The Glory (27 page)

“That sounds right.”

“No. Nobody’s irreplaceable.”

He got up and sat beside her on the wrought-iron glider. They swung gently together. “It’s such a strange kind of happiness,”
Emily said, her face pink with sunset glow.

“What is?”

“Oh, this surge of well-being, of rejoicing in existence, just because somebody’s there with you.”

“It’s called love,” said Barak.

She turned brilliant eyes at him. “Is that it? How dense of me.”

T
he mood was glum in the Barak household at dinner. Galia sulked, eyes on her plate, mouth pulled down. “I can’t stand liver,”
she said, then ate a lot of it. Ruti too was quiet. Usually vivacious, though still the ugly duckling at ten, she was chilled
by her sister’s ill humor. The girls cleared away the meal and disappeared into their rooms. Nakhama settled into an armchair,
put on black-rimmed glasses, and read a Hebrew newspaper. Barak worked on industrial reports at a desk. The atmosphere seemed
to him as heavy as in a buttoned-up tank. He laid aside an article on missile electronics. “Nakhama, what is it?”

She took off her glasses and beckoned him into their bedroom, where she pulled open a drawer. “I found this in Galia’s room.”
It was an open pack of Kools.

Well, thought Barak, standard crisis, she’s fifteen. “I’ll speak to her. Or will you?” Nakhama did the feminine talking-to’s,
but this might call for fatherly gruffness.

“I’m not finished. Last week, when you were at Fort Knox, she went to the movies with that Freddie from her new school. Not
even Jewish. With the long greasy hair in back, and the pimples. I woke up and went to the kitchen for a drink, and there
they were on the parlor sofa, on top of each other.”

After an embarrassed pause, Barak inquired, “Who was on top of whom?”

“What kind of question is
that
?” A ragged-nerved snap. “Does it matter? All right, she was on top.”

“So this Freddie wasn’t wholly to blame.”

“Zev, you’re being an animal. That school is full of degenerates. I’m not going on with this. The girls have learned English.
They’ve learned altogether too much, to all the devils. God knows what else Galia has picked up in that school with no nerds!
Ruti so far is fine. They have to go home, both of them.”

“The Ramatkhal wants me here one more year.”

“Then I’ll take them home. Enough America for my girls! If you have to stay here, I don’t.”

“Nakhama, there are boys in Israel, and now and then they lie on top of the girls. Also the other way around.”

Nakhama walked out of the bedroom. He gave her a few minutes to cool off, then went to the parlor. She was reading her paper
again. “So, how’s Emily Cunningham?” she said in a wholly pleasant tone.

He was startled into a witless echo. “Emily Cunningham? You mean Mrs. Halliday? Why?”

“Oh, yes, Mrs. Halliday. I visited Miriam Kress in the Georgetown Hospital, and I saw you both getting into your car. I waved,
but you didn’t wave back.”

“I didn’t see you, Nakhama. Her father’s in that hospital, recovering from a bad heart attack. We happened to meet when I
visited him.”

“Ah.”

“She’s pregnant.”

“Ah. That’s nice.”

“I gave her a lift to her father’s house, where her kids were staying.”

Nakhama nodded, and resumed reading. Heavy silence. When Barak could no longer stand it, he said, “Nakhama, I haven’t seen
Mrs. Halliday for months, or maybe a year, I don’t even remember.”

“Who asked you?” Nakhama removed her glasses and looked him straight in the face. “Zev, I’m not American, I’m not a shiksa,
and my education is very limited. I’m not trying to make trouble. I just know that when I take the girls home, one way or
another you won’t be unbearably lonesome.”

Within the week Nakhama and the girls were gone.

E
mily Halliday had a boy, to the great rejoicing of her father and the marked approval of her husband. General Halliday was
appointed commander of an air base in Florida, his wife and children went with him, and the Queenie-Wolf correspondence sporadically
resumed. Barak talked now and then by telephone with Nakhama and the girls. He managed brief returns to Israel, always finding
the people more prosperous, construction more hectic, automobile traffic more frightening, and tourism still on the rise.
He came there with gladness and departed with an ache, trying each time for a transfer back home, but in the zigzags of internal
army politics his chance at a sector command kept receding. When Dado Elazar became Ramatkhal he all but despaired; not that
Dado had anything against him, but rather that he had been too long out of sight to ride the wave of new appointments.

Anwar Sadat came on as a weak colorless successor to the fire-eating Nasser, and a relaxed frame of mind began to prevail
at the embassy. Announcing that 1971 would be “the year of decision,” when Egypt would regain its honor and the Sinai by force
of arms, the new fellow let the year go by with nothing happening. The superpowers kept pushing a wobbly UN peace initiative
called the Jarring Mission, trying to get Israel to offer greater and greater slices of the Sinai in a peace settlement, and
to persuade Egypt to talk to the Jews on any terms whatever; while quietly the Nixon administration let the Israelis know
that keeping the Canal closed, thus denying the Russians a short sea route to Vietnam, was not the worst possible thing that
could be happening in the Middle East.

Early in 1972 Barak began receiving increasingly urgent letters from the army engineering corps, asking for U.S. bids to supply
a huge number of steel cylinders six feet in diameter and eighty feet long, with no hint of what they were for. The steel
firms naturally wanted to know the purpose of these giant objects, advising Barak that they would have to be custom-made at
high cost, and that even shipping would be a problem, but to his inquiries the army engineers remained mum. So the whole business
was hanging fire, when a letter from Don Kishote shed some light.

SOUTHERN COMMAND

Chief of Staff

Top Secret

10 July 1972
By Pouch

Dear Zev:

Arik is after me about “the cylinders.” They’re not my job, but you know Arik. The bull charges and everyone runs for the
fence.

I’m not surprised that Bethlehem Steel can’t figure out the purpose, nor that the engineers won’t tell you, but here goes.
You know about our bridging problem.
Carry the battle to the enemy’s territory
is doctrine, so to win any war Egypt starts we must cross the Canal. The bridging equipment we’ve got is from European junkyards.
Trying to cross on those French amphibious rafts (crocodiles, we call them) or the British pontoons would be suicidal. As
you’ve found out, the Americans won’t sell us mobile bridges because they’re not “defensive.” We can forget the Europeans,
Arab oil has them crawling.

Well, the cylinders are rollers for a bridge more than 600 feet long that will be towed to the Canal and pushed across by
tanks,
hence, no exposure of engineers to gunfire. Once in the water, the rollers become giant
pontoons
. That’s the trick. Built in sections, it will be flexible enough to traverse the hills and dunes of Sinai. I recently watched
a miniature prototype perform for the high brass on a sand table. Weird to see it crawling along on the level, humping itself
over the obstacles, and slithering down into the mock-up Canal! The budget for the roller bridges means steep cuts in other
hardware, and some muttering goes on in high places about “Tallik’s monstrosity.” But General Tal’s number two to Dado, so
several of these behemoths will be built. So please obtain a decent bid on those rollers and get Arik off my back. Producing
them in Israel would strain our steelmaking capacity, though it’s feasible. A few have been made here for a full-scale prototype
of one section.

Arik assumes we’ll have a war with Egypt as soon as Sadat is ready to go, and we’ve been extending the network of military
roads in Sinai for a rapid war of movement. We keep hardening up the Bar-Lev Line too, though he questions the whole concept.
He makes enemies the way a steamboat makes waves. I know how you feel about him, but the soldiers will follow him anywhere.
That’s something. His energy is awesome, and if war comes I’ll not be sorry that he’s OC Southern Command.

Yours,

Yossi

Barak was still working on the procurement of the cylinders and not getting far, when at last he was relieved of the extended
attaché duty and ordered back to Israel for reassignment. At once he called his brother Michael in Haifa to say that he would
be returning in time for his wedding to Shayna Matisdorf. He notified Nakhama, who sounded reasonably joyful, and he took
bitter pleasure in packing up and getting out of the small furnished apartment off Wisconsin Avenue in which he had spent
too much lonely and unrewarding time after his family’s departure. Last-minute official duties delayed his detachment, forcing
him to miss Michael’s wedding, after all; a bleak end to a bleak tenure.

The morning of his departure was a whirl of trivia — landlord, bank, dentist, and so on. When he stopped his taxi at the embassy
en route to the airport to make his farewells, Ambassador Rabin jolted him with a few slow dry words. “So, what do you think
of Sadat now?”

“Sadat? What about Sadat? What’s happened, Ambassador?”

“You haven’t heard?” Rabin squinted at him, shook his head, and a characteristic quick half-smile came and went. “Well, you’re
anxious to get home. It’s the big news this morning. He’s expelling the Russians, giving them a week to leave Egypt — all
seventeen thousand of them — and he’s nationalizing the Soviet installations and military equipment.”

After a dumbfounded silence Barak said, “What do you make of it, sir?”

“I don’t know.”

From the ambassador down, Barak gathered as he said goodbye to the embassy staff, nobody knew quite what to make of this grand
stroke, this international thunderclap, launched by a man rated low if not laughed at by experienced diplomats, Israeli and
otherwise. The general sense was that the move was very good news, reducing the threat of war, for surely the Egyptians could
not venture into battle against Israel without close Soviet guidance and support. Perhaps because of his chronic gloom at
being marooned in Washington, Barak’s first guess was that it could be an elaborate charade played by both Sadat and the Soviets,
to lull Israel into exactly the sense of relief prevailing in the embassy. In any case it was not necessarily good news.

Daphna was puzzled by the invitation from Professor Berkowitz and Shayna Matisdorf to their wedding, but she knew her parents
had been asked, so perhaps she was being included out of courtesy, or possibly Noah had seen to it, and was hoping to patch
things up with her there. So she had accepted; but on the day, after a glance into her tiny closet, she decided to skip it.
Three dresses, one tackier than the next. She and her roommate Donna, both being from military families and both, after their
compulsory army service, in a state of anarchic revolt, wore only jeans day and night, preferably American jeans, preferably
from San Francisco. Putting on a dress for a stupid wedding in Haifa was just too much. Besides, she had something better
to do today.

A few nights ago, at a party of artists and writers at the Jericho Café, the haunt of Tel Aviv’s bohemia, she had intrigued
the famous ceramicist Shimon Shimon with bright questions about his art, and he had invited her to visit his studio. Since
then she had been reading everything about ceramics she could find. Maybe that was a way to go, for the ballet dancing had
long ago proved a dead end. Apparently she was too
zaftig
for ballet. She would have to starve down to stringiness, she had been told, and start in classes with twelve-year-olds and
younger. Daphna had tried the starving, and the classes, too. But she loved to eat, and loathed the giggles of the bony little
girls at the way her bosom bounced. So much for ballet. Now she was writing pieces for tourist handout magazines, which at
least paid something. But ceramics seemed so exciting, molding works of art worth money out of muck! So she scrawled a note:

Dear Dov — Sorry, I just can’t face it. Shimon Shimon is showing me his studio this morning, and I may actually make a start
at ceramics! He charges a fortune to teach, he’s the best, but he said never mind money, let’s find out first if you have
talent. Nobody will miss me at that wedding. If they do say I dropped dead from boredom at the thought of it. Daff.

She crayoned a heavy red
DOV
on the envelope — he was supposed to pick her up and take her there — and jammed the disingenuous scribble into the crack
of the door as she left. Daphna knew that two Berkowitz relatives would miss her badly, Noah and Dzecki, and she was just
as glad not to be caught between them. She was especially sore at Noah, since their blowup at the Jericho Café over the Independence
Day military parade.

It had been her mistake, perhaps, to take him after the parade to the night spot where her crowd hung out, drinking Gold Star
beer and eating olives at a big wooden table. Donna had introduced her long since to these exciting people: long-haired bearded
fellows, girls in jeans with crazy bouffant hairdos or unkempt heads, all-night smokers, talkers, and beer-sippers. They were
fun,
different, hip. Shouting over the rock group belting out American, Hebrew, European, and South American songs, they discussed
writers like Camus, Sartre, Brecht, and Faulkner, they dissected the new Hebrew novels, films, and plays, they gossipped about
painters and actors, they made acid jokes about Israeli politicians, and they were passionate on all sides of the Arab question.

Naturally, watching the evening news on the café’s TV, they had made sarcastic cracks about the military parade. Noah had
not been amused, countering with banalities about the danger Israel still was in despite the cease-fire. A real bore! He had
even spouted some serious Zionism, a theme more old-hat, ridiculous, and taboo in this company than God. The scene had turned
ugly when General Motta Gur appeared on the TV, and Yoram Sarak, the star of the Jericho Café crowd, exclaimed, “Ah, the Angel
of Death!” A career cynic at thirty, with a lean choleric look, overgrown hair, and dark glasses to match, Sarak wrote an
acerb column in a rowdy leftist weekly.