A Dove of the East (17 page)

Being practical, the men of Kfar Yanina did not worry about the fates of their charges but rather tried to nurture them into robust meatiness. In the breeding and feeding they were already expert, but they had to learn how to ride and rope, and this they took up rapidly if only for its romance and publicity in films. There were a few accidents. Once, red-haired Avner crashed his horse head-on with a fat steer, causing minor injuries in order of increasing seriousness to the steer, the horse, and Avner, who rode chuckling in an ambulance to the nearest X-ray machine. But all in all they were good herdsmen, and they developed into a permanent élite group within the settlement. Perhaps in doing so they struck a natural balance, for they became extraordinarily desirable to women, who were irresolute and nervous in their presence. This may have been because they saw the women so rarely. For whatever reason, hot fires were lit when the Golan crew'returned suddenly out of the dusk for alternation, hot showers, conversation, movies, and dalliance.

But they left their women after a day or two and rode back in the old truck to a little camp of tents and trailers. It was usually on Friday or Saturday. They rested for the evening, then got up the next morning and began to work.

Each day a scout was sent to trace ahead the paths by which the herd, or parts of it, would move the next morning. In that way the scout and the herd moved out simultaneously, the herd stopping at a place determined the day before, the scout continuing into fresh country. As many steers as they had could not have been moved spontaneously and freely—it was hardly a place for Isadora Duncan—for various reasons. The first was the availability of watering places. Sometimes they were wet, sometimes not, and the scout was obliged to find a wet one within a certain distance. The second was the condition of march. One is always surprised by the agility of cattle and their willingness to confront the steep and narrow, but they are after all not goats and it is not possible to drive them over too difficult a path. The third is pasturage, which must be suitable and green; green, that is, in a Middle Eastern sense, which can be yellow. The fourth is that a herd should be able to find new pastures without too much backtracking, an act which is a waste and which tends to upset them. The fifth is that the herd and the riders must be fairly well protected from saboteurs. Occasionally a steer will fall, victim of a long and casual rifle shot. In that case the riders must turn their own guns against it, and call immediately for a truck to take it for butchering. Steers have been known to set off anti-vehicular mines, resulting in an awful sight, but there is little danger to the men, whose weight even if combined with that of a horse will not trigger the fuse.

A scout must balance these conditions, weighing and judging, until he reaches an acceptable result. He then rides back to camp, sometimes late at night, for he has his work cut out for him. It is a good job though, because he can be alone and he usually rides all day on the mountains and in the canyons, stopping only for a small lunch, to rest his horse, or for the hell of it to sing and eat chocolate and know he stands alone for as far as he can see and sense.

And for every Jew who did this a terrible joy descended. He was a cowboy, standing with a rifle, a rope, a horse. He was strong, tanned, able to move with lightning speed over long stretches of ground, tough, alert, and dirty. And yet he was incredibly sad and thought perhaps he was wrong to ride rather than reflect. Being in the saddle was a fearsome thing. And no matter how natural it seemed or how rough and arrogant he was he feared deep down that he had succeeded, and fearing his own success he rode harder and was more daring and it seemed that he was extraordinarily capable upon a horse.

A favorite and excellent scout, a hard and trustworthy man, was Leon Orlovsky, a French Jew who had been at Kfar Yanina since the Second World War, who spoke little, and who often did the work of two men. He was one of those people with neither past nor future. About him the young, the middle-aged, and the old never thought very much or hard for he was self-contained, a little irrational, and he absented himself from normal society by means of superior work. Had he only been able to deal with people he might have been elected secretary many times, for he was well educated, and although in his fifties, as handsome and masculine as a man could be, like the rare film star who has aged well, or the fit professional soldier who hasn't a mean look. Yet he did not even speak to women, and appeared shy and confused by them. Many women had fallen in love with him from a distance, but momentarily, for he was clearly not to be sought.

For most people he was just a brusque and silent ex-European, an ill-fitting refugee who had strange habits. In his case it was that he wore a tremendous coat into the dining room (when he was on rotation from the mountains) and filled its pockets with all manner of things—eggs, bread, scallions, salt shakers, tomatoes, and whatever else he could fit in—and then left to eat alone in one of the watch towers or among the date trees.

Whatever his peculiarities, and they were many, the young men, army officers in the reserve with new families, knew that they could trust him. As a scout he was unmatched, for he had not only vigor but wisdom. He had in twenty-five years become senior on the land, a master farmer and horseman, as knowing of the winds, soil, and animals as a man can be—and yet he was from Paris.

This Parisian, who walked no longer among the shimmering autumn trees of the Jardins du Luxembourg but instead in the pale green and sulfurous orange date orchards ripe with heat and sweet decay, packed his canvas saddlebags and laid on his equipment with the thoroughness of a legionnaire. “If a man is to be independent,” he was fond of saying, “he must be the master of his kit, and pack lightly but with great care.”

His horse, the offspring of a Texas quarterhorse and a purebred Arabian, had the strong chest and mathematical curves of a desert animal, along with the somewhat thicker neck and sturdy legs of the American mount. A chestnut mare who would have been at home in Virginia, she carried her rider with great speed and over difficult terrain despite the heat and hills. A locally made saddle, cool for the horse, with a palm-wood pommel and an English halter and bit, could not have weighed more than five pounds altogether on her.

His saddlebags were of white duck and in them he carried a liter vacuum bottle of cool water purely for the pleasure of it since he carried two plastic bottles also a liter apiece in the bags and a similar one on his belt. In a little tin box he always put some wheat biscuits, half-dried beef, dried apricots peaches and bananas, chocolate, and a Cuban cigar cut in two. He carried an aluminum cup in which were four teabags, a small sack of sugar, and matches. In the other half of the bags he had three long magazines of ammunition for his automatic rifle which was in a leather case on the saddle, a small and powerful Carl Zeiss pocket telescope, his book for the week, some toilet articles, and whatever else might end up there (for instance a newspaper or an interesting-looking rock he had found). A warm leather jacket was rolled inside two cotton wool blankets resting over the top of the bags; on his belt in addition to a canteen he had a parkerized knife in a leather sheath which held also a pliers-wirecutter, a stainless steel awl, and a pocket whetstone. A white although vaguely cream-colored leather lariat which smelled just like his horse hung near his rifle, where he also often put his shirt. He brought the lariat mainly out of habit but also because he sometimes came upon strays which in a long and frustrating process he eventually led home.

With all this, or rather with only this, he stayed away from his companions for a full day, often two, and sometimes three, depending on what he was supposed to find and how easy things were or how difficult. For him this was a great delight. In solitude he could remember, and hope, and in rapturous moments in the early mornings or late afternoons when the sun did not impose its glaring reality he sometimes even dared to plan.

“I'm going up ahead,” he said to Yossi, the head of the crew, “about five or ten kilometers. I don't think that at this time of year it will be hard to find water. At least it wasn't last year at this time; the damn thing was overflowing. I'll be back late this afternoon.”

Yossi nodded his head and said “O.K., see you then,” and Leon, whose Hebrew was not quite perfect and who spoke in a deep and rather sad voice, mounted his horse and rode away. He had arisen before the others, shaved while they slept, eaten while they were shaving, and left while they were eating, with only a few words to Yossi. He passed by the herd quietly and then rode hard and fast for some distance until, surrounded by silence, beige rocks, and fast-rising heat, he came to a ridge which he climbed and followed, seeking out a decent route suitable for cattle.

After an hour or two he thought he had found a good path and rode on it toward the place where the steers were being driven. He could see far off in the distance a light cloud marking their transit. Had he been new he might have departed from the path to that nights resting place at the point where the two were closest. But he could see that although he and his horse could pass through the ravine in between, the herd couldn't. So he left the path a good mile or two before most people would have and followed a gently rolling hill along its topmost ridge. In order to get to his destination along an easy way he sometimes had to travel in the opposite direction, waiting for the hill to curve around again and send him to where he was going. This reminded him of something he had heard a long time before, in Switzerland. He had taken it as a figurative lesson for his life, and then in the Golan he found himself all the time acting out its literal sense.

 

“I
N
S
WITZERLAND
,” saida tall bland-looking man whom the children called “Monsieur Yaourt,” “one must often go down in order to go up.” The lights switched off and a projector beamed a blinding ray at a glass-beaded screen. Leon covered his eyes until he heard the film winding through the sprockets and could smell the warm celluloid; he saw on the screen a black and white meadow, and mountains. He recognized on the wall what he saw each day in colors untranslatable in depth and perfection. He then saw a boy much like himself, about twelve, blond, in leather shorts, walking across a log bridge to the beginning of a trail. Klaus, as “Monsieur Yaourt” called him in his narration, was a Swiss boy about to climb a small non-dangerous mountain. Otherwise, he judiciously added, he never would have gone alone. Klaus knew when to set out, when to return, how to climb, and what to take. Klaus had asked his parents or some other higher authority if he could climb the small non-dangerous mountain alone. They had said yes only because he was a Swiss boy used to living in the country. And children from Paris would have to wait until they were older to climb mountains by themselves, small, dangerous, or otherwise. Klaus held up several completely unidentifiable packages and “Monsieur Yaourt” said, “He has taken with him for the ascension cheese, bread, meat, and fresh fruit.” Klaus was pictured going down in order to go up, and later after he had raised a large Swiss flag on a heavy pole waiting for him at the summit, going up in order to get down.

Leon noticed the strange mottled gray of the Swiss flag, a flag he knew to be scarlet red, a color not naturally common in the Alps, a color which in black and white has a peculiar heat and grain. And he stared at it with feigned intensity, but not more than that of the girl next to him who had an equally serious look. Each was sure the other was looking and wanted to appear grim and reflective. He was perfectly content to sit in the pinewood hall listening to the rapid clacka clacka clacka of the projector for as long as any film would run even if it were not a Charlie Chaplin because sitting next to him was a girl also from Paris, from the 16th as was he, a girl he had noticed in the station even in the midst of his fear at being packed away to the cool green Alps, a girl with dark red auburn hair and thin long legs and arms. She was tan and beautiful, and was prone to giggling, and tried to show that she did not care that he existed by doing cruel little things like walking away from him abruptly as he spoke, or making fun of him. But she cried every night and clasped her arms around his imagined presence because she loved him so much, so much that it frightened her, for it was a very deep and serious love for a child. Her name was Ann.

In Austerlitz Station, a Paris June, and lines of children waiting for special trains to take them to Brittany, Germany, and the Alps. Leon had come with his father to await the train. The little boy carried a small bag in which was a carefully packed tin of sandwiches, chocolate, a penknife, and a French translation of Mark Twain's
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
He wore schoolboy's shorts, a Bristol blue shirt, and an enameled pin glowing red and white with the Swiss flag and the name “Suisse.” He was young enough to half think, half imagine that the pin and small military bag would set him apart as a youthful Swiss official returning gravely to the country he knew so well, on a mission vaguely connected with banking, military affairs, and the prevention of German rearmament. And so he acted haughty and serious, silent, and in a way he thought to be adult. His father, a gentle but tough-looking man who had seen the Great War almost from its very beginning to its absolute end as a press officer assigned to all battles on all fronts, accompanied him and stood there in a gray suit with a Legion of Honor pin he had earned by filing thousands of dispatches to inform the public of the carnage. He had started with fine description, casting a good eye on the rapid clash of those two armies and the suffering countryside underneath, and had ended half-alive, with reports as clipped and sad as Morse code. But during the war he had fathered a son, an only son, who brought him back alive and restored his humor.

While standing by his boy he passed greetings to other fathers he knew or with whom he was acquainted, and this included a doctor of considerable wealth and age who lived in the same district and frequented the same restaurants and bookstores. The doctor's daughter was tall and looked older than her age: she had the most beautiful mouth and eyes Leon's father had ever seen, and when he saw her as he greeted her father he felt as if he were looking simultaneously into the past and the future. He was understanding what his son could only feel, that the life of their generations was here reborn, and blessed, and compassed; Leon in his confusion had only a sense as strong as memory of all his life, while shattering whistles reverberated between shafts of dusty light as trains ended or began what trains exist for.