Relations with Nahum Shemer, however, were very close. They would joke together and understand each other with few words spoken. Nahum would take Danny with him to all the official receptions, to the great regret of the other diplomatic staff. They went together to soccer matches that paralyzed half the city, and from there they would go to locales frequented by men only. They would sit and talk for hours. Nahum Shemer loved talking about the War of Independence and the Sinai Campaign, and about the general who had recruited him to his service. The general read a book that Nahum had written about him, he then called Nahum and said more or less, “As a journalist, you aren’t half-bad, but you will never be an author, so why not come work with me?”
Danny must have heard that story dozens of times, and he would repeat it to his friends, including an imitation of Nahum Shemer in his Polish accent after making sure that he wasn’t around, and his audience would roll around with laughter. The truth of the matter was that Nahum had hours and hours with the general, pretty much like what Danny was doing with him now, on the pretext of getting the research right for the book.
After Friday night dinner at Nahum Shemer’s house, we would sit around singing songs. His wife, a Brooklyn native, knew where to shop in the remotest neighborhoods of Rome and prepared the most wonderful dinners. After dinner and singing, Danny and Nahum would start telling jokes that only they understood.
“We have a ministerial visit next week,” Nahum Shemer said one Friday night. He was referring to the former foreign minister who had made a political comeback and was back in the office for the second time. “You know that he and I go back a long way. We stole many horses together back in the day, but he is the greatest, a true visionary,” Nahum Shemer snickered. “Let’s see what he can do these days. I am sure he hasn’t said his final word yet.” I couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine what the final word of a horse thief could possibly be, but Nahum said that he would not be surprised if this friend of old would end up as president of state. Nahum continued as if talking to himself, “We must arrange a great visit for him. Give him your dog and pony show. Arrange some meetings with pre-cooked journalists. Give him all the questions ahead of time, so he can prepare. You get my meaning, don’t you?” Danny managed to run the media contacts expertly even through the hard years of the war in Lebanon.
“Don’t worry about it, Nahum. Consider it done,” Danny calmed him with his captivating half-smile. I felt sorry for Nahum, who had become so dependent on Danny and probably didn’t realize it yet.
The foreign minister took up his position in the National Unity Government a week earlier. He hated the prime minister, who was from a rival party, with all his heart. I had learned long ago that politicians grow and thrive in a climate of hatred. There is no love among them, and there are certainly no friendships. “But a little bit of hatred is a good thing for them,” Theo had told Danny once, with disgust. “It keeps them on their toes, nervous, and alert.”
The minister who came off the plane actually looked to be in a good mood, but I kept thinking about the things that were happening behind that wide smile and those gloomy eyes. He shook hands with the dignitaries who had come to meet him, with the embassy staff, and with the heads of the Jewish community, the clothes-traders of the Tshuva and Arbib families, out in their Sunday best to receive him. I was getting excited and a bit breathless. I was supposed to greet the minister and hand a bouquet of flowers to his wife, but she never came. When he started walking down the stairs from the plane, I suddenly saw Stanley Ellsworth, our religion teacher at the International School, a bitter and scornful man, and got confused.
“Welcome to minister, honorable Rome,” I saluted the minister, getting my words wrong, and handed him the flowers. For three days I had been practicing how to say “Welcome to Rome, honorable minister,” and at the last moment, I had got it wrong. I started sweating and choking and I felt terrible. I felt embarrassed and guilty for the damage I had done, but Danny, Nahum, and the minister just laughed.
The minister spoke in a metallic, monotonous voice and his eyes were sad. He was elegantly dressed, and every few minutes he would pull a comb out of his pocket and carefully tend to his hair, looking to all sides to make sure he wasn’t being watched. In the three days following his arrival, Danny never came home. One night he called from the Excelsior Hotel where he’d bunked down in the office suite that the embassy had booked. I told him that I had seen him briefly on the evening news on Channel One, walking by with the Ambassador and the visiting minister. I think he was happy to hear it, even though he pretended to be casual about it. On the third day, before the minister went home, I was invited to the farewell dinner at Nahum Shemer’s home. “It’s because of the flowers,” Dad said, and I felt the embarrassment again. I was even more hurt when I read about the whole flower episode in the gossip column of the Yediot Aharonot newspaper the following week.
There were about twenty people around the table, and the minister was talking about Ben Gurion who lacked a sense of humor. But the minister’s jokes weren’t funny either. Nahum laughed nonetheless. Danny sat throughout the meal with a permanent half-smile on his face, ready for any ministerial attempt at being funny. Even Mom laughed at the minister’s jokes. After dinner, when we sat down in the living room, the minister surprisingly chose to sit with Mom and me. “Do you know, Pnina, that your Danny is really a heck of a guy, a top-notch man?” he stated. She looked at him, nodding, but the smile froze on her lips as she awaited the second half of his words. “He hasn’t told you yet, but I offered him the chance to come back with me as my press advisor.” Mom went pale and looked at me, but I said nothing because it was all happening above my head anyway and nobody bothered to ask me. Mom replied in a voice that was not totally hers, “When do we have to move back home?”
“Danny will return with me in my plane and you two can take three months to get organized,” said the minister. “It’s all been taken care of. You’re studying, I understand, and will graduate with honors the summer. Until then you can get organized. Talk it out among yourselves. But I did want to tell you, lest you have any doubt, that this is a matter of national interest for Israel. I need Danny at my side. We are on the brink of historic breakthroughs, and it’s up to you and to this sweet girl here as to whether Danny will be able to work alongside me in tranquility and do the excellent work he usually does.” The minister tried to give his semi-sour smile.
I looked around me, frantically searching for Danny. He was sitting with Nahum and they were giggling as usual.
“Why isn’t Danny talking to us about this? How long has he known about it? Why hasn’t he said anything to us?” I asked in a panic.
“He is about to be of great help to me, and in the meantime, I am trying to help him, you smart girl,” the minister said and tried to pat my head but I pulled it back. The minister’s hand was left hanging in the air, and contrary to when he landed at the Airport, I was actually happy to embarrass him and Danny and I didn’t care if I was embarrassed too. I was particularly mad at Danny for not having had the guts to tell us and for sending the minister in his place. I felt sorry for myself, for Tami that we were about to leave behind, a little bit for Piazza di Spagna and Villa Borghese that I loved, and for the fabric and cosmetics stores on Via Condotti. I didn’t feel sorry at all about leaving the International School and the kids I knew there.
The following evening, Tami and I were sitting and hugging in the tiny lobby of the Gamla Hotel. She offered me her best Maamul cookies and I put my head on her shoulder and I sobbed. It was terrible. My life was getting cut off again without me being able to do anything about it.
“It’s a fantastic promotion for Danny,” she tried saying. “A huge step up the ladder.”
“But what will become of me?” I sobbed uncontrollably. “I keep having to go to new places and start all over. I don’t have a family as it is, and everywhere I go I have to find me a new dad or a new mom. Why must it be at my expense? Nobody even asks me
!”
“Don’t worry,” Tami offered me another cookie and another cup of tea that she had been keeping for special occasions. ”Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
That didn’t make me happy, and I went on crying. She said, “Shh… be quiet, honey. Don’t let others see you crying.” Someone was coming down the stairs at the Gamla. I was used to the couples coming here for a night to steal some love.
“People love and people steal at all ages,” Tami explained. It was funny seeing them sneak in and out of the hotel. Sometimes they would exchange a few words as they parted ways on the staircase before they made their way out into the world. The chamber maids, polish refugees, knew how to fake terrible sorrows and cried loudly, making their benefactors leave a particularly large tip. “Sentimental blackmail penetrates deeper into the soul than the best fuck in the world,” Tami always said. There were elderly couples there, talking in sweet baby voices, enjoying a dream about something they would never have. The couple parting ways right now must have been parting for a long time.
The woman said, “What will I do without you?” and I immediately thought about myself.
The man replied in Italian with a foreign accent, “I will be in touch; I won’t leave you by yourself.” He slipped into the corridor and stepped quickly into the night. For a second he looked familiar. But it was true that men in raincoats all looked alike at night and from behind.
I hugged Tami firmly and we sat there, not saying another word.
At noon, the next day, Uzi Feinstein arrived after an eighteen-hour flight from Manila. He had changed his name to the more Israeli Bar-Sela. He had gained weight, and his skin looked yellowish due to a rare local virus that he had caught in Manila and had almost gotten him back in trouble with the remains of the jaundice that he had had during his military service. Danny decided that Uzi would be his replacement, and he tried for hours to convince Nahum that Uzi was the only possible spokesman for the embassy. It didn’t interest Nahum one bit. After Danny, no other spokesman would ever be good enough. Uzi told boring stories about his life in Manila; of the tropical islands of the Pacific Ocean, where natives were sleeping with the pigs, and worshipping Jesus like they worship their old time gods and goddesses. Uzi seemed to have enjoyed his time in Manila but had the habit of always following Danny’s guidance. He explained that even though he was raising a young family, he dedicated all his time to his work and to expanding his network of contacts. He told of his lunch meetings with newspaper editors at the Polo Club of Makati and of the manipulations he was performing on the political correspondents in Manila. After an hour of brown-nosing and making a huge effort, Nahum looked up at him with weary eyes and said, “You know, Mister Bar-Sela, Rome is not Manila.”
Uzi started wriggling and squirming in explanations, but I saw the quick looks that Nahum exchanged with my father and knew that Uzi didn’t stand a chance.
If Uzi was offended, he never showed any sign of it. He insisted that I join him as he went shopping for his family. His wife Thelma had high ambitions for him. She was a tough disciplinarian and his only concern was that he wouldn’t have time to complete the huge shopping list she had compiled for him.
“Is it true that back in your army days, Danny would get girls for you?” I asked.
Uzi hesitated for a long while as if grappling with a heavy political issue. I was fourteen, with the understanding of a thirty-year-old.
“You understand,” he finally started explaining. “He would usually leave me the slightly less pretty one, and I would sit her on my bed, offer her a cup of coffee and ask her about her family and her parents. At first, she wouldn’t be interested because she had only come to our place for intercourse.”
“You mean sex?”
“Yes, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do it with a girl I didn’t know.” He hesitated, and then said, “You know, I was recovering from a hard case of jaundice… so I would ask them about their home and their parents and I would take the sad stories to heart. Their stories were always interesting. Danny knew that I really appreciated the attention, and he tried to impress me. ‘The system works’, he used to explain to me, ‘because it’s obvious that a small-town girl with two older brothers and elderly parents who never gets noticed would fall for a guy who suddenly appears from Norway with French manners and talks to her at two in the morning at Hayarkon Street and offers her half the world, and explains to her why she is so important and that he has a friend who shares an apartment with him and he would give her a night that she would never forget. So obviously she would come’.”
“And did they really get an unforgettable night?” I asked, trying hard not to burst out laughing.
“I think that there was only one who didn’t want to forget,” Uzi admitted scratching his skull. He didn’t seem to be too shy. “A girl from Beer-Sheba. We still write letters to each other, but Thelma doesn’t know. She would surely not allow it.” He guffawed. “Most of the girls that Danny gave me felt cheated, instead of a touch of honey that Danny had promised them, they got a long boring pointless night”
* * *
Chapter 12
Like a big silver bird, the Air Force Boeing hovered over the Tel Aviv Airport runways. When we entered the operations center inside the tower, the communication gear was already open and chirping in a huge tumult. Ehrlich scoured the room with a quick, expert glance. “Let’s get to the control room!” he barked, and started walking briskly in quick, small steps, his stomach shaking.
Brigadier Harel, the head of operations was standing by the doorway and didn’t try to stop us. He was looking at the big screen on the opposite wall. Just like everyone else, he was staring at the black dot on the green screen, as if he was trying to will the plane into submission. A stern-looking air traffic controller was talking into the microphone, “Four X-ray Lima, Four X-ray Lima, this is Lod calling. Four X-ray Lima, Four X-ray Lima, this is Lod calling.” He had a steely patience. In a monotonous voice that betrayed no fatigue, he repeated the same message that would become engraved in my mind. “Four X-ray Lima, Four X-ray Lima, this is Lod calling.”
“How long has he been calling the plane this way?” I whispered to Harel.
“Almost four hours since the hijacking. They are still not responding,” Harel sounded tired and tense. “Soon they will run out of fuel. It’s no coincidence that the plane is hovering above us.”
“Four X-ray Lima, this is Lod calling.”
There was a murmur over the radio. I got goose bumps right away. The hijacker spoke for the first time, in passable English with a heavy Arab accent,
“This is Deir Yassin calling the tower, we will land and we will taxi to the end of the runway. Lod tower, did you copy?” He didn’t wait for a reply, “I don’t want to see anyone approaching us, neither an ambulance nor a fire truck or a refueling truck. Nobody. If you want your foreign minister alive, do not come near me. Lod, do you copy?” There was a long silence on the transmission and in the room and then everybody was speaking at the same time.
Lieutenant Hezi, the intelligence officer, handed a note to Harel. “Ahmed Yassin, 26 years old, number two or three in the group.” Harel gave it a quick look, wrote something on the other side, and handed it to the controller sitting by the microphone, “Request to talk to the foreign minister.”
The controller transmitted in Israeli English, “Deir Yassin, this is Lod control, we need proof of life from the minister.”
“You will receive no proof.” The reply from Yassin was immediate and determined.
The plane circled above us once again, then appeared above the Rosh Ha-Ayin hills and landed with small puffs of smoke rising from the wheels as they touched the tarmac. It galloped the full length of the runway and came to a halt at its end.
Mossik, the airport director, followed the plane through the giant windows, clutching his chin in his fingers. “Damn it, he is blocking the whole airport now.”
As if reading his mind, the Boeing trans
mitted again, “Lod control, this is Deir Yassin. I don’t want to see any plane either approaching or leaving, either landing or taking off. We are going to stand here and then we will explain what you must do next.”
Down one flight of stairs below the control tower, the entire floor was a huge open space that now looked like a busy hive. Soldiers were dragging equipment, hanging television screens, lifting communications equipment, taking out antennas and checking beeping machines. The noise was unbearable. Women soldiers were climbing on chairs, trying to hang maps. Someone was arranging seats in rows, opening a table and laying out glasses with refreshments. Harel arrived a moment later, surrounded by a flock of lieutenant colonels. He walked in, and the room became silent.
“What a mess,” he was talking to himself and the flock of officers around him were about to say something. “Carry on,” he ordered the local officer in charge in a hoarse voice and smoothed his mustache while his eyes toured the room. “In five minutes, I want to see this place in order and completely silent. Where is Dagan?”
A heavy-set colonel, taking the last bite of a chocolate bar approached him. “Sir? You were looking for me?”
Dagan came from field operations. A red paratrooper’s beret was stuck nonchalantly in the epaulet of his work uniform. The crepe soles of his boots were worn out. The two had apparently been very close for many years.
“How well are we covering the scene?”
“Quite shitty.” Dagan had been ready for the question. “The bastards stuck the plane at least 2,100 feet from the nearest building, and even that one is no more than a decrepit old shack at the edge of Yahud. 2,100 feet is not a range we can do anything with. 3,600 feet to the nearest building in the Air Force base, 6,300 feet to the base’s tactical HQ. We are 1.3 miles from the plane. All of our command and control tools are extremely weak; too weak for this kind of operation.” Dagan successfully conquered the chocolate bar he was chewing.