The Hope

  Marcus sounded spent and old, his voice almost a croak. “It’s very bad, Zev, much worse than last time. Great plan, but terrible foul-ups in communication, not enough manpower—”

  “Sir, the convoy made it safely and sailed into Jerusalem, people were out in the streets cheering—”

  “Yes, yes, so we’ve heard. But the intelligence is that the Arabs will counterattack tonight, south of Latrun. If they reach Hulda the road’s kaput. We’ll be ready for them, but—”

  “Colonel, I’ve got the press accounts of the convoy here. Podotzur’s just cleared them. Please listen to Reuters. Just the lead. It’s very dramatic—”

  “Well, go ahead.”

  “‘In a remarkable show of their ability to improvise, the Israelis have opened a new and secret road bypassing Latrun to link Jerusalem to the Tel Aviv front. This development transforms the truce picture, and could prove the turning point of the war…’”

  “Zev, that’s Reuters?”

  “Reuters, sir. Good old anti-Israel Reuters! The Los Angeles Times is even better.”

  “Christ, go on with Reuters, Zev.”

  “‘This correspondent travelled in a command car at the head of a convoy which last night trucked a hundred tons into Jerusalem, decisively breaking the siege. There was no enemy interference…’”

  “By God, I don’t believe this! Read on, it’s adrenaline!”

  “‘It was a rough ride, bucking and bouncing in a fresh-cut road which climbs, dips, and winds through the rugged wild Judean hills. Gunfire around Latrun lit up the sky, but on the road soldiers prodded along cattle and loaded mules, human chains of porters trudged peacefully in both directions…’”

  As Barak read off the three pages, Marcus kept interjecting, “Marvellous! …Wonderful! …Outstanding!”

  “Listen to how he winds up, sir. ‘Whatever one’s views of Israel’s politics, the construction of this miniature “Burma Road” in the shadow of defeat is a stunning military coup. Together with their demonstrated competence in the field, it confirms the Jews as a force to be reckoned with hereafter in the Middle East.’”

  “That’s it? That’s the end? It sounds almost like an editorial.”

  “That’s it. He’s got a big scoop, and he’s making the most of it. Reuters! Front page tomorrow in every capital in the world! Want to hear the L.A. Times?”

  “Never mind. ‘The Burma Road’!” Marcus laughed like a boy. “Terrific! Hold everything, Zev, I have to tell this to Colonel Allon.”

  Barak could hear the deep voice of Allon, a kibbutz farmer in his twenties, a hardened Palmakh commander, in animated converse with Marcus, who soon came back on the line. “Allon’s tremendously moved, Zev, and you know what? We’re going to defy the Old Man! He’s been after us to attack Latrun yet again! Tonight! Fourth time! He’s crazed! Yitzhak Rabin is down in Tel Aviv arguing with him right now. It’s been going on for hours. Now I can tell him, forget it, and I will! Jerusalem is saved, and not another Jewish boy is going to die at Latrun!”

  “You’ve done it, Colonel. You pushed the road through.”

  “Well, there’s plenty of credit to go around. Meantime there’s that Arab attack tonight, but Allon assures me we’ll crush them! Look, come to my Abu Ghosh headquarters, Zev, and we’ll talk.”

  “I’ve got those press guys on my hands, sir. Got to baby them.”

  “Agreed. Just come when you can.”

  “Yes, sir. So we have a rendezvous at Abu Ghosh.”

  Marcus guffawed. “Good memory, me boy, and a mighty different rendezvous, hey? Rendezvous with life! A whole new ball game, Zev! You people are wonderful, you’ve pulled off a miracle, you’ve held on to the beachhead by your fingernails.” Marcus’s spirit was soaring, it rang in his voice. “By God, maybe I was born to save Jerusalem, but if that’s so, it’s done! Now everything starts!”

  ***

  The Blumenthal brothers wandered into the King David dining room as Yael was checking over the bill with the headwaiter, and Barak was talking to the hotel manager. The officers and journalists were gone, and plenty of food was left in platters on the table: fish, cheese, meat, and cakes. “Leopold wants to ask you something,” Kishote said to Yael. She ignored them and went on arguing about the price of items, while Leopold helped himself heartily to the food until an old waiter in a stained apron came up and snarled, causing him to desist with a last fast filch of a cheese wedge.

  “Mah ha’inyan? [What’s up?]” Yael inquired of Leopold, as she signed the bill.

  “How do I get out of the army?”

  She gave him a chilly stare, up and down. “You don’t.”

  “Why not? I didn’t volunteer, I was put into uniform the day we landed in Haifa. I have to get a job to support our father, he isn’t well. There’s a truce tomorrow. If there’s another war, well, I’ll join up.”

  “Don’t bother me. Talk to your platoon commander.”

  “That shithead? I don’t think he can read or write.”

  Yael decided to be offended. He had some of his brother’s peculiar buoyancy, but he was too fresh by half. She hitched a shoulder and walked out.

  “Ayzeh hatikha! [What a piece!]” exclaimed Leopold devilishly to Kishote, in recently acquired slang.

  Upon returning Barak to his flat, Kishote got permission to use the jeep, and drove to the tailor shop. “Wait,” he said to his brother, and he carried two large paper sacks inside. “Reb Shmuel, some food from Tel Aviv.”

  “So! You came with the convoy!” The old man gestured at the back door, smiling. “Shayna and her mother are in the kitchen.”

  Kishote had been in the dark little apartment only once before. Passing through the gloomy hallway, he opened what he thought was the kitchen door. Shayna stood in a tin tub, her back to him, luxuriantly squeezing a large sponge over her head, a pink slim Eve pretty as a flower. “AI!” She saw him in a looking glass and flung the sponge over her shoulder, a mirror shot that got him square in the face. He backed out, slamming the door.

  “Fool, give me back my sponge!” It was rolling on the floor, but with his glasses gone and his eyes drenched he was blind.

  “First you give me back my glasses!”

  “They’re not here, fool. Oh, yes, here they are.” A dripping white hand and arm reached out. “Take them, fool.”

  Shayna’s mother appeared in the hallway. “What’s going on? Hello, Yossele.” She picked up the wet sponge, and exclaimed at the door, “Shayna, what nonsense is this?”

  “Oh, Mama, go away,” cried the girl in a singularly mature tone, and the naked arm snatched the sponge.

  Soon the two brothers were greedily downing bread and soup at the kitchen table. “So tell me, Leopold,” the mother inquired, “what do you think of Jerusalem, now that you’ve seen it?”

  “Lots of damage.”

  “Yes, but that we’ll repair.”

  “It’s nice. Just a small town, though, not like Tel Aviv.”

  Shayna entered, drying her long black hair with a towel. “God in heaven,” she blurted to her mother, “is that idiot still here?”

  “Meet my brother Leopold,” said Kishote, unoffended. “He’s no idiot.”

  “Faugh!” The girl stamped out.

  “The war has upset Shayna,” her mother said. “Pay no attention.”

  Leopold thanked the mother and left to find his unit. She smiled approval as Yossi said an after-meal grace. “How is it that you’re religious and not your brother? He ate without a blessing, no hat, no grace.”

  “The war has upset Leopold.”

  ***

  Barak took the two correspondents to Mount Zion that afternoon, so they could see the dynamited synagogues in the Old City, and the great ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives being used as a quarry, the gravestones trucked away openly for construction or paving. The Palmakh commander there, David Elazar, was short but imposing, a charming Yugoslavian Jew who knew almost no English, and so could not be questioned too closely. Elaz
ar led Barak and the correspondents to a high point on the Mount. “This was as far as we could advance,” he said, Barak translating. “We did push patrols into the Jewish Quarter, but there wasn’t the manpower to keep the lines open, and we had to pull out. So the Quarter fell.”

  “Then you’ve lost the Old City for good,” said Schreiber, “if this truce leads to peace.”

  “We have a saying—‘If my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a carriage.’”

  St. John Robley inquired sharply, “You don’t believe the truce will hold?”

  Elazar took his time about replying. The soldiers of his unit were gathered around, their eyes alight with regard for their commander. “Well, I think we’ll get the Old City back,” David Elazar drawled, “though I admit I don’t know when or how.”

  Until darkness fell, Barak drove the correspondents here and there to the many battle sites of besieged Jerusalem, where they talked with the commanders still on guard. By the time they headed back to the King David, shells were sailing from the Old City over Jerusalem in arches of red fire, with loud explosions and many blazes springing up. The correspondents seemed to enjoy the fireworks. “The Arabs are finishing up with a bang before the truce, aren’t they?” said Schreiber.

  “Putting up quite a show,” said Robley. “To little avail.”

  In the shuttered hotel they found an excellent dinner laid on, considering the austerities of a siege; and the staff officers who joined them were in high spirits over word that the Arab counterattack was being bloodily repulsed. The dinner became a sort of unbuttoned wine-fueled review of the whole war, the correspondents prodding the officers with questions and scribbling notes, the euphoric Israelis vying to tell their personal tales of combat. It went on for hours, with some minor security lapses, but Barak perceived that the journalists seemed engrossed, so he made no attempt to interfere. It was very late before the talk broke up and he could escape and drive to Abu Ghosh.

  “Haderekh shelanu [The road is ours],” he replied to a sentry’s challenge from the dark gateway of the headquarters, an abandoned monastery. That was the password for the night. As he walked into the vaulted stone hall, three officers saw him and broke off conversation, looking peculiarly embarrassed.

  “Zev, you here? Mah ha’inyan?” a former battalion commander of his inquired.

  “Colonel Stone asked me to come and meet with him here, but I was delayed. If he’s having a nap, don’t disturb him.”

  The battalion commander took his arm. “You won’t disturb Colonel Stone.” He led Barak into a small room where a candlelit body lay on the floor wrapped in a white blanket. He lifted an edge of the blanket. The face was Mickey Marcus’s. The eyes were shut, the expression coldly peaceful. Shocked speechless, Barak shuddered.

  “He went walking outside the camp perimeter, evidently wrapped in that blanket. Nobody knows why, or exactly when.” The battalion commander’s voice trembled. “Somebody heard a shot about half an hour ago, and went out to check. He was lying on the ground in the blanket, shot through the chest.”

  “How? By whom? A sniper, way out here?”

  “What else?” The commander spread his hands in an unhappy gesture. “He’s gone.”

  Another officer looked in. “The ambulance is here. The doctor is waiting down in Abu Ghosh.”

  “Too late for doctors,” said the commander.

  Barak followed the stretcher to the ambulance, and watched till the vehicle disappeared down the dirt road. The stars were paling in the indigo sky when he walked aimlessly out into the camp.

  “Mi sham?!” The challenge was boyish and nervous, the armed figure tense in the twilight.

  “Haderekh shelanu,” said Barak, fighting back dry sobs, and under his breath he added, “Ah, God, Mickey, Mickey, the road is ours.”

  ***

  A few hours later the cease-fire took effect. A truce of a month was on. Before it ended the Holy Land trembled on the edge of another civil war, this time between Jews and Jews.

  6

  Diamond Cut Diamond

  Ten warm June days into the truce, Barak’s apartment was shaping up. Clad only in sneakers and faded shorts, his arm out of the cast and usable though stiff and crooked, he was cementing glass into a window sash, happy with such relaxing mindless chores. Nakhama was out shopping, Noah was back at his old kindergarten, and all was quiet in the household. In a week of hard work he and Nakhama had restored it to its former neat look, and there might never have been a war, except that the telephone remained dead, the water supply was chancy, and gas for the stove had not been restored until that morning. Electricity still came on only two hours a day, but candles and kerosene lamps diffused a romantic glow at night, suited to a sort of second honeymoon in their own flat, their own bed.

  A knock came at the door and a soldier delivered a despatch which made Barak groan aloud. When he came out of the shower in a bathrobe, there lay on his desk a slaughtered duck, its feathers all bloody, and off in the kitchen Nakhama was clattering pots and singing an Arabic song of her childhood, a signal of great good cheer. “Where to all the devils did you get this?” he asked her, flourishing the carcass by the legs.

  “Never mind! Fresh-killed! Tonight we celebrate, motek.”

  “Celebrate what?”

  “Having gas in the stove, that’s what.”

  Barak put down the duck and showed her the despatch. She cried, “Ai! But he promised! He promised you two weeks!”

  “I know, and he’s a man of his word. I’ll have to find out what’s up, though.”

  “L’Azazel!” She clanged a pot down in the sink. “Why did I have it slaughtered? A live duck doesn’t spoil. Noah could have played with it till its time came.”

  “But then he wouldn’t have let you kill it. He’d have named it Joshua or Itzhak, and fought you off.”

  “Hah! No doubt. Well, so it goes in the Bluestein refrigerator.” The lady next door was the envy of all tenants, for American cousins had once brought her a Kelvinator. “But don’t let him cheat us of our two weeks, you hear? You come back home!”

  Instead of having to fly a dogleg to avoid antiaircraft fire, the Piper Cub went buzzing straight over the Latrun fortress, and the young pilot pointed down at half-dressed Legionnaires strolling about. “Very glad not to be fighting, what?” he shouted over the engine noise. “Same as us!” In the beautiful green Ayalon fields, on both sides of the invisible partition line, Arab and Jewish farmers bent to their work and tractors peacefully crawled. The small plane bucked and teetered, coming down in the sea winds north of Tel Aviv. Outside the terminal shed a short barrel-chested man in coat, tie, and a fedora hat, eating a thick sandwich from a paper bag, said as Barak walked past him, “What’s the matter, big shot, you don’t talk to civilians?”

  “Sam! Emigrating, are you? Very sensible!” Pasternak only laughed and bit his sandwich. “Come on, Sam, where to now, of all times?”

  Pasternak lowered his voice and replied, chewing. “Prague. Detached duty. The Czech arms market is breaking wide open, Zev. Surplus Messerschmitts, tanks, cannons, machine guns, rifles, ammo! Anything we can pay for and carry away, we can have now.”

  Since the Pasternak family were Czech Jews, and Sam had done gunrunning in the underground, his mission was no surprise. “But the embargo, Sam? The truce terms? We can’t bring that stuff in.”

  With a mirthless smile, Pasternak said, “No, of course we can’t. The Arabs are hauling weaponry in by the ton, because the UN observers can’t monitor all their borders and coastlines, but those UN snoops are all over us like fleas, aren’t they?” The old foxy look creased his big-jawed face. “Still, a Jew can find a way sometimes, hah? And you? I thought you were on leave.”

  “I am. B.G. summoned me here by plane, God knows why.”

  “I know why.”

  “Then tell me!”

  Pasternak put an arm through his crooked elbow and drew him aside. “He didn’t mention Begin?”

  “Begin! Not a wor
d.”

  Ben Gurion’s fire-eating rightist political opponent, Menachem Begin, led the Irgun Zvae Leumi, United National Force, the rightist faction of Zionism.

  “Well, Begin’s people bought an old surplus LST, one of those big landing ships, in America, and filled it chockablock in Marseilles with French munitions. It’s off our coast right now, about to unload. But who’s to get the weapons? The army, or the Irgun? That’s what’s up, Zevi, and it’s a ticking bomb, I warn you. Good luck!”

  The Old Man was hunched over tea and cake at his desk, his white wings of hair blown by a noisy fan. “We’ve finally heard from the Americans about Marcus,” he said without ado. “The story is out, it’s getting a big play in their newspapers, and they plan a funeral with full military honors. Burial at West Point, a very grand occasion. No more than he deserves. A true hero. Moshe Dayan will accompany the body, but I’m still trying to hire a transport plane in Europe. So expensive! And the insurance! Terrible!” Ben Gurion heaved a deep sigh, sipped tea, and went on with the sly side-glance of an insider. “Well, it’s all very sad. You know what really happened?”

  “Yes, a sniper bullet.”

  Ben Gurion slowly shook his head. “Bobbeh-myseh! If Mickey had known any Hebrew, poor chap, he’d still be alive.” He paused to relish Barak’s puzzlement. “Those Palmakhniks at Abu Ghosh threw him a big party late at night. Celebrating the road, the truce, lifting the siege, and so on. You know, he liked his drop, and I guess he drank plenty! He must have wandered out in that white blanket to relieve himself. Anyway, a sentry challenged him, a new recruit who didn’t know English. When poor Mickey couldn’t say ‘Haderekh shelanu,’ or just tell him who he was, the young fool shot and killed him. Thought he was an Arab infiltrator, all wrapped in white like that. And then when the kid found out what he’d done, he tried to commit suicide.”

  “No!” Barak felt dizzied and sick. “Killed by a sentry!”