Refiner's Fire (61 page)

The bus ride through cool autumn air had been a collage of beauty and quiet. The ride in a military truck had had the same effect. They traveled across enclosed plains and past ancient walled cities to a mountaintop on which a small camp was perched amid pine trees and rocky turrets. It was an ammunition storage dump protected by twenty-five soldiers and two armored halftracks. Besides sentry duty, they each served in the kitchen twice a year for a week of dishwashing and food preparation in aid to the Yemeni cook; they maintained the halftracks, heavy machine guns, mortars, small weapons, mine fields, and communications equipment; they (rarely) received and stowed shipments, or sent them out; and they gardened. The only plants in the Fourth Daughter had been highly armed roses. At Nashqiya, lawns were in abundance, beds of flowers climbed the hillside, and vegetable patches were placed between concrete bunkers. There were benches, badminton, chess, checkers, darts, and croquet. The officers were graduate students who spoke perfect English and were interested in
Beowulf,
Philip the Second, the economy of Japan, and bacterial chemotaxis. The beds had sheets and pillows; five soldiers shared a large, quiet, airy room; the food was fresh and nutritious; there was a radio; passes were arranged according to a rational system; and those who were married had supplementary leave. The wonders never ceased.

Marshall's job was to go on clear nights to a sandbagged redoubt overlooking the fragrant valley. Down a run of pine needles the camp reposed in dark blue. For eight hours, he sat next to a .50-caliber machine gun, staring past the wire as he inhaled fine resinous air. Roving patrols brought fruit, cakes, and tea, and stayed for conversation. When he was alone, he taught himself the names of stars and constellations in English, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic. Far away, a medieval minareted city sparkled with tiny electric lights. In the mornings he returned to his quiet barracks and slept on clean sheets; before he fell asleep he would look appreciatively at the sunlit white curtains blowing inward.

He went to the Camp Commandant and explained that he had tried to contact Lydia to tell her not to work on the transfer, but the phones had been knocked out in a lightning storm.

“Yes. You know, to reach Bet Shan, it has to go through Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, and Haifa. It's silly, but perhaps it means that we're going to pull out some day. Wouldn't that be nice? We'll send a telegram. But I wouldn't worry. For better or worse, in this Army it takes a hundred years to obtain a transfer.”

Marshall had only ten days until forty-eight hours' leave. What a delightful restoration. The bitter taste of the Fourth Daughter had fled. Falls and restorations taught the truth of the world, and provided dizzying rides. Ten months at Nashqiya would be perfect. Every night was starry and warm. The constellations blazed. Their names in Arabic were dazzling and mysterious.

T
HOUGH BORN
and bred in Norfolk, Lydia had been sent to a boarding school in Grosse Pointe. Her parents were rather old, and, foreseeing the eventuality of their own deaths, wanted to make her as independent as they could without making her bitter. It was begun during summers in Columbine, on sailing ships, in the Swiss mountains. And it continued in autumn, when she was sent lonely and beautiful up to Michigan, where the leaves died in early October and the cold was nearly unbelievable.

Her speech was a perfect combination of the considered Eastern seaward Virginia drawl, and the less sophisticated, slightly flat, rapid and charming upper Michigan trot. She threw out the middle of many words. For example, she did not say “animals,” but “annils.” Of all her characteristics, the most extraordinary was her smile.

Those with the misfortune of seeing her but briefly remembered her smile for the rest of their lives. God knows where and how it followed and haunted them. The best of gentleness and the best of strength were combined in the beauty of the ravishing lines of her mouth—her lips, the corners, the juncture between upper lip and cheek, the faint parallel lines along her lower jaw—and in the pure white of her teeth, which were as white as chiclets, and which looked as if she had just come out of a freezing mountain river. They were slightly uneven in the front, so that in kissing, there was character. Even when she wore sunglasses in obfuscation of her gentle eyes, or if her dress were sequined and low-cut, her smile opened up all that was gentle and fair and warm and kind.

Sometimes she forgot her disputational skill and fell into jargon, but the result was an illumination of the commonplace, which, held up for Marshall's consideration, deferred his impulse to shake it to pieces and elicited from him instead profound respect and understanding. Even when partisan for nonsense, she changed it, as if all things were possible, and she often had the effect of making irrelevant his best-protected principles and beliefs, of soothing anger, taming flared passion, etc. Though her external characteristics were splendid and admirable (those fools who think that beauty is nothing are the same as those who think that it is everything), they were best because of their saturation in the light of her spirit. Marshall did not need the golden light of an olive-wood fire in an oil drum underneath the autumn sky at Nashqiya. He needed only Lydias smile. Therein the seasons were made obsolescent, and he understood the deeply felt warmth which had come to her and remained when, at boarding school by a dark lake shore succumbing to the advance of Canadian winter, she had felt rising within her certain conceptions and realizations which (by the greatest of luck) had combined into a sort of tender and happy perpetual motion.

She had no way of knowing what Marshall had found at Nashqiya. She knew only of the Fourth Daughter, of Marshall's fervent request. Thus, she rode on a bus full of Bengalis from Bet Shan to Haifa. It was the year for Bengalis—they were everywhere, and they were enthusiastic. The driver called out his stops, and they responded in spirited unison. “Afoola,” he said.

“Afoola!” they cried.

“Ramat David.”

“Ramat! David!” And so it went at every stop.

Lydia went to the great hotel on top of the mountain. High above the bay she watched from blue translucent shade as sunny little ships moved toward Cyprus and Crete, and she listened to the pines rustling cold to the touch because it was winter and the heights were deliciously cool. A girl came around with steaming white pots of tea on a pastry cart.

“Thee and pastry?” she asked.

“Thank you!” said Lydia, choosing a tiny strawberry tart on a dish with a golden rim. The fork was heavy and solid, as in all good hotels. The tea was magnificent. Its steam rose past the high windows through which the wide bay was always visible.

“Are you a guest, Mister?”

“Certainly,” said Lydia, as graciously as she could.

“Without money, Mister,” said the girl.

“Thank you very much.”

Lydia sat in the elegant room high above the quiet city, taking in a sense of position and elevation which she hoped would help her with the general. It was so beautiful there. Because she was in love, the background and climate of the land seemed magical, and all the more so because she was in love with her husband. Marshall was somewhat strange and had not grown up in all the ways in which he might have. But she burned with love for him, for all the imperfections, all the roughness, and all the misunderstandings. She trusted him, and they had the same dreams, and they were for one another in many ways.

Staring out the high windows, she unleashed her transfixing smile, because she was lost in a plan that she had been developing since Marshall had left for the Army.

They had discovered that they loved life in agriculture. Perhaps they would stay on at Kfar Yona, but they missed America and Marshall never stopped complaining about how irrationally Kfar Yona was run. If
he
had a farm,
he
would do this and that, and the things he said were surprisingly true. On several occasions he had said that, after the Army, it might be nice to go back to America and buy a wheat farm somewhere in the West. This had moved both of them in that it was reaccess to a stirring memory. Enraptured by the idea, she had closed her eyes and envisioned a productive rational acreage; a big airy farmhouse full of books; and many lovely children growing up strong and happy; she had even gone so far as to envision a
pied-a—terre
in San Francisco.

“Wait a minute,” said Marshall. “It's going to be a struggle. Maybe we can get going on a small farm, but you'll have to hold off awhile on a place in San Francisco.” She neglected to tell Marshall, however, why she had allowed her dreams to be so explicit.

She had some money. She had never mentioned it, for it seldom occurred to her. The Levys had become wealthy when, after a vision, Levy had bought real estate and sold his ship provisioning business to a great corporation in exchange for a bloc of its stock. The corporation had then grown out of all proportion. Her parents willed most of what they had to Lydia, since she was the baby and the other children were well established.

Lydia had not been aware of the size of her inheritance until summoned to an elegant office in a new glass building near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. Her first impulse had been to give all the money away, but the trustee had informed her that she was not allowed to do that. In fact, she could not (without good reason) invade her principal, which Paul Levy would control until his death. The whole business was so unpleasant that she went back to Berkeley and forgot it, instructing the bank to pay her living expenses and re-invest the remainder. She associated the money with the death of her parents. Thus she had never mentioned it to Marshall, and seldom gave it a thought.

Now, high above the sea, she gave it plenty of thought in view of the wheat farm. She had arrived at the trustee's office, in blue jeans. The receptionist had given her an extremely dirty look, and later she had felt entirely out of place as the trustee attempted to delineate her wealth.

“Well,
how
much is it?” she had asked.

“I can't give you an exact dollar estimate,” he had answered. “I can give you an inventory with assessments, but these are often imprecise.”

“Can you give me an idea?” she asked, pained, for she knew nothing whatsoever about money, economics, or banking, and her checkbook was trench warfare. “Just an idea?”

“Sure. Let me illustrate it this way, Miss Levy. About two thirds of your holdings are in real estate. Of this, most is here in D.C. Of the real estate in D.C., about forty percent is represented in this building.”

“What do you mean, represented in this building?”

“You own the building.”

“This building? I own this building?”

“Yes,” he said, “all eight floors, and you also own that one.” He pointed to a similar building across the street.

“Oh God.”

When Marshall finished the Army, they would buy a wheat farm in alpine country—in Colorado, in Montana, or in the high plains of Oregon, someplace like Columbine if not Columbine itself. It could be several hundred acres, or several thousand acres. That was not important. What was important was being on the land and what it taught in balance, restraint, redemption, love, and beauty.

Above the sea, she dreamed of the dry golden grasses, the cool clear sunlight, the air. She saw a white farmhouse with black shutters, workshops lit by fluorescent light, equipment sheds as extensive and clean as those at Kfar Yona, shiny new tractors and combines, a forest of blue pine growing on the hillside, waving wheat, and a view of mountains—all within reach.

After some minutes of this dream, she walked over to the glass and stared at the sea. The waves were like tiny scratches, like light rays dashing and breaking across an interferometer. She glanced at the lovely terraced city, the Hadar. It was time to go to the headquarters of the Second Mountain Brigade. She felt ready, for she had lost some of the simplicity of a kibbutznik, in the contrivance of eating a fancy pastry in a fancy hotel.

Arieh Ben Barak's deputy was a middle-aged colonel, a turkey farmer in real life, named Steimatzky. Steimatzky was rather portly. That is an understatement. He was the
Titanic.
Every now and then his chief would order him to reduce, explaining that no infantry soldiers, no, not even nonheadquarters units officers, could not afford not to be not slim. Then he gave up on beating around the bush by use of the infamous permissible and reversible Hebrew double negative and came right out with it. “Weigh your right arm, and then lose that amount of weight.”

“But my right arm is where I wear my watch and my class ring.” “Take them off.”

“I can't.”

“Why not?”

“My fingers are too fat.”

“What about the watch?”

“It stretches, but not enough.”

“Steimatzky.”

“Yes, Arieh.”

“Weigh your right leg. You can take off your shoe, can't you?”

“My leg...?”

“And Steimatzky, this is a mild climate. You don't need to eat those American things, what are they called...‘flapjacks'? Especially in the summer. That's what makes you fat.”

A secretary poked her head in the office and announced that there was a visitor.

“Who is it?”

“A wife, General. A new immigrant.”

“Bring her in. I'm not busy now.”

Lydia was nervous and tense on a hard bench in the fortress courtyard. Soldiers walked rapidly from one office to another and from level to level. Messengers covered with dust sometimes ran up the wide stairs, clutching their pistols and their code cases. On her left, Lydia saw an arsenal. Two soldiers with automatic rifles slung from their necks guarded wide double doors. Inside, light effused from heavily barred windows onto two dozen armorers hard at work, bending over weapons in various states of disassembly, stacking cases on long counters, polishing, cutting, drilling. Against the walls and in the middle of a long corridor leading to the windows were metal racks on which were closely stacked thousands and thousands of rifles, machine guns, pistols, heavy machine guns, recoilless rifles, ATR tubes, rockets, mortars, and bangalore torpedoes. They glistened with light gun oil and were frightening to behold. A soldier leaned over and pointed inside. “In one hour,” he said, “two thousand men can walk through there and come out fully armed. I bet you never saw anything like that in America.”