Ruthi reads to him from the Bible, the portion of the week. She cobbles together her own version of the Hayom Yoms, psalm and song, prayer and piety, and whatever commentary of the ancients she can uncover that is relevant to the goings-on of the broader world. Because of this practice, she has become learned and sage.
Growing up in Darb al-Barabira, her oral tradition was drawn from the kitchen. Her lessons learned from her mother as Ruthi sat in a corner, grinding away with mortar and pestle locked between her knees. Her family had stayed after so many others had gone. And she knows she has it in her, a hereditary ability, in the face of all hopelessness, to hang on and believe.
The General knows they could’ve turned this war around at the onset if they’d taken the position at Missouri during the first three days. He’d arrived there to find a quarter of the Egyptian heavy armor blasting away. Infantrymen swarming, a force that quickly grew beyond counting.
He has not slept from the start of the fighting, hunting a route to rescue that still eludes. How the Egyptians were able to breach. How they sneaked up without sneaking—with the government watching every move. It is the thought he is mulling when his scouts bring back word. Water cannons, do you believe it? Embankments a hundred feet high, and the Egyptians use water to blast their way through. They laid their pontoon bridges at eventide and drove through the fresh valleys they’d made.
A moon in early evening and then pitch-black until dawn, perfect cover for a crossing. And the Jews anyway distracted by penance, their stomachs stuffed for the fast, and their heads chock-full of atonement.
He had warned Military Command about the Bar Lev forts months before. “Sitting ducks,” he’d told them. “Mobile defense is the only way.” They ignored him. His ideas too big, his plans without respect for scale or budget or boundary. His record filled with rashness and ruthlessness and missions too costly for both attacker and attacked. “Look at the Vietnamese,” he’d said. “Look how they strike, light and quick and unencumbered. If we can catch Egypt off guard,” he’d said, not knowing that surprise is exactly what the Egyptians had planned.
The General pressed on and on, brawling in the war rooms as he did in the wars. He would not stop until Command paid him heed. They gave in. They were making changes. But, like everything in Israel—a two-year wait to get a telephone line—here, along the borders, the forts were half shuttered and the mobile units still locked in place, beached and unprepared.
All his warnings, and always they told him, “Don’t worry, my friend, the Egyptians are weak. The Egyptians are frightened. Look at how they bungled ’67.”
Ruthi reads to him from Jeremiah, and she reads to him from Isaiah, stressing the appropriate passages again and again. “Who else but you ‘with the breath of his lips shall slay the wicked’?”
She takes the sponge on its stick, a little lollipop of pale yellow foam, and dips it into a cup of glycerine-thickened water. One sip going down the wrong tube could be, for their fearsome, unstoppable leader, his end. She reaches over and wets his cracking mouth, splitting and scabbed at the corners.
“Come back,” she says, openly begging. “Come finish what you started.”
Southern Command had set up flamethrowers along the canal, a child’s imagining of a solution. They were going to send the Egyptians running from jets of fire, toast the enemy up like bread. And where is this man-made inferno? The General focuses his binoculars in the distance, though he knows the answer. No gas. No flame for the flamethrowers, while the Egyptians, with their water cannons, come rolling through.
The enemy, they fight beautifully. Batteries of SAM-3s to keep our air force at bay. The Saggers tearing everything to shreds. All of this, it must be the Russians, and the Germans, and maybe some brand-new Libyan planes in the sky. A shopping spree is behind a war like this. The Egyptians push ahead like real soldiers—they have been training hard over the last six years. No motivation like humiliating defeat. They must hear every splash of a Jewish dive into that Red Sea water, every sizzle of a kosher steak on the grill, every moan of Jewish romance on Israeli cotton sheets amplified, all of it on seized Egyptian land.
The General comes to an immediate decision. It’s time they forge their own passage back into Egypt. The Jews made it both ways before, they can find their way again.
He will find his own lane between enemy battalions. He will sneak along it and surprise the invaders, attacking from behind. It was a brilliant Egyptian assault with a brilliant Egyptian defense, but somewhere there must be a gap in the rampart.
The General can already see that, while the Egyptians fight well, they are already drunk with success. They probably only planned to take the eastern bank of the Suez—and no more. But they already taste progress, taste victory. Sadat must have his eyes set on liberating the Holy City, on Jericho, on every name mentioned in the holy books.
The General is calling for maps. Demanding aerial photos. He is sure the Egyptians won’t see it coming. They won’t envision a tap on the shoulder and then a punch in the mouth. He will find a way to cross, and then, like Moses, he will hide in the reeds.
The General can picture it already. The first of Sadat’s soldiers to remember his sweetheart, to pull a photograph from his breast pocket, the first one to shed a tear thinking of flag and country, all full of national pride, he is the one who will be first to turn back toward his beloved Cairo. And what will he see? Who will he find there but the Israelis charging his way.
Ruthi knows the Messiah will come at a time when all Jews are good. Or when all are guilty. And to the General she says, I don’t know if we’ll ever get closer to one of those days than right now, yes? Either the world is right or we are right. Greater Israel, either our greatest pride or our shame.
Ruthi dips her sponge.
Ruthi wets his lips.
Maybe that’s what you wait around to see? A born competitor. You need to know how it ends.
The General stands where he should not stand, out in the open in front of his troops. His radio operator says, “Before the medic has to put you back together, sir, would you mind, maybe—” And this is when the tank right next to them takes a hit.