by Herman Wouk
Emily put on glasses to peer at Noah. “I swear, he’s the image of you, when you first came to our house. When I was all of twelve.”
“Everybody says he looks like Nakhama.”
“Nonsense. He’s you.”
The announcer was talking French, Dayan was talking Hebrew, and the reporters were shouting questions in several languages. Barak snapped off the set. “Well, they made it. On to The Magic Flute.”
“God in heaven, how proud you must be. My father phoned me yesterday, you know. He said those boats have been on the New York Times front page all week. He’s thrilled.”
Barak looked out at the street. “Why are all those women lined up down there, Em? What’s going on?”
“You poor innocent, don’t you know? Those are poules.”
“What?”
“Whores, dear, it’s their street. It was that way, back in my Sorbonne days. Paris is very tradition-minded.”
Barak stared, shaking his head. “Vive la France.”
She twined fingers in his. “Quite. Spécialité de la maison. Let’s get the hell out of here.” In the cab she asked, “Was it so very important after all, Zev, the whole escapade? They’re such small boats.”
“With the stuff we’re putting into them, they’ll be very dangerous, and we needed every one. Now if we’re attacked at sea on two fronts, the Red Sea and the Med, we can handle it. Yes, it was important.”
“Your business with Bud is obviously important.” Barak only nodded. “Whatever it is, thank God for it. And for this.” She put her cheek to his.
When they came into the lobby at the opera house, they could hear the overture ending. Racing up the magnificent staircase, they got to their dress circle seats just before the curtain rose. “Darn good serpent,” Emily panted, as the tenor bolted onto the stage, singing fortissimo as he fled a slithering green monster with flashing red eyes, and smoke jetting from its nostrils. Three magical ladies entered, causing the monster to recoil and crawl off. Emily barely whispered, as they sang a rousing trio, “This is real life, Zev. It’s exactly this loony. Mozart knew that.”
A blue-haired wizened woman in the next seat gave her a filthy look. Barak put a finger to his lips. She took his hand and dug sharp nails into his palm. Later when the Queen of the Night’s coloratura pyrotechnics brought an ovation, she spoke through the applause. “Nothing’s more loony than our just sitting here, you and I, unable to talk. Let’s go.”
He followed her out. Going down the deserted staircase he said, “I guess Mozart will understand.”
“Mozart?” said Emily. “Mozart sits on the left hand of God, laughing and forgiving. Don’t you worry about Mozart. Think about where we go next, what we do.”
“It’s your city, Paris.”
“Yes, and it lies before us, doesn’t it? Midnight mass at Notre Dame, mon vieux, in due course? Again, very traditional.”
“I’m not for mass.”
“Okay. Right. How religious are you, anyway, Wolf? We’ve never written or talked about that. I’ve seen you eat most things, for instance, if not Bud’s creepy-crawlies.” She clung to his arm.
“Heavy topic.” They were idling along the boulevard in a fresh evening. The lights blotted out the stars, but a pallid half-moon barely showed over the buildings. The hurrying passersby were bundled up.
“Well, dear, let’s drop it, then.”
“No, I’ll try to tell you. Why not? We Jews are unique in history, that’s plain. We’ve lasted thirty centuries and more. Unless we’re God’s people, how come? But if we’re God’s people, why have we gone through such a thirty-century wringer of calamities? Have we really been all that sinful? And didn’t He get badly absentminded or inattentive from 1941 to 1945? That’s about where I bog down.”
“So you’re not a believer.”
“Easy, now. I never said that, I said I bogged down. I just don’t understand. I don’t understand Mozart, either. How could a man born of woman do what he did? No, I don’t understand God, but then, I don’t understand much in this life. I don’t understand, for instance, why your husband made me a present of this evening.”
“It’s a present to me, you fool. And I know what we’re going to do. Flag down a cab.”
They settled in a rear bench of a light-strung bateau-mouche, and it glided out on the breezy black Seine. On the half-empty benches ahead of them young couples were hugging and kissing. In the bow an old man was playing on a concertina things like “Autumn Leaves” and “La Vie en Rose.” The river smell was pungent, the breeze was cold, and over the dark river he could see a few stars. Emily took his hand and prattled lightly about how different her twins already were, although only she could tell them apart. He could listen to her with half his mind, because she seemed to be talking with half her intelligence, a mere doting mother.
He sat trying to sort out the painful stirrings of this surprise encounter. Perhaps she was giving him a chance to do this, with her inconsequent chatter. He and Nakhama had been kids, after all, younger than Noah was now, when the flame had leaped between them. They had married, the children had come along, and that part of life had been wonderful, with its ups and downs. Nakhama was an irreproachable, all-embracing, lovable wife. Emily had broken into his life as a curiosity, then a diverting correspondent. He had ignited very, very slowly. Now she was in his life, an unforeseeable romantic passion which he wanted to hang on to, on paper or in rare encounters like this, as long as he lived.
“Penny for your thoughts,” she threw at him.
He was startled into replying, “Just trying to figure out why I love you so much.”
“Sure, sure.”
“That’s the truth, Emily.”
She stared. “Oh, God, oh God, you’re serious,” she choked out. “Zev, you should not have said that.”
“Why not? You asked me.”
“Because this isn’t working, that’s why. Nothing works. I’m in deepest misery. When this thing docks we’re going straight to the hotel.” Barak felt a shock of pleasurable alarm. Of all things he wanted no lovemaking with Mrs. Bradford Halliday, but could he resist Queenie? She went on in flat nervous tones, “And I’m going to pack up that stuff I bought, and you’ll take me to the Gare du Nord. I’m going back to my babies tonight, on the 12:22 milk train.”
“Is there such a thing?”
“You bet your sweet life. When I had a Belgian boyfriend in the Sorbonne, it was the 12:29. All kinds of helling took place on the 12:29 to Brussels, kiddo! Now it’s the 12:22.”
“If that’s what you want.”
“What else? I can’t stand the torment, Zev, I truly can’t. Bud meant well, or maybe he’s too clever for me. I still haven’t figured him out. I know you much better than I do him. Don’t, Wolf, don’t, my darling, don’t! This certainly won’t work.”
He was taking her in his arms. “Shut up for once, Emily.” They kissed as they always had in the Growlery.
“Well, this is what they’re all doing,” she muttered, breaking away, and gesturing at the other couples. “But enough. To use Bud’s favorite dismissive term, sex is a pain in the ass.”
“Spécialité de la maison,” he said, and she mournfully chuckled.
They did exactly as she said. When they arrived at the Gare du Nord, the huge clock over the terminal entrance and all the smaller clocks inside were inching up on midnight. While she bought her ticket horns blew, bells rang, and drunken Americans here and there in the terminal began bawling “Auld Lang Syne.”
“He’ll be calling the hotel from Rome in the morning,” Barak said, trailing her with the bags.
“I left a message. No problem, he’ll understand. Perhaps too well. It doesn’t matter. Now I’m safe,” she said as he set down the bags at the train gate. “So tell me, would you have asked?”
“How’s that, Queenie?”
“You said, ‘Wait till you’re asked.’ I heard you. You had your chance, you know, old chum. There we were in the bedroom, while I packed. Just us two and
a bed. Shades of the Growlery! And — nothing.”
“Then there’s your answer.”
“Oh, yeah? Suppose I’d paused, just paused for a moment in that frantic nonstop packing, and given you a come-hither look? Just one?”
“Academic. You don’t know how.”
Clanging of train bell, hiss of steam, smell of the rolling vapor. “Prenez vos places, mesdames et messieurs!”
“Oh no? Watch me.” She did an inviting leering slut, eyes almost closed, mouth salaciously curving.
“Okay, okay, I’ll go with you to Brussels.”
“How I wish it! Goodbye, my everlasting love.”
“Goodbye, Queenie.”
“You wretch, write more often.”
He brought her bags aboard the train. There was nobody else in her compartment. They embraced and kissed until the bell clanged. He felt tears on her cheeks, and tried to brush them away. “Auld acquaintance,” she gasped. “Go! Go! It was marvellous, delicious, and oh my love, a silver star for not asking. Happy New Year, and hooray for the Cherbourg boats!”
11
The Dogfight
In a scaled double envelope stamped TOP SECRET, the Secretary of Defense received at his house a thick mimeographed document from General Halliday, together with a memorandum written on long yellow sheets in a firm vertical hand. Halliday was regarded in the air force as something of an intellectual. A serious reader of political and military literature, he had served two years in the plans directorate, and the Secretary of Defense still called on him for informal analyses of current crises, and even for drafting an occasional presentation to Congress.
5 February 1970
Dear Mr. Secretary:
Herewith, as promised, an advance copy of my official report on the Soviet P-12 radar now in Israel’s possession. My team of air force experts inspected and analyzed the equipment very thoroughly, as you’ll gather from these 87 pages and four appendices.
My personal impression of Israel’s strategic situation as it relates to our national interest, which you asked me to write in confidence on the basis of a first visit of five days, is also enclosed. I earnestly request that you consign it to a burn-basket once you’ve perused it. I’ve “told it like it is,” kept no copy, and pulled no punches.
Respectfully,
Bud Halliday
MEMORANDUM
Personal & Top Secret
4 February 1970
Subject: Israel — strategic posture after Six-Day War
American policy in the Middle East has clearly been skewed toward the Jews, Mr. Secretary, partly out of sympathy for their ordeal under the Nazis, partly because of their domestic political clout. The Six-Day War established the Israelis as a nation of supermen, but that is media nonsense. I gathered in my visit, however, that too many of them, including senior army officers, believe it. That can prove dangerous. They achieved surprise with a professional preemptive strike, and fought well thereafter. Their air force in particular is first class. But the war’s end left them in an overextended position. There is no basis for their occupation of Sinai except force of arms. Superior force can throw them out and Egypt is applying that force, increasingly aided and abetted by the Soviets. The Israelis are used to short wars of movement, but now have to hold a static front over 100 miles long at the end of very lengthy supply lines through the desert, while also guarding active fronts against Syria and Jordan. Colonel Nasser has large harassing forces right at the Canal, with no other front to worry about. The task is simply too much for the Jews. They are spread too thin.
Hence, shocking exploits like the radar capture, the Cherbourg boats, the Green Island feat, and the armored raid in September, all intended to paralyze Egypt. The Israelis are now playing their last card: deep air raids with the Phantoms. As a result, the CIA reports, Nasser went to Moscow last month to plead for Soviet intervention. Israeli intelligence, I was told, confirms that report. At this point Israel will be taking on a superpower! Such escalating military events cannot be indefinitely controlled. If the Jews find themselves fighting Soviet forces in order to hang on to Sinai, Israel can become the Serbia of a third world war.
Israel has nobody to turn to but the United States, and its chances of survival will only improve when we manage, despite Jewish domestic pressure, to mend our fences with the Arabs. Views like these are more prevalent in the State Department, I realize, than in the Pentagon, where there is a tendency to admire and believe in Israel’s invincibility. I too respect the doughty way the Jews have recovered from the Nazi massacre to create and defend their mini-state. Like crows and coyotes, the Jews are an indestructible breed, a wonder of history, but for the narrow calculation of our own interest, something of a problem.
On this calculation, Mr. Secretary, I recommended over the telephone against accepting the Russian radar for transport to the United States, and I repeat the recommendation. My team’s report contains all the useful intelligence that might be gleaned by stateside radar specialists, and should word leak out that we’ve acquired this hijacked equipment, our already strained relations with the Arabs would be much worsened. We truly don’t need a snatched Soviet radar on American soil.
Respectfully,
Bradford Halliday
General Halliday’s memorandum was disregarded. The radar was flown to the United States. In the months that ensued, CIA disclosures about the scope of Soviet intervention in Egypt amply confirmed his warning. By June 1970 some five squadrons of Russian-piloted MiG-21s were flying air cover over Cairo and major military targets; and a Soviet buildup of AA missile bases and systems, requiring thousands of military officers and technicians, was rapidly proceeding. As a result, murky diplomatic maneuvers were intensifying, to halt the War of Attrition and reinstate a ceasefire; and the State Department persuaded President Nixon to bring pressure on Israel by halting the delivery of Phantoms.
Then in July 1970 the Russian aviators began pursuing and even firing at Israeli aircraft, whose pilots were under strict orders to avoid combat with them, so that they had to flee with afterburners gulping fuel. Meantime Phantom losses to the new missiles kept increasing.
Eva Sonshine, runner-up for Miss Israel in 1968, was putting to rights her dishevelled long black hair when the telephone rang. “Benny,” she shouted over the shower noise, “he’s in the lobby.”
“Already? Tell him, ten minutes.”
“B’seder.”
The aviator hurriedly dried himself with capacious Hilton towels, grateful to poor Eva for lifting him out of a mood of fearful gloom. He had had a harrowing morning, visiting the parents of Phantom airmen who had fallen to the sinister black “flying telephone poles,” as the squadron was ruefully calling the missiles. What had made the visits especially difficult was that he really hardly knew the lost aviators, for the previous squadron leader had gone down only a few days ago. In this eerie new warfare between Phantoms and electronically guided Russian rockets, the air force was barely holding its own, and so Benny Luria, who had not yet qualified in Phantoms, had been commandeered to take over the squadron, and he was rushing through a Phantom course.
“Why are you so rough?” she grumbled when he came out, still drying his close-cropped head. “Look at my hair. Hopeless. Did you have to pick my lunch hour to fall in on me?”
“Motek, you’ve saved my life.”
“Don’t exaggerate. Listen, I’d like to meet this General Pasternak.”
“You never have? Sure. Look for us in the lounge.”
“I don’t want to be that obvious.”
“Nonsense. Do it.”
A warm kiss, and he was gone. The runner-up to Miss Israel stared at the mirror, inventorying her slant eyes, smooth skin, and Greta Garbo cheekbones, as Benny called them. How much longer, really, should she put up with the man? This receptionist job he had gotten her was more secure than modelling, but so dull! And her looks would not last forever. Well, no matter, lovemaking in midday was something different, a bit wild, almost
as in their early days. Back to the lobby then, to smile and smile at the stupid questions and angry squawks of rich Americans. It was a living for her and her bedridden mother.
Pasternak’s eyes were bloodshot, shoulders sagging, head drooping from a three-day emergency trip to Washington. He and Luria sat in a far corner of the lounge, not crowded because the tourists were mostly out sightseeing. “Number one,” Pasternak said hoarsely, sipping coffee, “they’re going to resume sending the Phantoms.”
“Hundred percent! It’s definite?”
“Yes. On the quiet, so as not to step on Arab corns. Just the stuff they owe us that Nixon held up in March.”
“Sam, what did it?” He looked here and there and dropped his voice to a murmur. “Habakkuk?”
This was the code name for intelligence from a deep source in Egypt, which revealed the reason for a sudden steep climb in Phantom losses; the Russians had equipped the SAM-3 missiles with advanced countermeasures to nullify the Phantom electronic shield.
“Habakkuk, plus the fact that the Russians weren’t really bearing down on the Egyptians to consider a cease-fire.” Pasternak heaved a thick weary sigh. “Nothing will ever stop the attrition but Soviet pressure on Nasser.”
“But meantime, anyway, the Washington stick turns back into a carrot.”
Pasternak’s large head heavily nodded. “Yes, and if Golda would choke down the State Department’s cease-fire plan, which is absolutely terrible, and which she’s rejected so far, we’d get a bigger carrot than that. However —”
“Isn’t that Colonel Benny Luria?” A lean very tan lady came striding through the lounge, followed by a bald man carrying a camera. On the general principle of being nice to Americans, Benny smiled and waved. She carolled, “Oh, so you do recognize me!”
As she came closer, he had a memory flare. “Why sure. Gloria. Los Angeles bonds dinner. You showed me how to do the frug.”
“Well, bless your heart. Yes, I’m Gloria Freed. Julius, this is Colonel Luria, the air hero of the war.”
