The Hope Page 24

  “He had a rifle with him?”

  “A rifle in Montmartre? Are you crazy? No, he strangled it with a checkered tablecloth.”

  “All right, let’s have coq au vin. Did you really see Hemingway in here?”

  “Well, a guy who looked like Hemingway.”

  “In what way did Dayan alter KADESH?”

  “Let’s go in and order our coq au vin. It takes nearly an hour, though.”

  “Sam, let’s get a cheese sandwich.”

  “If they make them, sure.”

  Over the sandwiches and a bottle of superb red wine, Pasternak ticked off Dayan’s scheme in a low voice, in quick Hebrew military jargon. The few diners at other tables were almost out of earshot, and none looked like a Hebrew speaker, or like Hemingway. “Dayan has his heart set on KADESH, hasn’t he?” Barak commented, shaking his head. “Wants his Sinai war.”

  “He’s right,” Pasternak replied with sudden asperity. “Moshe’s sense of priorities is incomparable. If we have to fight Nasser sooner or later—and I see no alternative—the best way is with the British and the French, not alone. If this is the only way to bring in the British, okay.”

  “With Israel the foil for their comedy act, taking all the blame in the United Nations?”

  “Zev, our choices are few.”

  ***

  Next morning Barak sat in the posh busy lobby of the George Cinq, waiting for Emily Cunningham. His mind was on the Dayan plan, and he paid little heed to the prosperous guests, mostly American by their dress and chatter, coming and going. The military attaché of the embassy, his platoon leader in the old Haganah days, had awakened him with a telephone call. Ben Gurion wanted him at the villa by half-past ten, so the breakfast with Emily would have to be short. Barak had no idea what the girl wanted, and was not very interested, but he had been unable to reach her to call it off.

  Through the street door came the poet he had called Hiroshima in a trench coat, hatless and smoking a pipe; a short doughy fellow of twenty-five or so, with long hair around a bald spot. They made eye contact, and the poet gave him a crinkly eye-shutting smile and sank into an armchair across the lobby, pulling a newspaper from his pocket. Soon Emily Cunningham came catapulting out of an elevator straight at Barak, dressed in the American collegiate skirt-and-sweater uniform, the skirt a loud tartan, the sweater loose, hairy, and bright blue. “Oh, God,” she said, falling on the couch beside him before he could get up, “I’m late as hell, and there’s no time for breakfast. André and I have to go to a lecture. I clean forgot. I’m so sorry I could die. Mother and Dad leave this afternoon. I just had coffee upstairs with them. Have you had coffee? Oh, God, there’s André.”

  “Emily, I really haven’t time for breakfast, either, so it’s just as well—”

  “Oh, God, you’re not just saying that? Thanks.” She took his hand with large bony fingers. Her touch was cold and gentle. “Why do I keep saying ‘Oh God’ like a schoolgirl? I keep hearing myself being an idiot. You fluster me. Can we have a drink? Say at five, here in the bar?”

  “Look, Emily, it’s not important, I’d have enjoyed talking to you, but—”

  “Not important? It’s desperately important. How long will you be in Paris?” She was staring at him through large glasses. The black pupils of her gray eyes were enormous, like a cat’s in a dark room.

  “Not long at all, a day or so, and I’m pretty well tied up, so—”

  Her grip tightened, her voice dropped and became charged. “I’ll be here in the bar at five. If you can’t make it I’ll completely understand. I’ll wait till five-thirty and then leave. I just don’t believe it’s completely accidental that we’ve met again. It can’t be. You look much older. Remember the fireflies? How many children do you have, Wolf Lightning?”

  “Two, Emily.”

  “Oh, God, here comes André. Oh, God, that’s my fourth ‘Oh God.’ Zev, André knows more about Lamartine than anybody alive, and he writes gorgeous poetry. I’m doing my master’s on Lamartine. You must think André’s a creep.” She jumped up, and he stood too.

  “I don’t know him at all.”

  “He’s a crashing creep, truth to tell, but fascinating. My parents would like him better if he were a Ubangi with wooden plates for lips—André, chéri!” She kissed Hiroshima, and they chattered in rapid French. André closed his eyes at Barak, and they made off together, still rattling away.

  Left with time on his hands, Zev Barak sank back on the couch, more than a little bemused by the girl’s eccentric appearance and disappearance in a minute or two, and by her bizarre manner. Emily Cunningham radiated high voltage and some kind of distress, and though she was only passably pretty—the excited eyes with the big black cat pupils, the face all bones and angles like her father’s, a nice girlish figure vaguely discernible inside the loose outfit—she amazingly attracted him, and he was not sure why.

  “Adon Barak!” Lee Bloom stood there with an overnight bag and a despatch case, both of softly gleaming leather. “We meet again!”

  15

  The French Whore

  Yossi and Yael climbed the Eiffel Tower in a balmy sunny autumn morning, rewarded as they ascended through the giant gaunt girders by an ever-broadening view of Paris and the crooked Seine crossbarred by bridges; a great sprawl to the horizon of brown and gray buildings and spiderweb avenues, except where parks and gardens flamed with October color. They found a café on the lower platform, but Yael wanted to go all the way up first, so they climbed to the top.

  “This is what the ground looks like, Yael,” said Kishote, raising his voice over the wind whining through the steel struts and railings, “when you jump.”

  She was clutching the rail with one hand, and peering down at the vertiginous view. “Oo-ah! It gets me here.” She pressed a palm between her thighs. “I’ve thought of asking for parachute training. I believe I won’t.”

  “Aah, this is worse. Something about looking over the rail, and seeing the tower curving away below, makes you want to dive over and kill yourself,” Yossi said. “God knows why.”

  “That’s it. That’s just how I feel.”

  “Well, in a chute you float down, it’s all different, it’s exhilarating, it’s great.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Kishote. I’m ready for breakfast.” Yael shuddered. He put an arm around her.

  “Cold?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “It was your idea to come up here.”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it. If you’re going to climb a tower, you climb it. Let’s get down out of here.”

  The coffee à l’américaine in the almost deserted café was fresh and strong, with a different European taste, and it came in large cups. “Well, if you want a good cup of coffee in Paris,” said Kishote, “you evidently don’t go to La Tour d’Argent, you just climb the Eiffel Tower.”

  “It was exhilarating at that, up there,” said Yael, laughing as she heaped butter on a flaky croissant. “Something to do once.”

  He grinned at her. “Your color’s coming back. You looked green for a while.”

  “I felt green. Funny. Heights never bothered me before.”

  “Never mind. You look lovely now.”

  She shot him a skeptical glance. In a leather jacket and wool cap she felt comfortable, but far from lovely. “Thanks. I hardly slept. Did you have bedbugs?”

  “What! No. Did you?”

  “Maybe it’s that hotel. My skin crawled all night. I never saw one, no.”

  “Why don’t we start with the Louvre?” He was thumbing a guidebook he had bought in the café. “Then take the boat ride on the Seine? The book gives them both four stars.”

  “Anything you say. Tonight I want to go to the Comédie Française. I saw in the paper that they’re doing Tartuffe.”

  “Sure, but is your French that good? Mine isn’t.”

  “Pretty good. When I was a kid I read all the Molière I could find in Hebrew, and then in French.”

  “Yo
u’re still a kid.”

  “Ho! Look who’s talking…”

  They smiled at each other. The early start, the hard climb in the morning air, the disturbing thrills at the top, the jolts of coffee, had put them both in high spirits. He really was a kid, she was thinking. In a green army sweater, his curly hair tousled by the wind, his eyes boyishly playful through the rimless glasses, he was no longer a shabby Israeli out of place in Paris. He was Don Kishote. And it crossed her mind that Shayna or no Shayna, Pasternak or no Pasternak, there might be jolly harmless doings with the Don while they were in Gay Paree together. Nothing to plan or to work at, just play the situation as it unfolded.

  “Yael, you’re looking me over like the headwaiter at Le Tour d’Argent.”

  “I am? No, I’m not. You spilled coffee on your sweater.” She pointed. “If we’re going to start doing all the four-stars, let’s go.”

  They raced through the Louvre, touching base at the Mona Lisa, which they found startlingly small, and then at the Venus de Milo. They walked all around the Venus, contemplating it in reverence. At least that was Yael’s mood, and she thought it was Yossi’s until he spoke up. “You know, if this statue had arms, nobody would ever have heard of it. That’s what makes it. No arms.”

  “Kishote, don’t be idiotic. It’s the most beautiful woman’s figure in the world.”

  “What? Look at those fat thighs, that thick waist, and those dinky little breasts! Why, you’ve got better breasts. She has a lousy figure. Yours is nicer, but you have arms, so you’re not that special.”

  “You’re not only a fool, you’re an ignorant fool.” In Yael’s tone there was amused kindly music. However ridiculous the fellow was, it was not displeasing to be favorably compared to the Venus de Milo.

  “What I want to do besides all these four-star things,” said Kishote, as they left the Louvre, “is ride in a carriage in the Bois de Boulogne, and eat there at a restaurant among the trees. I read about that once in a book. Then I saw the movie. It was with Ingrid Bergman. And it was in the autumn like now. She was an older Frenchwoman in love with an American college boy, a big romance, but they were giving each other up, as the autumn leaves drifted down on them.”

  “You’ve got me crying,” said Yael. “The way we’re dressed, though, I don’t think a carriage will stop for us in the Bois de Boulogne, or a restaurant let us in. Anyway, how do you pay for all this? You’re not spending that kind of money on me, even if you’ve got it.”

  He told her about his brother’s largesse. “Lee wants us to have fun, so why not? He won’t take back the francs.”

  “Well then, that’s different. All right.”

  In the Bois de Boulogne a carriage driver reined in his horse so abruptly, when Kishote waved one of the larger and more colorful French bank notes at him, that sparks flew from the creature’s hooves. The headwaiter at a restaurant tucked among the scarlet and yellow trees gave them a long Tour d’Argent scrutiny before conducting them through many empty tables to a small one in an inconspicuous corner.

  “Quel vin monsieur désire-t-il?” inquired a waiter in a purple velvet vest, with a gold chain around his neck, approaching with a large leather book, after Yael had ordered in French from another waiter a lunch climaxing in roast duckling. Kishote looked to her inquiringly.

  “He says, ‘What wine does Monsieur desire?’”

  “Not do I desire wine—what wine do I desire?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, at that, Ingrid Bergman drank wine with that boy at lunch. In fact, they drank champagne. Champagne,” Kishote said to the waiter. The man opened the book to a middle page and extended it to show him a long list of champagnes. “Yael, just tell him the best champagne they’ve got.”

  “Are you crazy? That can cost the price of an automobile. Anyway, champagne in the middle of the day?”

  “We go next to Napoleon’s tomb and then the Bastille. We need cheering up.”

  The wine steward was grimacing at the rapid exchange in Hebrew, as though he too suspected Dreyfus was guilty. Yael ordered a modestly priced red wine which seemed to show great connoisseurship, for the waiter brightened, bowed, offered a fast smiling compliment, and went off rethinking Dreyfus.

  The food was quite as exquisite as the best French food was supposed to be, and this unaccustomed midday feasting and drinking lifted them both into the giddiest of moods, laughing at the French, at Israel’s problems, at the world, and at themselves.

  “Poor Shayna,” said Yael. “What she’s missed!”

  “Yael, I want you to keep notes and tell her about it. Tell her everything.”

  “Ha. She’ll scratch my eyes out. You tell her.”

  “If I ever talk to her again,” said Kishote, in a sudden drop to bitterness.

  “Come on. She’s a nice religious girl, and you knew that right along.”

  Signalling to the waiter and pulling out Lee’s wad, he growled, “Let’s go to Napoleon’s tomb.”

  The last thing they did that afternoon as the sun was sinking was to walk in the Tuileries Gardens, where the children still played in brightly colored warm clothes under the chestnut trees, and gossiping nannies wrapped in cloaks were starting to wheel home the prams. The breeze had freshened, and leaves were whirling down on the lawns, on the pools, and on afternoon strollers like the two young Israelis. “The guidebook says we’re supposed to feed the carp, or we’re not allowed to feed them, I forget which,” said Yossi. “Anyhow, I’m for feeding them.” He pulled a roll from a trouser pocket, broke it in half, and gave half to her. “For what that lunch cost, I figured I could take a roll for the carp.”

  “You think of everything, don’t you?” Yael laughed. Children gathered to watch as they threw out bread bits and the fat fish rose to gulp them. “Paris is glorious, Kishote. Unbelievable! Tomorrow let’s just walk. Let’s walk everywhere.”

  “Sure. Now, Lee said the concierge at the George Cinq would get us tickets for anything we want. Is it still the Comédie Française?”

  “Why? Would you rather see more big chickens with the feathers off?”

  “No. I thought you might be tired.”

  “I couldn’t be fresher. I’m walking on clouds.”

  The concierge, a gray-headed roly-poly man with the dignity of a cardinal, in a wing collar and dress coat, was all condescending grace to Yossi. Ah, yes, Monsieur Bloom had arranged to take care of whatever entertainment Monsieur might desire to book. Moreover, Monsieur Bloom had left instructions that Monsieur might care to dine in his penthouse suite or in the George Cinq Grill, and all that too would be taken care of.

  “Let’s look at Lee’s suite,” said Kishote. “He says it’s nice.”

  “Fine, but I don’t want to dine in any grill. I look like a peddler woman. Anyway, I’m not hungry after that lunch.”

  As they walked through the ornate double doors into the suite, Yael exclaimed, “Oo-wah!” The sitting room was a rich long vista of antique-style furnishings and real paintings, not famous but to their unpracticed eyes serious art. They wandered through to the bedroom, where she uttered another “Oo-wah!” The bed was draped from the ceiling to the floor in swathes of rust silk, and the spread was a pattern of Chinese characters, in black and white.

  “Look!” Yael peeked into the bathroom. “Marble. Gold faucets! My God, what does this cost? How rich is your brother?”

  “Rich enough. How about a drink?”

  “No, no, I’ve had plenty today, I don’t want to sleep through Tartuffe. Let’s look at the view.”

  Yossi had to pull hard on the tasselled cords of the heavy drapes. The floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over the Arc de Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower. Paris glowed below in a rosy sunset arching all over the sky. “Ah, God,” Yael murmured.

  “You know something, Yael?” he said quietly, as they stood there side by side, both reddened by the sunset glow, “I still have that handkerchief you gave me, when we went into Lod and Ramle. The blood’s all black.
I never washed it out, just kept it.”

  “Why, you crazy thing? Why keep that rag?”

  “Because I thought you were a goddess. A girl soldier, the first I ever knew, beautiful and tough and so far above me! I never threw it away. It’s in my stuff somewhere.” Yossi felt a sharp tug at his elbow that spun him half around to face Yael. She was looking at him with intense glittering eyes, and a small tight-lipped smile.

  “A goddess, hey? And what’s the difference, again, between me and the Venus de Milo?”

  “You have arms,” said Kishote, through a constricted throat.

  “Exactly so,” said Yael, and she held them out to him in the leather jacket sleeves. The gesture was an impulse, like the offer to go to Paris with him. It was a long moment before Yossi made his move, while Yael wondered half-embarrassed whether he would. The move when he made it was crushing and inflaming. So far as that went, as she should have known if she did not, Don Kishote was no kid.

  Furious kissing and caressing for a while, then Yael appeared to shrug out of her clothes; one moment all dressed if disordered, the next naked as Eve.

  “By God, I was right about you and that Venus,” gasped Don Kishote, startled by this sudden unveiling of stark beauty. “No comparison whatever. None! Especially the breasts.”

  “My best points,” said Yael, posing with chest thrust out and arms concealed behind her back, Venus de Milo fashion.

  “Yes, both of them,” said Yossi, and as happens at such moments they both laughed and laughed at nothing while he peeled as fast as he could, seized her, and rolled with her into the bedroom and onto the canopied bed.

  ***

  In the bar below, Emily Cunningham was waiting for Barak at a narrow table. Beside her, two Germans, one portly and black-haired, the other a bronzed blond ski-instructor type, were smoking heavy cigars and talking heavy business. It was twenty-five past five. The smoke was choking her, but the bar was very crowded, and she did not want to move until she had given the Israeli his five more minutes. And in fact here came Wolf Lightning, striding through the shorter men standing three deep at the bar, looking around for her. She waved, and he came and sat down.