Mitla Pass (41 page)

Hannah, who was closing shop for the night, was unnerved. “Shut up, you
nudnik!”
She threw her hands open futilely and was starting up to him when she was detoured by a ring of the front door bell.

Leah stood there, drenched from the downpour, with little Molly clutching her momma’s hand and shivering. A half-dozen suitcases sat on the pavement.

“My God! Leah! Molly!”

“Oh, Momma! Momma!”

Leah was hustled into the vestibule and sobbed as her mother dragged in the luggage.

Molly was taken upstairs and given a hot tub and fed and tucked in, before the two women settled in the kitchen. A glass tea and a hot water basin for Leah’s feet.

“Nu,
darling, what happened?”

“Momma, it’s been horrible! Ghastly!”

Only then did Hannah notice her daughter’s multicolored bruises around the left eye.

“Joe Kramer beat you up?”

“Oh, Momma,” she wailed.

“I never trusted that boy. Not for one minute. He didn’t lay a hand on little Molly, did he?”

“He tried, but I threw my body across her to protect her, and he doesn’t care if he ever sees her again, his only child. He said a hundred times, if he said once, that he felt like a caged animal. A beautiful family I gave him. Momma, I tried. God in heaven knows that I tried. It’s a terrible thing to say, but he should have died an honorable death in France. At least the memory wouldn’t have to be so bitter. Don’t look at my eye. Do you have any idea what a horror story Joplin, Missouri, is? Thank God he didn’t find out about Richard Schneider. He might have killed me.”

“Leah, Leah, you poor child. You’re home now.”

“Joe drank every night like a Cossack.”

“Hub him in dreard,
”

“I did everything. I went on bended knees. I scrubbed. I baked. I gave in to some very weird desires.” She whispered into her mother’s ear.

“He made you do that! The pervert!”

“That’s not half of it. The games he played, like making me dress up like a prostitute. It was disgusting. I worked my fingers to the bone. Don’t look at my hands, they’re raw. He’d go days without picking up dear little Molly. Not so much as a pat on the head he’d give her. I was a goddess on earth to that man.”

The thump of Moses’ cane on the floor interrupted. Hail pelted against the window. “I want somebody to take me to
shul!”
Moses shouted.

Hannah found Al sitting on the bed in his room, playing solitaire, dressed like a peasant in his underclothing. He played cards with himself, while his wife slaved at the Ginzburg Brothers factory.

“Al, take the
alter kocker
to synagogue.”

Al flung the cards down. “Shit, a guy can’t find no peace here.”

“For three months you’re sitting. Go find a house to paint.”

“Shit.”

“And the roof of B’nai Israel won’t fall in if you join in the prayers.”

“Shit.”

Molly was awakened by the shouting and, seeing herself in a strange place, hollered at the top of her lungs for her mother, who had resumed weeping loudly.

Thump, thump, thump. “Will somebody take me to
shul!”

L
EAH FAILED
to relate to her mother a significant part of the story. Joe Kramer returned from the war a sorely hurt man from mustard gas. He coughed and hacked day and night. His only relief came from drink and heavy medication, which often made him strange, and he grew bitter and surly.

Joe craved tenderness. For a fleeting moment in the postwar hysteria, Leah was consumed with an angelically noble desire to care for a wounded veteran. That urge was soon dissipated in the day-to-day grind. She saw a lifetime before her of caring for a semi-invalid.

Joe had a lot of attractive men friends, and Leah, in love with her concept of her own innocence, was a toucher and a brusher-up-against. This rankled the hell out of Joe.

Life boiled down to a cycle of arguments, drinking bouts, sullenness, and drugs. One day Joe found a packet of perfumed letters, bound with a satin ribbon, tucked away on a shelf in her closet. It contained love letters from over a dozen soldiers who wrote to her from France after she had become a married woman. Leah swore she knew the boys before she had met him. She just didn’t have the heart to tell them, being in the trenches and all, that she was now married.

With bottomless sincerity, Leah asked Joe, “How could I write that I was married when they were facing death?”

“What the hell were you going to do, marry them all?”

“Oh, Joe, you just don’t understand.”

“How many of them did you fuck?”

“Joseph Kramer! How dare you! Don’t you use those words when you speak to me.”

That was when he punched her in the eye, threw her out, and then left Joplin for points unknown. It was back to the Ginzburg Brothers factory for Leah, with her sewing machine next to her sister Fanny’s.

A
FTER AN INITIAL
postwar boom, America slammed the brakes on its overheated industrial machine. Billions in war contracts were abruptly canceled, resulting in massive layoffs and a deep national economic depression.

Everyone struggled, Lazar in his new store, Momma with her wedding gown business, house painting. Even that
paskudnyak
Gilbert Diamond felt the pinch. Only Dominick, with his city job on the police force, was untouched.

Hannah broke her head trying to keep the house on Fayette Street, but it became a hopeless cause. She had no choice but to liquidate and sell the business at a tremendous loss. She shopped around for smaller, cheaper quarters.

Foreclosures were a common occurrence, and many of Baltimore’s little two-story row houses, with their uniform pearly-white marble steps, were for sale at bargain prices. Alas, there was no Uncle Hyman to come to their rescue.

Hannah found a house to lease, dirt cheap, on Monroe Street, out of the downtown area. The neighborhood was only partly Jewish and partly everything else. It was a crying shame to leave the sights, sounds, and smells of Jewish Fayette Street, but there seemed to be little choice.

The house on Monroe Street consisted of a pair of flats. Downstairs, the living room was converted into a dressmaking shop and the dining room into a bedroom, which Hannah would share with Leah. Upstairs, the three children, Molly and Fanny’s two, would have the front room and Al and Fanny the rear bedroom.

It meant there was no place whatsoever for Moses. When he learned that Hannah had made an application to remove him to the Hebrew Home for the Aged, a sudden miracle took place.

He walked down the steps by himself and stood humbly before Hannah and confessed. “I wasn’t entirely wiped out. I’ll buy the house on Monroe Street, if you take me with you.”

“You dog! You
goniff!”

“I implore you humbly not to send me to the old age home.”

“You can go shit in the ocean.”

“Here, take the money.”

“What’s the difference? There’s no room for you.”

“All I ask is a cot in the shop. I swear to the Lord of Abraham and Isaac, I won’t make a minute’s trouble. And what is more,” Moses continued, “some feeling is returning to my hands. Maybe I can even take in a little tailoring work.”

At first Hannah couldn’t believe what she was hearing. But God moves in strange ways. Well, what to do? Beggars can’t be choosers. Off they moved to Monroe Street, consuming every square inch of living space. But there was a bright side. Hannah had all her children in Baltimore and within easy walking distance.

PART FOUR

ARISE, YE PRISONERS OF STARVATION

TEL AVIV

IDF HEADQUARTERS

October 30, 1956

NOON, D DAY PLUS ONE

D
AVID
B
EN-
G
URION’S
Tel Aviv office had been converted into a makeshift hospital room.

Exhaustion and tension, the black knights of battle, had taken a toll. Ben-Gurion was ravaged by inner fires. He appeared helpless, more like a needy cherub than a national leader.

The doctor took the thermometer from the Old Man’s mouth and read it with concern. “You’re still running a high fever,” he said. “We don’t want this spreading to your lungs.”

Ben-Gurion chose not to hear the doctor. “Where is Dayan?” he grunted.

“On his way over,” Natasha Soloman answered.

“What’s going on?” B.G. asked.

“It’s the American ambassador again,” Natasha said. “He demands a meeting at once and he’s getting nasty about it.”

“You have to hold him off until I speak with Dayan.”

The doctor rolled a portable stand to the bedside.

“What are you doing?” B.G. demanded.

“You’re dehydrating again. I’m giving you another intravenous.”

The Prime Minister’s wife, Paula, entered with a fresh pot of tea, wearing her patented expression of combat.

“I don’t want the needle,” B.G. protested feebly. “Take it away.”

“Do what the doctor tells you,” Paula commanded sharply.

“Who let her in here?”

“Here, drink,” she said, feeding the tea to him.

“What are you poking?” he said to the doctor.

“I’m having a bit of trouble finding a nice juicy vein ... ah, here we go. Now then, are we comfortable?”

“No, I’m not comfortable. Why don’t you go back to South Africa?”

“I might just do that if we get out of this mess alive. I’ll be grabbing forty winks in the next room.” He took Paula aside, beyond B.G.’s hearing. “Paula, he’s very sick. He should be in the hospital.”

“How can he leave?” she asked. “He’s conducting a war.”

“He’s not going to be any good to us dead.”

“Don’t worry, he’s too stubborn to die.”

The doctor looked heavenward in a gesture of futility and staggered from the room to a cot in the secretary’s office; he was asleep as his head hit the pillow.

Jackie Herzog, the Old Man’s confidant, entered. “Natasha,” he said, “a coded message is coming in from Paris. You’d better get over to Communications and translate it. It could be extremely urgent.”

Natasha nodded, then tugged at Jackie’s arm and motioned for him to come out into the corridor.

“Any word from Mitla Pass?” she asked hesitantly.

Her reddened eyes probed his. Jackie fidgeted with the
kipi
on the back of his head. “Apparently, some Egyptians crossed over during the night in rubber boats and are inside the Pass. We don’t know how many. The Lion’s Battalion is coming under both air and mortar attack.”

She closed her eyes a second. They stung from weariness. “What else, Jackie?”

“Gideon Zadok was injured during the jump. We don’t know how serious it is. He’s refused to evacuate. Look, Natasha, the man is a former Marine. He knows what he’s doing.”

“No, he doesn’t,” she answered in a shaky voice. “Gideon is a little boy being driven by some kind of demon.”

“He’ll get back. He’s got a book to write, remember?”

“Oh Jesus, what did we let him go out there for?”

“You’d better get over to Communications and get that message translated.”

General Dayan, the flamboyant one-eyed Chief of Staff, turned the corner and moved crisply down the corridor toward them just as the Old Man shouted, “Where is Dayan!”

Dayan stopped for an instant and he and Natasha exchanged the wizened glances of former lovers. Dayan said nothing, but his strange, Cyclops-like expression told her the story. The situation at Mitla Pass was now in doubt. She turned quickly and made haste to the Communications center.

Paula Ben-Gurion helped prop her husband up, surrounding him with pillows, as his Chief of Staff arranged some pins on a large wall map, denoting the progress of the four sectors of battle. The Sinai was a huge tract of viciously hot desert, pocked with treacherous mountain defiles and little habitation except along the Gaza Coast.

Up to the last instant, Israel played the card that hinted they were going to attack Jordan, then wheeled about and hit the Egyptians in the Sinai, achieving a brilliant tactical surprise. The IDF was now engaging the Egyptians at a number of their primary defensive strong points.

The campaign had quickly reached its first critical phase. Control of the air had not been established. Israel’s Air Force was a potpourri of aged piston planes from World War II, along with a few squadrons of modern French jets. Their pilots had but a few months’ training in the jet craft and faced an overwhelming, state-of-the-art Egyptian air power, consisting of Russian MiGs and bombers. Mastery of the skies had to be attained, or Israel’s ground forces could get caught naked out in the open desert.

The British and the French, who were scheduled to neutralize Egypt’s air power, had not taken to the skies and both Russia and America were applying enormous pressure on Israel to cease fire.

“How far has Para 202 penetrated?” Ben-Gurion asked.

“They made a beautiful fake at Jordan, then crossed into the Sinai at Kuntilla. They are approaching the Egyptian defenses at Thamad right now.”

“Thamad? They still have a hundred and fifty miles to go to link up with the Lions at Mitla Pass.”

“I’m afraid that’s right,” Dayan answered.

“Moshe, I don’t like it,” Ben-Gurion said. “Jackie gave me a message a half hour ago that most of Zechariah’s tanks and transport have been eaten up by the desert. What do they have left? Tell me the truth, Moshe.”

“They have about half of their transports and about three tanks still in operation.”

“About three tanks? What does that mean, ‘about three tanks’?”

Dayan, speechless, knowing what was coming next, gestured defensively. A disaster was brewing. He hadn’t told the Old Man that the Egyptians had crossed the Canal and reinforced the Pass.

Nausea swept over Ben-Gurion. He vomited and went into palpitations. A national catastrophe was shaping up, imperiling statehood itself.

“B.G.,” Paula pleaded, “please, darling, calm down.”

“Dayan,” Ben-Gurion rasped. “Get the Lions out of Mitla Pass, now.”

The air grew thick with an invisible terror.

“This is no time to panic,” Dayan asserted. “Zechariah is just about on schedule. If he hasn’t taken Thamad by tonight, we can talk about evacuation of the Lions then.”