“Hug your Uzi every morning, kiss it every evening, and sleep with it every night!”
“Yes, sir!”
“Now, get around the building! Thirty seconds!”
“Yes, sir!” The company of about sixty soldiers broke into a sprint, raising dust and spinning pebbles. Lemmy held the Uzi to his chest and ran as fast as he could. Beside him, a dark-skinned recruit tripped over a rock. Lemmy stopped and helped him up, and they chased after the others around the building, rejoining the line in attention.
“You!” The officer pointed at Lemmy. “Did you have a nice stroll? Did you enjoy the view? Shall I call a taxi for you next time?”
Lemmy yelled, “Yes, sir!”
Everyone burst out laughing. Even the officer laughed, suddenly appearing almost as young as the recruits. “Thirty seconds! Go!”
This time, Lemmy was the first to return. When the rest arrived and lined up, the officer clapped slowly. “A bunch of old ladies. Do you want to play bingo now?”
“Yes, sir!”
He grinned. “My name is Captain Zigelnick. But you can call me God.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Drop and give me twenty pushups. Now!”
Lemmy kneeled carefully and strapped on the Uzi so that it rested against his back while he dropped forward on his hands. He heard the officer berating the soldiers who had put their machine guns on the ground.
By the tenth pushup, he was surrounded by grunts and groans. Lemmy gritted his teeth, ignored the burning in his muscles, and counted in his mind. At twenty, he stood up.
Zigelnick pointed at him. “Give me another twenty!”
After more running and pushups, they marched into a rectangular building with bathrooms and showers at one end, an office at the other, and rows of metal-framed beds with foam mattresses in between. Lemmy picked a bed next to the soldier he had helped-Sanani, who spoke Hebrew with the crisp accent of a Yemenite Jew, which also explained his dark complexion.
It rained outside as they lined up. Captain Zigelnick led them down a rocky crevice. Soon, their new boots were caked in mud, and the rain soaked their uniforms. Some of the trainees cursed under their breath, but to Lemmy the wet uniform felt better than any dry black coat. They started up a new hill. Sanani raced him to the top. When the rest of the company gathered, they lined up three-deep and someone started singing, “ Jerusalem of Gold, and of bronze, and of light… ”
It was a popular song by poet Naomi Shemer, infused with Jewish longing for the Old City, as if the threatened war with the Arabs was not about Israel’s very survival, but about recovering the ancient Israelite capital.
Others joined. “ The enchanted city, which sits alone, a wall across her heart. ”
Captain Zigelnick joined the singing. “ And no one travels to the Dead Sea, by way of Jericho. ”
Their voices rose louder, echoing from the surrounding, barren hills. “ Jerusalem, which is made of gold. ”
Lemmy stood shoulder to shoulder with his fellow paratroopers-in-the-making, a chorus of devotion to the Old City he had watched from across the border every Friday of his young life, listening to his father’s prayers. He thought of the narrow alleys and the smell of fish from his mother’s hands. And the sound of Benjamin’s laughter.
“R ead our history, and you’ll know the future!” Elie watched the two agents push aside their cups of coffee and gaze at the open book. This page of Samuel II told of a hot day in Jerusalem, when King David had enjoyed the cool evening breeze on the roof of his royal palace. He noticed a beautiful woman bathing in a pool of rainwater on a nearby roof and sent a courtier to summon her to his royal bed. When she became pregnant, the king assigned her husband to the front line, where he died in battle. The widow married the king and gave birth to an heir. ‘ And God disapproved of the evil which King David had committed.’
The younger agent, Dor, looked up with a grin. “Naughty boy, the king of Israel.”
“Like he had a choice? Bathsheba was irresistible.” Yosh was an older man, whom Elie had recruited over a decade earlier.
Elie closed the book. “Great men are all alike-three thousand years ago, and yesterday. You know the rumors about Moshe Dayan. I want facts about his affairs: Who he’s seduced, where, when, and what happened to their husbands-names, ranks, and service records, especially if they died.”
“It’s not going to be easy,” Dor said. “Dayan is a popular man and a member of the Knesset. We’ll have to sniff around his former military staff, his driver, his neighbors, his friends-”
“I don’t like it.” Yosh pushed Samuel II aside. “I didn’t sign up with your department to assist inept politicians in a lascivious blackmail operation to keep Dayan out of the defense ministry.”
“Who said anything about the defense ministry?”
“Oh, come on!”
“And you signed up with me because you were kicked out of Shin Bet for equally lascivious activities.” Elie paused to let his rebuke sink in. “Now go and do your job!”
Chapter 28
Three weeks after she had accompanied Lemmy on his first day in the army, Tanya found a letter from him in her mailbox. He described how the harshness of boot camp had forged the company into a tight-knit group. He was learning new skills and growing stronger after a bout of the stomach flu. There was a long paragraph about a five-day hike they had taken in the desert as part of a drill involving a mock attack on a tank-battalion base which, he wrote, was a lot of fun! As if anticipating her question, Lemmy added at the end of the letter that he had been thinking of his parents and wondered whether Tanya could find out how they were, especially my mother. From this Tanya deduced that he had received no letters.
Late that night, after the chatter on the UN radio dwindled down to silence, Tanya turned on the automatic recording device and called a taxi.
When they reached Meah Shearim, she asked the driver to wait for her at the gate. Dressed in an overcoat and a knitted wool cap, she walked quickly through the alleys and climbed the stairs to the third-floor apartment.
Rabbi Abraham Gerster opened the door wearing black pants, a white, button-down shirt, and a black yarmulke.
“Shalom, Abraham.”
He glared at her. She feared he would slam the door in her face. But he beckoned her into his study.
“You got some nerve coming here.” He leaned on his desk. “How is my son?”
“He’s in basic training. Paratroopers corps.” A reading lamp by the cot shed light on an open book by his pillow, but otherwise the small room was dim. She could not decipher the expression on Abraham’s bearded face. “He’s doing well,” she added.
“I can’t say the same for us.”
She pulled off the wool cap and unbuttoned her coat. “I had to rescue him from this fundamentalist concentration camp.”
Abraham grimaced and stepped forward, coming at her with quickness she had not expected. She retreated, her back hitting the book shelves. He closed his arms around her, tightly, as if trying to smother her. But then he uttered a deep, painful sigh, and she gave in to his embrace, placing her arms around his waist, resting her head on his chest, which rose and sank with quick, halting breaths.
After a long time, they let go of each other. Abraham blew his nose into a handkerchief and sat on his cot. She sat next to him.
He took her hand and kissed it. “You did him a favor. He deserved better. I should have sent him away years ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.”
“How could you? Parents can never let go, even under the best of circumstances.”
“Not only that. I was afraid for him. Still am.”
“Basic training will take six months,” she said. “He’ll be safe when the war comes-if it comes. Eshkol will do anything to avoid war.”
“It’s not war that I fear. This place is close to the border.” Abraham gestured at the walls. “He would be more likely to get hit by a Jordanian cannonball here than while serving in the IDF.”