by Herman Wouk
“Moshe, there are three more days. You’re being leaned on because your position’s weak. Stick it out. Get all the progress you can on the drafting, and let Carter send for Begin.”
Abruptly Dayan picked up the eye patch and put it on. “I need some air.”
The moon was bright on the snow. They could barely walk abreast on the path. “Good air,” said Dayan. “Like on the Hermon.” They passed through the cottages and were climbing a hill before he spoke again. “Golda’s death has hit me hard.” Crunch of feet on snow, long silence. “I respected her, but we never saw eye to eye. Unlike Golda I was born among the Arabs. I’ve lived with them. I’ve fought them, but I understand them. They were there in the land for centuries upon centuries, minding their own business. And then, along come these Jews pouring in from Europe, waving something called the Balfour Declaration and the Bible, and they say, ‘Gentlemen, this land is ours, God gave it to us, be good enough to pack up and leave quietly.’ Unbelievable chutzpah.”
“Not so, Moshe, it was they who swore to drive us out, and tried, and keep trying, or we’d have been living together in peace long ago.”
“Look, I said just that today to Vance. He asked, ‘Why can’t you Jews accept coexistence with the Arabs?’. I replied, ‘Cy, that’s exactly what we’ve always wanted and still want.’ But, I told him, for them to blow up the busses, and for us to collect and bury the bodies, that’s not what we call coexistence.”
“Well said.”
“Oh, that was plain Golda-style arguing. For Golda it was always so simple and clear! She came to Palestine from Russia and America, already twenty-three and married. All she knew was doctrinaire Zionism. For us or against us? Capitalist or socialist? Labor or Rafi? Jews or Arabs? Black or white?”
Dayan was puffing hard, though the hill was not steep. The path had ended, and they were plunging their legs deep in snow. He stopped, looked around, and gasped, “Very pretty landscape.” Behind them, the lights in the cabins and cottages gleamed through the trees, and a plume of smoke rose from the main lodge. “Well, forward, then. The top isn’t far.” His breath smoked in regular puffs and he did not speak until they came to the crest. “So, here we are. Nice little climb. Clears the lungs and the mind, no? Let’s go back.” But he stood where he was and went on. “I expected too much of the Jews. That was the mistake of my life. I thought they could hold the lines we won in the Six-Day War. I was wrong, and I bear that burden. Labor calls me a traitor for joining Begin, and for him I’m just a discardable outsider. I did it because, once he won the election, my nose told me peace with Egypt was possible. I was right about that, and it will happen. We must, and we will, have this treaty, but this second Camp David is a misbegotten sterile business. You’re right, Zev. It’ll soon be over. I won’t tell Begin to call me home.” He started down the tracks they had made in the snow, and did not speak again until they were passing the cottages. “Zev, isn’t this where you stay?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Good night.” Dayan strode off into the dark.
At the sitting room table, a plump young man with an intensely earnest look, wearing the unlikely combination of a Camp David windbreaker and a yarmulke, was murmuring over a small Talmud volume. He looked up smiling. “Hi. Did I hear Dayan out there?”
“Yes. We took a walk. He’s low.”
“Tough job,” said the young man, a lawyer named Eliakim. “Responsibility without authority.”
“Right. Especially since the Egyptian comes as a plenipotentiary.”
“Khalil, a plenipotentiary?” Eliakim grimaced, closing the book on his forefinger. “Yes, to make demands that he knows the Americans will support, and to accept our concessions. Not to concede anything, Dayan’s been summoned here for that. He’s not well, but he’s holding the line. What willpower! He was tremendous back in September, too, with Begin and Sadat.”
“You were here?”
“Oh, yes, straight through the thirteen days. They got the Nobel Peace Prize for it, but believe me, the architect of the Accords was Dayan.”
Barak got into bed with Christian Cunningham’s document, but the faded typing blurred and slid before his drooping eyes. Turning to the last pages, he came on a heading: “Conclusion: How It Will All End.” Now he recalled the CIA man telling him, as they drove through Rock Creek Park long ago, about this memorandum to Admiral Redman. He put it aside, too tired to concentrate; and as he was dozing off, he half remembered that the lawyer Eliakim had some special tie to Dayan that made his praise of the Minister highly suspect.
It was barely light outside when he woke. Shuffling to the coffee machine in the other room, he found Eliakim pacing in phylacteries and a prayer shawl.
“Good morning. Am I interrupting?”
“I’ve prayed.”
Barak drank coffee and asked, “Say, didn’t you help prepare Dayan’s defense for the Agranat Commission? Do you believe the outcome was just?”
Eliakim began removing the phylacteries and winding up the leather straps on them. “The outcome? The outcome was that Dada died a beloved national hero, while Dayan lives under a cloud of blame that never lifts.” Folding his prayer shawl, Eliakim gave him a keen look. “You disagree with that outcome?”
Neat, thought Barak, and his opinion of Eliakim went up. “Tell me about Dayan’s role in the Accords.”
“He was the bad Israeli. Sadat had a warm feeling for Begin, sincere, or brilliantly acted. He called him ‘My great friend Menachem.’ But he and Dayan rarely met, and when they did the encounter was frosty. Sadat knew who his true opponent was.”
“Surely, Eliakim, it was Begin.”
“It was Dayan. On the day we packed to go home, it felt like a funeral, a total fiasco, over the issue of East Jerusalem. Carter called in Dayan — Dayan, not Begin — for a battle royal. When Dayan held firm, Carter finessed the East Jerusalem issue and got Sadat to go along. Moshe knows when to hold and when to give. All those thirteen days, on every sticking point, he kept finding substance and language that Sadat could live with, and that Begin could hope to have the Knesset pass. He fashioned the main breakthroughs.”
“Then maybe he deserved the Nobel Prize.”
“Not so. The burden was on Begin. He had to get the Accords through the Knesset, and that was as difficult a feat as Sadat’s coming to Jerusalem. He did it. Ever since, Sadat’s been doing his damnedest to back away from the terms that have got him in trouble with the Arabs. This second Camp David is his last attempt to fuzz the aspect of a separate peace. Pharaoh kept changing the deal with Moses, you remember. Backed away and backed away to the last.”
“But there’ll be no smiting of the firstborn,” said Barak, “to make Sadat stick to his deal.”
“No. This time there is only Moshe.”
When Barak returned to his cottage that evening, the telephone was ringing. “Wolf! At last! I’ve called and called and called —”
“It’s been a heavy day, Queenie. Maybe tomorrow we —”
“Listen. Let me talk. There’s been a massive earthquake in the Halliday region today, Zev. It’s on, it’s on, and I’m in heaven. I haven’t been this happy in years, and as for Bud —”
“Hold it. What’s on, Emily?”
“The switch is on, that’s what. I’ve agreed to come home, Bud will go to Japan, and I’m getting Chris back. I’ve spent the afternoon with the boy, and he talked, Zev, my God how he talked. He’s been pining away for me, and as for that Elsa, he can’t stand her. The ultimate stepmother. Zev, I’d never have done it, if not for you!”
“Nonsense, you two would have worked it out, sooner or later.”
“Never, I say, never. What, me? Accommodate that sonofabitching Bud after he threw me over for that animated Scandinavian coatrack? You brokered the deal, and I adore you for it. Now listen, can we meet tonight?”
“Em, things are boiling over here. However, tomorrow night —”
“No go. I’m leaving on Air France at two. I called Fox
dale, and if I can shoot the girls in there before March first, they’ll be okay, they won’t lose a semester. So I’m popping over to Paris to wrap things up, help them pack, turn the key to my flat, and make a lightning return. You’re sure we can’t meet tonight, my dearest? I long to hug you, you’ve turned my mourning to dancing.”
“I can’t do it, Emily. I just can’t.”
“Damn, then is this one more telephone goodbye? Welladay! That you came at all is marvellous, it’s a miracle, my life is ablaze. I kiss your eyes. Darling, about the Growlery, I gave the headmistress holy hell, but she explained that nobody was using it, termites had got into it, and the school needed tennis courts. So there you are. What does it matter, if love lasts?”
“We’ll go up there together, Emily, next time I’m here,” said Barak, “and I’m coming, I promise you. And in a far corner of a far court we’ll dig a hole and bury a little bronze plaque. And on the plaque will be engraved, ‘Its ont aimés.’ ”
“Oh, God, White Wolf, you wretch, you’ve made the tears start. Goodbye.”
Click.
The darkened El Al plane was halfway back to Israel and Dayan was fast asleep when Barak took Christian Cunningham’s memorandum from his despatch case. The first paragraph hooked him and he read on to the end.
Christmas Day, 1956
THE SACRED REGION
Christians and Jews alike hate to face one stark truth: that the Mosque of Omar has stood on Mount Zion for thirteen hundred years. That is longer than the First and Second Jewish Temples combined stood there — about a thousand years — plus the Crusader occupancy, a mere ninety years. To a believing Christian like myself, the long Moslem reign in Zion must be serving some occult purpose of Our Lord. Now the saved remnant of the Jews, a brand snatched from the burning, has returned to Jerusalem, halted by the Moslems just a few hundred yards short of the Temple Mount. If the Jews succeed in retaking that Mount, mankind will surely have come to a turning point of sacred history. That is of no concern to the Central Intelligence Agency, but it will be a turning point of global political trends as well, and that is our whole business.
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, rioting 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 Zion,
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 skull-capped 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 hi
m. “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 Eliakim. “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.”