Three Weeks in October Read online

  In an old wooden building next to the landing site, there was an improvised emergency room. The stretchers were brought from the helicopter, sorted out and sent on to surgery or wards.

  Two soldiers with minor injuries could walk. Their uniforms were torn and bloodstained, but they were planning their escape already.

  “I should have never agreed to fly out here, they could have treated me in the field hospital.”

  “We’ll get a ride back with the next copter. Hey, nurse—” one of them spoke to me.

  “I’m not a nurse, just Amalia. You better go in, you are bleeding.”

  “This can wait. Just a scratch. Where is the nearest phone?”

  I promised him that he could use the telephone in Ward L if he would see the doctor first. His shoulder was covered with a bloodstained bandage.

  “How is the coffee in Ward L?” he smiled and walked in.

  Four others were wheeled into the operating rooms, two were destined for our ward. I walked back to help prepare rooms.

  The helicopter took off, sprinkling us with dirty puddles of water from the runway. By the time I reached the ward a second helicopter had landed, then a third.

  “And they said the war was practically over,” Shula, the night nurse, said. “You’d better start making beds.”

  Uri’s bed was empty. He had left during the day, and so had his mother. I put on fresh sheets, and hurt my fingers pulling the edges, tucking them in tightly, putting energy into it as if half the cure were in a carefully made bed. Making beds in the hospital always made me think of my children. The rubber sheet under the cotton one—my little boy still needed it. The flat pillow—my husband believed it was bad for the children’s backs to get used to pillows. Another sheet, a blanket, sheet over blanket, an inviting triangular fold of the free corner … I washed the side cupboard, which was intended for personal belongings, working by the neon light streaming in from the corridor.

  Shula was pushing a bed from the waiting room. “Major Ilan is going to have company, so is room 7,” she sighed. “The next one will have to be in the corridor.”

  Lea was dozing in the chair in the small room. I touched her shoulder. She was immediately fully awake, helping me to push her husband’s bed near the window and to make the new bed.

  I told her how making beds made me think of my children.

  “You’re lucky they are young. Perhaps it’s the last war.”

  “They said so in ’67, too.”

  Empty beds, all made up, make me nervous, restless. The first day of the war, when all civilians were dismissed and went home or to other hospitals, this was the way it was. Empty white beds. We prayed then they should remain so, then two days later the hospital started filling up, as if someone felt these clean sheets deserved occupants. Now they looked to me like coffins with shrouds saying, “Here we are, come and bury your pain in sterile conditions. Shula and Leib and Amalia will watch over you so you can suffer in company. They’ll cry with you and laugh with you and wash you and feed you and wish with you that you were never here, and hold the hand of your wife or daughter or girlfriend or mother.”

  I made another bed in the last room, next to the unidentified “No. 7,” as we referred to him, and surgery called to say that there were two stretchers—second degree burns—on the way. One had a leg amputated as well.

  They were pushed in by school teen-agers and nursed and transferred to the beds. Anesthesized, they didn’t mind the inconvenience of transfer. In the morning they would ask, where am I and for how long and where is the mobile telephone? In room 7 I switched on the light. The face on the pillow was a face I knew. It was my brother’s.

  Not my real brother. Someone I used to call “my brother” all through high school. He was asleep and seemingly unharmed. I didn’t dare look under the sheet. One hand was bandaged but the face, though pale and drawn, was unscratched. I looked at the chart attached to the bed. There wasn’t much on it yet.

  Avraham Goldin. Male. Age 32. Temperature 37° Centigrade. Blood count—normal; so was the pulse. Tomorrow morning the chart would be filled out. Right now it was like an identity card with a slight medical touch.

  I felt weak for a brief second. My knees trembled. Not a face on a stretcher, not a hand on the blanket, not another chart, another name, but the face, the hand, the name I knew. Amnon’s face surfaced to my mind. Avraham Goldin. It said age 32, but he was a boy, a teen-ager in shorts, never a fighter. I could never think of him as a soldier. We were the same age and yet here I was, a woman, looking at a boy with a new feeling. Something had just sunk in, a realization of the human involvement. Nothing could really justify the fact that Avi Goldin was a casualty of war. With the others, I knew it. Here, for a moment, I felt it, with sadness and compassion.

  The headlines, the broadcasts, the figures and the reports helped me keep out. The war was a mechanism, a power struggle. The helicopters brought in casualties but they were just candidates for beds I had to make meticulously. Here was Avi. He was a person I knew, my brother, my friend. The long finger of the war had touched me too. The last time I had seen him was graduation day.

  “Brother’s” nickname was Avi. Auburn hair, freckled face, spaced front teeth, a mocking grin.

  We lived in the same Tel-Aviv suburb. Avi had a natural talent for mathematics and science and used to help us all with the final exams.

  What does one remember when looking at a “second degree ten percent” burn case back from surgery, last seen fourteen years ago?

  Secrets. We shared secrets. He told me about his first love, her kisses, the feeling of her breasts. He tried to flirt with me once but we decided it was wrong and remained brother and sister. He told me about his first cigarette; his father was a radiologist and showed him X rays of diseased lungs which scared him out of smoking a second one. We walked home together every day. He was the first in the class to introduce T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas to our lives. He thought Thomas Mann and Hesse were the greatest fiction writers and made me read them.

  Fragments of memories. Long legs sticking out of the shortest shorts. He used to kiss his parents on the lips. He served in the army and went with his family to the states. He was studying physics. His father got a job in New York and for all purposes they had left the country for good. Another classmate mentioned him once—“An emigrant,” he said, “very successful.” There were two letters. One announcing his graduation, the other his marriage.

  My brother Avi. A long way from New York and family. Leib was watching me.

  “You are smiling,” he said.

  “Yes. The new patient in No. 7 is from your city. Used to be from mine.”

  “Shouldn’t we call his parents?”

  “Better wait and ask him. He is a stubborn, capricious man, used to be as a boy.”

  It was morning. Among the cases admitted during the night, two were Egyptians. A separate room was allotted to them, together with a Syrian flown in at the beginning of the war. A military policeman was more or less stationed at the entrance to their room. He felt superfluous and disappeared often to wheel stretchers or help in errands.

  The old man who so wanted No. 7 to be his son was gone. His son never smoked, he said, never used army socks, the book wasn’t his. He’d go on looking.

  I drove home in time to tell Daniel about Avi. I mentioned the Paul Valéry book, the Egyptians, Uri’s transfer. He didn’t seem to be listening. My life, my world, now, seemed like little episodes of no importance to him.

  “Two, three days and it’ll be over,” he sighed.

  “Not in the hospital.”

  “At least we are fighting west of the canal. Sharon did it again. I wish they’d let him earlier.”

  “The radio said ‘a small task force.’ Is it serious? Are they to be joined by others?”

  “How do I know? I hope so. We stand a chance to win, and soon, if we fight from the rear. If we appear where they don’t expect us, if we blow up the missiles and make air support effecti
ve.”

  Daniel didn’t talk strategy to me, and even now he was having a dialogue with himself. Our eyes didn’t meet, as if we all shared a shame. At weddings and Bar Mitzvahs we look people in the eye. At funerals we all look to the sky in protest or at the earth in agony.

  The children were all around and busy. I touched them carefully, the way I did every morning as if I were contagious. As if I had no right to enjoy their softness until I was back with them.

  My mother woke me; Dr. Leib was on the phone. He had talked to Avi, who said not to call his family. They didn’t know he was in Israel. He was in Europe on vacation as far as they were concerned. Should we, nevertheless?—Dr. Leib wondered.

  “He is not in danger, his life, I mean.”

  “No. Just, I think, if it were my son, I would have liked to be here.”

  “We’ll talk to him tonight.”

  “I mentioned you to him. He said it was worthwhile being injured to have a reunion with you!”

  He hung up. I wondered when he got to sleep, he seemed to always be around the ward.

  My mother remembered Avi well. Rather as a “boyfriend” than a brother. My father was still alive when we were friends, and his admiration of anybody who could find science and math fun and easy found a good candidate in Avi. “He’ll be somebody,” my father used to say.

  Mother thought we should spare the family the news until he got better and could talk to them himself.

  It was Friday night. Before leaving I lit the candles with the children. Daniel said he’d come to the hospital later, if he could. My next-door neighbor brought in a cake for me to take to the hospital. Her face was drawn. She hadn’t heard from her husband for a few days. His unit was across the canal.

  “They don’t have public phones there, you know. And no news is rather good news these days.”

  She was a cheerful type, always knitting and baking and trying new recipes for marmalades and jams.

  “You are lucky to have something to do at night, something useful. Still, another few days and we’ll throw a cease-fire party.”

  Fighting tears, she managed a clownish smile.

  Friday candles were lit in the ward’s dining room. I could hear a guitar and a woman’s soft singing voice from the big room.

  There were cakes and sweets and fruit on all the side tables. In the large room the regulations on sterility were less strict. Visitors were allowed and entertainment, too. The singer was a woman in her thirties, well known as a composer and performer. In 1967 we had met in the front line, just after the war. We were at the end of a battle and she had come to sing with a theatrical group. The woman has changed, and so have her songs. A dimension of sadness replaced her joviality. The soldiers watched the ceiling rather than her. Each one had his world of thoughts or memories or wishes, and her voice caressed them like an ancient prayer. It started raining and she was crying. Singing and crying. There was no applause. Someone asked for a song he wanted to hear, a Friday night song from the Song of Songs. I walked past them to room 7.

  As if he knew my footsteps, before I fully entered the room the freckled smile was all mine.

  “Well, well, Sister. Just the way I imagined our next meeting when we said good-bye.”

  “Very funny. Good to see you awake. How do you feel?”

  “You really want to know? Terrible.”

  “The pain will get less daily. Doctor Leib says you are in good shape. Considering.”

  “Come on, who cares for the pain or the shape. It’s the location. I didn’t travel this far to enjoy the medical services of Dr. Leibowitz.”

  “You did your bit.”

  “Sure. I even crossed into Africa. Got it on the other side, at least not while defending but during an attack. We are winning this war, if you didn’t know.”

  I took the cake out.

  “Should I call you Mother instead of Sister?”

  As teen-agers we had been trapped in a teasing game. Each had to be wittier, more cynical—intellectual one-upmanship.

  I felt as if this were a moment of truce. We were two adults with lives behind us. One injured in a war that was only partly his, I thought. Me, a mother of two making beds for other mothers’ big children. We can afford fatigue and seriousness. I told him so.

  “Why don’t you want me to call your parents?”

  “Sure. This is Ward L. Central hospital. We have someone half burnt. New arrival from Africa. Claims to be your son.” He changed his voice a little. “It must be a mistake, my mother would say. He is not in Africa, but in Europe.”

  “We said we were serious now.”

  “OK, serious. I’ll fill you in. Graduation, remember? The army service, artillery officer. My father got a good job in a hospital and a scholarship for me. It was always for ‘another year,’ for another credit, a bigger savings account. Temptation was great. I was offered eventually my own research program in applied physics. I truly thought I’d be better equipped to contribute here when I returned. More excuses? My mother was not well, she is not well now. As a matter of fact, she has a couple of years to live.” He paused, then, “How are your parents?”

  “My father died in 1960. Mother is fine, working, busy. She sends her love.”

  “So I met this girl. From Springfield, Massachusetts. You’ve never heard of the place. A summer holiday love and a long winter of a bad marriage. One daughter. Separation. I decided to return—even if you don’t believe me—and then my mother was hospitalized. My father was semiretired and aged suddenly. A story full of holes. We would all be better here—the sick, the aged, myself. But it would mean seeing my daughter very seldom. My mother recovered, became a great TV fan, father grumbles. I live on my own and ‘dedicate my life to science.’”

  The sarcasm I remembered was still there.

  “The cake is great,” he said.

  He was exhausted. He shouldn’t have talked so much.

  CHAPTER

  3

  We sat in silence for a while, half listening to the singer. Avi asked whether she could come in. Dr. Leib joined us and so did the singer in a fresh white gown. She whispered nervously, “Should I sing here, with this guy asleep,” pointing to No. 7.

  “If you can wake him up you’ll get a medical prize,” Leib said somewhat bitterly.

  Avi asked for a song which was popular two decades ago. The singer wasn’t sure about the words and Avi sang along with her in a hesitant voice.

  “And what’s the most recent hit?” he asked.

  She sang, “Let it be, let it be, oh please let it be. All we were to wish, let it be …”

  “What’s your wish?” Leib suddenly addressed the singer.

  There were tears in her eyes again. An emotional woman trying to be strong. She stopped playing the guitar and looked at No. 7, hypnotized, then excused herself and hurriedly left the room. I followed her to the bathroom where she was sick and could hear Avi snapping unkindly, “That was some cheering up!”

  Someone came in to say another ward was expecting her. She packed her guitar. I wondered how much more she could take, but she blew us all a kiss in the air and managed a smile and a confident, “Speedy recovery.”

  Back in the last room Avi tried to sit up.

  “Now tell me about my roommate,” he ordered.

  “We don’t know,” I started. “He hasn’t been identified. We have an estimated age—about thirty-five, medium height, fair hair, no fingerprints, teeth structure. The rest is either burnt or just unknown, a third degree case, full-thickness burns, no pain as nerve edges are burnt, too. Loss of fluid, kidney malfunction—the lot.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Avi stated.

  “You see,” Leib helped me, “he was brought in from a field hospital in Sinai, the third night of the war. He was stripped and bandaged and there were no discs. The battle involved several units, and there were many casualties and no accurate records. He was taken to Beer-Sheba, and then flown here. The unit responsible for identification and ‘miss
ing in battle’ information has not come up with anything. There are no lists of casualties yet, and it will take a while before the computers are put to work on cases like this.”

  “Very cheerful company. It could be anybody, then. Someone I know, maybe, someone like me who is not supposed to be here in the first place—an Egyptian soldier perhaps. I hate the thought.”

  “So do we,” I said. “There is also a bag, socks, cigarettes, a book by Paul Valéry, people coming in and out.”

  “Is he dying?”

  The question, in an unexpected shrill voice, was obviously addressed to Dr. Leibowitz. He didn’t seem to react.

  “Is he dying?” Avi repeated louder.

  “It seems so. The fact that he is in coma means he can’t cooperate. Medicine also needs willpower and the desire of the patient to struggle. It’s the burns, and now the kidneys. The Professor sees in him some personal challenge, he nurses him in surgery as if he knew him.” Reflectively he added, “He, too, can’t accept the anonymity.”

  Avi was falling asleep. He had taken his “good-night” pill, as we called it, a while ago, and couldn’t keep his eyes open.

  We left for the doctor’s room to warm up some coffee.

  “Why does No. 7 bother me so much?” Leib half-asked, half-stated.

  “It’s inhuman, that’s why, I suppose.”

  “Because it is happening here. I imagine a mathematical solution—all the casualties will be listed soon, those with names. Corpses identified and buried. By elimination of the known there will be, say, a hundred unidentified, or less. Then the computers will spill out names of the unaccounted for. There will still be some left, maybe No. 7 too. Maybe he’ll remain till the last. If he is the only nameless one, that will be the final clue and someone will be sure to come for him.”

  “Not a very satisfactory process.”

  “It bothers me because we are a family. It’s not a coincidence that you meet a relative here, a classmate there, someone who lives up the street or down the road or a block away. You are bound to, because you are a few and within a few circles—circles that cross and meet. You know each other. He pushes me back to the Nazi era.”