Married to the State
One reason Ruth preferred the leaking shack and cowshed over the mansion was that the rambling Villa Lea was far too large for her to manage on her own; she needed a maid, and having hired help rankled her socialist sensibilities. The maid pitched in with the cooking and cleaning, a necessity because the house turned into a sort of flophouse for Moshe’s gang of commandos, crowding into the available rooms.10
The first major social event was the wedding of her sister to the ex-fighter pilot Ezer Weizman, President Chaim Weizmann’s nephew. It was the closest thing Israel had to a royal wedding, vastly different from the rowdy singing, dancing, and firing of rifles during Ruth and Moshe’s ceremony.
Ruth had her hands full raising children in a dangerous, divided city. In Yael’s eyes the new family home was like a palace fit for princes in glittering pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg she had heard about from Moshe’s mother or an enchanted castle in a fairy tale.
The villa doubled as Dayan’s military command center. The nine-year-old Yael was dazzled by the revolvers and maps in her uniformed father’s office, the boxes of ammo piled high in the hallways, and the boldly striding officers who streamed through the house. The front line with Jordan, with its coils of barbed wire and trenches, was just around the corner. From the top floors, Yael could sit for hours staring off at the walls of the Old City. She once ran downstairs excitedly carrying a still hot bullet from the gun of a Jordanian sniper. Four-year-old Assi, the “little Beelzebub” as he was called, was once found wandering in the booby-trapped and fortified No Man’s Land.
For the first time since moving to Nahalal as a teenager, Ruth had free time on her hands. As the maid cooked and cleaned, Ruth began meeting a friend Betty, a born New Yorker, for morning coffee at Cafe Atara on King George Street. The two had a lot to commiserate about: Betty’s husband was the founder of the Mossad, and the spy chief was even more secretive than Moshe.11 One bit of cheerful news Ruth got from Betty was that her husband had intercepted letters of foreign diplomats praising Ruth’s—and the maid’s—cooking.
Moshe lived in the same house as Ruth, and she saw him every day. Absorbed in the monumental task of keeping the city safe from attack, Moshe’s hard-driving work routine from crack of dawn till late at night reintroduced the terrible loneliness that had plagued Ruth since his underground days. Ben-Gurion’s favorite commando was sucked up into the vortex of geopolitics when he negotiated with King Abdullah’s top general Abdullah El-Tell the “Absolute and Sincere Ceasefire.” Moshe and Abdullah El-Tell conducted clandestine talks to stabilize the long fortified border and bring a modicum of normalcy to deeply scarred Jerusalem.
Dayan set up Mandelbaum Gate, established on the ruins of a villa built by a Russian-Jewish manufacturer of stockings. The Gate was the Checkpoint Charlie of Jerusalem and for Arabs a symbol of the loss of their country and their forced separation from families, neighbors, and friends.
Ruth tried her best to be a part of his life. One of her attempts to have a toehold in Moshe’s world was a spy course organized by Betty’s husband; but she flunked because she didn’t have what it took to betray people: passing the course meant she would have to spy on the foreign diplomats who praised her cooking.
The children worshipped their increasingly famous father. Yael would later describe her father as a “tribal patriarch,” and his world became theirs. There was a more human side to the hero, like peeing in the garden behind the villa or cleaning out earwax with the house key.
Yael rambled with her father through the “abandoned” Arab villages surrounding Jerusalem, where they gorged themselves off the fruit from orchards whose owners were vegetating in tent camps. In her child’s eyes, rambling through the empty countryside and scampering through haunted ruins was a new Eden. Her brave father was the first Adam, she his mischievous little Eve.
On a different occasion, it was Udi’s turn to be dazzled by his father. Moshe took the nine-year-old on a pigeon shoot not far from Gaza, a thin strip of land then under the control of the Egyptians. Moshe liked to bag the birds and take them home for Ruth to cook. By chance the hunt was around Tel el Hesi, which was the first major archeological site to be excavated in Palestine. There was so much rain that year that a part of the slope had been washed away, exposing a clay jar. Moshe pulled it out of its mud and, curious about its provenance, took it to an army colleague and part-time archeologist who dated it back to the Iron Age era of David and Goliath.12 Moshe was hooked. Over his long career as an amateur archeologist, Moshe assembled a private museum full of ancient treasures.
For a man who never lost his boyish love of discovery, Eretz Yisrael, which in his imagination had been neglected and fallow for millennia by Arabs in their “mud hovels,” was the world’s most thrilling sandbox. With pick and shovel, he pursued his fetishistic mysticism of pure and authentic Hebrew roots, his tactile encounter with the epoch of the Patriarchs, Judges, and Kings.13
He had never been happier. Ruth still missed life on the farm, and whenever she could, she took prominent visitors on a tour of the cowsheds. In his book Strange Lands the US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas describes one such visit “to a pleasant, fertile spot” owned by the “famous Colonel Moshe Dayan and his attractive and brilliant wife.” “Brilliant” was an adjective neither Moshe nor Yael would ever employ in talking about Ruth. Married to the State of Israel, Moshe was too busy to notice that his neglected wife was beginning to blossom in unexpected ways.