“Zahal” is the Hebrew acronym for “Israeli Defense Force,” and Zahala is the classy northern suburb of Tel Aviv where army generals live. Moshe Dayan has a big house there. The general’s wife whom Mark has been seeing took Abe into her home, and has put Sandra up, too, with the general’s genial consent. These Israelis, the secular ones, tend to be what some might call adult about marriage and divorce. The general showed up during my visit, and there was no visible awkwardness among him, Mark, and the wife, who isn’t much to look at, but otherwise is quite a woman. She works in aeronautical designing, and has an engineering degree from the Technion in Haifa. The general is in love with somebody else’s wife, I think a bank manager’s, but I didn’t delve into all that. Mark has accepted a lecture post at the Technion; just temporarily, he assures me; there’s no way he’ll settle in Israel.
When I got there I saw Sandra feeding Abe lunch in the garden; so I let them alone and went inside, where I found Mark chuckling evilly over the foul review Time had given Peter Quat’s book. Its heading was My Eye, and it went on from there. The issue was several weeks old, for the war had delayed the mails.
“Well, this is the end of Peter’s kike comedy,” said Mark, “and high time. The joke is over. School of Quat fiction is dead. The Jews are a threatened species, probably doomed, because how many more military miracles can Israel pull off? It ain’t funny any more.”
Though I wasn’t in an arguing mood I fired up at that. “We aren’t a threatened species, and we aren’t precisely because Israel exists,” I retorted. “If we ever stop laughing at ourselves, then we’ll be a threatened species. As for the military miracles, they will go on, don’t worry, until the Arabs wise up, and get tired of dying for the Soviet Union. Then there’ll be peace.”
“He’s your client,” said Mark sourly.
Actually Peter isn’t in such bad shape. This book has to be written off as a muff, and his publisher naturally has gone sour on Quat merchandise, but Peter went to another publisher with a new book idea; and he telephoned me the day after the war ended, all in a happy fizz about, believe it or not, the Gilgamesh epic. He came upon this pre-Biblical flood story, and started reading up like mad on Mesopotamian religion, which was, I gather, very licentious and scatological. Peter has this vision of a tremendous Mesopotamian book ending in the great flood. “The ultimate disaster novel, a mighty parable of our times,” he calls it. Apparently the new publisher agreed and is talking big figures. The Noah of the Gilgamesh epic is named Utnapishtim. Peter will have to do something about that, but I daresay he will. You can’t keep a good man down.
I said my farewell to Sandra in the garden. She and Abe are being as reticent as Lee and Moshe Lev about their plans. I’m asking no questions. Abe’s blindness isn’t total. When they took off the bandages he could see light and shadow with one eye, and the other eye reacted to light stimuli. Now he’s bandaged up again. The best man in the world for this sort of thing, the Israeli doctors have told Mark, lives in Florida. Sandra and Abe will go there when he has healed enough to travel. He will be in Florida for a year, and Sandra says she will enroll in law school in Miami. “I’ll be his eyes,” Sandra said to me, “if he needs me for that, and anyway I may practice law. He makes it seem interesting.”
“He’s interesting,” I said.
“Oh, go on home,” said Sandra. “Mom must be climbing the walls, all alone there in Georgetown.”
When I shook hands with Abe, I found it very hard to get out any words. “I hope it goes well,” was what I managed to produce.
“It has gone well,” he said with a melancholy yet spirited smile, turning his bandaged sightless face up at me. “We won.”
The general then invited me in for a drink. His liking for old scotch is exceptional; most Israelis don’t drink at all, or they just sip sweet liqueurs. This is a big bluff career army man with a heavy jaw, large fists, and a brisk hearty manner. Before the war broke out, he was administering the Gaza Strip. I told him what Moshe Lev said about the disengagement talks. He disagreed tersely and violently. The Secretary is an opportunist, he growled, selling Israel down the river to snatch favor with the Arabs, when resolute American support of the Israeli victory could seal a secure peace right now in the Middle East.
“The Arabs are in a shambles,” he said. “Syria is finished. Egypt is broken. The Soviet Union made noise and sent arms, but failed them. With total surprise and total war, they still lost. The airlift gave us a moral boost, no doubt of it, but we were crossing the Suez Canal before it got going. We turned the war around in the field, with the stuff we had on hand. The Americans have been great. The way they mounted that airlift was awesome. But the Secretary is a damned court Jew, negotiating away the advantages we won for the United States and ourselves to make himself look like Metternich.”
“Golda herself has publicly said,” I ventured, “that the Americans saved Israel.”
“Golda and Dayan wouldn’t allow a preemptive air strike the day the Arabs began the war. They were afraid of what the Americans would think. That cost us two thousand dead boys and two weeks of fighting. She has to maintain that that price was necessary. It wasn’t.”
And that’s the kind of stand-off you come to, in most discussions in Israel; the old rabbinic break-off on so many issues, down the centuries: “This needs further study.”
They’re calling my flight….
***
And the thought of that further study is beginning to draw me. What really happened? Would a preemptive strike have stopped the Arabs in their tracks? Would it have alienated the Americans? The Arabs alienated nobody by striking first, that’s self-evident. What about the blowup among the Israeli generals on the southern front, hints of which are just surfacing in the press?
But over all looms the question that more and more haunts me: how did a people that thirty years ago marched docilely into gas chambers by the millions, women, children, and all, turn around in a generation to become one of the most impressive armed forces on earth? There is the true astounding reversal, the military miracle that still stuns the world, and that I don’t begin to fathom.
Who does? Where are the books? What is the answer? If I can’t find a book that tells me in plain English what I want to know, maybe I’ll dig for the truth and write one myself. After all, I’m now a man who has written a book—or almost.
The plane is taking off, and joggling my pen…
***
Airborne… I would have to come back to Israel, and maybe even live here, to write that book, but why not? Jan and I have money. Helping big utility companies to screw the Internal Revenue Service out of millions no longer seems to me a fun thing, as they say. Jan thinks Israel is fine for the Israelis, and for Sandra if that’s what she wants—though about that she’s skeptical—but that we would be nuts to live here. We’ll see.
The lights of Israel are blazing in the twilight as the plane circles and climbs, and the music tape is playing an old liturgical song, the last words of the kaddish, which has become a sort of marching song for the Israelis:
He who makes peace in the Highest
He will make peace, for us
And for all Israel, amen.
Every time I leave Israel and look back at the coastline and the lights, I feel a tug, but now! Mama is there for good, and perhaps Lee, and at the moment Sandra, too, and even Mark Herz. That song’s refrain goes on and on, a rousing melody repeating just two Hebrew words, Yaaseh shalom, that is, “He will make peace.”
Yaaseh shalom
Yaaseh shalom
Let me write my last glimpse of Bobbie Webb, as I take my last glimpse of Israel, and then get stone-drunk, but one more thing first, before I forget. This morning as I said my prayers, alone in my hotel room, I recited this passage from the daily liturgy; and it is sounding in my brain as I watch those receding lights.
Look dawn from Heaven and see that we have become a scorn and a derision among the nations. We are considered as sheep bound for the slaughter, for murder, for extermination, for smiting and for shame. Yet with all this we have not forgotten Your name. Do not You forget us.
We spoke those words, I and my father and his father, and their fathers before them, for two thousand years—and even in my own time, alas—as a terrible statement of fact. Now there are the lights of victorious Israel below.
Yaaseh shalom…
Yaaseh shalom…
***
Some years after we were married Jan and I went to a Broadway show, and ahead of us, passing the ticket-taker, I glimpsed Bobbie Webb. More by her carriage, and the way she held her head than anything else, I recognized her, because her back was to me. The man who apparently was with her, handing over the tickets, was a greasy-looking, swarthy little person about sixty years old. I thought with horror, ye gods, is this what Bobbie has fallen to? But when we came out into the lobby at intermission, there she stood with a very tall, good-looking man in rimless glasses, so that had been my mistake. She saw me and smiled, and I saw her lips form the words, “There’s David Goodkind.”
The obscenity trials were getting a splash in the papers just then. No doubt she had told her husband something about us. The tall man said, when she introduced us and we shook hands, that he admired what I was doing in the trials. His manner was cordial, his clothes excellent, his speech cultivated. So Bobbie had landed well, after all. She was plumper, but still good-looking, still straight, still striking. Only her eyes were dulled. “I’ve followed you in the papers, David,” she said. “It’s wonderful, everything that’s happened. I’m so proud for you.” Her mother was gone, she said, and Angela was doing well in boarding school. “Angela’s a beauty,” the tall man said, with a touch of fatherly fondness.
I was so stirred I almost lost awareness of where I was and what I was doing. I had not heard from Bobbie Webb since that last meeting in the Palm Court. The four of us went back into the theatre together, still chatting. Bobbie walked past the aisle like a blind woman, and her husband had to take her arm and turn her. “This way, dear.” I watched them walk down to two of the best orchestra seats. Yes, Bobbie had landed well. Thank God.
“Maybe we can meet them afterward for a drink,” I said to Jan.
I did not look for Bobbie after the show. Bobbie Webb’s last best gift to me was to vanish from my life.
Yaaseh shalom
Yaaseh shalom
The plane still climbs away from the coastal lights, and the old kaddish song goes on, sung in full-throated chorus by young Israelis.
Bobbie and I always talked of going to Lake Louise together. We never did. We should have gone there at least once, and danced under the stars, but the time went by in our quarrels and reconciliations, and we did not manage it. I have never yet been to Lake Louise, and if I ever get there, it will not be to dance with Bobbie Webb under the stars. I do not know what has become of Bobbie; I did not catch her married name, and I have no idea whether she is alive or dead. She would be only sixty or sixty-one, so there’s no reason why she should not still live. But if this book is published and she reads it, I will not hear from her, and I will never know what she thought. She and Jan smiled and spoke fair to each other, but Bobbie has sense, and her last best gift stands.
He will make peace,
For us, and for all Israel, Amen.
The lights of Israel are gone. The kaddish song has ended. So has my book. It is a kaddish for my father, of course, start to finish; but in counterpoint it is also a torch song of the thirties, a sentimental Big Band number that no one has ever heard till now, and its name is, “Inside, Outside.”
***
The stewardess comes up the aisle of the first-class cabin, taking drink orders. The man sitting beside me is a young American, perhaps a war volunteer. “Arthur Susman,” she reads from her list.
“That’s me,” he says.
“What will you drink, Arthur?” Warm smile, Israeli first-name informality. He asks for a martini.
“Israel David Goodkind,” she says.
“Right. Double bourbon and water.”
She blinks at the hairy-chested order, and makes a note. Then, with that El Al smile: “And what do they call you, Israel or David?”
Slight pause. Then Pop’s Yisroelke, enjoying a wry Yankee joke she may not get, smiles back.
“Call me Israel.”