by Herman Wouk
“You’re absolutely right, motek,” said Daphna. “We’ll just serve the drinks and hors d’oeuvres down in the screening room.”
“Terrific idea,” said Guli.
On all evidence Daphna had actually given her heart to the gorilla. At the Jericho Café she had endured a protracted ragging from her friends about her notorious romance with the rich Haifa kablan, twenty years older than she was, until one night she turned on them, on her feet and shaking her fists, shouting over the rock-and-roll din, “Kvetchers! Envious impotent kvetchers! Good for nothing but to sit around and criticize, and complain, and jeer, and find fault, and mock, and sneer, and eat olives, and drink beer, and belch, and talk about Brecht and Kafka, and feel each other under the table, and pretend you’re in Paris or in New York! Why don’t you go there? Who needs you here? You don’t build like Guli, you don’t work the land, you don’t do anything. If somebody in this crowd turns out to be talented like Shimon he leaves, or to be brave like Yoram he dies. None of you is worth one of Guli Gulinkoff’s farts. Kvetch away for the rest of your lives, I’ve heard your last kvetch!” And out she stalked into the rainy night, never to return. As between Guli and bohemia, she was going with Guli.
The Barkowes arrived early at the villa with the engaged couple, Dzecki and Galia. It was big-hearted of them to show up, for Dzecki and his father were suing Guli over a shopping mall project into which they had sunk some three hundred thousand dollars, with nothing to show for it but a vast brown hole on the outskirts of Haifa. For three years Guli had been assuring them that “it will all hang itself out.” Since the court clerks of Israel were on strike again, it looked as though the thing would not hang itself out for years and years. Meanwhile Guli had their three hundred thousand or had spent it, and he remained unfailingly affable to them. “By all means sue,” he had said with great good cheer. “Maybe the courts will help me pin down those ben-zonahs [sons of whores], the subcontractors. It’s all their fault.”
Nevertheless Dzecki had insisted on coming to Guli’s party. “The greatest favor anyone ever did me,” he said, “was when Guli started up with Daphna. I’m the world’s happiest man, and we’re going there to wish them well. While we’re there we can snoop around, and maybe find our money stashed in the woodwork.” Dzecki’s parents were utterly disgusted with the Holy Land, which, aside from Guli’s prestidigitation with their money, had cost their son an arm. On the other hand they loved their future daughter-in-law, and were much taken with their Barak relatives; they thought Noah dashing, Zev noble, and the women exceptionally warm and nice.
Noah and Julie came with their two babies, both yelling their heads off, and the party split up by sexes, the men going downstairs to get away from the screams and watch the doings at Ben Gurion airport, while the women huddled around in the master bedroom, calming the infants. “So where are Yossi Nitzan and Shayna?” Daphna’s mother asked her. “You said you invited them.”
“Shayna’s at the airport because General Nitzan’s there, commanding the military security for the whole visit,” said Daphna, rocking Julie’s older baby in her arms. “It’s like a mobilization for war, Shayna told me, three thousand troops at the airport alone.”
Julie said, “Look, my Sarah’s quieting down. You have a way with babies, Daphna.” Her Hebrew was much improved, if the French accent was ineradicable.
“Thanks, dear.” Daphna ruefully laughed, the jealousy between them long since forgotten. Daphna was beautiful as ever and Julie was getting fat, but Julie had Noah and Daphna no longer wanted him. “Just don’t say that around Guli. He says he wants five kids. He’s got it all figured out, but who has to have them? Me, and one is frightening enough.”
“The man does think big, doesn’t he, darling?” Daphna’s mother said a shade tartly. The Lurias were not enchanted by the match of their sabra daughter with a gross kablan of vague immigrant background, no matter whether Guli was really rich, or a fast-moving fraud. In banking circles where they had made inquiry, this was a highly moot point.
Galia said, “Me, I’ll settle for one, and quit. Dzecki agrees.”
When the babies were at last quieted and asleep, the women went down broad marble stairs to the screening room. “Just in time,” said Guli, as they settled in the overstuffed leather armchairs. “Golda’s arriving.” On the big projector screen a car with a motorcycle escort was driving up to the airfield gate, and the police were holding back a turbulent crowd.
Julie tapped Noah on the shoulder. “Look, look, chéri, there’s your father.”
It was a long camera shot, but the white hair was unmistakable. As Barak helped Golda from the car, the crowd broke into cheers and applause. “Golda! Golda! Golda!” The camera zoomed in on her looking around amid the general roar and waving in pleased bewilderment.
Benny Luria said, “Now they cheer her. In the war she was a rock, and afterward they spat at her. Sadat’s coming only because she defeated him.”
Over the noise, the excited announcer was trying to describe the scene. “I see tears on Golda’s face,” he enthused, “tears of joy! Surely she never expected this acclaim.”
“Who did?” said Guli. “All you heard after the war was that Golda was a disaster, and that it took her too long to resign.”
The Barkowes, who had never learned Hebrew, were sitting mum through all this, but now his mother exclaimed, “Jack, translate. What is the man saying?”
“Just that the people love Golda, Mom.”
“Now they love her again? I lose track.”
When Ruti Barak and Danny Luria, who had started going out together, arrived in the screening room, the lights of Sadat’s plane were just appearing in the sky. “So you made it,” Benny Luria said to his son. “Come sit by me. You too, Ruti.” The Lurias were hoping that at least this second match with a Barak girl might come to pass. They made an attractive pair, Danny in uniform with his heavy red hair well groomed, Ruti in a swirling pink skirt and white sweater, both tall, both laughing as they came in.
On the screen, as the plane descended in a blaze of search-lights, Arabic markings and ARAB REPUBLIC OF EGYPT became plain to the eye. The airfield was a sea of color with a hundred huge flapping flags, Israeli and Egyptian. Deep lines of soldiers guarded the landing area. A red carpet stretched from the plane ramp to the microphones, where a large military honor guard was drawn up, and the army band waited with brass instruments flashing in the TV floodlights.
The plane swooped in, the wheels touched the tarmac, and scattered applause broke out in the crowd as it slowed down with a roar, turned, and taxied back. A hush fell on the crowd, and in the screening room too. As the plane halted, Guli spoke out in his gravelly baritone. “I tell you what, people. That door will open and a monkey will come out.”
On the black-and-white set in Max Roweh’s Yemin Moshe house the picture was too streaky and blurry even to show the plane. Aryeh was trying in vain, with all his Sayerct Matkhal know-how in electronics, to make it work. His new girlfriend meantime had gone out to look for a TV shop, and she now returned, saying, “Hard to find a store open on Saturday night, but I did.” She reached into the back of the set, fussed with its glowing entrails, and the picture sprang into sharp focus. There was the airplane under floodlights, the exit door still closed.
Yael exclaimed, “You’re a genius, Bruria.” The girl was sixteen or seventeen and not much to look at, short, sallow, unpainted, with heavy brown eyebrows. “Come, Max, it’s working,” she called. “You can see the plane.”
Roweh hurried in from the balcony facing the illuminated Old City walls, the shawl around his neck flying. “Has he appeared?”
“Not yet. Bruria fixed the set.”
“Kibbutzniks are handy,” Aryeh said. “They have to be.”
“We have that Grundig set in the kindergarten,” said Bruria. “The same tube usually goes bad.”
The thronged airfield was singularly quiet. A long time seemed to go by, and the door failed to open. Even the annou
ncer’s frenetic gibbering trailed off. Silence on the field. Silence on the tube. “Pharaoh comes to the children of Israel offering peace,” Max Roweh mused aloud.
“An unusual circumstance,” Yael said.
“Possibly the most unusual circumstance, my dear, in the thirty-odd centuries since we left Egypt. But not in the least supernatural.”
When the door opened there was a disorderly outrush of Egyptian journalists and photographers down the ramp and out on the field. A long pause, the empty door dark; then out stepped Sadat. He stood very erect in a well-tailored gray suit, his face grave, blinking at the strong light that engulfed him. Trumpeters blew a long spine-tingling flourish, and distant guns began to thunder a salute.
“Look how dark he is,” said Aryeh, as other officials were emerging behind him.
“A son of Ham,” said Roweh.
THUMP … THUMP … went the guns.
“I hope he trips coming down those stairs and breaks his neck,” said Bruria.
“The man’s on a peace mission, Bruria,” growled Yael.
“My oldest brother was killed in Suez City,” said Bruria.
“By God, there’s Abba,” exclaimed Aryeh, pointing.
“Where?” Yael peered through glasses she had just started wearing.
He put a finger on two figures in front of the honor guard ranks. “That’s the Ramatkhal, and that’s Abba.”
So it was. Kishote was stiffening at attention as Sadat came down the ramp. Here was the man responsible for the graves of thousands of Jewish soldiers, including hundreds of his own men, yet he felt no hatred for Sadat. Rather, he felt something of Max Roweh’s historical awe, and also a strong sense of unreality, seeing Prime Minister Begin shake hands with the Egyptian and, while flashlight bulbs popped like fireworks, exchange smiles and pleasantries.
Zev Barak, standing beside Golda Meir, did not hear the two leaders’ words, nor Sadat’s greeting to Motta Gur as he returned the Ramatkhal’s salute. With measured step and majestic mien, Sadat came to Moshe Dayan, and these words of his Barak heard. His English was clear and mellifluous. “Ah, General Dayan! You must let me know in advance when you’re coming to Cairo.” Dayan smiled, and Sadat went on, “I will have to lock up all the museums.” The dig at Dayan’s penchant for helping himself to ancient artifacts brought nervous chuckles among the dignitaries. Dayan made no response, and Barak thought his face fell. Sadat then shook hands with Abba Eban, and went on to Arik Sharon. “Ah, the famous Sharon. If you attempt to cross my Canal again I’ll put you in jail.”
Sharon was unfazed and ready with the counterpunch. “Oh, no, I’m Minister of Agriculture now, sir, a man of peace.”
Sadat laughed, moved on, and came face to face with Golda Meir. His countenance hardened, and he shook hands with a bend just short of a bow. “Madame Prime Minister, I’ve wanted to talk to you.”
Looking him full in the face, she said, “Why did you wait so long?”
A shadow, almost a wince, flitted across Sadat’s face. “I’m here now.” He walked ahead and shook hands with cabinet ministers. Side by side with Begin and the President of Israel he stood at attention, while the band played the unfamiliar Egyptian national anthem, followed by “Hatikvah.” He reviewed the honor guard, then drove off with the President and Begin in a long black limousine to cheers. Israel owned no such limousine. It had been borrowed from the American ambassador.
Max Roweh’s Rothschild wife had long ago bought the old Yemin Moshe house and renovated and furnished it with elegant pieces, now somewhat worn. Max had inherited it with her Bentley and her loyal old driver, minus two fingers from a mortar misfire in the Six-Day War. After taking Eva to school next morning, the driver reported that all Jerusalem was going mad with Egyptian flags and welcoming placards, and throngs were lining up to glimpse their erstwhile foe on his way to the Knesset. So the Rowehs set out early in dense traffic, and crawled toward the Knesset in a bluish miasma of fumes.
“Let me say, my dear,” Roweh remarked, “that the way you’re taking on Edith’s funds and boards is a joy. The managers tell me that they’re delighted to be rid of me.”
“Ha! They’re appalled. They were cats in cream, Max. Now the party’s over.”
His pouchy eyes twinkled through thick glasses. “Do you suppose I wed you for your charms?”
“No, you old serpent. You married an executive director for Edith’s charities.”
“Mea culpa. It did occur to me that you might wield a sharp pencil.”
Outside the Knesset, an enormous unruly crowd, hemmed in by iron barriers and doubled police lines, was pressing toward the entrance gate. Yael had never seen Knesset security so tight. As cars trickled through, the passengers’ identities and passes were minutely scrutinized by frozen-faced special police. Suspicious guards were checking and rechecking all visitors on foot, however harmless-looking, as they passed inside. In the great chamber only half the Knesset members were at their desks but the galleries were already packed. Yael saw her nephew Danny Luria in a reserved front row with the Barak girls, and the American with the empty pinned-up sleeve. She told Max Roweh the story of Dzecki Barkowe while the Knesset floor filled up and the cabinet members took their seats at tables in front.
“A poignant story,” said Roweh. “Most American Zionists are prudent enough to keep their distance. A gallant young man, but he should have known better.”
“I’m puzzled how those kids managed to get front seats,” she said. But in fact, it was no puzzle. On coming in they had encountered Colonel Amos Pasternak, pacing the main corridor holding a walkie-talkie. With a quick word to Ruti he had slipped them in there.
In a glare of TV lighting, after a few brief formalities, the President of Egypt mounted to the podium under the portrait of Herzl, to deliver an unsmiling uncompromising address, taking the most extreme Arab positions on all issues, with a threatening undertone. The warm excited atmosphere in the chamber chilled by the minute. “Who wrote this for him, the Politburo?” whispered Yael, her heart misgiving her, her vision fading of Aryeh living free of military service.
Roweh whispered back, “Churchill: ‘In defeat, defiance …’ ”
Dzecki Barkowe was staring glassily at Sadat. He had long since blanked out of memory the night that now came flooding back in all its horror — the moment of glory when the traffic first went roaring over the bridge, then the shattering explosions, and his awakening in the hospital bus with a bloody bandaged agonizing stump where his right arm had been.
Danny Luria’s reaction to Sadat was utterly different. He never talked about it afterward. He came to the Knesset fearing that Sadat would be a convincing peacemaker, that the wars would all be over, his skill as a Phantom pilot irrelevant, his years of training wasted, the chance gone to avenge his brother in combat with Arab pilots; fearing, moreover, that his fighter-pilot prowess would no longer matter to girls like Ruti Barak. Danny was not yet twenty-one. An infatuation with Ruti was sweeping him, with a vision of having a son and calling him Dov, so as to give the mingled Luria and Barak strain the life that Dov’s death had cut off. The more uncompromising and belligerent Sadat now sounded, the more Danny cheered up, while most of the hearers sank into gloom. He paid little mind to Menachem Begin’s ad-lib response, full of Holocaust and Bible references as usual. The historic moment had passed when Sadat sat down.
In the crush of visitors headed out of the chamber afterward through lines of soldiers and police, Danny and Ruti went by Amos Pasternak, stationed at a staircase and surveying the scene with a cold commanding eye. Amos gave the willowy Ruti a brief wave and a fetching grin.
“How well do you know him?” Danny inquired.
“Amos Pasternak? Oh, not well.”
“He seems to like you.”
“Him? I think he likes them older.” The bitter twist of Ruti’s mouth would have suited a woman of forty.
Not far behind them in the slow-moving crowd, Yael said to Max Roweh, “Why are you so quiet?”
“You haven’t said a word for a quarter of an hour.”
Roweh drily laughed. “I’m trying to come to terms with a very strange thought, Yael, which may be nonsense, but then again, may be the truth.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s just that of all the unusual turns in Zionist history, this is the most unusual — that Islam may have produced a new Saladin, a Saladin of world peace.”
40
Moshe
After six years, Zev Barak was once more en route to Washington, because Moshe Dayan had decided he wanted somebody along who wasn’t burned out, angry, and stale at this next-to-last stage of the tortuous Camp David negotiations. The first meeting at Camp David in September 1978, inconclusive and at times stormy, had produced tentative “Accords”; but peace between enemies who have warred for decades is no simple business when a conqueror is not dictating the terms, and since Sadat’s flight to Jerusalem more than a year of the harshest wrangling had by now intervened. Foreign Minister Dayan, the former world hero, in disfavor at home and discredited even in his own party for serving in Begin’s cabinet, had been at the center of the risky abrasive dealings throughout; and he was returning with some reluctance to Camp David for yet another go-around with Sadat’s Foreign Minister.
His old confidant Sam Pasternak could not very well come, being a Knesset member. Sam had suggested Zev Barak, and Dayan had at once telephoned him at Rafael. Before his abrupt departure, Barak had tried to call Emily Halliday at the old McLean house, for he knew her father had died and she had gone there from Paris to settle his affairs. But she had never been in.