Refiner's Fire (58 page)

Then the soldiers' hearts flew. For Hector Encaminar did a few teasing steps in his heavy boots, and the stage became like the diaphragm of a timpani. He threw his head back, and danced more and more rapidly. They cheered. They were elated. His song grew stronger, his eyes closed, and the reports against the floor were as loud as the cracks of rifles and as fast as two machine guns firing simultaneously. The percussions cleaned the room. His boots sailed in flashing circles, beating in sustained series, reversing like the illusion of spokes, spinning, disappearing. The hall was filled with the refreshment of machine gun reports and his shouted Spanish song was clear at every note.

He danced that way for half an hour, until light began to blot through the heavy rain. It was morning and time to go back to barracks. But they were lost in Spain. The smudge pots swayed as a thousand soldiers stamped their feet and clapped their hands. The Hasidim had turned into passable Spanish Gypsies, moaning enthusiastically. Hector was dazzling. Deep in ecstasy, he pounded the floor harder and harder.

Then Yossi threw open the door and wet gray mist flooded in. As it covered the soldiers they stopped their accompaniment. Finally, only Hector was not in the mist. As it rolled to his feet he spun around and stamped the floor boards one last time. He actually said, “
Olé!
” And then he bowed. It brought down the house.

As the soldiers filed out into the rain and fog they were charged with an energy that they did not understand. All feuding groups had united. They were ready to do anything or go anywhere. Having been lost in Spain, having cleared their souls in the dancing of Hector Encaminar, and having felt as if the lightning of that night had run up and down their backs, they looked at the chill mist and they laughed.

P
ERHAPS LONG
before, in the dim time, the Jordanians had had hot showers. But they must have taken the hot water with them when they retreated in 1967. A greater advocate of cleanliness and purity of body than either of his friends, Lenny sat beneath a numbing stream, legs enfolded lotusly, eyes closed, chanting some nonsense he had learned in Los Angeles. Soon he was blue.

“Hey Lenny,” Robert said. “You've been under there for five minutes. Its not good for you.”

“I don't feel the cold. I feel nothing.”

“Well, come on, we have to get back,” said Marshall.

The sun had burned away the mist and brought a clear blue day of dry winds. “It is forbidden to speak!” a lieutenant in sunglasses and a red beret had barked at them as they assembled yet again in threes. “Fill your knapsacks with rocks. Two minutes!” They rushed to do this, and in less than two minutes they were back in position. Sometimes they were tired, but, deprived of rest, they passed into active, lucid, energetic states. It was a great lesson. In the mornings, especially on sunny days, they always felt as if they had slept even if they had not.

“We are going to put these rocks on that mountain!” the sun-glassed lieutenant bellowed, pointing to a rust-colored peak. “Because that is
our
mountain, and we are proud of it, and we want to make it
higher
The company cheered. They had gained a sense of group courage, better at least than the criminals' usual nervous anarchy.

All one hundred fifty of them, rifles held slanting in unison in front of their chests, began a formation run out of the camp, and they looked for all the world like a group of elite commandos. The officers were shocked, and said, “Who are these soldiers?”

And they replied, “We are Company T. Criminals. Fighters.” They chanted slogans such as, “We are black. We are black. We are black.” And they were powered for an hour or two by the sudden discovery that they could run halfway up a mountain—outpacing fit officers unencumbered with rock-filled packs, rifles, grenades, and helmets—sweating until they were drenched and their burning eyes fixed ahead like bayonets in an Eastern trance of painless momentum.

After contributing to a sizable cairn on top of the mountain, the lightened platoons drifted down the side and bivouacked in the rocks. They listened to an interminable Hebrew military lecture, of which they understood mainly pronouns, proper names, and the numbers one to ten. Light-headed, they viewed an almost African landscape. The rain had formed little lakes in basins between the hills, and these took on the pure color of the sky. From them, white storks arose and flew in graceful circles to clear the rock ledges. Marshall's attention had been devoted exclusively to the lakes and to the winds which whistled across the empty mountains, until one of the lecturers broke off some branches from a eucalyptus and placed them between his helmet and the rubber strap which girdled it. Antlered, he continued his lecture, which they then surmised was about camouflage. Soon they all broke off and were antlered. They looked like a lost tribe of antelope.

“Now,” said a sergeant, “we will learn to walk with rocks.” The idea was to walk on all fours, using rocks in each hand as improvised shoes.

“Begging your pardon, Sergeant,” Marshall asked, “but what is the purpose of this?”

“To fool the enemy.”

“How so? Will he think that we are reindeer?”

“Goats.”

“Goats don't have antlers.”

“Mountain goats.”

“Tell me something. Who in the world would think that we were mountain goats?”

“Look,” said the sergeant, indicating a patch of hillside across the ravine. “Do you see those mountain goats?”

Marshall saw a herd of ibex grazing calmly amid the outcroppings. “They're ibex, I believe.”

“They're ibex, you believe. My dear sir, look closely, and you will see that they are not ibex; they are Platoon Three.”

Marshall saw only ibex, beautiful silver-brown animals with white chests. The sergeant was just another
meshugah.
The real Platoon Three was in the midst of sneaking up on Marshall's position. With rocks in their hands and their antlers sweeping up and out from their helmets, they were extraordinarily conspicuous as they came over the hilltop. “Stupids!” yelled someone from below. “Where do you think you're going?”

That evening, they had their first free time. The weather was good and they were told that they could sleep until 4:30 the next morning. Marshall and Robert spent the hours before bed in a quiet corner of the hand grenade toss, but Lenny was nowhere to be seen. They thought that he had gone to visit Hannah, one of the half-dozen women in the camp. He had an affinity for female Army clerks, especially those in the Fourth Daughter, who did not understand that even a glimpse of their gentle forms could save a soldier from despair and insanity. Marshall was revived time and again by the sight of one of those girls—disappearing into a building, walking awkwardly past a battalion of hard men cut to the bone by privation and the ever-present sense that they were dispensable. The existence of those girls said emphatically that there was balance in the world, and the soldiers hungered for them in all possible ways.

Lenny skipped training sessions to sit in the tiny cramped office of Hannah, the junior social worker. She was a little blonde of rough and disaligned features. Her hands were strong, and her eyes were as blue as the rain pools which formed in the basins after storms. It was wonderful to see the wisps of hair, detached from the careful combing under her peaked officer's cap, touching her cheek and getting in front of her eyes. She always pushed them back gently with her thick hands. Because she had bad skin—she was only nineteen—and because she was very short, and young, she was not used to men taking an interest in her.

Late one evening she had come with an old reserve captain to make the rounds of the platoons. Platoon Two had just returned from labor, and were not only filthy, but wet. Hannah and the captain set up a plywood table in the middle of the barracks. The bastardly sergeants were solicitous, and brought them three candles in paper cups. Hannah opened up an Army looseleaf book, and surveyed the soldiers, who were glued to her one and all. When, in the gold light, she perceived this, she cast her eyes down to the lines before her. There was not one soldier sitting on the straw in that dark smoky room who had not fallen in love with the rough-featured girl—for in the light and shadows dancing against a rack of oiled guns, she looked angelic.

She played with her pencil, and when she sensed that they were still staring, she blushed. This they loved, and a tall Kurd who looked like a wolf said something which sounded very beautiful. Marshall turned to Baruch and asked him what it was. He had said, according to Baruchs translation, that he blessed her, and that he wished for a woman like her to be the mother of his sons and daughters.

The captain made an incomprehensible speech, not realizing that the amused smiles on the faces of those to whom he spoke meant that they hadn't the slightest idea of what he was saying. Trapped in a world of no language, with poor quarter-Hebrew and less of their own abstruse native dialects, they were like the deaf and dumb. The captain ended his homily with the easily understood phrase, “Does this disturb you?” They shook their heads and said, “Oh, no, not a bit.”

Then Hannah spoke. “Have any of you ever been in trouble with the police?” When thirty of the fifty raised their hands without hesitation, she gasped and her eyes opened wide. This sent Platoon Two into paroxysms of shared laughter. Their ivory teeth were bared in uncontrollable smiles. They slapped their knees and looked around. She too began to laugh. “Have any of you spent any time in jail?” Again, a forest of hands, and everyone thought it was a good joke. She closed her book, sat back, and said, “It's too much for me. I give up.” It started to thunder. The captain went into his second incomprehensible speech, and Hannah could not help but glance again and again at Lenny, who was handsome even in his wretched state, and who was looking at her from an abyss of love and respect.

That Lenny skipped training sessions mattered little. Since the criminals were baffled by anything mechanical, an inordinate amount of time was spent in weapons lecture. Lenny was a light weapons expert, and knew far more than even the pompous well-fed armorers. When he arrived late, sometimes hours late, he capitalized on his sparse Hebrew.

“Where have you been! You can be court-martialed for this. You'll spend the rest of your days scrubbing pots. How do you explain this atrocious unmilitary conduct? And you'd better explain well, scum, fool, or I'll see to it that you get fucked,” the sergeant would say with immeasurable venom.

Lenny would say, “Good morning,” and sit down in complete self-assurance and satisfaction. The sergeants were always disarmed when he smiled pleasantly and sighed. One day, Lenny commissioned Maloof the sneak thief to get flowers from the General's walled garden. Maloof went out at two in the morning and darted through the camp like a black cat. He returned with three sleepy red roses and an unopened bottle of cognac. Explaining that he used only hashish, he gave Lenny the cognac. Lenny hid it in an empty barracks, and, the next morning, he took the roses to Hannah. They assumed that he and the roses reached her with appropriate effect, for he became in those last days marvelously happy and calm. They had learned to run with the wind in the precincts of the Fourth Daughter, and he had found a sweet-eyed girl.

When they returned from the grenade pitch, they found Lenny fast asleep, wound tightly in his four foul blankets. They wrapped themselves in their own foul blankets, and awoke at 4:30 eager and refreshed, greeting the mild starlight for the first time with a feeling of complete health and well-being. The rush proceeded; they washed at the freezing tap; they dressed and armed in darkness. As they assembled in threes Marshall and Robert realized that Lenny wasn't there. Robert went into the barracks, where Lenny was fast asleep in his blankets. Robert reported that he had not awakened even when the daylights had been shaken out of him. “He's sick,” said Robert. “He breathed with his mouth open, and his breath was as hot as a fire.”

“Let him sleep,” the sergeant said, “and if he's still sick when we come back, then he can go to the hospital.” It seemed reasonable, because they would be returning in just a few hours.

They went to a gully where for two hours they crawled over barbwire, goat dung, and thorns. The thorns stuck deep, and the soldiers developed extremely painful puncture wounds all over their bodies. The sergeants had to hold them down with their boots to make sure that they would really crawl. They envied Lenny.

But he was unconscious when they got back, and there were alarming spaces between each of his labored breaths. Robert picked him up in his arms and carried him in the blankets to the hospital, where a hundred soldiers lined the corridors. They had thermometers in their mouths and were sucking tongue depressors and lollipops. Most were malingerers or hypochondriacs. Robert and Marshall pushed through them into the emergency room. Because they had a body wrapped in blankets no one minded that they had broken line. Every now and then a soul was torn apart by a shell or hit by a ricochet on the rocky firing ranges, and it was not unusual to see limp bleeding forms being carried with utmost urgency through the rows of white buildings.

Robert put Lenny onto a stretcher in the middle of the floor. A corpsman at the desk glanced around and turned back to his papers. Then he had a second thought and looked again at Lenny, who had what seemed like two days' growth of beard, and whose eyes were open and glassy. He took a thermometer from a glass jar and was about to put it in Lenny's mouth when Lenny went into convulsions. “Get the doctor,” shouted the corpsman. A nurse ran out of the room.

The doctor walked in. “Who are you?” he asked Marshall and Robert.

“We're his friends,” they said slowly in their awkward Hebrew. “He stayed under a stream of freezing cold water for five minutes—yesterday.” The doctor shook his head. Lenny was in the midst of a terrible seizure. Marshall was not at all shocked, as was Robert, by its power and explosiveness. It was as if his soul were warring to escape his body.