The Glory (47 page)

“I was right yesterday about the Sinai, Yigal,” returns Dayan, “and with a heavy heart I tell you I’m right today.”

Golda picks up her telephone. “Get me our ambassador in Washington. … Gentlemen, we’ll meet again at the full cabinet.” Zev
Barak stays behind as the others leave, still disputing.

“Hello, Simcha? Sorry to wake you. Call Kissinger, and … I
know
it’s midnight there in Washington. Now you listen to me.” In brief harsh words she recounts what Dayan has been saying. “Call
Kissinger,” she repeats, and hangs up. “Nu, Zev, why the long face? We’ve been through worse.”

“Madame Prime Minister, Kissinger won’t agree to your flying there.”

“I’ll handle Henry Kissinger.”

“May I speak my mind?”

“That’s your job.”

“I understand the Defense Minister’s concern, but don’t act on it. You’d be running up the white flag for the world to see.
Even more than his resigning would have done.”

Golda scowls. “Why? I can go incognito.”

“Pardon me, Madame Prime Minister, you can’t. It’s bound to become known. Golda flying to Washington! The Arabs will gloat
on TV that Israel is collapsing. What’s worse, they’ll believe it. It’ll pump them up to drive for the kill. Jordan will move
in to grab its share, across a border we’ve stripped of forces to stem the Syrians on the Golan. In the UN the Soviets will
call for a quick cease-fire, and Nixon will be in a dangerous corner.”

“Dangerous how? To us?”

“To us, exactly. Remember Eisenhower and Dulles after Suez?
‘Gentlemen, be good enough to give up everything you’ve won, or else!’ ”

“Remember? How could I forget?”

“Madame Prime Minister, that’s your exposure if you fly to Washington. Between Watergate and his crooked Vice President, Nixon
is in crisis. A foreign policy success like ending a war will be a godsend to him. Give him this opening and he can make snap
judgments that will be our sorrow for centuries.”

“Don’t exaggerate.”

“I don’t. You may hand him a knife to cut our throats with.”

“Hm! You’re still Mr. Alarmist, after all.”

The telephone rings. “Simcha? What already? Nu, what did he say?” She turns on her rare angry voice. “
‘Sort it out in the morning’
? What’s the
MATTER
with you? … Well, we
also
thought it was going well, but the situation has changed. Why does he think I want to fly there, because I like the food
on El Al? If America lets us run out of weapons she’ll face her first big defeat by the Soviet Union on the world stage! You
tell Kissinger that, and tell him
right now
!” She slams down the receiver. A total change of voice, a genial smile: “Simcha Dinitz is a good ambassador.”

“Madame Prime Minister, can you afford to leave the war for two days?”

She lights a cigarette with an odd sidewise glance at him, eyes half-closed, mouth corners wrinkling. “Isn’t it fighting the
war to get an airlift from Nixon? Simcha can’t do that. I can.”

It strikes him that this is now the woman talking. Her coquettish manner should be grotesque in the grim chunky old lady,
but it is not. It brings to his mind Golda Meyerson’s legendary love life among the Zionist founding fathers. She used her
charm in those long-gone days, some people say, as a political blunt instrument. Perhaps! At any rate she can still flash
that charm from her ruined body and timeworn face.

“And if you hear from the President that you’re not welcome, then what?”

“Then I’ll send you, so be prepared. Why the smile, Mr. Alarmist? Think it’s a joke? Simcha is fine, so is Motta Gur, but
I remember what you accomplished there in the Six-Day War.” She picks up a paper on her desk. “The man on the military side
handling resupply is one Halliday, Brigadier General Halliday. You had dealings with Halliday, I suppose?”

“I had dealings with him.”

“Is he our friend?”

“No.”

“Did you get results?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“Americans like winners. But they don’t like whiners.”

The wisp of femininity fades. She looks affronted.

“One more point, Madame Prime Minister.”

Cold nod.

“I beseech you to ask Dado under four eyes how urgent an airlift is. He’s the one who knows best. He may not agree with Moshe
Dayan.”

“Moshe Dayan.” Leaning her elbow on the desk, she holds her arm up and stiffly fans it back and forth. “One day like this,
one day like that. The great Moshe Dayan!” She clumsily gets up. “Time for the cabinet. Is your navy son all right?”

“So far, fine.”

“Good. So far, the navy’s our one pleasant surprise.”

N
oah Barak is leaping from his boat to the sunlit wharf in high spirits, though his eyes smart from lack of sleep after another
long night battle, this time off Port Said. Result, three Egyptian Styx boats sunk, one escaped, and to the Jewish flotilla
no damage. Latakia all over again. On the Syrian coast oil-tank farms flame from offshore bombardments, and the Wasp patrol
boats in the Red Sea report knocking out numbers of Egyptian landing craft. In short, success after success at sea.

He has no inkling, strangely, that Israel is not winning just as handily on land. The army communiqués of the first three
days have been vague, of course, as they were in the Six-Day War. Now as then the Arab broadcasts boast of huge successes,
and now as then, the noncommittal Israeli reports are a strategic deception, he is certain, to stave off a UN cease-fire while
Zahal mops up the enemy. From a booth on the dock he telephones the French Embassy in Tel Aviv, and learns that Julie Levinson
has volunteered to work in Haifa’s Rambam Hospital. Great news, she is just ten minutes away. He stops the jeep at a kiosk
to pick up a morning paper.

DADO: “WE WILL BREAK THEIR BONES”

Fine, situation normal. In the hospital’s crowded entrance hall, he comes upon his Aunt Shayna, pale and sad, who tells him
that Uncle Michael had a stroke two days ago. “It happened during Golda’s speech on television,” she says, “of all times.”

“Will he be all right?”

“I don’t know yet. I must wait and see.”

“What did the Prime Minister say, Aunt Shayna?”

“Nothing so shocking, I thought, simply realistic, but he took it very hard. He was saying she looked terrible and didn’t
sound like herself, then he sounded awful himself and fell over on the couch.”

“I’m very sorry.”

Shayna wanly smiles. “Well, God will help. How is it going at sea?”

“Not too badly.” Obligatory Israeli taciturnity. But Noah is young at the game, he is fresh from a triumph, and a few words
break through. “So far, clean sweep! Can’t say much more.”

“Good for the navy.”

He goes looking for Julie in the wards, where bloodily messed-up soldiers fill the long rows of jammed-together cots. More
are arriving on stretchers or wheeled tables, with hurrying medics dripping plasma into their veins. “The French girl?” says
the harassed head nurse. “Try the nurses’ lounge, green door down the hall.”

Julie is alone in the narrow windowless room, crouched on a cot and crying. She springs up and embraces him.
“Oh, Noah, Noah! Mon Dieu, c’est toi! Tout est perdu! Les Arabes nous ont vaincus! La guerre est finie! Que ferons-nous, chéri?”

He can barely follow this rapid-fire outburst of anguished French. “
Doucement
. I thought we agreed to speak Hebrew.”

“Yes, yes, I’m sorry.” She dashes a hand across her eyes. “It’s so frightful! I worked in a hospital in Cherbourg, but I never
saw such ghastly things. The boys — the wounds —” She chokes. “I can’t talk about it. Oh, Noah, the hospital is overwhelmed,
and still the wounded pile in. The terrible stories from the Golan! We’ve lost the war.”

“Nonsense! What stories?”

“Ten of our tanks against a hundred, fighting day and night without stopping. A tank driver from Kfar Blum with both legs
smashed told me it’s all over, the government’s lying, the Syrians and the Iraqis will be in Haifa tomorrow, and it’ll be
a big massacre. That’s when I broke down and started to bawl. He said we’ve lost nearly all our tanks, there are no more reserves,
nothing to stop them, and—”

Noah is flabbergasted. “Battle-shock talk. Not a word like that on the radio. And look!” He shows her the newspaper. “Our
army tells the truth, you know that.”

“Is that the commander-in-chief? He looks cheerful enough.”

“Can you get off duty?”

“I’m dismissed for the day.” Her eyes fill with tears again. “I’m so ashamed —”

“Come. You’ve got to get out of here.”

In a sidewalk café with a view of the harbor, over cake and coffee, he tells her of the victories at sea and she begins to
cheer up. “I promise you we’ll win on land too, Julie. The Ramatkhal says it’s a hard war, and it is. The country was caught
by surprise. Only the navy wasn’t. But those regulars on the Golan and in Sinai are great fighters. They’ll hold till the
reserves come up, and then we’ll drive out the enemy, you’ll see.”

She is eating her flaky pastry, and he is thinking how pretty she looks in her rumpled nurse’s uniform; no Daphna, of course,
but with beautiful honest brown eyes, a creamy skin, and a promising bosom he has yet to explore. “Oh, Noah, everything’s
so different out here in the sunshine. That hospital is hell.”

“It was good of you to volunteer.”

“I’ll stick to it. I just fell apart today.”

“Great! And your job at the French Embassy?”

“After the war I can have it back. Meantime I’ve rented a room here.”

“You have? Julie, on the first date we had in Cherbourg, you said nice French girls didn’t go out with sailors. Not seriously.”

“I know.” She manages a weak laugh.

“Do they go out seriously with naval officers?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well, do they?”

The large brown eyes widen, and she is a girl on instant alert. Her reply in Hebrew is slow and arch. “Well,
chéri,
nice Jewish girls certainly don’t. Not with the gentiles, and if there are Jewish officers in the French navy, I’ve never
met one.
L’Affaire Dreyfus,
you know.”

He said, “Lots of them in the Israeli navy. No Dreyfus problem.”

“So! What’s all this about,
chéri
?”

He leans over to embrace and kiss her. At the other tables, drinking coffee and sunning themselves, old people observe this
light moment of the war with amused nudges. She murmurs, her mouth against his, “Well, well. My parents have been on the telephone
every day, begging me to come home. I truly don’t know why I haven’t gone —”

“Where’s your room?”

“My
ROOM
?
Doucement, doucement
!” A wise wary enchanting smile, a new gleam in rounded eyes. “Why, what do you have in mind? What about this Daphna? I never
have met her yet.”

“Over. Forgotten. Never worked out. Couldn’t. She likes leftists, and she smells of clay.”

“
Vraiment? Vois-tu,
” she lapses into evasive French chatter, “a leftist proposed marriage to me just before I came here. I should have accepted,
what’s more. He’s Cherbourg’s supervisor of sewage disposal. A nice Jewish fellow. Civil service, very reliable income.”

“Hebrew, lady!”

“Ah, yes, yes. Sorry.”

“Where did you say your room was?”

She blinks. “I didn’t say. What does clay smell like?”

“Mud. Drying mud.”

“Don’t you have to go back to your boat?”

“My crew’s taking on missiles, ammo, and fuel.” He glances at his watch. “An hour and a half.”

“Actually, it’s just around the corner, but it’s a dismal hole.”

He jumps up, beckoning to the waiter. “
Doucement,
” she says, seizing his fingers. “Can’t I finish my coffee?”

“P
anter Shakhor!”

A few hours earlier, in the bone-chilling starless gloom and clanging racket of the replenishment area, Amos Pasternak has
encountered another battalion commander and impulsively embraced him, exclaiming again, “Panter Shakhor!” (“Black Panther!”)
Short, squat, with a bristly growth of black beard, and thick unkempt hair hanging below his helmet, Major Kahalani, like
Amos, has been fighting for three nights and two days, and he is acquiring a Neanderthal look. Between them these two battalion
commanders hold a crucial stretch of the front, a low saddle in the ridge that blocks the enemy advance into Israel.

“Some panther!” Kahalani’s voice is hoarse and cracked from shouting over the combat networks. “No claws left, hardly.”

“Black Panther” is a bitter joke Kahalani made over the brigade network at his own expense, during the worst of yesterday’s
Syrian onslaught.
“Don’t worry, Yanosh, I’m a Black Panther. They won’t get past me.”
Actually the Black Panthers in Israel are Tel Aviv street toughs, Moroccans and other dark-skinned Jews of the so-called
Eastern community, or “Second Israel,” from Arab countries. But Kahalani is a Yemenite, a proud different group of ancient
lineage, which nevertheless endures similar disadvantages in Israeli society, and in the army too. In the heat of battle fury
Kahalani lashed out with that defiant jape, and Amos loves him for it.

“How long does this go on, Avi?” Amos says. “How can the Syrians keep it up?”

Except for a few gun flashes to the east, the third night battle has at last died off. Tanks are parked higgledy-piggledy
at the ammunition trucks, and unshaven crews stumbling with fatigue are loading shells by the glare of headlights. All night
the embattled defenders of the saddle were unable to drop back and replenish, and some tanks have shot off their last shells
and held their ground with machine guns and grenades. En brera! If the Syrians once break through this gap they cannot be
stopped short of the main Golan roads, and the highway to Haifa. In the terror-stricken stories Julie Levinson has heard from
the wounded soldiers, that much is grimly accurate.

“As long as they keep coming, we hold!” says the Panther. “You’re doing brave work over there on Booster, Amos.” Booster is
the southern hill of the saddle. Kahalani holds the commanding northern Hermonit Hill, the highest ground, which has been
taking the brunt of the artillery and tank assaults.