Refiner's Fire (49 page)

This was what he had known. Who was to fathom what the Moroccans and old Turcomans and Kurds were thinking exactly—but they too were dreaming of home in a golden age, as they, without knowing it, were in the thick of yet another golden age. Though Lev would have preferred a living Katrina Perlé, there is little more exquisite and taxing than devotion to a lost love. For it is one of the ways in the world to confront and beat mortality, like standing on a platform above time and earth and compassing everything in an eye, commanding time, inviting all images to circle and concentrate until they sear the cup of the eye like fire. Lev had lived a hundred battered lives—it was his choice. Some men are like that. They halt time by intent and determined recollection. If it were not for them we would know no value, and our lives would slip through our hands like a wet rope. But they slow it in their self-destroying grip.

Before he had time to unlace the heavy boots one of his men came to him and said, “Don't bother. They say on the radio that there are going to be big thunderstorms, and that this is it.” He meant the beginning of the rainy season. Their work would be curtailed. Since on this tour they had only three days left, it was up to Lev to do the obvious. “Well?” asked the old Moroccan.

“Okay,” he said. “Let's go now, but make it quick or we won't get to Haifa in time for dinner.”

They extinguished the lunch fires, gathered weapons and tools, and nearly ran through the woods to the truck. Lev rode in the cab—a lucky circumstance, for the men in the back were punching, screaming, and throwing food at each other in their mysterious enthusiasm. They gathered speed, passing valleys in the forest that they knew so well, and they came over a ridge and saw Haifa standing like a white mirage, many miles beyond them, across the land and the bay, perched on Mt. Carmel, a perfect city for which they had great affection.

Lev would once more be a general; it would soon be time to rejoin his brigade. The gap between him and the others in the truck became more and more apparent as they approached Haifa. He would go to an apartment in a tower high on the mountain, from which the sea spread out visually for a hundred miles in three directions. They would home to burrows in the Hadar.

Having gone against traffic, they arrived in Haifa at dinnertime. He paused at the name on his mailbox, feeling, as always, like a thief. The core of his life was cast around a time when he was called Lev, and he would always be that in his own mind and heart. But after some years in Israel he had Hebraized his name, and to everyone else in the world he was Arieh, one of the minor generals.

He entered his apartment and walked across the livingroom to a wide balcony from which he could see the city, the sea, and the dunes of the North Coast. Without taking his eyes off the sparkling lights he stepped back and cast his handful of mail onto a table where the maid had left fresh roses. Then he went out to the balcony and watched until it became completely dark. The clouds were steep and forbiddingly purple. But to the west the weather over the Mediterranean was still and perfect. For just an instant before he went inside and turned on every light in the house, he had cast a practiced glance southward to a dark feature of the coast he knew well, where waves and spray were dashing coldly over sandbars and beaches, a wild spot on the coast, covered with pine and palm.

I
T WAS
December, but in Tel Aviv some people bathed in the sea. The gardens were sleepy and the bees flew very slowly because it was so cold at night that they became punchy. By the time they had fully awakened and regained their legendary efficiency, the sun was already going down and they had to start back for various hives in the orange groves circling the city. They do not fly more than several stories up, and so had to follow the plan of the streets—an exhausting process which some of them seemed to avoid by taking the bus, a risky endeavor because Jews on a bus panic if they see a bee or a mosquito, and will not rest until they have forced it out the window or crushed it in a day-old copy of
Ma'ariv.
But the bees were skilled at hiding in boxes of vegetables, perching silently on top of a hat, or riding in neat organized rows on the roof of the bus.

The Jews of Israel loved winter more than other seasons because in most parts of the country winter was like spring. Whereas in summer the heat was intense and the colors furious, in winter the air, the sea, the reflections, the flowers, and the light were tranquil. Except when the Mediterranean went wild in storm, it was a time of healing in a weak but warm sun, in the sometimes cool breeze over the deserted Yarkon and its puntlike boats, and in the quiet shadows of silent flower-edged verandas.

To begin their life in the East, Marshall and Lydia had found a tiny whitewashed room in the old Sea Quarter of Tel Aviv. Most of their neighborhood had been leveled by time and bulldozers. It was ridiculously poor there. They paid eight dollars a week for one room, two cots, a table, a chair, and a sink; with ten dollars a week for food, they ate quite well. They shopped only in the great market at closing time, when vendors were tired and wanted to empty their stalls and go back to Petach Tikvah. The old Moroccan granddaddies who traded tomatoes and cucumbers all day were quickly infatuated with Lydia. She was sunburnt and tall, greeneyed and auburn-haired, with a radiant white smile. They thought that she was an angel, and, since they did not want to carry their wares back with them, she often fetched great bargains—a dozen grapefruit for 25¢, a kilo of rice for 30¢, five enormous tomatoes for a dime. Marshall, for his part, would stare down the chicken vendors and come away with a fresh-killed hen for half a dollar, or eggs at 20¢ apiece. Sometimes they dealt so well in the frantic market (where thousands of shrewd traders bluffed and lied and counterbluffed, but Marshall and Lydia were just honest, naive, and cheap) that they had enough left to buy a bunch of daffodils, a potted geranium, or a chunk of halvah—Lydia's favorite candy. And each day they would sit by the sea from eleven until three, with four fishing lines out. Often they caught nothing, but when schools of sea bass and other plump Mediterranean fish were running they had to quit early and sell their surplus to a nearby hotel for soldiers with nervous breakdowns.

Though choked with rampant Western institutions, Israel was built upon the East, and Marshall and Lydia could not escape its singular signs. The sea surged not far away and the light in their room changed through an infinity of degrees as day progressed, diffusing a thousand colors of cream, orange, and red against the bare white walls. In what they assumed was not a rare practice, they learned to contemplate an object—such as a pitcher of flowers—while the light played across it. This they could do for hours as it became cooler or warmer and shadows swelled to the full or retreated. They felt the life of the air as it moved unseen about the room. What a great event when an old white horse drawing a lumber cart would clop down the street, shattering the rhythm of the waves with the complex reports of its hooves. They saw that insects in the garden flew in ellipses, and that the flowers were full of motion.

They became extraordinarily thin and bright-eyed, and their senses were so sharpened that when they went to a movie and it flooded onto the screen they felt as if they had been knocked over by a wave. Marshall was perpetually at the edge of seizures, but taught himself how to control them by concentration. Once, they were riding on a bus down Allenby Road where many trees fleck the light and make it green and mottled on the masonry. It was unusually quiet; the bus went steadily along, its wheels rolling hypnotically. Marshall was pulled by the light which burst through the trees in glorious flashes. But then he looked at the gardens within the arcades, and down the disappearing perspectives of the quiet side streets. He clenched his fists and, by power of will, brought himself equanimity. In winter there was as much fog and mist as sun, and in storms the rain and waves threatened to drown the road by the sea.

Especially on the gray days, they exhausted themselves in the mill of the semi-feudal, part Eastern European, part Ottoman, part Moroccan, and entirely Jewish bureaucracy, the likes of which have never been seen in the world and will not be in any worlds yet to be discovered. But somehow (as if there were workers in hidden underground cities) the country grew and prospered despite its civil service, while fighting off a breathtaking coalition of enemies, teaching itself its own language, parleying with the great powers, and attending the cinema five times a week. How this was done, no one knew.

Trained in the Sudan or rural Mexico, the syrup-blooded bankers required twenty visits, fifty coffees, and a dozen stamps and seals to cash one check for five hundred dollars. The back of the check had so many signatures and imprints that it looked like a micro-edition of the Rosetta Stone. At each visit, Marshall would wait for several hours in several anterooms, where Arabian rugs had upon them leather cushions, which in turn had upon them elaborately tooled Eastern trays, which had upon them in turn piping hot strudel, which had upon it in turn indestructible flies the size of grasshoppers.

Marshall had to explain why he (an Israeli citizen) could speak practically no Hebrew, and was trying to cash a foreign check into dollars. Having been born in Haifa, Palestine, as his passport said, he was upon entry to Israel issued a set of many documents which he and Lydia were translating over the weeks. He was liable for military service, income taxes—everything. By virtue of being his wife, Lydia too had become an Israeli. Suddenly they found themselves subject to a comprehensive set of Levantine responsibilities, most of which seemed to derive from the Mamluk Interlude, and some of which were strikingly contemporary—notably, Marshall's imminent conscription into a modern mechanized army. They became professional office-sitters, official stamp-purchasers, rushers to the post office, waiters on line, and explainers to fat little men who looked like East German woodchucks and sat behind barred enclosures sipping tea and eating sesame cakes.

Only after they learned the language would they begin to search for Marshall's father. Without further knowledge of Hebrew, it would be a hopeless task to wade into the most complex and heartbreaking cell of the bureaucracy—the Bureau of the Missing. They knew (from Metzner's narrative) that he was tall, with blond hair and brown eyes, that he was Russian, and that with his intimate knowledge of the land he had enabled his fighting group to survive in the forests.

So Marshall and Lydia went on their forays in the mornings and early evenings, or rested quite happily amid the palms, green gardens, and quiet streets. And when the storms stopped and spring began to blacksmith the fields with a burning Middle Eastern sun, they moved up the coast to Haifa, where they were to study in a language school in the Bat Gallim Quarter.

H
AIFA LIES
on the north face of Mt. Carmel. Air Force pilots cannot resist flying down the ridge until, on a great thermal, they come over the top of the mountain and the world opens to them. The city beneath is white and breathless—full of gardens and eye-intoxicating rows of stairs spread out and falling like charts of optical illusion. The steps on the mountainside go up at some points until they reach so far that their lines fuse in a dot. And often they wind lasciviously through arches and iron gates and by walls on which vines themselves are winding.

Marshall and Lydia went up the mountain on a day late in July. They saw the city and a hundred thousand roses. In the distance over the bay were great beaches and walking dunes. Beyond these were green hills of sandstone and thorns, and beyond the low hills were small mountains high enough for sweet valleys, and finally (as if in another world) the mountains of the northeast, in Syria and Lebanon.

Out to sea a submarine was rising in a ring of white. It was headed for the Navy base in the harbor, where dozens of swift heavily armed boats lay in electrified enclosures. In their gray rows they looked from above like sharks in a stable. Grenades were often tossed into the harbor from a speeding launch and, like an invasion fleet, a hundred ships rode at anchor in the bay, but they were there for oranges, electronics, cement, and oil.

Haifa is as airy and peaceful as a stranded bank of clouds. But they had lived there for some months, and they remembered several hundred fully armed soldiers rushing from their assembly place in a square to a line of waiting trucks—the violent mountings, the black twin 40's on halftracks, the diesel engines starting one after another until the convoy moved east and captured the commercial streets.

Their hearts went out to these people with whom by law they had become one. For they were engaged in a grip against massacres and, to be honest in a way they have never been, they expected to die at the hands of their enemies as if in continuation of an inevitable pattern. The Sfardim were delighted to confront the enemy on his own terms. But the Ashkenazim bled with European ambiguities. The Sfardim were great fighters, a shock to all, a vitality untutored. They stormed enemy redoubts, with the mountains of Morocco and a host of devils in their eyes, and the enemy melted away like clarified butter. Dark of skin and quick as insects, the Sfardim were the spark. But the Ashkenazim—refugees from slaughter, full of bitterness, not afraid to die—were the ones with the staying power, and stay they would. Assembled on the square, they had been an essay in victory.

Marshall was drawn to the convoys, sensing that his place was with the nervous barbaric soldiers and the potent weapons. He loved Lydia so much, and yet he wanted to go north and fight. He valued her above all, and yet he was drawn to the Army, to the very words for it. When he thought of how it would be, he imagined Gaston Reynelle's forge, and he saw hot iron as it was struck, moving inside itself in crimson planes and rosy swirls like sunspots coding out a message of leanness and war. The name of war spread across the Galilee and caught him up as surely as the closing of a steel lock or the crack of a breach.