Pursuit (42 page)

“No, really,” Herzl said, confused by the discussion. “I never even—” He stopped, his face flaming with embarrassment, forcibly raising his eyes from the now partially visible cleavage.

Rifkah Zimmerman felt a wave of heat suffuse her body. She knew now that she was on a path that could end only in bed, or in a rejection that would shatter her. Should the boy tell his parents—! She forced the thought away. She could not stop now.

“No girl friend?” Her voice sounded odd, even to herself, but the words almost formed themselves. “And what haven't you ever? Don't tell me you've never seen a woman without her clothes? A naked woman?”

Herzl stared at her, speechless. He couldn't believe what was happening. Or was it happening? Maybe she was merely being curious, making a friendly query, as an aunt might make. Or, rather, an uncle. He wet his lips.

“No, ma'am …” His voice was low and hoarse.

“Would you like to?” Rifkah's voice had also dropped, as if they were two conspirators deciding on a terrible but needful act.

Herzl could only nod, his throat dry. Rifkah opened her dressing gown and then watched his face anxiously, as if fearing his rejection. Herzl's eyes were wide, his face pale. She dropped the gown entirely, watching him.

“Well? Am I ugly? Say something.”

“No … No … You're beautiful …”

“Good. Come.” She felt the flush of success and took his hand, pressing it to her breast, leading him toward the bedroom. “Come …”

Their affair lasted two years.

Once, one evening when they had finished making love, Herzl pulled Rifkah to him tightly.

“I love you …”

For the first time Rifkah's voice was sharp with him.

“Never say that! When you fall in love, you'll know it. Don't make a mistake about that. You're just a boy; I'm an old woman. We give each other pleasure; that's enough.”

And when, after those two years, Rifkah Zimmerman remarried and moved to Haifa, Herzl felt betrayed. He had not even known she was seeing anyone else. But after a short time the ache went and he found himself realizing how much he owed her. She had taken him through some very difficult growing-up years, and while he knew now he had never loved her, he also knew he would always feel a profound sense of gratitude to her for all she had done for him. He wondered how he would feel if he ever saw her again, but he never did.

Colonel Benjamin Grossman's stature in the Israeli Defense Forces grew as time went on and as his usefulness in assignments other than fighting became more and more evident. Old Shmuel Ginzberg was still alive but he was a very old man now, who lived with a daughter on a kibbutz in the Galilee, and who was no longer active in any capacity. In his place, Colonel Grossman was often called upon to travel to foreign countries, to make purchases of everything from armaments—which were still needed despite the growing Israeli industry—to supplies of every nature. His technical skills came in handy, as well as what Morris Wolf claimed was his natural Jewish ability to bargain, despite Grossman's evident antireligious attitude. And on several occasions of his trips abroad, Colonel Grossman took his son along, for he felt the boy needed broadening before facing the demands and sacrifices almost built in to the study for a medical career. So Herzl grew up a well-rounded boy in a happy home with a happy future ahead of him—which was exactly as Benjamin Grossman had planned it.

It was very shortly after the 1967 war that Brigadier General Benjamin Grossman was one day asked, rather formally to his surprise, if he might drop into the office of Chief of Security Max Brodsky. The request almost amounted to a demand, and it was therefore with a bit of surprise that he presented himself in the outer office and was told by an extremely efficient-looking secretary that he was expected and could go right in.

Max was sitting behind his huge desk, which, as usual, was entirely clear of papers and supported only two telephones and a note pad. He smiled at Ben and waved him to a chair. Ben took the one directly across the desk from Brodsky, and frowned.

“You wanted to see me, Max?”

Brodsky swung his swivel chair to stare from the window a moment, and then swung back. He tented his fingers and stared at Grossman across them, thoughtfully.

“Ben,” he said slowly, “you spent a lot of time at Ein Tsofar …”

“Too much,” Grossman said, wondering at the statement. “Nearly a year, in fact. Why?”

“Your shop, where you worked, was in a cave, as was the hospital. And there were other caves, as well, where arms were stored, and there were also the old cisterns, I believe, going back to biblical days …”

“That's right. Why?”

“What did you think of the caves?”

“In what way?”

“Were you ever afraid the roof might collapse and bury you?”

“Those caves?” Grossman shook his head, becoming more and more puzzled by the direction the conversation was taking. “As you said, they were there from biblical times without falling in; they'll be there forever. They're solid as rock. Why?”

“All of them solid?”

“All of them.” Grossman leaned across the desk. “Now tell me why the questions.”

“I know you're not a geologist,” Brodsky said, totally disregarding Ben's request, “but you are a fine engineer. I don't want to bring in any geologists on this; in fact, I don't want to bring in anyone I don't definitely need. Let me ask you this. If we were to take all of the caves, plus the old cistern excavations, and make one big room out of them or out of some of them, by cutting away the walls, would the mountain simply collapse and fill them in?”

Grossman leaned back, considering the question on its merits.

“I don't believe so, not if you took proper precautions. You would have to shore up the present cave roofs before you started to cut away the walls and eventually, of course, you might want to concrete the entire roof area, but it could be done. Why?”

“How big a room could be built inside that mountain?”

Grossman shrugged. “As big as you want, I suppose. Acres, if you wanted. I understand they have bomb shelters in the United States built under mountains in the west, there, the size of villages. Why? What are you thinking of putting there? Not a bomb shelter, I'm sure, a hundred miles away from people.”

Brodsky swiveled his chair and stared from the window a moment before swiveling back.

“I suppose you'll have to know …”

Grossman frowned. “You suppose?”

Brodsky laughed. “I've been in security too long, I guess. I mean, of course you must know. I'll need your help. We have a big job to do.”

The war of 1967 also had a profound effect on Herzl Grossman. When the war was over and Herzl emerged from it unscathed at the age of eighteen, he strongly suspected that surgery was not the profession he would have chosen without his father's influence. As an infantryman in the attacks on the Old City of Jerusalem, and at Ramallah, Nablus, and later the storming of the Golan Heights by way of Tel Azaziyat at the northernmost end of the Syrian fortifications, he had seen enough blood in that short week to last him a lifetime. He recognized that there would undoubtedly be other wars in the future in which he would be called upon to serve, and he also knew there would be bloodshed in those. But that was blood that could not be avoided, while the blood of the operating room could be. It was a weak argument and he recognized it as such, and so he dutifully entered the university in the fall of that year, prepared to continue his pre-medical studies at least until he found some other profession more to his liking.

Three additional years of university did not make him more amenable to the ideas of spending his life either cutting someone open or sewing them back together again. They were years that formed a sort of hiatus in his life, years passed through in a state of inertia rather than of progress, pointless years. He spent only as much time with books as was necessary to pass his subjects; otherwise he often found himself restlessly walking the streets or sitting on the beach staring out to sea, searching for he knew not what. At times he would sit with his friends at one of the sidewalk cafes on Ben Yehuda Street, halfheartedly arguing with his more impassioned companions such youthful subjects as sex, or politics, or religion—for nowhere is religion argued more vehemently than in the all-Jewish country of Israel. Girl friends he had none; he felt he wanted to settle down to a meaning, a significance in life before encumbering himself with girls. On occasion he would visit one of the houses at the upper end of Hayarkon Street, but he always came away feeling cheated by the falseness of their affection as compared to the warmth and passion of Rifkah.

As the years passed Herzl began to feel a sense of panic, as if he were being drawn into medicine as a future against his will. But he needed an anchor to hold him from being swept into the operating room with its sutures and its scalpels and its blood and death, and in the middle of his final year of pre-medical studies, he found it.

One evening a friend of his, studying Communication at the university, invited him to a club the friend had recently joined, a film club, and in the course of the three hours spent at the meeting, Herzl Grossman felt as if a curtain had been raised before his eyes, revealing his future so clearly as to make him wonder why he had not found the miracle answer before.

He sat on the floor with the others who could not find seats, and watched a jumpy, amateurishly made picture, filmed with a handheld camera in black and white, covering a trip the cameraman had made to the Dead Sea caves, and the uncovering of some of the early discoveries of the archaeologists exploring there. The cameraman, admittedly a beginner but a definite enthusiast, kept up a running commentary—for the film, of course, had no sound—describing what was being done, how he and another member of the club had climbed together with the archaeologists to the caves high in the cliffs, how they had managed lights from battery packs or used light reflected from tilted stainless-steel mirrors for some of their interior shots of the caves. He apologized for much of the camerawork, explaining that he had a very limited collection of lenses, and pointed out certain shots he would have improved had he owned better equipment.

When the showing was over and tea and cake served, Herzl listened enthralled as the members criticized the picture, not in any fashion meant to denigrate, but rather with an eye to learning themselves, to fathom the means of improvement. The evening opened an entire new vista for Herzl, and as he walked home that night he pictured the endless things that could be brought to the screen through the magic of the camera. Until that night he had gone to the cinema as most of his friends did, to enjoy whatever was unfolded on the screen for his entertainment, without the slightest thought as to the techniques and combined efforts behind the finished product.

The following week the film club was privileged to have for showing a professionally produced documentary, produced by a small but active company for the Israeli Government's Department of Highways. The film dealt with the construction of the first all-weather road from Ein Bokek at the juncture of the Arad Road and the Dead Sea, down through the Negev Desert to Eilat on the Red Sea Gulf. The film was in color and accompanied by proper sound, and Herzl lost himself in it. It was an area of the country he knew; with his father he had returned several times to Ein Tsofar to see where he was born, and to listen again to the tales of those tense days. Several times on these trips they had taken their jeep down into the desert south of Sdom, once as far as Ein Yahav, nearly halfway to the gulf, bouncing along the barely defined trails, noting the signs that indicated there were mines still scattered about the inhospitable terrain, seeing the depth markers for the water that could suddenly flood, even in that arid region, from a cloudburst over the sharp wadis.

He found himself studying the film from a completely different angle than he had ever watched a film before, trying to picture where the cameraman had set up his equipment for various shots, how they must have waited for a certain position of the sun—for it certainly wasn't luck—to get the reflection just right off the steep cliffs behind the mounds of potash at the Dead Sea Works, or how they arranged the sharp shadows of the broken country surrounding Hatzeva Ir Ovot. As he walked home that night, rerunning the film through his mind, he knew how very little he knew, and how very, very much he would have to learn.

But the university, he was convinced, was not the place to learn. As one couldn't study war properly at the university despite the training one received in the reserves, so one couldn't study film-making there despite the courses taught. During the week he had gone over the curriculum of the communications courses and the little they had to teach in film techniques and the related subjects was certainly not enough to justify the time. He had wasted over three years already; he could not afford to waste more. The field was where one learned, as it was in war. With experience one learned, not with theory. So he went out and got a job.

But he wondered how his father would react.

At the moment his father was in bed, reading a newspaper—he had little time during the day. At his side, Deborah was knitting—she also had little time during the day. She put aside her knitting and turned to him.

“Ben—”

“Yes?”

“I'd like to talk to you.”

“Of course.” Grossman put down the newspaper he wasn't particularly interested in reading in the first place, since it represented the political opposition, and looked at Deborah with a smile. Married twenty-two years and she still excited him. “What is it?”

“It's about Herzl.”

“What about him?”

“He's been talking to me lately. He wants to leave the university—”

Grossman frowned. “A girl?”

“No, no. He doesn't want to be a doctor. He wants to make movies—”