Raquela (44 page)

He'd returned to his desk and put his head in his hands.

“I have
etzes
for everybody except myself,” he said. “I can't throw off my fears.”

He lifted his head to her. His face was distraught.

“Oh, God, I love you so, but I feel it so clearly: some morning you'll wake up and see, next to you on the pillow, the face of an old man. And—I don't blame you—you might run into another man's arms. And I would die.”

“It's no use, Arik. I can't deal with your fears.”

She moved toward the door. “The longer we go on, the more we'll hurt each other.”

In the warehouse, she felt again her desire for him and her frustration. Had she made the right decision? She felt an emptiness already.

She heard a voice snap: “Come on. Get moving. You nurses sure take your time.” A young noncom with two diagonal stripes on her right sleeve tried to speed the line along. She was small, with a round baby face and huge black eyes. Her dark hair was cut short and straight.

“Call me Miriam,” she said, bristling. “I'm the corporal in charge of your unit, and I can see I'm going to have a lot of trouble with you.”

The tough voice coming from the baby face brought giggles from the nurses.

“What's funny?” she demanded. “Come on. Stuff your gear into your duffel bags and follow me to your barracks. Get moving. On the double.”

The twenty-five nurses dragged their heavy khaki bags down one of the dirt paths that separated the rows of Nissen huts in the army compound.

Inside their barracks, Raquela and Naomi Samueloff, a friend from Bet Hakerem who had enlisted with her, selected two empty cots. They tossed their kits on the foot of the bed and sprawled out.

“I'm bushed,” Naomi said, and put her hands behind her head. She was strikingly handsome, with porcelain-blue eyes, ash-blond hair, and a finely carved face. Three years younger than Raquela, she had fled Hitler's Germany with her parents in 1939, studied nursing at Hadassah, and spent six months on Mount Scopus, after the convoy massacre, nursing patients too sick to be moved.

The barracks hummed with the voices of the nurses. They knew one another from Jerusalem, and were now busy catching up on news of their families and friends.

The corporal shouted, “
Sheket!
” Silence.

The nurses paid no attention.

“
Sheket
,” I said. “Now, all of you get right into your uniforms. This minute.”

“Where are we supposed to hang our clothes?” Raquela asked. She looked at the arched metal walls.

“Stick them in your duffel bags.”

“And what do we do with the duffel bag?”

“You roll that up every morning and put it at the head of your bed—for inspection.”

The nurses changed into uniform.

“Crazy. Absolutely crazy,” a surgical nurse complained. “Experienced nurses like us taking orders from that kid.”

“She looks like my twelve-year-old sister,” a nurse from Neurology griped. “I'd like to hit her across the mouth.”

“Get cracking,” Miriam commanded.

A tall pediatric nurse stalked up to the little corporal. “Who do you think you're talking to? We've been serving our country since before Israel became a state. What are you giving us this nonsense for?”

Miriam pulled herself up to her full five feet. She addressed the whole room: “You will all report in six minutes to the parade ground!”

On the parade ground the nurses were ordered into formation, the twenty-five from Hadassah and the fifty from other hospitals around the country.

The nurses were volunteers; lining up beside them were eighteen-year-old women who'd been drafted. Raquela looked at them as they marched uncertainly to their places.

It's a new Israel
, she thought,
a mosaic of fair-skinned, olive-skinned, black-skinned young women
.

“Look at these kids,” she whispered to Naomi. “I feel like ancient history. At twenty-five I'm probably the oldest rookie in the whole army.”

“
Sheket!
” Miriam commanded.

She walked through the three-deep lines of formation, pushing bodies into alignment. “Straighten your lines. Pull in your gut!”

Raquela stiffened her back and faced forward.

In front of the parade ground was a small wooden platform with three flags—the flag of Israel, the flag of the army, and the flag of C
HEN
. C
HEN
was an acronym for
Chail ha-Nashim
,—the Women's Army—and a play on the word “charm.”

A mature woman colonel, flanked on each side by a captain, marched down the parade ground, climbed the small platform, and saluted.

A lieutenant standing below the platform addressed her: “Company ready for inspection.”

The colonel and her two captains descended the platform; accompanied by the lieutenant, they moved through the ranks, inspecting the rigid lines.

Raquela recognized the colonel from Jerusalem; she had served in the ATS in Egypt during World War II. The colonel gave no sign that she recognized Raquela or any of the Jerusalem nurses. Her back straight, her face controlled, her inspection completed, she returned with her junior officers to the platform. “At ease!” the lieutenant blared out. Up and down the ranks the young recruits and the seventy-five nurses placed their hands behind their backs and waited.

The colonel's voice rang across the parade ground. “Welcome! You have just become part of C
HEN
. You are now soldiers in the Army of Israel. We know you will make us proud of you.”

Soon the brief speech was over. The colonel saluted smartly and left the parade ground.

Miriam corralled her unit of twenty-five nurses and marched them back to the warehouse to pick up sheets and blankets.

In the barracks, the young corporal shouted, “Attention! I'm going to show you nurses how to prepare an army cot for morning inspection.”

One of the nurses snickered, “Listen, kid, you're wasting time. We can make beds in our sleep.”

“You'll make beds our way.” The young woman turned red. “Now, watch me.” She demonstrated tightening the sheets under the army mattress. She took a coin and bounced it on the taut sheet. She glared at the nurses.

They watched her in frozen silence.

“Now, for the blanket. It'll take two of you to fold blankets the army way.” She handed one end of a blanket to a nurse and, with a complicated series of stretching and folding, produced a small square. She placed it at the head of a cot, picked up a duffel bag and set it on top of the folded blanket.

“Forget everything you've learned in your hospitals. This is the way
I
want the beds to look.”

“Are you for real? Are you running some kind of a kindergarten here?” one of the nurses grumbled.

The corporal shot back, “You've got seven minutes to make these cots. Then you will be outside in front of the barracks with your mess kits, ready for lunch.”

She turned on her heels and marched out.

One by one the nurses straggled out of the barracks, holding their aluminum kits. The noon sun beat down upon the rows of barracks and the dirt paths.

“Who needs lunch?” said the last nurse to emerge, mopping her forehead. “I'd like to flop down on my tight army sheet and go to sleep. I've been up since the crack of dawn. It's enough already.”

Miriam looked at her wristwatch. “You call this seven minutes? You're three minutes late!” She barked between clenched teeth, “All of you run around the parade ground. You will do it in seven minutes. Then you'll know when I say seven minutes, I mean seven minutes!”

The nurses paced themselves as they trotted around the parade ground. Finally, panting and exhausted, they entered the mess hall. Then, standing in line, they held out their mess kits. Young soldiers shoveled in mashed potatoes, peas, chicken floating in gravy, and a thick slice of rye bread. The nurses sat down at the two tables assigned to them. The eighteen-year-olds filled another area of the mess hall.

Miriam approached. “You'll find sinks behind this building. After each meal you wash your mess kits, and they'd better shine like new. Now you've got one hour to rest. At fourteen hundred hours, mess kits and beds will be inspected.”

At the stroke of two the young corporal returned to the barracks. She headed for Raquela's bed. “A potato sack has more shape,” she said, glaring at Raquela.

She began walking up and down the center aisle. “Okay. Looks as if you're learning. Outside now. Into formation.”

She marched them across the compound to a lecture hall. They sank down on the floor with the eighteen-year-old recruits.

A scholarly-looking woman in her mid-thirties, the three gold bars of a captain prominently displayed on her shoulders, addressed them. Her brown hair was parted in the middle, with broad streaks of gray on each side.

On the wall behind her hung a huge color map of Israel. She lifted a pointer from a table, turned to the map, and pointed to the states surrounding Israel. “Here is Egypt, on our west and south; on the east, Jordan; on the north, Lebanon and Syria. You see how close they are to us. These are the countries that declared war on us and were defeated. Now they're licking their wounds; how soon they will feel ready to attack again, I cannot say. All I can say is, we have to be prepared. If we want to survive, we have to be prepared for any attack.”

She stopped, letting her words sink in.

“Now, look at our borders.” Her pointer traced the narrow elongated contour of Israel. “We have 594 miles of border to be defended. And here, right in the center, we're just ten miles across. We've got the smallest waistline in the world. Like an hourglass figure.” A few recruits laughed. She acknowledged the laughter and went on. “It's our most heavily populated area. Within a few hours, an invading army could slice us in half. Like this.” She ripped her pointer across the center of the map.

The nurses and recruits followed her pointer, absorbing her words.

“If we could have a regular standing army—like most countries—we'd be in good shape. But we can't afford it. That's why we have universal conscription. That's why every boy and girl of eighteen is drafted. That's why you're here.”

Raquela looked again at the mosaic of young women emerging from adolescence and innocence to face the brutal reality of survival.

The nurses, she thought, were older, more mature; many had been in the War of Independence. They had lived with violence and the ravages of war. She had stopped listening for a few minutes. Now she forced her mind back to the captain who was looking directly at the eighteen-year-olds.

“You recruits will begin your eighteen-month tour of duty with three months' basic training. Then you'll be assigned according to your ability. Some of you will go into communications, as radio and wireless operators. Some into meteorology, some to work at radar stations. You can pack parachutes or you can become paratroopers. You can be secretaries and clerks in military installations. Some of you will teach newcomers who have not yet learned to speak Hebrew. And some will make officer-candidate school.”

She paused. “Now we have a special group among us.” She looked down at the seventy-five nurses sitting together.

“You nurses will do three weeks of basic training. You'll become second lieutenants and begin work in the military hospitals immediately. You're probably wondering why you need any kind of basic training, since you're already nurses.”

They nodded vigorously.

“It's to give you even greater stamina, endurance, and discipline.” She smiled at them. “You'll be hearing these words a lot during the next weeks. It's to teach you the
army way
.”

She lay her pointer on a table.

“We don't expect women to serve in the front lines—if war comes. But even in peace, every soldier must learn how to use a gun. Tomorrow you'll be issued rifles.”

They returned to the barracks, and by the end of the first day they collapsed in silence in their beds.

At five-thirty the next morning the sound of reveille over the loudspeaker shattered the dawn silence of the campground.

The nurses crawled out of bed, dressed, and marched outside. Miriam was waiting. “Setting-up exercises,” she shouted.

They stretched, touched their toes, did deep knee bends. They breakfasted at six, and at seven stood at attention for bed inspection. At seven-thirty they assembled on the parade ground for inspection of their uniforms.

A top sergeant reviewed the nurses and recruits.

“You there.” She singled out Raquela's friend, Naomi. “Where's your beret?”

Naomi lowered her blue eyes. “Sorry. I forgot it in my bunk.”

“Forgot it! You do five laps around the parade ground.”

Embarrassed, Naomi circled the field, her head down. The morning was still cool.

The sergeant counted off the laps. “Now get your beret, and make sure your hair is properly tucked in.”

At eight classes began. At ten Miriam issued the rifles.

In the next days Raquela and Naomi, accustomed to shooting needles into arms and buttocks, learned to shoot rifles into cardboard figures.

A week passed. At daybreak Miriam marched her nurses, carrying their packs and rifles, out of the campground. Behind them came a unit of eighteen-year-olds led by their noncom.

All morning they hiked across the fields surrounding Tel Nof. They crawled on their stomachs. Their feet blistered. Their joints creaked. Their muscles cramped. Insect bites inflamed their faces and bare legs.

At noon Miriam called a halt.

“Twenty minutes to eat, rest, and relieve yourselves,” she commanded. “Find your own bush.”

Raquela and Naomi dropped their heavy packs and rifles.

The twenty minutes evaporated; the nurses and recruits gulped their food and took long drafts of water from their canteens.