The Glory (52 page)

Pasternak is startled by a woman’s voice cutting through all the guttural army Hebrew: “Nu, Sam, no opinion?”

“Madame Prime Minister, I’m with Yigal Allon. Attack in the south.”

“Why?”

“Clausewitz principle,
‘Strike for the heart.’
If you knock out your strongest enemy, you win the war.”

Dado speaks up briskly. “Sam, we’ve all studied Clausewitz. That rule is modified in our case by geography, time, and the
position of the forces. In the north we can act tomorrow at dawn. It’ll take us four or five days just to move our forces
south. And suppose meantime that the UN votes a cease-fire, on lines that seal the enemy’s surprise success?” He turns to
Golda. “Madame Prime Minister, I say again — and I can’t emphasize it enough —
at least two Egyptian armored divisions are still west of the Canal, where I can’t get at them. Nor can the air force, because
of the missiles
. A premature crossing against such power is a reckless gamble —”

“Sooner or later, Dado, you’ll have to fight them,” says Allon, “to end the war —”

“I know that. But the time may come when —”

It is at that moment that a red telephone rings at Golda’s elbow. Sudden ominous silence, for only emergency news can break
into this meeting. Golda takes the call and listens poker-faced for long minutes, with now and then a gruff “Ken,” and finally,
“B’seder, Simcha.” She hangs up. “Gentlemen, Brezhnev has telephoned President Nixon, to propose an immediate joint cease-fire
resolution in the Security Council.”

Grim prolonged stillness, grave faces turning to each other; then the strategy debate starts up again with added urgency and
heat. Pasternak is shaken. Clausewitz is all very fine, but Dado is right, unless Israel hits out at once, this cease-fire
will clamp her in defeat.

“Enough, gentlemen.” Golda raises her hand and speaks heavy slow words. “If I had the option to strike north or south tomorrow,
it would still be a difficult choice. Now I have no choice. Henry Kissinger has told me, over and over,
‘You have to start winning on the battlefield.’
Sound advice. He has neglected to mention how. He leaves those details to me.”

A mutter of bitter amusement around the table.

“So it must be the Syrians, gentlemen. If we have a success and hold territory beyond the Purple Line at the cease-fire, the
outcome at least will be unbalanced. The Egyptians lodged in Sinai, but our forces deep in Syria and heading for Damascus.
That’s already a negotiation.”

E
arlier on this same fifth day of the war, Yael Nitzan sets out to fly home. Like most people, she thought when it started
that the Arabs were committing suicide, but day by day she has become more and more concerned, and her Leavis involvements
have seemed to matter less and less. So after an all-night session on paperwork with her secretary she blearily boards a plane
to New York, masks her eyes, and falls fast asleep in her first-class seat well before takeoff. When she awakens the plane
is thrumming along high above sunlit clouds, and in the seat beside her a man is reading a book in Arabic. But except for
a few words she recognizes, this is like no Arabic she has ever read or heard spoken, though she can read a newspaper or magazine
and converse in a simple fashion.

He is a strange man with strange mannerisms, probably in his mid-fifties, with curly black hair streaked gray, and a long
dark Spanish sort of face. He is pleasantly scented or pomaded. His very wrinkled black suit is of fine material, and the
gray pullover under the jacket looks like cashmere. As he reads he pencils notes, not on the margins of the pages, which have
the marbled edges of an old library volume, but in a pocket notebook, pushing his glasses up on his forehead, and holding
notebook and pencil nearly to his nose.

Boredom plus curiosity make her say at last, “I beg your pardon, are you an Arab?”

He peers at her. “Do you know Yiddish?”

Taken aback, she says, “A little. Why?”

“Very old joke. In the New York subway a black man sits reading a Yiddish newspaper. Man beside him can’t resist. ‘Pardon
me, sir,’ he asks, ‘are you Jewish?’ The black replies,
‘Nor doss felt mir oiss
[That’s all I need].’”

“Ha! I deserve that for disturbing you.”

“You read Arabic?”

“Not
that
Arabic. It’s Chinese to me.”

“Ah well.” He closes the volume. “It would be to many Arabs. And are you an Israeli going home because of the war?”

“Just so. And you?”

“I live in New York. A few days ago I lectured on ‘Vico and Heroic Islam’ at a university to a small comatose audience. Tonight
I repeat it in a very grand Manhattan temple. Now that this war is on, I shall be hooted at and possibly stoned by anxious
New York Jews. That is, if anybody comes.” He speaks in rapid bursts of words, punctuated by breaths like gasps. “Though if
one pays attention, what I have to say isn’t too bad from the Jewish viewpoint. I gave a similar talk at Tel Aviv University
last summer. It was well received.” The flight attendants are approaching with the bar cart. “Join me in a glass of sherry.”

“I’d better not. I’ve interrupted your work.”

“Nonsense, my eyes are tired, do drink with me.” The attendant pours for them. “Tell me about yourself and your family.”

“My husband is an army general. I have a business in Los Angeles. We have two children. My name is Yael Nitzan.”

“Nitzan?” He shifts in his seat to stare. “Is your husband the one they call Don Quixote?”

“You know him?”

“He was at my lecture in Tel Aviv. Forced his way to me afterward, captured me and took me to eat Yemenite food in Jaffa and
explain my lecture.”

“That’s my husband.”

“Well, here’s to Don Quixote. May he emerge safe and victorious from this wretched war.”

“Amen.” She drinks. He gives her a smudged card.

DR. MAX ROWEH

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

“Roweh? Didn’t a book of yours just get a rave in the
Los Angeles Times?
In fact, I bought it.”

“Vico and Descartes: The Fork in the Road,”
he says. “You truly bought a copy? How lovely of you. Heavy going, isn’t it?”

She is embarrassed. Yael follows the book reviews, sniffing for novels that may make movies. On impulse now and then she buys
highly praised nonfiction to improve her mind, which however resists improvement as a mackintosh resists rain. “Frankly, I’d
never heard of Vico. I didn’t reach the fork. Maybe I will.”

He smiles. “A-plus for honesty. That first chapter is a sinker. Vico is not easy. This is dreadful sherry. Have you spoken
to your husband since the war began? Inevitable, the war, but good may yet come of it.” She is about to ask him to explain,
but in his voluble way he runs on. “Vico’s theory of history has been badly vulgarized — in the unscholarly vogue he’s been
having lately — to a cyclical view of civilizations, which would not be original with him, it’s in Aristotle. James Joyce
made Vico modish after he’d been neglected for centuries, by supposedly basing
Finnegans Wake
on his theories. So an academic cottage industry is springing up, and small journals are breaking out in a Vico rash. Look,
wouldn’t you rather have a nap, or read your
Vogue
?”

“What I’d like to do is hear your lecture. I have to stop in New York overnight.”

“Bless me!” He looks astounded and delighted. “Would you really? How brave. Well, nothing easier! My car is meeting me. We’ll
just drop off my bags at my flat and take you on to the lecture. Afterward, where are you staying?”

“Airport Hilton.”

“You’ll be driven there. In fact” — he glances at his watch — “we might still have a decent glass of sherry in my flat before
the lecture. Small courtesy to the wife of a true hero. I’ve heard much about your Don Quixote.”

“Where is your flat?”

“River House. Midtown, east side.”

“I know where River House is.” Yael tries not to sound bowled over. “Will your wife be there?”

“Alas, I’m a widower. I lost her four years ago to cancer.”

“I’m very sorry.”

“Thank you. She was a great lady, enormously active in good causes, Israeli and otherwise. I’ve had to carry on much of her
work in endowments and foundations, and I’m quite unsuited to such things. But one must be true to her memory, and her family
expects it.”

“She wasn’t an Israeli, was she?”

“Oh, no, no. On her mother’s side, she was a Rothschild, British branch.” Roweh glances sidewise at her. “The impecunious
cousins. It’s decided then? You’ll come to my lecture.”

“I will indeed, and thank you.”

“Splendid.” He opens his book.

“Now, what is that you’re reading?”

“Ibn Khaldun.”

“Should I have heard of him?”

“No. Academic subject. He’s the Arab Thucydides, a great historian, fourteenth century. Not quite as great as Toynbee says,
but then, Toynbec mainly cribs from Khaldun. I’ve come to Arab thought late, but it’s very important.”

Yael is in far over her head, she thinks, as Roweh immerses himself again in Ibn Khaldun. But sherry in River House with the
widower of a Rothschild of sorts ought to be nice, though beyond it glooms a lecture about Vico. She’ll have plenty to tell
Sam Pasternak when they meet in Paris.

And indeed the River House apartment stuns her: opulent furnishings, fairyland night view of downtown Manhattan and the bridges,
walnut-walled library massed with books floor to ceiling, and on the living room walls, among other paintings, a Degas dancer
and a Corot river scene. A fussy Irish cook-maid serves finger sandwiches of smoked salmon with the sherry. Yael is used to
Sheva Leavis’s moneyed luxury, but Max Roweh is a highly novel meld of intellect, wealth, and class; yet after all just an
untidy middle-aged scholar, with his mind off on the moon. The whole encounter is dreamlike. She likes him.

A peculiar scholar though, taking her in his own chauffeur-driven Lincoln to hear him lecture! His rapid-fire talk traces
stages in the “civilization of Islam” according to Vico’s scheme of history, and what she can understand, before she dozes
off, is all new to her. Roweh appears to admire greatly Mohammed and the Koran, and to see virtues in Islam which have never
crossed her mind. His lecture style is much like his talk in the airplane, rat-tat-tat sprays of words with glints of irony
and humor; hard to follow and much too much for the postprandial audience in the majestic Reform temple. She is not the first
one to fall asleep. As they drive away from the temple he explains that he has been paid a large honorarium, which will go
to one of his wife’s foundations. “There is no such thing as enough money in philanthropy. They were unwise enough to invite
me. I did my act. Remaining conscious was their lookout.”

Next day Yael carries aboard the Air France plane a new copy of
Vico and Descartes: The Fork in the Road
, inscribed

For Israel’s Don Quixote,

and his charming Dulcinea,

Yael Nitzan,

with the author’s best wishes

for health and victory

M. Roweh

Again the first chapter defeats her, inducing a long restful nap, which with a movie and a good French dinner makes the flight
pass quickly. She means to keep at the book and worm through it, no matter what. She wants to understand Roweh if she can.
His erudition awes her. He learned Arabic in a year, he told her, in order to read the Koran and Ibn Khaldun in the original.
Besides Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, which he absorbed in Kiev as a child, he knows five European languages. The mere list
of titles of his books is scary. All the same, she has a handle on him as just another lonesome man who has taken to her.
About that she knows she is not mistaken. She glances often at his formal stern photograph on the book jacket, with a wall
of books behind him. That isn’t the whole picture of Max Roweh. Not half!

And now for a rendezvous with Sam Pasternak, a very different sort of lonesome man. Unlike the brush with the wealthy philosophy
professor, it will lack the edge of the unexpected, but she is very glad it’s on. When she called from Los Angeles before
leaving, he told her that Amos was in the Rambam Hospital, badly wounded, and a warm impulse to console him flooded her. “Look,
darling, you say you’ll be in Paris tomorrow? I’m coming home via Air France. I don’t want Aryeh lying about his age and volunteering
for something crazy. Where will you be in Paris? Let’s meet.” And it is still something to look forward to. After all, that
moment at Shimshon’s …

S
am Pasternak finds two messages at the desk of his Paris hotel.

Plane delayed two hours by fog in JFK airport. But I’m coming, patience! Love, Yael.

Am in the bar. Uri.

Uri is the military attaché in the Paris embassy. Pasternak attended the circumcision of Uri, son of a Palmakh buddy, and
remembers the wild wail Uri raised, spitting out the soothing wine. Now Uri is a lieutenant colonel with a neat black beard.
Sam finds him drinking wine in the bar and looking pained, as though the taste subliminally reminds him of the covenant of
Abraham.

“Is there any hope?” he greets Pasternak, who drops beside him in a leather-lined booth.

“Hardly any. And what’s your news?”

“All negative so far,” says Uri. “We expected the British to refuse, of course. But the Italians, the Belgians, the Dutch,
the Spanish, the Greeks —
Lo b’alef raboti!
[No with a capital N!] You were hoping for some results with the French, Sam.”

“Near zero.”

“Well, I’m not greatly surprised. Say
‘oil’
to a French politician and he goes catatonic. But what to all the devils ever made you hopeful?”

“I know the Minister of Transportation from the Resistance days. Actually I once saved his life. We’ve remained in touch,
and he even stayed in my home in Ramat Gan. When I talked to him on the phone, he thought landing rights might be arranged,
so I came. There’s a lot of public sympathy for Israel here.”