The Hope

  “Yes, that’ll do it,” he said, taking keys from a drawer. “Shayna, you know where my pots are, red for meat, blue for milk. Lena’s pots are white, never mind those. Thanks, Yossi.”

  Shayna said, “You mean I should go with him?”

  “Why not? It should be cooler around Nazareth. Look, Yossi, figure on having dinner with us. My brother Zev may come. He’s touring factories in the north.”

  “I’ll have my five-year-old son with me.”

  “Aryeh? Beautiful.”

  The pots bumped and clanked in the trunk as Yossi’s driver sped them eastward on the narrowing tar road. “This is almost like the old days,” said Yossi. “Remember when we used to go climbing the hills around Nazareth?”

  “I’m engaged to be married,” said Shayna. His look of shock pleased her.

  “Well! Mazel tov. Who is he?”

  “You’ll meet him at dinner tonight. He’s the son of Haifa’s chief rabbi. He won’t eat, though. He’s very strict. He’ll only eat his mother’s cooking.” Short pause. An added sentence like a stiletto. “And mine, now.”

  “Hm! When are you getting married?”

  “Chaim has to finish his Ph.D. He’s a math genius. The army deferred him. He’s twenty-two.”

  “Much younger than you, eh?”

  Stiletto tone. “More mature than some people much older.”

  “So it won’t be for years yet.”

  “Not necessarily. The army may let him do his service at the Technion.”

  Looking at her with frank rue, he said, “Well, I wish you happiness, that you know.”

  She turned away from him and pointed. “There’s a whole hillside of those yellow flowers we used to pick. What was the name?”

  “We never found out, Shayna. You said you would, but you didn’t.”

  “Couldn’t ever count on me, could you?”

  He threw an arm around her slender shoulders, gave her a rough hug, and withdrew it before she could object. “Turn off here,” he told the driver.

  A winding one-lane dirt road led to a fenced army camp where the commandant, a paratrooper friend of Kishote’s, waited at the gate. “You’re in luck, Kishote,” he said, getting into the front seat, “it’s cleanup day, the vats are boiling.” He directed the driver to the long wooden dining hut. Shayna, Yossi, and the driver carried Michael’s stuff through rows of wet tables to the back, where half-naked soldiers were scouring and mopping out the stifling kitchen. When Shayna appeared, a babble of obscenities faded down.

  “No problem,” said the fat blond-bearded cook in charge. He dumped the cutlery into a coarse net, dropped it into a steaming vat, and immersed pot after pot with a large iron hook. “The rabbi makes us do this before Passover. Also when our pots get mixed up. Don’t ask me why. I’m Hashomer Hatza’ir.” This was a very radical irreligious Zionist faction, the Young Guardian.

  “Aren’t you curious? You could at least ask,” said Shayna. “Then you’d know what you were doing.”

  “Excuse me,” said the cook. “Asking our rabbi a question can kill an afternoon. He says dunk pots, I dunk pots, and finish.” The cook shrugged and rolled his eyes at Don Kishote. A major’s girlfriend who was strict about dunking pots! Weird.

  At Nahalal they drove past orchards, fields of corn and vegetables, farmhouses, and communal buildings to Benny Luria’s home, one of the oldest on the moshav, inherited from his father. There was nobody in the plain small cottage, where children’s toys were scattered around a washing machine on a badly weathered sagging porch. “They must be out working,” said Yossi. He took the wheel to drive here and there through the concentric circles of the Nahalal layout. “There they are! See him, Shayna? The curly-head? Kid needs a haircut!” Several children were hoeing beside Benny Luria, in a fallow patch of broken brown clods amid green fields. The aviator wore threadbare shorts, a canvas hat, and sneakers, and sweat was rolling down his thick neck and hairy brown chest.

  Aryeh shouted, “Abba, Abba,” dropped the hoe and came running. Shayna had last seen a toddler, but this was a stoutish good-sized boy who sprang up into his father’s outstretched arms. “Abba, ani eh’yeh tayass [I’m going to be a pilot]!”

  “Why does Yael say he’s a terror?” asked Luria. “He’s a good boy, he likes to work. Hello, Shayna.”

  She forced a smile, feeling like a fool. It had not occurred to Shayna, until it was too late, that of course Yael’s whole family would be at Nahalal. Don Kishote had swept her along, and it had all happened too fast. Not that Benny Luria so much as lifted an eyebrow, but she knew well that Israeli army men, as a matter of mutual courtesy, took in stride all pairings.

  “Shayna’s engaged to the son of Haifa’s chief rabbi,” said Kishote in an offhand way.

  “Mazel tov! Great guy, Rabbi Poupko. He comes to the base sometimes and talks about Talmud and cabala. The fellows like him.”

  “Remember me?” Shayna said to Aryeh, who was still in Yossi’s arms and inspecting her with sharp bright eyes.

  He put a hand to her face, and said with a smile that melted and hurt her, “Aunt Shayna.”

  “That’s right! Aunt Shayna.”

  Aryeh demanded that Luria’s oldest son come in the car while the other children started to walk back. This was Dov, a weedy tanned youngster much resembling Benny, even to the sneakers, shorts, and canvas hat.

  “Dov is going to be a pilot,” said Aryeh, sitting on his father’s lap. “So am I. Can’t I stay for Dov’s bar mitzvah next week? Or come back?”

  “Bar mitzvah?” Kishote looked to Luria in surprise. Moshavniks were not much for ritual, and Benny Luria, he thought, was as freethinking as Yael, despite his nosing in the Bible.

  “It can’t harm him,” said the airman. “Why are we here, after all, in this land? Let him pick up a little tradition.”

  Dov spoke from the front seat without turning around. “Rabbi Poupko talked Abba into it, so I had to learn it.” Matter-of-fact words, not resentful.

  Yossi gathered up Aryeh’s clothes from a bedroom where two double-decker wooden bunks left little room to move around. Luria’s cheerful wife Irit showed up with hay in her hair and on her cotton dress, and pressed cakes and cold soda on the visitors. While Dov and Aryeh turned cartwheels and handsprings on the grass outside, Yossi told the Lurias about the ex-Nahalal people Yael had met in California.

  “Listen, Los Angeles can have Herschel Rosenzweig,” said Irit. “And that Bluma. She’s the one who wanted America. It’s a shame about those three beautiful children.”

  “Yael talked to the kids. They miss the moshav.”

  “I’ll bet both boys come back,” Benny said. “They were Dov’s pals. They still write, and their Hebrew’s perfect.”

  “What do you say about Dov’s bar mitzvah?” Irit addressed Yossi. “Next thing I know, Benny will make me wear a wig, you’ll see.” By tradition strictly pious married women wore their hair short under a wig or a cloth, or both.

  “Why? Here’s Shayna,” said Kishote, “engaged to Rabbi Poupko’s son. She doesn’t wear a wig.”

  “Engaged to that Chaim? Congratulations.” Irit looked at her with interest. “Well, once you’re married you’ll wear a wig. Pity, you have such nice hair.”

  “We’ll see,” said Shayna.

  They left Nahalal, and the car was threading down through grassy hills when Yossi told the driver to stop. “Aryeh, want to pick flowers?”

  “Yes, yes.” The boy bounced on the car seat.

  “Yossi, let’s not waste time, I have to get back to Haifa,” said Shayna. But she went with them, climbing the rocky hill and picking yellow flowers, with fuzzy stems that slightly stung the fingers.

  “Pick plenty,” Yossi said to his son. “We’ll bring some home for Mama.”

  The faint wild sweet scent shattered Shayna with total recall of her first real kisses, when they had gone climbing long ago in these hills. Not like the first shy pecks at the windmill. Kisses! She could hardly bear to look at Yossi
, but she could see that—however many girls he had kissed, and more than kissed, before her—it was hitting him hard, too.

  “Enough, enough,” she said. “Let’s go!” All three had their arms full of the fragrant yellow wildflowers.

  “I want to pick more,” said Aryeh.

  “No, we go now,” barked his father.

  ***

  They were five for dinner in the Berkowitz flat. Aryeh had eaten early and voraciously, and was napping. Shayna and Zev Barak took the peculiar table setting for granted, but it was all new to Don Kishote: two tablecloths, red and white, two sets of differently colored dishes, and two kinds of cutlery; metal on the red side, wooden-handled on the white side. Lena tersely and acidly explained that the red side was kosher, and gave him his choice. He sat with her.

  “How’s your factory tour going?” Michael asked Barak, in a heavily obvious change of subject. “Are you encouraged? Discouraged? What?”

  Barak shook his head. “‘The Eternal of Israel will not deal falsely,’” he quoted the Book of Samuel, an Israeli byword of despairing bravado. “Otherwise we have problems.” Barak was reviewing the arms manufacturing capacity of the country as projected for the next ten years; purpose, to explore feasibility of manufacturing tanks in Israel.

  “What about that French 155-millimeter howitzer, Zev?” Kishote inquired. “Will they be able to mount it on the Sherman chassis?” Israel had a number of old Shermans, bought from war surplus and scrap wherever available.

  “Not without modifying the Sherman drastically. It may not be feasible at all. The study’s still going on.”

  “The answer had better be yes!” Kishote looked and sounded grim, shaking his head. “Or we’ll be outgunned in the field before we ever engage the enemy. Half our tanks will be blown up by Soviet artillery, firing outside our combat range.”

  “Well, we have more immediate problems,” said Barak. “The turret of the Centurion can’t handle the German cannon we ordered. The contract has to be cancelled.”

  As they ate dinner, Professor Berkowitz joined in the officers’ quick terse exchange of jargon and acronyms about the state of munitions supply. Like most academics he had a defense task, analysis and design of weaponry, a subject he taught at the Technion. Shayna was struck by an aspect of Yossi Nitzan new to her. That he was an able combat soldier she knew, but he was dealing here with technology for which he had no academic training. His face and manner changed as he talked. When he pushed up his glasses, the humorous glint was gone from his eyes, and the other men were paying close heed to his analytical battlefield thinking.

  “You could do worse, Kishote,” Barak said, spooning up fish soup, “than to apply for the course at the Army Industrial College in Washington. They’d admit you, I’m sure.”

  “I’m not leaving my brigade to sit in American classrooms.”

  “There you speak emptily,” said Berkowitz. “You’re top-heavy with field know-how and combat experience. There’s more to command in war than being a fighting man.”

  “In the end that’s what it all rests on,” retorted Kishote. “Seasoned fighters leading young fighters. The new thing about Israel is that Jews fight. Nothing else.”

  “The new thing about Israel,” exclaimed Lena, restless at having been quiet so long, “is that the Jews have come home after two thousand years.”

  “The Arabs dispute that this is our home, and they have their viewpoint,” said Shayna. “So far they can’t dispute that here we Jews fight.”

  “Exactly, and if they dispute that successfully just once, Shayna,” said Kishote, with somber mien and an approving nod, “it’ll all be over. My job, and maybe Aryeh’s job, is to make sure that they don’t! If necessary, for a hundred years.”

  “Bluster,” said Barak. “You want to stay at brigade level, that’s up to you. Leadership beyond that needs training, no less than platoon leadership did.”

  “Anyway, don’t talk about my going to America around Yael,” said Kishote. “That Beverly Hills fragrance is in her nose already, believe me.”

  Shayna jumped up as the doorbell rang. “There’s Chaim.”

  Kishote expected her rabbi fiancé to look like the usual yeshiva product: pallid, stooping, undernourished, shabby, or the alternate florid, pear-shaped version. Into the apartment there strode instead a tall straight fellow all in neat black, with an extremely bushy black beard that left visible below his forehead only his mouth, nose, and eyes, and a black felt hat perched on heavy long black hair growing down into the beard. The nose was big and imperious, the brown eyes somewhat fiery. Barbered and dressed Vienna style, Chaim Poupko might have looked not unlike Herzl. Invited by Lena, he sat down in the white unkosher area, declining tea with a smile.

  “What’s wrong with my tea?” demanded Lena, still bellicose. “Not kosher enough?”

  “Thank you, Lena, I’ll have tea.” He left it untouched.

  Shayna said to him with an affectionate grin, “Dr. Berkowitz showed me the written outline of your thesis, and he agrees with me. You’re biting off more than you can chew.”

  “Riemann or Gauss, Chaim,” said Michael. “Not both.”

  “My theme links them,” said Poupko. “The link created differential geometry.”

  “It’s not unoriginal,” said Michael, “but it’ll take a few hundred pages full of equations, and I’m not sure it’ll work, even so.”

  “It won’t,” said Shayna. “Two cats in one sack.”

  Rapid-fire mathematical cabalisms ensued among the three, and Kishote could observe an unmistakable warmth between Shayna and Poupko. He wondered whether he should have yielded, after all, to the haphazard notion of dropping in on her en route to Nahalal. As a consequence his nose was being rubbed in the good fortune of this hairy son of a chief rabbi, and Shayna’s evident fondness for him.

  “We’ll be late for Alterman,” Poupko said abruptly, standing up. “They close the doors, and we’ll miss the first half.”

  “I love Alterman’s poetry,” Lena said. “But I hate poetry readings. Poets can’t read their own stuff.”

  “Let’s go.” Shayna held out a hand to Kishote. “Give Aryeh a goodbye kiss from Aunt Shayna.”

  As the door closed, Kishote said, “Quite a fellow.”

  “Excellent brain. Talmudic vigor, mathematical gift,” said Berkowitz. “And it isn’t every black hat who’ll go to hear Natan Alterman.”

  “And he’ll do his army service at the Technion? Too bad,” Kishote said. “Looks like he could make a soldier.”

  “Doing it at the Technion is Shayna’s idea, not his,” said Berkowitz. “He’s talked to me, in fact, about putting off his thesis and serving his two and a half years in the field.”

  “Well, she’s right and he’s crazy,” said Lena. “What’s he going to eat? He won’t trust the army’s kosher food. He won’t even eat Michael’s. He’ll starve.”

  “I don’t see that fellow starving,” said Zev Barak.

  “If he decides to put on a uniform, tell him to ask for armor,” said Kishote to Berkowitz. “I’d like him in my brigade. I’ll see to it that he eats.” He went and woke Aryeh. “Come, we’re going home.”

  Aryeh inquired, stretching, “Where’s Aunt Shayna?”

  “This is from Aunt Shayna.” The father kissed him. “She’s gone.”

  “Don’t forget Mama’s flowers. They smell nice, Abba.”

  “Very nice.” Kishote lifted the bouquet dripping from a vase. “Come and say goodbye.”

  “Well, Aryeh! They grow up fast, don’t they?” Zev Barak said as Kishote came in with the yawning boy. “I visited my son at the Reale School today. He graduates next year, and he wants the navy.”

  “The navy?” Kishote wrinkled his brow. “Why the navy? That’s a dead end.”

  “This is a navy town,” said Lena, clearing both areas of the table.

  “So far that’s Noah’s choice,” said Barak, “but a year’s a long time.”

  “I’m going to be a f
ighter pilot like Dov Luria,” said Aryeh.

  Zev Barak’s melancholy eyes brightened at Aryeh. “I believe you.”

  ***

  The small hall where Alterman read his poems was only half full. “Haifa is not a town for poetry,” remarked Poupko, walking out with Shayna to the smoky lobby during the interval. Some people were leaving.

  “It’s too hot for poetry,” she said. “But let’s stay. The poems are worth it. Bitter, irreligious. Good.”

  “By all means.” After a silence he said, “So that was your famous Don Kishote.” It was his first reference to Nitzan. On the way to the hall they had talked about his thesis.

  “Not my Don Kishote,” she shot back. “Not a word in two years, then he drops out of the sky to give me a ride to Nahalal, can you imagine, and pick up his son. Sorry you didn’t see Aryeh, he’s sweet.”

  “Nitzan’s a good-looking man. Quiet sort.”

  “Ha! Quiet? Kishote?” Shayna gave a harsh laugh. “He was looking you over, very hard. I think he approved. Not that I care.”

  “Does he have any religion?”

  Shayna coughed and coughed. “Let’s go outside. I’m choking.”

  The stars were bright over the dark nearly empty street. “Religion? Yossi isn’t observant, but he’s a Jew all right, he’s nothing else. He loves Israel, loves the ground he walks on here. Just before you came in, he rejected a suggestion that he go to an American army college. He was in the camps, you know, as a kid. Maybe that’s why he’s a crazy fighter. I really never figured him out. Never got to know him that well. By your terms no, Don Kishote’s not religious.”

  “Sounds like my grandfather.”

  “Your grandfather? The Ezrakh?” This Jerusalem-born sage, still hale at eighty, was popularly called the Ezrakh, “the Native,” because in his lifetime he had not set foot outside the Holy Land. “Chaim, you’ll have to explain that, if it’s not a silly joke.”