Refiner's Fire (59 page)

“Get out,” the doctor said as he bent over Lenny. They moved to the door but hesitated there, looking on. A small nurse, almost a midget, kicked Robert in the shins and told him to leave.

Squatting in the white dust outside the hospital, they waited until finally the corpsman jumped from the steps and started to walk rapidly toward a square gray building conceived by the British as a fortress and used by the Israelis to house NCO's. Marshall and Robert ran up to him. Because they were trainees and he was a sergeant, he refused to acknowledge them and kept walking. They followed him at his irregular pace.

“Can you tell us how our friend is?”

“I don't know who you are. I don't know who is your friend.”

“We just brought him in, at noon.”

“At noon? It's five o'clock. You call that just?”

“But how is he? It's not against the law, is it, to tell us that?”

“Go ask at the hospital.”

“They won't let us past the desk, and the soldier at the desk doesn't know anything.”

“I don't know anything either.” They were almost at the fortress courtyard. Tanks, halftracks, and ambulances were parked inside.

“But how could you
not
know?”

“I know that your friend was an idiot. That's what I know. Who asked him to stay under the cold water for so long? Are we'responsible for all you criminals, idiots, and madmen?”

“To hell with that,” shouted Marshall at the corpsman, who had drawn them into the courtyard, where they stopped next to a coffee-colored Russian tank captured years before. “To hell with what you think, or whether we are idiots, and your opinions of us. Just tell us how he is.”

The sergeant shook his head, nodding it up and down as a bird might do. His contempt and assumed superiority enraged Marshall. He put his hand up against a bolsterlike external fuel chamber on the tank, and glanced around. Robert had already guessed, and leaned against the tread as if he had been suddenly taken ill.

“You don't care if I think you are madmen. You just want to know how he is.”

“Yes!”

“Okay, all right. I'll tell you how he is. Why not? You want to know. I'll tell you. He's dead.”

There had been only two days left in the Fourth Daughter, and Lenny had died on the day when conditions were eased. The suddenness of it hit Marshall and Robert like an artillery shell. They thought that the corpsman was lying. But the Major summoned them to his office, where they stood at attention and described how Lenny had stayed under the stream of water. All the while, the Major had a look of disgust. “He was not fit to be a soldier.”

“Why?” they asked.

“Because he died.” Strangely, and for once, the Major was right.

N
O LESS
bare than other rooms in the Fourth Daughter, Hannah's office had white walls and a large barred window overlooking the parade ground. A heater glowed at her legs. It was November 22, and anywhere in the mountains that the sun did not reach was cold. Arranging envelopes and folders spread before her on the desk, she was consumed by the fervor such a task will sometimes elicit and did not see that Marshall stood by the doorpost.

She kicked off one shoe and put her bare leg underneath her, slowly swiveling back and forth on the chair. Marshall realized that he might have been able to stand in place unobserved for an hour. Then his eyes swept up as in an ascending scale, and he saw a little stuffed bear on a bookcase. He looked at Hannah again, trying to determine if she were a woman or a girl. It seemed strange. There he was, a free prisoner of sorts in a semi-prison company in a captured fortress. Having been placed there by mistake, he was about to tell of the completely senseless death of a dear friend of just a month, to someone his friend had known and perhaps loved, who had known him and perhaps loved him for only a week. And he did not know how to tell her or how to act, because she was doing the job of a full-grown woman and it was a very serious place, and yet she had a stuffed bear on the bookcase.

The roses were there, in a bottle of water. Outside, an entire battalion marched back and forth in mass and precision. Soldiers marching in ranks make for a special sight and sound unlike anything in the world. Hannah didn't look up. She was quite used to it.

Marshall began to phrase a statement, but everything he thought shattered as it was conceived. At first she would think that he had come to ask her help in assignment northward, to make sure that he would reach his own brigade, and to request that Baruch come as well. She was very sympathetic to these requests, truly so. Marshall had come to love her in much the same way that soldiers once loved the Virgin. He had assumed that Lenny would marry her, that sometime in the future he and Lydia and she and Lenny would eat in a restaurant in Tel Aviv and be able to look back on the hard times in the Army, on the West Bank—where no one wanted to be except Jerusalemites, who had an affinity for the thin air and who were near to home.

But he would not see her again, and there would be no meals over which they could talk. What was her office anyway? Where were they? In a fortress built by the British after they had taken Palestine from the Ottomans. It had been British for a long time. And then for twenty years it was occupied by the Jordan Legion, and then it was overcome by the Army in the uniform of which he stood. Occupation implies the ironical surrender of the victors to the attractions and history of the conquered place. He felt as if he were back in time much more than half a hundred or a hundred years. He sensed the fleeting presence of Janissaries and Mamluks, of administrations and empires so old and well-worn that they were impressed into the land as if they were its features. They had all stumbled into the light hard by the hills of Jerusalem and been possessed. It was a magnetic, intoxicating place. Forces unknown and immeasurable emanated from the rock, fell from the air, and did with souls and minds and bodies just what they pleased. It seemed to be a gateway, refreshing and dangerous in its turbulence.

It
was
a portal. He knew that, because when Lenny died Marshall had had a strong feeling that Lenny hadn't far to go. It was easy to die near Jerusalem, as easy as falling in the undertow of a history which surged in tides and currents and was unknown, but left its marks like wind eroding the rock. All things conspired there on a high part of the stage upon which they had come at their risk. He knew it when he looked past the window and saw that roses grew in abundance under a nearby wall. He realized that what he had come to tell her was there in as much profusion as the roses. He was certain that he would not have to speak. What he had to say already filled the room.

He stepped inside. At first she was surprised. She thrust her leg out from under her and put her foot back in her shoe. Then she leaned over the folders to look for Lenny in the hall. When she did not see him, she sat back in her chair and smiled at Marshall in the special way with which people greet the emissaries of those they have just come to love. They toy and flirt with the surrogate, knowing that the message will get through.

But as he moved a little way across the room her eyes followed him and her expression changed, plunging with perfect evenness. She winced in pain and shook her head from side to side. They could hear one another's breathing. Time passed. She knew from his continued stare that it was so. The room was filled with the unsaid.

Suddenly she stood up. She had a crooked, pitiful smile, like that of a woman who is mad. She went to the bookcase and put the stuffed bear on a lower shelf. Then she returned it to where it had been, and sat down. An expression of hatred came over her face. It was the most cynical look that Marshall had ever seen, harder and tougher than that of a battered old man, and it took form on the face of a nineteen-year-old girl. She placed her feet firmly on the floor as if it were moving like the deck of a ship, and began to shuffle the folders and envelopes, just as when Marshall had entered. As he walked down the echoing hallway he prayed that he would hear her cry. But she did not, and when he shut the outside door behind him, he was a different man. All had changed, just like that.

L
ENNY WAS
dead. It was no one's fault, but it made Marshall angry. Hannah would never be the same. That too was no ones fault, but it also made him angry. In addition, he had been posted to an ammunition dump on the West Bank and had only thirty-six hours' leave before he was to report. That meant that he could see Lydia and not have time to contact the Second Mountain Brigade, or vice versa. He had to see Lydia, which meant that he would be staying in the ammunition dump for quite a while, since he had learned with considerable trouble that it was no breeze to extricate oneself from any kind of assignment.

Tight-lipped and full of rage, he returned to the barracks, where he was greeted by a very foolish Moroccan sergeant.

“Where were you!” the sergeant screamed, spraying Marshall with saliva. Marshall stared at him and built up steam.

“I asked where you were!” the sergeant said, pushing even closer, in imitation of drill sergeants he had seen in films. But he spun his wheels in midsentence and his arrogance subsided when he realized that a bomb was about to go off. He backed away; Marshall followed step by step. Then the sergeant turned and ran to the rear of the barracks, but someone had bolted shut the door. The sergeant burst into a little enclosure in which were kept a few dozen crates of hand grenades. Marshall followed him inside.

The sergeant breathed hard. He had many times threatened the Bengalis, and had been particularly fond of tormenting the weaker soldiers. He had suggested to those who were married that their wives were busy in the beds and arms of others, and he had done so in vivid, graphic terms. He had laughed as the frail ones broke and cried. Now he was shaking like Saint Vitus.

And no wonder. Behind Marshall were a dozen soldiers. To the sergeant, their eyes looked like rats' eyes, and it was as if they had pushed him deep into the skittering tunnels of their nest. Marshall approached, fists clenched, the veins in them standing out netted and elastic.

“You'll go to prison,” the sergeant said, pointing his finger.

“Good,” answered Marshall.

“It's against the law,” he said, bumping against a crate of explosives. “They'll try you. You'll spend a year in prison.”

“Good.”

“Not the Fourth Daughter but Kele Arba. You can die in Kele Arba.”

“You can die here.”

“They shave your head with a razor blade.”

Red hot, Marshall raised his fist. “I eat razor blades,” he said, and then took after the sergeant in a cruel, mean, bloodthirsty, horrible way. He swung wide with his right fist and brought it against the sergeant's cheek. The blow wasn't particularly powerful, but the sergeant rolled so much with the punch that his hat flew off and he fell to the floor. Marshall was on him in a second, flailing with his open hand, leaving no marks. He beat the sergeant's face in rapid slaps—hard, sharp, and humiliating.

“I'm no saint,” Marshall growled in a hoarse, terrifying voice. “I'm no saint. I fight back, you son of a bitch. Surprise.” He picked up a grenade and held it over the sergeant's head. The sergeant began to whimper. He thought he was going to die.

“You see this?” Marshall asked. The sergeant nodded. “Eat it,” Marshall commanded. The soldiers laughed. They would just as easily have killed the man right there. “Eat it!” Marshall yelled and began to choke his victim. The sergeant put the grenade in his mouth and actually tried to eat it. Marshall sickened so suddenly that tears began to stream from his eyes. He pulled the sergeant up off the floor and pushed him away. As the sergeant crashed against a crate, his spleen returned.

“This is the end of you, the end,” he said, tasting it in his mouth as he stormed past the others. Marshall sat on a box, tears running down his cheeks. He made no sound, but the front of his shirt was black and wet. It all came out, and it was over. He felt relieved, but he knew that they were going to put him in Kele Arba, and he believed that there he would die. He would not see Lydia for even thirty-six hours. It was possible to get through Kele Arba relatively unscathed. But not for Marshall Pearl. He had once had that gift—back on the White Water, flaxen dam and Eakins and the Schuylkill—but he had lost it. The sergeant had disappeared and nothing was to be done. Soon the Major would march in and Marshall would be arrested.

But the White Water shook its mane. Marshall and the Bengalis looked up. A mysterious sound was coming toward them. As if a wide-winged bird of prey had entered the barracks, a whistling sound beat the air. The Bengalis ducked and dispersed just before a great blur pushed through the rear door, smashing the bolt like a dynamite charge. A puff of air rattled the broken windows. The sergeant flew in backward, four feet off the ground, and was carried across the room and dashed into a bullet-holed wall. Two strong hands held him motionless and astounded. All six and a half feet of Ashkenazi, bull-necked and balloon-armed, crushed the little sergeant against the concrete. Plaster began to fall from cracks in the ceiling. The soldiers looked in wonderment.

Ashkenazi freed one hand and drew from his pant leg a doubleedged knife at least two feet long. It was so sharp that it buzzed like a bee as it came shining from the scabbard. Ashkenazi put the needle point against the sergeant's naked eye. The sergeant dared not move. Sharp steel touched an egglike membrane of white. Ashkenazi spoke.

“We are from Kfar Saba. And we were from Marakesh. Do you remember me in Marakesh? I was not so gentle there. I swear by Almighty God that if you say anything of what happened here, I will cut your eyes out. I will cut your mother's eyes out. I will cut your sister's eyes out. I will cut out your father's heart, for I know that he is already blind.”

He carried the sergeant to the door and threw him from it like a bunch of dirty rags. Clearing his throat, Ashkenazi turned to Marshall. “They say—that is, Yakov said—that in America you are a millionaire, that you have made many inventions. If you'return to America, take me with you.”