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South of El Alamein, Egypt, October 15, 1942
“All warfare is based on deception,” read the plaque on Geoffrey Barkas’ desk.
He caught me looking at it, and smiled vaguely. “Sun Tzu, from The Art of War. Familiar? MacArthur’s a big fan, or so I hear.”
I shook my head, though Barkas didn’t notice. It seemed a bit unusual for the head of the British Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate to meet with a prospective ditch digger assigned to his unit, even one with an impressive-sounding title like mine. Thus, I didn’t bother him during his lengthy perusal of the manila folder that presumably contained all the British Army knew—or cared to present—of me. Waiting patiently, I studied his downturned face.
It was a hard, ironic face, with a sardonic twist etched on lips that sheltered, umbrella-like, a round, full chin. Narrow cheeks drew attention from a broad forehead accentuated by slicked-back hair. Most striking about Geoffrey Barkas, I discovered quickly, was his gaze. It pierced whatever it fell on—stripping away pretense and laying bare motive.
Finally, he looked up from the folder. His eyes flayed me thoroughly before he spoke. “Jesus Christ, Private Katz,” he said in clipped English, then read aloud from the typed orders in his hand. “‘To maximize the learning experience, the Zionist Liaison shall be intimately exposed to all facets of camouflage activity—from the ground up. To this end, he should be assigned field work of a type requiring no specific skill set. There is no need for any formal classroom instruction, nor necessity to supply him with in-camp accommodation.’” He set the paper down. “So, who in the hell did you piss off?”
I smiled wryly. “Just about all of them, sir.”
He snorted. “All of them, indeed. I’d say so, young man. Well, what the hell am I supposed to do with you, then?” His eyes once again interrogated me at length, and I imagined I could see the wheels of his mind turning rapidly. After a long pause, he finally broke the silence with another, more decisive, snort. He jotted a note in my file and handed it across the desk to me. “Very well, Mr. Katz, you shall learn from the ground up. You will be attached to an engineering group building important infrastructure for Operation Bertram. That will be all.”
I took the proffered file, but did not yet turn to leave. “Operation Bertram, sir? No one in Palestine mentioned that....” I let my voice trail off, hoping for a semblance of explanation as to what I was doing here.
‘Here’ was in British Army Camp E just outside of Helwan, Egypt, a sparse, nearly colorless Cairo suburb most notable for the large military airstrip on its southern edge. The bus from the throbbing iron-girded monstrosity that was Cairo’s Ramses Station had first meandered at length along the refreshingly reed-skirted Nile. Then, regrettably, it had turned away into a bland, flat, and tan uniformity broken only by the occasional green-topped date palm. The monotonous landscape persisted as we pulled into a dusty enclave of wooden huts and squat concrete houses. The driver had stopped, allowing the trailing dust cloud to catch up and settle over us, and called out “Helwan!”
I’d alighted into a throng of khaki-clad British soldiers and thawb-wearing Egyptian fellahin—none of whom seemed to know anything about the Camouflage Directorate or its head. After an hour of aimless wandering, during which time everyone either ignored me or misdirected me, I found Barkas’ office.
His eyes now spoke of fatigue, yet his face momentarily lit up. “Operation Bertram, my boy, will be written and spoken about for generations. We’re creating the single largest campaign of deception in the history of military conflict. Sun Tzu would shit himself if he could see what we’re up to here. Now, off to work with you. See the Major out front about the details of your posting.”
I shuffled from his office and stood expectantly in front of the desk of the Major, whom I’d registered only in passing when I came in. He looked up from his typewriter with a bored expression, and I handed him the note I’d received from Barkas.
With a sullen sigh, he grudgingly shuffled papers and filled out the forms required for my transfer. After several minutes, without looking up, he explained in a monotone that I was to assist in the laying of a water pipeline that would carry no water. At this, he looked up slyly, clearly regarding this paradox as inescapably intriguing. He waited in expectant silence for my inevitable query, clearly eager to launch into an explanation.
I offered none.
I was no longer curious about what I was to do, bone-weary from the two-day trip from Palestine, and desperate for a bath, which I guessed would be long in coming. Mostly, I simply cared little where I would end up and what they would force me to do. Thus, I looked back at the Major with the same dumbly bored expression he’d given me just minutes before.
He stared back at me.
Finally, to break the standoff, I raised a querulous eyebrow, which was all he needed. I’d granted him a victorious spark of interest in a subject that clearly delighted him.
“It’s all part of the grand and brilliant farce that is Operation Bertram,” he sang out merrily, boredom dispelled. “The pipeline you’re to help lay is codenamed Diamond. It runs from an actual water pipeline—” He showed me on the large map behind his desk. “—to a fake supply depot to the south. The idea is to convince the Germans that the upcoming offensive will begin far to the south of General Montgomery’s actual plan. The fake pipeline's construction schedule is also timed precisely to make it appear that the job will be finished by a date far after the offensive is scheduled to begin.”
He droned on, explaining far more than seemed appropriate. “During the day, your group will work with heavy earth-moving equipment to dig an eight-kilometer stretch of two-meter deep trench. When the trench is dug, you’ll lay out pipe—” he made little air quotes around ‘pipe.’ “—made of wood and covered with tin from spent petrol cans—next to the trench, as if ready for welding into place. When night falls, you’ll fill in the trench and move the same fake sections of pipes ahead to a staging area for the next section.
“Thus, to the ubiquitous high-altitude Nazi surveillance aircraft, it will appear that we’ve completed a section of the pipeline overnight, and are preparing to lay the next section. We’ll even be building fake watchtowers and supply stations—placing scarecrow men and decommissioned vehicles next to these installations to make them look real from the air.”
I listened to the Major’s explanation in skeptical silence.
Catching my expression, he smiled in condescension. “There it is. That’s the look they all give me. It’s too bad I never get to see their faces when they actually get to the field.” He slammed my file onto a pile of files that started on the floor and ended just above desk level. He ripped the final form from his typewriter, handed me two pieces of flimsy carbon-copy paper, and directed me to the transport hut.
***
My Darling Sean,
I said ten thousand goodbyes to you. I began right after we first said hello. I said goodbye every time I woke with your hand on my arm. I said goodbye every time I caught you looking at me across the Armon Hotel bar. I said goodbye over breakfast, when the morning sun slid through your curls like melted butter. I said goodbye every time you unlocked the door to my flat, undressed, and crept silently into bed with me—army dust and your own sweat still clinging to your skin.
I said ten thousand goodbyes to you because there are too many hellos in the world. They’re so common as to dissipate without a trace. We say hello to strangers on the street, to bus drivers, to nameless neighbors—but we’re stingy with our goodbyes. These, we reserve for those whose absence excavates an open pit in our stomachs, which cannot be filled. This is why goodbyes leave a residue. Microscopic pieces of each goodbye stick to the soul like burrs in a field-worn pants leg. Thus, I carry with me ten thousand pieces of you, tangled irretrievably in the fabric of my soul. I can’t get rid of them, nor do I want to.
***
I didn’t send this letter to Sean, just like the countless letters I’d never sent to Samuel.
I’d always been my own harshest judge. Yet in objective fairness, I couldn’t have sent the letter even if I’d wanted to. I was kilometers from any post box, lying face down in a shallow, hastily scrabbled foxhole in the sand, next to the foundations of a water pipeline that would never carry water, in the vast desert emptiness south of El Alamein, Egypt. Even if there had been an incongruously located post box in this wasteland of tan, getting out of my foxhole during a Luftwaffe bombing run seemed rather imprudent.
Through my cheek, pressed tight to the sand, I felt the ground groan, as if the planet itself were grumbling about the punishment being inflicted upon it. The Luftwaffe directed the bombing not at us, but at the artillery set up some distance to our rear. Yet my superiors had ordered me into the foxhole, and I was frankly glad for the rest.
Flashes from the bombs illuminated the desert emptiness with stroboscopic persistence. Over and over, the flashes of light revealed the slice of our deception that was visible over the rim of my foxhole.
Deception and goodbyes, I thought. Why are these always so intertwined for me?
The guns answered, and I closed my eyes against their insistent mocking.
When the raid ended and the guns fell silent, darkness reasserted mute dominance over the landscape. My eyes readjusted to the starlight, and I grabbed my shovel—the only weapon they’d issued me on arrival in the camp—and moved to get back to creating nothing.
For what was our fake water pipe if not nothing? What was the goal of my daily and nightly labors with the rough-handled shovel—which in just five days had turned my hands into calloused mitts—if not nothing?
I had said ten thousand goodbyes—to Sean, to my parents, to Samuel, to my life in Tel Aviv. I had no more letters to send, no more goodbyes to say, no further secrets to reveal. Now, I had only deception, which was, after all, the production of nothing.
