A Tale of Love and Darkness - Amos Oz [254]
**David Ben-Gurion, "Further Reflections," Davar, 24 Feb. 1961.
So I spent the whole of the night praying silently for a disaster: a war, an earthquake, a heart attack—his or mine, either would do.
And at four-thirty I polished my studded army boots for the third time, put them on and laced them up tight. I wore well-pressed civilian khaki trousers, a white shirt, a sweater, and a windbreaker. I walked out onto the main road, and by some miracle I managed to get a lift and made it, half fainting, to the minister of defense's office. This was located not in the monstrous Ministry of Defense building, bristling with antennas, but in a courtyard at the back, in a charming, idyllic little Bavarian-style cottage on two floors, with a red-tiled roof, covered with a green vine, which had been built in the nineteenth century by German Templars, who created a tranquil agricultural colony in the sands north of Jaffa and ended up being thrown out of the country by the British at the outbreak of World War II.
The gentle-mannered secretary ignored my shaking body and strangled throat; he briefed me, with an almost intimate warmth, as though plotting with me behind the back of the divinity in the next room:
"The Old Man," he began, using the affectionate nickname that had been in common use since Ben-Gurion was in his fifties, "has, you understand, how shall we say, a tendency these days to get carried away by long philosophical conversations. But his time, I'm sure you can imagine, is like gold dust. He still deals with virtually all affairs of state himself, from preparations for war and relations with the Great Powers to the postal workers' strike. You will, of course, beat a tactful retreat after twenty minutes, so that we can somehow rescue his diary for the rest of the day."
There was nothing in the whole wide world that I wanted better than to "beat a tactful retreat," not after twenty minutes but right away. At once. The very thought that the Almighty himself was here, in person, just behind that gray door, and that in another minute I would be in his power, almost made me faint from awe and dread.
So much so that the secretary had no alternative but to push me gently from behind into the Holy of Holies.
The door was closed behind me, and I stood there, silently, with my back against the door I had just come in by, and my knees were shaking. King David's office was an ordinary, sparsely furnished room, hardly bigger than one of our modest kibbutz living rooms. Facing me was a window, covered with a rustic curtain, that added a little daylight to the electric light. On either side of the window stood a metal filing cabinet. A large glass-topped desk stood in the middle of the room, taking up about a quarter of its area; on it there were three or four piles of books, magazines, and newspapers, and various papers and folders, some open and some closed. On either side of the desk there was a bureaucratic gray metal chair, of the sort you could see in those days in every administrative or military office, and they were always inscribed, on the underside, with the words "Property of the State of Israel." There were no other chairs in the room. An entire wall, from ceiling to floor and from corner to corner, was taken up by a huge map of the whole Mediterranean basin and the Middle East, from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Persian Gulf. Israel, the size of a postage stamp, had been marked out with a thick line. Another wall had three shelves loaded and piled with books, as if someone might suddenly be seized here with an urgent reading frenzy that brooked no delay.
In this Spartan room there was a man pacing to and fro with rapid little steps, his hands clasped behind his back, his eyes on the floor, his big head thrust forward as though to butt. The man looked exactly like Ben-Gurion, but there was no way he could actually be Ben-Gurion. Every child in Israel, even in kindergarten, in those days knew in his sleep what Ben-Gurion looked like. But since there was no television yet, it was