The scene switched to the side of the house, with its gaping hole. Lander leaned forward eagerly, trying to gauge the force of the blast. Fasil watched as though hypnotized.
The firemen were taking up their hoses. Clearly the TV crew had arrived when the operation was almost completed. Now film from the ramp outside the hospital. Some intelligent television deskman, knowing Long Island College Hospital was the designated receiver for disaster victims in the 76th Precinct, must have sent a camera crew directly to the hospital immediately after the alarm. The news team had arrived just before the ambulance. Here was the ambulance crew bringing out the stretcher, two men rolling it and a third holding up a bottle of intravenous fluid. The picture jerked as the cameraman was jostled by the crowd. Picture bouncing now as the cameraman trotted along with the stretcher. A pause as they reached the emergency room ramp. A closeup of the smoke-stained face. "David Kabov, no address, remained in Long Island College Hospital, his condition described as very critical."
"Kabakov!" Fasil shouted. His lip was drawn back from his teeth and he lapsed into Arabic in a string of filthy oaths. Now Dahlia was speaking Arabic too. She was pale, remembering the room in Beirut, the black muzzle of the machine gun swinging toward her, Najeer slack against the splattered wall.
"Speak English." Lander repeated it twice before they heard him. "Who is that?"
"I can't be positive," Dahlia said, breathing deeply.
"I can." Fasil held the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. "It's a filthy Israeli coward who comes in the night to kill and kill and kill, women, children... he doesn't care. The bastard Jew killed our leader, killed many others, nearly killed Dahlia." Unconsciously, Fasil's hand had moved to the bullet stripe on his cheek, suffered in the Beirut raid.
Lander's mainspring was hate, but his hate came from injury and madness. Here was conditioned hatred, and though Lander could not have defined the difference, was not consciously aware of the difference, it made him uneasy. "Maybe he'll die," he said.
"Oh, yes," Fasil said. "He will."
Chapter 10
Kabakov lay awake for hours in the middle of the night, after the noise of the hospital had diminished to the rustle of nylon uniforms, the squeak of soft-soled shoes on waxed floors, the toothless cry of an elderly patient down the hall calling for Jesus. He was holding onto himself as he had before, lying awake listening to the traffic in a hospital hall. Hospitals threaten us all with the old disasters of childhood, the uncontrolled bowel, the need to weep.
Kabakov did not think in terms of bravery and cowardice. When he thought about it at all, he was a behaviorist. His citations credited him with various virtues, some of which he believed to be nonexistent. The fact that his men were somewhat in awe of him was useful in leading them, but it was not a source of pride to him. Too many had died beside him.
He had seen courage. He would define it as doing what was necessary, regardless. But the operative word was
necessary.
Not
regardless.
He had known two or three men who had been utterly without fear. They were all psychotic. Fear could be controlled and channeled. It was the secret of a successful soldier.
Kabakov would laugh at the suggestion that he was an idealist, but there was inside him a dichotomy that is close to the center of what is called Jewishness. He could be utterly pragmatic in his view of human behavior and still feel on the very heart of his heart the white hot fingerprint of God.
Kabakov was not a religious man as the world sees religious men. He was not learned in the rites of Judaism. But he had known that he was a Jew every day that he lived. He believed in Israel. He would do his best and leave the rest to the rabbis.
He was itching under the tape on his ribs. He found that by twisting slightly, he could make the tape pull on the itching place. It was not as satisfactory as scratching, but it helped. The doctor, young what's-his-name, had kept asking questions about his old scars. Kabakov laughed to himself, remembering how the doctor's curiosity had offended Moshevsky. Moshevsky told the man Kabakov was a professional motor-cycle racer. He did not tell the doctor about the fight for Mitla Pass in 1956, or the Syrian bunkers at Rafid in 1967, or the other, less conventional battlefields that had marked Kabakov---a hotel roof in Tripoli, the docks on Crete with the bullets splintering the planks---all the places where the Arab terrorists had nested.
It was the doctor's question about old wounds that had started Kabakov thinking about Rachel. Now, lying the dark, he thought about how it began with her.
June 9, 1967
: He and Moshevsky lying on stretchers outside a field hospital in Galilee, the wind blowing sand against the canvas sides with a hissing sound and the generator roaring over the moans of the wounded. A doctor, stepping high like an ibis over the litters, carrying on the awful business of triage. Kabakov and Moshevsky, both hit with small arms fire storming the Syrian Heights in darkness, were carried inside the field hospital, into the light, emergency lanterns swinging beside the operating room lamps. Numbness spreading from the needle, the masked doctor bending over him. Kabakov, watching like a stranger, not looking down at himself, mildly surprised to see that the doctor's hands, extended for fresh sterile gloves, were the hands of a woman. Dr. Rachel Bauman, psychiatric resident at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York turned volunteer battlefield surgeon, removed the slug that had notched Kabakov's collarbone.
He was recuperating in a Tel Aviv hospital when she came into his ward on a round of postoperative examinations. She was an attractive woman of about 26 with dark red hair gathered into a bun. Kabakov's eyes never left her after she began her rounds with an older staff doctor and a nurse.
The nurse pulled down the sheet. Dr. Bauman did not speak to Kabakov. She was engrossed by the wound, pressing the skin around it with her fingers. The staff doctor examined it in turn.
"A very nice job, Dr. Bauman," he said.
"Thank you, Doctor. They gave me the easier ones."
"You did this?" Kabakov said.
She looked at him as though she had just realized he was there. "Yes."
"You have an American accent."
"Yes, I'm an American."
"Thank you for coming."
A pause, a blink, she reddened. "Thank you for breathing," she said and walked away down the ward. Kabakov's face showed his surprise.
"Dummy," the older doctor said. "How would you like it if a Jew said to you 'Thank you for acting like a Jew all day today'?" He patted Kabakov's arm as he left the bedside.
A week later, leaving the hospital in uniform, he saw her on the front steps.
"Dr. Bauman."
"Major Kabakov. I'm glad to see you out." She did mot smile. The wind pressed a strand of hair across her cheek.
"Have dinner with me."
"There isn't time, thank you. I have to go." She disappeared into the hospital.
Kabakov was away from Tel Aviv for the next two weeks, reestablishing contact with intelligence sources along the Syrian front. He conducted one probe across the ceasefire line, moving through a moonless night to a Syrian rocket launcher position that persisted in violation of the ceasefire despite United Nations surveillance. The Russian-made rockets all detonated simultaneously in their storage racks, leaving a crater in the hillside.
When his orders brought him back to the city, he sought out some of the women he knew and found them to be as satisfactory as ever. And he persisted in his invitations to Rachel Bauman. She was helping in the operating room and working with head injury cases as much as 16 hours a day now. Finally, wearily, smelling of disinfectant, she began to meet Kabakov near the hospital for hurried meals. She was a reserved woman and she protected herself, protected the direction of her life. Sometimes, after the last surgery of the evening, they sat on a park bench and sipped brandy from a flask. She was too tired for much conversation, but she drew comfort from sitting beside the large, dark form of Kabakov. She would not come to his apartment.
This arrangement ended suddenly. They were in the park and, though Kabakov could not tell it in the darkness, she was close to tears. A desperate four-hour operation had failed, a case of brain damage. Knowledgeable in head trauma, she had been called in to aid in the diagnosis, had confirmed the signs of subdural hematoma in a seventeen-year-old Arab soldier. The increased cerebrospinal fluid pressure and the presence of blood in the fluid left no doubt. She helped the neurosurgeon. There was an unavoidable intracerebral hemorrhage and the young man was dead. Wasted even as she watched his face.
Kabakov, laughing and unaware, told her a story about a tank driver with a scorpion in his underwear, who flattened a Quonset hut. She did not respond.
"Thinking?" he said.
A column of armored personnel carriers rumbled along the street behind them, and she had to speak loudly to be heard. "I'm thinking that in some Cairo hospital they're working just as hard to clean up the messes
you
make. Even in peacetime you do it, don't you? You and the fedayeen."
"There is no peacetime."
"They gossip at the hospital. You're some sort of super commando, aren't you?" She could not stop now and her voice was shrill. "Do you know what? I was passing through the lounge at the hotel, going to my room, and I heard your name. A little fat man, a second secretary from one of the foreign missions, was dunking with some Israeli officers. He was saying that if real peace ever comes they'll have to gas you like a war dog."
Nothing. Kabakov still, his profile indistinct against the dark trees.
The anger went out of her suddenly, leaving her slack, sick that she had struck at him. It was an effort for her to speak, but she owed him the rest of the story. "The officers stood up. One of them slapped the fat man's face and they walked away with their drinks still on the table," she finished miserably.
Kabakov stood in front of her. "Get some sleep, Dr. Bauman," he said, and then he was gone.
Kabakov's duties chafed him in the next month-office work. He had been transferred back to the Mossad, which was working furiously to determine the full damage wrought on Israel's ring of enemies in the Six-Day War and to estimate their potential for a second strike. There were exhaustive debriefings of pilots, unit commanders, and individual soldiers. Kabakov conducted many of the debriefings, collating the material with information provided by sources within the Arab countries and reducing the results to terse memoranda carefully studied by his chiefs. It was tiresome, tedious work and Rachel Bauman intruded only occasionally into his thoughts. He neither saw nor called her. Instead, he confined his attentions to a ripe Sabra sergeant with a bulging blouse, who could have ridden a Brahma bull without holding onto the rope. His Sabra was soon transferred and he was alone again, remaining alone by choice, numbed by the routine of his work, until a party brought him out.
The party was his first real celebration since the war ended. It was organized by two dozen of the men who served in Kabakov's paratroop section and was attended by a wild and friendly group of fifty-men and women, soldiers all. They were bright-eyed and sunburned and most of them were younger than Kabakov. The Six-Day War had scorched the youth off their faces, and now, indomitable as a hardy crop, it was coming back again. The women were glad to be in skirts and sandals and bright blouses instead of uniform, and it was good to look at them. There was little discussion of the war, no mention of the men they had lost.
Kaddish
had been said and would be said again.
The group took over a café on the outskirts of Tel Aviv beside the road to Haifa, an isolated building blue-white under the moon. Kabakov heard the party from 300 yards away as he approached in his jeep. It sounded like a riot with musical accompaniment. Couples were dancing inside the café and under an arbor on the terrace. A ripple of attention swept over the room as Kabakov entered, weaving his way through the dancers, acknowledging a dozen greetings yelled above the crashing music. Some of the younger soldiers pointed him out to their companions with a glance and a nod of the head. Kabakov was pleasantly aware of all this, though he made an elaborate effort not to show it. He knew that it was wrong to make anything special of him. Every man took his own chances. These people were just young enough to want to indulge themselves in this bullshit, he thought. He wished Rachel were here, wished she had come in with him, and he believed innocently that the wish had nothing to do with his welcome. Damn Rachel!
He made his way to a long table at the end of the terrace, where Moshevsky was seated with some lively girls. Moshevsky had an assortment of bottles before him, and he was telling lewd knock-knock jokes as fast as he could think of them. Kabakov felt good and the wine made him feel better. The men at the party held a variety of ranks, commissioned and noncommissioned, and no one thought it strange that a major and a sergeant should carouse side-by-side. The discipline that had carried the Israelis across the Sinai was born of mutual respect and sustained by
esprit
, and it was like a coat-of-mail that could be hung by the door on these occasions. This was a good party: the people understood each other, the wine was Israeli, and the dances were the dances of the kibbutz.
Just before midnight, through the whirling dancers, Kabakov spotted Rachel hesitating at the edge of the light. She walked toward the arbor where the couples danced, clapping their hands and singing.
The air was soft on her arms and brushed her legs beneath the short denim dress, air scented with wine and strong tobacco and warm flowers. She saw Kabakov, lounging back like Nero at his long table. Someone had put a flower behind his ear and a cigar was in his teeth. A girl leaned toward him talking.
Shyly, Rachel approached his table, through the dancers and the music. A very young lieutenant grabbed her and spun her in the dance and, when the room stopped whirling, Kabakov was standing before her, his eyes wine-bright. She had forgotten how big he was. "David," she said, looking up into his face, "I want to tell you---"
"That you need a drink," Kabakov said, holding out a glass.
"I go home tomorrow---they said you were here and I couldn't leave without---"
"Without dancing with me? Of course not."
Rachel had danced during her kibbutz summer years before, and the steps came back to her now. Kabakov had a remarkable facility for dancing with a glass in his hand, obtaining refills in full flight, and they drank from it by turns. With his other hand he reached behind her and plucked the pins from her hair. It tumbled in a dark red mass down her back and around her cheeks, more hair than Kabakov would have believed possible. The wine warmed Rachel, and she found herself laughing as she danced. The other, the pain and mutilation she had been steeped in, seemed distant.
Quite suddenly it was late. The noise had dropped and many of the revelers had left without Kabakov or Rachel noticing. Only a few couples still danced beneath the arbor. The musicians were asleep, their heads down on a table by the bandstand. The dancers were very close together, moving to an old Edith Piaf song played on the jukebox near the bar. The terrace was strewn with crushed flowers and cigar ends and puddled with wine. A very young soldier, his foot in a cast propped up on a chair, was singing along with the record, holding a bottle at his side. It was late, late, the hour when the moon fades and objects harden in the half-light to take the weight of day. Kabakov and Rachel barely moved to the music. They stopped entirely, warm against each other. Kahakov kissed away a trickle of sweat on the side of her neck, tasted the sweat, a drop of the moving sea. The air that she had warmed and scented rose to touch his eyes and throat. She swayed, a short sidestep to keep her balance, thigh sliding over his, around his, holding, remembering absurdly the fast time she had laid her cheek on the warm hard side of a horse's neck.