The Glory (88 page)

“Em, things are boiling over here. However, tomorrow night —”

“No go. I’m leaving on Air France at two. I called Foxdale, and if I can shoot the girls in there before March first, they’ll
be okay, they won’t lose a semester. So I’m popping over to Paris to wrap things up, help them pack, turn the key to my flat,
and make a lightning return. You’re
sure
we can’t meet tonight, my dearest? I long to hug you, you’ve turned my mourning to dancing.”

“I can’t do it, Emily. I just can’t.”

“Damn, then is this one more telephone goodbye? Welladay! That you came at all is marvellous, it’s a miracle, my life is ablaze.
I kiss your eyes. Darling, about the Growlery, I gave the headmistress holy hell, but she explained that nobody was using
it, termites had got into it, and the school needed tennis courts. So there you are. What does it matter, if love lasts?”

“We’ll go up there together, Emily, next time I’m here,” said Barak, “and I’m coming, I promise you. And in a far corner of
a far court we’ll dig a hole and bury a little bronze plaque. And on the plaque will be engraved,
‘Its ont aimés.’
”

“Oh, God, White Wolf, you wretch, you’ve made the tears start. Goodbye.”

Click
.

T
he darkened El Al plane was halfway back to Israel and Dayan was fast asleep when Barak took Christian Cunningham’s memorandum
from his despatch case. The first paragraph hooked him and he read on to the end.

Christmas Day, 1956

THE SACRED REGION

Christians and Jews alike hate to face one stark truth: that the Mosque of Omar has stood on Mount Zion for thirteen hundred
years. That is longer than the First and Second Jewish Temples combined stood there — about a thousand years — plus the Crusader
occupancy, a mere ninety years. To a believing Christian like myself, the long Moslem reign in Zion must be serving some occult
purpose of Our Lord. Now the saved remnant of the Jews, a brand snatched from the burning, has returned to Jerusalem, halted
by the Moslems just a few hundred yards short of the Temple Mount. If the Jews succeed in retaking that Mount, mankind will
surely have come to a turning point of sacred history. That is of no concern to the Central Intelligence Agency, but it will
be a turning point of global political trends as well, and that is our whole business.

The memo wandered off into Cunningham’s archaeology hobby, his religious notions, and the Communist threat. There was much
about “the three Abrahamic faiths” — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — and their common root in the land between the sea
and the Euphrates. All modern boundaries in the region, Cunningham wrote, were tissue-paper fictions; either sanded-over former
Ottoman border markers, or arbitrary lines drawn by the departed Europeans. In nature, in archaeology, and in religion it
was all one land, God’s dwelling place, the primal Eden. The brotherhood of man had first been prophesied in this land. The
three Abrahamic faiths had spread the vision to half the earth. The Return of the Jews to the Temple Mount would signal that
the Second Coming was at hand, when the vision of Abraham would go out to the rest of humankind, and usher in world peace.

Then came the summing-up he had long ago mentioned to Barak.

Conclusion: How It Will All End

You asked me to write down, Admiral, what I said over brandy as we were talking the other night about the Suez War. I’ve tried
to do so. The coming of the Messiah is not, as I say, the business of the Central Intelligence Agency. However, political
trends in this volatile region, which contains the major reserves of the world’s energy, are indeed a prime concern.

The pacifying of the region can only come, I believe, on the religious basis of the oneness of the region, and the underlying
Abrahamic bedrock. Christianity and Islam fought each other to a bloody standstill in the Middle Ages, while despising their
teachers, Our Lord’s people, the Jews, as a dry dead fossil of history. When those dry bones revive and stand again on Mount
Zion, that will signal a new political time, an epochal if slow reconciliation, a digging down to the common bedrock, so as
to defeat Marxist atheism and forestall the nuclear devastation of the planet. The Second Coming may be a matter of my personal
belief. But I predict that when the clouds of polemic and ancient prejudice clear, the New Politics of the Sacred Region will
emerge, with a burst of peace and prosperity beyond all present imagining.

Christian Cunningham

This was followed by a red-inked scribble:
“Chris — You should only live so long. Redman.”

Cunningham had written in pencil underneath, in a wavering hand,

January 12, 1979

Zev Barak — You once said you’d like to read this. Here it is. After 23 years, I still think this is how it will all end.
But then, I’m departing a believing Christian.

Farewell from the far shore,

Christian Cunningham

The date was four days before his death. Barak’s eyes smarted from reading the faded typescript in the cone of dim light from
the overhead hole. He let the papers fall on his lap, musing for a long time on this strange farrago. A man of paradox, poor
Cunningham: a devout believer in Jesus Christ, and as good a friend as the Jews had had in the labyrinth of American bureaucracy.
Barak had never talked religion with him, but what could Chris have thought of a Pope who averted his eyes and kept silent
while the Germans were massacring European Jewry? What had he made of the inquisitors who burned Jews in public squares, all
in the name of his Savior, well into the eighteenth century? Secretive, brilliant, obsessively suspicious, naively believing;
Christian Cunningham was gone, taking his contradictions with him to the far shore. He had fathered Emily. Rest in peace,
Chris.

Under Cunningham’s farewell Barak wrote one word in Hebrew,
HALEVAI
, and settled back to sleep.

W
hen President Carter came to Cairo and Jerusalem to iron out the last stubborn wrinkles in the treaty himself, Dayan did not
consult Barak again. Nor did he invite him to Washington for the signing ceremony. Barak watched on TV the historic three-way
handshake on the White House lawn, rioting how different their demeanors were: Carter all smiles at a foreign policy triumph
he badly needed, Sadat formidable and stiff, as though sensing the life-threatening danger of his move, and Begin genially
stealing the show with a coup de theatre straight from the Yiddish stage, putting on a large black yarmulke to declaim Psalm
126 in Hebrew. Carter, Sadat, the VIPs and the media people listened uncomprehending; Barak of course understood the words,
and why Begin had chosen this psalm.

When the Lord returned us to Zion,

We were like dreamers.

Then our mouths were filled with laughter,

And our tongues with song …

And so on, every word to the last.

He who went forth weeping,

Bearing sacks of seed,

Will surely come rejoicing,

Bringing in his sheaves.

Was this the Prime Minister of Israel? This was an old skull-capped Polish Jewish tailor saying
t’hilim
, psalms; a Holocaust survivor, praising God for the confirmed miracle of the Return. It was a gesture at once awesome and
faintly embarrassing, a final steamrollering of the old galut whisper, “What will the goyim say?”

At a party in Jerusalem not long afterward, Eliakim met Barak and told him about the gala dinner that had followed, in a tent
outside the White House. “The Night of the Big Givers,” Eliakim jocosely called it. Fifteen hundred people sat at small tables
in a deafening din of chatter and music, he said, mostly American Jewish leaders with a sprinkling of Washington notables,
freezing in the March night air or roasting if too close to the electric heaters. Not knowing how kosher the kosher food was,
Eliakim ate nothing and yearned to leave early, but he feared offending a Vermont senator and three UJA chairmen he sat with.
When he saw Dayan get up from the table of Cyrus Vance and the President of Israel, he seized the excuse to follow his Foreign
Minister, and walked with him through a bitter cold wind to their hotel. Dayan spoke not a word until in the elevator he invited
Eliakim into his room. “What a balagan that was, eh?” he said as they came in. “Would you like to order something to eat?
Sardines, cheese?”

“I’m okay, Minister, thanks.”

Dayan rattled a box of Oreo cookies at him. “These are good. Have some.”

Though he avoided American packaged foods, not sure of what was in them, Eliakim took an Oreo, but did not eat it. Dayan ate
several, staring out the window at Lafayette Square and the floodlit White House. From a pile of hardcover books on a table
he picked up a copy with his smiling much younger face on the cover. “Eli, have you ever glanced at this?”

“I’ve read it twice, Minister. It’s a classic.”

“Don’t exaggerate, it’s just a plain story of my life. I had no time to be elegant. I have to sign these for ten big givers
back there in that tent.” He sat down and penned brief Hebrew on the flyleaf:
To the good Jew Eliakim, from Moshe
. “They’ll get nine, and let them fight it out.”

“Thank you, Minister. I’ll treasure this.”

“Well, good night.” Dayan opened another copy of his life story, and as Eliakim left he was reading it and eating Oreos.

Eliakim recounted all this to Barak on the narrow flower-lined terrace of a flat belonging to a Hebrew University professor,
while behind them a stereo played Beethoven over the party talk, and from the apartment below rock-and-roll music blasted
the Jerusalem night. “I still don’t know just why,” Eliakim added, “but I’ve never felt sorrier for anybody.”

“On television you hardly saw Dayan,” Barak said. “It was all Begin.”

“Yes, I thought of that at the signing. Not the New Jew, the famed sabra warrior, the effacer of the Wandering Jew image,”
said Eliakim. “Just an old shtetl Jew.”

Eliakim left Barak sitting alone on the terrace, thinking long melancholy thoughts about Moshe Dayan, and about the river
of time swiftly flowing away. Amos Pasternak came out in a short-sleeved shirt, carrying a Pepsi-Cola. He dropped in a lounge
chair, “Hi. Noisy in there.”

“Amos, tell me about Toulon.”

A nuclear reactor assembly that France was committed to ship to Iraq had been blown up in a warehouse outside the seaport.
The incident was causing an international stir.

“Well, Zev, you’ve heard the latest, haven’t you? The French say every key item was destroyed by precise planting of plastic
explosives. An inside job of some sort.”

“Did we have anything to do with it?”

Amos’s round face wrinkled in an innocent smile. “Why, an outfit nobody’s heard of is claiming responsibility. ‘The Group
of French Ecologists.’ ”

“And how much of a respite does this give us? A couple of years?”

“Dubious. The French can replace the stuff out of their own reactor reserves. Saddam Hussein will grunt,
‘Deliver, or no cut-rate oil.’
They’ll deliver.”

“A year, anyway?”

“Well, a year, yes.”

“I tell you, Amos, Camp David or no Camp David, we are in great peril. This Iraqi reactor frightens me as I haven’t been frightened
since June ’48.”

“What happened then?” inquired Amos. “I was three years old.”

“We were at the end of our rope. If the Arabs had kept going for one more week, they’d have overrun us and ended the whole
thing then and there, for good and all. We caught our breath during the cease-fire, made it through the war, and here we are.
But two atomic bombs exploding over Tel Aviv and Haifa would spell doomsday. Poor Golda used to call me Mr. Alarmist. By my
life, I only try to see things as they are.”

Amos said soberly, “Well, this Toulon business puts off the day.”

“It’s not a solution.”

“Not in the long run, no.”

Barak gestured toward the party. “Have you seen my Ruti? She came with Danny Luria.”

“No, I just got here.”

“Amos, just between the two of us, aren’t you giving Ruti a hard time?”

“I don’t mean to.”

“If you didn’t see her at all, that would be one thing. But you do.”

“I like her.”

“She more than likes you. Did she tell you that she intends to apply to the California Institute of Technology?”

“Cal Tech? Oo-ah! No.”

“Well, she’s out to live my dream that failed, and become a scientist. She’s a math and physics whiz like my brother Michael,
and amazingly ambitious. If she does go to California, will that end it?”

A silence, then, “Zev, can you picture what it’s like to be in love with a woman in another country, a woman you can only
see rarely, a woman with kids, a love which won’t die, which has nothing to do with casual romance, which is
it
? Can you picture something like that?”

“Well, I’m getting on, but I can try,” said the White Wolf. “So what?”

“I’m up for operations officer, Northern Command, and —”

“Why, that’s tremendous, Amos.”

“— and I know I’m coming to a crossroads. It’s tough.”

“Is this woman a widow?” Amos shook his head. “A divorcée?”

“No. Married. A lot older than I am. Three children.”

“
Alleh myless
[All the attractions],” said Barak.

It drew a sad laugh from Amos Pasternak. He stood up. “Ruti couldn’t be sweeter or prettier or smarter. Cal Tech! I bet she
gets in, too. Danny Luria is lucky.”

“Not while you’re seeing Ruti, he isn’t.”

“Are you telling me to stop seeing Ruti?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Or to give up the lady?”

“That only you can decide.”

“You’re a big help,” said Amos. “I appreciate your frankness. By your leave, I’ll now go and look for Ruti.”

“With my blessing,” said her father. “It was just a quiet word.”

“Yes, I’ve got the idea.”