by Yaël Dayan
At home, I assured everybody that Daniel was well and that they could see him the following day. Only when my mother left did I call one of Daniel’s friends and asked him to locate Ofra and have her contact me.
I called the hospital, talked to Shula, gave Avi my love and learned from the night nurse at Ward N that Daniel was asleep.
As I switched off the light the phone rang and an unfamiliar voice introduced itself.
“Ofra speaking, is that Amalia?”
“Yes. I really wanted to see you, it’s not for the phone,” I said clumsily.
“He is dead. I know. Arik is dead.”
“Were you told about it?”
“I just knew, when he left on Yom Kippur, I knew. I even inquired once or twice, looked at some lists. When did he die? Was he in pain?”
“We buried him yesterday. He was unconscious in the hospital for a couple of weeks, and unidentified.”
“Are you sure it’s him?” she asked without hope.
“As far as we can tell. There are some things here which belonged to him. Perhaps you would like to have them. A book.”
“Valéry? Monsieur Teste. I gave it to him.”
“And a diary, sort of. Daniel, my husband, has it.”
“I’ll come tomorrow.”
“Better to come to the central hospital. Daniel is wounded. He is in Ward N. I’ll be there, too.”
They don’t announce death by telephone, I thought, yet I just did. She wasn’t his wife or mother, just the girlfriend he came to live for and ended up dying for.
CHAPTER
15
The battle of Suez was the last battle. On Friday morning the newspapers devoted space to analysis rather than reports. The movie houses and theaters announced that performances were resumed, restaurants were reopened and the back page gave the new cease-fire maps in three colors.
There were no obituaries, as casualty lists were not made public yet. Couples whose weddings had been postponed announced the newly set dates.
Leading articles hinted at what was to follow. Things had gone wrong, and we’d have to find out where and why. What two or three weeks ago had been a terrifying supposition was now a certainty, still delicately handled. Having recovered from the initial shock, the long fingers and minds of the media started the search into the phenomenon of failure.
The media, and each of us privately, hesitantly, and with a touch of guilt.
I did the Friday morning shopping in a hurry. There were long lines at the market. Men began to return home on short leaves, and the shopping baskets boasted bottles of wine and beer, ingredients for baking and delicacies. It almost felt like back to normal, yet the same line of housewives, a month ago, had been in a different mood. Now above the chatter and the gossip there was an aura of unfathomable sadness, as if we all suffered a very personal loss.
I arrived at the hospital to find Beni and David in Daniel’s room. For a brief second I felt like an intruder. I kissed Daniel and busied myself in a corner with some things I brought from home. They asked me to join them for coffee.
I had never met David and his language irritated me at first, but he was complimentary and scolded Daniel in a fatherly way that pleased me.
“My ex-chief from the service paid me an early visit,” Daniel said. “He took the diary and the other things you left here. There was quite a scene. He takes responsibility for the bastard, he said, but he’s going to find out exactly what happened and why.”
“Ofra called. She is coming into town later.”
“I don’t envy her when they come around to questioning her.”
“She is not at fault and he is dead, so what’s the use?”
“The use is that next time you don’t put your trust in one man only, and when you choose your men you make sure they don’t run off on the eve of war to fuck someone a thousand miles away from where they are supposed to be,” David contributed.
“It isn’t that simple, is it?” Daniel countered. “And don’t let us act as judges or prosecutors.”
“The witch-hunt hasn’t started yet. Soon the corporals will blame the captains, the captains will accuse the majors, and the generals will have to hide under the skirts of the politicians, and on it will go until we find rest.” Beni wanted to go on but Daniel hushed him.
“We’ve won the war, so it can’t be all bad.”
“Ask the widows and the orphans whether we’ve won the war.”
“There were widows and orphans in other wars.”
“The victory was different. What went wrong here was much deeper. What failed was a concept, in historical terms. Not wrong tactics or one wrong move but a complete misconcept of where we were, what our enemy was like. What our and their capacity was. We’d gone slack all along the line and did we pay for it!”
They were all talking together. Daniel looked feverish, trying to put in a calming word, but I could see his mind was working faster than his tongue, which made him prefer silence after a couple of sentences.
“And this is only a rehearsal for what we are going to say and hear for a long time now,” David summed up. “I am on my way to kiss the wife, then the girlfriend, then a few hours’ sleep and back to sit under a palm tree until we are told that Mr. Kissinger is displeased with us there and we go back to where we started.”
“Minus the canal,” Beni sighed, and got up to leave, too. “I’m off to the prisoners’ hospital. There is a colonel there I helped evacuate and promised to see.”
“Love thy enemy,” David snapped. “Better to visit him in the hospital than in the Chinese Farm.”
“Better yet in Cairo.” I tried to sound light.
“The day should come,” said Daniel, ending the conversation, and the two men left, promising to return.
“Where are the children?” Daniel asked when we were alone.
“Mother will bring them after school. Ofer asked if you were in a cast, Rani did a drawing. I am glad they are familiar with the hospital.”
Daniel was in pain and the nurse gave him an injection. “He shouldn’t get excited,” she said.
I walked over to Ward L. Avi was in a wheelchair in the dining room reading the papers.
“Hello, beautiful. How is Daniel?”
“Come and visit,” I said.
He was cheerful and looked well. He was recuperating fast and began to be bored with the hospital routine.
“Julie called. She misses us all, she fund-raises for us and takes Hebrew lessons. She’ll come for Easter, if I am still here.”
“Will you still be here?”
“I suppose so. For a while. Help lick the wounds and join the choir of repenting idiots. Maybe this war will make me feel at home again. Starting from scratch is always a challenge.”
“We’re not exactly in ruins.”
“Not quite, only morally.”
“So you want to preach, you!”
“No. Just take advantage, if this place will again be something special.”
I hated this kind of talk. The outsider giving a recipe, tasting the dish, criticizing, and “may come again” if we behave or produce something better next time.
I pushed his wheelchair to Ward N. He wanted to visit Daniel and I couldn’t refuse.
I stopped at the doorstep as I heard voices. The door was open and on the chair next to the bed sat a girl in uniform. Her hair was auburn and very long and straight. She was heavy but not fat and I couldn’t see her face. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper. I asked Avi to wait for me.
“Amalia, meet Ofra,” Daniel said.
She turned her face to me. Her eyes were red and swollen, as if she had spent hours crying bitterly. There was something Slavic about her wide bone structure, like a country girl from the Ukraine, but her long fingers ended in well-manicured nails.
We shook hands and I mumbled some words of condolence.
“What a mess,” she said, wiping another unwanted tear.
“He didn’t suffer. He was unconscious.”<
br />
“He suffered enough from the time the war started. Coma must have been a blessing for him. What a mess,” she repeated.
“It’s not your fault.”
“I told him to go back. I said I’d wait till he left the service and returned to settle. He was like a blind person having a retina transplant and discovering the world. As if drugged, he had erased everything that wasn’t us.”
“When did you see him last?”
“Friday morning. Three weeks ago. I went home for Yom Kippur and he said he’d stay in his room. I was to return Sunday morning. When I came back he wasn’t in. I didn’t go into the room. The landlady said he had left, and that she would let me know when he was back. I received a postcard, a one-liner.” She pulled one of the army distributed postcards from her handbag. The familiar handwriting read, “I was right but I apologize and I love you, Arik.”
“And that’s all,” she said.
I remembered Avi at the door. I pushed him in and introduced everybody. Ofra chose to go out with me and we left the men chatting.
She wanted to know about his burns, his last days, the funeral. She would go to the cemetery now, she said. Before she left I felt there was something else she wanted to say.
“There is something that bothers you. Perhaps we can help.”
“What a mess,” she said. “I may be pregnant.”
What was there to say? A mess it was.
“Don’t do anything in haste. I’ll be home later in the evening. You can come and spend the night and we’ll talk more.”
I saw her round figure disappear between the wards’ flat-roofed buildings. A woman confused and ashamed and lonely. Everything seemed to happen for her too late.
Avi and Daniel were obviously talking about me. They stopped and smiled when I entered. I decided not to tell Daniel about Ofra, not until she made up her mind what to do next. There was no hurry.
When the children arrived, Daniel was asleep. They stood in the doorway and watched him, worried. Suddenly I saw Ofer’s mouth twist as if about to cry, and it occurred to me that he thought Daniel was dead. I put on my brightest smile and cheerfully took them by the hand. “Here, let’s wake up father, with a kiss, but carefully as he still has some pains.”
He woke up gently and hugged them both. He touched their heads and faces and hands and comforted the little one who was on the verge of tears. In five minutes they settled on the bedside to tell and listen and I sat in the chair watching when I felt my mother’s hands on my shoulders. She bent and kissed my head, something she hadn’t done in so many years. I didn’t dare look at her face to see how touched she was for fear of embarrassing her.
The Rabbi came into the room with sunset. I lit two candles and he talked to Daniel and the boys. The soldiers liked him for he never preached, just talked and laughed with a certain moral authority or self-confidence which we seemed to be short of these days.
He left and dinner was brought in. The boys shared Daniel’s food and Rani fell asleep next to him on the bed while we all watched the evening news.
It’s been only three weeks was a thought we all shared as the announcer went on summing up the recent events and political developments.
Friday, three weeks ago, we were on our way back home from the synagogue. My mother was in bed reading a book, Arik Berkov was alone in Beer-Sheba planning his life with Ofra, and hundreds of thousands of men couldn’t for one minute imagine they’d be fighting a bitter battle the next day.
“Can I sleep here?” Ofer asked.
“No, son. Go home with mother and come back tomorrow.” Daniel was exhausted and we took the boys and said good-night. Rani was asleep in my mother’s arms, and Ofer clung to me like a baby as we walked into a chilly peaceful night.
My car was parked near Ward L. There was light in some of the windows and someone playing a guitar in the large room. Professor Rothman came out of the ward and stopped to greet us.
“I heard about your husband. How is he?”
“Chest wound, the lungs are not hurt. He is lucky.”
“Indeed. I suppose you’ll be nursing him, but come and see us sometime.”
“Of course. Thanks for everything.”
“I should thank you.”
He walked away, shoulders slightly bent under an unseen enormous burden.
I drove my mother home. Both boys were asleep in the back seat.
“Are you all right?” she asked when I parked in front of her apartment building.
“Yes. No worse than all of us.”
“It’s been a nightmare,” she confessed.
“You are saying it? So cool and composed and organized.”
“It’s no use pretending. It helps for a while, then when it is shattered, it all breaks into a million pieces and even I don’t manage to put them back in order. Will you manage with the boys?”
“Of course. Sleep well.”
I had to wake Ofer up and carry Rani. I put them in my bed, changed and lay between them. Instinctively they cuddled and held me.
CHAPTER
16
I had the vague feeling that someone was gently rapping at the door. The doorbell hadn’t rung but I got up and walked through the dark corridor and opened the front door. Ofra was standing there. She was no longer in uniform and her gray eyes were dry.
She apologized. She had gone to the cemetery, then got a hitch to the kibbutz where her parents lived and back to Tel-Aviv.
“I thought I’d consult with them but it was impossible. They are unhappy as it is. There were three funerals in the kibbutz. It’s like in the family. They think of me as a rock of decency and morality, ‘the good girl,’ and I didn’t dare say anything. Just changed and left.”
I fried some eggs for her and made some coffee and we sat in the cold kitchen.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said.
“You should take your time. It’s all too fresh and whatever you decide is going to affect the rest of your life.”
“He returned for Rosh Hashanah. I don’t know where from. We corresponded now and then, but his letters never indicated a deep attachment. Vague, uncommitted, an occasional touch of humor. Mine were more inviting. I wasn’t sure whether he was fully employed by us. I wrote to England, kept inviting him to come over. I wrote him about the desert, Beer-Sheba, life in the university, the Sinai, my loneliness. I shared with him the love I have for places, nothing personal really.
“I returned from school one day and he was there. In the front garden of the house which I shared with two other students. I promised not to ask questions, not to tell anybody he was there. He said to introduce him, when I had to, as Arik, a newcomer from Britain. His Hebrew was amazingly good. I knew of a vacant room not far from where I lived, and he paid the rent in advance.”
“Did he tell you he was on a job?”
“Only a week or so later. I took him with me to the kibbutz. He met my parents there, and told them he was an engineer thinking of settling permanently in Israel. They encouraged him. He said he was Jewish, which wasn’t quite true, but I didn’t interfere.
“He was on some sort of voyage of self-discovery. When he was alone he seemed tormented, struggling with something. With people, he listened. Most of the kibbutz elders are survivors of concentration camps. For him the Holocaust and the foundation of the state were inseparable. He kept referring to it.
“We made love. He was very gentle. He was very secretive, but I felt I was watching a process I couldn’t define, like a snail sending feelers out, then its head, and then pulling back into the shell.”
“Did he talk of his plans, did he contact anybody?”
“He said he would after the holidays. He was going to look for ‘the chief,’ declare himself the victim of Eros and look for a job here. Once or twice he said he shouldn’t really be here, it was wrong, and if something were to happen he couldn’t forgive himself.”
“You should have known better. You could have encouraged him to report in
time.”
“We were in love. Our world was walks in the wadi looking for desert plants, long talks about nothing and lovemaking. It all seemed innocent and calm and beautiful. We read Paul Valéry together, Monsieur Teste, the personification of total detachment. At first it amused him, and finally he felt sorry for him. I introduced him to Hebrew poetry, too.”
“Sounds idyllic. Where did you think it was leading to?”
“It was short. Ten days was all we had. He said he kept a diary, his needs were minimal, there was something aesthetic in his behavior. Obesity produced decadence, he said. He loved looking at children. It was a new sensation he had, he said.”
“He never mentioned Egypt?”
“Not really. He said once or twice ‘across the border,’ talking about vegetation, or food, or climate. He had money and bought books—history of Israel, geography, poetry. He said he should write to his mother, but he never did. I sound as if we spent years together, it was only ten days. The humanization of Mr. Berkov …”
“It’s time to go to bed. I can’t help you decide about the child, just remember that a child is not a monument to the memory of someone.”
I made the bed in the living room, and she thanked me and fell asleep instantly. It had been a long day for her.
The phone rang at four in the morning. It was Julie, from New York. She was with Leibowitz and they decided to call and find out how Daniel was.
“Bad news travels fast,” I said, forgetting Avi talked to her in the morning. “He will be OK in a week or so.”
“Is Avi staying?”
“You talked to him, didn’t you, at a decent hour, too? How should I know?”
“Should I come over?”
“Julie, you are a big girl and you’ve made decisions in your life, so don’t ask me at four in the morning to advise you.”
“Sorry.” And a pause, a long one for an overseas call. I had nothing to say and she was uncomfortable.
“I am sorry too. Give us some time. Don’t judge and don’t rush us, we are at some kind of a beginning again.”