by Ruth Gruber
In the barracks, the young corporal shouted, “Attention! I’m going to show you nurses how to prepare an army cot for morning inspection.”
One of the nurses snickered, “Listen, kid, you’re wasting time. We can make beds in our sleep.”
“You’ll make beds our way.” The young woman turned red. “Now, watch me.” She demonstrated tightening the sheets under the army mattress. She took a coin and bounced it on the taut sheet. She glared at the nurses.
They watched her in frozen silence.
“Now, for the blanket. It’ll take two of you to fold blankets the army way.” She handed one end of a blanket to a nurse and, with a complicated series of stretching and folding, produced a small square. She placed it at the head of a cot, picked up a duffel bag and set it on top of the folded blanket.
“Forget everything you’ve learned in your hospitals. This is the way I want the beds to look.”
“Are you for real? Are you running some kind of a kindergarten here?” one of the nurses grumbled.
The corporal shot back, “You’ve got seven minutes to make these cots. Then you will be outside in front of the barracks with your mess kits, ready for lunch.”
She turned on her heels and marched out.
One by one the nurses straggled out of the barracks, holding their aluminum kits. The noon sun beat down upon the rows of barracks and the dirt paths.
“Who needs lunch?” said the last nurse to emerge, mopping her forehead. “I’d like to flop down on my tight army sheet and go to sleep. I’ve been up since the crack of dawn. It’s enough already.”
Miriam looked at her wristwatch. “You call this seven minutes? You’re three minutes late!” She barked between clenched teeth, “All of you run around the parade ground. You will do it in seven minutes. Then you’ll know when I say seven minutes, I mean seven minutes!”
The nurses paced themselves as they trotted around the parade ground. Finally, panting and exhausted, they entered the mess hall. Then, standing in line, they held out their mess kits. Young soldiers shoveled in mashed potatoes, peas, chicken floating in gravy, and a thick slice of rye bread. The nurses sat down at the two tables assigned to them. The eighteen-year-olds filled another area of the mess hall.
Miriam approached. “You’ll find sinks behind this building. After each meal you wash your mess kits, and they’d better shine like new. Now you’ve got one hour to rest. At fourteen hundred hours, mess kits and beds will be inspected.”
At the stroke of two the young corporal returned to the barracks. She headed for Raquela’s bed. “A potato sack has more shape,” she said, glaring at Raquela.
She began walking up and down the center aisle. “Okay. Looks as if you’re learning. Outside now. Into formation.”
She marched them across the compound to a lecture hall. They sank down on the floor with the eighteen-year-old recruits.
A scholarly-looking woman in her mid-thirties, the three gold bars of a captain prominently displayed on her shoulders, addressed them. Her brown hair was parted in the middle, with broad streaks of gray on each side.
On the wall behind her hung a huge color map of Israel. She lifted a pointer from a table, turned to the map, and pointed to the states surrounding Israel. “Here is Egypt, on our west and south; on the east, Jordan; on the north, Lebanon and Syria. You see how close they are to us. These are the countries that declared war on us and were defeated. Now they’re licking their wounds; how soon they will feel ready to attack again, I cannot say. All I can say is, we have to be prepared. If we want to survive, we have to be prepared for any attack.”
She stopped, letting her words sink in.
“Now, look at our borders.” Her pointer traced the narrow elongated contour of Israel. “We have 594 miles of border to be defended. And here, right in the center, we’re just ten miles across. We’ve got the smallest waistline in the world. Like an hourglass figure.” A few recruits laughed. She acknowledged the laughter and went on. “It’s our most heavily populated area. Within a few hours, an invading army could slice us in half. Like this.” She ripped her pointer across the center of the map.
The nurses and recruits followed her pointer, absorbing her words.
“If we could have a regular standing army—like most countries—we’d be in good shape. But we can’t afford it. That’s why we have universal conscription. That’s why every boy and girl of eighteen is drafted. That’s why you’re here.”
Raquela looked again at the mosaic of young women emerging from adolescence and innocence to face the brutal reality of survival.
The nurses, she thought, were older, more mature; many had been in the War of Independence. They had lived with violence and the ravages of war. She had stopped listening for a few minutes. Now she forced her mind back to the captain who was looking directly at the eighteen-year-olds.
“You recruits will begin your eighteen-month tour of duty with three months’ basic training. Then you’ll be assigned according to your ability. Some of you will go into communications, as radio and wireless operators. Some into meteorology, some to work at radar stations. You can pack parachutes or you can become paratroopers. You can be secretaries and clerks in military installations. Some of you will teach newcomers who have not yet learned to speak Hebrew. And some will make officer-candidate school.”
She paused. “Now we have a special group among us.” She looked down at the seventy-five nurses sitting together.
“You nurses will do three weeks of basic training. You’ll become second lieutenants and begin work in the military hospitals immediately. You’re probably wondering why you need any kind of basic training, since you’re already nurses.”
They nodded vigorously.
“It’s to give you even greater stamina, endurance, and discipline.” She smiled at them. “You’ll be hearing these words a lot during the next weeks. It’s to teach you the army way.”
She lay her pointer on a table.
“We don’t expect women to serve in the front lines—if war comes. But even in peace, every soldier must learn how to use a gun. Tomorrow you’ll be issued rifles.”
They returned to the barracks, and by the end of the first day they collapsed in silence in their beds.
At five-thirty the next morning the sound of reveille over the loudspeaker shattered the dawn silence of the campground.
The nurses crawled out of bed, dressed, and marched outside. Miriam was waiting. “Setting-up exercises,” she shouted.
They stretched, touched their toes, did deep knee bends. They breakfasted at six, and at seven stood at attention for bed inspection. At seven-thirty they assembled on the parade ground for inspection of their uniforms.
A top sergeant reviewed the nurses and recruits.
“You there.” She singled out Raquela’s friend, Naomi. “Where’s your beret?”
Naomi lowered her blue eyes. “Sorry. I forgot it in my bunk.”
“Forgot it! You do five laps around the parade ground.”
Embarrassed, Naomi circled the field, her head down. The morning was still cool.
The sergeant counted off the laps. “Now get your beret, and make sure your hair is properly tucked in.”
At eight classes began. At ten Miriam issued the rifles.
In the next days Raquela and Naomi, accustomed to shooting needles into arms and buttocks, learned to shoot rifles into cardboard figures.
A week passed. At daybreak Miriam marched her nurses, carrying their packs and rifles, out of the campground. Behind them came a unit of eighteen-year-olds led by their noncom.
All morning they hiked across the fields surrounding Tel Nof. They crawled on their stomachs. Their feet blistered. Their joints creaked. Their muscles cramped. Insect bites inflamed their faces and bare legs.
At noon Miriam called a halt.
“Twenty minutes to eat, rest, and relieve yourselves,” she commanded. “Find your own bush.”
Raquela and Naomi dropped their heavy packs an
d rifles.
The twenty minutes evaporated; the nurses and recruits gulped their food and took long drafts of water from their canteens.
“On your feet, everybody,” Miriam shouted to her nurses.
The march continued. The sun rode the sky and set slowly. Still they marched. It was nine o’clock and pitch dark when they bivouacked in an orange grove. They drew lots for sentry duty. Raquela and Naomi stood guard the first four hours while the others slept.
At one in the morning they woke the second shift of sentries. Raquela unrolled her blanket and in seconds was fast asleep.
At dawn Miriam prodded them awake. They ate their field rations, marched all day, and late in the afternoon, straggled back limply, mindlessly, to Camp Tel Nof.
Raquela tore off her crumpled uniform and showered away the dirt and sand and sweat.
The nurses ate dinner in the mess hall and then fell into their cots.
Raquela could not sleep.
Overtired, her mind played tricks; she was back in the Yellin Seminar, terrified, listening to the stories of the Arabs’ murdering in Motza, in Hebron; it was snowing, and she was entering the nursing school, caring for Henrietta Szold; now Athlit, Cyprus, Hadassah A, Beersheba, began to spin in her brain. She was running again…the desert…Arik.
Why had she left him? Why had she demanded that their love be on her terms, not his?
Her limbs ached, and in the cocoon of the Nissen hut, surrounded by the other exhausted nurses, even her mind seemed to ache as she painfully recalled the past week.
Again she was back in Beersheba, lying in bed in the nurses’ cottage, trying to understand Arik, asking herself, Why doesn’t he trust me? How can he even imagine I would look at another man now that we’ve slept together?
Somewhere in the darkened hut, someone sighed. She could hear a few women turning on their cots, breathing heavily. She lay uncovered; night brought no respite from the June heat.
She closed her eyes.
Arik was beside her in the army hut; she felt him caressing her sore limbs, healing her.
Arik the doctor. Arik the healer. Arik the lover.
She saw his face. I know the army needs nurses like you. But so do we…and so do I.
She could feel his body against hers. Her heart pounded. What was she doing here? Why wasn’t she in Beersheba, holding him close, listening to him tell her, “You’re the most desirable creature in the universe.”
She sat up suddenly in bed. The things I love in you are the things I fear. Is it possible he sees me as so desirable he can’t believe I’m ready to stay with him forever? He, of all people—so secure as a doctor, so sure of himself as a man. How can he be so insecure about me?
Loss.
That’s what he’s afraid of. Afraid of losing something he loves.
The end of the second week, Raquela, felled by a stomach virus, was sent to the infirmary.
She woke in the afternoon and found Miriam sitting beside the hospital bed. She looked at her in surprise. “You’ve come to visit me?” she asked the young corporal.
“Why not?”
“We seem unable to do anything right in your eyes.”
“You nurses were pretty arrogant.”
“So you tried to break us. Was that it?”
“That’s my job.”
“But why? We’re all in here for the same reason. You seemed to be tougher on us than the other noncoms.”
“I had my reasons. You nurses acted so superior. Our army takes all of us—no matter what our background, no matter what our education, no matter what countries we came from—and makes us all equal.”
Raquela studied Miriam’s earnest face.
“Do you know what the army did for me? Do you know where I come from, Raquela?”
Raquela sat up. It was the first time Miriam had called her by name.
“I don’t know anything about you. I’d like to know.”
“I was born in the Atlas Mountains, north of the Sahara Desert, in Morocco. We lived in a cave—my parents, my twelve brothers and sisters, and I. We came here during the War of Independence. I was seventeen. I had never been to school. I went to school and in one year had learned enough so I could join the army. Now, here I am, nineteen, only two years in Israel, and I’m a corporal. And I can give orders…Where are you from, Raquela?”
“Jerusalem.”
“A Sabra?”
Raquela nodded.
Miriam was thoughtful. “I often wonder if a Sabra like you can understand where I come from, what it means. You and I would never have met; it’s the army that brings us together. You’re as strange to me as I am to you. I don’t know what your life was like in Jerusalem any more than you can know what it was like to live lower than the lowest Arab in an Arab land.”
“But I think I do understand,” Raquela protested. “I’ve delivered the babies not only of Arabs but also of Jewish women from Arab countries.”
“But did you ever march and eat and sleep with girls from Morocco the way you did the nights we’ve bivouacked? Did you ever live so closely with girls from Tunis? From Algeria? From Libya? From Yemen? From Ethiopia and Afghanistan and Cochin, India?”
Raquela shook her head.
“This is what it means to be in the Israeli army. This is what our army does. They took my brothers, all illiterate, and taught them to read and gave them each a vocation they can use when they get out. They took Jews like the Yemenites, who weren’t allowed to ride camels because their heads would be higher than an Arab’s. They took Jewish girls like me who weren’t even second- or third- or fourth-class citizens and made us first-class citizens.”
For the first time Raquela felt close to Miriam; they belonged together—she and the young corporal. The army was bringing them together.
Miriam’s huge eyes focused on Raquela. “Now maybe you’ll understand why I act the way I do. I want to be the best soldier in CHEN. Someday I hope to have children. Because of what the army did for me, I’ll be able to give them everything I learned here—and more. The things my father could never have given me if we had stayed in Morocco.”
A week later, the course was over. Miriam stood proudly as her nurses received their second lieutenants bars.
“Good-bye, Raquela.” Miriam looked up at Raquela’s face. “May a corporal kiss a second lieutenant?” she asked.
Raquela and Naomi strolled through Tel Hashomer’s hospital complex outside Tel Aviv. Soldiers in hospital robes sat in wheelchairs lined up in front of a Nissen hut. Between the hospital huts, men hobbled on crutches; some walked with canes; others struggled painfully with new limbs. A group of young men, sitting together, lifted their sightless eyes to let in the morning sun.
Dressed in khaki uniforms with the gold bar of a second lieutenant on their shoulders, Raquela and Naomi made their way toward the administration building to report for duty. They were assigned to Rehabilitation.
They changed into white uniforms and entered the ward. Soldiers lay on beds, legs up in traction, arms swathed in bandages.
A soldier whistled. “Wow! Look at these two new birds.”
Every soldier who could move sat up. Long low whistles sang through the room.
“Life’s looking a lot better,” a soldier called out. “Pinch me. Am I dreaming?”
“Okay, guys,” Raquela said, smiling broadly. Pregnant mothers had never greeted her this way. “You’re not dreaming.”
Naomi looked around. “How you doing, fellows?”
Two young men in traction answered, together, “Great, since you came.”
“You both sound pretty cheerful.” Naomi walked between the two beds; wire pulleys elevated the soldiers’ legs encased in white plaster.
“We’d better be cheerful,” one of the young men answered. “We want to get out of here fast.” He pointed to a calendar on his night-stand. “By the time I’ve torn off thirty more pages, I’ll be home.” The calendar page read JULY 1, 1950.
Naomi turned to the second so
ldier in traction.
“You’ve got a whole art gallery pasted on your wall.” She looked at the posters, cartoons, photos. “Who did these drawings?”
“My three-year-old daughter. My wife brings her every day.”
Naomi fixed his sheet. “I can imagine that homecoming.”
Raquela was walking through the ward, exchanging pleasantries, when a young man deliberately turned his face away from her. She read his name on the chart at the foot of his bed. He was a quadriplegic.
“Can I do something for you, Aviad?” she asked.
“Nobody can.”
In the next days Raquela sought ways to make Aviad comfortable, gently lifting the paralyzed arms and legs as she changed his sheets and pajamas. He lay silent, a dead weight, neither thanking her nor protesting.
His mother came to help the nurses; she spoon-fed him, her eyes red-rimmed. She tried to talk to him, but he rarely answered.
One morning he called out, “Nurse, will you come here, please.”
“Yes, Aviad?” Raquela asked.
“My girlfriend is coming this afternoon for the first time. I want to be dressed.”
“Avi—” Raquela began, then cut herself short. “Of course I’ll dress you.”
She left the ward and returned with a new white T-shirt and khaki pants. His mother helped her draw the clothes on his wasted limbs.
Excitement flushed his pale face. “Do you think I could sit up in a wheelchair?” he asked.
Lets try.
Raquela brought in a wheelchair and lifted him into it. But his head—the only part of his body that moved—collapsed on his chest.
“I’ll get a neck brace,” Raquela said matter-of-factly, trying to control the quiver in her voice.
She whispered to his mother, “Keep holding his head up. I’ll be right back.”
She raced through the hospital compound to the supply room, found a high leather collar, and began fitting it around Aviad’s neck. His mother turned her head to hide her tears.
Aviad looked at the soldiers watching him in the ward.
“Hi, fellows. How do I look?”
Raquela, still arranging the neck brace, heard a familiar voice say, “You look just fine.”
