The Hope

by Herman Wouk

  A flaming log tumbled forward, smoking into the room. Barak shoved it back with a poker, then dropped on the floor beside her and took her in his arms.

  “There’s another bottle of Brunello,” she quavered. “I bought three.”

  “I’ve had enough wine.”

  “Well, have some pistachio nuts.”

  “Not just now.”

  He kissed and caressed her, at first gently, then with rising passion. She was shyly and inexpertly responding, and he pulled her to her feet. “Come, Queenie.”

  Breathlessly, “Where, dear?”

  Clasping her icy hand, he led her toward an open bedroom door. “Oh, there,” she said. “Well, bless my soul.”

  A patch of moonlight fell through a tall window on the double bed. He took off his jacket.

  “I see. I guess this is it,” Emily said. “Well, I’m all for it. Here goes nothing!” With a determined yank at a zipper, she shrugged herself out of her woolen dress. It lay in a puddle at her feet. She stood in a lacy slip, bare arms crossed over her chest. “So, what do you think so far? Pretty stringy, like the marchesa?”

  “Beautiful, young, glorious.”

  “Thanks, but Wolf, this feels damn funny. I’m not at all embarrassed. It’s as though you’re another girl, almost. Now why should that be?”

  “Are you saying you’re not in the mood?”

  “Darling, can’t you tell I’m seething with passion? But my gosh, you’re undressing fast! Army training, hey? Now under this slip,” she said, picking up the frothy hem, “everything is French. Incredibly yummy. You’ll go out of your mind.”

  “I can’t wait, but how about pulling down the shade?”

  “Oh, yes, yes, to be sure. Nobody’s out there, still, good idea. I’m sort of—Christ on a bicycle!”

  “What?”

  “Fiona.”

  “Fiona!”

  “Wolf, she’s heading this way. I left her at the Red Fox, she should have been good for hours!” She thrust all ten fingers wildly at him. “Put on your clothes! Or get under the bed! Jump into the closet! Do something!” With great speed she pulled on her dress and zipped it up.

  “Now listen, Emily”—Barak seized his trousers—“you just go out there and tell Fiona you’ve got a guy in here.”

  “A guy? She won’t believe me. She’ll think I’m doing something truly horrible. Cooking frankfurters in the fire! She’s murder on frankfurters, because of all the dripping grease. We had a hair-pull about that once.”

  “Do as I say, Emily. Just go on out there.” He propelled her by the elbow toward the door.

  “You really think I should do that? All right, I will. But dress, dress, in case she barges in! She’s a rhinoceros, Fiona.”

  As Barak dressed he heard voices outside, then hysterical giggling. He went to the couch, took a fistful of pistachios and ate, tossing the shells in the fire. The high-pitched hilarious chatter outside went on and on. It was after nine o’clock. His amorous mood waned, and he began to feel like a fool, sitting and cracking pistachio nuts in a cottage on the grounds of a girls school in Virginia, at the end of a failed mission for armaments, waiting and waiting for the chance to be unfaithful to his wife. Emily came in at last, laughing, and slammed the door.

  “Well?”

  “You were so right!” She dropped on the couch. “When I told her, you know what she did? She went, ‘Whoopee!’ and threw her arms around me, and laughed fit to bust. She’s three sheets to the wind, and then some! She cross-examined me about you, wanted to come in and just say howdy, and I had a hell of a time getting her to vamoose. She’s gone now, and—Oh, blast, Zev, stop eating those stupid pistachios!” She embraced him, and pushed him back on the couch for a desperate amateurish kiss. “Where were we, now? Shall I open the other Brunello?”

  “Never mind the Brunello.” He pulled her close, and kissed and kissed her delicious thin mouth.

  “Ah, that’s the spirit,” she murmured against his lips. “Come on now, hotshot.”

  But it was just talk. Her response was forced and clumsy, and her elbows and legs kept getting between them. After a while, holding her a little away by the shoulders, he said, “Now, Queenie, is it on? We get undressed again, go through all that business, okay?”

  “Why not? I’m all on fire, aren’t you? Only, I’m thinking you have to be back by ten, don’t you? And it’s after nine already. Would we be rushing it too much? How long does it actually take, dear?”

  “Depends on how quickly the novocaine works.” With a wry grin, Barak sat up. That she too had been jarred out of the mood was all too plain, and her inexperienced effort to conceal it was rather sweet. “Darling, I think Fiona dumped a pail of wet sand on you.”

  Emily sat up with a sad laugh. “Okay, she sure to Christ did. But how could you tell? Wasn’t I kissing you like Garbo? Zev, I’m still willing, honest.”

  “You’re adorable and I love you,” said Barak. “You and Fiona enjoy the Brunello.”

  “All right. I was afraid of this as soon as she showed up. God, was she ever amused. You know what she said, Wolf? She said, ‘Well, well, Snow White earns a scarlet letter.’”

  “Not yet.” He helped her to her feet. “Drive me back to my car. Nice try.”

  ***

  Sam Pasternak flew to California at the invitation of Sheva Leavis to discuss weapons available on the open market, while Barak visited an armor general at Fort Knox whom he had kept in touch with for years. Unluckily the general’s new young wife, slim and hoydenish, reminded him of Emily, and Barak’s idea had been to get away from Emily and, if he could, from thoughts of her. He was in too deep already, he felt, and to what possible good end?

  Pasternak telephoned him at Fort Knox from Los Angeles. “You promised Kishote to talk to Aryeh? He’s right here, in Sheva’s guesthouse. Yael sends regards. She’s out at the moment. Here’s the boy.”

  In the doleful way Aryeh said, “Mah shlomkha, Dode Zev?” (“How are you, Uncle Zev?”) Barak got the instant whole picture. Did he like California? Yes, it was nice. Any friends? Yes, but he could only see them after they came home from school, and when they spoke English he couldn’t understand them. Did he feel well? Yes, but he would be glad to go home. He missed Abba.

  Pasternak came back on the phone. “He was putting that on for you. He gives Yael a hard time, too. But he swims in Sheva’s pool, and plays with the Chinese houseman’s dogs, and usually he’s in fine spirits. He does want to go home, and good for him.”

  “How’s Yael?”

  “Very busy. I’m coming back tonight. Is that farewell reception for us on at the embassy?”

  “Yes, and Rabin invited all those guys from State and Defense we were dealing with.”

  “That’ll be a jolly gathering.”

  ***

  To Barak’s enormous surprise, it was. The plane out of Fort Knox was delayed, and when he got to the embassy he found a cheery party going on. Everyone had a glass in hand, but mere alcohol could not account for this extraordinary ambiance of good feeling, and certainly not for General Rabin’s smiles and banter with the lanky black-clad Assistant Secretary of State. Pasternak took Barak off into a library out of sight of the reception room, and sat him down in a corner couch under bronze busts of Ben Gurion and Herzl.

  “In strict confidence, Zev, something wonderful has happened. Turnaround! The special counsel met privately with Rabin this afternoon, with a message from President Kennedy. The President has read State’s protocol, and he’s going to overrule it. We’ll get the tanks by executive order!”

  “Oo-ah! Blessed be the Name! When? Which types? How many?”

  “All that will be negotiated. The decision is the main thing, and it’s taken. The counsel’s working on the presidential order, and he told me to tell you he’s making good use of your aide-mémoire. Kennedy will issue the order when he gets back from a speaking trip.”

  Barak set down his Coca-Cola, and put out his hand to Pasternak. Nodding and grinni
ng, Pasternak clasped his hand. “And those guys out there have no inkling of this,” he added, “and are giving us credit because we’re such good sports about being turned down.”

  Returning to the reception, Barak saw Christian Cunningham putting on his hat and coat. He had not spoken to the CIA man, but thought Cunningham had given him odd looks across the room. Then again, he was in such turmoil about the Cunningham connection that it might have been his imagination. He stayed on at the embassy for dinner, and midway through the meal an aide called him to the telephone.

  “Wolf, how are you? I’m calling for my father.” Amiable light tone. The sound of her voice shook his nerves with pleasure.

  “I’m okay. I’ve been out of town.”

  “So the embassy told me. You go back to Israel day after tomorrow, don’t you? Dad hopes you can come for a farewell lunch here early tomorrow. Say around noon?”

  “Sam Pasternak, too?”

  “Just you this time.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Anything special you’d like? I’ll be cooking. I make good pepper omelettes.”

  “Sounds fine. How’ve you been, Emily?”

  “Wonderful. Fiona and I finished off the Brunello, all right. She kept drinking to ‘the guy.’” Emily laughed charmingly. “We got wildly soused, and I’ve gone up a hundred percent in Fiona’s esteem. Ray is pleased, too.”

  “Ray? Pleased about what? What the devil did you tell that quack?”

  “See you at lunch. Ray’s no quack. He says you’re what the doctor ordered. He’s right. Bye, Wolf.”

  The cab brought Barak to McLean on a windy gray November day, with brown leaves whirling past the windshield and dancing along the road. He rang the bell of the house, expecting Cunningham’s ghostly voice from the cupola. Instead the door opened, and there stood Emily in an oyster-gray negligee, her eyes glistening, a tremulous smile on her very pale face.

  “Come in, Wolf. I lied. My father’s gone to New York.” She closed the door behind him. “He didn’t invite you to lunch. We’re alone. Now. Would you like a pepper omelette?”

  Issur yikhud!

  And so it happened, in Emily’s bedroom on the second floor, overlooking the terrace where fifteen years ago they had watched the fireflies. She lay on her stomach, her face buried in her arms for a long time, while he foggily wondered at his own feelings—somewhat as though he had been electrocuted and survived—and at her worrisome silence. At last she rolled over and looked at him owlishly. In a very hoarse voice: “You know that all this is absolutely new to me.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Well, how many times do we do it? I don’t want you to strain yourself, but I feel like doing it a lot more.”

  “Really?” He gathered the slim body in his arms. “That’s good. Dr. Sapphire will be pleased.”

  “I ought to feel terrible about Nakhama. Why don’t I? Have I hurt her? You’ll fly away, and I’ll not see you for another seven years. Maybe never. Maybe I’ll get married now.” Her hands moved softly over his back. “My God, Zev, gitchi-gitchi is not overrated. I always thought it was, I thought there was something cloacal or nasty about it. It’s the most beautiful thing, it’s unutterably beautiful, ineffably—” She kissed him again and again, covering his face with kisses.

  “I hope you fall in love and marry, Emily. I want to know that you’re happy—”

  “Fall in love?” She put fingers on his mouth. “Old Emily D. wrote a quatrain that takes care of that, sweetie.”

  I’ve known her from an ample nation

  Choose one;

  Then close the valves of her attention

  Like stone.

  “Which doesn’t mean I can’t be a good wife and mother. I will be, I promise you, Wolf, but those valves are shut.”

  Later they were really eating pepper omelettes, in a large old-fashioned kitchen looking out on barren trees and brown shrubs, when the telephone rang. Emily answered it, rounded her eyes at Barak, and put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Sam Pasternak?” she murmured.

  “Sure. He knows I came here for a lunch.” He reached for the telephone. “Little does he know what else was on the menu—any more than I did…. Hello, Sam. Yes, I said I’d be back around two, but—What?” At the startling change in Barak’s face, Emily jumped up and came to him, putting an arm around him. “Okay. Yes. By all means.” He hung up and snapped on the kitchen radio.

  “Zev, what is it?”

  He held up a hand, his face a mask of shock. “Let’s just listen.”

  It was a small old set that whined as it warmed up slowly. When the whine cleared off, an announcer was saying in a shaky voice, stammering and repeating himself, that President Kennedy had been shot, and nobody yet knew whether he was alive or dead.

  “Oh, my God. Kennedy!” Emily choked on her words. “No, no! Not President Kennedy! It can’t be happening. Not the President.”

  “Sh-h-h!”

  For a few minutes the announcer’s talk was a disjointed hoarse description of crowds, cars, policemen, motorcycles, an ambulance, a glimpse of a body on a stretcher, more crowds. Pulling himself together, he gave a more coherent story of the President’s arrival in Dallas, of the motorcade, and of the shots which had gravely wounded him and the Governor of Texas, possibly coming from the top of a building. He went on with repetitious graphic chatter about stampedes of shouting people around a line of automobiles, which disclosed nothing of what had actually happened to the President. Going back in time, he began recapitulating his impressions of the hatless smiling Kennedy waving from the back of the open car, with his wife beside him in a pink tailored suit and pillbox hat.

  “Oh God, Zev. That radiant young man, that goddess of a wife at his side—struck down! It’s something out of Plutarch. Jack Kennedy! Jackie Kennedy!” Emily sobbed, dashing tears from her eyes with a fist.

  Struck mute, Barak was thinking that this frightful American catastrophe was also an immeasurable disaster for Israel. He could only hope that the early reports were panicky, that the young President would live.

  “Emily, I must go to the embassy.”

  “I know.”

  “Call a taxi.”

  “Of course.”

  At the door, as the cab honked, she clung to him and kissed him, tears running down her face. “Will I ever see you again?”

  “I’ll call you, Emily, before I leave.”

  “Listen to me, Wolf, at this terrible moment I want you to know that if this morning was all, it’s enough. It will last out my life, it’ll never fade…”

  Gripping her in his arms, the bulky army coat between them, he said, “And I’ll forget nothing, not the Lincoln Memorial, not the Growlery, not your white lie about lunch—”

  “Scarlet lie—”

  “Snow-white lie, Queenie, Emily, Snow White, God bless you. I love you. God make you happy. Goodbye.”

  “Write, Wolf! Write! Let’s write, always!”

  Cold wind swept in as he opened the door.

  ***

  Summertime. Fighter planes were landing and taking off in a hazy day in the Negev as Barak and Benny Luria watched from the control tower. Now and then Luria barked air force jargon into the microphone, and more jargon gargled back at him from the loudspeaker. Though Barak had picked up some of this talk from combined air-and-armor exercises, he still felt like an outsider on any air base. Heyl Ha’avir, the air force, was a tough little asteroid in orbit near the small planet Israel, so Barak sometimes thought; the gravitational connection was there, but minimal.

  “Sorry, I had to get this drill over with,” Benny said as they climbed down the ladder. “It was scheduled before I knew you were coming. We’ll give you a decent lunch, anyway.”

  “Will your staff have the air annex of the exercise ready before I leave?”

  “If not, they’ll hear from me.”

  As they sat in Luria’s office, eating fried chicken and assorted vegetables, they got to talking about aircraft procurement,
and that led to Barak’s tale of the arrest to the tank program. Pasternak and the Mossad, he told Luria, after half a year, were still on the quest for “hard” intelligence of Egypt’s tank forces, since President Johnson had accepted the State Department’s protocol. Luria was wrinkling up his handsome face so grotesquely that Barak inquired what was the matter with him.

  “With me! What’s the matter with Pasternak? With the Mossad? With this crazy country? Did anybody think of asking the air force about Egypt’s tank force?”

  “Why, what would the air force know about their tanks?”

  Luria pressed a button on his desk. “Do you by chance remember Rotem?”

  “Rotem?”

  “Yes, Zev, Rotem.”

  This was the massive surprise incursion by Nasser into the Sinai three years before with armor and infantry divisions. Incredibly, the move had gone undetected by Israel for days. The first shocking reports had set off secret war alerts and first steps toward mobilization. After two weeks Nasser had withdrawn his forces, trumpeting that he had forestalled Israeli plans to attack Syria over a border dispute. With the Mossad and army intelligence blaming each other for the fiasco, shake-ups had ensued in both services, heads had rolled, Pasternak had risen to his present post, and doctrines had been drastically revised.

  “I remember Rotem,” Barak said with a shade of irony.

  A girl soldier entered, neater and prettier than most of those in the armor division. Barak did not begrudge Luria the comelier girls, the snappier uniforms, the more comfortable barracks, or any other perquisite of the air force, with its simple fateful mission, Clear skies over Israel.

  “Mira, tell Yoram in photographic to pull the Rotem folios for us to look at.”

  “B’seder.” As she left, Mira managed an arch glance at the husky armor general with the gray-sprinkled hair.

  By the harsh light of a magnifier, in a gloomy stuffy record storage room, the two officers studied aerial desert photographs from a large stiff folder labelled ROTEM—EGYPTIAN ARMOR. “The whole picture,” said Luria, “formed up west of Jebel Libni. What more do you want?”