The Jerusalem Diamond (15 page)

Marriage brought her luck: she made progress at the museum. One day a rare bowl, a Phoenician bronze in the form of a lion's head, was brought into the Conservation Department for repair of a small chip that had occurred in handling.

But when she examined it, the dislodged fragment revealed a series of stratified layers that were odd, to say the least. Scraped, one layer proved to be copper, incongruously new-looking. Another was a mixture of red sealing wax and the soft solder used in modern welding. When she placed the bowl under ultraviolet light she was able to see that it consisted of a genuine ruined bronze over which a forger had skillfully constructed a false surface that appeared to be both old and excellently preserved.

The museum had been about to purchase the bowl at a cost many times the sum of her annual salary. A lot of people began to say hello to her when she came to work in the morning.

It was gratifying, but she also enjoyed being a wife. She learned that
her husband couldn't eat Yemenite spices, and he loathed lamb. He doted on the
mishmish
, the small native apricots so luscious that the Arabs have a saying to describe the promise of far-off happiness:
when the mishmish comes
. Yoel had the phrase printed on cards and handed them out at the first sign of impatience.

His co-workers obviously liked him—partly, Tamar thought guiltily, because he was working outside of the mainstreams leading to promotion and career. But he was getting results. Infant and maternal mortality among the Bedouin always had been tragically high; in their difficult nomadic life, prenatal care was nonexistent. Yoel spent the first months arguing with the power structure, selling his ideas. He appeared repeatedly before the Water Commission with the necessary authorizations from his department until they agreed to run an aboveground water line to the Beersheva grazing grounds of one of the Bedouin tribes—a black plastic pipe, ugly as a curse but spewing blessings. For the first time, the tribe did not have to move out in search of new grazing. Yoel and a government agronomist convinced the aged sheikh to stay as long as the government provided his animals with grass. In return, the sheikh directed all pregnant women to report regularly to the mother-and-baby station. Getting the women into hospital confinement was the hardest chore, since it was bred in their bones that a child should be born in his father's tent. But after the first dozen mothers and their infants survived, the message was plain.

Yoel was not above driving out to the Beersheva camp if a woman was overdue for examination. When Tamar was free, sometimes she went along to translate. On one such occasion, after he had checked and scolded his patient and received her sheepish promise that next month she would come to the station, they sat in the sheikh's tent for the inevitable coffee and dates.

The old Bedouin looked at him quizzically and spoke.

“He says, why do you do this?” she said.

Yoel told her to ask if they were not brothers.

“He says, no.”

“Ask if some day we may not become as brothers.”

“ … He says it is not likely.”

“Tell him I don't care what the hell we are so long as we help one another and live in peace.”

The sheikh stared into her husband's eyes, looking for hidden dangers.

“He says, and if we cannot live in peace?”

“Then the
mishmish
will not come,” Yoel said.

That July he left her for the first time, reporting for his annual thirty-one days in the Reserves. He was a medical officer with the rank of
seren
, captain. Before he left, she saw that his sleep was torn by dreams. He admitted readily that he was afraid. He had volunteered for paratroop training.

So each night she waited bleary-eyed by the telephone between two
A.M.
and four
A.M.
, when Israeli soldiers are allowed to make free calls home. On his tenth night away, it rang.

“Nothing to it.”

She didn't ask him what he was talking about; only one thing would have allowed that much relief in his voice. He qualified with five more jumps, finishing the school in twenty-one days. When he came home she sewed the red-and-white dragon patch on his uniforms and admired the red beret and the red paratroop boots, which they called ballet slippers.

His commanding officer was a major named Michaelman, a surgeon at the Eliezar Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot. In September, Dr. Michaelman came to Jerusalem with his wife to attend a meeting, and she and Yoel had them to dinner. Dov Michaelman was a spare man with whitening hair and quiet eyes, a headquarters officer who commanded other doctors in combat units. Eva Michaelman was a red-haired butterball with a kiss-kiss mouth set somewhat absurdly in a face otherwise arrived at middle age. After dinner Yoel turned on the radio for news, a mistake. Egyptian armor was reported beginning to mass on the western bank of the Suez Canal.

“Maneuvers,” Dr. Michaelman said. “They hold them every autumn.”

Strangely, what made her afraid was not the radio report so much as the fact that as Tamar watched, Eva Michaelman's sweetheart mouth suddenly became as old as the rest of her face.

She and Yoel went to her mother's for a Yemenite Rosh Hashana and then, to be fair, decided to spend Yom Kippur with his parents in their little Ashkenazi synagogue.

Shortly after midday, three army officers entered the
shul
. They edged through the worshipers in prayer shawls and went to the bema to deliver a list to the rabbi.

The sexton called for quiet. “The following men are ordered to report to their military units,” the rabbi said.

Yoel's name was not among those read. From the women's section, Tamar saw her husband push forward to ask questions. She found it hard to breathe. She went outside as sirens broke into a keening.

Her father-in-law joined her and she turned to him. “What is it?” she asked.

Mr. Strauss scratched a gray stubble and peered skyward over steel rims.

“Perhaps it has begun,” he said.

They hastened home, but the radio and television were dead. There were no broadcasts during Yom Kippur.

“The car needs benzine,” Yoel said.

“The filling stations are closed.”

“The Arab stations are open in the Old City.”

She nodded, knowing he would seek news as well as fuel, and he hurried away.

At two-forty
P.M.
the radio came alive with an announcement from the Israeli Defense Forces. At fourteen-hundred hours, Egyptian and Syrian armies had launched attacks across the Suez Canal and into the Golan Heights. “Because of Syrian aircraft activity in the Golan sector, sirens can be heard all over the country. These are genuine sirens … Orders have been given for mobilization of reserves. In view of the emergency, everyone who has no need to move on the roads should refrain from doing so …”

Yoel came home to find her listening to strange messages that kept interrupting the music and news. “Purple Hyacinth, Purple Hyacinth, please report at four
P.M.
to the place of concentration.”

“What's the code name of your brigade?”

“Good Book. Isn't that silly?”

“No,” she said shakily.

While they were looking at one another, the radio called for it.

“Well,” he said.

“Can I help you get ready?”

“I just have to change into uniform and take my toilet things. Nothing else has to be done.”

“Yes, it does.”

In the bathroom she stood for a moment holding the diaphragm and then she shut it back into its little case and returned the case to the cabinet. They made love too hurriedly and without real pleasure. As his seed came, she breathed in his ear what she had not done.

“ … Ah, you fool …”

She could see the annoyance on his face. “ … Why, fool? …”

“In a few days this will all blow over. Then we're going to have to figure out how to support a pregnancy and a child.” But he kissed her.

“Do you think we made a baby?” she asked as she watched him put on his uniform.

He shrugged absently. She saw that at least part of him was impatient to get away, enjoying the dangers even as she hated them.

“Yoel.”

He kissed her in a way that said more than the hurried congress on the bed. “
Shalom
, Tamar.”

“I hope so,” she said.

The city became a different person. Each morning as she left the building to go to work, old men were shoveling sand into burlap bags. Civilian traffic was light. Many of the cars, like the red Volkswagen, had been mud-daubed and driven into the army with their owners. There was a shelter in the apartment-house basement. The women of the building lugged mattresses into it and Tamar helped tape all the windows and sew blackout curtains. At the museum, the women employees cut bedsheets into bandages.

The activity helped. Based on past experience, everyone expected a brief war, a lightning defense against the invader followed by quick, all-out victory.

But for three days the news broadcasts were puzzlingly vague. By that time the wounded had begun to fill Hadassah Hospital and the news reports started to deal frankly with the catastrophe wrought by surprise and the newest Russian weapons. The Egyptians were solidly dug in on the east side of the canal, and the Syrians were inflicting high losses in the Golan.

Everyone tried to function as usual. With ridiculous timing, Tamar discovered another forgery, a painting this time. When she had it x-rayed she found that a portrait supposedly more than a century old had been painted over a landscape. She scraped a minute sampling of the paint used for the original picture, and chemical analysis showed the presence of titanium, which had been an ingredient of paints only since 1920. The original picture was only a few decades old.

She was summoned by the Director. “What caused you to suspect?” he asked.

Tamar shrugged. “I noted traces of stippled pigment. An occasional different brushstroke. One place had a muddy transition from one hue to the next.”

The Director nodded. “You have a talent, Mrs. Strauss. You can see the apple in the wagonload of oranges. It is not an ability everyone has,” he said thoughtfully.

This time she received a raise in salary and she was no longer a technical assistant; she was a conservator. It was made part of a procedure that each new acquisition was to go through her desk. Ordinarily, she would have been exhilarated. Now she scarcely took note. Each night her alarm went off at two
A.M.
and she stayed awake until four. But the telephone did not ring.

She received two letters, factual and unpoetic notes. Yoel told her he was all right and that she shouldn't expect telephone calls. The lines were being reserved “for soldiers with personal troubles such as family illness, which, please God, we shall not have.” He did not tell her where he was nor mention the war in any other way.

By the end of the week, things began to turn around on both fronts. Kissinger had been trying to arrange a cease-fire, which had been refused by Sadat. Suddenly, the Egyptians were quite willing. The I.D.F. was well inside Syria and traveling the road to Damascus, and one morning Tamar awoke to the news that Israel had crossed the canal
and was carrying the war into Egypt. It was expected that a cease-fire would be accomplished in a matter of hours.

She wanted to thank God at the Western Wall.

When she got there, she found that hundreds of others had the same idea. The crowd eddied, the people on the fringes waiting patiently, dwarfed by the Herodian stone. She sensed many things but perhaps they came from within her, pinned as she was between a sobbing graybeard and a young boy, his face dazzled.

She slipped into a hole in the mass, getting closer. The people next to the Wall were considerate. They stayed a moment or two and then moved away, allowing others in. Pushed and tossed, eventually she found herself next to the sun-warmed blocks.

All along the line, people were reaching with reverence to touch the stones, weeping with gratitude, many writing prayers and stuffing them into crannies, courting the legend that such requests were granted by the Lord. The only paper she had was an old shopping list. On its back she scribbled a petition that eventually she might have the son that this time had been denied her. She put it in a crack, hoping somewhat giddily that the sides of the note would not be confused, and that she would not have to carry and birth eggs, bread, cheese, apples and a herring.

She moved away, making room for another woman. The crowd was a net that she battered until the mesh parted to let her swim through a stream of sound loud as pain, a
shofar
blown in her ear. A circle of Polish Hasidim held hands and danced, chanting to their own triumphant tune a snatch of psalm—
Thy Mercy I Do Trust!
Some were bearded and gray. Little boys, each dressed exactly as their elders in fur-trimmed
streimels
and long black caftans, shared the blanket of ecstasy woven by the voices and bodies. As she watched, a paratroops officer made himself a link in the chain, whirling and stamping his red boots, his head thrown back and his eyes, like theirs, searching the heavens. Finally he broke loose and stood laughing and breathless, and she saw that she knew him.