by Herman Wouk
“Fantastic,” muttered Barak.
“I flew some of those missions.” The young soldier Yoram spoke with pride, his curly black hair dangling over the magnifier. “This is a shot I took myself, this panoramic one. We’ve got telescopic shots that identify types, even show regiment markings. We had German lenses, you know, the real stuff.”
“Well?” Luria poked Barak with an elbow.
“I’ve got to phone Sam.”
Pasternak was not at the army intelligence HQ. “Track him down,” Barak told the duty officer, “highest urgency, and tell him I’m in Benny Luria’s office.”
Soon Pasternak called back. “Gott in himmel,” he exclaimed, as Barak described the find. “How could we have missed that? Army intelligence has been even stupider than the Mossad, and that takes a lot of doing.”
***
The most convincing photographs, with precise and exhaustive technical evaluations and extrapolations, went off by army intelligence courier to Washington. Three weeks later, a jubilant report from the military attaché: the CIA was convinced! So was the Defense Department. Even the State Department conceded that the Soviet Union might well be upsetting the balance of armed force in the Middle East, and that countervailing steps might be considered.
State’s proposal, emerging laggardly, was that West Germany sell Sherman and Patton tanks to Israel, and the United States would resupply the Germans. The Bonn government, dependent on the United States for weaponry and for protection from the heavy Soviet forces in East Germany, cheerlessly agreed. With little delay, Arab threats were forthcoming against West Germany of economic boycott and a possible oil embargo. Thereupon the Germans, expressing much sympathy for the unfortunate predicament of Israel, pulled out of the deal.
The next State Department idea was to provide elements of tanks to several European countries—chassis here, turret there, gun and fire control elsewhere—and have them assembled in such a way as to diffuse and fuzz the responsibility of supplying Israel with tanks, leaving America in the clear with the touchy Arabs.
31
The Queenie-Wolf Letters
22 November 1964
Dear Old Wolf:
Has a whole year really blitzed by? The papers today are full of backward glances at the assassination, with copious pictures and a general elegiac tone. For me this day is forever a day of mingled joy and horror, a strangeness which will haunt me while I last. The rest is silence, my love. I know I’ve been laggard all year in writing, I who importuned you to write, write! And you’ve been a dear. If your epistles read a wee bit like army reports, long on fact and short on sugar, well, that’s my Israeli Spartan.
I didn’t want to tell you until it was definite, but most of the year I’ve been in the throes of taking over from Fiona as headmistress. You see, at long last Reverend Wentworth has doffed the cloth. Fiona has said to me a million times that she would never be a minister’s wife, and indeed with her hollow leg she’s not quite the type, so the Reverend has packed in the divinity thing, and has got himself a job as an editor in a Christian publishing house. They tied the knot back in September. I guess they’re happy, but Fiona seems to lack the old fizz lately, so help me. Can it be that authorized gitchi-gitchi turns out to be a bit of a bore, compared to the sneaky article? No spice like a sense of sin, hey toots? Is that it? Will she have to shoot him in the other groin to recapture that old magic?
Answering the query in your October letter about Hester, I’m sure I told you that I went out to Oregon for the christening of their girl baby. I was godmother, she even named the poor helpless mite Emily. Well, next I heard Hester was in a severe post-parturition depression, and hinting at trying the chandelier caper again, only this time on a magnificent old oak in their garden, which must have been standing there when Lewis and Clark trekked by. Even Hester couldn’t bring down one of those branches, sure as hell she would hang. So her hubby begged me to come out again and cheer her up.
I went and did my best. We gossiped and played Mahler records and read aloud John Donne and Plutarch, and got roaring drunk a few nights (much the most effective recourse), and she loosened up and let me into her attic studio, where she is now into painting insects. She stupefies them with cigar smoke—she’s taken to smoking black stogies—then looks at them through a magnifier and paints them. I believe Hester’s found her metier as the Audubon of the creepy-crawlies. She did the most alarming spider! I thought it would leap right off the canvas with those hairy legs and sink fangs into me. My visit did the trick, especially my reaction to the spider. She’s now doing spiders like mad, and is positively lovey-dovey with her maddeningly bland hubby, who reports to me that she’s no longer studying the oak tree for the best place to sling a noose.
Now Old Wolf, I don’t want to hex the thing by being too hopeful or explicit, but a new guy may be entering my picture. He’s a classmate of Jack Smith’s, and before Jack married Pat he took me to a reunion of their West Point class, dinner and dancing, and I met this Lieutenant Colonel Bradford Halliday. He’s in Germany now on an air force base. I had no idea I’d made the slightest impression on him, Wolf, and out of the blue a couple of weeks ago here comes this stiff letter saying that since his wife died (some tropical plague in the Philippines did her in, despite all the shots) I’m the only lady who has ever… etc., etc., and he hoped I wouldn’t mind his getting in touch when he comes Stateside again.
I do remember the man well. Extremely tall, an intelligent talker, and with something melancholy yet pleasant about him. Jack told me that “Bud” Halliday has a red-hot rep in the air force. Don’t get jealous now, mon vieux, so far this is just mostly imagination. But you’ve always been after me to get married, and since that wonderful and ghastly morning, exactly a year ago today, the possibility now at least exists for me.
My God, let me quit this scrawling before I burst out with futile love talk and tears.
All my love,
Queenie
The correspondence continued, infrequent but steady, and a year later, Barak wrote one of his longest letters.
22 November 1965
My dearest Queenie:
First of all, my condolences on your mother’s death. I’m writing separately to your father. May she rest in peace. I met her only twice, but I remember her as an elegant lady with a subtle sense of humor and a hint of depth, a lady out of a Henry James book almost. I know what a blow it can be, having lost both my parents not too long ago, within a short time of each other.
It happens to be exactly “that day” again, doesn’t it? Yet another year gone by! I just realized that, writing down the date. In my life the months seem to flash by like hours. We’ve had much terrorist activity in Central Command, and I’ve been in the thick of preventive and reprisal raids, less said the better. You destroy my letters, I’m sure, as I do yours. I have a lot to tell you, but forget what I’ll now write about Germany as it pertains to our rearmament problems. I set foot on that accursed ground last week, after vowing long ago that I never again would.
No country on earth will openly sell us front-line battle tanks, Queenie, but we’re due to get some American tanks through a devious process of international assembly which compels us to deal with the Germans. I was sent on the first mission, German being my language and armor my service branch. No escape. Well, when the airplane door opened and we walked out on the ramp, there on the tarmac was an honor guard of Wehrmacht troops, with the German and the Israeli flags flapping in the breeze side by side. A stomach-churning moment, I tell you! My father got us all out of Vienna well before Hitler came, but the Nazis were already strutting in the streets. Long-buried memories rose up and overwhelmed me, with a sickness of soul that nobody can know who wasn’t a Jew in Europe then. The strained politeness of our encounter with the Germans, from the first handshakes (how could we avoid exchanging salutes and shaking hands?) was simply awful, and the awfulness went on to the last. I’ll sum it all up in one story.
We were invited to coc
ktails and dinner at some senior officers club. To warm the atmosphere, I guess, the waiters kept refilling our wineglasses, while we chattered about everything but what was really on all our minds; on the Israelis’ certainly, and by the artificial very forced good humor of the Germans, on theirs too. But all that wine backfired. One of the wives at my end of the long table, middle-aged and all painted up and loaded with jewelry, suddenly burst out in a loud voice, “What’s going on here? How long can we keep on pretending? You were all in on it, all you officers, and you know it! Let’s at least be honest with these Jews, tell them we’re sorry. Or even if we aren’t, at least talk about what happened instead of all this gibble-gabble—” Something like that she managed to yell out before her husband grabbed her and hustled her away from the table, shouting over her voice that she wasn’t well and hadn’t been for some time.
The mission itself didn’t go badly, though the Germans drove cold hard bargains at every point. Bad conscience or not, no easy terms for the Jews! However, as to the tank work, they know what they’re doing. They always know, whether it’s tanks, rockets, or crematoriums. When the door of our special El Al plane closed on Germany, I drew my first full breath in four days. The evening we got back Leonard Bernstein was conducting the Israel Philharmonic, and seats were reserved for our party up front. Nakhama and I found ourselves first row center. I tell you, Queenie, when the concert began, and Bernstein and that magnificent orchestra struck up “Hatikvah,” The Hope, and the packed hall stood up as one man, I was swept by a sense of what we Jews have accomplished here in the Holy Land, a feeling of pride and strength in our new beginning, that made all the hard times and sacrifices seem endurable.
But the rest of the evening didn’t stay on that high emotional plane. You and Hester make a fetish of Mahler, and I too love his huge beautiful mishmashes, but for Nakhama, who tends to fall asleep at concerts anyway, Mahler is straight chloroform. Sixteen bars and she’s under. We were in the front row, not two feet from the first violinist, who happens to be my old friend Pinkhas, a fine musician, and Pinkhas kept scowling at poor Nakhama as he scraped along through that stupendous First Symphony. I tried a pinch or two and an elbow jab, but she only muttered. I was damned tired myself, anyway, so during the Brahms piano concerto that followed, I too nodded off. I haven’t run into Pinkhas since, and don’t especially want to.
Aside from her low tolerance for classical music Nakhama is just great. So are my children. Noah’s about to go to sea in a patrol boat, and I, Queenie, may be coming to Washington as our military attaché.
I put this baldly, just as a possibility. I’ve tried and tried to dodge this assignment, it’s a dubious sidewise career move. But General Rabin (a) thinks that I’m effective with the Americans and (b) assumes that Nasser is preparing for a military showdown with us. If I resist hard enough, I can probably get out of it and stay in my deputy post in this Central Command, aiming for the next upward rung of the army ladder, commander of the sector. But the experience in Germany gave me pause. Israel has existed only seventeen years so far, by the skin of her teeth. The more I come to understand things, the more I perceive how our miracle of the Return is linked to your older miracle of America. Your father’s been talking that line for years. I’ve just begun to grasp it. Two world titans confront each other, America and Russia, freedom versus despotism, and square in the middle of the battle zone is this precarious little nonsense called Israel, to me the most precious patch of ground on earth. If General Rabin is right, and I can best serve over there, why should I fight it any longer?
So I tell myself, and then again I tell myself cut the bullshit, what you mean is that Queenie is in Washington.
More soon.
Deep love, Zev
P.S. One of our best officers, Lieutenant Colonel Nitzan, my former brigade deputy, is now at the Army Industrial College at Fort McNair outside Washington. He’s married to a mighty attractive Israeli lady, so he’s no alternative to your Lieutenant Colonel Halliday, who sounds promising. But if your paths cross you’ll like Yossi, he’s funny and bright.
Z.
***
Yael left the busy bridal shop and hurried to her rented house in Westwood. The instructions she had left for lunch were peculiar: “Cook for two, set the table for three.” She found all in order, and her Peruvian maid starting the chicken Kiev which Lee Bloom fancied. The other guest had a diet problem, according to Lee, and would bring his own sustenance.
She was changing her dress when she heard a throaty engine sound in her driveway, and then a cutoff. Damn, were they half an hour early? She threw on a robe and saw through the window a fiery-red convertible Cadillac, out of which emerged not Lee Bloom but—to her utter stupefaction—Don Kishote in uniform, pulling luggage with him! Three days earlier he had telephoned her that his course was over, and he was flying back to Israel that same evening. He came into the house, dumped suitcases and canvas bags in the hall, and greeted her with an exhausted grin and a quick kiss. “Hi. When does Aryeh get out of school?”
“Kishote, what the devil…?”
“Yes, yes, long story. That car out there belongs to my friend Alvaro, a Mexican colonel who was in my course. Alvaro is rich as Korah, nice guy, he mentioned he wanted to hire somebody to drive his Cadillac to L.A., and I said I’d do it for him, no charge, just to get myself out here. I couldn’t afford to rent a car to cross the country, but this way—”
“For God’s sake, was that a problem? I’d have sent you money—”
“Yael, who wants your money? When does the boy come home? Three, four o’clock? My plane leaves at nine.”
“Your plane?”
“Sure, for Tel Aviv, via New York.”
“Listen, listen to me, you crazy man! Why didn’t you call me at least? What kind of business is this, just falling in on me, and why must you leave tonight? You must be dead, and—”
“I’m all right. I tried calling you twice.” He glanced at his watch. “Fascinating, driving across America! Washington to Los Angeles, sixty-three and a half hours. Now I have to get the car to Alvaro’s hotel, the Beverly Wilshire. How do I get there?”
“Yossi, your brother Lee is coming to lunch here with a film producer. Why not join us? Aryeh won’t be home until four.”
He waved her off. “Your business is your business. Lee and I have talked by phone. I’ll say hello when I come back, then I want a bath and a nap.”
She gave him directions to the hotel, staring at him incredulously. “You drove clear across the country to see Aryeh for an hour or so before you fly off to Israel?”
“And to see you, of course, and talk a bit. We didn’t resolve anything in Washington, you were busy showing Aryeh the sights and the course didn’t leave me much time. Tell Lee I’ll be back soon.”
Shortly after he left, Lee arrived with one of the strangest persons Yael had ever seen; a man so fat that he shook all over as he waddled in, dressed entirely in black, including a black shirt and a black neckerchief. “Mrs. Nitzan, Mr. Greengrass,” said Lee, whereupon the fat man smiled and said through his teeth, “I’m Jeff. If you have any straws, Mrs. Nitzan, I’m all set for lunch.” His diet problem was at once obvious, for his upper and lower teeth were wired together, and he was carrying two purple cans of liquid nourishment. “My secretary stupidly forgot to give me my straws.”
“I have straws.”
“Fabulous.”
While Yael and Lee ate chicken Kiev, Jeff Greengrass sucked at his lunch and described the film for which he sought Sheva Leavis’s financing. The industry was in the bust end of its perpetual cycle, he explained, and bank money was unobtainable except for the big stars and directors. This would be a small-budget film starring a rising stand-up comedian named Cookie Freeman, who would write and direct it.
“Cookie’s dying to make pictures,” said Greengrass, reasonably clearly through clamped jaws, “so we can get him for spit. It’s a very cute idea. Two-Gun Teitlebaum, he calls it, all about a Jewish tailor
in Brooklyn who inherits a piece of property out in a Wild West town, where his uncle came as a peddler and stayed to run a saloon. This town is run by the bad guys and nobody wants to be sheriff, see? So they make this Jew, Hymie Teitlebaum, sheriff the day he arrives. Well, I swear to Christ, Cookie Freeman milks that idea for comedy like you wouldn’t believe. Mr. Leavis can read the script, of course. Or you can, Yael, if I may call you that? It’s a winner.”
“Mr. Leavis can’t judge a movie script, and neither can I. Lee sent me your proposal and I read it carefully. I have some questions.”
“Hit me.”
The trouble with Greengrass’s answers were that they were so voluble and detailed. Yael got lost in all the industry jargon: above the line, below the line, negative cost, one-year write-off, investment credit, distributor’s gross, producer’s net, and so on and on, all sprayed through Greengrass’s teeth as by a fogging machine. What she thought she discerned was that Greengrass as producer could not lose, and that Cookie Freeman might well wind up working for nothing. As for the risk, it would be all Sheva Leavis’s, or Lee’s too if he participated. Kishote reappeared while this was going on. The brothers briefly embraced, then he went off to bathe.
“How’s your little boy?” Yael asked Lee when the fat man wobbled out after lunch, leaving two empty cans.
The buoyant manner Lee had been maintaining faded away. “Okay, but that ear infection hangs on. The doctor says it’s not unusual in three-year-olds. It would help if his mother were around more, but what makes her happy is playing the clubs, so her agent gets her the bookings, and she goes out and sings. What did you think of Jeff’s pitch? He’s sort of a freak, but he’s made two successful small films.”
“Well, he seems to know his business. Maybe Two-Gun Teitlebaum could make money. Sort of a Jewish parody of High Noon, isn’t it?”
