Raquela (56 page)

The paratroopers broke their way into narrow streets that wound into blind alleys. They ran, crouching against the sides of deserted houses and shuttered kiosks.

They reached the Western Wall.

A soldier scrambled to the top of the Wall and raised the flag of Israel. Chief Rabbi Shlomo Goren blew the
shofar
—the ram's horn—and the eerie notes
te-kee-ya
pierced the ears of the soldiers.

Shortly after noon, all the generals and all the commanders who had fought for Jerusalem—Dayan, Rabin, Narkiss, Motta Gur—and hundreds of their soldiers came together at the Wall.

All day and through the night the paratroopers, dirty, tired, their uniforms dusty and bloodstained, kept coming to the Wall, touching it, caressing it, kissing it, weeping. The Wall and their tears blended together.

On Mount Zion the commander of another paratroop unit stopped his half-track on the little plaza in front of the home of an elderly couple from South Africa, Albert and Pauline Rose.

“We're going into the Old City from this direction,” the commander told Mrs. Rose. “We've been selected. We're to put the flag of Israel on the Tower of David. But we haven't got a flag.”

Pauline Rose climbed the stairs to her bedroom, pulled a sheet out of her cupboard, opened a tube of blue paint, and painted a star of David on the sheet. Then she hurried down to her garden, found a long stick, and attached the sheet to it.

The paratroopers drove off, waving her flag. At the Citadel of David, they scaled the stone rampart and planted the homemade flag of Israel.

The mystery of the Wall seemed to touch all the wounded; Raquela felt a new spirit in the satellite hospitals. In the wards she could hear soldiers humming “Jerusalem the Golden.” It had become the anthem of the war. Jerusalem was reunited.

On the southern front the desert was ablaze. Israeli tanks and Soviet tanks, shelled from the ground, were blistering. The battle whipped up the sand, turning it into a blinding sea. The air was pierced with the noise of ammunition trucks' exploding. Helicopters chugged above the desert, landing just long enough to pick up the wounded. Parachutists dropped out of the sky, bringing water and more ammunition. The temperature climbed to one hundred five degrees.

Standing in the half-track with General Yeshayahu Gavish were his aides and liaison officers in constant radio communication with the units they represented: air force, armor, infantry, paratroops, artillery, engineer corps, medical corps, communications—all flying or plowing across the desert.

Buses carrying the troops trekked through the desert, followed by private cars, taxis, station wagons, milk wagons, and delivery wagons. There had been no time to paint them with army colors. Children had been given the job of splashing them with mud, “not for camouflage,” General Arik Sharon explained, “but to make them look a little military.” It was just as well the mud didn't stick. Looking down, the Israeli pilots could tell their troops from the Egyptians' when they saw ice-cream trucks, hot-dog vans, and laundry wagons navigating the desert.

The Israel Air Force flew a cover over the three brigades that were now reversing the course Moses had taken to lead the children of Israel out of Egypt.

Their goal was the Suez Canal and on
into
Egypt.

In the northern Sinai, Brigadier General Israel Tal, the builder of Israel's armored corps, rushed his troops along the Mediterranean.

In the center of the peninsula, Brigadier General Avraham Yoffe, the stout conservationist called back to duty from his job as director of national parks, sped his tanks across the sand dunes toward the Mitla Pass, the strategic gateway through the desert to the Canal.

In the south Arik Sharon's troops were fighting toward Nakhl, from which they were also wedging their way through the pass to the Canal.

On the sea, a small Israeli naval assault force with helicopter cover sailed from Eilat to capture the Straits of Tiran. To their disgust, they found the Straits empty: the Egyptians had fled.

Two
A.M
. Friday morning, June 9, Yoffe's forces reached the Canal.

Less than five days after the Egyptian threat to fight a holy war had exploded in the Gaza Strip, the Egyptian army was in flight across the desert. The great Soviet fleet of tanks lay burned or captured.

In New York, Mohammed Awad el-Kony, Egypt's suave ambassador to the United Nations, handed a message to U Thant. It was apparent that el-Kony found the message too agonizing to read himself. U Thant read it to the Security Council. The Egyptian government agreed to a UN cease-fire. The war in Sinai, in Jerusalem, and on the West Bank was over. It was not yet over in the Galilee.

Of all the Arabs who encircled Israel, the Syrians were the most vicious.

From the day the war broke out, they directed an almost ceaseless barrage of artillery fire at the northern kibbutzim and the new little development towns. People were killed, houses demolished, livestock destroyed, orchards and fields of cotton and grain decimated. Women and little children lived in the shelters underground. The northern villages knew the war as no other part of Israel knew it; for six full days they took its brunt.

At seven
A.M
. on Friday morning, General David Elazar, known affectionately as Dado—a Youth Aliyah graduate who had escaped from Hitler as a child—gave the command.

From all the kibbutzim and settlements that had endured Syrian fire for nineteen terror-filled years, the army now moved with trucks and half-tracks and jeeps, with infantry and tanks, and with the Israel Air Force.

They moved up the cliffs, some of which had never been scaled by men.

In Kibbutz Dan, Major Mottel, watching through binoculars, saw the first Israeli tanks burst into flames, blown apart by Syrian mines and antitank fire. He saw men leap out of turrets to pull the wounded out of the burning tractors and tanks. Under searing fire, they raced to climb into other vehicles. The tanks lumbered up the Golan Heights like prehistoric monsters.

The men in the kibbutzim below the cliffs saw the slaughter. Each time a tank exploded, they knew three men were trapped in it.

Leading a unit up a hill was Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Klein, an infantry battalion commander who had come from Hungary. The Syrians destroyed his half-track; Colonel Klein escaped from his burning vehicle and with his soldiers climbed the rest of the hill on foot—running, crouching, taking cover wherever they could find it. He saw two groups of his soldiers moving up the hill separately, and, fearing they might mistake one another for the enemy, he stood up to coordinate the two groups. The Syrians killed him.

Behind him, his deputy, Major Zohar, took over. A Syrian bullet pierced his neck; the medics carried him down the hill past the troops racing forward. Thirty-year-old Major Alexander Krinsky, who had come with Youth Aliyah from Poland, was rushed in; he led the men up to the top of the hill, and there he was killed.

Without officers, even without orders, the soldiers continued to advance.

The hills were blocked by fences of barbed wire protecting the Syrian trenches and the fantastic underground network of Soviet-built concrete bunkers from which the Syrians could blast every vehicle scaling the Heights.

All Friday afternoon the Israelis fought along the Golan Heights, racing down roads, encircling camps and villages. The Heights and the valley were blazing with smoke and fire.

At dawn on Saturday, with heavy air support, the Golani Brigade, made up of crack infantry, burst into the village of Baniyas, the fortified area where the Syrians had sought to divert the headwaters of the Jordan River.

Another force raced over tough mountain terrain, knocked out antitank emplacements, and pushed on toward Kuneitra, the largest city on the Golan plateau. The Syrian army was collapsing, retreating as fast as it could to Damascus, forty-five miles away.

One day after the first breakthrough into Syrian territory, the battle for the Golan Heights was over.

The casualties were heavy: one hundred fifteen Israelis killed and thirty wounded; one thousand Syrians dead—no one knew how many wounded—and six hundred taken prisoner. Eighty thousand Syrian soldiers and civilians had fled.

The Syrians lost the Golan Heights, the cliffs from which they had harassed and killed for nineteen years.

On Saturday afternoon silence fell on the kibbutzim. The children climbed out of the shelters and were blinded by the sunlight. To Major Mottel in Kibbutz Dan the silence was that of a roaring ocean that had suddenly grown still.

Islands of light glittered in all the hills and valleys of the north. The people were told, “Turn on your lights—even your searchlights. No more blackouts. The Heights of Golan are ours.”

That Saturday afternoon, Raquela and Moshe entered the Old City of Jerusalem on foot.

They walked through the narrow streets. Señora Vavá had lived here, and before her, for more than three hundred years, the family had walked on these stones, had lived and borne children and died here.

They reached the Western Wall. Raquela pressed her head against the Wall. Moshe and their four children had come through the war alive.

A few days later, Raquela opened the French doors and walked through the garden to the patio of Mama's cottage. Voices floated to her, a strange voice she could not recognize. She hurried through the little foyer to the living room.

A tall woman in a black Bedouin gown stood talking animatedly, towering over Mama. Could it be? The mysterious smell of musk and incense filled the room.

“Aisha!”

The Arab woman flushed with pleasure. “Can this beautiful woman be my little Raquela?”

The two tall women embraced. Then Raquela stood back, for a moment a little girl again, watching Mama and Aisha, drawn to each other by some strange bond, their hair a web of gray laced with black, their faces creased with nearly seventy years of living.

“I will get us coffee,” Mama said in the tones she had spoken each morning on the patio before Jerusalem had been torn in half.

Raquela and Aisha sat together on the sofa, holding hands, euphoric.

The truncated city had become whole again. The ugly barbed-wire fences and the corrugated tin walls were torn down. Jerusalem was one city.

There had been dire predictions of bloodshed. Jews would be massacred if they entered the Old City; Arabs would be massacred if they walked down Zion Square. But the warnings were groundless.

The moment the barriers came down, Raquela had joined the thousands of Jews swarming through the Old City, revisiting her favorite little shops, welcomed again by friendly Arab merchants eager to sell their wares.

On Zion Square, Arab men in long gowns and
keffiyehs
and women in beautifully embroidered Bedouin dresses entered the clothing stores to study the western fashions and pushed shopping carts through the wondrous aisles of the supermarket.

Aisha and Raquela caught up with each other's lives. In 1948 Aisha and her family had gone to live with relatives in East Jerusalem. She was a grandmother many times over.

Mama entered carrying a tray with demitasse cups of Turkish coffee.

“And how is the boy?” Aisha asked. “Jacob, who used to fill my basket with pine twigs from your garden?”

Mama's hand trembled; the cups shook.

Raquela spoke mutedly. “Jacob is dead. He was very ill.”

“Ah,” Aisha sighed. “I loved him like my own son.”

Mama, in control again, handed her the little cup of coffee.

“Do you remember,” Aisha asked, “I always brought you eggs so fresh—the minute the chickens laid them.”

“I remember,” Mama said. “You never fooled me.”

Raquela watched the two women in silence. Would this euphoria last?

She stood up. “Aisha, I must leave for work. Please come again soon.”

“I will come, Raquela. I will bring you eggs and figs. It will be as if nothing had happened—between then and now.”

TWENTY-NINE

JULY 1967

R
aquela spent the next days talking, feeling, looking, listening, exploring, walking—walking endlessly—through the Old City.

Then, one morning, driving her car to work, she felt an overwhelming urge to return to Scopus.

She was glad no one was with her. She wanted to be alone, her emotions deflected by no one. She drove through the city toward East Jerusalem. The hideous fences and barbed wire were still there, but torn down and shoved aside.

It was 1943 again and she was a nineteen-year-old girl on Bus 9 riding through a snowstorm. She steered her car through the broad streets hugging the crenellated walls of the Old City. Now the road began to wind. Her hands gripped the wheel in a spasm of fear. She was in Sheikh Jarrah:
Dr. Yassky…the convoy…the seventy-seven doctors and nurses massacred
.

Through the windshield she saw Arab men sitting on little stools in front of their coffeehouses, smoking hubble-bubble pipes. The mufti's villa and the Nashashibi houses stood, surrounded by trees, untouched by the war.

Above the Arab houses she saw the white flags of surrender fluttering in the mountain breeze. Her hands relaxed on the wheel.

Now she was traveling up the Mount of Olives with its crown—Mount Scopus. She drove slowly, apprehensive, beginning to fear what nineteen years and three wars had done to its “monumental serenity.”

She left the car on the road. Hesitantly she approached the hospital. The white marblelike tiles were discolored and broken, like ancient ruins. The garden was a jungle of weeds and rubble. She picked her way through the dirt and stones and entered the main hall. It looked haunted. Cobwebs spun a gray filigree around the rusted pipes; the marble floor was carpeted in dust and fallen plaster.

The rest of the world was blocked out. Memories spilled over. Her graduation. The student nurses sitting on the marble steps in blue and white uniforms, like cornflowers. The speakers table…
Raquela Levy
—Shulamit Cantor's voice echoed through the empty hall—
will you please come forward.…You have been selected outstanding student in your class
…”