Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [142]
What else did I love? He was a good fellow. He couldn’t resist a party and he was a happy drunk. I mean, the little putz could outdrink any Russian Jew in Israel.
Chutzpah was his middle name. When he got someone drunk, they’d spill their guts out to him. Even sober, people seemed to want to tell him their story. He got to the soul very fast. A few weeks and I began to feel his lust for life and tremendous energy. Maybe, just maybe, Nimrod and the others had made a good gamble. I started to believe in him.
The hate part? Oh boy, was he arrogant! It didn’t matter who he wanted to get to, or what he wanted to know, he got it, often out of my hide. He drove me out of my mind. Push, push, push, two hundred, three hundred kilometers through the night to make a six o’clock meeting. Questions, questions, questions. History, anthropology, geology, agriculture, geography, military, archeology. Shlomo, what happened behind that rock? How the hell did I know what happened behind every rock?
And look, we were a small new country trying to make rules. He broke every one of them and left it for me to explain. I hated his tenacity and I come from a country of tenacious men.
He was often angry, a madman with a bad temper. Just when I hated him the most, he would turn around and weep for an hour after an interview with a concentration camp victim.
Love-hate. When I failed at something, he cursed me as though I were a peasant. When I got through on something difficult, he hugged and punched my shoulder like I had won an Olympic medal.
Bit by bit, I started believing in this little shlemiel. He didn’t forget one fucking thing I taught him. So, maybe I was serving some kind of literary messiah. Besides, Nimrod refused to accept the three resignations I turned in during those first weeks.
SHIT! Gunfire from the forward observation post. I wrapped myself in my blanket and continued to watch the star show. I fished through my backpack and found a bottle of good old Israeli brandy. The rest of the world can laugh at us, but not at our brandy. Best cognac in the world. Ah good ... the shooting had stopped. I made a short prayer that when the sun came up, I would see Zechariah’s Para 202 crossing the desert floor toward us. If not, oh boy!
I could see Ben Asher pacing. Even in the semi-darkness his figure was unmistakable. Wait! Yes, airplanes. I could hear stirrings all over our lines. In a few moments we could distinguish the engines. Dakotas! An air drop! God, I hoped they sent a radio. I didn’t like this isolation.
We popped off several flares to give the planes a fix, and silently several platoons moved out to recover the parachutes.
HE WAS ASLEEP like a baby now, the little momser. Jerusalem. That’s when he started up with her. Gideon and Natasha Solomon, as crazy a pair of bedroom warriors as I have ever known, and I’ve been in some pretty good skirmishes, myself.
Jerusalem was a divided city with an ugly barbed-wire no-man’s land running through the Kidron Valley. There wasn’t too much levity in the city. In fact, night life was downright grim. Of course, a party in someone’s home would often turn out to be a good party.
A costume party at Joshua Hillel’s flat showed promise. He was a very successful journalist, a stringer for a dozen American and European newspapers and magazines. His crowd consisted of actors, musicians, and newspaper people. A number of them had access to the foreign commissaries, so there was the promise of embassy-level food and real whiskey and vodka. Everyone would be in costume and some were very daring for Jerusalem.
Gideon and I came rather late and the evening was in full swing. Shoshanna Daman belted out Israeli songs and the more intimate revelry had found its way into the bedrooms, balconies, closets, and W.C.s.
Gideon had put together a cowboy