Feathers

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Thirteen 1. The story I have told you was meant to end here. Not only did Behira Schechter’s visit cast new light on the last days of Leder, whose figure I have tried to portray in this book, it also officially sealed the story of my friendship with him and began another friendship that need not concern us. Nevertheless, human relations, as my mother’s good friend Ahuva Haris once described them, are like eczema: sometimes unrelenting, tormenting one day and night, and sometimes dormant in a state of remission that may last for years—yet even then, never totally gone. And so, the story of my friendship with Leder, which to all appearances was over somewhere in the late 1950s, was relived for a brief instant at the end of the Yom Kippur War, lit by that blinding lightning bolt of Jewish destiny, the low rumble of whose ensuing thunderclap accompanies this tale from start to finish. 2. And so, some fifteen years after that voluptuous Jerusalem night, several of the characters in this book came together for a final epilogue , through which they stumbled like sleepwalkers in the yellowing landscape of the oases on the African side of the Suez Canal, carried unwittingly onward to a wondrous denouement that lent a kind of meaning to the chaotic events of long ago. On my first day in Sinai, I ran into Haim Rachlevski. I had spent the entire month of the war in the western Negev, in a temporary military graveyard near Kibbutz Be’eri to which the dead were brought. Day and night, while heavily loaded trucks drove up from the south, we dug long rows of graves in the yellow loess. Once the trucks stopped coming, our commanding officer decided to send me and a soldier named Leibovitz across the canal to reinforce the front-line burial teams, which now, in the after-battle lull, were looking for the missing in action. Toward evening, the two of us arrived at Absalom’s Junction on the southern outskirts of the Gaza Strip. A long convoy of trucks, buses, and tankers was waiting to set out for various bases in Sinai. The bus to Tasa, to which an M.P. directed us, was as crowded as an opium den and littered with cigarette butts, orange peels, and newspapers thrown away by the passengers, reservists returning from brief furloughs, on their way down from up north. A hush descended on them as Leibovitz’s huge beard and death-glutted eyes appeared in the door. “Rabbi, come quick!” The silence was broken by a voice calling from the back in a Persian accent. “Moshe’s dead between his legs.” A roar of laughter cleared the air and the soldiers went back to their noisy talk and playful bombardment of each other with the colorful woolen caps knit for them by their girlfriends and wives that had become their medals in those days. Soon, as the convoy set out and was swallowed up by the quickly falling desert night, they stopped talking and dozed off. The bus bounced and jolted along paved roads that were covered in places by sand dunes and that, as we traveled deeper into Sinai, grew pitted from Egyptian air raids. On the turns, sticking out of the sand that had already partly buried them, piles of shell cases, treads and turrets of wrecked tanks, and clusters of burned vehicles were trapped by the level beams of the headlights that briefly lit the sides of the road. We reached Tasa in the middle of the night. Buttoning his pants, a sleepy sergeant from the chaplaincy emerged from the room of a female social worker and led us to an abandoned hut at the far end of the camp. In it, he told us, two men from another burial unit, who had come from the air base at Refidim, were already sleeping. Tomorrow , God willing, a car from Fa’id would take us across the Canal. There was a masculine sleep-smell in the room, an odor of rifle oil and dirty, unchanged underwear. Leibovitz lit his pocket flashlight and arranged a bed for himself. By a masonite wall in one corner of the bare concrete room, the two men from Refidim lay curled 227 } up in their sleeping bags and army blankets. Leibovitz stepped outside to say his...