by Herman Wouk
“Then am I to tell my Prime Minister, Mr. Secretary, this: that you yourself recognize the need for the airlift, that resistance within your government, specifically at the Pentagon, is causing delay, but that the President and you will ensure that the airlift flies by Saturday?”
Staring at him, the Secretary of State finishes the sandwich and brushes crumbs from his dinner jacket. “I begin to see why Golda sent you.”
“Am I mistaken, sir?”
An impatient shrug. “General, the airlift is a problem for the Pentagon and the Department of Transportation. I’m lost in all this talk about civilian charters, painted-out military markings, and so on—”
“You said Israel must achieve a military success by Saturday, Mr. Secretary, or the U.S. may face a dilemma at the UN. In my country it’s already Thursday. An immediate all-out battle, very costly in weaponry and blood, is the task you’re laying on us.”
“I’m not. For your own preservation you must do it.”
“Yes, but how do we fight on after that, Mr. Secretary, if all-out resupply is not in the air by then? If we’re overwhelmed, no matter how well we fight, by the sheer weight of Soviet metal?”
In slow, heavy, irritated tones, the Secretary says, “Listen, General, our national concern is not just the predicament of our good friend Israel. Mrs. Meir understandably thinks of nothing else, but we must also consider the welfare of our European allies and Japan, and our détente with the Soviet Union, the one present ray of light in world affairs. This war must lead to a peaceful long-range settlement in that vital oil region. There are those in the Pentagon who cry that if we now give Israel any help at all, we ‘blow our role as honest broker.’ Those are the elements we deal with, hour by hour.”
“Mr. Secretary, what would you say to my Prime Minister, if in fact she had flown here and was now sitting in this chair?”
“Well put.” The anger dims from the Secretary’s face and voice. “Number one, for God’s sake keep me accurately informed of the battlefield situation. If I’m in the dark about that, how can I be a useful friend in negotiations? Second, don’t talk or even think cease-fire anymore, while you’re losing in the field. The other side is brutally quick to sense weakness. They’ll just keep upping the price. Third, the status quo ante is gone. For good! It was always an unstable stalemate. It couldn’t have lasted. Mr. Sadat fooled you by crying wolf for years and then launching a war that looked unwinnable, just to break up the political ice. I’m sure his success has amazed him. He’s proved himself a statesman, and you may hate him now, but with such an astute personality you may in time do business.” The Secretary glances at his watch. “As for the airlift, I would emphasize the President’s resolve that Israel must not lose the war, and ask her patience. And please, no dramatics.”
“Mr. Secretary, I’ve read your work on Metternich, A World Restored.”
“You have?” Kissinger looks surprised and pleased. “Was it all right?”
“Outstanding. In one passage you call a statement of Castlereagh’s ‘thin gruel.’ ”
This surprises a hearty laugh from Kissinger. “I must go. I would tell Mrs. Meir one thing more. She’s thrown her voice very effectively across the ocean. But I’d hasten to add, General Barak is no dummy.”
“You’re a flatterer, Mr. Secretary.”
24
The Fork in the Road
In Jerusalem, for some time before the alarming Brezhnev cease-fire proposal reaches Nixon and is relayed to Dinitz, a fateful strategy conference has been going on in Golda Meir’s office. More senior officers are crowded into the Prime Minister’s conference room than Sam Pasternak can remember from his days in the Mossad; and since then, this is the first time he has been included in such a meeting. Out of the government for nearly a year, Sam has been keeping his mouth shut and scribbling notes on the different view-points:
Allon: Transfer all available forces south and cross the Canal at any cost, because hitting Syria won’t end the war …
Dado: No, Syria now. The world’s waiting for Israel to do something, and we can move tomorrow only in the north …
Benny Peled: Agrees. Air Force almost down to the red line, can operate for three or four more days, wants quick action, hit Syria now …
Dayan: Neither option viable. No decision can be forced on either front, we lack the strength. Retreat and dig in north and south, harden up defensive positions — the Purple Line and the Sinai mountain passes — and regroup to fight another day …
Pasternak is thinking that Dado long ago foresaw this dilemma and warned the politicians that, with the cuts in the military budget, he could not wage all-out war on two fronts. The question now is, which way to hit out? At which front to throw all strength to seek a decision in the war? Round and round the arguments have gone while Golda Meir sits silent at the head of a long table, yellow-faced with fatigue and concern; almost like a wax museum effigy of herself, which puffs smoke and brings cigarettes to its mouth with one movable arm.
Pasternak is startled by a woman’s voice cutting through all the guttural army Hebrew: “Nu, Sam, no opinion?”
“Madame Prime Minister, I’m with Yigal Allon. Attack in the south.”
“Why?”
“Clausewitz principle, ‘Strike for the heart.’ If you knock out your strongest enemy, you win the war.”
Dado speaks up briskly. “Sam, we’ve all studied Clausewitz. That rule is modified in our case by geography, time, and the position of the forces. In the north we can act tomorrow at dawn. It’ll take us four or five days just to move our forces south. And suppose meantime that the UN votes a cease-fire, on lines that seal the enemy’s surprise success?” He turns to Golda. “Madame Prime Minister, I say again — and I can’t emphasize it enough — at least two Egyptian armored divisions are still west of the Canal, where I can’t get at them. Nor can the air force, because of the missiles. A premature crossing against such power is a reckless gamble —”
“Sooner or later, Dado, you’ll have to fight them,” says Allon, “to end the war —”
“I know that. But the time may come when —”
It is at that moment that a red telephone rings at Golda’s elbow. Sudden ominous silence, for only emergency news can break into this meeting. Golda takes the call and listens poker-faced for long minutes, with now and then a gruff “Ken,” and finally, “B’seder, Simcha.” She hangs up. “Gentlemen, Brezhnev has telephoned President Nixon, to propose an immediate joint cease-fire resolution in the Security Council.”
Grim prolonged stillness, grave faces turning to each other; then the strategy debate starts up again with added urgency and heat. Pasternak is shaken. Clausewitz is all very fine, but Dado is right, unless Israel hits out at once, this cease-fire will clamp her in defeat.
“Enough, gentlemen.” Golda raises her hand and speaks heavy slow words. “If I had the option to strike north or south tomorrow, it would still be a difficult choice. Now I have no choice. Henry Kissinger has told me, over and over, ‘You have to start winning on the battlefield.’ Sound advice. He has neglected to mention how. He leaves those details to me.”
A mutter of bitter amusement around the table.
“So it must be the Syrians, gentlemen. If we have a success and hold territory beyond the Purple Line at the cease-fire, the outcome at least will be unbalanced. The Egyptians lodged in Sinai, but our forces deep in Syria and heading for Damascus. That’s already a negotiation.”
Earlier on this same fifth day of the war, Yael Nitzan sets out to fly home. Like most people, she thought when it started that the Arabs were committing suicide, but day by day she has become more and more concerned, and her Leavis involvements have seemed to matter less and less. So after an all-night session on paperwork with her secretary she blearily boards a plane to New York, masks her eyes, and falls fast asleep in her first-class seat well before takeoff. When she awakens the plane is thrumming along high above sunlit clouds, and in the seat beside her a man is read
ing a book in Arabic. But except for a few words she recognizes, this is like no Arabic she has ever read or heard spoken, though she can read a newspaper or magazine and converse in a simple fashion.
He is a strange man with strange mannerisms, probably in his mid-fifties, with curly black hair streaked gray, and a long dark Spanish sort of face. He is pleasantly scented or pomaded. His very wrinkled black suit is of fine material, and the gray pullover under the jacket looks like cashmere. As he reads he pencils notes, not on the margins of the pages, which have the marbled edges of an old library volume, but in a pocket notebook, pushing his glasses up on his forehead, and holding notebook and pencil nearly to his nose.
Boredom plus curiosity make her say at last, “I beg your pardon, are you an Arab?”
He peers at her. “Do you know Yiddish?”
Taken aback, she says, “A little. Why?”
“Very old joke. In the New York subway a black man sits reading a Yiddish newspaper. Man beside him can’t resist. ‘Pardon me, sir,’ he asks, ‘are you Jewish?’ The black replies, ‘Nor doss felt mir oiss [That’s all I need].’”
“Ha! I deserve that for disturbing you.”
“You read Arabic?”
“Not that Arabic. It’s Chinese to me.”
“Ah well.” He closes the volume. “It would be to many Arabs. And are you an Israeli going home because of the war?”
“Just so. And you?”
“I live in New York. A few days ago I lectured on ‘Vico and Heroic Islam’ at a university to a small comatose audience. Tonight I repeat it in a very grand Manhattan temple. Now that this war is on, I shall be hooted at and possibly stoned by anxious New York Jews. That is, if anybody comes.” He speaks in rapid bursts of words, punctuated by breaths like gasps. “Though if one pays attention, what I have to say isn’t too bad from the Jewish viewpoint. I gave a similar talk at Tel Aviv University last summer. It was well received.” The flight attendants are approaching with the bar cart. “Join me in a glass of sherry.”
“I’d better not. I’ve interrupted your work.”
“Nonsense, my eyes are tired, do drink with me.” The attendant pours for them. “Tell me about yourself and your family.”
“My husband is an army general. I have a business in Los Angeles. We have two children. My name is Yael Nitzan.”
“Nitzan?” He shifts in his seat to stare. “Is your husband the one they call Don Quixote?”
“You know him?”
“He was at my lecture in Tel Aviv. Forced his way to me afterward, captured me and took me to eat Yemenite food in Jaffa and explain my lecture.”
“That’s my husband.”
“Well, here’s to Don Quixote. May he emerge safe and victorious from this wretched war.”
“Amen.” She drinks. He gives her a smudged card.
DR. MAX ROWEH
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
“Roweh? Didn’t a book of yours just get a rave in the Los Angeles Times? In fact, I bought it.”
“Vico and Descartes: The Fork in the Road,” he says. “You truly bought a copy? How lovely of you. Heavy going, isn’t it?”
She is embarrassed. Yael follows the book reviews, sniffing for novels that may make movies. On impulse now and then she buys highly praised nonfiction to improve her mind, which however resists improvement as a mackintosh resists rain. “Frankly, I’d never heard of Vico. I didn’t reach the fork. Maybe I will.”
He smiles. “A-plus for honesty. That first chapter is a sinker. Vico is not easy. This is dreadful sherry. Have you spoken to your husband since the war began? Inevitable, the war, but good may yet come of it.” She is about to ask him to explain, but in his voluble way he runs on. “Vico’s theory of history has been badly vulgarized — in the unscholarly vogue he’s been having lately — to a cyclical view of civilizations, which would not be original with him, it’s in Aristotle. James Joyce made Vico modish after he’d been neglected for centuries, by supposedly basing Finnegans Wake on his theories. So an academic cottage industry is springing up, and small journals are breaking out in a Vico rash. Look, wouldn’t you rather have a nap, or read your Vogue?”
“What I’d like to do is hear your lecture. I have to stop in New York overnight.”
“Bless me!” He looks astounded and delighted. “Would you really? How brave. Well, nothing easier! My car is meeting me. We’ll just drop off my bags at my flat and take you on to the lecture. Afterward, where are you staying?”
“Airport Hilton.”
“You’ll be driven there. In fact” — he glances at his watch — “we might still have a decent glass of sherry in my flat before the lecture. Small courtesy to the wife of a true hero. I’ve heard much about your Don Quixote.”
“Where is your flat?”
“River House. Midtown, east side.”
“I know where River House is.” Yael tries not to sound bowled over. “Will your wife be there?”
“Alas, I’m a widower. I lost her four years ago to cancer.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Thank you. She was a great lady, enormously active in good causes, Israeli and otherwise. I’ve had to carry on much of her work in endowments and foundations, and I’m quite unsuited to such things. But one must be true to her memory, and her family expects it.”
“She wasn’t an Israeli, was she?”
“Oh, no, no. On her mother’s side, she was a Rothschild, British branch.” Roweh glances sidewise at her. “The impecunious cousins. It’s decided then? You’ll come to my lecture.”
“I will indeed, and thank you.”
“Splendid.” He opens his book.
“Now, what is that you’re reading?”
“Ibn Khaldun.”
“Should I have heard of him?”
“No. Academic subject. He’s the Arab Thucydides, a great historian, fourteenth century. Not quite as great as Toynbee says, but then, Toynbec mainly cribs from Khaldun. I’ve come to Arab thought late, but it’s very important.”
Yael is in far over her head, she thinks, as Roweh immerses himself again in Ibn Khaldun. But sherry in River House with the widower of a Rothschild of sorts ought to be nice, though beyond it glooms a lecture about Vico. She’ll have plenty to tell Sam Pasternak when they meet in Paris.
And indeed the River House apartment stuns her: opulent furnishings, fairyland night view of downtown Manhattan and the bridges, walnut-walled library massed with books floor to ceiling, and on the living room walls, among other paintings, a Degas dancer and a Corot river scene. A fussy Irish cook-maid serves finger sandwiches of smoked salmon with the sherry. Yael is used to Sheva Leavis’s moneyed luxury, but Max Roweh is a highly novel meld of intellect, wealth, and class; yet after all just an untidy middle-aged scholar, with his mind off on the moon. The whole encounter is dreamlike. She likes him.
A peculiar scholar though, taking her in his own chauffeur-driven Lincoln to hear him lecture! His rapid-fire talk traces stages in the “civilization of Islam” according to Vico’s scheme of history, and what she can understand, before she dozes off, is all new to her. Roweh appears to admire greatly Mohammed and the Koran, and to see virtues in Islam which have never crossed her mind. His lecture style is much like his talk in the airplane, rat-tat-tat sprays of words with glints of irony and humor; hard to follow and much too much for the postprandial audience in the majestic Reform temple. She is not the first one to fall asleep. As they drive away from the temple he explains that he has been paid a large honorarium, which will go to one of his wife’s foundations. “There is no such thing as enough money in philanthropy. They were unwise enough to invite me. I did my act. Remaining conscious was their lookout.”
Next day Yael carries aboard the Air France plane a new copy of Vico and Descartes: The Fork in the Road, inscribed
For Israel’s Don Quixote,
and his charming Dulcinea,
Yael Nitzan,
with the author’s
best wishes
for health and victory
M. Roweh
Again the first chapter defeats her, inducing a long restful nap, which with a movie and a good French dinner makes the flight pass quickly. She means to keep at the book and worm through it, no matter what. She wants to understand Roweh if she can. His erudition awes her. He learned Arabic in a year, he told her, in order to read the Koran and Ibn Khaldun in the original. Besides Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, which he absorbed in Kiev as a child, he knows five European languages. The mere list of titles of his books is scary. All the same, she has a handle on him as just another lonesome man who has taken to her. About that she knows she is not mistaken. She glances often at his formal stern photograph on the book jacket, with a wall of books behind him. That isn’t the whole picture of Max Roweh. Not half!
And now for a rendezvous with Sam Pasternak, a very different sort of lonesome man. Unlike the brush with the wealthy philosophy professor, it will lack the edge of the unexpected, but she is very glad it’s on. When she called from Los Angeles before leaving, he told her that Amos was in the Rambam Hospital, badly wounded, and a warm impulse to console him flooded her. “Look, darling, you say you’ll be in Paris tomorrow? I’m coming home via Air France. I don’t want Aryeh lying about his age and volunteering for something crazy. Where will you be in Paris? Let’s meet.” And it is still something to look forward to. After all, that moment at Shimshon’s …
Sam Pasternak finds two messages at the desk of his Paris hotel.
Plane delayed two hours by fog in JFK airport. But I’m coming, patience! Love, Yael.
Am in the bar. Uri.
Uri is the military attaché in the Paris embassy. Pasternak attended the circumcision of Uri, son of a Palmakh buddy, and remembers the wild wail Uri raised, spitting out the soothing wine. Now Uri is a lieutenant colonel with a neat black beard. Sam finds him drinking wine in the bar and looking pained, as though the taste subliminally reminds him of the covenant of Abraham.
“Is there any hope?” he greets Pasternak, who drops beside him in a leather-lined booth.
