Mitla Pass (44 page)

Dreams! I have only one dream ... only one. Where is it? Venice? Auschwitz? The Cornwall Coast? It is the same, always covered in billowing fog. I see him emerging from the white mist. “Father!” I call. His eyes are so cruel and filled with lust and anger. He smiles, thin-lipped. His Van Dyke beard coming to a sharp point.

I shiver. It is so cold.

“So you have won again,” Father says.

“It wasn’t my fault they found the note. I didn’t want to send you to the ovens. Father! Don’t go away this time! Father!”

Just as I am about to touch him, the fog envelops him and he is gone. I run after him ... nowhere ... nowhere ... “Father!”

We were once the Solomons of Budapest, a great affluent family. Thirty, forty, fifty at a gathering. Doctors, teachers, merchants. So highly respected. Monarchs of Jewish society.

I loathed him ... Professor Doctor Hubert Solomon. He was so cold, so unloving. The pain he caused my brothers as he sliced them down, never letting them rise to his level, and the pain he caused my mother when he went to bed with her.

It was me, Natasha, you wanted, wasn’t it, Father? He touches me, pats my head ... I cringe. His eyes follow me all the time. Yes, I want to love you, Father, so I can plunge a knife into your back.

The Nazis came and took us all ... uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers. Father and I escaped. I lived over half the war in a blond wig and sharing false “Aryan” documents with three other Jewish girls.

They found us and took us to Auschwitz. Luck had to run out. Or were we betrayed? Who will ever know? When we got to Auschwitz, we found out who carried messages and we learned the entire family had been killed ... everyone ... everyone ...

Just Father and I were left. We found a secret way to get messages to one another from the clothing factory where I worked to the school where he taught the children of the SS officers.
It was one of my messages that got him killed. The guards intercepted it and thought it was a coded message to the underground. It was only a birthday greeting. They never discovered me as the sender, but they sent him to the gas chamber and crematoria.

Father would have survived if I had not sent the message! But hadn’t we said all along that only one Solomon would survive?

Oh, Father, I did love you, really.

I hated you!

I loved you.

And you ... and you ... and you. Ah, you look just like Father. ... Come in, come in.

I love you till the strength is oozed from your stupid body. Till you can no longer move, function. Oh, Natasha has gotten you so tired you can hardly stand up. Well, get the hell out of here! You’re dead! Oh, I’m so sorry. I hate to see you beg and whimper. Get on your knees like a dog!

Natasha, you naughty girl, you’ve got to stop doing this.

... I would stop, but the dream keeps returning. He is in the fog luring me. So I will go to another party and another and another until I see him again ... the fog ... the smoke ... the smoke from the ovens of Auschwitz!

The costume party in Jerusalem? Wonderful!

There he is! The American. He swaggers toward me. I want him! “Hello, cowboy.”

The son of a bitch is a clever one. I will do it more slowly to him. The bastard. Doesn’t he ever get weary? He tells me things that make Natasha cry. His fingers always play over my tattoo number. It brings him pain, but he refuses to weaken like the others. Bastard!

I hate him.

I love him.

I hate him.

I love him.

What do you know about refugee camps and swamping blockade runners and barbed wire and guard dogs and the crematorium? I sent my father there! You understand what that means! The fog! The fog!

... bloody fog again ... even in Jerusalem ... what do you know, cowboy ... everything is hunky-dory in America ... oh, the wife and daughters are coming to Israel, how lovely ... but you will not leave Natasha. No one leaves Natasha until she is ready... .

A week later Gideon returned from a routine Negev patrol with a company from the Lion’s Battalion to his base at the Accadia Hotel. He was so grungy, one could almost smell him across the lobby.

He glanced at his mail, then stared at the telephone. He stared and stared and stared ... picked it up, set it down. An hour passed and he still stared. It rang, startling him.

“Hello,” he said.

“All right, you son of a bitch, I called first. Are you now satisfied?” Natasha said and slammed her receiver down.

“Oh Jesus,” Gideon moaned.

The phone rang again. Gideon lifted the receiver, a bit gun shy. “It is Natasha,” she said in a sudden soft voice. “I’m sorry. I knew you would be back today and I hoped you might want to see me.”

Gideon closed his eyes and clenched his teeth ... then broke. “Yes, I want to see you, God damn you. You haven’t left my mind all week. Where are you?”

“In the lobby. I’ll be right up.”

MITLA PASS

October 31, 1956

0400 HOURS, D DAY PLUS TWO

G
IDEON ROLLED OVER
in his sleep and lay on his bruised hip long enough for it to irritate him into wakefulness. He blinked his eyes open and saw Shlomo sitting with his back against the boulder, one eye open, one eye shut, like a coyote.

“What time is it, Shlomo?”

“Four in the morning. They made a good air drop, right on target. We’ve got a radio working. A message was sent to you from the P.M.’s office. The American evacuees were taken to Athens and will be flown to Rome tomorrow. I’m sure Val will wait for you in Rome.”

Gideon sat up, heaved a sigh of relief, and massaged his leg. “What’s happening?” he asked.

“Para 202 broke through at Thamad. They were approaching the Egyptian fortifications at Nakhl. It isn’t clear if they made a night attack or will try it in the morning. If Zechariah clears Nakhl, we’ll probably see him late tomorrow. If he gets stopped, Southern Command is going to try to evacuate us.”

“Jesus. How are we getting out of here?”

“Don’t worry, they’ll take Nakhl. You don’t know Zechariah. He is a bulldozer.”

“Hey,” Gideon said, “wow, look at those stars. How many do you think there are?”

“A billion billion? A trillion trillion? You will never see it again like out here in the desert.”

“You’re a desert rat. Once, a long time ago when I was a kid in Norfolk, I saw it like this. Someone took me flying out over the ocean. Man, it is cold.”

Shlomo fished through his pack and came up with a half bottle of brandy. Gideon took a swig, coughed, and grimaced.

“This stuff is weed killer, buzzards’ puke.”

“You have to understand the subtlety of Israeli brandy.”

“Val used it as nail-polish remover.”

“Speaking of Val, are you going to join her in Rome?”

“Honest to God, I don’t know, Shlomo. I’ll face up to that one if we get out of this mess. Maybe I’ll just disappear and turn up someday in a Tibetan monastery.”

“Tell the truth. You love Natasha?”

“I’ve tried to walk away from her a half-dozen times. I can’t.”

“But do you love her?”

“Every time we make love, we go out to another part of the universe. It happens every time. It has to be some kind of love, or lunacy, I guess. I know there are things I love about Val.”

“You’re greedy, that’s your problem,” Shlomo said, taking a long drink and banging the cork back on the bottle.

“Let me ask you something, Shlomo. Your wife ever cheat on you?”

“Naomi? That’s a fair question. I don’t know the answer and I don’t plan to find out. We started as kids together in the Palmach. When we were in training or forced marches, we slept together in the fields. Americans have a crazy thing about all women must be pure. It’s not the way life works. I’ve been on diplomatic missions to Burma, to Uganda, to America. Two, three months without her. She’d stay at the kibbutz with two kids. We are people, just people. We’re not saints. If Naomi has needed a man, she’s been extremely careful. I come home, I don’t ask her, she doesn’t ask me. I cannot get more love from anyone than I have from her. Americans are always worried about it. Why should it be bothering you in the middle of the Sinai?”

“I’m up to my eyeballs in guilt.”

“Natasha?”

“Natasha and others before her.”

“You should be guilty. You’ve been a real shmuck.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Gideon said. “Suppose you found out by accident that Naomi had been screwing around. What would you do?”

“You know how it goes. When you’re young and sitting around the campfire and life is just beginning and this question comes up, everyone says they would kill, they would break bones, they would walk away. Today? If she still loved me, I’d probably forgive her. It would kill her inside if I didn’t forgive her. You don’t kill the woman you love because she makes a normal, human mistake. Hell, anybody can get hot pants. The trouble with you Americans is you’re always playing Jesus, Joseph, and Mary.”

“I didn’t forgive Val,” Gideon said, as though he were speaking to himself, “and it’s bugging the hell out of me. I wish I could shout out to her so she’d hear me in Rome ... Val, I forgive you.”

“What’s with Val? She worships you. She does not love anybody else. I don’t believe it.”

“It happened a long time ago, years ago.”

“Then forget it. She’ll be waiting for you at the Leonardo da Vinci Airport and she’ll kiss your feet with love.”

“I can’t forget it. Maybe I’ll never forget it.”

“Then stick it away in a little closet in your head and close the door and lock it and throw away the key. Every day people have to make the decision to live with infidelity.”

“Maybe it would be dead and buried if I hadn’t run into Natasha.” And then Gideon’s voice quivered. “I need it as an excuse for what I’ve been doing. I started up with the women as soon as I became a published author. Up till now, I blamed Val for holding me back as a writer ... the old lady doesn’t understand me at home, sweetheart, so let’s you and me get it on for the weekend. It was my justification for a lot of crap I pulled. All Val’s fault. I didn’t realize it then, but I was giving away pieces of my soul.”

“Hey, don’t talk about it. Jumping from airplanes, morphine, the desert. Everything makes you crazy out here.”

“I never talked to anyone about it, because I was Mr. Macho Man. I wouldn’t admit my wife could or would do that to the great Gideon Zadok.”

“You know, we may be dead tomorrow at this time. What do you need to punish yourself for?”

“That’s right. Maybe we’ll be up in the stars looking down. I have to square it before the trip starts.”

Shlomo shook his head that he understood.

“It happened a few years ago,” Gideon continued.

“You’re still married, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but I handled it very badly. When I learned what Val had done, I went ape shit.”

Sherman Oaks, 1954

G
IDEON HAD COME
home from the studio early, aching all over, running a fever, and it was growing worse. He groaned and crawled his way into bed. After getting him settled in, Val left for the afternoon to pick up Roxy and Penny and deliver them to Girl Scouts and a piano lesson, respectively.

Within the hour, there was a frantic call from Gideon’s secretary, Belle Prentice.

“They’re having a hemorrhage over here, Gideon,” Belle said. “They rehearsed the garden scene today and it didn’t play. They’re shooting it tomorrow and there’s no cover set. The colonel wants to go back to your original idea.”

“Belle, you’ve got to be kidding. I’m sicker than a dog. I’m going to start upchucking any minute.”

“They want to send me over with the studio doctor.”

“Isn’t there some kind of state labor law against this sort of thing?”

“Honey, be a big Marine. It’s only three or four pages.”

“All right. Look, I’ll sketch it out and phone it in to you, so they can set up the lights and sound. I’ll have the dialogue in, sometime tonight. You going to be home?”

“I’ll stand by here at the studio.”

“Later.” Gideon moaned and rolled out of bed and dug the screenplay out of his attaché case. His legs were wobbly. God damn it, no foolscap pad! His office was in an outside building, so he began to fish around in Val’s desk, which occupied an alcove in the room.

“Ragpickers’ ball!” he mumbled as he waded through the nests of papers and God knows what in the desk drawers. Come on, Val, he thought, give me a break. Where’s a note pad?

What’s this! Gideon pulled out a key with a large black tag reading “King’s Court Motel—Santa Monica Blvd & La Cienega St. Room 357.”

He blinked in disbelief. He had used that motel on several occasions. Oh my God, he thought, his heart racing, Val has found the key! No, wait a minute. Gideon always asked for a certain corner room on the second floor. He’d never been on the third floor. What the hell was this all about?

Johnny Brookes had told him about the motel when he needed a hot sheet joint for a matinee. In fact, Johnny even registered him in on one occasion and brought the key over to him.

Johnny Brookes! Hold the phone!

Johnny and Cindy Brookes were part of “their” crowd, close buddies. John was an ex-Marine and was now a minor but promising director. He and Val and the Brookeses had been together a few dozen times, anyhow. Lots of nice, clean, grab-ass late barbecues and skinny dips at the Zadok pool and an equal number of trips to Johnny and Cindy’s place on the beach.

The Brookeses didn’t have any children. Cindy preferred poodles. John was a good sort, but he had become very unhappy and the marriage was floundering. He and Gideon bowled on the same team, played tennis as doubles partners by day and occasionally bummed around together in the evenings, particularly after a late working day. John didn’t monkey around too much, but he needed a quickie more often as the marriage soured and he had a yard-long list of available ladies.

Gideon began thinking back. Six months ago, Johnny was doing a film at Goldwyn and Gideon ran over for lunch from Pacific Studios. That’s when the King’s Court Motel first came up.

VAL AND JOHNNY IN THAT CRUMMY MOTEL!
Val naked in front of him! Johnny going down on her. Sixty-nining in front of those lousy headboard mirrors! Had he fed her pot or some of his goof balls? Did she wear the black lace garter belts? What about the filthy music and the oil baths and the water beds!