Mitla Pass Read online

  Val ordered the girls to strip and they squealed under the outdoor shower. She rubbed them dry with big towels, dressed them in muumuus, and sent them to their room to do their lessons.

  In the kitchen, Gideon reached under Val's muumuu and caressed her backside. Most of the Jewish men she had met since Gideon often as not had their hands on their women. A lovely horny breed.

  "What's for dinner?"

  "Surprise. We've got prime rib."

  Gideon peeked into the oven. "Chicken," he grumbled. Gideon hungered for a thick, juicy slab of prime rib. His visions of food, which grew daily, always ended up at Lawry's Restaurant. He'd get off the plane at L.A. International and all the customs officers would have been alerted to pass him through without formalities. A helicopter would be waiting to fly him directly to the Lawry parking lot. The big silver cart would be rolled up to his table, the lid would be opened, and there would be ... one entire steer. He wouldn't get up from the table until he was so bloated that a pair of waiters would have to pack him out on a handcart. . . . Well, anyhow, the fruits and vegetables were outstanding in Israel. !

  Gideon seated himself at the kitchen table and | snapped on the radio. His hand snaked over to the fruit bowl as he checked the mail.

  Oh, thank God, a letter from F. Todd Wallace, his literary agent! Gideon had bombarded Wallace with letters pleading with him to find some writing assignments

  magazine article, a guest column, anything to augment the foundering bank account.

  Val watched Gideon's anxiety turn to deflation and then to anger. "Incompetent, lazy son of a bitch. All that mother knows how to do is collect commissions like a hungry landlord. The whole God-damned Middle East is about to blow up, he's got a writer in place, and he can't get me a nickel's worth of work!"

  "Why don't you just replace him?"

  "He's got me tied up on this book and there's no way he's going to give it up. You remember how it was? We were in a real mess with J. III and Reaves Brothers Publishers and in comes Wallace, Princeton charm in Brooks Brothers' uniform. We thought we were lucky to have him at the time."

  "Honey, don't get yourself all churned up."

  "Depend on that literary pimp to pull you through and you're dead, man, dead. You've got to lay a winner in that sucker's lap. Give him any God-damned task requiring creative selling and you might as well be represented by the seals at Sea World."

  "Listen, we can only eat two chickens a day. We'll get through."

  Gideon was pacing, throwing his middle finger up. "F. Todd Wallace and his God-damned club. Harvard and Yalie blimps with rigor mortis, in their overstuffed chairs, sneering down on Fifth Avenue. That crowd is drunk by noon. Can you believe it? God, I hate that crowd. Hey, Wallace, how'd they let me in? Do they know I'm a Jew?"

  "Calm down, Junior, gor nisht helfen," Val said, once again butchering an attempt at Yiddish.

  Gideon jammed his hands into his pockets and continued his monologue. "If worse comes to worst I can always do a doctoring job on a screenplay. That'll set the novel back three months. I'd better write and see what's doing at the studios. There's always a script in trouble."

  He flopped back down. Val had taken one of the

  letters and put it in her apron pocket. A letter from Nathan, Gideon's father.

  "Might as well let me have it," he said.

  "Maybe you ought to save it till after dinner."

  He took the envelope from her pocket and held it as one would handle a box with an unexploded bomb inside, sighed, and tore it open.

  "Want me to read it?" she asked.

  "Yeah."

  My Dear Son,

  I am still trying to get used to being deprived of your weekly letter, which I came to depend on when you were home in California. Now I come home to the usually empty mailbox. Am I to blame for having the blues?

  Val sighed. "Honey, you really don't need this," she said.

  "Go on, finish it."

  "As you wish. Let's see . . . 'blame for having the blues?'"

  Son! I am getting nasty letters from the relatives in Israel that you are boycotting their homes. I am having terrible difficulty to convince them that Gideon is not a snob. Son, I beg of you. It wouldn't hurt a thing to drop in for a meal once in a while. You still like gefilte fish! Even though Valerie doesn't know how to make such dishes and seems reluctant to learn.

  However, that is not the point. Especially you should every so often see my brother, Mordechai, who suffered so brutally at the hands of the Nazis. He pleads with me for you to read his essays, which are world-famous in some circles, a highly respected scholar. You could easily, with a letter or two to your famous friends, get him published in America. It

  would do miracles for his health (ruined by the Nazis) if you could accomplish this small favor. Or maybe I'm asking too much.

  Also, to visit my sister (your aunt) Rifka, who sits in a dark room all day grieving for my beloved mother (your grandmother), who was murdered at Treblinka. She is not a well person, mentally speaking, and it is my firm belief and honest opinion that a visit from you would make her well. Thank you, son, for not ignoring the relatives.

  How are Valerie and my beautiful eynikles? Ah laben auf dier kups. I love them all! I embrace them. I kiss them. Perhaps you could convince Valerie to drop the old man a few sentences, a post card. It would be nice to get from her regular mail IF IT'S NOT TOO PAINFUL FOR HER. Also, is there a reason that Roxanne and Penny should be ashamed of their zayde? I have for each of them a little Channukah gelt in exchange for a letter. Please, so they shouldn't forget, have them write regularly. It would also alleviate my loneliness.

  Now, let me address you on a very serious matter. I am not no literary expert, although I have read all the classics in a number of languages. I am only a humble worker, but you must listen to what I have to tell you. Menachem Begin and his crowd are nothing but fascists. Don't let them convince you they are Hollywood heroes. The Jewish people will never forgive you if you glorify, in your book, these thugs and hoodlums. God forbid I should tell you what to write. I am only offering a suggestion that should be carefully followed, FOR YOUR SAKE.

  I miss you. I long to see you. I embrace you. I plead with you, don't take chances and also MOST IMPORTANTLY to write. Lena

  sends love.

  Your loving, Dad

  P.S. We are okay for old folks. Nothing happens

  new in Philly except to wait to die.

  The letter sent Gideon directly to the liquor cupboard over the sink.

  "He gets better with age," Val said.

  "Shit!" They had finished up the Scotch last night. Gideon took down a bottle of Israeli brandy and glared at it as though it were an adversary. A few ice cubes, without integrity, were scraped from the tray. He poured a brandy and diluted it with soda water. The ice cubes vanished on contact. The first swallow was the worst.

  Kol Israel radio beeped out its signal. Gideon turned up the sound. Syria and Jordan were meeting with Egypt to form a joint military command. Val watched her husband tense up. His back and neck would be as hard as a billiard table tonight.

  More news. A fedayeen raid from Jordan. The marauders caught a girl from the kibbutz, raped her, and stabbed her to death. The Arab Legion fired into West Jerusalem from the walls of the Old City.

  Well, at least the sunset was reliable. Gideon repaired to a tiny porch on a flat part of the cottage roof that afforded almost a full-circle panorama.

  Between their cottage and the sea was a smattering of cottages and small villas, randomly scattered in the dunes and anchored by a pair of hotels, the Accadia and the Sharon, on the beach about a mile apart.

  Before Val and the girls arrived, Gideon had lived at the Accadia. Now they gave him a room to write in and the family was able to use the hotel switchboard for phone messages.

  In the opposite direction lay the Plain of Sharon, now glistening from the sprays of overhead sprinklers. Jordan was only ten miles away. Gideon was certain

  there would have to be a major reprisal against the Jordanians. Something big, a real klop to sober up Hussein and stop him from joining up with Nasser and the Egyptians.

  His thoughts were interrupted as Val brought up a second drink. If you survived the first one, the second one was almost palatable.

  They were invaded by squadrons of fighter-plane gnats followed by squadrons of bomber mosquitoes.

  "Where's the bug spray, baby?" he asked.

  "The store was out. The store was out of everything."

  "Except chickens with pinfeathers. I'll get some bug spray in Tel Aviv tomorrow," he said, dipping his finger into his drink and rubbing the brandy on his cheeks, ankles, and exposed arms. No self-respecting mosquito would touch the stuff.

  "Tel Aviv is out of just about everything as well," Val said. "I've got a long shopping list of things we're out of."

  Val had that expression on her face that implied, "you know where you can get anything you want, if you really want to."

  Gideon had managed to circumvent a quagmire of rules and regulations. He had hustled a full-time assistant, Shlomo Bar Adon, from the Foreign Ministry, commandeered the last electric typewriter in the Defense Ministry, borrowed a jeep from the Army, slid around a variety of currency laws, import regulations, and taxations. Customs was still trying to figure out how one G. Zadok managed to get a Ford through Haifa port with phony diplomatic plates. Gideon was a bulldog when it came to clearing himself a path and getting at his research. He was chutzpah personified.

  "You know, honey," Val said, "if you really wanted to spare your family from all this privation, you could do it with an itty-bitty phone call to Rich Cromwell at the embassy. He's offered us use of the diplomatic commissary a half-dozen times."

  Gideon's non-r
eply was definitive.

  "Just think about it. Scotch, non-scratchy toilet paper, bacon, prime rib."

  Richard Cromwell, a purchasing agent in the American Embassy, was also the CIA station chief. Cromwell knew, of course, that Gideon was well connected in the high Israeli echelons. Rich had cultivated Gideon's friendship early on. From time to time Cromwell had dangled Polish hams, tobacco, booze, butter, and assorted other goodies before Gideon's eyes, at wholesale prices. Gideon wasn't buying.

  Val couldn't come to terms with her husband's being so sanctimonious about using the commissary. After all, they were Americans, and what would be the damned sin in slipping a little information to Cromwell now and then? Not that he knew any Israeli state secrets, and it wasn't as though Israel and America were enemies. Gideon was wearing his honorable jut-jawed boy scout expression. Honorable prick! She dropped the subject.

  "How about a walk on the beach after we put the girls down?" she asked.

  "We can't, honey. It's off limits after dark now. Being patrolled. Let's get downstairs before these little bastards eat us up."

  After the girls' lessons and dinner, there was a family roughhouse. Gideon noted that it was becoming more difficult to wrestle with Roxanne and get a decent grip on her these days. She was filling out beautifully. Kisses and more kisses good night. Maybe a ride up to Jerusalem in a few days.

  Then came an awkward, uncomfortable moment. Gideon had new pages. "I'd better get these into the hotel safe," he said, "I'll leave you the carbons. Oh, incidentally, I asked Shlomo to meet me at the hotel tonight. We've got to work out some appointments and next week's travel plans."

  Valerie used to be privy to all the plans, but Gideon seldom talked them over with her anymore. Once upon

  a time, it had been a wonderful nightly ritual for her to read the new pages back to him while he took notes. She hadn't read to him for weeks.

  The pleasure had faded. Val didn't laugh at his funny lines anymore, only the mistakes. She would get combative and argue over meaningless points. Val seemed very distant from what he was writing and trying to say. Her barbs left him fuming. Little by little, the pages stopped coming to her on one pretense or another. He'd leave the carbon for her to read on her own.

  "I wouldn't mind reading to you, tonight." Val's expressed desire was now a desperate attempt not to be shut out.

  "Aw, hell. I've really got a ton of stuff to go over with Shlomo."

  They exchanged cold kisses and a "See you later, honey . . . don't wait up for me."

  Gideon wheeled the jeep through the breezeway of the Accadia Hotel and spotted Shlomo Bar Adon. Shlomo was an unpolished gem, a native-born sabra who coordinated all of Gideon's interviews, travels, translations, and showed him every corner of the land. Shlomo knew Israel and taught it with the zeal of an ancient seer. For Gideon, Shlomo's rough edges were more than compensated for by the breadth of his knowledge.

  Valerie barely tolerated him and Roxanne generally mirrored her mother. Val had eased Shlomo out of coming to their home, but he had become indispensable to Gideon. Perhaps she was even a bit jealous.

  Shlomo indicated that they should get out of earshot, so they walked to the bluffs.

  "We've been invited to join an operation," Shlomo said.

  "When?"

  "Tomorrow."

  Gideon registered a flush of excitement. "Reprisal? Jordan?"

  Shlomo shrugged that he didn't know.

  Gideon had pestered, demanded, pleaded for a chance to go out on an action over the border. He knew there was something different about these soldiers, different from any others in the world. Their connection with the ancient biblical warriors intrigued him. The pieces of a six-thousand-year-old puzzle could not be found hidden away in an office drawer. He could only find them by going out and putting the puzzle together with his own hands.

  Most of his prodding of the authorities had been done before Val and the girls arrived. They changed the picture. His embarking on such a risky adventure would be brutally unfair to them. But what the hell, writing is unfair. It takes from everyone—the writer, the wife, the children. Everyone's blood ends up hidden in the pages. Was this beyond reasonable unfairness?

  "So, what do you think, Shlomo?"

  "Val?"

  "Val."

  Shlomo's black beard and head rolled from side to side: maybe yes, maybe no. "There's going to be gunfire. People are going to get hurt . . . killed . . . maimed. You don't have to smell gunpowder to write about it. Something else pushing you to go out?"

  "Maybe."

  "What is it, Gideon?"

  "I don't know. But I do know the only way I'm going to find out. I'm coming."

  "We'll keep our asses down low."

  "Your assignment with me doesn't call for this kind of crap. You don't have to come."

  Shlomo puffed out his chest. An insult. "Be here at the hotel at five in the morning," he said. "I'll take you to the staging area."

  Valerie sat cross-legged on the bed, her gown drawn up so that her thighs were bared. The international edition of Time was balanced between her legs as

  she wiped her reading glasses. She had hit the wastebas-ket with the Jerusalem Post and Herald Trib. Four points. Gideon's pages were on the bedstand to read last, for dessert.

  Val turned to the Time book review. A full page in frothing lionization of a minor talent who couldn't sell twenty thousand books if they spotted him nineteen thousand.

  "Pricks," she said, tossing the magazine. She picked up Gideon's pages, teased herself with them. She had looked forward to them voraciously.

  Val read half a page, then lay back on the pillows with a thud and rubbed her eyes. My God, I'm finding fault. Nit-picking. I'm not reading what he's saying, but what I want it to say. I've become just like those Goddamned critics I loathe. It's become insatiable. Why? To annoy him? Hell no, to hurt him. My head's not clear anymore. You just can't read with a hate bird sitting on your shoulder.

  Val, damn you, you've got to be more supportive. Read what this guy is reaching for. He's good. He's ripping himself open to find meanings. That's when a writer can really be great, on a voyage of discovery.

  What the hell, I came to Israel, didn't I? Isn't that being supportive enough? Did you come for Gideon or to save your own ass?

  She heard Grover growl and the rubber flap of his dog door snap open and shut. Sounds disturbed her here, adding to the jittery feeling she always had when Gideon was away. Everything in this damned country ran on nerves and anxiety.

  Val drew images of him whispering into the phone, calling that woman. Perhaps that woman was waiting for him at the hotel and they'd go at it desperately. If he smelled of a fresh shower, it was no doubt to get rid of her scent. He usually wore his guilt like a neon sign.

  Lots of parties in Israel. Big social life. You know what it's like to feel every pair of eyes in the room glaring at you. That's the poor wife. Pity. No big deal in Israel, this bed-hopping: sophistication personified.

  Natasha Solomon. She's a bloody charmer all right. So sweet to Penelope and Roxy at the Savyon Club.

  "When you come up to Jerusalem, I'd love to take your daughters around."

  And I'd like to bust you one in the mouth, lady!

  Come on, Val, read the pages ... no use. She flung them down rudely. Stinks! Oh God, it hurts!

  There was that awful night, not long after I had arrived in Israel. Gideon was working late at the hotel. Or so I thought. I decided to drive over and surprise him and maybe talk him into a little romantic stroll on the beach.

  When I parked the car in the front of the Accadia, I heard riotous laughter coming from the beach.

  "What's going on down there?" I asked the doorman.

  "A reunion of Hungarian survivors, from all over Israel," he answered.

  I was magnetically drawn to the bluffs that ran along the rear of the hotel. The Hungarians were strung all up and down the beach; a crowd of them around a campfire were having a boisterous time. Some of the revelers began to shed their clothing, daring others to do the same. They plunged naked into the water and indulged in horseplay that bordered on the sexy. I felt like a bit of a peeping Tom, but it was so damned joyous down there I almost had the urge to join them. Good Lord, if anyone deserved happiness, they certainly did. Seeing their naked bodies, I shuddered for an instant . . . that was the way they were sent into the gas chambers.