Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [6]
Valerie’s response was always double-edged. (“Poor baby. These Israeli rocks do have teeth in them.”)
Now the family was gone, and Natasha jumped me in the sand dunes. She had me as she used to have me, before Val came to Israel. Natasha went ape. She was the only woman who could make love while cursing you in seven languages.
An hour or so later we went to my hotel room to survey the damage. Natasha was filled with remorse. Scrubbing very gingerly, it took over a half an hour to get the sand cleaned out of a lot of unlikely places. As she examined my back, she chastised herself but reckoned I could get by without stitches.
In the shower, she started up again. Natasha adored making love in the shower ... or out of the shower ... or in bed ... or locked in a public rest room ... or on the desk in the Prime Minister’s office after he had gone for the day.
“Oh, poor baby, look at what I’ve done. Natasha, you are an animal,” she said of herself.
There was a Swedish mouthwash in my cabinet that could peel the paint off a battleship or make a leper aseptic. The tenderness with which she dabbed it on my wounds was the flip side to her character.
From the rape in the sand dunes, one would hardly get the notion that Natasha Solomon was also the most gentle, patient woman and lover I had ever known. She could play with my eyelashes for an hour with her whisper touch and lips and make every moment of it new.
She cried as she patched me up. All I could manage was to hang on to the bedposts, clench my teeth, and fight off the tears.
The alarm clock woke us up a bit later. She went out onto the balcony as I dressed and she read my new pages. I couldn’t help myself, but it felt good—damned good, wonderful—as I laced up my old Marine boots and strapped a .45 pistol on my belt. I wondered why it should be feeling good ... khaki shirt and trousers ... fatigue jacket with an IDF logo ...
I came out to the balcony. Her white knuckles gave her away as she gripped the railing like a vise. I put my arm about her shoulder as she slowly calmed, and we watched the sea as we had watched it from there in fifty stolen rendezvous.
“You’re writing beautifully,” she said.
“I wonder how it sounds in Hungarian.”
“Don’t worry about the dog,” she said. “I’ll take him to Dr. Klement. Grover will keep me company. Put him in my car. I parked right next to you.”
“Natasha ... ”
She broke. Seeing someone off always terrified her ... since she had seen her mother sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz ... God almighty!
“See you around,” I said.
SLOW TRANSPORTS ALWAYS “lumber.” Our formation of twenty Dakotas lumbered over the Negev Desert toward the Sinai Peninsula. The twilight was fading fast. This military version of the DC-3, the famed Gooney Bird, was built for neither speed nor comfort. Twenty-five of us were crammed into miserable bucket seats along either bulkhead.
First time I flew in a Gooney Bird was to cross the States returning from furlough. The trip from Philly to L.A. took almost twenty hours. I had to transfer to four different airlines. From L.A. it was a train to San Diego, because there was no air service.
On the other hand, there was something comforting about the Gooney Bird. I used to read a bedtime storybook to the girls called The Little Engine That Could. This little engine was a small-time train and found itself in a rough situation. It had to huff and puff its tiny heart out to make it over a mountain, in order to take candy and toys and food to the kids on the other side. I acted out the story with nail-biting suspense a hundred and one times, but in the end the little engine always made it. So did the Gooney Bird. Sometimes it landed with one engine out, or half the tail assembly shot off. But the Gooney Bird was the mainstay of the lift over the Hump, the Himalayas, and it carried the Berlin Air Lift.
During the briefing earlier today, we had been told that at the same moment, a pair