by Herman Wouk
***
Christian Cunningham was drinking coffee alone in the dining room, at a window overlooking the harbor. It was mid-afternoon, and like most hotels this one was nearly empty. The boots of the two officers made echoing noises on the marble floor. “Isn’t that where the gunrunning ship ran aground,” Cunningham said, pointing, “and you almost had a civil war? And now that gentleman Mr. Begin is the minority leader in the Knesset.”
“All true,” said Pasternak, signalling to a hovering waiter to bring more coffee.
“There are no people like the Jews,” said Cunningham. “‘A people that dwells alone, not to be considered as among the nations.’ Balaam said that, you know. Balaam was a seer.”
“I don’t know about Balaam,” said Pasternak. “Balaam’s ass saw more than he did, had to give him a talking to. The Prime Minister told me to inquire, would you like to see him?”
Cunningham stuffed a pipe from a red-white-and-blue-striped pouch and lit it in slow deliberate moves. “I’m far too lowly a functionary for that. My wife and I came to Paris to meet the fellow our daughter is in love with.” The long bony face gloomily lengthened. “I thought I would visit the dig at Capernaum, to salvage the trip, while my wife consoles herself by buying Paris hats.”
He puffed in silence, then took a hard tone. “The British and the French will make a fearsome blunder, Sam, if they attack Egypt. So will Israel, if she plays along with them. I hope you people don’t think Eisenhower is really lovable old Ike with the big grin. He’s steel and ice, Dwight Eisenhower is, and he doesn’t like to be crossed. In anger he’s fearsome. He once sent millions of men to face death. Don’t ever forget that.”
Under Cunningham’s severe stare, Pasternak responded, “If in fact the British and French are planning an attack, and if in fact they don’t clear it first with Mr. Ike, that might indeed be quite risky for them. So?”
The three men were silent for a while, their cups clinking. Cunningham spoke up. “Early this year the French cleared with our State Department the sale to Israel of twelve fighter planes, Mystères. Well-named! They’re mysteriously multiplying here, like amoebas. We know you may now have close to a hundred.” Long pause, many puffs. No comment by Pasternak. “Doesn’t that suggest that Israel may take part in an attack on Suez?”
Pasternak said, “Which would make Mr. Ike very displeased with little Israel.”
“Very.”
“Chris, that Secretary of State of yours, Mr. Dulles, is a disaster. ‘Massive retaliation… going to the brink…’” Cunningham winced and wryly smiled as Pasternak ground out the quotes. “Talk, talk, while Russia makes that ‘Czech arms deal’ with Egypt! Twelve Mystères! What are we supposed to do while Nasser trains up pilots for those two hundred Russian planes, and the crews for the five hundred Russian tanks—recite psalms? That’s what the Jews did in Poland, getting into the trains.”
“The target of the Russians is not Israel,” said Cunningham.
“No, of course not. They’re playing the old Great Game, only now not against Disraeli, but John Foster Dulles. Why in God’s name does Mr. Ike let that pompous old lady run your foreign policy?”
Cunningham took a long time to answer. The words came slowly and carefully. “Mr. Dulles regards the Soviet Union as the great menace to western civilization. About that he’s right. About how to deal with the menace, he’s an innocent. He’s a corporation lawyer, a drafter of plans and treaties.”
“He was defeated for the Senate in New York by a Jew, Herbert Lehman,” Barak put in. “That’s not good for us, possibly.”
“Well, the French are not exactly Jew-lovers, are they?” Cunningham’s manner turned very sharp. “Israel might in fact help a Suez operation to succeed. In that case the Americans will condemn you. The Russians may intervene and take military action against you. Moreover, at the first setback, you can count on the British and French to abandon you. That’s the guess of a low functionary. The one thing I’m sure of is the wrath of Eisenhower.”
“He’s busy running for reelection,” said Pasternak, “and New York is a big state with many Jews.”
“That’s stupid thinking, Sam. A war crisis will at once bring out the D-Day commander inside the nice guy with the big grin, election or no election.” He took out his watch and squinted at it. “I had hoped to drive up to Jerusalem, for the sunset on the Old City walls. It’s getting late for that.”
“You might be disappointed at the view,” said Barak. “Wooden barricades, sandbags, barbed wire sort of spoil it.”
Cunningham walked down to the lobby with them. Barak said, “Sir, my regards to your daughter, and please tell her the firefly poem was very nice.”
“Firefly poem?”
“She sent it to me after our visit to you about the Constellation. It showed up after a year and a half. Israel postal service at the time. It’s better now.”
“I’ll be sure to tell her. She writes poems in French these days.” Watching them go out through a revolving door, Cunningham felt his personal sadness come back strongly to mind. What a difference between these fellows and Emily’s pasty long-haired midnight lingerer in trendy cafés in a Sartre trench coat, with Sartre eyeglasses and no Sartre talent!
Barak was saying to Pasternak as they left, “Inconclusive chat! Can you tell me why I was shlepped away from my brigade for this?”
“The Old Man wanted to have your reaction.”
***
“He was speaking for his government?” asked Ben Gurion. They were in the underground map room of the Kirya, and he stood with Dayan at a large wall map of the Sinai Peninsula, slashed with the heavy lines, arrows, and unit symbols of Operation KADESH. The code name was printed in bold black crayon on a lower corner.
“I can’t say,” replied Pasternak, “but the State Department is bound to know of his visit. Was he carrying a message? I don’t think so. As he says, he’s too low a functionary.”
Ben Gurion looked at Barak, who said, “I’m not sure how low he is, but I’d say he talked as a friend—a very worried friend—not as an emissary.”
“Is that all? Then why did he bother? We’ve had plenty of nasty warnings straight from Eisenhower and Dulles. This was nothing new. I’m a lot more worried than this Mr. Cunningham is.”
It hurt Barak to see how unwell and very aged the Prime Minister was looking. Dayan on the other hand had good color and radiated high spirits. He had been advocating an attack on Sinai for more than a year, ever since the “Czech arms deal”; smash the Egyptian army, he had urged, before it could absorb the vast influx of Soviet weapons and turn them on Israel! Ben Gurion dropped heavily, despondently, into a chair. “That the British and the French will abandon us at the first setback goes without saying. And how does the war end? Who replaces Nasser, but another Nasser?”
“Whatever happens, it’s a political opportunity for us, Prime Minister,” insisted Dayan. “We can wipe out the terrorist bases in Sinai, open the Straits of Tiran, and secure passage through the Canal. And we’re gaining a major arms supplier in France. That’s plenty for one war.”
For as long as a minute Ben Gurion sat silent, breathing noisily, his eyes filmy and vacant. “I will go to Paris myself,” he said at last, “meet with the British and French Prime Ministers face to face there, and find out what’s what. If they will not meet me, I will assume bad faith and I will cancel Operation KADESH.” His bleary look turned on Pasternak and Barak. “Moshe will accompany me, of course, and so will you gentlemen.”
13
On to Paris
At the little engagement party in the home of Shayna’s cousin Faiga, the boys without exception wore yarmulkes, and the girls long-sleeved dresses with skirts well below the knees. Religious Jewish families tend to favor early marriage, and this was especially true among Shayna’s Jerusalem friends, who were pairing off like turtledoves. Shayna’s dark blue midcalf silk dress, which she had made herself, was the best she had, for she was going on to Lee Bloom’s party for
Don Kishote at the Dan Hotel in Tel Aviv; a prospect as dismal as this gathering was joyous.
These young people were her bunch from childhood days. She might wear jeans and go out with a paratrooper, yet she had never broken away and did not want to. The others regarded Don Kishote askance, but there was always the hope that she would make a mentsch of him; though many a skullcapped boy there hoped instead that she would come to her senses and drop the paratrooper. She had had her decorous romances with one or another of them, but none had lasted long.
“Must you go so soon?” Glowing with the excitement of her betrothal, Faiga gave Shayna a reluctant goodbye kiss at the door.
“I wish I didn’t have to go at all. You know that.” Faiga was her confidante, and Shayna had told her about the Tel Aviv party.
The cousin pulled her aside and whispered, eyes agleam, “And what about Paris? Shayna, will you really do it?”
With a heavy noncommittal sigh, Shayna left.
It would have to be raining and windy, she thought, as she wrestled with a gyrating umbrella on her way to catch the sherut, the jitney taxi, to Tel Aviv. She was sorry her mother had ever mentioned Yossi’s birthday to Lee Bloom. He wasn’t giving a party for his brother. That was his excuse for inviting big shots to his hotel and mingling with them. They were coming because Sheva Leavis had been written up in the Hebrew press as an Israeli who was making a fortune in the world outside, a topic always good for feature stories in the weekend editions, and Lee Bloom usually figured in those stories as Leavis’s sharp young associate who had fought at Latrun. Such write-ups did not wholly skirt the touchy aspect of Bloom as a possible army deserter. Israeli journalists were masters of the wounding innuendo, and the hints were there.
The hem of her dress thoroughly bedraggled because it hung beneath her coat, she climbed into the crowded sherut, and landed in a jump seat facing a black-bearded black-hatted Hassid, who was at great annoyed pains to make no contact with her knees. She sympathized and did her best to cooperate, but as the sherut careened and bumped wildly roaring downhill from Jerusalem, the Hassid had to endure a few repellent contacts through her coat and skirt. Not that Shayna was herself repellent; had the Hassid allowed himself to notice such things, he would have conceded that she had a lovely face and beautiful dark eyes. He might then have noticed, too, an anxious gloomy look in those eyes. In fact, Shayna felt almost as though she were on the way to be hanged, for she was about to tell Don Kishote that she would not go with him to Paris. Ordinarily she could handle her antic paratrooper, but she had seen him tough and angry—with others, never yet with her—and that side of him cowed her.
Don Kishote had burst into her life again only during the past year, after she had all but forgotten him. He had changed so much that, except for the way he pushed his glasses up on his nose, she might not at first have been sure it was he. Her neighborhood synagogue was providing meals after the Yom Kippur fast for hayalim bodedim—“lone soldiers,” foreign volunteers, and soldiers far from home or with no family—and the women and girls did the serving. There he was, with another soldier who had brought him: tall, muscular, brown, erect, and solemn-faced as of old until she said tentatively to him, “Is this Kishote?” Whereupon he looked at her puzzled, pushed up his glasses, and gave her the unchanged prankish grin. She had grown a foot or more since the siege days and acquired a woman’s body, but taking no note of that, he replied, “As you see, in a gentile trade.” That had been that, once he asked about her family, and acknowledged that yes, the Lee Bloom of the newspaper stories was his brother Leopold. There had been no spark.
The spark had leaped months later at the university, where the army sent him to give a recruiting talk. All able-bodied boys and girls were liable to the draft, unless they had religious or other exemption, but the army wanted the best youngsters to enlist as regulars. Seeing his name on the bulletin board, she went to hear him speak. The paratroopers were becoming an infantry elite almost on a par with fighter pilots, for their night reprisal raids were destroying fedayeen bases in Sinai and Jordan, reducing terrorist episodes, and going far to restore national morale.
Kishote spoke vividly and with much humor about his service in the fabled Unit 101 led by Ariel Sharon, which Moshe Dayan had created to activate the reprisal policy. The paratrooper force had absorbed 101, and with it, he said, much of the spirit of the legendary Palmakh. He did not gloss over the risks and the high casualties of the night raids. When he spoke of the empty seats in the cars returning from the raids, and of friends who had died, his voice hoarsened, and his young listeners grew very still. After the prolonged applause she went up to congratulate him. “Oh, you again? Good. Take me home with you. I want to see old Reb Shmuel.” But his eyes told her that this time she had fetched him, as he had transfixed her with his soldierly presence and colorful talk.
Shayna was really not too sorry that her father had put his foot down and forbidden Paris, though she hated having to tell Kishote. She had never ventured outside the Holy Land, and Gay Paree was a big scary leap into the unknown. How would she dress? What could she eat? How would she manage with Kishote? It was murmured in her set, and the murmurs had reached her, that as soon as Shayna had put on blue jeans she was on the slide, and anything could happen to her next; and a hevrehman (wise guy) like that paratrooper was certainly bad business. She had heard more than she wanted to know about Don Kishote’s escapades and amours, in a notorious room he had rented with some other platoon leaders, on a crooked old street in downtown Tel Aviv.
Yet a girl in love sheds such talk as a duck sheds water. Besides, her parents liked Yossi, who retained enough religion to mind his ways around them, and Reb Shmuel loved him because he listened to and enjoyed his Torah talk. Shayna still could scarcely face the notion of one day marrying someone in “the gentile trade,” but by now she knew that Israel lived or died by its soldiers, and the inescapable truth was that she adored Don Kishote in his red beret and heavy red boots, and couldn’t look or think beyond an infatuation verging on the besotted.
Now her father had spoken, Paris was off, and Shayna was not feeling too abused or deprived, just apprehensive. In a way she was getting out of a corner. Shayna was no innocent. She had avidly read authors like Balzac, Zola, Lawrence, and Joyce; Boccaccio too, also Hemingway, Colette, and plenty of more trivial fare. Deep within her, strong passions were banked by upbringing and conviction. Some nights she could not sleep for thinking of Don Kishote and bitterly wondering what devilry he was up to in that room on Karl Netter Street in Tel Aviv, while his religious love lay alone and wide-eyed in a narrow bed in Jerusalem. Suppose they were alone together in Gay Paree? Would she herself behave? Oh, how she could astound that rakish Kishote, if she once put her mind to it! Riotous pictures of what might happen in Gay Paree had been haunting her imagination, not to be disclosed even to Faiga.
Fortunately, she had exams on the days they had been planning to go. That was true, and that she would tell Yossi. She had inquired about taking them later, and as a straight-A student she had been granted exceptional permission. That she would not tell him. A girl was entitled—and sometimes badly needed—to fib.
***
“There’s probably nothing you’ll eat,” said Kishote, cleaving his way through the chatter and tobacco haze of the party to hug and kiss her while she still wore her coat and held her umbrella. He gestured at the buffet table, where amid various meats and salads fat pink shrimps, which to her looked like amputated thumbs, were piled high in an iced bowl. “I told Leopold no shratzim [swarming sea things], because you were coming. He says he told the hotel, but—”
“Look there, will you?” Shayna interrupted. At the buffet Benny Luria in air force uniform, his heavily pregnant wife, and his sister Yael were helping themselves to platefuls of swarming sea things. “Isn’t that Benny’s third, on the way?”
Kishote grinned. “Yes. These moshavniks don’t waste much time. And neither does Leopold. He’s bought the Paris tickets! How about
that? El Al, leave Sunday morning, return Thursday. No Shabbat problem, isn’t that fine?”
Shayna kept a timorous silence. Flushed with party host elation, Lee Bloom came and took his brother’s elbow. “Guess what, the American ambassador showed up with the manager of El Al! Shayna, come and meet the ambassador.”
“In a minute, Leopold,” she said, for Benny Luria was smiling at her and beckoning with a swarming sea thing on a fork. “Benny, do you know I haven’t met your wife?”
“My fault, I almost never leave Nahalal,” said the wife. “I’m Irit.” Hands folded on her huge stomach, she had the attractive outdoors look of so many moshav women.
Shayna and Yael exchanged cool party smiles. “So, it’s raining in Jerusalem,” Yael said.
“It hasn’t stopped for a week.”
“Nice that you could get away from the university for Yossi’s party.”
“Yossi’s party,” echoed Shayna, with a satiric look around that sufficed to show she was no fool.
Benny laughed. “That brother of Kishote is something.”
“He does business with the army, that’s all,” Yael said shortly. “Sheva Leavis’s business.”
“I was with him for an hour this afternoon,” said the aviator. He was a Mustang pilot about to graduate to jet fighters, much on the climb, the straightest of straight sabras. “Sheva Leavis has amazing sources of supply. For the air force these fellows are a godsend. And they’re appreciated. Lot of army stars here.”
“Oh, who won’t show up for food and drinks in this town, Benny? What else is there to do?” Yael snapped at her brother, and in an evil mood stalked off to the bar for a glass of cognac. Pasternak had brought his wife; only to be expected, but mighty irksome. The woman had returned from London with her two children when Dayan had become Army Chief of Staff and had selected Pasternak as a deputy. Their son, Amos, by their agreement, was coming back to Israel for his education, and she had come, too, no doubt because Sam’s army career was taking off. The marriage was holding solely for their children’s sake. At least, so Pasternak kept saying. Yet the pestiferous woman had recently had another baby! Just one of those things, Pasternak had rather lamely explained.
