The Drifters (30 page)

‘I have been to the Red City,’ Yigal whispered in the night, but as he did so, a pair of Arab guards patrolling the heights against just such an incursion approached. Closer and closer they came, on a course that would require them to step upon the huddled Jews. Yigal saw with horror that his two friends had their revolvers ready to fire, but at the last minute the Arabs turned aside to look down into the city below.

‘Nothing here,’ one said, and they passed on. When they were well out of hearing, the leader waved his revolver in the dim light and they started back down the slope, crossed the Wadi Arabah and found their car in the Negev.

There was no jubilation on the ride north, for each knew how close he had come to death. They did not conceive of themselves as heroes who had accomplished an
Odyssean voyage, but they did think of themselves as Jews who were compressed on all sides by avowed enemies and who felt an uncontrollable urge to visit a forbidden city which had become for them a symbol with meaning so vast that it could not be expressed in words.

By the time Yigal reached home, his family had agreed, after much passionate discussion, that no one was to refer to his absence. The car dropped him at his home about three in the afternoon and he sauntered nonchalantly into the house. His mother greeted him casually and his two sisters were studious in their indifference. At supper his father spoke only of the university, but when Yigal had gone to bed and was nearly asleep he heard his door creaking open. It was Ruth, the older of his sisters, and she whispered, ‘What was it like?’

‘It’s there,’ he said, and she kissed him fervently on the cheek.

That winter, when he was again Bruce Clifton at his school in Detroit, some of his more daring classmates began experimenting with marijuana. They were conspiratorial about it and invited him to join them. ‘It’s exciting!’ they assured him. ‘Boy, you see visions like you never saw before. And sex! Stand back, Errol Flynn, because here I come!’ When he indicated that he wished no part of their frolic, they asked, ‘You chicken?’

Then June 1967 erupted, and when the stories filtered back to Detroit, there was no further question of his being chicken.

By mid-May it had become apparent to Bruce that the Middle East was not going to escape war.

He and his grandparents had followed the collapse of civilized relationships with a kind of horror; they could not believe U Thant would dare to behave as he did; they could not believe that Gamal Abdel Nasser would take the risks he was taking. ‘He must know,’ Bruce said at dinner the night the Gulf of Aqaba was closed to Israeli shipping, that our army can defeat his at any time.’

‘How can you feel so confident?’ his grandfather asked.

‘I’ve seen our army.’

The regular junior-year examinations, coming as they did when Egyptian pressure was at its height, were an
ordeal; Bruce had the subject matter well mastered, but he could not attend to abstract questions when the real questions of life and death were being decided in his homeland. On the morning that he left his grandfather’s house to take the examination in mathematics, the radio carried reports from Damascus, boasting that the Syrians were going to cut right through Israel, slaughter everyone they encountered, and push the remnants of the nation to the sea. The Syrian spokesman specifically said, ‘We shall bomb Haifa from the face of the earth.’

When the exam was over, the last in the agonizing series, Bruce took one of his classmates aside, a Jewish girl, and said, ‘At six o’clock tonight—now remember, at six, no sooner—I want you to call my grandfather and tell him that I stopped by your place after school to discuss the exams. You must convince him that I am there having dinner with you.’

‘You want me to lie for you?’

‘You must.’

‘Where will you be?’

Bruce looked about him, then said quietly, ‘Can I trust you?’

‘You know you can.’

‘I’ll be in Israel.’

The girl stiffened as if an electric shock had coursed through her. In a flash she comprehended everything and realized that she was being asked to become a conspirator for a noble cause. She said nothing as Bruce explained that in his family, people kept their passports up to date and that when he came to America each autumn he had a roundtrip plane ticket. From a leatherette folder he produced the two imposing documents and satisfied her that he was telling the truth.

‘I’m driving to the airport right now, catching a plane to New York, and at seven ‘I’ll be in the air for Israel. My grandfather’s a smart old geezer, and if he doesn’t hear from me, he just might guess what I’m doing, because he’s as worried about Israel as I am. I figure he’ll be getting suspicious about six o’clock, and I don’t want him telephoning the airport police in New York.’

So the plot was laid, and although his co-conspirator was not a pretty girl, nor one that he had ever dated, he kissed her, and she asked, ‘Are you going to join the army?’ and he said, ‘Most of my friends are in the army and I
help them with the radio bit.’ He kissed her again, jumped into his Pontiac convertible, and sped off to the Detroit air terminal. At seven, as he had predicted, he was flying out of New York bound for Israel.

He landed mid-morning on Friday, June 2, to find his homeland caught up in what he later described in a letter to his grandfather as ‘a terrible reality. No one panicked. No one made empty boasts. But everyone knew the dreadful threats that had come from Radio Damascus. What stupefied me was that King Hussein, on whom we relied for some kind of balance, had joined the chorus and was shouting stupid things. We knew it was to be war, and we knew that if we lost we would be slaughtered. They told us so. So we decided not to lose.’

He caught a
cherut
—a private car operating as a taxi on a set run—and drove north to Haifa, where his parents were both astonished and relieved to see him; they approved of what he had done and said that at such times a family ought to be together. ‘I was prepared to see them, and their quiet courage,’ he wrote to his grandfather, ‘and I was prepared for the tense excitement that gripped Haifa, but I was totally unprepared for what happened when I met my two sisters, for suddenly it dawned on me that when Radio Damascus cried that everyone in Haifa was to be slaughtered, it was Ruth and Shoshana they meant, and without being able to control myself, I burst into tears.’

He had arrived in Israel on Friday, the day of worship, and although his family avoided synagogues, on this night Dr. Zmora said, ‘I think we might go to
shul
,’ and they went as a group. Later that evening Yigal established contact with his older friends who were in the army reserve. He had gone into the center of Haifa to that public square where the Carmelit, the underground funicular, starts its climb up to the top of Mount Carmel, and at the open-air café he met three of his gang. They were delighted to see him, but the air of hushed expectancy which gripped the whole city operated there, too, and they kept their voices low lest their neighbors at the other tables think them afraid or excited.

‘It’s got to be war,’ they told him.

‘Why aren’t you at the front?’ he asked.

‘The front? Everywhere’s the front. They haven’t called
us yet because there isn’t room to absorb us. We’re waiting.’

June nights in Haifa can be exquisite, with the dark whisper of cedars on the hills and the echo of the sea along the waterfront. Lovers climb hand in hand up the long flights of stairs, while the babel of many languages lends a counterpoint to the fundamental Hebrew which most speak. But on this Friday night the city was trebly beautiful, for people on the edge of doom were trebly attentive to one another.

Then, without sirens or horns, ordinary passenger cars began circulating through the city, both in the alleys by the waterfront and on the broad boulevards of Carmel. The driver was often a girl, never in uniform, and the men she drove were in civilian dress too. The car would stop, motor running, and the men would move out quickly, but never at a run lest they excite panic. They would go from door to door, almost in silence, knock once or twice, and nod to the man who had been anticipating their call. Oftentimes not a word was spoken, just the knowing nod, the grim smile of recognition, the closing door and the messenger on his way back to the car, which would then carry him to another quarter of the city. Israel was moving quietly, without a single word on the radio or in the streets, into total mobilization.

It was about nine o’clock that lovely spring evening when one of the cars pulled into the plaza where Yigal was drinking orange soda with his friends. They saw it coming and could guess its import as soon as they spotted the girl driver. She pulled beside the curb, and four men sifted through the crowd. When one of them reached Yigal’s table, there was a flash of recognition, but neither the messenger nor the civilian soldiers spoke. The man simply looked at them and nodded. When he was gone the young men quickly rose and walked unostentatiously from the plaza, except that as they went, one of them turned back to Yigal and asked, without speaking a word, if he wanted to come along, and he did want to, very much, and he rose as casually as if he were going to a movie and followed them into the darkness.

Mobilization plans for this particular unit called for them to requisition one of the
cheruts
and twenty gallons of gasoline from a dealer at the edge of town, and to motor down to the desert capital of Beersheba. They were
to leave immediately, without goodbyes, and would find that the necessary gear had been assembled in the south. From there they would pretty surely head westward into the Sinai, for their specialty was foot-soldier support for heavy tanks, the kind of operation in which communications were vital.

As they drove south that clear, still night Yigal thought: The difference between an American and an Israeli is that my grandparents are wailing in Detroit, asking, ‘Why has he done this thing?’ while my parents in Haifa, when they find I’ve gone, will ask, ‘What else could he have done?’

It was not yet dawn when their car reached Beersheba, to fall in line behind a thousand others that had assembled from all parts of the nation, and the military depot to which they reported was so agitated that Yigal’s unauthorized presence was not noticed; after all, he was not much younger than many of the troops, and his civilian appearance corresponded to theirs, for it was a civilian nation that was girding for war. When it became apparent that their unit was not going to accomplish much that night, they fell asleep in the car, a bunch of casual young men who might have been waiting for a soccer game.

By noon on June 3 the unit was more or less formed up, and the officer in charge, a civilian-dressed major known to everyone as the Sabra, for he had been born in Israel and spoke only Hebrew, looked into Yigal’s car and asked, ‘Who’s this?’ and Yigal’s friends explained. ‘He’s a communications nut. He can fix anything.’ The Sabra studied him and asked, ‘You acquainted with our gear?’ When Yigal nodded, the major said, ‘We could use him,’ and in this haphazard way Yigal Zmora went to war.

By midnight on June 3 the unit had moved, by commandeered taxicabs, to a point within two miles of the Egyptian border, but this measure was misleading, for the part of Egypt which touched Israel in this region was merely the Sinai, that vast and empty wasteland which ought to have served, throughout history, as a natural buffer between Egypt and her neighbors to the east but which never did. Instead of forming a wall, it formed a garish, terrifying highway which for the past four thousand years had consumed camels and armies and which in recent decades had developed an appetite for tanks and airplanes.

During the long, hot day of June 4 Yigal and his companions waited; they cleaned their guns and he fiddled
with the radio gear, unable to test it properly because of the enforced silence. He did monitor messages coming from the Sinai, and although they were in code, he deduced that there must be considerable tank movement in the area. ‘I wonder what it’s like facing a tank?’ he asked his buddies. ‘We’ll find out,’ they said stoically, ‘because those tanks of ours aren’t going to hang around protecting us. When the flag drops, they’re off to Cairo.’

It was known generally among the foot soldiers that once the war began, they were on their own, because victory depended not on their safety but on the speed with which the tanks could slash into Egypt. ‘We’ll be at the Suez Canal two days after war begins,’ one of Yigal’s companions predicted. ‘We’re going to move so fast … well, you keep that radio going so they can keep track of where we are. Because we’re on our own.’

The unit had some trucks geared for desert warfare, but not enough. They also had some taxicabs with extra tires and racks for gasoline cans, but not enough of them either. ‘You couldn’t claim we were a flashy unit,’ Yigal’s friend said. ‘The good gear is up front, where it’s needed. But you know what I think? I feel absolutely confident that before nightfall of the first day we’ll be riding in Egyptian equipment.’

In the hot afternoon they asked Yigal what the United States was like, and he said, ‘Not bad. Big roads. Air conditioning. I liked it, but the schools are sort of sloppy. You don’t learn much … not if you’ve been to a good school in Israel first.’ None of his listeners had been to high school, so they couldn’t judge.

‘You think you might like to live there … permanently, I mean?’

‘You could do a lot worse.’

‘The girls?’

‘Funny thing. Something I never realized before. But when you’re in the United States, people expect you to be a Jew. Over here—who gives a damn, except maybe the Egyptians, and only some of them. My parents almost never go to synagogue. But in the United States … You were asking about girls. Every girl is either Jewish or not Jewish. Big deal. Besides, any soccer player in Israel could make one of their teams.’

Night fell and there was silence. From the Sinai, not a sound. Pale light showed nothing moving, and the men fell
asleep, but toward morning there was a steady sound of airplanes. Everyone prepared for an attack from the Egyptians, but none came, and shortly before dawn the word was passed, ‘Move out,’ and the motley collection of cars and trucks revved up and started westward toward the border, but they had gone only two miles when they were ordered to pull off the road, and they sat in dust, amazed and somehow terrified, as a convoy of tanks sped past with every apparent intention of crossing the border ahead. Even when the young soldiers saw these monsters standing only a few feet away, they were awed by the tremendous power, but when they heard them rushing past, collapsing the world with noise, they understood for the first time what war might be.