by Herman Wouk
“Well, what’s the matter?” inquired Shayna.
“Nothing at all. That’s great,” he said. “Really great.”
“You sound funny, Yossi. And not very happy, or am I crazy?”
“Of course I’m happy. Why shouldn’t I be? That’s great.”
“Yossi,” said Shayna, her voice hardening, her instinct almost infallible. “You’ve got a shmata there with you. Haven’t you? How dare you!”
“What makes you say that? There’s nobody here.”
“That’s good. Then when can I see you? Can you come to Jerusalem now?”
“To Jerusalem? Now?”
Yael was pacing, her hips sinuously swaying. She stage-whispered, “No! We have to talk.”
It was a bit too loud, and Shayna was too alert. “Who was that? Yossi, I heard that shmata! You throw her out, do you hear? Throw out that shmata now! I’ll hold the line.”
The repeated word “shmata” came through the buzzing of the receiver, and Yael flared, though still whispering, “Who’s she calling a shmata! The mother of your child? Let me talk to her!”
“Darling, there’s somebody at the door,” said Yossi. “I’ll have to call you back.”
“There’s nobody at the door. There’s a shmata in your flat, and if you ever want to see me again, tell her to leave!”
Yossi pounded his fist on the wall. “It must be the landlord. Our rent’s overdue. He’s breaking down the door, Shayna! I swear I’ll call you right back.”
“Yossi—”
He hung up, and faced into Yael Luria’s infuriated glare. She was radiantly beautiful, a wrathful goddess indeed. “That’s more like it, and you’re not calling her back. Not until we’ve talked all this out. Maybe not then.”
But Yossi had had enough. “You don’t love me, Yael. Whatever’s going on between you at the moment, you love Sam Pasternak. You’re his woman.”
“I have been. I’m not denying that.”
“I love Shayna Matisdorf. She’s my woman, and I mean to marry her.”
“Shayna wouldn’t go with you to Paris, Don Kishote. I did.”
***
The towers of Manhattan, spiking up through dirty haze as the plane descended, brought to Barak’s mind his last arrival in New York. He decided at that moment to visit Marcus’s grave. There was time, he had three days in all, plenty for this wretched UN errand. Visiting Marcus would at least be a mitzvah, a good deed, however sad.
The long, long hours on the plane had dragged by like one interminable hour of 3 A.M. thoughts, as he studied the different withdrawal plans and charts to keep them distinct in his mind. The woman beside him was an overperfumed dumpy sort in her fifties, leafing through fashion magazines when she wasn’t sleeping or eating, not likely to peek at blurry Hebrew mimeographing. Withdraw, withdraw, withdraw; that brilliant victory, the terrific march of the Ninth to Sharm, which now reverberated in his memory, like his advance over the Roman road in 1948, as a brief burst of glorious hours balancing and justifying long plodding years in uniform; and now this crawl-out! Dog leash again, this time with choke chain. Obey, or suffocate.
During the next two days the working sessions with Israel’s UN delegation were a bitter business, the morning-after headache from the brief intoxication of victory. It was a wretched change from life in the field with his brigade, another damnable courier job, a fate that seemed to pursue him. He was glad to escape on the second day, in a train bowling along the majestic Hudson through a misty landscape, the autumn colors all faded to brown. The West Point graveyard with its well-tended grass and stands of firs was still green. As he passed through the rows of markers he saw one thin army officer standing with folded arms and bent head far from Marcus’s grave. Otherwise the cemetery was deserted. At Marcus’s stone he recited a halting half-remembered Ayl molay (prayer for the dead), then on an impulse began to whisper, his eyes moistening:
“Situation report, Colonel Stone. We’re a lot better off than we were when you died. We won the Negev, and some vital ground in the center and around Jerusalem. You’d be amazed the way the country’s built up. The population’s more than doubled. We never took Latrun, so the highway runs around it. But we’ve just won a big victory, we conquered the whole Sinai, though the politics won’t let us keep it. Anyway, the beachhead is holding. So rest well, Mickey, and—”
Footsteps on gravel. He fell silent, brushing fingers at his eyes. The footsteps halted, approached, halted again. Barak stood with bowed head for long moments, then looked around. The officer was a major, dark-haired and athletic-looking, with a round friendly face. “Colonel Marcus, eh? You knew him?”
“Very well.”
“You’re from Israel?”
Barak was wearing civilian clothes to be inconspicuous on this trip. He held out his hand. “Zev Barak. Israel Defense Force.”
“John Smith.” The officer faintly smiled as they shook hands. “That’s my real name.”
“Why shouldn’t it be?”
“Well, it’s so common here people make jokes about it.” He gestured toward a car parked in the distance. “I saw you come in a taxi. I can give you a lift. Not all the way to New York, I’m heading for Washington.”
“That’s where I’m going now, Washington, but I’m figuring on flying.”
“Come along.” They started to walk side by side. “Like to talk to you about your Sinai campaign. My war is Korea. Certain parallels. Military brilliance, political washout.”
“How long is the drive?”
“Five or six hours. By the time you get to the airport, and catch your plane, and fly in this weather, you won’t do much better.”
The parallel of Korea and Sinai had never occurred to Barak. It interested him, and Major Smith had a pleasant no-nonsense manner. “Well, I accept. Many thanks.”
Barak’s reminiscences of Marcus intrigued the American, especially the account of the “Burma Road.” He had never heard of it, and the use of the name made him smile and nod. Thereafter the drive went by in searching comparisons of experiences in Korea and Sinai. In Korea even mighty America had been brought up short, so Major Smith maintained, on a political dog leash. MacArthur could have won the war. UN and home-front politics had stopped him, and eventually gotten him fired. Smith drove at high speed with skill. He was in armor and wanted nothing else, he said. Using force internationally these days meant moving armor, Sinai had once more shown that. He got Barak to describe the Ninth Brigade’s operation at length.
“Very impressive, like the Jap march down Malaya to Singapore,” he observed. “Surprise via an overland route considered impassable.”
“Well, but in three days, not seventy.”
“Your theater of operations is small. Like your ‘Burma Road.’ A few miles instead of seven hundred miles, but the same idea. The principles of war don’t change.” By this time they had passed Baltimore and were approaching Washington. “Now Barak, can I ask you a frank question?”
“Why not?”
Smith’s tone changed; dry and careful, just short of hostile. “You Jews say you’ve returned to your homeland. You claim you were there before the Arabs. Suppose the American Indians raised a claim that they were here first and wanted it all back? What then?”
Such talk was not new to Barak. He too changed tone, deliberate and cool. “Two answers. If they had the force to take it back, they would, and the world would probably marvel and approve. But that’s too hypothetical, like your question, and it’s not the real answer. After what has happened to my people, we need a state of our own, strong enough to make sure that nothing like it will ever happen again. So we’ve gone back to where we came from. Where else?”
“There are eighty million Arabs. Eight hundred million Moslems. They don’t want you there, don’t believe you belong there. Think you can hack it in the long run?”
“We’re trying. It’s our one shot left. ‘No choice’ is a good motive.”
Smith nodded, his face impassive, and they di
d not speak for a while. He was driving to a house in McLean not far from where the Cunninghams lived, staying there with a married brother in army intelligence, while seeking a bachelor flat in Washington. Just back from duty in Germany, he had lectured that day at West Point on Soviet armor, before visiting the grave of his academy roommate killed in Korea.
Pasternak had ordered Barak to telephone Cunningham and see him if possible, so the CIA man was expecting him. Over the phone the father had not mentioned Emily, and Barak had not asked about her, though among his dark airplane thoughts he had wryly wondered whether the girl had willed him into making this trip, with her marvellous occult powers. As it turned out, she wasn’t there; still in Paris, not returning until January, and her mother was with her. In the foyer of the house a large oil painting of Emily pleasantly jolted Barak.
“Who’s that?” inquired Major Smith on the way out. Cunningham had invited him in for a drink.
“My daughter. Bad likeness, painted by a girlfriend in college.”
“Looks like a girl who turned me down when I graduated from West Point. Sue Funston.”
“No relation,” said Cunningham. When Smith left, Cunningham asked Barak what he thought of the man.
“Well, on that long drive we talked a lot. He’s a smart professional. Why do you ask?”
“I know him. He’s going places in the army.”
“Well, I’ll say this, he’s not sympathetic to Israel.”
“The army isn’t. Or hasn’t been, I should say. That may change.” Chris Cunningham did not elaborate. He liked to deliver enigmatic pronouncements, and Barak let it go at that. With a rare smile, Cunningham rapped a knuckle on the portrait. “Barak, her mother believes you rescued Em from that little fat Frenchman. We’re in your debt.”
They had cocktails in a glass-enclosed porch full of potted greenery. “Crazy end to the war, that was,” said Cunningham as he quaffed a large martini while Barak sipped sherry, “and it’s a damned good thing your Mr. Ben Gurion backed off from that light-headed victory speech of his. You people were on the brink of an abyss, Barak. Did you realize it? Eisenhower was fit to be tied. The Russians had snookered him with the rocket-rattling, and hogged the credit for stopping the war, whereas it was he and Dulles who stopped it, of course. Squelched the French and British, made you quit, and saved Nasser’s bacon.”
“Well, Chris, the Russians did threaten to flatten us in twenty-four hours if we didn’t stop. That wasn’t pleasant.”
“Noise. And now they’re making noise about your withdrawing. But you’ll withdraw because Ike threatens sanctions and means it.” He finished his drink and stood up. “Let’s have a bite to eat. I tell you though, there’s another side to Ike, if that’s any comfort. He’s a warrior. He’ll understand that he’s forcing you to sacrifice a victory you won fair and square, and he’ll probably remember it.”
When Barak met again with Abba Eban in New York before flying home—Eban had a dual job as Israel’s ambassador in Washington and UN representative—he ventured to quote these views of “an astute friendly CIA man,” as he put it. The tall highly intellectual Abba Eban was an unlikely but ideal Israeli diplomat, Barak thought, for the UN post; speaking better English than the British representative, expressing his sharp points in mellifluous flawless sentences, the embodiment of what Americans called an egghead, complete to his almost perfectly oval head. Eban listened to him with a magisterial smile, now and then nodding. “We shall gradually withdraw, of course,” he commented. “En brera! And under American, not Russian, pressure. That is true. But we shall emerge with substantial gains, after very difficult parleying for which I shall be responsible. I believe we shall put a long quietus to the fedayeen raids from Gaza and Sinai. We shall obtain an American guarantee of free passage through the Straits of Tiran, our main casus belli. And the menace of a combined attack of Arab armies on us will be lifted for a term of years, perhaps as long as ten. That too is victory, or victory enough, shall I say, in our constrained circumstances.”
***
Sharm el Sheikh, March 1957, four months after the end of the war. Troops and vehicles of the last Yoffe battalion to leave the base are lined up in formal array on the parade ground in blazing sunshine. Opposite them, the battalion of incoming Egyptian troops in almost a mirror formation. Band music, shouted orders.
“Why, Abba? Why do we have to give it back?” Noah’s voice, choking with anger. “We won the war.”
Barak is not in charge of the ceremony. That is the battalion commander’s mournful task. He has come to observe as a senior officer of the Ninth Brigade, and Yoffe has granted him permission to bring Noah and his scout troop. Though the youngsters know what they are about to witness, they are staring with shocked faces as the Star of David flag comes down, and the Egyptian soldiers spring to hoist their green banner with white crescent and stars. Barak looks at his son, whose face is set in a peculiarly hard grown-up expression.
“Why, Abba?” he repeats. “Why, when we beat them?”
“We’re doing it for peace, Noah.”
“But they hate us. Look at them.”
The faces of the Egyptians, to be sure, wear unfriendly grins of triumph.
“That may change in time.”
A soldier walks past them carrying the folded blue-and-white flag.
“We’ll get it back, you’ll see.” Noah sets his little jaw and lifts his head, looking around at the base, the cliffs, and the sparkling blue waters. “I’ll get it back.”
PART THREE
Missions to America
22
Emily’s Letters
After the Suez fiasco, Great Britain and France were no longer serious players in the Middle East, and Israel was tarred as their co-conspirator in a failed last gasp of imperialism. Colonel Nasser, on the other hand, gained immense prestige as a giant-killer. For had he not seized the Suez Canal, defied the two great colonial empires, weathered the storm, and brought them down? Riding high, Nasser launched a confederation of Syria and Egypt called the United Arab Republic, proclaiming it as his first step toward creating and leading a strong bloc of all the Arab nations. American planners perforce turned to wooing him, but he showed much smiling skill in remaining noncommittal while accepting the largesse of both superpowers; from the Americans economic aid, from the Russians massive new weaponry.
Israel meantime was left once more with the haunting problem of military supply. France was in deep political turmoil, and a cutoff sooner or later of that source had to be reckoned with. Certain British munitions could be had in controlled quantities, strictly for cash on the barrelhead. As for the U.S.A., some army strategists saw in Israel’s “classic of the military art” a new factor in the region, a possible offset to Nasser should he tilt all the way to the Soviets. The notion of using a million Jews, however, as a counterpoise to the hero of eighty million Arabs made slow headway. By and large the State Department and the Pentagon hewed to the old British policy in the Middle East: firm ties with the Arabs and a cool shoulder to Israel.
After some two years of this ongoing problem, Zev Barak, a rising armor commander, wrote Christian Cunningham for a confidential appraisal of a possible change in American policy regarding tanks for the Jewish State. The CIA man was slow in replying. When Barak opened the thick envelope that at last arrived, a scrawl on yellow ruled paper in Emily’s writing fell out of the wad of Cunningham’s typed pages. Barak read her letter first, shaking his head over it and smiling.
Foxdale School
Middleburg, Va.
Sept. 15, 1958
Dear Wolf Lightning—
Hi! Voice from the past! I don’t think of myself as a sneaky sort, but this is pretty damn sneaky, tucking a billet-doux of mine into my father’s letter to you. He gave me the letter to mail and it wasn’t sealed too well. On impulse I pried it open—didn’t read it, of course—and am hastily scratching off these unpremeditated and no doubt dopey words. I just can’t help it. I’ve ached to write to you
for well over a year. When I think I missed your flying visit after the war when you brought Jack Smith to the house, I grind my teeth with frustration.
The thing is, I don’t know whether Nakhama can read English, though she can hardly say ten words in it. If I were your wife I sure as hell would be inquisitive about a letter arriving from America addressed in a feminine (sort of) hand! I should have thought long ago of using Dad’s stationery and typing an address, but as I say I’m really not the sneaky sort. It never occurred to me. So if Nakhama opens your mail (which I kind of doubt) and sees this, folded inside Dad’s impeccably typed pages, you’ve got a problem. But not much of one, and I have a very bad problem being utterly cut off from you. So I’m taking this chance. If I embarrass you send me a short snarl or ignore me and that’ll be that. I’ll wait. I’ll wait until you come here again or our paths cross in your country or in Europe or for all I know in Madagascar. It will happen.
All right, now that I’ve done this fell deed what can I say to you? I’ll just let ’er rip. For me there’s been one event in my meager life in the past couple of years, Wolf, mon vieux—one event—your kissing me in that dingy room in the King David Hotel. Before it I had a dishevelled random existence and a small craziness about an Israeli army man I glimpsed as a girl of twelve. Since then I’ve been your “yotze dofen” (is that nearly right?), untimely ripped and getting through the days with one poignant life-nourishing memory.
There’s nothing either of us can do about it. How well I know that! Perhaps come to think of it you’ve done more than you realize, by providing me with a way out of this cul-de-sac, if I want out. Guess what? Major Jack Smith has become a beau! Or a suitor, or a swain, or anything you please except boyfriend. I’ve never had a boyfriend unless you count old Hiroshima, who by the way continues to write me long letters in exquisite French enclosing fine poems. (Although he now lives with another poet, an Indian from Trinidad, who I gather is his boyfriend. Modern times.) I keep up the correspondence, André was and is delightful, very funny when he’s in the mood and an absolute mandarin about literature, and in his way he goes on loving me. It’s nice to be loved. I hope you agree with that simple proposition.
