A Sagger missile sneaks right into that wedge of negative space under the scoop of the turret. A weak point on the Pat-tons, a fatal little fissure between the moving parts. It’s what he hates about the M48. Its top section sitting there like a melon rind, with that vulnerable edge curving up. The tank rears back, throwing its front end off the ground.
The General watches the blast waves rippling, the way one watches the heat billowing off a tarmac, the pulses of energy barreling toward him. He feels himself lifted from the ground. His radio operator is tossed up into the air along with him. The boy, upended, looks like a turtle with that unit strapped to his back. Side by side, they seem to be airborne a very long time. What they both notice—for the General points downward and the radioman nods—is that the space where the radio operator was begging him to move is now under a tread of the tank, and that tread swallowed up in a ball of fire. In recognition of this, understanding, the radioman turns to him in the air and shrugs.
He is aware that it is taking too long to land, and the General laughs at himself. Such a heavy man, what a mighty explosion it must have been to throw him this high. Always on duty, the General cannot resist taking advantage of vantage. To be able to peer down at the war, to see the battlefield laid out. It’s an opportunity not to be lost.
The General turns again to the radio operator, still sailing through the air by his side. He can see that this brave boy is frightened. Not battle frightened but scared of this strange flying. The terror is clear on his face.
A leader must know how to lead in every situation, and the General, taking charge, reaches out. He takes hold of the boy’s hand and he says, “Look at me. Just look at me.” The General says, “Tell me, from which part of the country do you hail?” When the boy answers, the General, who knows every inch of the Promised Land, all of it his home, asks a follow-up question, sweetly specific to that place. The boy locks eyes and, still agitated, begins to calm. The General, who never suffers remorse over a battle, finds himself, in mid-flight, feeling a rare pang of guilt.
He feels bad about enjoying this restful soaring while the boy clearly endures. “I have an idea,” the General says, hoping to make things better. “Maybe it would be nice to hear a song?”
“I do not sing,” says the radioman, “unless, of course, that’s an order.”
“No, no,” the General says, shifting the weight of an arm, and then a shoulder, to turn himself toward the boy. He does this in the way one might when rolling onto one’s elbow to talk to a lover in bed.
From this position, up there in the air, the General pantomimes fiddling with knobs. “The radio,” he says. “See if you can get a station.”
“Sir,” says the boy, “it’s not that kind of transceiver.”
“Come, come,” says the General. “That sounds like defeat. That sounds like the attitude of a soldier fighting to lose. Why not give it a shot? How can you know, until you try?” The boy hesitates, and the General continues to egg him on. “Flip a switch,” he says. “What about that button you’re always paddling at on the side.”
The boy pulls the body of the radio around front, careful not to drop it. He turns the knobs and, with a bit of fine-tuning, he holds up the handset right there between them. Out of it comes music, Arabic music. It is Umm Kulthum, the legendary singer, so legendary that both of these flying Israelis are already familiar with the ballad they hear. A song so famous even the Jews cannot not know it. “We are very far south,” the boy says, apologizing for the station. “No, no,” says the General, tilting his head, bringing his ear closer to the receiver. “It is a lovely song. Let’s listen.” And together, they take in this plaintive voice crooning in Arabic, and they fly.
2002, Paris
He shouldn’t have gone back to the restaurant to find her. Not the first time or any of the days that followed. He’d kept returning, though the waitress had never appeared again. Neither had that horrible, threatening Huguenot waiter, whose vanishing Z had taken as a positive sign.
He told himself that the visits weren’t about her. He was crossing the river simply to satisfy his cravings for eggplant salad and poppy seed cake. He was exposing himself on those walks because, except for those lunches, he was left hiding in his apartment on an as-yet-uncommenced emergency family leave, a long-dormant excuse that was supposed to be Z’s fallback means of escape. His boss had invited him to kick it off early, which Z accepted over showing up at the office to act bizarrely normal, while being treated with threatening normalcy in return. He was afraid to drink a cup of tea there, or enter the bathroom or the stairwell, or to be out of view of the many coworkers who had no idea what his cohort at their company really did.
Hunting for a better out, Z would run through every alternate scheme he could come up with, from mad dashes to the American embassy, to plastic surgery, to faking his own death. But he knew how his pursuers worked, because he worked for them. It was chaos theory and game theory and psyops and all the best intelligence and counterintelligence whisked up together. He’d think a plot through and then reverse engineer his own behavior in light of theirs, and then, working his way back forward, he’d map the steps he’d need to take to extricate himself from this bind in the face of their counter to his counter to their counter. He could see nothing better than his original plan, already muddled, which would have already seen him flown home to tend to his sick and dying mother, who was absolutely fine.
He was losing his mind, he knew. He was rapidly going stir-crazy, harassed by the cycling of his own nightmarish thoughts. The best way he could describe it, the image that arose for a man who spent his time studying his room, was to think back to the walls of his first hovel in Jerusalem, the one he’d shared with his roommate, Yoel, while they were both studying at Hebrew U. When the rainy season started, the apartment walls would first turn very cold, and then very damp, and eventually, battered and battered by the rain and the wind, they would bead up with moisture, never drying, as wet inside as out. It would get so bad, you could run your finger along them and scoop up the water.
At each spot where a droplet formed, a little black flower of mold would eventually bloom, and, as the winter dragged on, they’d open out, spreading and connecting up, until, by the middle of the season, the whole of those walls had turned black.