by Hesh Kestin
Before him, almost within reach, is a Bedouin silhouetted against the rising sun. The Bedouin holds a shotgun. It is pointed straight at his head.
39
SIXTY MILES TO THE southwest, a parachutist floats silently toward earth. Above him, he sees his plane smash into an enemy fighter, both aircraft exploding simultaneously. Kamikaze tactics are not taught at IAF Fighter Academy, but with a crippled engine and depleted ammunition, it was either eject or lock his jet onto an enemy plane and then eject. A difference of seconds. His port wingman does not have that choice. A squad of Egyptian F-16s brings him down early in the engagement. His starboard wing remains airborne, but the parachutist doubts the poor guy will survive. With little to no ammunition, it will be a fox hunt, a dozen Egyptian aircraft in pursuit armed with heatseeking AIM Sidewinder missiles. As he descends, he can see above him the Egyptian F-16 and his own aircraft plunging to earth in pieces, the same planes really—though the IAF version carries electronic modifications by Israel Aircraft Industries, both aircraft were manufactured by Lockheed Martin at the same factory in Fort Worth. The pilot about to come to earth visited that factory, just as it is possible his Egyptian counterpart, now dead, did also. For some reason this causes Alex to grin as the ground comes up fast to greet him with a thud.
40
IN THE BATHROOM OF his suite thirty-one stories above the roiling streets below, where thousands of American Jews are flooding in to demonstrate outside the United Nations General Assembly, Shai Oren, ambassador to the UN of all that is left of the State of Israel, shaves himself carefully with a straight razor, as he does every morning.
The razor was his father’s, a prosperous furrier in Dusseldorf who in 1939 brought it with him to what was then British-governed Palestine. The Nazis had closed his business two years before. It took every pfennig the old man could gather together to buy the family out—what little savings were left, his wife’s jewelry, the proceeds from the sale on terrible terms of their country house, the sale on even worse terms of a small Courbet that had hung over the fireplace in their home in the Oberkassel.
The razor, with its bone handle and Solingen blade, both worn down, like the old man himself is a talisman, a touchstone, a memory in ivory and steel of the time before the Oren family, then Kiefer, came to Israel as refugees, carrying little more than the clothes on their backs, heavy woolens unsuited to Israel’s climate, and a new German-Hebrew dictionary.
In 1939, Ambassador Oren’s father was thirty, spoke no Hebrew, and his only knowledge was of furs, not a likely path to success in the Middle East. Like tens of thousands of other German-Jewish refugees, who insisted on wearing jackets in the Palestinian heat, and ties, and proper shoes, not sandals, Ambassador Oren’s father was part of a lost generation, unintentional Zionists, a people cut off from their Central European roots.
Among the few who did succeed in the holy land were a small group of architects who immediately found work as Jewish willpower built up the land (and who later emigrated to the US when the building boom ended), along with those whose professions were portable: bankers, musicians, doctors, dentists, accountants. Lawyers either learned Hebrew and prospered or could not and didn’t. The rest, like Ambassador Oren’s father, whose optimistic first act in the holy land was to exchange the old family name, German for pine, to its Hebrew equivalent, were condemned to agriculture or modest commercial activities. Some sold cigarettes in the street. The old man had held out until little Shai was six before slitting his throat with the same razor his son now holds in his right hand.
He has shaved half his face, holding his chin in his left hand like an object unconnected to him, stretching the skin for a clean cut. “This is it,” he thinks. “I have reached the same state as my father, hopeless and fatigued and no longer sure of who I am.”
Ambassador Oren had always considered the old man a failure, gutless in the face of a wall of impossibilities. All his life, Ambassador Oren had never backed down in the face of calamity. As a veteran member of Knesset who had seen his party disintegrate into factions and then into separate parties, he had been compelled to make political deals that sickened him in order to keep his seat so that he would have the chance later to do for Israel what Israel had done for him. He had seen his boyhood friends, friends even from kindergarten, perish in war. He had buried his elder son at the military cemetery on Mt. Herzl in Jerusalem. He kept silent when the younger son emigrated to California to take a position at Stanford, raising his grandchildren to be what he thought of as “surfer Jews,” ignorant of Israel, ignorant of the Holocaust, ignorant of everything outside the Pacific Coast hothouse in which they were raised. They speak no Hebrew outside a few choice curse words, of which they are inordinately proud, and the odd terms for food, sex, and micturition. On the few occasions each year they saw him, now most often via Skype, they called him Grandpa. Ambassador Oren had always expected to be called the Hebrew equivalent, Saba, but their Hebrew was not even up to that. He had lived through his wife’s death by cancer, followed by a progression of good but inadequate women whose company brought him only momentary cheer and then unfathomable loneliness. Through all this, he marched on, ever fearful that he might take his father’s course.
Now he examines himself in the mirror of the large bathroom of the ambassadorial suite. It is guarded by a team of rigorously trained young security men and downstairs by a detail of New York Police Department whose numbers had tripled since what happened happened. He never thinks of it in terms other than “what happened,” or “the thing that happened,” as if it were a freak storm or a flood or an electrical fire, and not the ongoing catastrophe and something even worse, far worse.
He puts the razor to his throat, pauses for just a moment, then continues shaving in fluid, practiced strokes, careful as ever to avoid even the smallest nick, the tiniest drop of blood. Whatever else might happen, he has work to do.
41
WHEN THEY MOVED INTO the White House, the president cautioned his wife that it is unlucky for a new occupant to make changes to the décor. Jacqueline Kennedy had gone on a spending binge to renew the old place, and her husband had paid the ultimate price; Nancy Reagan, who did not go that far, saw her husband survive an assassination attempt. Perhaps worse in the eyes of the president, the White House had been seriously redecorated by his predecessor, at great cost to her popularity, which played a small but significant role in her defeat for a second term.
“Hon,” the president had told the first lady, “if they don’t kill you, they vote you out—and I ain’t about to lose a second term because of some gay son-bitch wielding a fine aesthetic and an unlimited expense account.”
With a sure sense of the American electorate, the president hardly requires an opinion poll to know the great unwashed was disgusted by the Franz Kline abstract in the Lincoln Bedroom and the Jackson Pollack in the Oval Office. His predecessor allowed presidential power to go to her head and in the process badly misjudged the tastes of the American people. Even her Democratic base looked upon the redecoration as a form of desecration when opposite a full-length Gilbert Stewart portrait of George Washington was hung a mobile in primary colors by Alexander Calder. One Fox Television personality termed the result “Washington crosses the nursery,” and spent a month—forever in air time—demanding the Calder be scrapped. Wall Street, the Hollywood elite, museum curators, writers, and gallery owners protested that removing the Calder (to say nothing of the Rothko, two de Koonings, and that very large Jackson Pollack) would be giving in to American mass culture, while the rest of America demanded that the White House continue looking like the White House. The president did not need more than a minute to weigh the issues. “Some of this stuff ain’t to my taste,” he announced at a press conference, making sure to sound down-home. “But I’m no expert. So I am appointing a commission to study this issue and make recommendations.”
Regarding the emerging situation in the Middle East, the president will be similarly decisive. In Washingt
on, the appearance of action is better than action itself. Appearance rarely involves consequence.
42
AS AMBASSADOR OREN TAKES the podium, the General Assembly empties until only a scattering of delegates remain: the US, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Guatemala, Holland, Italy, Panama, and Paraguay. It is as if a plague has entered the chamber in the form of one man.
The plague seems not to care.
“Mr. Chairman, distinguished members,” Ambassador Oren begins. “It is now one week since the sudden, bloody, and unprovoked attack on the State of Israel by four of its neighbors, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Iraq, and by one distant self-declared mortal enemy, Iran. Their forces now illegally and brutally occupy over eighty percent of the State of Israel, the same State of Israel whose borders were affirmed in 1949 by this very body.
“In Israel’s ancient capital of Jerusalem, Jordanian and Iranian troops, through the widespread use of terror, including centrally organized mass rape and murder, have caused the greatest refugee crisis since the Roman expulsion of the Jews from their homeland two thousand years earlier. The political leadership of Israel has been wiped out, either assassinated or missing. This includes all but one member of Israel’s parliament. Israel today is leaderless. In Jerusalem alone, eleven thousand civilians are dead. The principal occupation of the population of Israel’s ancient capital is the digging of graves.
“Some four hundred synagogues have been destroyed, their holy scrolls burned in the streets. Not content with wiping out every trace of Jewish cultural life, the Muslim invaders also burned or desecrated at least sixty churches. Though some video has been smuggled out, the true scope of the carnage is as yet not known. As in other areas under control of the invading forces, hospitals are closed to Jews, including women in labor.
“Mass terror, organized, planned and executed, is the rule in every Israeli city but one. Tel Aviv has so far not felt the imprint of one Arab boot.
“For those of you who see in this some sudden burst of compassion, be not deceived. The Muslim master plan for Israel is now clear. Even as I speak, Jews from outlying areas are being herded into ghettos in the major centers of population. Haifa, once a city of 300,000, now holds a million Jews. Beersheba, a city of 150,000, now holds 400,000. Jerusalem, home to one million Jews, now contains two million. In every case, Jewish civilians have no access to water, food, or shelter. What they do have is access to transport.
“Fellow delegates, as I speak Israel’s national railroad, now in the hands of the so-called Islamic Liberation Force, is being used to funnel all of Israel’s Jews into what is being called Ghetto Tel Aviv. Here they are forced to live on the streets and the beaches, surviving on shrinking reserves of food. Some eat grass pulled from the ground in public parks. Since the invasion, no ships have been permitted to bring aid to the starving people of Tel Aviv. For two weeks, no milk, flour, fruit, or vegetables have entered the ghetto. Electricity is limited to two hours a day and is expected shortly to cease entirely as supplies of coal dwindle and simply run out. Tel Aviv’s hospitals have no medicine, and soon will have no power. By the time all of Israel’s Jews are concentrated within the borders of Ghetto Tel Aviv, some six million men, women, and children will be concentrated here to starve or die of disease. When the time comes, the Muslim invaders will doubtless wipe out these survivors house by house, their bodies burned on the beach.
“Fellow delegates, yet again six million Jews will be killed—infants, children, mothers, fathers, grandparents—to fulfill the hideous dream of Israel’s conquerors, to make of the Jewish State little more than a dismal memory and its population a mountain of bleached bones.
“Fellow delegates, when Israel turned to you for support in defending against this brutal, cowardly, and unprovoked attack, you paused, considered, pontificated, invited cease fires, and called for peace conferences, but did little other than to make the sympathetic noises whose words will redound to the shame of the human race for centuries. You remain sitting on your hands trembling that the price of oil might rise one cent more, frozen in fear that the Saudis and their colleagues in OPEC might make your lives a bit less comfortable. Despite the solemn treaties, the lessons of history, and the certain knowledge that your own non-Muslim countries too will soon fall victim to the same brutal aggression, you let it happen.
“Fellow delegates, I ask you to come to the aid of the State of Israel, now a city-state of the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the hopeless, the dying and the dead. Send your ships. Bring us food. Drop it from airplanes, as you did during the Cold War to feed the people of West Berlin. Bring it by sea, as you did to support the people of the former Soviet Union in World War II.”
The ambassador seems now short of breath, or perhaps hope. He pauses, searching the faces of the few diplomats in the hall.
“And then begin the sad but necessary evacuation of the surviving population, six million wretched refugees belonging to a people whose contribution to the world has never been exceeded by any other people, large or small. The people of the State of Israel are prepared to help build your nations, your societies, your homelands. Step forward now as you did not in the previous century, when six million Jews were murdered. Please, I beg you, help save these six million.”
As if in relief that this accusatory monologue is over, a sprinkling of applause rises from the handful of people in the vast space. When he steps down from the podium, the members of 181 other delegations re-enter the hall.
The chairman of the General Assembly, a Norwegian diplomat who sees himself as an international civil servant, a genial friend to all, replaces him. “Thank you so much, distinguished representative of Israel,” he says with zero emotion, his face illuminated with divine neutrality. “I now call the distinguished representative of Algeria, followed by the distinguished representatives of Malawi, Iraq, France, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”
43
IN THE OFFICES OF Isracorp, now descended from the thirty-second floor of the Isracorp Tower to the fourth because electricity is not available to run the elevators, two men sit together watching the proceedings of the UN General Assembly on a jury-rigged electronic connection, one of the few means of contact with the outside world. They watch in silence as the picture dims, then goes dark, followed by the office lights. Electricity must be saved. Tel Aviv’s power station is now burning little more than coal dust. Tomorrow even that will be gone.
Misha relights his cigar. “I’m not going anywhere. You?”
“Wait until you’re so hungry you’ll eat your shoes,” Yigal says. The gangster removes the stylish moccasin on his right foot, and with a theatrical flourish inhales its aroma. “Italian cuisine,” he sighs. “My favorite.”
“We’ve given up. You heard it. Done. Take us away. The end.”
“There are worse things.”
“Like what?”
“Like this being my last Cohiba Esplendido.” Abruptly Misha changes his tone, his voice dropping an octave. “Yigal, no one will have us.”
“Probably not.”
“We shouldn’t have fallen back.”
“Still, we destroyed four hundred Iranian cans,” Yigal says. “Eight hundred more came the next day. We fell back. We didn’t advance. I’ve never not advanced. Not in Russia, where they called me filthy yid. Not here, where they called me filthy Russian. In a tank, not ever. How could it happen?”
“Too many Muslims. Too few Jews.”
“Too few? Close to six million are now in Tel Aviv, more shipped in like livestock every day. Quite a few Jews, Yigal.”
“Armed with what, Misha? Anger? Desire? Teeth?”
“They don’t want us to fight, our new leaders. They want to be taken in and fed, like dogs in the street.”
“No tanks, no planes, no ammo, no fuel. I run a global business—well, I ran a global business. You know how? With a weapon called money. Without this weapon, for investment, research, trade, leverage, I couldn’t have run a falafel stand. The Amer
icans have declared themselves neutral. Ipso facto, we have no weapons.”
“But you didn’t start with weapons. I didn’t either. We acquired them.”
“Over time. Of which we have none. Look out these windows. People sitting like statues in the street, moving only to find shade. For water they’re already drinking from the Yarkon, a river so poisonous you could die from falling into it. It’s over.”
Misha goes to the window, coated with the desert dust that swirls in from as far away as Saudi Arabia. The huge sheet of polarized glass has not been cleaned since the invasion. “Yigal,” he says, looking out. “I’m not the one who can do it. I’m a good criminal, very organized, good contacts, not stupid. But I don’t have your experience. You run the biggest company in Israel—”
“What I run is an office building with really nice furniture. Everything else is gone. Factories, banks, telecoms, software. Finita la comedia.”
The gangster turns so that in Yigal’s view he is now little more than a silhouette against the sun. “You through feeling sorry for yourself?”
“I thought I’d give it a bit longer.”
“Fuck, we don’t have any longer. Yigal, nobody will follow me. They will follow you.”
44
THE MAIN JERUSALEM OFFICES of Israel Discount Bank were looted on the first day of the war by optimistic Jordanian mechanized cavalry who had seized the center of the city and then, with resistance melting by the minute, moved to seize the cash assets of the bank. This was patently a waste of energy; by the next day, the Islamic Liberation Force had declared the Israel shekel as dead a currency as the eroded Roman coinage Israeli children often found in gardens and excavations at building sites. Only one day before the invasion, the shekel had been trading at a strong three to the US dollar. The next afternoon it was empty of all value other than nostalgia. The Jordanian troopers did somewhat better with the bank’s small supply of foreign currency—like most Israeli bank branches, it did a brisk business in foreign exchange to serve the tourist trade—but there wasn’t that much: the branch’s dollars and euros were transferred every night to Bank Discount’s vaults in Tel Aviv. Frustrated, the Jordanians next blew the vault and pried open one by the one its several hundred safe deposit boxes. These yielded a small pile of jewelry and masses of documents and family memorabilia—photos, ancient passports, brittle papers which ascribed to their namesakes the rights of citizenship in Iraq, Austria, Germany, Poland, Romania, Algeria, Syria, Lebanon, and other countries that over the years had voided the same documents. These litter the floor of the bank’s vault like yellowing snow.
