The Masada Complex (6 page)

Masada watched Rabbi Josh leave, his ponytail wet with sweat, his blue T-shirt clinging to his wide, muscular back. His son took his hand, looking up to him with a big smile. The sight pinched her heart. She turned and went to the bathroom. While the sink filled up with warm water, she examined her face in the mirror. Her cheek and neck were bruised, her eyes bloodshot. No wonder Rabbi Josh kept averting his gaze.

She sat on the floor and removed the bandage. The old leg brace had skinned her knee when she ran home after the accident. The raw knee was still oily from the ointment she had applied last night. Soaking a facecloth in hot water, she pressed it to the wound. It burned, but she did not relent.

Before going to sleep, she had washed the blood off the brace and oiled the worn leather on the thigh and shin extensions, which were hinged to the brass knee cap. It stood on the bathroom counter like crude forceps.

A wave of sadness overwhelmed her. She sat on the toilet, hugging the brace to her chest. “O, Srulie.” Her lips touched the coarse leather. “I almost joined you last night.”

With a fresh bandage on her knee, Masada strapped on the brace, put on shorts and a tank top, and grabbed a bottle of water. The urge to exert her body was irresistible. She had to sweat off the acid of old memories.

She left through the rear patio, across the backyard, and through a small gate in the fence. Following along the drainage wash, she took the path over the lower hump of Camelback Mountain. Her body hurt, especially her right leg, but she kept going, heading east for the main Echo Canyon trail.

The sun was high, the heat rising. She passed between two huge boulders, where the trail took a steep turn to the left, ascending over the crest of the camel’s nose. She stopped to look down at her street. A news van was advancing toward her house.

She went on, stretching her arms, inhaling deeply. The trail split, and she took the steeper path through a deep crevice, pulling on the steel rail attached to the boulders, her arms taking the load off her aching leg.

Midway up the crevice, an engine rattled nearby, disturbing the tranquility of the mountain. She paused and looked back down the crevice.

A yellow motorbike entered the bottom end and stopped. The engine’s rattle was louder now, bouncing off the walls. The rider, with long limbs in black leather, revved up the engine.

Masada stood frozen, hand gripping the railing.

The motorbike raced up the crevice toward her.

The ophthalmologist browsed the sign-up sheet. “Car accident. No serious injuries. Age seventy-two. Have you been drinking, Flavian?”

“Professor Flavian Silver. My friends call me Levy. And I don’t drink.”

The doctor dropped the papers on the desk. “Let me see your glasses.”

“It’s only for protection. Not optical.”

“But there is a problem with your vision, yes?”

Silver hesitated. “A smudge. Like a shadow. It’s not too bad, but for me, limited as I am already, every little thing worries me.”

“A smudge.” The doctor gave him a stern look, as if he’d intentionally rubbed sand into his eye. “Left or right eye?”

“I wouldn’t see it in the left.”

The doctor picked up the chart again and browsed it. “Of course!” He moved Silver’s face from side to side. “They matched color and shape perfectly. Excellent work. How did you lose the eye?”

“A work accident. The current porcelain left eye was fabricated in Toronto, replacing earlier glass eye installed in Italy. I had occasional infections, treated in London, Ottawa, and Toronto.”

“You travel a lot.”

“My research takes me to different universities.”

“Research?” The doctor perked up. “I do some research myself. What is your field?”

“Jewish history. I wrote a book:
The 1938 Evian Conference—Springboard to the Holocaust
. Perhaps you heard of it.”

“I don’t have time for pleasure reading. This smudge you see, where is it?”

Professor Silver pointed at the doctor’s nose.

“Center field.” He clucked his tongue. “Let’s not sound the alarm before finding the fire. We’ll conduct a few tests and see what’s going on.”

Trapped between two walls of rock, Masada faced the speeding motorbike. Its front wheel tattled on the rocks, approaching her rapidly. She raised her hands to protect herself.

It stopped just before hitting her.

She picked up a rock.

The rider dismounted and shut off the engine. “Hi there.” It was a female voice. She pulled a second helmet from the rear rack. “Someone wants to talk to you.”

Masada recognized the accent. “You’re an Israeli.”

The rider handed her the helmet. “It’s set up for videoconferencing.”

Masada hesitated, but her journalistic curiosity was piqued. She slipped on the full-face helmet. It fit snugly, limiting her view through the open eye shield. A tiny electric motor buzzed as a miniature screen descended before her eyes.

A picture appeared. Mountains, rocky and bare of vegetation.

At first she thought it was somewhere nearby in Arizona. But the frame widened to show a body of water, flat as a mirror, its shoreline bleached with dried salt.

A drop of sweat trickled down Masada’s back. She tried to retreat from the familiar sights, which she had banished from memory, but the draw was too great. She watched the salty shore her feet had once walked, the clusters of tall weeds where she had scooped black mud to smear her young body. She remembered the heavy scent of sulfur and the smothering humidity.

The picture moved to the salt factory that had taken her parents’ lives, the long docks reaching into the thick water like skeletal fingers, the pinky still missing its middle phalanx. She thought of her dying mother, lips caked in salt, the air squeaking in and out of her destroyed lungs.
Watch over Srulie!

“Shalom, Masada.” The camera focused on a man in a wheelchair, a bouquet of flowers in his lap. “It’s been a long time.”

Her right knee buckled. She swayed, her hip hit the steel railing. She tried to pull off the helmet.

The lanky rider grabbed Masada’s hands with surprising strength.

“I’m not talking to him.” Her eyes mixed the sights of the rider in her black helmet and the man in the small screen, sitting in his wheelchair on the other side of the world.

The camera angle widened, and the sight ended Masada’s struggle.

“I come here often,” Colonel Ness said, laying the bouquet on Srulie’s headstone. “Your brother was a gifted kid, a poet in the making.”

Masada groaned.

“I’d like to send you this one.” Ness pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “Someone at the kibbutz gave it to me. Your brother wrote about missing his mom.”

“What do you want?” Masada swallowed hard. Srulie had recited the poem aloud in the dining hall during a ceremony marking the sixth anniversary of their parents’ death. Miss Feldman, the kibbutz’s general secretary, had confiscated it because of the concluding, unpatriotic line:
And the Dead Sea reeked.

The camera focused on the colonel’s face. The skin had creased and weathered, yet his jaw was still square and stubborn, his expression still calm, radiating confidence. It was the same face she had once caressed and kissed with the wholeheartedness of first love.

Colonel Ness looked down at the paper. “This morning I read this to my grandkids at breakfast. Your brother would have become another Agnon.”

Masada was determined not to cry. “You didn’t arrange this high-tech showoff just to recite childish poetry.”

“True.” Up close, his eyes had remained as blue as the Mediterranean on a sunny day. “That disaster wasn’t only my fault. We were soldiers, sworn to follow orders.”

“You were the commander. You failed to act.” Masada’s voice trembled. “You practically killed him.”

“And you practically killed the others!” Ness shut his eyes, breathing deeply. “If not for your crazy attack, the Arab wouldn’t have thrown the grenade. But you’re right. In hindsight, I should have acted despite the orders, and then even Srulie would have survived.”

“Your only hindsight was covering your ass. You’re worse than those two Arabs. They sacrificed themselves for an idea, but you only thought of career and reputation. I despise you.”

“Still, after all these years?” He sighed, passing a hand through his white curls. “If you knew all the facts—”

“That won’t bring Srulie back.”

“You have not been the only one to suffer.” The camera descended to the paper with Srulie’s poem, resting on the wool blanket that covered the colonel’s lap. “I didn’t know they sent you to jail. I was in the hospital, dealing with my own loss. When I found out, I pressed for pardon.”

“How gracious. Why didn’t you wait outside when they released me, with red flowers and a mandolin?”

“Listen,” he said, “we both paid a terrible price. You should not have grabbed my megaphone, and I should have ignored the orders and attacked, which I would have done if I’d thought for one minute that Srulie was in danger.”

“If
.
If. If. It’s too late for excuses.”

“Always full of passion. That’s why I loved you.”

For a moment, Masada saw him in her mind as he had been, bright and confident, the ultimate sabra.

He smiled sadly. “It wasn’t all bad.”

“It wasn’t bad,” she said, “for a married father of two to screw a young babe in uniform.”

That shut him up.

“How do I get this thing off?” Masada pushed on the bottom of the helmet.

“In all these years,” he said quietly, “not a day passes that I don’t think of you. Not a single day that I don’t miss my beautiful—”

“Take it off!”

Colonel Ness leaned forward, his face filling the screen. “When you saw him crushed, you were crushed too. That night, you lost not only a brother. You lost your love for your country and for yourself. That’s the heaviest burden on my conscience.”

Masada’s eyes welled up. For a moment, she wanted to believe him.

“I’ve dreamt often that time rolled back, that I gave the order to attack, that we killed those two Arabs. In my dream, Srulie didn’t die, you didn’t attack the Arabs, the grenade didn’t go off, the other kids didn’t die, my legs didn’t separate from my body, and you didn’t run away to the other side of the world. In my dream I can walk, even run. And you and I? We’re happy. Together.”

She breathed deeply, exhaled. “And your wife and kids? Are they also happy in your dream?”

He sat back, his face turned away from the camera.

“Stop dreaming about me,” she said. “It makes me feel dirty.”

The camera left him and focused on the gravestone:

Israel (“Srulie”) El-Tal
Son of Miriam and Shlomo
Murdered 19.8.82
Seventeen at his death
God Avenge His Blood

Masada hoped the camera would linger. The grave had withered over the years, the stone no longer smooth, no longer white, no longer alone. There were many other graves under the shade of mature trees. Only the blue sky was the same, and the mountain towering over the kibbutz.

The camera returned to Colonel Ness. “What’s happening now is bigger than us. If you think I haven’t suffered enough, then chop off my arms too. But don’t punish the State of Israel for my sins.”