The Glory (72 page)

“Ugh,” says Daphna.

Through the open door to the apartment comes the sound of lively talk. “These are mostly university people,” says Dzecki as
they walk in. “Friends of Professor Berkowitz, or else members of his synagogue. We won’t stay long, just pay our respects
to Shayna —”

“Why, there’s General Barak,” says Daphna, discerning him sitting in uniform on a low stool. Another mourning stool beside
him is empty. “He was just at Dov’s funeral.” She makes her way to him. “Sir, accept my condolences about your brother Michael.”

“Thank you. A day for mourning brothers, isn’t it?” he says. “You were very good with Galia, Daphna. She was more grateful
than she could say.”

Words about Dov stick in Zev Barak’s throat. His own brother has been a casualty of the war, but in a different way. Barak
has attended too many funerals of his friends’ sons, each interment a new agonizing laceration. The visits to the badly wounded,
like Dzecki Barkowe there near the door, talking to his mother and father, are in a way even more harrowing; less final, less
black, but harder to endure because of the glaring disfigurement and the pain. Alas for those poor stunned Berkowitz-Barkowe
parents and their one-armed son, maimed in a Jewish war so far from Great Neck, Long Island!

Dzecki comes to him and gestures at the vacant stool. “Where’s Shayna, sir?”

“She’s packing up for Reuven in the back bedroom. His mother has come from Australia to take him.”

“Haval. That’s very sad. Very hard on Aunt Shayna.”

Dzecki goes off with Daphna to the back room. Other consolers approach the general, and some try to engage him in talk about
the Agranat Commission, but he makes no response. Yossi Nitzan shows up, and sits down on the low stool beside Barak.

“That’s not necessary, Yossi. Family only. Get yourself a chair.”

“In a minute. Zev, what’s going to happen with this Agranat Commission? Whose heads will roll?”

“That’s what they’re ordered to decide.”

“How does Golda feel about this?”

Barak shakes his head. “I don’t know. She’s inside a thick shell these days.”

“Well, let me tell you, I see Dayan as the prime target. All the big political and military decisions — size of army, length
of reserve service, weapons budget, projecting of strategy and tactics in case of war — all back up to him, don’t they? And
it was Dayan who said there’d be no major war for ten years. He didn’t change his mind until the Egyptian and Syrian artillery
opened up.”

With a melancholy smile Barak inquires, “Working up Dado’s defense, Kishote?”

Shayna appears and takes her place on the stool that Kishote vacates. Visitors form a line to step up and console Professor
Berkowitz’s wife and his brother with the ancient formula,
“May the Name comfort you, in the midst of the mourners for Zion and Jerusalem.”
It is late in the day and all but a few leave, though a few remain to consume cakes, coffee, and wine set out on a table.

“Where’s Reuven?” Kishote asks Shayna, when the line has gone by, and Zev Barak has left.

“Taking a nap. Lena will be here any minute. It’ll be a long tiring trip for him.”

“You look well, Shayna.”

She does. Kishote has expected to find her woebegone, incoherent, perhaps unkempt, but her black dress is neat, her hair carefully
parted and braided, and if anything, some lines in her very pale face have smoothed away and she seems younger. “You’re being
kind, as usual,” she says.

“Appalling that you have to give up Reuven.”

“Oh, Yossi, she’s his mother. It’s only right.” She shrugs and spreads her hands. “I really have nobody now, I guess. An orphan,
a widow. I have my work, and I had a few beautiful years.”

He says with low intensity, “Shayna, you’ll have many beautiful years.”

Her response is a grieving glance, and an affectionate flash of reddened glistening eyes. She jumps up. “There’s Lena now.”

A stoutish woman in a tailored red suit and a gaily feathered red hat is coming toward her. “Pardon my travelling clothes,
Shayna. Where’s Reuven?”

“Ready to go, Lena,” Shayna says. “Come and get him.”

“I’ll help,” says Kishote.

Reuven is sitting up on the bed, reading a picture book. Dressed in a suit and tie, he looks older than his six years and
not very comfortable, but he smiles and holds out his arms to Lena. “Imma, are we going to ride on the airplane now?”

“Yes, darling. All the way to Australia. A nice long ride.”

When she tries to pick him up, he protests. “I go myself.” Slipping off the bed, he tucks a crutch under one arm and limps
to the door, glancing at her for approval. “Myself,” he repeats.

“Very good, Reuven.”

He also insists on going down the four flights of stairs himself, hanging onto a bannister and carrying the crutch. It is
a slow business. He clearly takes pride in it, and the adults do not hurry him. Lena murmurs in English, “You and Michael
have brought him up right.”

“He’s brought himself up,” says Shayna. “We just had the joy of it. He’s advanced in every way, and he’s a good boy.”

A taxi is waiting. Reuven allows Shayna to help him in, and kisses her. “Goodbye, Shayna,” he says cheerfully. “Come on an
airplane and visit me in Australia.”

“It’s a long way for Shayna,” says his mother. “Goodbye, Shayna. Goodbye, General Nitzan, and thank you.”

The boy waves as the taxi pulls, away. Kishote puts his arm around Shayna. She leans against him, watching the car until it
disappears around a corner. “A good boy,” she repeats in a steady voice. “Come up and eat something with me, Yossi. I’ve eaten
nothing all day.”

“T
his is a complete Israeli victory,” says General Gamasy, leafing the disengagement document with a sour look. The tent at
Kilometer 101 now has transparent plastic curtains, also electric heaters to combat the January cold. But a few feet from
the red-glowing coils the tent is chilly, and the atmosphere between the two warmly clad negotiating teams is as frosty as
the desert air.

“A victory? General, this is a unilateral pullback by Israel, our first since 1956.” Aharon Yariv’s riposte pleases Sam Pasternak,
huddled in his Hermonit. He would have said as much himself.

Gamasy angrily shakes his head. “Our President Sadat, I say frankly to you, has made a wretched bargain.”

“And I say to you, General, that for us it’s bitter medicine prescribed by Dr. Kissinger, and forced down our throats by President
Nixon. There are long lines at American filling stations, and Mr. Nixon wants to end the oil embargo and maybe hold off his
impeachment. So your Third Army is marching home in honor with all its arms, instead of being starved out or destroyed as
the situation in the field dictated.”

“Not so, the Third Army was ready to fight its way out!” Gamasy strikes the table. “Only Dr. Kissinger stopped it with this
one-sided deal.”

Yariv throws up his hands. “Let’s say it’s a hard bargain on both sides. Are you ready to sign?”

Journalists come into the tent for the grim short signing ceremony, enlivened mainly by the popping of flashbulbs.

Afterward Sam Pasternak drives from Kilometer 101 to Kishote’s headquarters. “Get ready to take your boys home, Kishote,”
he says, coming into the command caravan. “It’s done.”

“So, we win a war with Egypt,” Kishote says, “and they stay put while we retreat from the Canal to the Gidi and the Mitla
Passes, without another shot being fired. A funny victory.”

“How will your boys take it?”

“They’ll be glad it’s over, that’s all. After they get home, they may start wondering what the devil it was all about, and
why their friends got killed.”

“Is that how you feel about this deal?”

Kishote takes a while to answer. “It can be one more Arab trick to make us drop our guard. If this man Sadat means peace it’s
a miracle, but we have to try it.”

Pasternak says, “Good, I agree. Look, if Ben Gurion had lived one more month, he’d have certainly called it a miracle. That’s
how I felt, there in that tent. A face-to-face deal with Egypt! Messiah’s time.”

“Halevai,” says Don Kishote.

T
he long withdrawing columns of rumbling machines are halted at the Canal and backed up for miles, waiting for passage over
the bridges. Kishote mounts an Egyptian rampart from which the Israeli flags are gone, to watch his troops crossing the Canal
the other way. On the bridges the traffic is now all eastward. To the north and south he can see in the Egyptian lodgments
the dust plumes of moving vehicles and the smoke of field-kitchen fires. Out of regard for tender Arab honor, the Israelis
are backing out first. Only then will the Egyptians get out of Sinai. The bridges will be left behind like the evacuated Bar-Lev
Line; or will Zahal engineers try to salvage them? Kishote doesn’t know. He does know that those pontoon bridges, and the
solid earth bridge, and the roller bridge itself, are relics of the past. A phrase of his childhood leaps to mind:
Opge-shluggeneh hoyshainess!
(Beaten-out willows!). He speaks the Yiddish words aloud to nobody, “Opge-shluggeneh hoyshainess!”

Once a year, on the day called the Great Hosannah, worshippers beat willow stalks on the synagogue floor to knock off the
leaves. The meaning of this ancient custom is obscure, something to do with bringing rain. On Great Hosannah day before morning
prayers the willow stalks, hoyshainess, are at a premium in Jewish neighborhoods, eagerly sought after, never enough to go
around. Afterward they lie scattered around the synagogue, broken and half-denuded, for the shammas to sweep up and burn.
Beaten-out willows …

Beaten-out willows, these bridges.

He crosses the roller bridge in his command car. Most of his division is already over in Sinai by now, wending eastward on
roads chewed to bits by tank treads and already drifted over by the blowing sand, mere vague tracks on the desert floor. Kishote
stops at the Sinai end, walks out on the greasy steel-netting surface against the booming clanking traffic, and in mid-Canal
murmurs a prayer for the boys in his division who fell.

T
he weeks that follow are hectic for Don Kishote. Demobilizing ten thousand men, coating and storing hundreds of tanks, inventorying
and warehousing mountains of weaponry, make for incessant work. The time races by for him, while Dr. Kissinger is doing his
picturesque shuttling around the Arab capitals, trying for an armistice on the still-smoldering Syrian front. From Don Kishote’s
viewpoint the world news continues bad for Israel. Mr. Nixon has his big success, the oil embargo is lifted in March, so the
gasoline lines in America evaporate. But the drive to impeach him does not, and the price of oil stays at the new sky-high
level, since the European governments, not daring to unite against the cartel of Arab oil producers, are making shifty individual
deals with them. That is the one clear outcome of the war. The Arabs have learned that they have Europe over an oil barrel.

Dado talks often to Kishote before and after he testifies to the Agranat panel. He returns from these sessions confident that
he has done well, and Kishote is dumbstruck when early in April the newspapers explode with gigantic headlines. The Agranat
Commission in a “partial finding” has not only cleared but praised Moshe Dayan, and has recommended that General David Elazar
be relieved. Golda Meir has already requested and received Dado’s resignation.

The next morning a public commotion starts to boil up, and in the army there are angry mutterings of resignations. Don Kishote
goes very early, uninvited, to see Dado. An unprecedented hush lies over the entire Kirya. The female soldiers in the outer
offices are as silent as at a funeral. When the Ramatkhal arrives and sees Don Kishote, he holds up a hand, says, “Another
time, Yossi,” and goes inside. In all the years he has known David Elazar, Don Kishote has never seen him like this, bowed,
stunned, unmanned.

A beaten-out willow.

The Peace

THE LORD WILL GIVE HIS PEOPLE VALOR,

THE LORD WILL BLESS HIS PEOPLE WITH PEACE.

Psalm 29:11

Madame Irene Fleg could dawdle for hours in bathing and dressing, or, like an actress making a quick change backstage, she
could get herself dried, combed, made up, costumed and out the door in minutes, as she did now in her Tel Aviv Hilton suite.
She rode down by herself in the large ornate elevator, for all the journalists had long since flown, and tourism was still
at a jittery ebb. Into the almost-deserted lobby she strode, hoping the pink wool dress snatched at random from the closet
was on straight. There stood a robust fellow in a green uniform, grinning.

“Oo-ah, quick work!” he said. “Sorry I got you out of a bath. You’re sure you’re dry?”

“Am I dripping?” The hand that shook hers in a firm grip felt callused and scarred. She peered at his face. “So you’re Pasternak
fils
! I hardly remembered what you looked like, to tell the truth. I thought you were taller.”

“Disappointed?”

“How on earth did you find out I was here?”

“Julie Levinson told me.”

“You know Julie?”

“I know her bridegroom, very well.”

“I see. Well, let’s sit down.” On the long curving lobby couch, which in good times was crowded, they were the sole occupants.
“My husband’s in an Alliance Israelite Universelle meeting here. He’ll be out soon. My children should be showing up, too.
They’re going on a day trip with a group.”

“All three of them?”

She laughed. “The two oldest.”

“Madame Fleg, will you be in Israel for a while? I have to return to my battalion right after the wedding.”

“I’m afraid we leave Sunday.”

“Oh. Too bad. You came for the wedding?”

“Not exactly. Julie’s parents scheduled it for this week, so that their Alliance friends could attend. Monsieur Levinson is
on the board.”