Refiner's Fire (68 page)

By the end of October, only three soldiers remained in the high-ceilinged room near the sea. The others had died—attesting to the skill of the doctors, who had said that they would. They still did not know who Marshall was. The dental records office was unable to place him, and several slips of paper announcing this lay amid the magazines. Soon though, his family would come (as had many families of the missing) to look over the terminal ward. A score of fathers seeking their sons, and half that many distressed mothers and wives had been escorted past the bed in which Marshall lay. His family
would
arrive. There were only a certain number of missing, and the Army knew about this nameless one at Hospital 10. But it was difficult and complicated, because the war on the Syrian front was not over. Who had time for the missing? In striving to keep alive the living, commanders were too busy to pay heed to the dead and the dying.

Sometimes a warm wind would arise and carry into the ward the smell of pitch from the railroad ties and the voluminous sweetness of flowers in the war cemeteries clustered at the foot of Carmel. The nurses walked on the railway and crossed a muddy ditch to reach the cemeteries, where they went to rest and talk. Their favorite was the British because it was immaculate, the benches did not splinter, and there was much grass between the graves. Often a cold wind came in from dancing above the sea on luminescent spray, and it smelled of salt and great distance. The air in the ward was always cool and dark, and seemed to have a life of its own. It explored and circled as if it were searching. Sometimes the young nurse stared at it, in nearly angry puzzlement, and it answered by whipping a curtain, or by suddenly turning the pages of her magazines.

 

P
AUL
L
EVY
arrived in Israel for official reasons and because his brother-in-law was reported missing on the slopes of Mt. Hermon. The Livingstons followed. During the Second World War, Livingston had been in Jerusalem—for him a city of soldiers with guns, high above the mundane world, rarefied in action by the swirling magnetic conduct of war around it. Levy's position, his splendid blue uniform with a shock of decorations, and his physical presence, when combined with the age and dignity of Livingston, opened all doors. A full colonel escorted them.

Livingston became angry when the Admiral went to see politicians and generals, leaving in abeyance the search for Marshall. To Livingston's reprimanding eyes, Levy said, “I'm sorry, but I represent the United States. The business of nations, especially now, is more important than any one man's life—even if he is my brother-in-law and your adopted son.”

“That's your military training is it,” said Livingston, “duty?”

“Yes. That's my military training, and yours too. And it's right in both cases.”

But it was Levy who had them in a records office in Tel Aviv one midnight, searching with harried clerks and translators through a pile of folders. They had converted Marshall's height and weight into metric, and they sat with their jackets off, perusing one file after another. The poor military clerks were astounded that the Commander of the NATO naval forces spent hours in their office going through casualty documents. They were further astounded when the American Admiral and Livingston began to read without the aid of aides, and to exchange comments in a strange mixture of English, Hebrew, and Yiddish. “What is this?” the clerks asked. “Who are these people?”

At two in the morning, Levy held up a folder. “I've got it,” he said. “Exact height. Lighter, but that could be because of wounds and surgery. What does this say?” he asked the colonel.

“He is in Hospital 10. That is just south of Haifa. He is asleep all the time. The case is terminal.”

“We'll see about that,” Levy replied. “Check these records with his Command in Haifa. I want to know if he might have been sent to this place.”

“I can do it in the morning.”

“You can do it now.” Levy's authority was practiced and irresistible. The colonel rang up Second Mountain Brigade headquarters right then.

Arieh Ben Barak had flown in from the Golan a few hours before. He had not shaved for two days or slept for three. He was gaunt like a wolf but his eyes were bright and strong as he worked over maps late into the night, perfectly reconciled never to sleep. Few people were in headquarters. He had told his angels to go home and rest, for they were only children. When the phone rang he lifted it without looking, still absorbed in the maps. To the colonel's query he replied that, yes, the terminal cases would be in Hospital 10. Why hadn't the soldier been identified before? What was his name? The colonel told him once again, thanked him, and hung up. Arieh Ben Barak paused for a moment, angry that the war had taken the young man he had just promoted, and then he resumed his study of the fractured and faulted terrain on the road to Damascus.

Levy had the colonel call Kfar Yona. The phone rang forty times before the Druse night guard answered. His Hebrew was poor, so a major who knew Arabic was summoned from an allnight duty watch. “Awaken Lydia, the wife of Marshall. Tell her that Marshall is badly wounded but alive. Tell her to go to Hospital 10, south of Haifa off the Haifa—Tel Aviv road. We will meet her there.”

“Shall it be proper for me to go alone to her?” asked the Druse.

“It is proper.”

Levy and Livingston got in the colonel's car and drove through Tel Aviv's deserted streets to their hotel, where they summoned Mrs. Livingston. “I can drive,” Levy told the colonel and a sleepy private at the wheel. “Give me a map. I'll get there. You people can get some sleep.” At 3:30, the Army sedan pulled onto the Haifa road. It was misty and quiet as they crossed the Yarkon, and sheets of fog hung over its glassy surface.

Lydia was awake. She lay in the white room listening to the tenuous and feeble sounds of cicadas and crickets just before winter. It was misty in the Bet Shan valley too, and quiet. She had prayed for weeks. Her request and its unuttered vocalizations were not spineless importunities or passive begging. She parried; she struck; she struggled; she grappled and would not give up. It was as if for the time in question she held her breath and fought all along. She had been incredibly angry when the war broke out two days before Marshall would have returned. She helped with defense efforts at the kibbutz when it seemed that the Syrians might invade the valley, or that, in the case of widened Jordanian participation, Kfar Yona would be in the path of armies advancing via a nearby ford in the Jordan. Then came the telegram. Marshall was missing. She walked about as if she had no body. Her gaze fastened on nonexistent horizons. She burst into tears over her tea and then scolded herself for imagining the worst.

The Druse had gone to his room, brushed his hair, and changed his clothes. He came to her door and stood stiffly in a military manner. Lydia heard something outside. She dared not be convinced that it was what she thought, and lay with the sheet clenched in her fists. The instant the Druse knocked on the frail door she jumped up with a gasp, knowing that Marshall was alive. She came to the door, and he told her the message, struggling admirably in his awkward Hebrew. She was like a madwoman, full of tears and laughter. She ran through the trees and past the cottages to get Yossi Merzl. Before long, they were on the road to Haifa.

Arieh Ben Barak had decided to sleep on the cot in his office. He lay down and stroked his bristling beard as he watched mist pour through the louvers. But suddenly he tensed. It was not possible, he thought. Still, he swung to his feet and strode down the hall to a records room. There he retrieved the file for Marshall Pearl. He suspected that he was going mad, for his throat was tight and he could hardly breathe. He opened the folder and his eyes swept down lines of penned and typed Hebrew. At the space for
Father,
a blank line had been drawn. Next came date of birth: twenty-eight June, 1947. His eyes filled with tears. He could hardly bring himself to read the next line, but he did, and he reeled. In the space for recording the name of the soldiers mother was the name of the one woman to whom he had been devoted all his life—Katrina Perlé. In his lonely headquarters the able General leaned against a row of steel cabinets and wept. Soon, though, he too was on his way to the hospital by the sea.

 

T
HE GRAY-GREEN
room was both hot and cool, a paradox empowered by mist receding in anticipation of the breaking dawn. In the breathless space between dark and light, neither the night cicadas nor the morning birds were singing.

The nurse was wrapped in both her sweaters. She wanted to take one off but was too tired to move. She leaned against the glass-topped table. Immobile, she stared at the sea-green lamp which cast steep shadows and made her magazine colors too dazzling for a tired eye.

Then she heard the almost imperceptible singing of the sun in ascension. In a short time she would check to see if her patients were still alive. But she had some minutes until the first rays would strike through the half-opened door and throw a bright burnished beam about the room, warming it like a furnace, setting alight the powers of motion.

After his exhausting dreams, Marshall lay in a void. It was as if he had traveled the chambers of a nautilus. The first chamber had been that of birth, and those following had widened and lightened in glossy white and silver until he found himself on an open slope—from which he slid steadily and in perfect ease, as if by the trajectory of the shell he were to sail forever in the abstract darkness of sleep. But in an effort which pained him as much as or more than the wounds in his chest and legs, he spread his arms and pressed upon the smooth pearl glide, braking hard before the edge until he felt that he held a weight greater than that of the world.

As if in the field of another combat, his eyes opened aggressively. At first he saw only the white ceiling. But when his vision cleared he felt the pressure of advancing dawn. It served to push him up, and he lifted his head, but fell against the pillow in weakness. He was embroidered with plastic tubes; he had no sense of where he was, and did not know that they expected him to die that day.

He propped himself on his arms. The sun was beginning to light the half-open door. He managed to sit up and lean back against the bed posts. He was terribly weak and his hands and limbs trembled, but he found strength in anger. He was so angry that it was as if a war raged within him. He grit his teeth and took a breath. The beam of sun was rising and it began to flood his eyes. He screamed from deep inside his chest. The nurse started. Then she was unable to move.

In near slow-motion, he pulled the tubes from his body. First he whipped one of them to the right. Its fluid scattered across the room in an arc of shiny droplets. He lifted out a deep needle and flung it wide to the left, overturning a steel tripod and a bottle which smashed to the floor in a ringing clatter of crystal.

The stunned nurse shook her head back and forth and gripped the edge of the table as Marshall arose and fixed his gaze on the hot rays of dawn. “By God, I'm not down yet,” he said. “By God, I'm not down yet.”

And from the East, the sun came up with all its white thunder to light another day.