The Comedians
Isolation made Raymonda want to shriek at her children and Daoud; it slowly began to entomb her, day by day, like a chrysalis. Journalist friends kept writing about her case in the press. The only good thing to come out of forced isolation was the time she had to jot down notes for what her co-writer turned into My Home, My Prison.
At one point in late December 1976, someone must have decided that the price of keeping her under hermetic isolation was doing more harm than good, and she was released with a variety of warnings of future arrests and expulsion if she returned to her troublemaking.
Ruth, sitting in the Tawil living room the next day, asked Daoud whether he would marry Raymonda if he had to do it all over again. He chuckled, shook his head, and in a soft voice replied, “No. Way too much drama for a conservative banker,” he said, a lie belied by his eyes shimmering with affection and by the way he held Raymonda’s hand.
One of Raymonda’s first trips back to Jerusalem was to see Assi’s darkly comic Feast for the Eyes, a film about a failed poet who kills himself. Critics read into the film a metaphor for the collective suicide the youngest of the Dayan children believed his country was mindlessly committing.
In Ramallah, activists from all over the world and the West Bank, along with Ruth, Uri, Amos, and Abie, and a gaggle of other left-wingers resumed their regular pilgrimages to the Tawil’s house. The Israelis were brimming with excitement at the new political organization they were creating. They believed their group would break the power monopoly of the labor and right-wing parties. It was the first Zionist group to call openly for two states, one Jewish and one Palestinian, and Ruth’s support was considered a coup for the group. Then as now, Ruth wasn’t sure it made much sense to carve out a separate Palestinian state when it seemed easier, and better, for everyone to live together as equals. But she was happy to support the leftists. At least they were doing something.
The two-staters gathering at one-state Raymonda’s house, with their noble but wishful thinking over stuffed grape leaves and wine, badly misread the political map in Israel. Their group was never more than a boutique party with a voter base more or less equal to the bohemian theater and cafe population of Tel Aviv. In 1977 Ezer Weizman forged the Likud Party by cobbling together various right-wing groups; and, with the hardboiled Greater-Israel nationalist, Menachem Begin, at its helm, the Likud came to power. To Ruth’s dismay her ex-husband joined the government as foreign minister. Yitzhak Shamir, an erstwhile Irgun fighter with strangely reptilian eyes, also joined the cabinet. Sharon picked up the Ministry of Agriculture. Ruth’s dear Ezer, as chief architect of the most right-wing government in the history of the country, was the new minister of defense. Ruth wanted to march over to the Ministry of Defense and shake some sense into Ezer. Seeing him and Moshe smugly next to Begin felt like a betrayal far worse than cavorting with other women. “Cheating on me, that’s one thing, but cheating on the country!”
Israelis on the left called Begin every libelous name in the book: fascist, demagogue, dictator, and so on; many quoted Ben-Gurion when he compared Begin to Hitler.54
The California Café crowd, with their boundless vilification of the Begin-Dayan-Weizman-Sharon-Shamir government, became even more marginalized when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat announced his imminent arrival in Jerusalem. He was to appear before the Israeli Knesset. Word of the unimaginable act reached Raymonda in the middle of a conference, organized by the New Outlook magazine at the Tel Aviv Hilton. She and the manager of the hotel, a former governor-general in the West Bank, were at one another’s throats because she wrote “Palestine” on her plastic nametag. He barked into her face that there was no such entity.
“If you . . . you . . . you keep the name . . . name Palestine on that badge,” stuttered the general-turned-hotel-manager, reaching over and yanking it off her neck, “I . . . I will b-b-b-blow up this hotel.”
“OK, go ahead and blow it up,” she shot back. “Then the dead of Jaffa will rise to fight you.” The five-star hotel was built on top of the Muslim cemetery of Jaffa, expropriated after 1948.55
She and the stuttering manager were going back and forth, just as the announcement was read over the hotel loudspeaker that Anwar Sadat was going to visit Jerusalem. The manager lost his stutter. “You win, Raymonda.” He handed the badge back to her. “Write Yasser Arafat, if you want.”
Sadat made his visit, and Moshe spearheaded the subsequent peace talks with the Egyptians. Over the coming months of intense negotiations, he had the final adventure of his life that included one secret meeting with Sadat’s men that required him to travel undercover with a mustache, wig, and sunglasses, and to move between cars and far-flung Middle-Eastern airports.
With her ex-husband now racing around the world in his unlikely career shift as peacemaker, Ruth wanted to go on a long journey, much the way she went to the Congo in 1960. The Ogowe River was out of the question because Albert Schweitzer was dead, so she took up an offer from the Inter-American Development Bank to create handicraft projects in Latin America, extending her know-how accumulated at Maskit to a dozen poverty-mired countries. She resigned as head of Maskit, and was off.
Ruth’s eight years at the bank were the longest stretch of time away from home since she was in London as a child. She got the job when she was already over sixty, closing in on what most people look forward to as their golden retirement years. In and out of luxury hotels and palaces so often over the years, she felt most at home in squalid, outlying villages with cackling chickens where she communicated with her hands and feet, and where no one had ever heard the Dayan name, though her ex’s legacy managed to shadow her in the most unexpected places. Manuel Noriega, dictator of Panama, gave her a big kiss because her husband was one of his greatest heroes.
Letters she keeps in a shoebox and composed in neat Hebrew handwriting follow Ruth’s movements throughout her years at the bank. There are a hundred pages from the Andes, Tierra del Fuego, or Port-au-Prince, letters that read like something out of Bruce Chatwin.
At one point she was drinking a cocktail in an Argentine hotel bar, with a picture of Jesus on the wall, when over the radio came the news that a Turk tried to assassinate the pope. There was such a commotion—she didn’t understand a thing until a man in a business suit said to her, “Pray for the pope, señora, pray for the pope,” as if her Jewish prayers would fly through the Pearly Gates quicker than their Catholic ones.
One letter has her riding on a mule for a week, in the barren mountains of Bolivia in pursuit of a small indigenous tribe, and encountering, on a perilous rocky trail, a group of handsome Spanish priests devoting their lives to the damnés de la terre. Their mysterious self-sacrificing charisma, their “reverence for life,” brought to mind Schweitzer. The main difference between Ruth and the priests was motivation. The secular Ruth wasn’t on the prowl for isolated tribes to save souls, not hers and not theirs. “I’m a solitary ship lost at sea, floating from port to port,” goes one letter. “I have no close friends and I am dependent on the whims of revolutions and dictators.”
Ruth blossomed in the anonymity. She didn’t need to have an identity, not as wife-of, not as an Israeli. Her most emotional missives are from Haiti, a country ruled in those days by Jean-Claude Duvalier a.k.a. “Baby Doc” and his cronies known as the “dinosaurs.” Ruth felt at home in the country the instant she stepped out of the twin-engine plane into the fly-filled, sweltering airport in Port-au-Prince crowded with half-starving beggars, their hands groping after her.
From the airport, she rented a Citroën and headed off to a hotel operated by Abie Nathan’s ex-wife Rosie, a lesbian and disciple of the celebrated African-American dancer and mambo priestess in the voodoo religion, Katherine Dunham. Rosie had gone native, except for the tattoos and butch look of closely cropped hair.
Every morning, Ruth set out from the hotel into the slums navigating steaming streams of sewage, holding her Maskit shawl over her nose and taking in the dazzling colors of the homes and the people. “I’m on my way to a madhouse,” one of her letters begins. “Every day, my mind is captivated by the colors and the way of life—the natural goodness here. It is as if the heavens have opened and produced life, coconuts falling from the sky.” Haiti mesmerized her with its colors, singing, dancing, voodoo and art.
In the evenings, Ruth headed over to the legendary gingerbread-style Hotel Oloffson, the watering hole for the Haitian elite. Graham Greene set much of his novel The Comedians in the bar, to get support for her work in the slums. Greene writes of “nights with the discord of violence instead of jazz.” Ruth’s visits coincided with a spate of political murders.
At the Oloffson Hotel, Ruth hobnobbed with the elite mulattos and intrepid expatriates who continued to live in the country. She followed all the gossip on the island because one of her friends, a Palestinian from Nazareth, was Baby Doc’s sister-in-law.