64
IN THE READY ROOM of US Marine Aviation Forward Attack Squadron Wildcat, the three pilots turn to each other as Jimbo, who as ranking pilot has charge of the remote, clicks off the TV. They are all in regulation flight suits that allow pilots of supersonic planes to withstand up to nine G’s without passing out. The tight-fitting trousers prevent blood from pooling in the lower body, thus preventing it from draining from the brain. Unless they are about to fly, no pilot will wear them. The discomfort is considerable. Each suit weighs fourteen pounds.
Chris has an aeronautical map in front of him. “Two hours.”
“Guys,” Stan says. “You don’t have to do this.”
“Shee-it, everybody knows you Jews got no sense of direction. You people done wandered in the desert forty years. We wouldn’t want you to get lost out there all on your own, would we now?” Chris folds the map.
“Hell, no,” Jimbo says. “We sure as hell wouldn’t want that.”
65
ON A MOUNTAIN PATH west of Jerusalem, the two donkeys descend steadily. The shortcut takes their riders, both dressed in soiled Bedouin robes, from the secondary road where they were passed twice by an olive-green Cadillac flying the pennant of Egyptian headquarters staff to this narrow trail enfiladed by thick-trunked olive trees that bore fruit before the time of Jesus.
“Abed,” Cobi says, “my tuchis is about to fall off.”
“Why not let the donkey ride you?”
“Is this your idea of transportation, man? It’s the twenty-first century.”
“As it happens,” Abed says, “I possess a Ford pickup, four-wheel drive, AC. Beautiful machine. Despite Hollywood movies, the Bedouin is no enemy of the internal combustion engine.”
“So why in hell do we have to—”
“Because that vehicle is too big to negotiate this pathway. On better roads, we would be stopped, and questioned, and perhaps the Ford would be requisitioned. The Syrian sons of whores at the bottom, hidden in the foliage, they won’t bother stealing two donkeys.”
Cobi shades his eyes. “I don’t see any Syrians.”
Abed points to the rocky trail before them. “We’ve been following their tracks for two kilometers. Army officer, eh? Don’t they teach you anything?”
66
GHETTO TEL AVIV COVERS fourteen square miles. Far larger than the municipal boundaries of Tel Aviv proper, this takes in Bat Yam to the south, parts of Herzlia to the north, and to the east is bounded by the Geha Road, whose six empty lanes prove as much a natural barrier as any river. To the west is the Mediterranean Sea. The area contains six hundred schools, three universities, and so many eating places—from falafel stands to sidewalk cafés to elegant restaurants—that even the municipal licensing authorities, when they functioned, were unsure of the precise number. At any given time, eight hundred buses ran on its streets, not including several hundred sheroot jitneys that followed bus routes and were authorized to stop anywhere along the way to pick up and discharge passengers.
Tel Aviv’s luxury hotels lined the beach, each with hundreds of rooms, most of them booked year-round. Almost every commercial street corner held a kiosk selling everything from the nation’s two dozen newspapers to snacks and, in some neighborhoods, tiny bags of locally grown marijuana and more costly Lebanese hash, a world standard since the time of Abraham. Banks and post offices punctuated every avenue, along with supermarkets and tiny owner-run groceries in the side streets. Most service businesses operated from early morning to late in the evening, perhaps a hundred never closing, remaining open 364 days a year—Yom Kippur being the exception—and for the privilege paying a municipal fine every week for keeping open on the Sabbath, just a cost of doing business.
Once a buzzing maze of heavily trafficked streets, boulevards, and highways, Tel Aviv was a walker’s city, its ambiance a meld of New York, Paris, Nice, and Warsaw, with just enough of every other city in the world to make living there at once fascinating, complicatedly pleasant, and maddening. Half planned, half chaotic, it was a city of Bauhaus architecture, shortcuts, secret destinations, tiny parks, and favorite cafés. All it lacked was public toilets, but with so many cafés, no one complained.
Now Tel Aviv is one big public toilet. The cafés are closed, the offices empty but for squatters, and the only traffic on the streets is pedestrian, filling the roadways in search of food, drinking water, and news. Rumors fly the ghetto’s twelve-mile length in less than an hour, all propelled by fear, hope, and desperation.
In the six days since Yigal Lev took over as prime minister, much of this changed. There are still no commercial establishments in operation, though every street corner is an ad hoc market where jewelry and watches are bartered for tiny plastic bags of moldy flour. No buses or jitneys run, and bicycle traffic is light, largely because Tel Avivians never really took up bicycles as a mode of transportation—most apartments are too small to store them. But in those first few days, a change came across the face of the ghetto: the ratio of fear to hope was altered. There is now just a bit more of the latter than the former. Not much more, but enough to make a difference.
Yigal’s people managed to open the schools (which of course are flooded with the entire country’s students, so that classes normally overcrowded with forty pupils now hold a hundred, each school running at least two shifts—why not, all the nation’s teachers are available). The new government has re-established rudimentary policing, with former cops and former gangsters working together. That neither group has uniforms—the regular police early on got rid of theirs to avoid arrest, or worse, by the conquering armies—is not much of an obstacle: armbands with the large Hebrew letter mem, for mishtara (police), suffice. Most cops had kept their side arms; the hoodlums had their own. Public latrines are dug in parks, the stinking piles of human waste buried. Each block is compelled to establish its own voluntary workforce under the authority of street captains designated by the new government, most of these newly appointed officials functioning well enough, especially when they are female. It appears Jewish men are historically accustomed to being bossed around by females; even the most surly remains disinclined to sock a woman.
Almost immediately a sense of civic responsibility takes hold, aided in good part by the knowledge that there is no one else to do the work, that the next street already looks like humans live there, and that there is precious little else to do.
Yigal’s choice of Misha Shulman as chief of police (or chief enforcer, as he likes to think of himself) goes a long way to make this happen. Just as the Arab invaders borrowed the blueprints of the Nazis, so too does Yigal take a page from lessons learned in the Warsaw Ghetto: this time, among the Jews, there would be no factions, no competing ideologies, no separate armed groups.
To accomplish that with a normally fractious Israeli population, already viscerally subscribed to political parties with different aims and desires, calls for the application of indiscriminate force. Misha’s gangsters and a select group of former cops—a good many are former members of the Border Police, head-busters who were known to strike first and ask questions later—take on this mission with an enthusiasm that the population both welcomes and fears.
In the first twenty-four hours on the job, Misha’s specially designated Motivation Squad motivates forty-seven civilians on the spot—no trial, no appeal, no compunction. Whether the ignored prohibition is as small as pissing in the street or as large as displacing a family by force in order to take their corner of some miserably overcrowded apartment, the punishment is the same: a severe beating in full public view.