A Furious Aura
“The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms”
—T. S. Eliot, “Mistah Kurtz—he dead: A penny for the Old Guy” from “The Hollow Men”
The first time Raymonda read the book Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life, she was still in the hospital. In the epilogue, Moshe is wandering around a canyon in the Negev known in Hebrew as Nahal Beersheeba. Seeing what looks like a cave, he attaches a rope to the bumper of his jeep and clambers down, and begins sniffing around like a dog looking for a buried bone. What he finds is an Iron Age scene: potsherds, bones, flint blades, and an ax head. “This was their land,” he writes about the ancient troglodytes, “their birthplace, and they must have loved it.”
When they were attacked, they fought for their birthplace. And now here was I, at the end of a rope, having crawled through an opening in a cliff-side across their threshold and inside their home. It was an extraordinary sensation. I crouched by the ancient hearth. It was as though the fire had only just died down, and I did not need to close my eyes to conjure up the woman of the house bending over to spark its embers into flame as she prepared the meal for her family. My family.
Raymonda was barely able to hold up the book, and even though it made her wince in pain, she laughed at Dayan’s imaginary “family.” A light bulb went off. “My God,” she said to herself. “The great general with so much power over us is stark raving mad.” She almost pitied him.
Dayan was diagnosed with colon cancer shortly after quitting Begin’s government in 1980.
During the final family gathering on Joab Street, a brood of grandchildren clamored over the pirate’s chest of Roman sarcophagi, Byzantine gravestones, and bronze church bells. The parting gift the warrior-troglodyte gave his children that day was a macabre swansong: “At the end of the day/ Let each of you cultivate our ancestors’ land/ and have the sword within reach above your bed. /And at the end of your days/ bring it down and give it to your children.” Yael brushed off his ode as “clannish and almost primitive in its brutal lack of any shred of light, only fighting, till the end your days, and of our children’s days. This was his gift, his inheritance.”
Assi’s showdown with Moshe was one of the greatest theatrical scenes of his career, a soliloquy, or rather a rant at his father’s bedside. The verbal assault could easily be slipped into an Israeli version of King Lear, or Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Moshe in the role of “Big Daddy.”
Though the two had had nothing to do with one another for years, the prodigal son was running low on cash—cocaine was an expensive habit—and knowing his millionaire father could afford it, thought he could wheedle some money out of him and decided to swing by Zahala. Assi noticed his shrunken figure. “So it’s true, you are dying.”
Moshe was clearly in no position to slap his children around any more, so Assi spilled out decades of resentment:
“Listen, I want to tell you a few things.” His voice climbed into a high, reedy, inquisitional register. “I want to tell you that you were OK, you were quite a father till the age of sixteen. Since then just one thing I remember, that you are a SOB, you are the worst person, full of yourself, full of shit. You are the one who invented screwing as a national item; who sends his bodyguard to give my kids chocolate on their birthdays. They don’t know much about you. But I’ll tell them. You are the generation that lost sight . . . of what we were . . . Because at a certain point you thought you were King David.”
Assi, as emotionally crippled by his father as his father was by the Senegalese sniper, kept firing:
“Anyhow I want you to know that I simply hate your guts . . . You were interviewed in the paper, and you said that if you could live again you’d never have a family. I hope you understand what that means to me. That I was your mistake. Things have changed. Now you are my mistake.”
Ruth knew Moshe was ill, but made no arrangements to return to Israel. Yael assured her there was no hurry. Even when he fell into a coma, Yael said nothing. Ruth therefore wasn’t in the country in October 1981 when the farmer she still loved, the “firstborn son of redemption,” died a millionaire, despised by his sons Assi and Udi; only Yael clung to her stubborn, ambivalent love. Her memoir My Father, His Daughter opens with the image of his corpse in an intensive-care unit with the EKG machine displaying a straight green line, emitting a high, piercing whine. His heart is no longer beating; the trigger finger stiff and bluish; tubes and electrodes feed into the emaciated body of the Homeric hero, whose “maimed face,” scarred by a sniper’s bullet, “is turning yellow.” His left eye, scrolled open, is a cloudy gray marble. “I have seen many dead faces, tranquil or accepting, amazed or tortured, childish or wrinkled. Father’s conveyed angry frustration, as if he didn’t mean it to happen quite then, and for the first time was caught unaware, deprived of the last word. Those things unsaid and unaccomplished hovered there, almost palpable. This furious aura has haunted me ever since.”
Ruth caught the first plane back in time to attend the funeral on the hill just above Nahalal.
The general’s death began to ease the rivalry that pitted daughter against mother. Yael could still not discard her caricature of Ruth as weak and plagued by a “martyr’s complex,” an absurdity given her mother’s globe-spanning efforts at improving the lives of women, from the women threatened with “honor killing” in the West Bank to weavers in Haiti. But Yael grudgingly admitted that her mother, “poor and too generous,” was the only parent with the indefinable quality called love. “Mother flooded us with gifts from the nothing she had, and father had charged us for everything. I was amazed at this remarkable woman.”64