They wander out to the very edge of the desert in silence and stand side by side on a cliff overlooking the great barrens. The old man says, “This is where my grave will be. Picture what the Negev will look like a century from now. Picture standing at my marker and everything before you in bloom.”
The General stares out over the wadis and the tabletop mountains, setting his gaze on the vast blue sky. He keeps his focus there and guides the old man through the mission, explaining how they breached the defenses around the village itself, and how they first fired upon Qibya and, also, the next village over, a place called Budrus to the south.
The General explains his way to the house in which he set up command, and where he drank the coffee, still hot, from the finjan on the stove.
He knows the old man wants operational analysis, the tactical details laid out.
What the General tells him right then is about the ancient phonograph. How he’d dispatched the two soldiers and called his radioman in.
And there it was, against the wall in its wooden case, holding pride of place.
He tells the old man that, even in the moment, he was shocked to think how easily one can miss something right before his very eyes.
The General had his radioman crank it up. And the first thing they heard was the needle scratching itself dull at the record’s empty center, the speaker playing the sound of no sound.
He relays to Ben-Gurion how he told the radioman to go raise up the lid and move the needle. Everything from the General’s mouth, an order.
He had said, “Let us hear the last song this house ever played.”
They stood there, he tells Ben-Gurion, listening, in Arabic, to the most beautiful voice in the world.
That’s when the sappers began returning, rolling out their wire on the spools, the wheels turning, the men bent and backing away from their targets, as if prostrate with respect for the destruction to come. And all during this, the General standing in the doorway, the album playing, and—with the convoy revving up—that voice faintly heard.
That is when the first soldier came running up along with part of the General’s demolition team.
The old man, listening closely, says to the General, “The first?”
“There was a pair. First and second. The first had a tear in his shirt. I’d instructed him earlier to come back and prep the house.”
He’d watched, the General had, as explosives were set around that living room at a satisfying rate. Yes. He’d trained them up well.
The General re-cranked the phonograph and then, waiting by the entrance, stepped aside as the last charge was drilled into the doorpost where the children’s heights were marked. When the song was over, the speaker hissed, all crackle and heartbeat, the needle pushing against an empty groove. “Right then,” he tells the old man, “I gave the signal. The radioman radioed, and the last of us mounted the jeeps and trucks and rumbled off.”
The General turns to the old man, who stares out into the desert.
“That’s when we blew Qibya to the ground.”
The General leans back in his chair in his living room, and he thinks about that record. More than any of the spoils of any war, it was that album he wishes he’d carried home.
It’s that beautiful voice he hears right then, as if it were singing directly into his ears. First the voice and then the not-voice that replaces it, the needle turning against silence, living beyond the last groove.
This stretch of quiet, the General knows, would soon be pierced by that crack rolling across the fields. The waiting makes his chest go tight.
While the quiet is still his, he recalls what the old man had said to him. He remembers and he observes as, right before him, Ben-Gurion takes a deep, dry breath of that hot desert air. He watches as the old man turns his back on the view and begins his trek toward the kibbutz with its low-slung buildings and its walkways lined with patchy, burnt grass.
The General follows, devoted, at his heels.
As if passing judgment, as if sharing a terrible truth, the old man says, “You are our bulldog. You know that, yes?”
The old man turns to see what his protégé might say in response. The General, catching up, walking at the old man’s side, answers with the same silence that now runs, a simultaneous loop, in his head.
“I still can’t tell if having you will be for this nation a blessing or a curse. Not since bar Kokhba came popping out of his tunnels to bloody the Romans have we had one man who can do so much harm.”
“A nation needs to defend itself.”
“It does, doesn’t it,” the old man says.
They consider this as they stroll back to Ben-Gurion’s quarters.
At his door, he says, “The world hates us, and always has. They kill us, and always will. But you, you raise up the price,” the old man tells him. “Don’t stop. Don’t stop until our neighbors get the message. Don’t stop until killing a Jew becomes too expensive for even the rich and profligate man. That is your whole purpose on this earth,” Ben-Gurion says. “You, put here solely to raise the bounty hung on the Jewish head. Make it expensive. Make it a rare and fine delicacy for those with a taste for Jewish blood.”
2014, Black Site (Negev Desert)
It’s amazing what skills one can master given enough time to perfect them. Prisoner Z sits up in bed, in the dark, the stack of magazines on his lap as a desk, writing. Over the years, on the nights he cannot sleep, which are legion, Prisoner Z has not only greatly improved his penmanship in both Hebrew and English, but has become adept at composing without any light. It’s easier than one would think.
He is busy writing a letter to the General, his pen pal. In the morning he will give it to the guard, to give to his mother, to give to the General, who never writes back.
It’s the only avenue by which a prisoner-unnamed, in a cell-unlisted, might plead his case-that’s-not-a-case. The thrust of his letters has changed over time. Prisoner Z is no longer requesting to be freed, to be exonerated, to be sent to the States, so much as he is asking, only, to be made into a person again—an actual detainee, entered into a system that might see him properly pay for his crimes. He is inquiring most politely, wondering if his being might be returned.
Sometimes the content of these letters is legally bent, sometimes political, and, though the guard has limited Prisoner Z to one sheet per missive, sometimes they are much more expository and personal in tone. It’s a tricky thing trying to touch the heart of a man who has, toward you, been only heartless. Hard to personalize yourself to the person who has seen you undone.
Feeling it out, hoping to connect, he is hoping to stress only this:
“We are birds of a feather, me and you,” he writes the General. “How many times did you do what you needed to save Israel? Against all accepted wisdom. Against all advice. Misrepresenting your intentions. In defiance of our, and everyone’s, laws.
“You did what you needed to rescue the people even when they didn’t know they needed to be saved.
“We are the same, you and I.