Refiner's Fire (65 page)

“Tell me something.”

“What is that?”

“How many seconds does it take for a tank to lift itself out of its trench?”

“That's not the point. Their intentions are obviously defensive.”

“How many seconds?”

“I don't know exactly.”

“Just tell me. How many seconds?”

“Okay, thirty.”

Marshall began to spoon his chocolate ice cream into his tea. It looked horrible, and it overflowed.

“What are you doing?”

“I don't know what I'm doing, but when you're in Tel Aviv, enjoy yourself. Eat well and see lots of movies. When you get back, were all going to be fucked.”

“I don't think so.”

“Neither does anyone else. Maybe I'll see you up there.”

Marshall decided to leave right away. He did not get out until 2:30 and arrived at Fortress Six as dawn was beginning to break. Climbing to the highest observation point, he surveyed the plain while the sun arose far behind Damascus, looking as if it were cradled in a fiery pit somewhere in Iraq. As usual, a tiny red sliver churned and bent on the land horizon like molten metal. The shadows of the hills grew severe, and green strips appeared to the northeast. The plain below was still a collection of dark crags. But then the sun came up and its blood red became yellow and blazing white. It was round and hot, and, as it climbed, Marshall thought he saw the surflike lashing of its corona.

A few lights and fires dotting the half-dark below faded or went out as the sun got higher. Someone in the fortress tuned a radio to the dawn chimes of the Army station. A sentry yawned and threw off his gray blanket. With the light he pulled the clip from his rifle and slung the weapon over his shoulder. He would wait an hour and then go back to bed, or to a shower.

When the sun was high enough for Marshall to make out colors and textures in the distance, he swung a pair of tremendous military binoculars on their tripod to scan valley and plain. At first he saw nothing unusual—boulders, rocky terrain, ditches, roads, an emplacement or two. But then his muscles twitched and he felt a surge of electricity run down his back. For in places usually empty of the Syrian Army he saw tank after tank after tank, rows of artillery, netting in so many places that it looked like Verdun, and what seemed like thousands and thousands of trucks, new emplacements, new cuts in the earth, and troops who had begun to get up and mill about in hundreds of camps.

He pivoted over to view the Israeli line. It hadn't changed. Marshall closed his eyes and imagined how the vast Syrian columns must have looked rumbling past Damascus on their way to the armed camp below, which burst into life in the suns ascent and seemed to have a will of its own, as if it were a living creature spawned from steel.

L
YDIA TOO
was up at dawn, wandering about carrying a notebook and a leaky fountain pen. Though they did not intend their primary instrument in Columbine to be recollection of the kibbutz (but rather remembrance of what they had envisioned long before), she thought anyway to take notes on agriculture at Kfar Yona. What they did right, they did beautifully.

She was full of early morning energy and lightheartedness, and she was happy. So that when the sun swept over the escarpment from Jordan and Iraq, instead of taking notes she found herself sketching the cows and chickens as they frolicked in front of her. Taken up as in the slow rhythmic ease of a float trip, she walked about for hours doing renditions of the hollow-brained chickens.

When she and Marshall had married, she had felt as if she were starting a new life. Riding in the helicopter to the
Royal George
had been much the same, as had the sudden inertia and Easternness of Tel Aviv, and the thick agricultural abundance of the Jordan Valley. And when, with a foolish grin, Marshall had come out onto the balcony above the sea, suddenly a lieutenant in a rakish hat, she had moved through another gate. As the gates opened and shut, each frame had about it the satisfaction of a good painting, and the engine clicked on in strokes of color.

When Marshall had returned from the Fourth Daughter, she felt as if she were suffering with him the privations of an Ottoman soldier. At the kibbutz she was generally content—and lonely. Then they went to Tira, where she became lost in a world of books and she and Marshall dashed through warm shallow waters undulating with smooth fishlike waves. Yet another picture awaited them in Columbine. Unlike Marshall, she knew that it might not last as long as they thought. They could well move on to something else. Most important was the energy of transit—for which it was worthwhile even to be driven in a breathless life.

At Kfar Yona, the cows thrust their thick padded heads through the round iron rails of the pens in continual efforts to reach the other side. Both sides were flaccid mud, but it was the crossing-over which magnetized them. She noted in her sketchbook that they looked as distrustful as bears, and could be smelled for miles.

Yossi Merzl, the secretary of the kibbutz, came by on his tractor and stopped the motor. “Hello Lydia,” he said. “We'll miss you.”

“Marshall and I are going to have a wheat farm, in America.”

“I heard this. The capital! Can you do it?”

“Yes.” She shook her head affirmatively, and smiled sadly when she thought of leaving them under siege and in danger. Yossi Merzl knew exactly what she was thinking, and dismounted from his huge tractor to sit beside her on the iron rail. He had wild white hair, and a face with so many places written into it that he could have been a gazetteer.

It was hot. There were flies. The valley almost burned, and a warm wind pushed through the trees, as loud as a freight train. “I want to tell you something,” he said. “You may not understand, but...

“It was very nice of you to garden in the cemetery. Everyone appreciated it. But, you know, we left it untended almost on purpose. It's hard to explain. I'll try.

“When I was younger I lived in Poland. To make a very long story very short, the Nazis came. I went to the ghetto in Lodz. I was put in a camp. I escaped. I was in a camp in Cyprus. I escaped. I was skillful at escaping, but so what if I could walk around? Inside, I was dead.

“Then I came to Palestine. For many
of
us it was better than a new life, and even at the pier you could see people being reborn. They laughed, they cried, they even kissed the ground. But not me. I wondered if ever I too would emerge as had many of my friends. They had been broken and weak. Their selves had caved in. And suddenly, they came by one day and you saw that they were different, full of enthusiasm, as if their hearts had been replaced and they had taken new souls.

“Not me. I didn't understand. Would I always be bitter and unhappy? Nothing worked. I loved Kfar Yona, I loved to see it grow, but I was still a smashed-up Jew from a ghetto in Poland. Then the Arabs made the war against us in forty-eight, and I went with the others to fight. The war lasted for a long time. I did dangerous things. Many people died, people I loved.

“When it was over and the dust had cleared, and we started up again even though there were many new graves, I hardly knew what was going on. The day that I got back, I looked around at this simple farm, I looked up at those mountains, and I cried.

“We were still alive. That was something. I'm not saying, you understand, that I worship survival. Despite the fact that it has been made the primary duty of every Jew, it in itself is not so special. The special thing was that life came back. Each war is the same, like holding your breath for as long as you can and then realizing how wonderful it is just to breathe; like a dry field suddenly feeling the flood.

“You tended the graves, a gentle thing to do. However, did you know that for everyone who dies in war, there are others who are born, and reborn? That is why veterans will never make the peace, and why, in denying the nobility of battle, pacifists cultivate war. To stop something so powerful you must at least tell the truth about it, and they don't. What I'm trying to say is, don't feel bad about us. There is a balance to everything—symmetry, compensations. A soul buried in the ground rises in the air. When you go to America and have your wheat farm, thrive in peace, but don't pity those in war.”

He returned to the tractor and drove off to the hay fields. For Lydia, even in the space of minutes, a gate had closed, and a gate had opened.

W
HEN
M
ARSHALL
arrived at Fortress Six in the beginning of September there were actually fewer Syrian tanks than when he had left. But their positions had changed, and they were concentrated in such a way as to appear far more numerous, at least in those sections easily observed. During September itself the armor on the plain multiplied steadily until at month's end 900 tanks were in position. On the thirteenth, the Syrians pressed home an air battle over the sea, into which they flung and lost thirteen planes. Arieh Ben Barak decided then that war was imminent. The planes were sacrificed to lull the Israelis further into a stupefying sense of security, to probe their readiness, to test the wind. In the way that a farmer can sense a storm from the speed of clouds, the random electrification of the air, and the light in its gray and purple variations, Arieh Ben Barak smelled the full scent of war.

Not only did he go to the Chief of Staff and the Defense Minister (who sent only one extra armored brigade and put the Air Force on a high state of alert), but he began to take action independently. He canceled all leave, stockpiled ammunition and anti-tank weapons, summoned as many spare units as he could to the fortresses, impressed upon his subordinates the need for vigilance, and intensified efforts at gathering intelligence. There were 177 tanks on the Golan, and the Syrians were a few miles away with 900.

Marshall didn't go home. A strange collection of stray units streamed into Six, filling up all available space with tents and equipment. The ramparts were crowded and active. It was like a walled Arab town in the Middle Ages. Among those gathered in haste from other branches and divisions were Baruch and the three Bengalis, who had laid hold of an armored halftrack. Baruch drove and commanded (an unusual combination, to be sure); Wilson was the machine gunner; Chobandresh and Prithvi were mortarmen. Baruch wore sergeant's stripes, and the Bengalis had become corporals. Because they had been together for a year, they were well co-ordinated, and they lived with their machine day and night, maintaining it as if it were a new Rolls-Royce.

“A sergeant was mustering out,” Wilson told Marshall, “and Baruch was senior in service. They gave us this halftrack. Then that unit (a reserve group where we had been sent to wash dishes) was deactivated. But we are conscripts, so Baruch asked what to do and where to go. The Commander said to take the halftrack and patrol the beach between Rosh HaNikra and Nahariya! That was in April. No one has bothered us except the tourists, who always take our pictures. We were very astute in our duties. In case you are wondering, the Commander was a Kurd—the uncle of Baruchs sister's husband. At the petrol dump someone told us that all miscellaneous forces were being sent to the Golan.”

The new Captain of Commandos arrived, an Englishman who was so calm that he seemed to enjoy the heat of the moment as an Eskimo might enjoy a blazing fire. His name was Palmer. No one knew if in fact he were a Jew, or how he had gotten there. His Hebrew, though classical, was excellent and precise. He took half the force and assigned the other half to Marshall. They were busy that September, and they crossed the enemy line twice.

The first time, Palmer had taken two men out in early morning and returned several hours later, puffing up the road, a stick under his arm. He was noncommittal and emotionless, preferring not to describe the foray in detail except to give Marshall a few pointers on procedure, and to render his report—which attributed to the deployment of surface-to-air missiles a frightening density. “Looks like some real stuff,” Palmer had said, “like a big holy war.”

Marshall was impressed by Palmer's nonchalance about crossing the Green Line. “It's the Purple Line,” said Palmer. “Are you afraid of those silly incontinent bastards, those ... those crotchless half-wits?”

“Yes,” answered Marshall. “And I don't have contempt for them.”

Palmer gripped Marshall urgently by his lapels. “Neither did I, until the day before yesterday. But how do you think I got stiff enough to run around in their encampment?”

Marshall went out alone one day late in September, just before dusk. In addition to insulting the Syrians continuously and with verve, he had studied a route through the tels, consulted mine maps, and eaten carrots. On Palmers advice, he took several belts of whisky before setting off, and tried to think of the whole thing as a lark. “If you're going to be a Russian, you should be a little drunk,” Palmer had said. “In fact, you should be more than a little drunk. And scowl at them when you see them.”

“You see them?”

“Of course you see them! You get close enough to kiss the fairies. And you'd better get that close. If you don't, you'll look out of place. Walk loose. Remember, there are a hundred thousand of them down there in vast confusion.”

With the onset of darkness he made his way across the free zone, and approached Syrian lines just as the troops began to congregate about blazing gas fires and cookpots for their dinners. Marshall had carried with him all the way from Fortress Six a plate of stew and a bottle of lemonade. He went overland and then got onto a road. It was dark. He passed many troops. They too were eating, but their mess kits were shaped differently. It didn't matter, as it would not have mattered in Israeli lines. At choke points he passed right through, eating from his plate as he walked. He looked worried and preoccupied. He took many swigs from the lemonade bottle only to spit them back, and his bites were suitable for a tiny mouse.

The morale of the Syrians was not heightened and infused with vigor and destiny as before an assault. This perplexed him because he didn't know that even the Syrian commanders were ignorant of the plans for war until just hours before it was to begin. The soldiers behaved like soldiers on maneuver. There was a lot of laughing and joking—as in all armies at dinnertime unless it is raining.