Pumpkinflowers (9 page)

26

N
OT LONG AFTER
we visited Mordechai in the hospital, Jonah ended up in Mordechai's old outfit. When a loader-radioman in a crew bound for the Pumpkin made the reasonable decision that he wasn't going, and disappeared, the unit sent Jonah as a replacement.

During his time in the army Jonah spent many hours memorizing poetry to stave off boredom. He started with a pocket paperback of Natan Alterman's
Stars Outside
and still remembers fragments:

. . . the city bathed in the cries of crickets

. . . the moon on the cypress bayonet

. . . I will not stop looking, and I will not stop breathing, And I will die and keep walking

When he had committed the whole volume to memory he found some cheap English classics at a Jerusalem bookstore and picked up a Poe collection that included “
Th
e Raven.” He learned to recite it off by heart and still can. English wasn't a problem for him because he was born in Toronto, like me—we were friends as children before his family moved to Israel years before mine did the same.

Jonah's crew would head out of the outpost most nights on an enterprise known as an Artichoke ambush, so named because you were supposed to use the tank's night sight, the Artichoke, to spot guerrillas and then kill them with the cannon from afar. It was hard to imagine bad things happening during an activity named for an artichoke, but they did with some regularity, sometimes to our enemies and sometimes to us.

Th
e four crewmen took turns standing guard in the turret in case guerrillas crept through the bushes up to the tank.
Th
e others dozed inside. Sometimes a voice came from the radio and it would be the war room at the Pumpkin or some other outpost, or a girl down in Israel if you were lucky, and you would be reminded of the existence of other people on earth. But most of the time it was quiet. It was quiet that night too, and cold, with just enough wind to chill your bones but not enough to blow away the fog. Jonah scanned the bushes with night goggles and was taking it seriously, because some thought nothing would ever happen but Jonah had seen what Mordechai looked like and knew better.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore

Things were bad enough without Poe in the tank, but he recited it aloud anyway:

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,

And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor

Which was funny, because it happened just then to be a bleak December, and “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing” was also pretty accurate, and by this time Jonah was spooked, but he kept reciting the poem as he moved his head back and forth, and that was when he heard a rustle next to the tank and saw the shape scuttling on the ground, and it was real, not his imagination, and his heart stopped and started racing at the same moment, like three heart attacks all at once, and it was a plastic bag. That is a real Pumpkin story, and I wanted to tell it here because I realize that isn't how most of my stories end, but it is how most ended in real life.

27

R
EPORTS BEGAN TO
reach Bruria about people from nearby kibbutzim who were organizing in favor of a pullout from Lebanon. The nucleus was a group of four women who, like Bruria, had sons of army age. When the same reporter behind the first essay about the complicity of Israeli mothers interviewed them in the kibbutz newspaper two months after the crash, he called them the “four mothers,” like the four matriarchs of Genesis. This was the birth of the Four Mothers movement. It didn't look like much at first.

When Bruria heard that the women would be standing one Friday holding signs at an intersection, she decided to join them. A half-dozen women came, and a few photographers. Some drivers cursed them as they passed, because at this time most people still believed that without the security zone the north of Israel would be in danger, and if you opposed the army many thought you were a traitor. The mothers didn't oppose the army, just the policy, but it was hard to make that clear. There was bad blood in the country at the time over the peace negotiations with the Palestinians, and people assumed that the mothers were from the left, which they were, though they didn't think the argument about Lebanon needed to break down along the old political lines. Bruria began writing down the curses in a little notebook, not that they were particularly imaginative, mostly “Go fuck Arafat,” “Nasrallah's whores,” etc., etc. Nasrallah was the secretary-general of Hezbollah.

Bruria was opinionated and tough, the way the kibbutz assembly line used to make them, and once the matter was clear to her she could not be budged. The security zone was not the solution to a problem. It was the problem. The helicopter crash was an accident, but it had thrown the strategy into relief. Why were soldiers flying in helicopters? Because they were threatened by bombs on the roads. Why were the soldiers on the roads? Because they were traveling to a line of isolated forts in an enemy country. And why were they in these forts? No one seemed to have asked that question for a long time.

Bruria researched the history of the security zone and found that not only had it not been seriously debated by the government in years, but there had never quite been a decision to create it in the first place. The wording of the relevant government resolution from 1984, two years after the invasion, called for the complete withdrawal of the army from Lebanon and the establishment of a buffer zone along the border that would be controlled by the South Lebanon Army, the Christian militia allied with Israel, “with the support of the Israel Defense Forces.” But the army never withdrew. And that tiny fragment of language, “with the support of the Israel Defense Forces”—in Hebrew, only two words—had led over years of creeping “support” to the Pumpkin, Beaufort Castle, convoys, ambushes, the whole landscape that became the center of the universe for so many of us, a war so long that kids who were toddlers when it started fought there when they grew up.

The security zone had come to be seen not as a decision anyone made but as a state of nature. That's why this war never had a name—a name would suggest a decision. Instead it was referred to simply as Lebanon. It was something that just existed and always would. This wasn't a matter of debate as long as the price wasn't too high. But the helicopter crash made the price too high, and that spring Bruria and a few others resolved that if no one had the courage to end it they would end it themselves.

28

O
NE DAY LATE
that summer mortars hit the Pumpkin. Reports of a flower went out over the radio and were soon updated to oleander. It was one of the platoon leaders. Down in Israel, the gentle women of the army's grim notification machinery picked up phones. A car with a few officers moved through suburban streets.
Th
e news dropped like a boulder into a still pond: parents, siblings, girlfriend, friends. Later that day the information reached the training base of the Fighting Pioneer Youth at the encampment by the desert highway, then made its way to a sergeant in charge of the twenty recruits beginning their three years of service in the brigade's antitank company, one of them me.

Th
e sergeant called one of the new kids aside. It was Dani, for whom army service was a step on the way from a middle-class childhood to a doctorate on the modern history of Lebanon, a hiatus spent as a medic training to save lives and dreading the possibility of actually being called upon to do so. Just then we were standing in three rows trying with desperate ineptitude, and under threat of punishment, to precisely line up the toes of our new red boots in accordance with an order from the sergeants. But the discipline was abruptly relaxed, the first time this had happened, and no one was sure what to do. Boots began to stray from the line.
Th
ere was bad news about someone Dani knew from home. A hill in Lebanon, a mortar shell. We all saw him start to cry, and there was the Pumpkin again.

Not long after that our platoon was convened in a classroom to hear a war story told by a slight sergeant. It was Yaacov, from the incident at the Falcon Bend the year before. He was now at the desert base training the two dozen men of the engineering company's new draft—this was a sister platoon, housed in tents next to ours.
Th
ey were with us in the classroom. Anytime we were allowed to sit down our heads dropped and we fell asleep, but this didn't happen when he told us about that night. It was a gripping story, an awful story with no virtue to redeem it, and I think it was meant as a first warning about our future beyond the training base.
Th
e outpost's name was familiar to me by now.

Th
e engineering company had always been in charge of the Pumpkin, so at first we looked at those recruits with a mix of pity and envy; our unit had a less perilous assignment.
Th
e engineers were on their knees that summer, and everyone knew they were cursed.

While we were still in basic training someone high up decided the engineering company had suffered enough and that our company had not. Papers moved around in an office somewhere; a document was signed by a distracted officer, stamped, filed by a clerk, fates thus decided.
Th
e engineers were moved off the hill to a part of the security zone that was supposed to be safer.
Th
ere, near the border fence one night, an officer triggered a booby trap with his radioman, and both of them died.

29

W
ITH THE PASSION
of the new proselyte, Bruria approached drivers at intersections and shoved the Four Mothers petition through the windows of their cars. She pounced on unsuspecting visitors to the kibbutz library. She had a button that said
GET OUT OF LEBANON IN PEACE
, blue letters on a white background, and wore it everywhere. There are pictures from her daughter's wedding where you see it pinned to her dress. Things in Lebanon seemed to be getting worse. N
early one hundred soldiers died that year, 1997, in and around the security zone: the helicopter crash, a squad of commandos who walked into a Hezbollah ambush along the coast, five infantrymen trapped and incinerated when a shell lit a brush fire, a steady drip of others.

The women posted their manifestos on kibbutz bulletin boards and used their connections to get important people to meet them. Few took them seriously. The government ignored them, and public opinion was somnolent. It was common to hear said, by men of course, that the mothers were “speaking from the uterus.” Bruria tried hard not to say where she thought the men were speaking from.

In the fall of that same year something else happened on Bruria's kibbutz.

There was another member, Orna, who was the former manager of the communal factory and the incarnation of a giant piece of earth-moving machinery in the body of a wiry woman with a shock of blond hair. Orna had her doubts about the wisdom of the security zone, but she didn't like protests at intersections. She also had a son, Eyal, her youngest, commanding a tank northeast of the Pumpkin, at the outpost called Basil. Protesting seemed like a betrayal.

Orna was living at the time with what she calls a “paralyzing fear” about her son. People who know Orna, and nearly everyone in the Jordan Valley does, know she is not a woman easily paralyzed. Orna had a brother who died in the air force long before. She was kibbutz secretary in 1973 when the army notification teams showed up those five times at the gate. She knew what it looked like: a taxi with a few officers in dress uniforms come to knock on a door and enact the secret ritual at the country's heart. She called them the “green angels of death.” When her Eyal was born she named him for one of her friends, a kibbutz kid who died in the 1973 war.

Eyal was the same age as Alter, who died in the helicopter crash. They grew up together in the children's house, which meant they were more like siblings than friends. Eyal showed up late to Alter's funeral that February, armed and in uniform. He stood with the rest of the kibbutz and surprised his mother by bursting into tears. This was in the days of the debate about whether crying at funerals should be allowed, the real question being whether we're still strong enough to survive here. There were generals who said soldiers shouldn't cry, but it turned out not to be the kind of thing you can regulate.

Eyal believed in the mission in Lebanon. He thought the Four Mothers didn't know what they were talking about, which is what all of the soldiers thought at the time, if they thought about it at all. Orna and Bruria had known each other for decades, but Orna didn't sign her friend's petition.

Orna was in charge of gardening, and early one morning in September she was preparing one of the lawns for a kibbutz wedding. She had a Walkman clipped to her belt and listened to the radio through earphones as she worked. At 7 a.m. the announcer reported “heavy exchanges of fire” in Lebanon, which was the code. She kept working.

A few days before, Eyal had asked her to set up a meeting with the kibbutz secretary the next time he came home on leave. Members were debating in those days whether the kibbutz should be privatized, and though most of the young people were in favor, Eyal wanted the secretary to know he wasn't. He liked the kibbutz the way it was. Orna walked over to the secretary's office to make an appointment.

The receptionist had her back to the door. She didn't turn around, and Orna asked her what was wrong. Nothing, the receptionist said, in Orna's recollection, and she still didn't turn around. The kibbutz secretary opened the door to his office and saw Orna. He closed the door. She walked out and met her brother-in-law, whose son was at Beaufort Castle. The kibbutz had a half-dozen kids on the line. She asked him if there was news from the castle, and he said no.

Orna wasn't stupid. She knew something had happened to one of the kids, even if she didn't know what everyone else did—that it was hers, killed when a missile hit his tank at 6:25 a.m. She saw a taxi coming from the direction of the gate. In the back were figures in green. When the taxi passed the tennis court she finally understood what was about to happen to her and started running crazed across the pavement. She collapsed near the net. She doesn't remember much after that, only that when the green men reached her she was on the ground looking up, begging them to say he was just wounded.