Refiner's Fire (64 page)

They were trained and then formed into teams. Fifty at a time went to Tira for three months, during which they fought, swam, shot, learned special weapons, practiced languages, and had much free time. Arieh Ben Barak thought that the best irregulars were men of independent will. He believed that given the proper start and a little freedom, his commandos would apply themselves to problems, and that in the cross-fertilization of their particular talents answers would arrive at a staggering rate. He was right.

Tira was nothing more than a collection of tents in the dunes and two large warehouses for equipment, vehicles, and stores. Everything was improvised; they borrowed from all branches of the Defense Forces; and they were on the base only eight hours a day, with every Saturday off. Lydia had written to Paul, and he and the Livingstons made their anniversary present an apartment on the beach for three months. Summer arrived. Lydia took an intensive course in Middle Eastern history, while Marshall was trained and eventually put into a group specializing in ship capture. As she wrote a lengthy paper on the history and meaning of the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260, he made dry runs against ships in the harbor and at sea—he often had to swim several miles into the bay before he could climb the chains of vessels at anchor.

Each evening, Marshall and Lydia returned to an apartment overlooking the sea. There they resumed their life together. By August only two months were left in Marshall's service, and they spent quiet evenings on their balcony, listening to music, cooking roasts over a pan of charcoal, reading, talking, and looking out at the Mediterranean, which in Haifa is active in summer and full of friendly green breakers, whereas in winter (except for the large storms) it is as quiet as a lake.

One evening in the middle of August when the air was mild and full of the sweet scents of flowers and fruit trees, Marshall and Lydia walked several miles down the wide beach to the camp at Tira. The stars were out full, but the moon had yet to rise. In the distance they could see the lights of cars speeding through the warm air on the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway.

Except for two sentries who watched over the warehouses, everyone had gone home for the Sabbath, and the tents were empty. But as they approached they saw firelight behind the dunes. When the camp came fully into view, they saw a gas flame burning brightly. Its plume was the size of a cotton candy, it roared, and it made the sand underneath gold and orange. Two men sat on deck chairs, talking and drawing diagrams in the sand. They were Arieh Ben Barak and Frederick, who invited Marshall and Lydia to share a cauldron of tea. Both men had their pantlegs rolled. Frederick scratched out a map with his foot, and when he noticed that they were looking at his bare shins he pointed sheepishly toward the ocean and said, “We were wading.”

The General remembered Lydia, and, of course, Frederick recognized Marshall, who seized the opportunity to speak on equal terms with senior officers. He looked at Arieh Ben Barak, who had been busy making the tea, and saw eyes as diffuse and brown as his own. In fact, the General had a striking resemblance to this soldier far down in his command. But for their ages their coloring would have been the same, and there was much else which made them alike—even their teeth—though no one noticed.

Marshall presented a careful, well-analyzed case to support his point of view that the Arabs were preparing a big war for which Israel was not ready. He listed at least fifty signs that he had seen of laxness, overconfidence, poor planning, and lack of preparation. He spoke in phrases that ran together well because they had occurred to him repeatedly for many months, and the two high-ranking officers did not once interrupt. Sometimes they appeared concerned; sometimes they seemed to disagree; sometimes they toyed with their badges of rank.

At the end of his lecture, or plea, they said nothing and he began to go weak in the knees because he still harbored a considerable fear of officers. As long as he was a private on active duty he would be influenced by memories of the majors at Bakum and in the Fourth Daughter. He knew that Arieh Ben Barak could make him spend two months scrubbing pots in Afoola as easily as he could say one sentence to a deputy.

But the man with the soft brown eyes thought of the maps in the sand, looked up, and smiled.

“I'm interested to hear that you have given this problem some thought. When you finish your period of conscription...”

“Two months from now.”

“...come to see me. I'll look over your record, and if there is a place on my staff, we'll see ... for reserve duty, that is. I would have to make you an officer. Would you object?”

Marshall barely managed to say, “Not at all ... I'd be happy to be an officer, if it's possible.”

“I don't promise anything. We'll see.”

Lydia took advantage of the need to change the subject, and made a graceful transition to the Battle of Ain Jalut, explaining the inevitability of the Mongols' defeat. “They could have been stopped by the Ismailies in the mountains, but the Ismailies were in disarray.” And then she gave an historico-military analysis which was so well done that Arieh Ben Barak, who knew nothing of the topic, joined in a spirited discussion of the failure of Rukn-a-Din to stem the Mongol invasion, and how Baybars the Mamluk had finally accomplished it. Afterward, at home, Marshall could not get to sleep.

He paced the balcony. By 2:30 he was in command of the Israeli Army. By three he was wild-eyed, but Lydia was up with him and she understood that the hot tea had stirred him to trances and splendors.

“Come're,” she said affectionately, patting her knee. He strode over to her in large heroic steps. His heart was beating like a ton of bricks. He stared out to sea as battles criss-crossed his imagination.

“Sit here,” she said, indicating her knee. He looked at her as if from a throne. “Even generals can sit on their wife's knee.” He sat on her knee, eager to resume his pacing conquests. She began to stroke his forehead, which burned—her hand was cool. “You know what? You're crazy, and you'll never get to sleep if you keep marching across Macedonia. Just think of where we are,” she whispered slowly. “It's a beautiful night. Come back to me.”

He looked in her eyes and was no longer a general leading armies. Ambition was not even a thimble. The stars ceased their blistering and became soft, and the moon came up and whitened the sky and hills. They heard the wind rushing over the dunes and through the heather. It was warm and peaceful, and they lay fused together in the straight cool moonlight, gentle as the wind and the night birds on the slopes of Carmel. When finally the moon began to set behind Adit, the villagers' fires were already flickering across the dark hill.

M
ARSHALL ALREADY
had the alert and gentle hart on one arm, and the patch of the Mountain Brigade on the other, a white line of mountains with a II hovering above them in the azure blue. After the commando course at Tira, he was issued a pair of crossed swords in gold to pin over his left breast pocket. Arieh Ben Barak's deputy, Steimatzky, had been waiting early one morning at the circle of tents. When Marshall arrived he was shocked to find that he had been made a first lieutenant. Steimatzky explained. Thinking of Marshall, the General had ordered Steimatzky to check his records and (if they were satisfactory) to promote him. “Arieh said that this was a crisis, and that he was moving rashly, as in a crisis. I told him that you were due out on Eight October...”

“Eight October? It's the twenty-second, not the eighth.”

“No. You're all to get a two-week present. But he said, ‘Let him take charge of the commandos at Fortress Six for a month until the new captain gets there.' You were promoted to first lieutenant, because several of the commandos at Six are lieutenants, and we could not put you in charge unless you had rank.”

He gave Marshall a box in which were several sets of insignia. Marshall was stunned. The fifteen commandos at Six would not take kindly to his apotheosis, but it would be only for a month, and he would be cautious and kind. His heavily accented Hebrew was not particularly incongruent with his new station. Even Arieh Ben Barak had a noticeable accent.

Perhaps his changed station had stimulated a review, but for whatever reason, one day in the hotel Marshall and Lydia made their decision. They sat on the hotel terrace at dusk. Before hopping into the
Carmelit
to go down the hill to eat in a Rumanian restaurant and then see an Austrian mystery, they had stopped to look over the sea and have tea in the pine garden. “You see that ship in the middle,
Brigham Victory
? It has the black superstructure.”

“That one?”

“That's right. Today we tried to capture it. We haven't had much trouble before. You know that I like scaling the anchor chains and storming the bridge. It's fun to climb while the wind whips the green water below. If you fall, nothing happens. But today when we got to the top we had a surprise. The
Brigham Victory
is an American ship, chartered out to the Navy. As I climbed over the rail, four men closed in on me with shotguns and pistols. They had me. All the other ships have been pushovers. I looked at their faces. They were the faces of plains farmers. They put down their guns and we talked. After all, I was in a bathing suit. What I want to say is that I was much more than proud. It was different and better than being proud. I felt drawn to the plains, the Rockies, Columbine—where we started. I seem always to be on the other side of the fence, but I'd like to go back to Columbine, and stay.

“We can never be what they are, the plainsmen, and we can never be like the Israelis either (maybe its fine just to be whatever we are). But I want to make a home with you in Columbine. That's where I was happiest. If I belong anywhere, I belong in that valley. We could grow wheat, as we had thought—almost twenty years ago.”

“That's what I want to do,” said Lydia. “That's what I always wanted to do, what we're supposed to do. I was waiting for you to come around.”

“Then we'll do it.”

They yearned for the image and vision of Columbine. Even within the dream of childhood, it had been their dream.

“We'll go to Washington, to the Department of Agriculture, and get as much information as we can about the area. It's cold up there, and the growing season must be short. But I would imagine that you can grow spring wheat in the valleys. We'll check on taxation, mortgages, and the rest. Then, when we're ready, we'll go to Union Station and get on a train for Denver. And then we'll go north into the country. If there's a college nearby, maybe you can teach in it. I'll grow wheat.”

“I'll grow wheat too,” Lydia said. “I want to be a farmer.”

As they watched the lights and the ships they talked about their plans. “We can have a little apartment in San Francisco,” she said, knowing that it was true and that Marshall thought she was marching through Macedonia.

E
ARLY IN
September, Marshall returned to Fortress Six. He was just getting used to being an officer and times seemed easy, though he suspected that a shock lay ahead. He guessed that war would come in the winter, since the Israeli Air Force did not have allweather fighters, and thus would be neutralized to an extent favorable to the Arabs—who, also unable to fly in bad weather, would be spared the agony of air combat with the Israelis. Because winter in the Middle East has always discouraged war, Israel tended to let down its guard, but the Arabs' Soviet equipment was suited to mud and cold. Had Marshall been in command of the opposing forces, he would have insisted upon a winter war.

Marshall took Lydia to the Bet Shan bus, through the barred windows of which he kissed her as dozens of North African women watched. Standing on a railing at the bus queue, he was a strange sight in his colorful uniform as he grasped her through the light aluminum bars and, from most angles, appeared to be kissing and stroking the bus itself. Then the bus backed out of the bay and Marshall jumped to the ground, waved to Lydia, and walked off in the direction of a motor pool in Bat Gallim, from which he got a ride to the fortress on Mt. Canaan above Sfat.

Sfat is in the mountains, and looks into valleys and depressions with much the same tranquillity as Delphi. There are terraces along the main street, and many quiet courtyards, and in fall the weather is unparalleled, being cool, clear, and dry. He found a room in a luxury hotel, and at evening he went to a restaurant on an open terrace cantilevered over a steep green precipice. Colored lights and paper lanterns were strung across the dining area and they swung in the breeze. There were many geraniums in carved stone boxes. The valleys, Lake Kinneret, and Tiveria were in dusk.

Marshall put his hat down and waited for a menu. A lieutenant with insignia of the First Mountain Brigade asked if he could join Marshall, who was pleased to have his company, but who had to ask him to speak slowly. They both ordered steaks, and Marshall told the story of how he had gotten his rank. The other lieutenant didn't resent Marshall's rapid rise, for he was young, and he too had risen rapidly. He was going home to Tel Aviv for a week. It was pitch dark when they started on their ice cream and tea.

“You wont recognize it up there,” said the other lieutenant, who was from a strongpoint down the line.

“What do you mean?” asked Marshall, stirring his glass of hot tea.

“Don't you know? I suppose not, if you've been away. The Syrians must have brought in all but a few of their tanks, though they have recently thinned them out. Really, there are hundreds and hundreds, and all the support vehicles, APC's, and the rest, to go with them.”

“You mean they're just sitting there on the plain?” Marshall was honestly astounded, and put down his spoon even as the tea continued to swirl seductively in an orange maelstrom.

“I suppose it's more of a shock if you haven't been there in a long time. They've built up slowly. They're defensively positioned, hull-down and dug-in—against our aircraft. It's a purely defensive deployment.”