Three Weeks in October Read online

  Here at night the small size of the transistor seemed to minimize it all. The dry one-sentence announcements of the military spokesman were noncommittal, slightly vague and unnecessarily optimistic. Every day “our forces” repulsed enemy attacks. Every day “the enemy” suffered heavy losses. Every hour we were told of air superiority, but the helicopters kept landing, delivering bundles of pain who, when awake from anesthesia, told different versions.

  “Are we winning again?” Shula asked. She wasn’t being sarcastic, but her disbelief grew every time the news was announced.

  “We are not losing. Maybe it’s good for morale to smooth things, fog them for a while.”

  “In this fog there are people. Our sons and husbands and friends. I always believe truth is better, easier to take than disillusionment later.”

  Last night as we sat here, for the first time an announcement was made about casualties. After eight days of “our forces” and “enemy forces,” there was a figure. Six hundred and fifty-six dead. All families had been notified.

  Last night we sat in silence, counting in our hearts six hundred and fifty-six ungiven names, a long line of gravestones, the eyes of the families, weeping children, desperate mothers. Tonight we were back to the familiar war routine. The news as it was given, and then the rest of the picture—rumors, personal reports, gossip, hearsay. During the day it all seemed real enough. The Egyptians crossed, there were bridges and surrounded strongholds. There were new defense lines and air battles and air support. There were the stories from wounded officers and doctors who flew in from the front. These were the unofficial experts, those who knew better than the others who merely suggested, analyzed, predicted, blamed.

  But here at night, Shula and I, a professional and a volunteer, were at a loss. It all drifted into the abstract. The news of the missiles and the rockets and the artillery and the divisions, regular and reserve, were indigestible to us. The burns and the bandages were real, the red light above a door summoning a nurse was real. The helicopters landing with stretchers and limping soldiers, this was the war for us.

  With the first light of winter dawn the ward began to live. The sedation was wearing off, and the first moans and murmurs were heard. I walked behind the nurse through the rooms. We gave thermometers, urine bottles, a wash basin to an early riser. Many were still asleep. I heard my name—“Amalia”—and turned to Uri, Rina’s son. Amnon’s son.

  “I’m leaving today,” he smiled.

  “Good luck.”

  “I’ll come and see you when I’m on my feet again.”

  “It will be over soon, there is talk of cease-fire.”

  “See you next war then.”

  “Very funny. You were not supposed to be in combat anyway.”

  “Sure. War orphans are exempted. I should have worked in the canteen selling chocolates, keep the quota down to one dead per family.”

  “Don’t talk like that. Here, your mother is up.”

  She was standing there watching. A handsome woman with a restless smile. Still jealous of me for being loved briefly by a man dead six years ago, unable to bear the thought that I shared her memories of him. I spoiled the completeness of her widowhood.

  Along the corridor in a small room, attached to a variety of tubes, was Lea’s husband, Major Ilan, his chest and abdomen burned, his face unscarred. She was now standing near the window watching the wet grass covered with fall leaves. A handsome, strong man and a fragile, frightened woman counting time.

  “He’ll pull through,” I spoke to her.

  “I haven’t heard it from the doctor.”

  “They don’t promise. They don’t like to.”

  “I knew it would happen. I knew it when he left the house on Yom Kippur.” Lea’s eyes were full of pain.

  “He should have used the protective vest.”

  “They do at the beginning. The gloves, the head cover, then it grows hotter, it encumbers them and they take it off.”

  “He’s seen burning tank crews before …”

  She interrupted, “It would never happen to him, he used to say. They all feel that way.”

  “He is in the best of hands, you can get some rest.”

  “The nightmares are worse than the fatigue.”

  “I’ll see you tonight. Take care.”

  She wanted to talk. I felt empty, unable to extend a hand. I never felt that way with the patients, but with the relatives I was at a loss. A guilt, the guilt of the untouched. My children were babies in bed, my husband was relatively safe. This was his fourth war and he was no longer in the front line. Here I was a volunteer in a white apron over a uniform, mechanically doing routine night duty. And feeling important about it. My insignificant life of mother and wife, of dishwashing and trips to the supermarket, suddenly gained another dimension.

  I wasn’t doing anything remarkable, I wasn’t indispensable or irreplaceable, but I was there, a part of something major and horrible that was happening to us. Not the illusion of grandeur, no fantasies of being a lifesaver, but not a parasite either. There were people who fought and others who were defended by them, and I felt I belonged with the fighters, a drop of grease in a big machine, a square inch of blue in the painful gray sky. I glanced toward the unidentified soldier. The old man was in the room looking at him for the fifth day now.

  Could it really happen? Could it be his son and still unrecognizable to him? Or was it wishful thinking? He knew the man was dying—why cling to the hopeless rather than go on searching? There were so many missing in battle, and every day more families were ushered in here. Most left with relief—no, it couldn’t be their son, husband, brother. Yet he stood there, adopting what was under the sheets, hoping it was his.

  The large room with twelve beds in it was lively now. Smiling faces, jokes, the radio fully on, and the day nurse, fresh looking and energetic, pushing the breakfast cart around.

  “The military spokesman announces that all night there has been an exchange of artillery fire in the central section of the canal front. The Syrian front was quiet and three terrorists were killed near the Lebanese frontier.”

  As the headlines were read everybody was quiet. A second later the chatter resumed. There were rumors of a planned crossing to the west bank of the canal. Somebody’s cousin saw the large mobile bridges advancing yesterday.

  “We’ll give it to them from the rear. From Cairo and Ismailia, it’s the only way.”

  “You talk—I’ve been there. Right now it’s their bridges and bridgeheads.”

  “Where do you think I came from? A fight in a nightclub?”

  And so it went on, for those who were well enough to follow and argue.

  It was time for me to drive home.

  It was raining again, and I didn’t feel too tired. The children were just up, pink-faced and vulnerable. Ofer was asking questions. Every morning he listened to the radio news and the information didn’t satisfy him.

  “There once was a war that lasted six days only,” he said.

  “This one is longer.”

  “How much longer?”

  What could I say? “It will be over soon.”

  “Shall we go down to the shelter again?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why isn’t daddy fighting?”

  “He fought in other wars. Now it’s other people’s turn.”

  “When will it be my turn?”

  The little one was sure he was missing something. “And my turn?” he complained.

  “One day there will be no wars, no soldiers, no missiles.”

  Ofer seemed to doubt the banal prediction, but it was easy to change the subject as we’d been through this unsophisticated routine before. They were not upset or worried. Their life—other than my absence during nights—went on as before. To tell them more was unnecessary, to avoid queries was impossible, so I switched to Cinderella and we laughed at the ugly sisters and the wicked stepmother until they were ready to leave for kindergarten.

  A hot b
ath did not wash away the hospital odors, but it did calm the nervous tension. Every day I would sleep for a few hours and enjoy the first moments of waking up, believing it all had never happened. Just a dream. Yom Kippur had been an ordinary day, the war had never started, the canal never been crossed and the nightmare that followed was just another cruel fantasy. For five minutes, half asleep, I would think of the last days as an imaginary invention of a dark side of the brain. The minutes of “it never happened” were never long. The phone would ring, the sound of an airplane, the sight of a uniform on the chair tossed me back to reality.

  There were things to do. The front was many miles away. The rest of the country led a regular life. Kids went to schools, shops were open, supplies were not short, people did their work. Between the front and the home there were threads like a spider’s web. The flow of information, the transistor radios in baby cribs or on playground benches, the latest edition of the newspapers in everybody’s hands. Nervous teen-agers too young to fight hummed the new war songs. No lists of casualties, but the tears of those who knew formed a long rope between the battlefront and home. The brisk tension in every casual remark, the guilt of those remaining behind, anxieties unsuccessfully wrapped by routine activities. You could almost forget for a minute. There was no sense of danger in the city, just the shared ignorance of what was happening a few hundred miles away, and for me, the hospital—a nightly white reminder that it was not over yet.

  When I volunteered, my mother doubted I could be of much use, but nevertheless agreed to stay with the children. In the afternoon she would come straight from the library where she worked, because “life should go on, that’s our strength.” We had never been too close, nor estranged. She lived her life, refusing to retire or become too grandmotherly. Working in the library, she acquired the habit of classifying everything and everybody, and her mind was constructed like shelves with numbered volumes placed along them. I was grateful to her, helping with the children. She couldn’t really refuse, and perhaps it filled her evenings with some meaning, too. I heard her say to a friend, “Amalia is working in the hospital, so of course I take care of the children.” But then, most things she did with a sense of duty rather than joy and we accepted this.

  My husband came home late. At times we’d meet for a few minutes, exchange an understanding look, and I’d be gone. Gone with the feeling that he was convinced I needed the hospital duty much more than the hospital needed me. We never thought it would last so long. At the beginning I worked only in the morning, but when he half-blamed me for neglecting the children, I took on night duty. He was too tired at night to mind my absence.

  Ward L, like most wards in the central hospital, was a long independent building. A waiting room, a nurses’ station facing a dining room and a kitchen, and one corridor with seven doors leading to rooms of various sizes. The last two rooms each had one bed, the others were larger. The doctors had two rooms for examining and resting. Facing the patients’ rooms were several bathrooms. The building was an old one, repainted tens of times, too cold in winter even with heating, and stifling in the summer.

  Attached to the ward was an annex with three small operation theaters. These were used for minor grafts and changing of dressings under anesthesia.

  “Sterility” and “infection” were key words in the ward and an endless supply of fresh gowns, masks and cloth shoes piled up every day in each of the rooms. Nurses were assigned to rooms and stayed with the same patients. The Professor didn’t believe much in the textbook routine and these regulations were often broken. “I can’t prevent mothers and wives from entering,” Rothman used to say, “or make them look through windows, and bacteria develops in the patients even if they are isolated.” So however hard we tried, there were people coming and going, some being helpful, others a tremendous burden.

  For major surgery, the patients had to be wheeled on stretchers to the central building. Food was carted in five times a day from the central kitchens, as were medicines, blood and infusions in plastic bags. Nurses, volunteers, visitors walked hurriedly on the narrow pavements between the wards.

  I arrived early for night duty. A one-line announcement cheered up the ward. The spokesman reported that a special task force had been active for the last twenty-four hours in the rear of the Egyptian forces, west of the Suez Canal, destroying antiaircraft missile sites and artillery units.

  It was the first good news since the war began, other than the routine “repulsed” and “contained” and “counterattacked.” For a moment we were back with our old image. Inventive, courageous, unconventional. Some, a few of us, were in Africa, in the rear of the horrible armor battles, in the vicinity of major roads and cities, where it could really hurt and change the picture. For the first time I had a vague feeling that this nightmare might come to an end soon.

  The day staff was still around, two patients in wheelchairs watched TV. The Professor joined us. I sliced a cake I had baked at home, and we drank some sweet tea. He seemed to be in a good mood.

  “For three good reasons,” he said. “Major Ilan is out of danger. Still a long way to go, but he will live. A small bag was brought over from the emergency ward. Apparently it belonged to the man in coma. It may help the relatives who try to identify him, though there is no name on it.

  “And I had word from my son-in-law. He is OK, up in the Golan Heights.”

  This was the most I had heard him say since the war began. Now he enjoyed the almond cake, and left for the central surgery building where he spent his nights. The night nurse came in with the American doctor, a volunteer, a specialist in burns, a Jew of Polish origin with a practice in Manhattan, yet not entirely out of place here on night duty in Ward L.

  “Call me Leib, the way they do in New York,” he said to the soldiers when he arrived. They talked to him as “the American” anyway, and watched him patiently as he looked for words in the pocket dictionary he always carried.

  I translated the Professor’s remarks for him, and his face lit up when I told him about Major Ilan.

  “A fine man,” he said. “A hero. I don’t pray anymore, but I prayed for him.”

  He knew the Professor had a daughter, but you couldn’t tell by the Professor’s behavior that his son-in-law was in battle. He never disclosed a personal anxiety. We knew he loved music and played the cello, drove badly, and liked sweets. The rest of his private world was unknown.

  When I told Leib about the bag apparently belonging to the unidentified patient in room 7, he grasped my hand. He was excited, somehow nervous about it, “Let’s go and see!”

  I wasn’t sure we had the right. The nurse was on the phone softly calming a relative. Others were watching TV. Cease-fire did seem near, but fighting was still going on. In the big room a singer was playing the guitar, and Leib and I walked to the end of the corridor to room 7. The door was always open. The patient was breathing, but very still. Eyes closed and head bandaged, the rest of the bed was sheets. Odors of medicines and urine hung heavily. I opened the window to let in some fresh air of wet soil and leaves. An army bag hung on the rail of the bed. An unmarked regulation bag. Dr. Leibowitz opened it. Two cans of sardines, a tube of plum jam, C rations. Nothing personal. A pack of cigarettes, matches, small change. Socks, underwear—all army issue—and a book. I examined the book page by page. No dedication, no pencil marking, not new and obviously read. Monsieur Teste by Paul Valéry, in Hebrew.

  “A hell of a clue,” I remarked. “How impersonal can personal belongings be?”

  “Still, it’s something.”

  “What something? For him the socks and cigarettes were very personal items. For us here? Every single patient arrives in the emergency ward with a pack of cigarettes and a pair of socks, if he has a bag that is. Only the others have names, discs, numbers, mothers, something. Alive or dead, they have something.”

  “The book maybe. Is it a popular book here? Does every soldier carry Paul Valéry to battle?”

  “No. They carry books tho
ugh, poetry, thrillers, student’s textbooks. We are no detectives, Doctor. Just trying to save lives here. If someone comes, and if this someone is very close to this person, and if he knew his reading habits and a hundred other ‘ifs,’ maybe it will be a clue. And maybe he borrowed the book, maybe he found it, or carried it for a friend. I can give you more ‘maybes,’ what’s the use.”

  I, too, was overexcited. Ever since this person occupied room 7, I was haunted by him. First superficially, a mystery. A change, something bizarre. Then troubled, almost panicky. I couldn’t stand the thought of a dying man being nameless. Not here, not in this land and this war. It was slow and tough and unexpected, but we were a family, we were all touched somehow. Our reactions and fears and anguishes were all human, and we related personally. He was the exception. The fact that he could exist contradicted all we knew and believed.

  I closed the window. We left the room to meet Lea in the corridor. She hugged me. She could cry now, and did.

  “It’s a long night,” Leib said, “we’ll talk later.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  It wasn’t such a long night. I wrote a letter for one of the boys who couldn’t use his hands, and thought of my own copy of Valéry’s book. Amnon gave it to me, eight years back, and even then it was out of print. A thin volume of a philosophical story emphasizing the victory of reason over emotion. I should look for it, I thought, when I heard the sound of a helicopter approaching.

  In spite of the regulation red badges assigned to those permitted to go to the emergency landing site, a fence and strict orders, everybody was on hand for each new load of casualties. Everybody—doctors and nurses and volunteers and visiting soldiers. Most of us were just trying to identify faces. Doctors who were not on duty there but had sons in the front were pretending to give a hand, trying to steal a glance at the list of arrivals.