The Jerusalem Diamond (17 page)

There was a small radio shack and one officer with whom she would work, a captain named Shamir who would soon return to his civilian recording studio. He wasn't interested in anyone who didn't live for woofers and tweeters. On the first day she asked him about the group of civilians.

“They work for the Water System.”

“Oh. What do they do?”

“Dirty jobs,” he said without looking up from his equipment.

It was a small camp. There was a good
shekem
, a combination post exchange and service club where people went when they were off duty, and within a week she met virtually everybody, including the men in civilian dress. She asked no more questions about them because she soon realized they neither worked for the Water System nor were civilians. She noticed that in addition to the vehicles from the motor pool they drove two cars with civilian plates, a gray Willys jeep and a beige Willys station wagon. The gate to their inner compound opened only when someone pushed a buzzer from the inside. A small sign on their fence said they were the Fourth Special Tactical Detachment, and their boss was a lean major with skin made as dark as her own by the sun. His name was Ze'ev Kagan and they leaped to obey his commands. Within three days, four of them told her casually who his father was.

Groups of men hiked out of the camp into the desert to train and
sometimes she saw that one or two of the women from the Chen detachment went with them. One afternoon she asked one of the female soldiers how this was arranged.

“There's never a fuss. Simply ask. They like it when a Chen comes along.”

She allowed Captain Shamir to load his work on her shoulders as well as her own. She could feel herself becoming somebody else, sloughing off and replacing the cells of her old life as her subconscious began to believe Yoel was dead. There were still times when she could see his face in sharp detail, but there were others when she had to force her mind to recreate individual features and then concentrate on trying to put them together. By this time her body had begun to demand the things he had taught it to need and she was sleeping badly. When she did sleep she dreamed a lot of Yoel, often sexually. She went to physical training every morning, but it wasn't enough.

When she entered Operations, Ze'ev Kagan was sitting at one of the desks, typing. The Officer of the Day was the captain who commanded the engineers. He listened to her and nodded.

“Ze'ev. You're starting to train your people in the morning. Can the lieutenant go with you?”

Kagan looked at her. “I can't afford to send somebody back with you if you decide you want to drop out.”

“I won't want to drop out.”

He grinned at her dubiously. “It's okay with me,” he said, and went back to his typing.

She went with them three days in a row. The men wore overalls without markings. The first day they walked only fifteen kilometers, but each day thereafter the major added five kilometers to the route.

She took long hot showers when she came back but her muscles became stiff and sore.

On the third day Kagan led them over scrabbly loess and up and down rock-snagged hills at a fast pace and she was sorry she had come. Eventually he called a halt and came back to where she stood with a young blond boy named Avram, midway in the double file of men.

He took her out of line and led her to the front of the file to walk with him.

“I'm all right,” she said wickedly.

“I wasn't thinking of you,” he said, and she understood that he wanted her where she could be seen by any man who doubted he could finish.

He didn't speak to her again. He was a large man but glimpsed from the side his profile was sharp and ugly as a bird's. She could smell herself and occasionally when they brushed against one another his body felt hard.

That night she dreamed of him, and from then on sometimes the male figure in the dream was Yoel and sometimes it was not.

One morning she was prepared to go with them but Shamir gave her a full lot of messages to be sent. In the evening he came to where she was sitting in the
shekem
.

“Where were you?” he said.

When she explained he nodded and asked if she would be with them the next day.

“I haven't decided.”

He looked at her. “I want you to,” he said. His face was as dark as hers but his eyes were gray, like an Ashkenazi's.

There was an unwritten code in the camp. With men and women living in close quarters, they were careful to keep their military lives uncomplicated by their personal relationships. But it was quite common for couples to go away together on an overnight pass.

He took so long to ask her that she had begun to think perhaps she had been mistaken.

They went to Tel Aviv, to a little hotel on a shabby stretch of beach. The sound of the sea eased through the open window. When he took off his clothes his dark body was startlingly white from waist to mid-thighs and at first in her eagerness it seemed far better than the dreams but it became quickly apparent something was wrong. She would have felt sorry for herself if she had not felt so sorry for him, yet she had to conquer an insane impulse to laugh at them both, as if she were watching two clumsy comics struggling on a distant screen.

She did everything she could to help him, but it was no use.

He was seeing a psychiatrist, he told her. The doctor had encouraged
him to try with her but had warned that he must not be crushed by failure.

He apologized!

When she felt she could speak she took his hand and showed him how muscular her calves had become as a result of his marches. She had read a little about such ailments, she said carefully. They were not uncommon and she was certain it was temporary. Things would be better soon for all of them.

“When?” he asked. The way a child demands an answer.

She took a cigarette from his pack of Nelsons on the bed table and when he lit it for her she saw that his eyes were lover's eyes, full of passion and something else that made her wonder how she could have been tempted to laugh at him or at herself. The strong smoke bit into her throat and caused her eyes to fill, and she touched him blindly, with as much healing tenderness as she could pour through her trembling fingers.

“When the
mishmish
comes,” she said.

It took her only three weeks to accomplish what the psychiatrists could not.

She helped Ze'ev Kagan tremendously. It was a reason for living.

He was not her kind of man. Her husband had labored to give the Bedouin health and permanent grass. She knew Kagan poisoned wells to speed the departure of Bedouin tribes suspected of supplying intelligence to Arab countries. He distributed hashish to addicts who were informers.

He was in charge of dirty jobs; God only knew what else he did, what else he had done.

They saw a great deal of one another for fourteen months. Finally, he grew too serious. He wanted more than she could give. She broke it off after she left the army and returned to her work at the museum.

When he approached her to work with him for a brief period she thought he was joking. But after he had explained the assignment she thought about it.

Finally, she agreed to take accrued vacation time from the museum.
She packed a bag and moved into the room at the hotel, the room next to Harry Hopeman's.

The American called and asked her to join him for breakfast. When she was ready she tapped on his door. They greeted one another quietly. In the dining room she waited until he had ordered and then told him she was aware he didn't welcome her assistance. “Neither of us now has a choice. I am assigned to work with you.”

“I would like to speak with the person from whom you take orders.”

“Mr. Hopeman, I was called in to make that unnecessary. They will not make themselves known to you.”

He scowled.

His features were plain but his craggy face was made interesting by the vitality in his eyes. She noticed his hands as he buttered a roll. There were myths about hands. Dov Michaelman was a fine surgeon with blunt, stubby fingers. This man's hands were long-fingered and handsome. She could imagine them untying intricate knots, threading a needle. Touching a woman. She smiled at her foolishness; no doubt he was clumsy and fumbling.

To her displeasure, she saw that he had misinterpreted the smile. A spoiled American, she decided; too much money, too much success. Too many women who smiled at him.

“I have work to do in my room,” she said. “I shall not be in your way while we wait to be contacted.”

He took a small, square package from the pocket of his coat and set it on the table. “I don't think it will be a long wait,” he said.

11

THE MONSIGNOR

“Like Gila County, Arizona.”

“What is that?”

Her voice startled him; she had proven capable of silences that lasted for miles.

“Hot.” He kept his eyes on the narrow road. Barreling toward them was a trailer truck; dead ahead, an Arab boy bounced on a donkey. Harry braked. The truck roared around them, they passed the boy. He struggled with the four-speed floor shift and the side of his hand touched her.

“Pardon.” His hand tingled.

From Yemen or the Bronx, a
kvetch
is a
kvetch
. As soon as she entered the car she asked him to turn off the air conditioning. It would make them ill, she insisted; it was better for him to learn to live with the heat.

Air buffeted through the window to blast his face like a furnace flareback.

That morning a note had been left for him. It was brief and to the point, written in the same spidery script as the address on the package
containing the garnet. It directed him to go to a hotel in Arad and register.

“In the north it is cool. There is snow on the top of Hermon all the year.”

“But Arad is south, not north,” he said.

“Yes. Arad is south.” She smiled. “You see? We
can
agree,” she said.

A flat, sunbaked town. The streets were filled with soldiers and vehicles.

“Wait, please!” she cried as they passed a hotel. “I want to go in there. Come, I'll buy you coffee.”

“It isn't our hotel.”

“I know, I know. Come.”

In the coffee shop, a middle-aged counterman with a shaved head and a moustache like a Turk's slammed the flat of his hand twice on the counter—“Ah-hah” His name turned out to be Micha. He pointed a huge forefinger at Harry. “Better be nice to her. This one is special.”

Harry sat through the reunion. Where is Itzak? In a kibbutz up north. Where is Yoav? An accountant in Tel Aviv. Where is Captain Abelson? Still here, a major now.

“And Ze'ev?” Micha asked. “He never comes in any more. How is Ze'ev?”

“I guess he's fine.”

“Guess? Ah-haa.”

For the first time, Harry saw her embarrassed. “Only Micha can put so much meaning into an ah-ha,” she said.

Micha served them coffee on the house.

“The camp is larger now?”

Micha shrugged.

“So many troops on the streets.”

“From elsewhere. On maneuvers.”

“Oh. Arad has grown.”

Micha nodded mournfully. “But have you been to Dimona? Immigrants. Russians, Americans, Cochins, Moroccans. Too many different vegetables in one pot. Lots of problems.” He moved away to wait on someone else.

Harry sneaked a look as she drank her coffee. An enemy of refrigeration technology, but her blouse had begun to cling damply. He glanced away. “You're an old customer?”

“I was stationed at an army camp nearby. I was here very often.”

With Ze'ev, he thought. Who has been banished with an ah-ha.

They finished their coffee, waved farewell to Micha.

“So many troops. Maneuvers. They won't come here, you know. The people you are going to meet,” she said in the car. “They were afraid to meet you in Jerusalem. They won't sit down in the midst of all these Israeli soldiers.”

Harry grunted. He had carefully not sought her opinions.

When he found their hotel, there were no messages waiting. They spoke little at dinner. She recommended the chicken. He ordered the veal, which was tough.

Just before it got dark a camel came out of the desert and began to eat a bed of flowers behind the hotel. The desk clerk chased it away with curses and stones.

In the morning, when he went through the lobby to meet her for breakfast, another letter was waiting for him at the desk.

“Morning.”

“
Boker tov
.”

“How are the eggs here?”

“Fresh.”

He ordered the eggs. He handed her the letter and watched her read it. It directed him to return to Jerusalem, to wait again at the hotel. “So you were right.”

She glanced at him. “You don't find it difficult to say that to a woman,” she observed.

He shrugged. “Right is right.”

“Nor do you seem perturbed about the … runaround.”