It was the summer of 1981, exactly one year before the War in Lebanon began and the week when the Tel Aviv author Ya'akov Shabtai died unexpectedly. I often sat in the unit operations room at our forward command post on the northern border. By day, I suffered in the sticky, oppressive heat; at night, seated at the bank of screeching radios, I whistled slow waltzes to myself to kill time. The intelligence sergeant lying on the bed beside me snored so terribly, I could hardly get a wink of sleep. But someone had slung a hammock of old sacks from one tree to another in the shady grove of oaks outside the command post and there I would steal away whenever I was off duty. The plums of the moshav beyond our fence were already turning black and the lovely hills of the Galilee appeared blue on the far horizon. The distant hilltops danced in the hot, shimmering summer air.
From his bed in the officers' quarters, Captain Micah, the ops room deputy CO, overheard the melancholy tunes issuing from my lips. He surprised me whistling once or twice, as though he'd caught me engaging in a private act or in some intimate, personal ritual. Slipping barefoot into the room, he stood behind me awhile listening surreptitiously, then burst out, "You whistle very nicely. Who taught you to whistle like that?" Astonished, I turned around but was momentarily too flustered to know what to say. "And where did you pick up those sad melodies?" Micah continued. That someone thought so highly of my whistling touched me deeply. Well, should I have told him how, as a boy on the farm, I had spent long days tending our flocks? Of those splendid hours so dear to me when the sheep were fat and content? Would I tell him now of how I suddenly would merge with the whole world around me? Would he understand if I told him how my soul abruptly and most unexpectedly would fill with glorious music? And I don't even know how to sing.
I played the mandolin at school for only a few weeks, until the music teacher summoned me and said, "Listen, we're not rich. We don't have enough mandolins for everyone who wants to play. How about letting the other children play your mandolin?" I understood at once what he meant. I ran home and brought back my mandolin wrapped in a khaki cover.
"Take it," I told him. "I really don't need it. Anyway, it's hard for me to strum and move my hand so fast." Fixing me with a look that I remember to this day, he took the mandolin and, without a word, placed it beside his desk. I never played again.
"You're a real warbler," Captain Micah said to me, and added, "but a gloomy one." I would have been hard pressed to explain, to myself as well as to him, the source of those sad, heartrending waltzes on my lips. One or two, which I'd heard at a captivating theater show in my youth, for some reason had been imprinted forever in the coils of my memory.
"Listen, Micah," I said. "I know the words, too, not just the tune." He asked me to sing a few lines from the waltz I'd been whistling. I hadn't felt the urge for years, but now I suddenly did and sang him the halting, fragmentary lines I'd known since I was a boy. "Why do you refuse me, discard me like a rag, and I love you so, my sweet...." Micah listened intently, following the movement of my lips. I'd heard the men mention in passing a passionate affair he'd had with a beautiful reservist, who did border checks at one of the crossings we oversaw. The song's trite, mawkish words seemed to affect him deeply for a moment. Here he'd fallen for a girl just like the one in the song; it was a replay of the performance I'd seen so long ago as a child. He, too, surely had heard the same or very similar words from his fetching customs agent. "And I love you so, my sweet."
The night patrol came in just then from the front, noisily tromping into the operations room. For now, my sad waltzes faded away among the plum groves on the slopes. The men brought with them a pair of plump salamanders in an upturned helmet. "You won't believe this. Right there, in the middle of the road at the front, these two fat, orange salamanders were crawling along." As they plopped the salamanders onto the big operations table, the patrol troops just then resembled a school class in the science room. Captain Micah tried to snatch the salamanders but they scurried between the radios and the thick operations log.
"Watch out," warned one of the men. "Those salamanders are dangerous." Micah wondered how such pathetic lizards could be harmful. And if they really were poisonous, how deadly could they be?
"No, it isn't poison," the soldier replied. "Not the poison at all. It's the terrible luck they bring."
"Micah," another soldier added acidly, "from chubby, painted broads like that, you of all people should know how to protect yourself. At your age, and married, too, and your son soon to be Bar Mitzvah. Be careful. Not everyone gets the right warning at the right time."
The men caught the salamanders, put them back into the helmet, and then headed raucously to the mess hall for dinner.
I felt oddly unsettled. An unpleasant sense of disorientation took hold of the operations room. I bent over the evening paper spread open beside me. The headlines announced the death of Ya'akov Shabtai, a writer from Tel Aviv. All through the night, attempts to save him had been made at the steps below his home. The rescuers had labored over his treacherous heart until the ambulance arrived. Tel Aviv's hot, stifling nights hadn't been good for his sickly heart. Even the doctor, tenaciously kneading his chest for hours, had been unable to revive him.
"Believe it or not, I've heard of him," Micah told me. "I have friends from my old farm school who read novels." Yes, indeed, I thought to myself. How good it is to have friends who read novels. Because others, like my Captain Micah on cool Galilean nights the summer before the war in Lebanon, make their own novels in the custom agent barracks at the northern border crossings.
I suddenly realized that I was sitting before the newspaper again, its pages open under the ops table lights. It would be dawn soon. The air began squeezing uncertainly through my compressed lips, the heartbreaking waltz I'd known for years began whistling itself. "Why do you refuse me, discard me like a rag, and I love you so, my sweet." I didn't need to sing the words because Captain Micah sat on the edge of his army cot, singing the banal lyrics on his own.
A shriek from the radios put an end to my whistling. All the alarms suddenly started to sound. A breach in the perimeter fence had been discovered close by. Someone already was shouting the news; there had been a serious penetration requiring the entire force, with whatever was at hand, to dash out and race to the fence. If terrorists had indeed broken in, the outermost houses of the moshav lay only a few hundred yards ahead of them. Glued to the radios, I yelled to Micah whatever I managed to hear, but he had already bolted into the officers' quarters to begin strapping on his combat gear and rouse the sleeping men. The wakening ops staff, dressed in sandals, sweaty undershirts, and towels draped around their necks, gathered in the room by the radios. The night patrol squad, which had brought the salamanders in a helmet, set out for the fence. Outside, the drivers, one by one, began revving up the emergency detachment's half-tracks and the officers' Jeeps. A different, grating melody filled the operations room. The last echoes of the waltz I'd been whistling vanished beyond the fences, somewhere among the moshav's plum trees.
I shut myself tight against the clamor around me. Only the fleeting, excited cries emanating from the radios got through to me. I became one with the telephone receivers. My gaze roved from the peeling ceiling to the grimy walls covered with dirty pictures, clichéd slogans, and dates scribbled with sooty sticks. And then I took a phone call with orders to prepare the helicopter landing kit for which I was responsible. In an instant, I forgot all the equipment and the din and the frantic shouts on the radios. The snoring intelligence NCO, still bleary from sleep, came in and took my place. I asked him to stay awake. This was a real emergency; don't snore, don't do anything embarrassing in the unforeseen chaos.
Kicking aside extra chairs and cursing the buckets of ice and scraps of cactus pear that blocked my path across the room, I ran to the corner where I kept my landing kit. Then, lugging the kit, with the idea of rushing it to a Jeep outside, which was already whining like a madman, I crashed into the new, telescoping fishing rod that Captain Micah had bought his son as a Bar Mitzvah present. I fell to the filthy, concrete floor, unconsciously cursing aloud all the obstacles, especially the Lebanese fishing rod that had conspired to trip me.
It isn't right for a man like you, married and the father of a 13-year-old son, to plunge into a wild, forbidden affair, to forget himself in the throes of desire for a young reservist. "It's just temporary insanity," Micah's men declared. "Who is she? She checks the Lebanese women at the border crossing. Lose your head over a girl like that?" But lose his head over her is exactly what he did. He skipped leaves and shut himself up with her in an abandoned house on the moshav next door. He barely reported for duty on time, which drew a reprimand from his commanding officer. Yet he passionately told me about his son and his love of fishing.
He had bought the telescoping rod with the fancy Japanese reel across the border. The young customs agent, who blushed whenever we passed the crossing, no doubt had helped him bring back the rod without complications. The Japanese inscription glittered on the reel's plastic cover. I remembered Micah flashing his proud, happy smile when he spoke of the manly comradery that had developed between him and his son when they went fishing together. It was into this fishing rod, this damned pole, that I had crashed precisely at the moment when I had to rush the landing kit to the helicopter landing zone.
Yes, he was cheerful as he sat on the army cot and asked me to lower the radio volume. Yes, he was so happy planning his son's Bar Mitzvah celebration, talking about his buddies and the big picnic they were organizing. It's easy to lose your son, all the more so when he reaches Bar Mitzvah age, but he was determined to preserve the masculine ties they recently had formed. He wouldn't be like those other fathers whose sons grew distant and then one day went off. His son would be overjoyed by the collapsing rod and its ultramodern reel, which had cost just pennies at the tackle shop in the Lebanese village across the border.
When the helicopter landed on the emergency pad, I'd already guessed what had befallen Micah's Jeep. I thought of the two orange salamanders nonchalantly crossing a narrow asphalt stretch of the northern road. No, it isn't their venom.
It's something else in their poisonous existence, something that Micah should have remembered. But he was so happy and mixed up. When the recon troops brought in the salamanders in that helmet, he paid no heed to their warning. So when he hastily hopped into the officers' Jeep, started the engine, and flew to the breach point, I was sure that the cut in the fence was the exact spot where the salamanders had crawled through without a care. "You whistle very nicely, do you know that?" I heard his voice pierce the drone of the evac chopper's blades. "You're a real warbler." When the helicopter lifted off, and I should have collected the scattered gear of the landing kit, I was able to add to myself from memory, "You're a real warbler, but a gloomy one."
The operations room had suddenly grown silent. On the table still lay the old evening newspaper. As the evacuation helicopter carried Micah on his final flight, I read the article in the paper. Once again, I imagined how he had collapsed, how the Jeep had rocketed into the air from the force of the blast, how he had been thrown to the fence. Neither the cool Galilean night, nor the burning passion of the young customs agent in her quarters, nor the chill, pre-dawn breezes on the northern road could save him. The physicians bending over him on the landing pad and at the hospital overlooking Haifa Bay also couldn't save his life. They could have done nothing for him even if one of them had tended him each moment as assiduously as the dogged doctor who had treated the writer Ya'akov Shabtai's ailing heart back in Tel Aviv. "Believe it or not, I've heard of him," Captain Micah had surprised me, explaining, "I have friends who read novels." I wondered whether they were the friends who had arranged the Bar Mitzvah celebration. Yes, what luck it is that your CO has heard of the writer Ya'akov Shabtai. That he has such friends, who read novels and so can appreciate the magnitude of the loss, that definitely is luck.
The action, the lack of sleep, and the awful rushing about later left me dazed. In my mind, I heard him creeping up barefoot behind me, raptly listening like a child to the sad waltzes I was whistling. Where had I picked up the melancholy tune? Well, Micah, isn't it obvious? I imagined him asking me to sing with him again, in a quavering, untrained voice, a voice charged with yearning, the few lines I remembered. Ever since I'd learned those inane lyrics, I'd never been able to forget them: "Why do you refuse me, discard me like a rag, and I love you so, my sweet."
Table of Contents
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Elisha Porat at porat_el@einhahoresh.org.il
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