Pumpkinflowers (5 page)

13

Morning will rise soon here in Lebanon, and fog will cover the land again. Only the hilltops will be visible above it, a view that is cold and enchanted like the set of a play, or a picture from a story or a fantasy film.

Avi was sitting in the outpost before dawn, writing a letter. Nearly a year had gone by since he first arrived on the hill. He was back for another tour. In this description of the beginning of a day at the Pumpkin it is possible to see his powers of observation beginning to sharpen, the flexing of literary muscles.

To the south, playing the role of the bad guy, is Beaufort Castle, haughty, dark and threatening above the mist. Afterward the sun will start to come up and paint the sky beyond Mount Hermon many shades of pink and red, turning the fog into a white and unthreatening carpet. In the end the sun will finally rise entirely and reveal itself, the fog will dissipate, and once again we will see Lebanon, beautiful and wild.

The nighttime sounds of the Pumpkin: the hiss of a radio, a few words passing through the ether from another hilltop, footsteps as a dark figure passes in battle dress.

Again and again I find myself amazed by the power of the landscape in this place, by the contrast between the hills, the valleys and wadis, a contrast so great it is almost impossible to calculate. The villages and towns here are also a puzzling mosaic sometimes. On one hill you see a village with a big church and a red tower, which makes the village look European, and opposite are typical Arab houses. New villas opposite churches, and old houses (from the previous century, some of them, or at least from the beginning of this one) next to new high-rises.

Letters from the Pumpkin went down to Israel on the armored convoys and then through an army office into the regular mail and thus to the homes of the girls to whom the soldiers unburdened themselves and from whom they hoped to receive—to receive what? Understanding, certainly. Respect. Just the right dosage of pity. And, when they got home, who knows? These letters were the most important personal records produced at the outpost, but most of them are lost now. Few of these relationships lasted, and who can blame the girls, forced to wait for unpredictable, intense letters and an unpredictable, intense person who showed up briefly full of incomprehensible experiences he wanted to talk about and not talk about, and then disappeared again. You can't just call her up today, now that both of you are other people, and ask for your letters back.

Avi's writing was in the form of letters to a girl he had known since the first grade. Her name was Smadar. She remembered him as a child constantly in trouble, exiled from classrooms into hallways, asking questions of teachers that occasionally won him esteem exceeding their exasperation.

Even when she and Avi had grown up he took nothing for granted. Their friends would always meet at the same place when they returned from the army on weekends, and he wanted to know why. Why not somewhere else? When they were about to go out one evening Avi saw Smadar putting on makeup and asked her why. It was dark outside, and did she think anyone would notice?

Everything here is a kind of illusion. Opposite the place where I am sitting, on a hill, is a beautiful villa with a large garden and red shingles. It's a pastoral scene. But if you look closely, you see the bullet holes all over the house, and you see that the garden is neglected because no one dares live there, in such dangerous proximity to the outpost.

It's very hard for me to put my finger precisely on the feeling I have when I'm here. It's a kind of sadness mixed with longing so deep that sometimes it's painful. And fear, of course. It's strange, but the fear doesn't bother me at all. It's part of the sadness and the longing. It's with me all the time, but not directly, kind of sneaking up on me. That's how it appears when you're alone. I mean not when you're literally alone, but when I step away for a second and think about home, about my friends, or about a love story I haven't started yet.

This was around the time that a copy of
Reality Bites
reached the outpost, when for a while one of the voices heard in the bunker belonged to Winona Ryder. It was also not long after the company commander—Yohai, the fighter who stormed the house with Avi the year before—was on his way up to the trench during a barrage when shrapnel sheared off his nose and cut an artery in his neck. He got himself to one of the bunkers. There was a soldier at the doorway who just stared at him and froze, because Yohai was like their father, he was supposed to be taking care of them, but here he was scorched and stunned with his nose hanging by a piece of skin. Yohai walked past the soldier into the bunker and lay on one of the beds. He called for a medic and blacked out. The medics say he was flailing around so much they had to drug him just to get a tube in his mouth and keep him breathing until a helicopter could land. They did a good job, so he's alive today. He sends his regards.

14

U
NTIL THIS TIME,
no one from Avi's company had yet been killed or badly wounded. The bad luck, the soldiers believed, belonged to the second unit that alternated on the hill, the one where Eran served, the one humiliated by the flag. This second unit, returned to the line in the spring of 1995, lost a rifleman and two trackers in an ambush among nearby olive trees. The Fighting Pioneer Youth, on the other hand, started to think they were protected, at least until their commander was hit—that was when the truth began to dawn on them, though of course no one knew the extent of it.

Before returning to Avi it would be useful to devote a few more words to Eran, whom we left in the trench after the flag incident, watching a soldier lying very still. The way Eran's time at the Pumpkin ended is worth describing.

Five months after the Pumpkin Incident, the rotation of the two units sent Avi's company down to Israel for training and brought Eran back to the hill. At around this time Eran was trying to arrive at a view of the world that would help him make sense of everything and allow him to function in light of what he had seen. He had come to the crisis John Prine sings about in “Angel from Montgomery”: “Just give me one thing that I can hold on to / To believe in this living is just a hard way to go.”

What Eran had in his brain up to that point—loyalty to his friends, the moderate religion of his parents, a few vague ideas about his country—was not enough. He needed an idea. This led him to a store in Tel Aviv where they sold the writings of a rabbi, Yehuda Leib Ashlag, whose readings of Kabbalah and Marx led him in the 1930s to a kind of mystic socialism. Eran picked up a pamphlet called
Th
e
Book of the Giving of the Torah
, in which the rabbi argued that altruism was at the center of the Jewish religion. “We must understand that all of the commandments of the Torah are no more and no less than the sum of the details to be found in the one commandment ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,' ” wrote the rabbi, echoing a much older lesson taught by the sages.

Altruism, like everything else, proceeded in steps, he wrote: first you love your immediate family and then your more distant relatives; then you learn to love your country and then the whole world. True altruism becomes possible in the third stage, because when you are part of a nation you give to people you don't know. That is why the Torah was given not to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, who were just patriarchs of an extended family, but much later, to Moses in the desert of Sinai, when the Hebrews had become a nation of hundreds of thousands.

The rabbi agreed with much of Marx's thinking, though he observed that the implementation of this thinking in Soviet Russia showed that people weren't ready yet. But he was optimistic. Humanity, he wrote, is “climbing up as if on the steps of a ladder,” and this was the thinking behind Marxism and also behind the Torah;
Th
e Ladder
was the name of the rabbi's most important book. He identified two forces at work in the machine of human development. One, egotism, is a negative force that leads people to take care of themselves and destroy their neighbor, and the other, altruism, is a positive force whose highest expression is giving to others without expectation of receiving anything in return. “The egoistic force acts like the centripetal force, pulling things from outside a person and concentrating them inside himself,” he wrote in one of his essays, “and the altruistic force is like centrifugal forces, flowing from the inside of his body outside; these two forces are to be found in every part of creation according to its substance, and also in the human being according to his substance.”

Eran brought the pamphlet to the outpost, kept it in his webbing, and read it when he could, sitting on the soiled mattresses under fluorescent lights, sneaking a cigarette in the yard between tasks, flicking the ash between his scuffed boots. He divided the men at the Pumpkin into two groups: the ones trying to do the minimum and make it home safe, and the idealists, who were committed to something larger than themselves. In hours spent arguing with the others about this he forged the following conclusion: He was there not for himself, not for the respect he received when he returned home, and not even for his friends. He was there
for the country
. This was the highest altruism he could imagine from where he stood. He volunteered for everything.

Before first light one day, someone shook Eran awake and told him to take over one of the guard posts for Readiness with Dawn. Eran didn't think it was his turn, and he was exhausted, so he argued and tried to go back to sleep. In the end he was forced to concede. He loaded his rifle and trudged up the stairs to the dark trench, angry with himself for resisting. He was here for the country, and his own fatigue should have no meaning. He had been weak, and in his memory this is how he left the Pumpkin—after descending a step on the ladder, after letting himself down. The night sky lightened.

A few hours before, around 3 a.m., a lookout using a thermal camera at the Pumpkin's surveillance post had seen seven figures leave Nabatieh, the Shiite town, on foot. The lookout was certain they were guerrillas. They were heading for the lower end of one of the riverbeds that led up toward the Pumpkin. Once they were in the riverbed they would be hidden from view, so he decided to ask permission from headquarters in Israel to open fire quickly with one of the outpost's tanks. Permission was necessary in such cases because the guerrillas were still outside the security zone and the army was worried about killing civilians by mistake, which was not uncommon. The lookout got on the radio:

Hoshen, this is Ataf 4.

(“Ataf 4” was the lookout, whose name was Amir. “Hoshen” was the soldier at headquarters in Israel, a young woman Amir's age; as it happened, the two knew each other from civilian life, and she never forgot the conversation. “Dirties” are guerrillas.)

Ataf 4, this is Hoshen, over.

Receive: A confirmed ID of seven dirties in the southern outskirts of Nabatieh.

Roger. Do you have the coordinates?

I'm giving it to you on the [telephone]. . . . Requesting permission to open fire.

Roger, hold on. . . . Ataf 4, this is Hoshen.

This is Ataf 4. Do we have permission to fire?

Negative.

What do you mean, negative? We have a certain ID of seven dirties. They're going into the riverbed. Soon we're not going to be able to hit them. I request permission to fire now.

This is Hoshen. Negative. No permission to fire.

Hoshen, this is Ataf 4. Then what the hell am I doing here?

The guerrillas disappeared.

When shells began falling at 5:59 a.m. Eran thought he saw a few heads peeking from behind boulders downhill. He fired at them and saw puffs of dust nearby. Then he was on his knees. He couldn't breathe. Something had flashed and something was burning. He looked down and saw that his right arm was no longer attached to his body but remained in the sleeve of his coat. He dragged himself out of the guard post and into the trench, where he found himself looking at someone's boots. Help me, Eran said.

Two soldiers found him charred and delirious. They put a tourniquet on the stump and carried him down to one of the bunkers, which by some magic appeared to have assumed the size of an auditorium, so he remembers. They laid him on the floor between the beds. A medic named Davidoff gave him a shot in the thigh—morphine. Eran felt he had to scream, he just needed to get it out of him, so he screamed and screamed, and then he said, I'm sorry.

The garrison radioed down to Israel that they had flowers and needed a thistle quickly to evacuate them, but the shelling made it too risky for helicopters, so the soldiers loaded Eran onto an armored vehicle and drove him down the hill and out of mortar range. When he was finally placed on a helicopter someone arranged his severed arm atop his chest. Next to him was the lookout, Amir, who had been running along the trench and must have passed behind Eran's emplacement just as the rocket hit. The lookout was now a motionless human shape under a gray blanket. He was twenty years old. A few months earlier, before heading to the Pumpkin for the first time, Amir had written in a neat hand on a yellow pad, “In a few days I'll be on my way to another outpost. It is a road that might be one-way, or might not be.” His mother found the note afterward.

When the helicopter landed in Israel men in white smocks rushed Eran through sliding doors into an emergency room, and a TV cameraman filmed him going past. In the footage you see the altruist's face blackened and unrecognizable, and hear him screaming something as he passes. If you pay attention you can make out the words: “For the country.”

15

A
VI WROTE A
letter to Smadar one night from the war room, a tiny space with a few chairs, radios, and blue cups sticky with the residue of tea. The army had recently completed one of its periodic offensives in Lebanon, a few weeks of shelling and air strikes and belligerent rhetoric after which everything remained as it had been before. Avi was at home when the offensive began and was in no hurry to get back. But his father, who didn't want him to incur the wrath of his superiors, pushed him to go and finally drove him north to catch a convoy. This ride inspired Avi to write a story, later lost, comparing it to Isaac's walk with Abraham up Mount Moriah.

Smadar had a boyfriend at the time who was not Avi. But they read the same books, and her intellect matched his. His letters to her, he once wrote, were a way to “calm my internal combustion.” She loved his writing, and he knew it. Even then, Smadar had a look that suggested she could fathom all kinds of things and that these things might include you. She thought Avi seemed much older than he was because he read so much and had lived two lives in parallel—his own and that of an observer watching himself.

Avi was thinking about a change in his life. His life was not his to change, stuck as he was on a hilltop in an enemy country. But Avi did not accept this, or accepted it only as a transient injustice. He thought he might move his things out of his parents' house in one of the Haifa suburbs and live somewhere else by himself.

The young Avi was a great analyst of his own thoughts and actions. This was one of the things that made being intimate with him so tiring, and it is also one of the common characteristics of a writer. He was aware of making an effort to maintain a barbed exterior while hanging on to something of his childhood, hoarding a small supply of innocence in the hope that it would survive until his discharge, upon which he would recover it. This was an idea from
Th
e Kites
, the part where Romain Gary tells us that the kite maker Ambroise Fleury, a veteran of the Great War, was wise enough in his youth to hide a particle of innocence that he protected through the horrors of the trenches and which had evolved over the years into a kind of wisdom. Ambroise's kites, for Gary, were beautiful flights of the imagination, acts of creativity representing the best of what humans can produce; one of the airborne contraptions is in the shape of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “with wings made to look like two books, the wind ruffling their pages.”

“Now I am keeping it in hiding, so no one here finds it,” wrote Avi of his own store of innocence. “If they find it they won't hesitate to use it against me, and it will be hard to make it through the time I have remaining in uniform. There is no room for innocence here. Innocence brings exploitation in this place.”

Avi knew he had an acute sensitivity to other people and knew this was not entirely a blessing. He found it hard to accept the imperfections he saw in others and in himself. For him the army was, more than anything else, an intensive course on human nature, and it was changing him. “I can't see people the same way I did at first—wonderful or terrible, little or big. Now they're a jumble of good and evil, small-mindedness and greatness,” he wrote. “The point is that we are changing (and this is what scares me most) into mediocre people, people who meet halfway, and it affects us all in nearly every aspect of life,” he wrote. “It affects our little choices and our big ones. Today you won't see the world as you did before. You won't make the clearer distinctions. You'll compromise.” The version of himself that once stood with the others in the yard at the training base was an innocent child with big dreams. Now he felt he was not a child and not innocent. “My dreams today are much smaller and simpler,” he wrote, “and I might even realize them.” He was starting to think about the book he would write.

Can we imagine Gary as a companion for the young and lonely Avi of those days, drawn by the presence of his books in the soldier's rucksack, flying nocturnal circles over the Pumpkin in an invisible biplane? Here is Gary on those members of the French military who, unlike him, surrendered and collaborated in 1940: “I understood, only too well, those who refused to follow de Gaulle,” he wrote in a memoir that Avi hadn't read. “They had learned wisdom, that poisoned draught with its sickly taste of humility, renunciation and acceptance, which the habit of living drips, drop by drop, down our throats.” The habit of living—that is, adulthood—this is what Avi was figuring out during those nights at the edge of the world.