Refiner's Fire (60 page)

There was an enormous, airy silence.

“I'll keep you in mind, Ashkenazi,” Marshall just managed to say.

Then, like a dream, it was all over and he was free again—shorn, thin, and strong. In a state of shock and joy, he was on his way to Nablus, riding north in an Army truck with two dozen of his fellow criminals.

M
ARSHALL AND
Robert were granted the first takes of Lenny's brandy, and they finished half the bottle. Thus the ride was painless, and rather than fearing the truck's excessive speed, they fell in love with it.

They felt as if they had spent millennia on the West Bank, but for the first time its beauty rolled out before them without inhibition—the autumn air, the miniature villages, the mountains, and the valleys. The towns were feudal in appearance and they beckoned like Oz. Having often been described in monographs and magazines, they were familiar, and yet they were forbidding. They had been conquered and could lie very still—still like a dragon.

Arab women beat the high olive branches with long switches. They had clothes of bright uncompromising colors Semitic in character and with no middle border or merging comfort, and their crackling fires burned a white quick smoke. As the truck sped past, they and their daughters machine-gunned it with their sparkling eyes.

Only Marshall was getting out at Nablus, since Kfar Yona was farther northeast in the Jordan Valley. The others were going to Haifa, and from there would make their ways. The truck did not stop, but, according to Army custom, it merely slowed. Marshall threw out his duffel and flew after it. A searing pain traveled through him as he hit the hard concrete. He toppled over and his magazines of ammunition scattered about. The truck disappeared.

He was drunk in Nablus, a city not known for its friendliness to the occupiers, and he collected his clips, shouldered his stuff, and staggered to the bus station. He had to wait an hour until a bus left for Bet Shan, and he went to an open-air cafe. The sun was shining bright and warm, and Marshall ordered tea and pastry. The way the people there gazed at him was like four hundred proclamations nailed on four hundred doors. The message was clear, but did they not understand that he too had his troubles? No, they did not. They would not have blinked one of their many eyes had he been ripped apart and quartered right then and there. And yet he was only a man, and he as they had been impressed into the matter as part of a supernatural levy. He had been born not far off, in the sea, while a battle raged. They had no exclusive claim to that coast. He had no desire to rule them. Since the tenth of June, 1967, he had been firmly against the occupation of Gaza or of the populated West Bank. He understood the hateful stares. But he felt the strong acid of his own imperative. They would have killed him there had they been able. And that was enough to make him happy that the gun he carried could fire 600 rounds a minute and would never jam. He was passing through Nablus on his way to Lydia. He grit his teeth. These people wanted to kill him. By force of arms, he would get through. To hell with them. The tea and pastries were sweet and he had paid for them, and the price had been steep, and he was not about to be marched backward into a grave. “To hell with them. To hell with them,” he muttered. “Survival is moral. In itself alone it is right.”

“Where are you coming from?” asked a young lieutenant as they boarded the bus. Marshall was shocked that an officer could speak with such kindness.

“The Fourth Daughter.”

“No wonder you're drunk,” said the lieutenant. “Lets sit in the back. That way no one can grab us from behind. Look at how they look at us. We must be careful.” He knocked Marshall in the ribs. “They want to eat us.”

Speeding over arthritic roads and choked bridges, they passed lines of rolling hills and descended to dry grasslands. Wheat-colored late November light flooded in and filled the slick inner barrel of the bus. Marshall and the lieutenant sat wide-eyed and seasick in the back, over the motor.

“The most important thing,” said Marshall, by this time only half drunk, “is to tell the truth.”

“I don't think so. Only a barbarian doesn't dress his thoughts. It's civilized and correct to lie a little.”

“No. Fire burns, but the best thing is to put your hand in the flames and hold it there.”

“Why?”

“Because then you are most alive. Not telling the truth is like being dead. It doesn't hurt, but you might as well be dead.”

“But why fire?”

“You feel everything.”

“You feel the fire.”

“And in the fire is everything.”

“You are speaking like this ... not because you are drunk ... but, I think, because you've come from the Fourth Daughter.”

Marshall turned to him. “The Fourth Daughter
is
fire.”

I
N LATE
afternoon, Marshall began the walk of several miles to Kfar Yona. Weighted with equipment, he sweated as he did double-time down the road. He pushed on. His heart beat wildly and it frightened him, but he used all his blood and strength to run, and he could not run enough.

Breathless, he passed the wire perimeter. Coming upon their white room, he threw open the door. She was not there. A letter tablet was on the table, and a coffee cup rested on a chair. In his absence, she had begun to drink coffee.

A man he didn't even know looked in. “You must be Marshall.” Marshall nodded. “Lydia is in the cemetery, gardening. After work she gardens it. We think its a little strange.”

“
You
think. Who the hell are you?” He dropped his things and shot out the door like a horse leaving a starting gate. He ran down the road to the cemetery so fast that it frightened the birds. It was as if he had been in training all that time just to run down that road.

He didn't see her, but he knew that she was there because he felt her presence. Suddenly, she popped up with her back to him—she had been bending over. There she stood like an Englishwoman in her garden, with the sun lighting her hair as she pulled weeds off a rake. He saw the sweet, solid, beautiful shape of her back. She was wearing her dark blue cardigan. He knew it well: it was as soft as the underbelly of a lamb.

She stood calmly, framed by the high royal palms and the tendrils of a winding iron fence. His last steps were long astounding leaps. He choked on her name. She turned and it was an opening, time-lapse flowers, the slow crown of droplets, as they laughed amidst the shock and wonder and flight. Marshall cleared the vine-wrapped fence by many feet. He spread his arms wide and baffled the flow of air as he flew in deep, still, smooth slow motion. They watched one another's faces as they came together. They rolled on the ground. They touched, and it was like breathing again. It almost burst his heart.

T
HEY HAD
very little time, and decided upon a night picnic in a hayfield. That evening they went to the kitchen and filled infirmary containers with freshly baked rolls, cold beef, salad, steaming hot tea, and what the cooks called Italian Chocolate Slice. Lydia pinched a carafe of wine from the religious stores, and they walked into the darkness, carrying what looked like aluminum models of Chinese silos.

Had they stayed inside they would have fought like hell, because the tensions were remarkable. Lydia had become good friends with new people that Marshall didn't even know. It drove him crazy. And when he mentioned Lenny, Hannah, Baruch, Ashkenazi, Maloof the sneak thief, and the rest, she too felt abandoned and as if he had jumped connections with insulting ease. Having been a woman waiting for her husband to return from the Army, Lydia was changed. Needless to say, Marshall was also changed. Like mating in the dark with a stranger, things just didn't slide so easily. She had little comprehension of where Marshall had been, and he wanted least of all to convey the full sense of the Fourth Daughter; but she was curious and kept asking questions. He was bound to leave at noon the next day, to travel via Nablus to an ammunition dump he had yet to see. The limited hours pressed on them like the lid of a tomb.

But the tension dispersed over the fields into a sky of whitened star-roads. The wind brushing the trees by the Jordan, the faint flow of the Jordan itself, the dewless cool grass, and the great and compassionate silence healed divisions as they appeared.

This was due in large part to Lydia's character and imagination. Dreading a catfight in their tiny room, she had pulsed with ideas to avert it. Her understanding of their natures had led her to bring him into a quiet field far outside the perimeter, the security lights, and the guard towers.

Slowly finding one another's speed, slowly joining together again, they could hardly speak. The time limit almost sickened them. When the moon came up it cleared the Jordan escarpment painfully fast, sending Marshall into a panic, but after he had finished his Italian Chocolate Slice and two thirds of hers (as was the custom in the case of things chocolate), she had him deep in her arms and she was deep in his. The distance disappeared; he told of how frightening it had been; she told of how lonely; and as a warm wind spilled over the mountains—a late autumn gift from Saudi Arabia—they fell back on the dry hay and slept under the traveling blond light of a bright flame-curled moon, unconscious in the rich protective din of crickets and tree frogs.

With the dawn came several combines moving parallel in the distance. They were green; they hummed; and they had come on a last foray into the hay. When the sun took fire on the lip of the escarpment, Marshall cursed the speed of astronomical processes. He discovered that, on leave, heavenly bodies rushed about the sky in madness, plotting against the slow drift of time. This reminded him of Major Pike and the great machinery hall of the Eagle Bay School. In illustration of an eclipse, the Major had cranked the orrery too far. Since the universe refused to back up, he had to bring it around again. “It's going to take five minutes,” he said to his cigar, knowing that the children would go wild. “The only thing to do is dance. Dance. When Holly and I found that time passed slowly in the Philippines or in Nicaragua, we just danced. The British danced too, all over the world.” He looked up at the children, who, because he was a wizard, would have done anything he said. “You kids do some dancing while I crank up the universe. Harlan Holmes, turn on the Victrola and put in cylinder sixteen—that's ‘Camp Town Races, Doo Dah.' ” Marshall danced with Francie Alden, a delicate little girl who was growing her long golden hair to drop out of a tower window. Around and around they went in a sort of waltz. “Can't you foxtrot?” asked Major Pike. “You're in the third grade.” They tried to foxtrot, but failed, and returned to the waltz. Under the biplane, the battle flags, and other stuff hung from the ceiling, they heard “Camp Town Races, Doo Dah,” five times before they drifted over to see how the universe was coming. Cigar ashes littered its green felt floor. The room was full of Havana smoke. The Major worked furiously. His glasses were in themselves moonlike and frosted on their rimless edges. Every now and then he would bend down and pat Franks snow-white fur.

“Who was Frank?” asked Lydia, stuffing the last of the rolls into her mouth.

“He was the Major's dog, a strange-looking thing (looked just like a horseradish). Frank was a genius—the only dog in the world who could work a drill press. On military holidays, of which we had about forty in Eagle Bay, the Major would take him hiking. Frank wore a knapsack and a little green hat with a feather in it. It looked entirely appropriate. In first grade, we believed that he had been a student who had misbehaved. You should have seen how the little girls talked to him, and kissed him on his broad white forehead, hoping to change him back.”

Suddenly dozens of jet fighters came roaring over the hills. They flew at 100 feet, far beneath the Syrian radars, to spring suddenly on the Golan. Their thunderous engines came wickedly close, each trailing a pyramidal torch of superheated fire. The noise shook the earth as, one after another, the Skyhawks and Phantoms from Ramat David passed above, quicker than silver and blue in the belly. The air smelled of kerosene, and the combines suddenly veered and began to paddle toward Marshall and Lydia.

“Let's get out of here,” said Lydia, rising.

“You have beautiful legs,” replied Marshall, still on the ground. “Quick, back to the room.” They jumped on a trailer towed by an enormous tractor.

“Is your Hebrew good enough for you to talk to a general?” Marshall asked.

“My Hebrew is good enough for me to talk to God.”

“Good. I want you to speak to the Commander of the Second Mountain Brigade. He seemed to be intelligent and nice. The idea is to get me back to my rightful place—a fresh start.”

“Are you sure you want that?”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. It might be risky.”

“Look. That way I might be stationed within half an hours bus ride.”

“You might also be stationed on the Syrian line.”

“They can't do that. I'm an only-son.”

L
YDIA COULD
work wonders. When Marshall passed again through Nablus on the way to Camp Nashqiya, it seemed like a city of gardens, and its inhabitants were as friendly and talkative as the citizens of a Hudson town before a major thunderstorm. They appeared to understand completely Marshall's lot as a soldier. He returned to the cafe, where the waiter greeted him with a warm smile. The architecture was beautiful. The light struck the stone softly and sweetly, and the Arab girls were dignified and royal.

How amazing, thought Marshall, that everything works so precisely well. The streets are clean and dry. Lamb is cooking on the spits for tonight's dinner. Bread rises. Oranges sit in fragrant piles, and the orange vendor is clean, honest, and punctual. Everyone feels as comfortable and as good as if he had just finished a hard day's work. The flags and banners are washed and pressed. This is paradise.