“What did the doctors say?” Sarah asked.
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Barak laughed. “Indigestion and old age. They gave me some pills.”
Sarah tried to press the issue.
“Come on, old girl. We are here to celebrate. Independence Day.”
Crowds had been pouring into Haifa all day. They hitchhiked, drove, and came by plane and train. The city was bulging with humanity. All day long people stopped by Barak’s hotel room to pay their respects to him.
In the evening a torchlight parade of youth groups started the celebrations. They passed in review before the green at the City Hall on Har Ha-Carmel and after the usual speeches there was a fireworks display from Mount Carmel.
The entire length of Herzl Street was packed with tens of thousands of people. Loudspeakers played music and every few yards hora rings formed. Herzl Street was a riot of whirling feet and music and color. Barak and Sarah joined the hora rings and danced to riotous applause.
Barak and Sarah were invited as guests of honor to the Technical Institute where the “Brotherhood of Fire,” the Palmach fighters during the riots, had gathered. They lit a huge bonfire and Yemenites danced and Druse Arabs danced and a lamb was roasted and Arab coffee was brewed and a chorus sang oriental and Biblical songs. All over the campus of the Technical Institute boys and girls from the settlements slept in each other’s arms. The “Brotherhood of Fire” danced and sang until daybreak.
Sarah and Barak returned to their hotel to freshen up, and even at daybreak the dancing was still going on in all the streets. Later in the day they drove in an open car along the parade route, to thunderous cheers, and went to the reviewing stand alongside the President.
Carrying banners like the ancient tribes, New Israel marched past Barak-the Yemenites, now proud and fierce soldiers and the tall strong sabra boys and girls and the flyers from South Africa and America and the fighters who had come from every corner of the world. The elite paratroops in their red berets and the border guards in green marched by. Tanks rumbled and planes roared overhead. And then Barak’s heart skipped a beat as the ovation rose in a new crescendo and the bearded, leathery Beasts of the Negev saluted the father of their commander.
After the parade there were more speeches and parties and celebrations. When Barak and Sarah left for Yad El two days later, dancers were still whirling in the streets.
No sooner had they reached their cottage at Yad El than Barak broke into a long, wracking spasm of coughing, as though he had been holding it in by main strength during the 576
celebrations. He sagged into his big chair, exhausted, as Sarah brought him some medicine.
“I told you it would be too much excitement,” she admonished. “You should start acting your age already.”
Barak’s mind was on the tanned, rough youngsters marching in the parade. “The army of Israel …” he mumbled.
“I’ll make some tea,” she said, fondly mussing his hair.
Barak took her wrist and pulled her down on his lap. She rested her head on his shoulder and then looked at him questioningly, and he turned his eyes away.
“Now that the celebrations are through,” Sarah said, “tell me what the doctors really told you.”
“I never have been able to lie to you very well,” he said.
“I won’t make a fuss, I promise.”
“Please understand that I am ready,” Barak said. “I think I have known it all along.”
Sarah uttered a short cry and bit her lip.
Barak nodded slowly. “You had better send for Ari and Jordana.”
“Cancer?”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
“A few months … a few wonderful months.”
It was hard to think of Barak as anything but a giant. Now, in the succeeding weeks, his age showed frightfully. The flesh had melted from his powerful frame and he was bent with age and his complexion had turned sallow. He was in great pain but he hid the fact and adamantly refused to be moved to a hospital.
His bed was arranged by a window so that he could spend his days looking out upon his fields and up the hills to the border of Lebanon. When Ari arrived he found Barak here, gazing with sadness toward the place where Abu Yesha no longer existed.
“Shalom, abba,” Ari said embracing Barak. “I came as quickly as I could.”
“Shalom, Ari. Let me look at you, son. It has been so long … over two years. I thought you might be at the celebrations with your troops.”
“The Egyptians have been acting up at Nitzana. We had to make a reprisal.”
Barak studied his son. Ari was bronzed from the Negev sun and looked as powerful as a lion.
“The Negev agrees with you,” he said.
“What is all this nonsense etna tells me?”
“Don’t feel obligated to cheer me up, Ari. I am ancient enough to die gracefully.”
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Ari poured some brandy and lit a cigarette while Barak continued to study him. Tears welled in the old man’s eyes.
“I have been happy these days, except for you and Jordana. If I could only go and know I am leaving you content.”
Ari sipped his brandy and turned his eyes away. Barak took his son’s hand.
“They tell me you could be chief of staff of the army of Israel someday, if you would choose to come out of the desert.”
“There is work to be done in the Negev, Father. Someone has to do it. The Egyptians are forming fedayeen gangs of murderers to cross the border and raid our settlements.”
“But you are not happy, Ari.”
“Happy? You know me, Father. I’m not given to making demonstrations of happiness like new immigrants.”
“Why have you shut yourself off from me and your mother for two years?”
“I am sorry about that.”
“You know, Ari, for the first time in my life, these past two years, I have had the luxury of being able just to sit and think. It is wonderful for a man to be able to meditate in peace. And in these last few weeks I have had even more time. I have thought of everything. I know that I have not been a good father. I have failed you and Jordana.”
“Come, Father … I won’t listen to such nonsense. Don’t get sentimental on me.”
“No, there’s truth in what I say. It seems now I see so clearly. You, and Jordana, and I … the little time I have been able to give you … and Sarah. Ari, for a family this is wrong.”
“Father … please. No son has had the love and the understanding that I have. Perhaps all fathers believe they could have done more.”
Barak shook his head. “When you were a small boy, you were a man. You stood beside me and worked these swamps when you were twelve. You have not needed me since I put a bull whip in your hands.”
“I don’t want to hear any more of this. We live in this country for what we can do for tomorrow. It is the way you had to live and the way I live now. I won’t let you torment yourself. We had to live this way because we have never had a choice.”
“That is what I try to tell myself, Ari. I say what else? A ghetto? A concentration camp? Extermination ovens? I say anything is worth this. Yet, this freedom of ours … the price is so high. We cherish it so fiercely that we have created a race of Jewish Tarzans to defend it. We have been 578 *
able to give you nothing but a life of bloodshed and a heritage of living with your back to the sea.”
“No price is too great for Israel,” Ari said.
“It is-when I see sadness in my son’s eyes.”
“You didn’t take David Ben Ami from Jordana. It is the price of being born a Jew. Is it not better to die for your country than to die the way your father died, at the hands of a mob in a ghetto?”