His father squeezes an arm around his shoulders. “I know. Mission fulfilled, and all pilots Charlie! A great feat, Danny, a feat for the generations. Highest professionalism, plus the hand of God.”
Epilogue
“And He Shall Reign”
April 1982. Deadline for all Israeli forces to withdraw from the Sinai and seal the Camp David peace.
In the media, and in many governments including the American, much skepticism has prevailed as to whether the Israelis would not in the end, find some pretext to stay put. What, leave behind their networks of modern roads, their airfields, their many military camps and underground command bases, constructed at such enormous expense? Give up the oil fields they have developed, which have made them energy-independent and balanced their national budget? Abandon the vital Sharm el Sheikh naval base, the great Etzion air base, the beautiful coastal town of Yamit? Meekly hand all these priceless installations over to the Egyptians, who tried and failed to recover them by force of arms? Just wait and see.
The Israelis are indeed full of surprises. As they surprised the world in the Six-Day War, and at Entebbe, and in the Reactor Raid, so they now surprise the world by hauling down their flags and quietly departing from the last of these irreplaceable assets. That is not to say the departure is a gladsome business. Moving day even in private life tends to be lugubrious; how much more so, in the life of a nation.
The dismantling is over at Sharm el Sheikh. Everything of military use has been removed or blown up, and only the ransacked buildings remain standing. The base commandant, Noah Barak, is having a last look around his rubble-strewn office when his father walks in. “Hi, I came down with the admiral. In case you’re not feeling bad enough, I brought you this. Remember it?”
He hands the commandant a framed snapshot of a skinny boyish lieutenant in shorts and a helmet, raising the Israeli flag over a building by the sea.
The commandant nods. His beard is flecked with gray, and he is far from skinny. “I remember more than this, Abba. I remember you bringing me here in ’57 when we gave the base back to the Egyptians.” Bitterly he adds, “For the first time, that is.”
“Remember by chance what you said way back then?”
“Do I?” Noah shifts to a childish treble. “ ‘Abba, why do we have to give it back? We won the war!’ And you said” — Noah puts on a deep voice — “ ‘We’re doing it for peace.’ ”
“Good memory. You also said, ‘We’ll get it back. I’ll take it back!’ “ Barak gestures at the picture. “And you kept your word.”
Noah puts on his white dress-uniform blouse and his cap. “Yes, and here we go again, doing it for peace. Maybe this time it will work.”
As the blue-and-white flag slowly comes down, green-clad soldiers on the parade ground, and navy girl soldiers lined up on the wharf in their pretty white uniforms, stand at attention singing “Hatikvah,” tears pouring down the girls’ cheeks. Zev Barak tries to sing, but cannot bring out a sound. Six Dabur patrol boats are leaving the wharf in a column. As the anthem ends, they sail in a tight circle round and round, their sirens wailing.
At Etzion air base Egyptian officers and soldiers wait to take over, keeping a discreet distance from the parade ground. Danny Luria has come from Ramat David for the ceremony, and now wishes he had not. The spectacle of the wrecked hangars and blasted facilities is bad enough, but not since Dov’s death has he seen his father so brought down. Yet Benny Luria goes stiffly through the flag-lowering, singing “Hatikvah” with the ranks of aviators and ground crew. The ceremony over, he exchanges salutes with the much taller, heavily mustached Egyptian general in resplendent dress uniform who approaches for a low-toned colloquy. Then Benny Luria comes to his son, takes his arm, and murmurs, “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, the True Judge,” the blessing on evil news, usually spoken at a death.
“Amen,” says his son. “Let’s go home, Abba.”
“Amen!” Benny’s voice turns loud and hard. “Back to the Promised Land.”
At Yamit (Seaside) on the Mediterranean, the ghost of Moshe Dayan hovers over the dismantling. Yamit is not a military base at all, but a beach and farming town constructed just across the Sinai border after the Six-Day War; as Dayan then put it, “to create uvdot [facts] on the land.” Several such “facts” were strung inside Sinai in a strip along the borders. In the end they almost wrecked the Camp David talks, for Sadat demanded, in return for peace, every last inch of the Sinai. So Dayan sadly reversed himself and agreed to the uprooting of the uvdot, including prosperous Yamit, his crowning fact. Before concurring, Begin telephoned Arik Sharon, the toughest of the tough, for his approval to give up Yamit. Now Dayan is gone, and the uprooting is for other hands. Whose but Arik Sharon’s?
“Kishote, I have to evacuate and bulldoze Yamit.” Early in April, Sharon, a civilian minister, is talking to the chief of planning branch in the Kirya. “We can’t leave a town on the Sinai border for the Egyptians to move into. That’s asking for trouble. We can’t leave ruins for terrorists to hide out in, either. Every stick and brick we can’t remove, we’ll have to plough under. It’s heartbreaking, but not one stone must remain on another.”
“I can see that.”
In a grating tone Sharon goes on. “Then there are the townspeople. They’re getting a dirty deal. We induced them to come and make their lives in Yamit, and now they have to give up their homes, their schools, everything. The diehards won’t go quietly. There’ll be protests, women lying down in front of the bulldozers, and so on. As usual with the charming jobs, I’ve got it. I need a deputy. Will you take it on?”
“All right.”
“So quick? It doesn’t bother your conscience one bit, Yossi, evacuating settlers and razing a settlement?”
“Yamit isn’t a settlement, Arik. Planting those people inside the Sinai was a strategic brainstorm of Dayan’s, and a misguided one. It doesn’t bother my conscience, no.”
“It does mine, and mark my word, it’ll haunt us as a precedent.”
“For the Holy Land? Show me in the Bible, Arik, where God promised Abraham the Sinai desert,” says the chief of planning branch.
“Okay, Don Kishote. Draw up a plan for the evil day.”
There is no flag-lowering at Yamit, only the crash of the bulldozers into crumpling walls, the yells of protesters, the sirens of police vans coming to take away the violent ones, the swelling murmur of crowds of onlookers. Some shoving, shouting, wrestling, a lot of camera work, and the people are out. It becomes a protracted long day of monotonous eradication of wreckage.
The crowds fade away. April 25 is the last day for Israel’s compliance with the Camp David Accords, and the chief of planning remains there to the last, to assure that all happens in full compliance with the treaty. As the sun sets on the place that was once Yamit, its dying rays slant down on level sands, departing bulldozers, and the lone figure of Don Kishote, surveying the patch of desert that was once Yamit.
The Lebanese War starts as a triumph and becomes a controversial bog, but it is the making of Danny Luria. After scoring six victories in the air battles, to his father’s bursting pride, Danny becomes a leading instructor in F-16 combat. He speaks no more of disenchantment. He speaks very little altogether for a long while after the elegant Hilton wedding of Amos Pasternak and Ruti Barak, a sort of feudal festivity for the top management of Rafael and Kivshan. At the wedding Danny is as jocund as anyone, kisses the abashed bride on the cheek, and leaves early.
He then blossoms out as an old-style devil-may-care tayass, toothbrush mustache and all, drinking and wenching in the obsolescent RAF pattern of the Weizman era. Girls either fall hard for him, or they steer clear of him so as not to be smirked at. “What, you’re going out with Danny Luria? Hmmm! Really? Well, kol ha’kavod!” The girls who fall take the teasing with superior smiles, for they have in tow a noted tayass, while it lasts.
Professionally, Danny remains dead serious, and his advancement in the air force yea
r after year is steady and rapid. When he requests a long travel leave before assuming a squadron command, he gets it as his due. He plans it meticulously, as he does all things that matter — his love life is not one of them — and trots around the globe touching all five continents. His return date is locked into one week before Israel’s Independence Day 1988, completing the biblical cycle of the first forty years. Back in 1948 the date was May 14, but this year, by the vagaries of the Jewish lunar calendar, the anniversary falls on April 22. The celebration promises to jam all air traffic into Israel for weeks, so he reserves the El Al flight from Zurich to Tel Aviv half a year ahead, and repeatedly reconfirms it. He is all the more astonished, when he boards that plane, to find it taking off only two-thirds full. As soon as the seat belt sign is off he goes to the flight deck to find out why.
“Where have you been, Danny, anyway?” The bald captain, once a wingmate of his father’s, sounds peevish. “This is a good planeload. Tourism is dead. Independence Day will be a total disaster. Don’t you know about the intifada?”
“Don’t blame the intifada,” objects the copilot, who wears a Shalom Akshav (Peace Now) button. “Blame our crazy government, setting free five thousand terrorists in exchange for eight guys captured in Lebanon. What did we expect all those terrorists to do? Go to New York and become bloody taxi drivers?”
“The intifada is kids throwing stones and burning tires,” says the captain, “not terrorists.”
“That’s just for American TV. The ringleaders are getting smart, sending the kids out front,” says the copilot. “It’s a terrorist uprising, and the tourists are right to stay away.”
Danny feels himself back in an unchanged Israel, though when he left the intifada was only starting. Emerging from the quiet airport into the steamy Tel Aviv afternoon, he sees Yossi Nitzan, in shorts and a sport shirt, talking to a paunchy grayhead, sharply dressed in Hollywood style. Yossi gives him a friendly wave as he goes by.
“But Lee, where are Spencer and his wife?” Yossi is saying to his brother. Lee’s son Spencer and Tamara Katzman were married some time ago, in a Beverly Hills wedding of Babylonian magnificence.
“Cancelled their trip at the last minute,” Lee Bloom says. “Intifada.”
“What nonsense! Why, they planned this first visit to Israel for months, I’ve got a car and driver for them, a great itinerary —”
“Look, she’s a nice Jewish girl, Tamara.” Lee Bloom shrugs. “It’s the TV, Yossi. She thinks Israel is like wartime Stalingrad. I know better, but —” He looks around, taking a deep breath. “Twelve years since I’ve been here! The air smells nice, the ground feels good.”
“You’re too fat, Lee.”
“I eat when I worry. Since Sheva died and Yael settled here, it’s all on me. I’m rich, I worry, I eat.”
Four people stand on a grassy hillside north of Yemin Moshe, around a low stone veiled with cheesecloth. The engraving on the stone is visible through the thin threads:
To
a Friend
CHRISTIAN CUNNINGHAM
with the dates of his birth and death. Teddy Kollek, the corpulent old mayor of Jerusalem, says to Emily, “Well, this is it, Mrs. Halliday. Not something to publicize, but the inscription says it all. To honor your father as befits what he meant to us, we dedicate this stone on Israel’s fortieth Independence Day. Will you do the unveiling?”
She nods, stoops, and pulls aside the cloth.
Sam Pasternak says, “He made a difference. Bless his memory.”
The mayor gets into his waiting car. Pasternak, even more portly than the mayor, walks off with his slow rolling gait toward Yemin Moshe.
“Where is this party we’re going to, Wolf?”
“Where Sam’s heading, that big house down at the foot of the staircase, with all the flowers on the balconies. It’s not a party, exactly. We’ll be watching the Independence Day celebration.”
“What does Sam do now?”
“Sam heads a big conglomerate. Among other things, he’s building thousands of homes for the Russian Jews. He’s also been very involved in the rescue of the Ethiopians, on the secret end. Covert action is in that fat old warhorse’s blood.” He takes her arm. “Come, we won’t be early, and it’ll be crowded.”
“Wolf, I won’t know anyone there.”
“Nonsense, you know Sam, and you know Nakhama. In fact, she told me she’s looking forward to showing you our grandchildren.”
“She did? Well, that sounds good. Four now, isn’t it, dear?”
“Five. Galia had her second in March. And Ruti’s expecting.”
“Prolific tribe, the Baraks. Bless them all.”
She gets down on a knee and touches her lips to the stone. He helps her up, for Queenie has grown quite stout and is all gray. She stands silent for several moments. “All right,” she says, “let’s go.” They start to descend a long stone staircase. She gestures at the Old City wall across the ravine, golden in the late sunlight, where many figures are bustling about. “There it is, Wolf, the light one sees nowhere else on earth. And what’s all that activity over there?”
“Readying the fireworks, no doubt.”
“My God, Jerusalem is so lovely, so lovely, Zev. Even Bud, that cold customer, always said so.”
“Beautiful in elevation, the joy of all the earth,” Barak says. “So sang the psalmist. He and Bud Halliday agree, so who am I to argue?”
Emily stops walking, and tugs at his arm. “Explain yourself.”
“Explain what?”
“That sarcastic tone. Those bitter words.”
“Oh, Emily!” He whips an arm toward the Old City panorama. “This is the tourist fantasy of Israel, so your father’s stone is well placed. Chris held that fantasy in his heart. He never lived here.”
“And the reality, dear?”
“The reality?” A tart laugh. “Not for the Independence Day mood, but okay, where do I begin? A government paralyzed by peanut politicians, that barely functions with sleazy horse trades? Chronic blowups between the religious and the secular? People working at two and three jobs to make ends meet, lives broken by reserve callups, tax evasion as a way of life, sons and daughters leaving the country and not coming back? The dark mutter of Islam all around us and right here, at our very heart, behind those beautiful walls? Will that do as a taste of our reality?” Enfolding her arm in his, he walks on down the flower-lined stone staircase. “Come along, let’s forget the reality for today.”
“Then is what my eyes are seeing, Zev, just a pretty lie?”
“Oh, Queenie, Queenie, call it a dream trying to come true. Listen, is the reality of America the Lincoln Memorial and the Manhattan skyscrapers, or the terrible mess you’re in yourselves? The old countries, Japan, England, Russia, worse off or better off, they just are. We’re both still trying to be, you the giant of the world and we the crazy little nobody in the Middle East. Who knows whether we’ll make it in the end, either of us?” His laugh is warmer. “And what set me off this way, anyhow? Thinking of Chris, I guess, and his vision of how it will all end. God make it so, and God rest his soul. Such friends are rare.”
She touches a handkerchief to her eyes, and he puts an arm around her. “This may sound morbid, dear White Wolf,” she says, “but I hope to God I die before you do. As long as I know you’re somewhere in this world, I’m okay.”
Yom Ha’atzma’ut! Independence Day! And if the tourists are not showing up, who cares? The Israelis are turning out in huge crowds. Intifada, shmintifada! Forty years! Parades, speeches, concerts, dancing in the streets, have been going on all day, all over the land. The crowning daytime event has been a flyby of Phantoms, Kfirs, and F-16s over Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem. Now toward evening, everyone in Israel who can drive, walk, or ride an animal to Jerusalem is doing so, for the laser-beam show to be projected on the Old City wall, and Handel’s Messiah to be performed in the amphitheater below by the Philharmonic and massed choral societies, concluding in an all-time extravaganza of
fireworks.
Yemin Moshe is a perfect site for viewing this spectacle, and its residents are under much pressure to invite their friends. The front-row mansion of Max and Yael Roweh, with balconies on two floors plus a rooftop, is the hottest ticket in town, in a manner of speaking. Yael has arranged chairs and refreshments for viewers on all three levels; places on the roof for the romantically inclined, for viewing in starlit darkness; more places downstairs for young anxious parents, where their offspring can fall but a foot or so to soft flower beds, and grandparents can baby-sit and dote; the big party in the main living room and on its spacious balcony.
Zev brings Emily Halliday downstairs, and Nakhama happily sorts out her small fry from the boil of children, displaying them for Emily’s admiration. Emily notes with a trace of chagrin, and faint amusement at herself for feeling so, that Nakhama — always the fleshy one — has stayed reasonably shapely, and almost unreasonably beautiful, into her sixties; her hair still dark, her arms smooth and rounded. Genes, or something. Lucky Zev, having it both ways to the last, the monster. She is grateful when he takes her up to the roof, where the first stars are appearing. “Dearest, just leave me here,” she says, with a light kiss on his cheek. “It’s beautiful here, it’s where I’m comfortable. I’ll come down when I feel like it.”
“As you wish, Queenie.”
Arriving about sundown, Amos and Ruti Pasternak find the house abuzz, and straight off encounter Irene Fleg in the main room. Amos knows (the wise Yael has warned him) that the French couple will be at the party, but the cane and the limp surprise him. Ruti gives the Frenchwoman a brief sharp head-to-toe scrutiny, and goes off looking unworried, leaving Amos to chat with his old friend.
“So that’s Ruti. She’s very pretty,” Irene Fleg says.
“Come on, Irene. What she is very, is smart. Ruti’s all right. She’s expecting again.”
“Glorious. Congratulations, chéri.”
“Why the cane, dear?”
“Oh, Amos, my skiing days are over. Third time I’ve broken my leg.”