic that it makes you wonder.”

  He talked about the children. I promised to bring them over the next day. A nurse came in and helped him wash and shave. When she left, I told him about Arik Berkov. I told him all I knew, all I remembered of the diary and letters. I talked about the sad funeral, and I asked about the missing clues.

  “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Even the banality of ‘a small world’ won’t do here. Coincidence, maybe. Providence? I doubt it.”

  I wasn’t sure w
hat he was talking about.

  “I went to look for him in Suez, after Gideon was wounded. The day he died, I was crawling into stinking rooms in a Suez suburb, with a flask of whiskey in my pouch, looking for him.”

  “He wrote about a job undone. He was in love, I think, a girl whose name began with O. He came for the holidays to be with her.”

  “Ofra. Very touching. Gideon could have been killed, so could I. One bit of information at the right moment could have saved many lives, if not more than that.”

  “What’s the use, he is dead now.”

  “And he was the example of detachment, of duty above all. No human ties, no emotions, guided by logic and reason, a perfect operator.”

  “Which proves something?”

  “Not really. It’s rather ironic. I was determined to find him and convince him to live a normal life. Persuade him to let go of the codes and radio messages and clandestine existence, to find a home if not a homeland, and a girl, and join humanity. He beat me to it. Only the timing was foul. The timing and the end result.”

  “We could find Ofra? She may be somewhere waiting for him.”

  “Yes, you can find Ofra. She is on file somewhere.”

  He asked for the diary and the evening papers. Supper was wheeled in, and I watched him eat without appetite. He must have sensed my disappointment. I felt as if a big wave had brought us together, momentarily, and another bigger one swept us apart.

  “Amalia,” he said very gently, “I love you. I have been somewhere, and I returned with many questions, which I have to answer, but I returned to you and the children, never to leave again.”

  He was being truthful, but it was also a way of saying he wanted to be left alone.

  I bent to kiss him, and with one hand he pulled me toward him and kissed my lips as if we were the only two souls saved from a terrible catastrophe.

  I respected Daniel’s need for privacy, but I was hurt. He was a man in pain, not only physical pain, and he loved me and cared, yet he couldn’t, or didn’t choose to, share his pain. Yet there was something new between us, a new knowledge of what really mattered, a pact of the survivors, of those who have been through a terrible wreckage and have emerged hurt but together in order to start anew, reborn not as innocent babies but as disillusioned grown-ups trying to rekindle a fire from ashes and grow in its light and heat.