Leon Uris (96 page)

It was here in the Negev Desert that Colonel Ari Ben Canaan volunteered for duty after the War of Liberation. He was assigned the task of learning every inch of this vital place hemmed in by three sworn enemies, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia.

Ari took troops over the killing slate fields and through the wadis in places where no human was meant to travel. He devised training so brutally hard that few armies of the world could duplicate it. All officer candidates were sent to Ari to receive some of the most severe physical testing human beings could stand.

Ari’s permanent troops became known as “the Beasts of the Negev.” They were a raw, spirited breed of desert rats who hated the Negev while they were in her and longed for her when they were away. Twenty parachute drops, hundred-kilometer forced marches, road-gang labor, hand-to-hand combat were all part of the experiences that made the Beasts of the Negev men among men. Only the toughest could qualify. The army of Israel gave no medals for bravery—one soldier was considered as brave as the next—but those who wore the shield of the Beasts of the Negev were held in special awe.

Ari’s base was Elath. He watched it grow into a town of a thousand hardy pioneers. Water was piped in and the copper mines went into full operation. Paths grew to roads as the Jews worked to strengthen their southern foothold.

There were whispers about the strangeness of Colonel Ben Canaan. He never seemed to laugh, rarely to change his hard expression. There seemed to be a sorrow and longing gnawing at him, forcing him to push himself, and his troops too, almost beyond human endurance. He refused to come out of the desert for two long years.

Kitty Fremont had become known as “the Friend,” a title hitherto conferred only upon P. P. Malcolm, the founder of the Night Raiders. After the War of Liberation, Kitty involved herself in immigration work and soon was the chief trouble shooter for the Zion Settlement Society.

In January of 1949 at the beginning of Magic Carpet, Kitty had been asked to leave Gan Dafna and go to Aden to organize the medical facilities in the children’s compound of the Hashed camp. Kitty proved a wizard at the chore. She brought order out of chaos. She was firm in her orders, yet tender in her treatment of the youngsters who had walked from Yemen. In a matter of months she had become a key official in the Zion Settlement Society.

From Aden she went directly to Magic Carpet at Bagdad, an airlift operation twice the size of the Yemenite airlift. Then with things under control in Iraq she rushed to Morocco, where tens of thousands of Jews poured out of the
mellahs
of Casablanca to go “up” to Israel.

She went from place to place as the
aliyahs
of the exodus formed. She made hasty flights to the European DP camps to break bottlenecks and she scoured Europe to find personnel and supplies. When the high point of the flood receded, Kitty was recalled to Jerusalem, where the Zion Settlement Society assigned her as an official in Youth Aliyah.

She had helped bring the youngsters in. Now she went at the job of getting them integrated into the complex society of Israel. Villages like Gan Dafna were the answers, but they were too few for the numbers arriving. The older ones received an education from the army of Israel, which became the greatest single integration instrument in the country, among other things teaching every new soldier to read and write Hebrew.

Kitty Fremont by now spoke a fluent Hebrew. She was at home flying in with Foster MacWilliams and a load of tubercular children, or visiting a border
kibbutz
. “
Shalom, Giveret
Kitty,” was a password in a hundred places which held her children.

And then something happened that Kitty found both heart-warming and heartbreaking at once. Kitty began to see the infants of the older youths she had known at Gan Dafna who had married and gone to the settlements. Some of them had been her babies in the camp in Cyprus and on the
Exodus
, and now they had children of their own. Kitty had watched the machinery of Youth Aliyah grow until it could handle any emergency. She had helped set up the administration and train the people, from the first harrowing trials of inexperience to the point where they constituted a smooth-functioning organization. Now Kitty Fremont suddenly realized, with heavy heart, that her work was done. Neither Karen nor Israel would need her, and she decided she should leave forever.

B
ARAK
B
EN
C
ANAAN
reached his eighty-fifth year.

He retired from public life and was content to worry about running his farm at Yad El. It was what he had longed for for half a century. Even at his great age Barak remained a powerful man, mentally alert and physically able to put in a full day’s work in his fields. His enormous beard was almost fully white, but there were still traces of the old red flame in it and his hand still had a grip of steel. The years after the War of Liberation gave him great contentment. He had time, finally, to devote to himself and Sarah.

His happiness, however, was qualified by the unhappiness of Jordana and Ari. Jordana did not get over the death of David Ben Ami. She was wild and restless. She had traveled in France for a while and she plunged into a few unsatisfying affairs that ended in bitterness. At last she returned to Jerusalem, David’s city, and went back to the university, but there was an eternal emptiness about her.

Ari had banished himself to the Negev. Barak knew the reason for Ari’s exile, but he was unable to reach his son.

It was just after his eighty-fifth birthday that Barak developed stomach pains. For many weeks he said nothing about them. As he thought of it, he was entitled to a few aches and pains. A nagging cough followed the pains, impossible to conceal from Sarah. She insisted he see a doctor but Barak made light of it. Whenever he did promise, he generally found reason to put off a visit to the doctor.

Barak received a call from Ben Gurion asking if he and Sarah would come to Haifa for the celebration of the third Independence Day and sit in the reviewing stand. It was a singular honor for the old man and he said he would come. Sarah used the occasion of the trip as a lever to make Barak promise to get a full examination. They left for Haifa five days before the celebration. Barak went into the hospital to undergo a complete physical check-up. He stayed in the hospital until the day of Independence eve.

“What did the doctors say?” Sarah asked.

Barak laughed. “Indigestion and old age. They gave me some pills.”

Sarah tried to press the issue.

“Come on, old girl. We are here to celebrate Independence Day.”

Crowds had been pouring into Haifa all day. They hitchhiked, drove, and came by plane and train. The city was bulging with humanity. All day long people stopped by Barak’s hotel room to pay their respects to him.

In the evening a torchlight parade of youth groups started the celebrations. They passed in review before the green at the City Hall on Har Ha-Carmel and after the usual speeches there was a fireworks display from Mount Carmel.

The entire length of Herzl Street was packed with tens of thousands of people. Loud-speakers played music and every few yards
hora
rings formed. Herzl Street was a riot of whirling feet and music and color. Barak and Sarah joined the
hora
rings and danced to riotous applause.

Barak and Sarah were invited as guests of honor to the Technical Institute where the “Brotherhood of Fire,” the Palmach fighters during the riots, had gathered. They lit a huge bonfire and Yemenites danced and Druse Arabs danced and a lamb was roasted and Arab coffee was brewed and a chorus sang oriental and Biblical songs. All over the campus of the Technical Institute boys and girls from the settlements slept in each other’s arms. The “Brotherhood of Fire” danced and sang until daybreak.

Sarah and Barak returned to their hotel to freshen up, and even at daybreak the dancing was still going on in all the streets. Later in the day they drove in an open car along the parade route, to thunderous cheers, and went to the reviewing stand alongside the President.

Carrying banners like the ancient tribes, New Israel marched past Barak—the Yemenites, now proud and fierce soldiers and the tall strong
sabra
boys and girls and the flyers from South Africa and America and the fighters who had come from every corner of the world. The elite paratroops in their red berets and the border guards in green marched by. Tanks rumbled and planes roared overhead. And then Barak’s heart skipped a beat as the ovation rose in a new crescendo and the bearded, leathery Beasts of the Negev saluted the father of their commander.

After the parade there were more speeches and parties and celebrations. When Barak and Sarah left for Yad El two days later, dancers were still whirling in the streets.

No sooner had they reached their cottage at Yad El than Barak broke into a long, wracking spasm of coughing, as though he had been holding it in by main strength during the celebrations. He sagged into his big chair, exhausted, as Sarah brought him some medicine.

“I told you it would be too much excitement,” she admonished. “You should start acting your age already.”

Barak’s mind was on the tanned, rough youngsters marching in the parade. “The army of Israel ...” he mumbled.

“I’ll make some tea,” she said, fondly mussing his hair.

Barak took her wrist and pulled her down on his lap. She rested her head on his shoulder and then looked at him questioningly, and he turned his eyes away.

“Now that the celebrations are through,” Sarah said, “tell me what the doctors really told you.”

“I never have been able to lie to you very well,” he said.

“I won’t make a fuss, I promise.”

“Please understand that I am ready,” Barak said. “I think I have known it all along.”

Sarah uttered a short cry and bit her lip.

Barak nodded slowly. “You had better send for Ari and Jordana.”

“Cancer?”

“Yes.”

“How long?”

“A few months ... a few wonderful months.”

It was hard to think of Barak as anything but a giant. Now, in the succeeding weeks, his age showed frightfully. The flesh had melted from his powerful frame and he was bent with age and his complexion had turned sallow. He was in great pain but he hid the fact and adamantly refused to be moved to a hospital.

His bed was arranged by a window so that he could spend his days looking out upon his fields and up the hills to the border of Lebanon. When Ari arrived he found Barak here, gazing with sadness toward the place where Abu Yesha no longer existed.

“
Shalom, abba
,” Ari said embracing Barak. “I came as quickly as I could.”

“
Shalom
, Ari. Let me look at you, son. It has been so long ... over two years. I thought you might be at the celebrations with your troops.”

“The Egyptians have been acting up at Nitzana. We had to make a reprisal.”

Barak studied his son. Ari was bronzed from the Negev sun and looked as powerful as a lion.

“The Negev agrees with you,” he said.

“What is all this nonsense
ema
tells me?”

“Don’t feel obligated to cheer me up, Ari. I am ancient enough to die gracefully.”

Ari poured some brandy and lit a cigarette while Barak continued to study him. Tears welled in the old man’s eyes.

“I have been happy these days, except for you and Jordana. If I could only go and know I am leaving you content.”

Ari sipped his brandy and turned his eyes away. Barak took his son’s hand.

“They tell me you could be chief of staff of the army of Israel someday, if you would choose to come out of the desert.”

“There is work to be done in the Negev, Father. Someone has to do it. The Egyptians are forming
fedayeen
gangs of murderers to cross the border and raid our settlements.”

“But you are not happy, Ari.”

“Happy? You know me, Father. I’m not given to making demonstrations of happiness like new immigrants.”

“Why have you shut yourself off from me and your mother for two years?”

“I am sorry about that.”

“You know, Ari, for the first time in my life, these past two years, I have had the luxury of being able just to sit and think. It is wonderful for a man to be able to meditate in peace. And in these last few weeks I have had even more time. I have thought of everything. I know that I have not been a good father. I have failed you and Jordana.”

“Come, Father ... I won’t listen to such nonsense. Don’t get sentimental on me.”

“No, there’s truth in what I say. It seems now I see so clearly. You, and Jordana, and I ... the little time I have been able to give you ... and Sarah. Ari, for a family this is wrong.”

“Father ... please. No son has had the love and the understanding that I have. Perhaps all fathers believe they could have done more.”

Barak shook his head. “When you were a small boy, you were a man. You stood beside me and worked these swamps when you were twelve. You have not needed me since I put a bull whip in your hands.”

“I don’t want to hear any more of this. We live in this country for what we can do for tomorrow. It is the way you had to live and the way I live now. I won’t let you torment yourself. We had to live this way because we have never had a choice.”

“That is what I try to tell myself, Ari. I say what else? A ghetto? A concentration camp? Extermination ovens? I say anything is worth this. Yet, this freedom of ours ... the price is so high. We cherish it so fiercely that we have created a race of Jewish Tarzans to defend it. We have been able to give you nothing but a life of bloodshed and a heritage of living with your back to the sea.”

“No price is too great for Israel,” Ari said.

“It is—when I see sadness in my son’s eyes.”

“You didn’t take David Ben Ami from Jordana. It is the price of being born a Jew. Is it not better to die for your country than to die the way your father died, at the hands of a mob in a ghetto?”

“But the sadness of my son is my fault, Ari.” Barak licked his lips and swallowed. “Jordana has become a great friend of Kitty Fremont.”