“Hi. Leave the car here,” says Emily. “We’ll walk down to the stable.”
“What a nice little house,” Nakhama says, gesturing at the Growlery. “You live here?”
“Well, off and on. I spend a lot of time at home with my father.”
As they descend the gravel path Galia, whose wrist is still taped, walks with dignity while Ruti goes frisking ahead. Emily now realizes she forgot to warn old Connors, the year-round stable hand, to make short work of these visitors. Unluckily, when Connors hears Nakhama’s accent he pegs the daughters as diplomats’ girls, potential students, and fawns on them. They pet all ten horses, and smooth all their noses, and learn all their names, and feed them all sugar. When Ruti asks whether they may ride, he says, “Why not? That’s the right spirit, girls,” and begins dragging two saddles from the wall hooks.
“Connors, the insurance—”
“No problem, Miss Cunningham, I’ll just walk them around the paddock for a while on Brown Beauty and Frankie.” The girls jump with joy. They mount the horses, and Connors leads them outside into a grassy fenced area.
“What a nice man,” says Nakhama. “They’ll be fine. Maybe meantime I can see that pretty little cottage of yours.” She drops her voice. “I could use your bathroom.”
With this, there is no arguing. But of all things, Emily has not planned on admitting Nakhama into the Growlery. While they climb the path and Nakhama praises the landscaping, Emily does a mental search of the premises for traces of Old Wolf. No, nothing. A couple of books he has loaned her would be identifiable only if dusted for fingerprints. The pullover sweater he once left behind he has since retrieved. Nothing else, all clear… then she remembers the pistachio nuts. There they sit—she can see them—a deep red lacquer dishful on the low table in front of the living room couch.
Well, so what, she thinks irritably. Is Zev Barak the only person in the goddamned world who eats pistachio nuts? Emily has acquired a taste for them herself. They bring tangy memories and they’re fun to crack. Nothing incriminating about a few goddamned pistachios! Yet as they approach the Growlery the lacquer dish is growing in Emily Cunningham’s mind to the size of the Rose Bowl, and the nuts to a capacity crowd. A sudden saving thought: she brought that dish into the kitchen last night to snack at the TV. Or did she?
“Maybe you’d like to come up and see the school, it’s rather interesting.” She grasps Nakhama’s elbow. The path here branches uphill to the main building.
“Later, maybe,” says Nakhama, drawing Emily along toward the Growlery with resolute Israeli strides. So they go in, and there on the low living room table sits the Rose Bowl. Nakhama exclaims at the charm of the place, staring up at the wagon-wheel chandelier. “There’s nothing like that in Israel,” she says. “That’s so nice.”
“Yes, isn’t it! An Early American sort of thing. The bathroom is through here.” Simplicity itself to whisk that dish out of sight, once Nakhama is past it.
“Thanks. So, you like pistachio nuts, too,” says Nakhama, and she goes into the bedroom. Emily drops on the couch contemplating the red dish, and thinks no wonder Israel wins wars. The flush of the toilet is the sound of the bell that tolls for thee. Nakhama is all smiles as she sits down beside her. “Look, it’s all right,” she says.
“What’s all right?”
Nakhama waves at the pistachios. Emily returns an innocent uncomprehending look. “You and Zev,” says Nakhama.
“I really can’t understand you. Will you have some coffee? Or a cold drink?” Maintaining the little-girl face is hard under Nakhama’s clever friendly brown eyes.
“Say, a Pepsi would be very nice, thank you. Diet, if you have it. I’m busting out of all my dresses. Those embassy dinners!”
Emily brings the drink with ice, numb and waiting for Nakhama’s next move, which is to take a sip and give a grateful nod. “I’ll tell you, Emily, life in Israel isn’t easy. For army officers it’s even harder. Zev must have written you about that.”
“Well, yes, he has.” (If this is just about the letters, what a relief!)
“Yes. The pay is so low, yet they have to keep up a standard of living. They’re away from home so much. There’s always the wars or the danger of war. Always something going on. Always the strain. So, it’s only human nature that they’re not all model husbands, exactly. Israel’s a very small place. Everybody knows these things. Everybody knows who’s doing what. I’m not saying there aren’t exceptions, of course there are. Zev is one, people don’t talk about him.” She smiles brightly at Emily, coming to a full stop.
(My turn to say something!) “I’m not surprised, he’s decidedly unusual, your husband,” Emily blurts into the pause. “Of course, you know him so much better than I do, we’re just what Americans call pen pals, our correspondence somehow got started, and we’ve kept it up, and it’s been lovely. He’s very well read and witty and of course I’m fascinated by what he writes about Israel. My father corresponds with him, too, though that’s about serious matters.” Once started Emily babbles until she breaks off to breathe.
“Pen pals. That’s a nice expression. Still, I imagine you know Zev pretty well.” Nakhama looks at the pistachio nuts, and looks at Emily. “And as I say—this is really why I wanted to talk to you, why I came out here with the girls—it’s all right. When you had dinner at our house you seemed not very comfortable, and there’s no reason. You’ve given Zev something nice. I’ve seen all along how he enjoys your letters, and, well, whatever else, it’s all right.”
To this Emily has to respond directly and fast. “Nakhama, years ago Zev wrote me about pistachio nuts. He calls them his secret vice, so—”
“That’s true enough—”
“So after a while I tried them and liked them, and now I eat them. Zev has never been here, and those nuts are for me and me only. Okay?”
“Okay. You’re lucky you stay so nice and thin, then.”
“I guess I don’t eat them the way he does.” Emily has no idea whether Nakhama is buying her response or not. The woman’s good humor is unfathomable.
“I’ll bet you don’t. Well, listen Emily, don’t let me talk you into having a love affair with my husband!” Nakhama laughs. “By no means. If you’re just pen pals, that’s fine, that’s better of course. I’m very old-fashioned. So is Zev, you know. But he is an army officer, and some of the other army guys are regular no-goodniks. Too many of them.”
“Nakhama, I’ll say this. If I were you, and even suspected Zev was playing around with another woman, I’d want to scratch her eyes out.”
Nakhama makes a peculiar face. Her mouth twists sideways, and all at once she looks shockingly coarse, sad, and cynical. It is only for a moment, then her pleasant geniality returns. “Oh, our backgrounds are so different, Emily! I’m a Sephardi, a Moroccan. On my father’s side I have two grandmothers. Some men in the old country still have plural marriages. I once asked Grandma Leah whether she wasn’t ever jealous of Grandma Dvora. She was an old lady by that time, of course. She laughed and said why should she be? Grandma Dvora did half the work, and kept Grandpa Avram from bothering her half the time. She said she was used to it.”
A knock at the door. They can hear the girls giggling. Connors tips his leather cap as he brings them in. “You’ve got two horsewomen there, ma’am,” he says to Nakhama. “I hope you’ll enroll them.”
“We had a race and I beat,” says Ruti.
“A walking race,” sniffs Galia. “I made Frankie trot.”
Emily walks with them to the car, waves them off, and returns to the Growlery dazed. Nakhama is either very simple, or much too much for her. The telephone is ringing as she walks in.
Barak says, “Hi, I’m calling from the airport. Did the girls get along with the horsies?”
“Beautifully. I even got along with Nakhama.”
“There you are. And I knew you were dreading it. She’s okay, Nakhama.”
“You can say that again.”
“Well, so, how do
things stand? You’ll be at the St. Moritz? …Queenie? Queenie, are you on the line?”
“I’m here.”
“Will you be at the St. Moritz? There may be a break in the UN talk at some point.” A pause. “Queenie?”
“I’ll be at the St. Moritz.”
***
Barak’s diplomatic credentials and his uniform readily get him through the police lines outside the UN building where a mob stands in the drizzle; a huge quiet damp gathering at the towering slab by the river, showing support for Israel just by being there. The cop who checks his documents says, “Go on in and give ’em hell, General.”
In the Security Council chamber, he goes to the packed gallery to sense the tenor of the scene. One speaker after another berates Israel and calls for instant condemnation, withdrawal, and severe punishment. Nobody is paying much attention. The council members sit at a grand curved table with patient faces leaning on their hands. In the earphones the usual comic incongruity; a bearded Algerian at the table shouting in impassioned French, and a bland woman’s voice translating, phrase by cool phrase: “…Zionist tools of capitalist imperialism are… once again… playing the filthy game of stool pigeon for colonialism… in defiance of world opinion. The only suitable… penalty is swift expulsion and a United Nations embargo on this… rogue entity which is… no real nation at all, Mr. Chairman, but a gang of… marauding murderers…”
At a small side table Gideon Rafael sits with two aides, busily writing. After a while Barak sends a note to him, and they meet in an anteroom. Tense but ebullient, the short wavy-haired ambassador hugs him. “Zev, once again the Arabs have saved the day for us with this lunacy about the air strike! Who could have foreseen it? The Americans are boiling. Last night, so we hear anyway, they and the Soviets just about agreed on a cease-fire draft with some fuzzy language about withdrawal, absolutely terrible for us. The Canadians were going to propose it. But this morning we hear Costa Rica or Ecuador will bring up a much better version—obviously American-inspired—that the Russians don’t like at all.”
“I have the entire rundown on the air strike, Gideon, if you intend to respond to this carrier foolishness.”
“Only if ordered, only if the Americans ask us to. Abba Eban’s flying here tomorrow to reveal our victory in a major speech. Keep me up to date on the military picture, Zev, in case of a sudden snag. Things change here by the hour.”
Outside the council chamber Barak runs into a Soviet military attaché. “So, Barak, up from Washington too, are you?” This is a blond flat-faced slant-eyed colonel about Barak’s age, much smaller and leaner, with ten medals to Barak’s two campaign ribbons. They sometimes exchange pleasantries at embassy parties, but the Russian does not look pleasant today.
“Tell me, Golovin, do your people believe this story about the carriers?”
“Who can doubt it? Your pilot who was shot down in Egypt confessed that American planes took part, didn’t he? Also Jordanian radar tracked planes coming from the direction of the Sixth Fleet. All that is well known.” Golovin has the Russian diplomat’s knack of saying this while conveying that he does not mean a word of it.
“Well, then, the Americans have been caught red-handed, eh?”
“You fellows think you’re riding high now. Wait!” Golovin walks away abruptly.
***
Emily’s voice on the telephone is breathless and strained. “Of course I’m here. I said I would be. How long will we have?”
“Well, say two hours.”
“That much? Come along. Are you all right? How is it going? You sound sad. Am I wrong?”
“I’m not sad about coming to the St. Moritz.”
“Here I am.”
As the taxicab inches across town in thick rain, Zev Barak is digesting the late word from home that the government may alter policy, and unleash the army to capture the Old City and the entire West Bank. It is a Central Command campaign he has often fought in his mind, and he has run detailed sand-table exercises at the senior staff college. Capturing the Wall for Jewry, returning to that sacred place at the head of a Jewish armed force, has seemed to him a glory he would be glad to die for. Now that glory will go to Uzi Narkiss and Motta Gur, good fighters, good leaders, while he is having a rendezvous with an American woman at the St. Moritz in New York.
What has happened? How has he missed out? Sitting in that crawling cab with the rain beating, horns honking all around, and the driver’s radio blasting Beatles music, he faces facts of his life that have emerged over the years: that though he is a good and brainy fighting man, possibly among the best, he has faltered in the grinding lifelong marathon on the maslul, against iron-nerved, mostly sabra competitors; that he has been a shade too thoughtful, and perhaps too gentlemanly, to play the hard Zahal game to the hilt; that there is more than a trace of the transposed Viennese Jew left in him, after all, so that he has felt hemmed in by tiny Israel’s boundaries, geographical and cultural, and has hankered too much despite himself for the great world outside. Maybe that broad outlook has made him a preeminent choice as emissary to the Americans. Who can say? At any rate the event is all, and here he is on his way to Queenie, while the Jews may be on the march to the Western Wall.
When she opens the door of her suite, shiny-eyed, charming in a tailored black suit with the gold wolf’s-head pin, he reaches to take that sweet slender body in his arms. At least, here is some recompense! She deflects his embrace with a deft sweep of a hand. “Easy, Old Wolf,” she murmurs, and leads him inside. There stands a mountainous woman in a flowing orange sack that reaches the floor. “Here’s Hester.”
“Well, General Barak!” The mountain brings forth a mouse voice, small and high. “I’ve heard so much about you!”
Hester is even bigger than he has pictured, but he does not remember Emily mentioning that she has a mustache.
40
Now or Never
Engine sounds wake Shayna: rumble, snort, GRIND, going by outside, one after another. Aryeh and her mother still sleep, but she pulls on a bathrobe and goes to the roof.
In the cool starry night, a line of busses stretches down the usually deserted hill, clear to the barbed-wire barriers. Far off an artillery battle flickers, flares, and crumps. On the street below, shadowy figures come swarming out of the busses, and by the glare of a star shell she can see webbed helmets. Troops! In this old Jerusalem neighborhood, even a single soldier is a rare sight. The usual passersby are bearded men in long black coats and black hats, and kerchiefed women with bundles or babies. Now here is an attack force piling up all along the steep slope of Bar-Ilan Street, and it can only be for a thrust across no-man’s-land.
After nineteen years Shayna is used to a divided Jerusalem: the rough concrete walls and high wooden barriers that cut off streets, the observation posts on the roofs of houses, the black snouts of enemy machine guns poking through sandbags on rooftops, sometimes only a few yards away. She has stopped hoping that she will ever see her childhood home in the Old City again. But from the more and more cheery words of General Herzog, the radio’s military analyst, it seems that a second Holocaust is not imminent, after all; that Israel may even win, and that she may yet walk those old streets once more. As she descends the stairs a burly blond soldier is coming up from below. “Ma’am, the Ezrakh says you have a phone. Can I call my mother?”
“By all means, come.”
Shayna makes a sandwich for the soldier as he tries to put his call through. It takes a while. “Yes, sorry to disturb you, ma’am, but please call Mrs. Gutman to the phone, will you? She lives on the third floor. I’m her son Shmulik. Sure, please wake her—”
Staring at the big hairy master sergeant, loaded up with battle gear and machine gun, she exclaims, “Shmulik Gutman? You’re Shmulik?”
He stares back. “Yes. So?”
Shayna turns to her mother, who is making coffee. “Mama, imagine! This is Shmulik from next door on Chabad Street! Shmulik, I’m Shayna, Shayna Matisdorf.”
?
??Shmulik!” The old lady gives him an excited hug. This huge fellow was once the frail bad boy of their Old City neighborhood, his long blond earlocks and black gabardine concealing a nine-year-old rebellious scoffer.
“So!” Shmulik gestures at Aryeh, curled asleep under an old feather comforter. “It’s your son, Shayna?”
“I’m not married. I’m taking care of him. His mother’s in America. His father’s down in Sinai.”
“That’s where our brigade was supposed to go, Sinai. Some of the guys are still sore. We were all fired up to parachute into El Arish, not ride for hours and hours in busses. Me, I’m happy, it’s great what we’re going to do—hello? Hello? Mama? Shmulik! I’m fine, no, not hurt, no problems, and guess what, I’m in Shayna Matisdorf’s flat…. That’s right, Shayna from next door long ago…. Sure her mother’s alive, she’s right here, they’re both fine.” After a hurried affectionate talk he hangs up and glances at his watch. “Mrs. Matisdorf, Mama sends you regards. Quarter to two. It’s time. Thanks!”
He is munching the sandwich as he goes downstairs. Shayna carries down a jug of coffee and some cups, and soldiers gather around her. The busses are now pulled off into side streets, and all down the hill the soldiers are getting into a column of command cars and armored personnel carriers. Through the Ezrakh’s open door she sees him swaying over a tall Talmud volume. Shmulik says, “Guess what Shayna? The Ezrakh remembered my father, and he just gave me a blessing! Listen, where I’m going I can use it!”
The night is getting chilly. Shayna returns to the flat for a coat, drinks the last of the coffee, and goes to the roof. There, to her astonishment, stands the Ezrakh, looking toward the dark walls of the Old City, humming a synagogue tune. Far off to the south, artillery flashes like summer lightning amid the stars.
A sudden blue-white glare! Volleys of nearby artillery half deafen her! She claps fingers to her ears. The searchlights blaze from the top of the Histadrut building, blindingly powerful. No-man’s-land far below is bright as day, a broad desert of tangled barbed wire, heaped-up rubbish, and overgrown ruins. Flaming explosions are throwing up earth, rubble, and wire, and tanks are crawling out of the black night into the glare. From the Old City walls heavy guns begin firing. The Ezrakh, a frail wisp amid this turmoil and blaze, stands stroking his beard and singing. She uncovers her ears and can barely hear the words from a Hallel psalm: