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Come in, Please

By Alec Aylat

Copyright 2014 Alec Aylat

Smashwords Edition

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only but you would like to retain your own copy, please return to your favorite ebook retailer to purchase it.

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Table of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1 - Jeremiah

Chapter 2 - Better Late

Chapter 3 - The Gang's All Here

Chapter 4 - Shock Waves

Chapter 5 - Shore Patrol

Chapter 6 - When You Wake

Chapter 7 - Drinks on the House

Chapter 8 - The Upper Crust

Chapter 9 - Tractorial Delights

Chapter 10 - Three Gilbert & Sullivan's for the Parody Minded

Chapter 11 - Recollections

Chapter 12 - Haganah Train

Chapter 13 - Reporters at Large

Chapter 14 - Don't Get the Breeze Up

Chapter 15 - Love Story

Chapter 16 - Presidential

Chapter 17 - Branbucket's Chair

Chapter 18 - Rain

Chapter 19 - The Rova

Chapter 20 - Come In, Please

Chapter 21 - In Defense of the Realm

Chapter 22 - A Fishy Story

Chapter 23 - Sinai

Chapter 24 - Amen

Chapter 25 - The Bridge Group

Chapter 26 - Screenplay Treatment: The Consequences of Randy McKabe

Chapter 27 - Twenty Years of Computer Club Press Releases

Cover Design and Editor

About the Author

Another Book by this Author

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Prologue

This ebook of Chapters is a collection of some of the short stories that the author particularly enjoyed writing and rewriting. He couldn't leave well enough alone. You will also find here singular reminiscences, parodies of well known lyrics, secular satires, and a Treatment for a riveting screenplay that is based on a characteristic event which preceded the establishment of the State of Israel. The producer is currently working to bring it to the screen when she has the necessary financing. We wish her success and, to you, a good read.

There are no tennis stories here. If this denies the expectations of my good playing buddies, I'm sorry. They were certain there would be at least one because my dad began coaching me when I was five and I've played throughout the years except when involved in at least three wars. Dad was a sportsman. He was a member of the famous Brady and Old Boys Clubs in London. He played for both clubs in First Division cricket and football (soccer), won the featherweight boxing championship of Brady and also the billiards and table-tennis championships. He represented his club in all of these, as well as in chess (he was one of the top players in Scotland), and still found time for rowing and cycling. He reached the finals of the Glasgow Jewish Lawn Tennis Club in its first year, and won the championship the following year. He played cricket and football for his Regiment, the 1st Oxford & Bucks Light Infantry, in World War I, in which he served for four years in France before being wounded by a shell fragment when he aimed to header it like a soccer ball. I mention all this because I've tried to emulate him, but the only tennis tearjerker is when I was leaving home for London, he gave me his favorite racquet and I left it on the overnight train. Nevertheless, I think he would be pleased that, after eighty-five years of playing, I still play with the same enthusiasm I had when I was five, although not much better.

Chapter One

Jeremiah

You've heard of, perhaps may have seen, those amazing acrobats who balance themselves on large balls, small balls, every size ball, rolling themselves around the stage while juggling more balls, dishes, hoops, clubs and fiery rods. Jeremiah is one such acrobat. Only he is much more.

Jeremiah is an illusionist of considerable renown. Able to make large structures like the Statue of Liberty apparently disappear and reappear with effortless abandon while balancing on a swirling multi-colored ball, he once 'disappeared' the Empire State Building, much to the chagrin of New York's mayor who was just then escorting his Parisian counterpart toward the magnificent view from the top. Then, of course, Jeremiah "reappeared" it with the elegance and flair for which he is deservedly acclaimed, provoking relieved plaudits in French from the discombobulated guest.

To say Jeremiah is an illusionist, however, is to tell only a fraction of the story. For Jeremiah is a believer. His exploits are no mirages to him, but actualities, begat by an awesome creative wizardry which spooks and terrifies him.

What set him off to prepare the world for what he claimed would be his greatest illusion was his perception, as the millennium approached, that this would be no bridge into the twenty-first century, but, on the contrary, an impenetrable barrier, that 1999 was to be the last anno Domini, the end of the line for the swirling multi-colored ball on which not only Jeremiah was balanced, but everything and everybody else. Let them all look forward to an illusion. Jeremiah knew better. They wouldn't be around. Neither remaining to be convinced, nor to be disappointed.

As a believer, he has never questioned that Planet Earth is rotating on its axis at more than a thousand miles per hour, while speeding around the sun at 66,700 mph, nor seen reason to challenge astronomers' assertions that the galaxy moves at 43,000 mph, give or take a few miles, toward the solar apex and thence to the Milky Way, which itself is drifting somewhere else at more than a million mph. Jeremiah's concern was centered on what was to happen at the countdown at Times Square on December 31.

What propels him to announce his final and greatest manifestation is a visit to the Cray Supercomputers at Los Alamos. An avid reader of The New York Times Tuesday Science section, he knows that the Earth surrounds a revolving inner core, a solid mass of scalding hot iron, 1,500 miles wide, turning more quickly than the outer Earth. He reads further that scientists have shown because of its extra speed, the inner core's magnetic field exerts a stabilizing influence on the Earth's magnetic field.

The acrobat in Jeremiah immediately appreciates that because the Earth's magnetic field reverses itself once every 200,000 years, this stability is the Earth's vital balancing act.

A phone call to a child prodigy of the late Dr. Einstein extrapolates one unassailable fact: that once, only once, in the entire existence of the extragalactic nebula, will the inner core's magnetic field and the Earth's magnetic field reverse themselves simultaneously. Then, and only then, both cores will come to a complete stop, albeit momentarily.

Normally, no one would think that would be anything to worry about in our lifetime, or in the lifetimes of, at least, the next couple of thousand generations. But Jeremiah is a born worrier. He is also a Machiavellian illusionist.

Visiting Los Alamos, a privilege afforded because of his celebrity, he verifies the prodigy's theory that simultaneous magnetic field reversals will occur precisely in New York in the last second before midnight ends the 20th century and starts the 21st. With the speed at which the Earth is revolving around the sun, without even taking into account all the other whirling speeds of the solar system, the galaxy and the Milky Way, coming to a sudden stop, is going to send everything and everyone flying into space. From New York, that is. Other places, other time zones. He was never one to speculate. Since everyone would be centered on Times Square, he declined to announce other times.

You would think that would put the fear of death into most people. Not on your life. The announcement of Jeremiah's greatest illusion, scheduled for Times Square at one second before midnight on December 31, 1999, created such a demand for tickets in the exclusive seating section that the mayor, still impressed by his visit to the Empire State Building, ordered extra bleachers be erected, and the whole area closed to standees for the first time in New York history. If anything was a bonanza for scalpers, this was it.

Some scalpers were among Jeremiah's best friends. He had nothing against them. They helped engender excitement around his upcoming illusions. He honored them, as he did many others among his friends, all of whom were delighted when he accepted their invitations to dinner, to weddings, birthday parties, graduations and other festive occasions, for they were certain of the gift he would bring - a simple illusion, though some termed it a delusion; it was one he always also left as a gratuity at restaurants and with taxi drivers.

Each week Jeremiah purchased lottery tickets at one dollar each. These he distributed generously in the manner noted above, saving a mint of money and none of that endless concern others have about bringing a suitable gift. Endearing himself to the recipients who lived in hope prior to the weekly drawing when they were inevitably unlucky not to win several millions of dollars, he was then reviled, usually under one's breath, as a cheapskate. And yet, strange be the ways of people, there was always this hope among the recipients of his illusion that, with his next gift to them, they would be lucky.

"Serve Jeremiah right," one close Jeremiah friend said to Tony, another admirer, "if one of those tickets were to win the grand prize." Twenty million dollars it was that week.

"He'd have a heart attack. I don't know how he gets away with duping people into thanking him with the same enthusiasm they thank us. We spend a lot of money on gifts and he gets by with a dollar."

"But that's Jeremiah all over. He's an illusionist. He makes you believe you're getting an expensive present. I've even seen waiters bowled over when they find a lottery ticket under the plate instead of an expected ten spot or whatever it should be."

"Has anyone ever won with one of his tickets?" Tony asked.

"Not that I ever heard of. He once told me he always holds on to the last of the tickets each week. Never gives them all away. Of course, sometimes he overestimates and is left with more than one, but he's usually so canny he figures the right number to buy each week."

"That holding on to the last ticket, I'll bet he believes his number will come up one day."

"You mean he's illusioning himself?"

"Delusioning's more likely."

"One of these days one of his friends is going to win big, and old buddy Jeremiah will flip his lid. He'll be sick at having given away the wrong ticket."

"Serve him right."

"Tony, you've just given me an idea. The lottery awards hundreds of smaller prizes as well as the one really big one. What if we could arrange it that one week most of his tickets win prizes?"

"How would you do that, genius?"

"Put a tail on him. Follow him around. See to whom he gives tickets. Then you and I visit them or phone them up, and ask them all to pretend to be winners that week. They call Jeremiah to thank him profusely. They'll love it. A chance to get back at him for all those cheap ticket gifts. There isn't anyone going to turn us down."

Tony laughed and clapped his friend's shoulder. "It'll be a pleasure to split the cost of a private eye with you."

"It's all very simple, really. They'll tell him they've won anything from a thousand to ten or twenty thousand."

"A few phone calls like that, he'll realize he's being had."

"No, he won't. He's a believer. Right?"

It was Tony who embellished their nefarious plot with a final O'Henryish twist.

A few weeks later, after the draw was announced, Jeremiah's phone line was busy that evening and the following day, the callers pronouncing their delight with his generosity and gloating over the extent of their winnings. Without exception, they insisted, despite his half-hearted refusal, on sharing their good fortune with him.

An anticipatory Jeremiah eagerly opened the next few days' mail, from each envelope withdrawing his share of the winnings: a brand new one dollar lottery ticket.

That was all forgiven, forgotten and forever when New Year's Eve was celebrated in Times Square with Jeremiah promising the world his greatest illusion. It happened as the spectacular glowing Times Square Ball Drop was counted down to the count, in unison, by the massed spectators. Ten - Nine- Eight - Seven - Six - Five - Four - Three - Two. The pause, the sudden silence in the split second when Jeremiah's greatest illusion was promised, when the twentieth century was about to become the twenty-first, at that precise split of the last second, when the magnetic force of the Galaxy and the magnetic force of the Earth's revolving inner core reversed, the spinning globe came to a momentary halt. Jeremiah had announced the disappearance of the Earth as only an illusion, though truly by far the greatest and most amazing he had ever perpetrated, and in this he was correct. The Earth did not disappear. At the other half of the split second it began spinning again. But the sudden feared jolt sent everyone on the globe, not only those in Times Square, into space. For them, the illusion that the Earth had disappeared was final and complete.

Jeremiah, however, was raised to believe that the soul lived on after death, and that one day he would be reunited with his parents, long since deceased. As a believer he faced the end with equanimity. His faith was rewarded when the first souls he saw were those of his parents.

"You see. Didn't we tell you?" his father said.

"I always believed."

"Over there are your grandparents," Jeremiah's mother smiled, pointing to a small group standing in line to greet four people beaming and shaking hands with them all.

"Those are my cousins with them," said Jeremiah, joining with his parents at the end of the line. "I remember them. They don't look as old now as they did when I was a youngster."

"That's because you're older now. We didn't expect you so soon."

It was some time before the end of the line where Jeremiah and his parents approached his four grandparents, who then announced together, in one voice "Now, you must meet our parents, your grandparents and great-grandparents."

The larger group surrounding Jeremiah's great-grandparents was swelled by Jeremiah and his relatives, of whom he was already losing count. Introductions took longer as smaller lines were formed to relieve the congestion. Nor was he surprised, when welcomes were completed, that the entire crowd, now composed of several thousand souls, moved on to meet the parents and grandparents of the great-grandparents.

Here the lines were longer yet, the waits increasingly lengthier, the introductions more long-winded as each person's relationship was carefully explained in detail to the elders who were seated on a dais in the middle of what appeared to be a large arena. Their relatives filled one half of the stadium. Another dais, on which sat four souls, was already surrounded by a mammoth crowd.

"Who is over there?" Jeremiah asked his father.

"I suspect those are your great-great-great-great grandparents. They are seated, resting because today is Shabbat."

"Thank the Lord for that."

"Indeed we do."

"How long does this go on, these introductions to the family?"

"Forever. That is what we do here. Usually it moves along more quickly, but thanks to your illusion, oh yes, we heard about it, the death of almost everyone on Earth at the same moment, that's causing tremendous delays. Everyone has to be introduced, you see, to be recognized, all the way down the line."

"All the way?"

"All the way."

"But there can be no end to it. There are always parents of parents"

Jeremiah was regretting his last illusion. "It goes all the way back?'

"To Adam and Eve," said his father.

"At least," said his mother.

"But that'll take forever."

"Longer," chimed in his mother, already tired from standing in line.

"This is Heaven, Jeremiah. No one ever knows in advance." His father sighed."To believe anything else would be an illusion."

Chapter Two

Better Late

"Maybe you remember my Aunt Anna? Anna Green?" Stupid question. Sitting around in the gazebo after a first set of doubles, Derek's tennis buddies laughed.

"You mean the late Anna Green?" She wasn't dead yet, so they didn't mean "departed".

Derek was the new guy on court. Early retirement was what brought him. That, and his Aunt Anna. Twenty years she lived in an active senior retirement community in New Jersey, burying three husbands before heading for an assisted living community in Florida where they were quickly becoming familiar with her exhausting, wearing, nerve-sapping, controlling propensities.

In the New Jersey community there wasn't a club she hadn't belonged to, a committee she hadn't sat on, a chairmanship she hadn't held, climaxing her reign with three two-year terms as president of the Board of Governors which has earned her the community flag at half-mast when she dies, even though she has taken up residence in Florida, much to the relief of the NJs. Not that she aspired to that rare honor, although the flag would have been lowered with pleasure by many who had spent exasperating minutes, sometimes fifteen or more, waiting for Miss Green (she was never known by any of her husbands' names) to start a meeting.

Derek's Aunt Anna was always late, but, while Alice in Wonderland's White Rabbit was late "for a very important date", she was late for every date, important or not. Why such a supremely organized person was consistently late for meetings, including those she herself called, in a community that capriciously, according to her, insisted on starting all its meetings precisely on time, was beyond Derek.

His relationship, he assumed wrongly, would make his acceptance a breeze. Unfairly, her unrepentant annoying trait for which she was best remembered, reflected on him. It had bedeviled him since his arrival. No matter how regularly he showed up on time for meetings, no matter that he arrived sometimes earlier than required, the heredity he tried hard not to live up to discouraged him from volunteering to serve on committees where experience was valued. Fortunately, no one yet knew that it was his suggestion, not Anna's, that she had pushed through a community referendum before she left for Florida. That was about to change, for he could no longer keep quiet about it.

"She was still here," Derek said, "putting the final touches to my financial suggestion to downsize the 18-hole championship golf course to nine holes."

"This was your idea?" Tennis, for the moment, was neglected.

"Well, yes. Look, the golf club was losing thousands of dollars a year, what with residents moving to assisted living or kicking the proverbial golf ball bucket."

"That's true. But a cemetery! That was your idea too?"

"I admit it. So look what we've got now. A profitable cemetery, occupied by departed residents and family members, and a pleasant green area for family picnics, or if you just like to walk in a park atmosphere."

"We thought it was thanks to your aunt that we lost our championship golf course. It was you."

"It was really her. She pushed through the referendum."

"The majority weren't golfers. That's how."

"That's why the club was losing money," Derek pointed out. "She left for Florida right after the referendum."

"She should have been late for it, and not shown up at all."

"Some say she was born late." Derek laughed, changing the subject. "Come on. Let's play."

Born late. Not just by thirty minutes or so, but by a full thirty days. Aunt Lolly, her elder sister by fifteen years, said Anna's was the only ten-month human birth to be let loose on the world, causing "untold suffering" on an "unprepared humanity". Specifically, on her mathematically imprecise and undeserving family.

Her late arrival at family gatherings, which Anna herself planned, guaranteed the hostess would be a nervous wreck, the food overcooked, the cousins and uncles and aunts less and less sociable, their children more frenzied and Grand Aunt Lolly repeating interminably that they should all sit down and eat without her, which they dared not do because Anna's whirlwind entrance could upgrade into a fast moving hurricane of wrath at their lack of courtesy.

Only Lolly dared remonstrate with her, promising that "the day will come, Anna, when I will fix you so completely you will never, ever, be late again for anything." And Aunt Anna laughed because Lolita Vinestein (Lolita was her real name, but everyone called her Lolly) was so disorganized and scatterbrained that she excelled in misplacing things, her house keys, her car keys (fortunately, since, in her nineties plus, she was a menace on the roads), her glasses, her knitting, her magazines, her appointments book, and her husband, dear Uncle Vinny (for Vinestein) whom she left sitting on one of the few chairs in Macy's, resigned to waiting for her while she went to buy stockings, ("Back in ten minutes" Lolly had said), forgot about him and drove home, never missing him for a moment. Several hours later he had security searching the mall for her, and, when he collapsed, "stress and worry," the doctor said, an ambulance got him to the hospital barely in time for him to whisper famous last words to a nurse:"Tell Lolly to stay away from Macy's."

Lolly would arrange to meet Anna in the city, but, when Anna arrived, late as usual, Lolly wouldn't be there, leaving Anna convinced her sister had not intended to come, when, in fact, Lolly had not materialized because she had mislaid her appointment book, either it slipped off her desk into the trash basket, or was carefully arranged with the plates in the dishwasher, or taken out into the rain instead of an umbrella, then dried atop a heater where she never thought to look until it caught fire. Apparently that taught her a lesson for, from then on when she misplaced her new appointment book, she would pray immediately to Saint Anthony to find it for her which he invariably did.

On the other hand, organizing people's lives was Anna's forte. Lolly chided her about it. "You always have to be in control. You should relax. Stop arranging things. Let someone else do it."

"I should be disorganized like you? Half the time you don't know where you are."

"So that's bad? You'll live longer. Look at me."

"I am looking at you. I'll live longer than you anyway. Law of averages."

"Not the way you work yourself. I wouldn't count on it."

"You're so rattlebrained, you'll miss your own funeral."

"And you'd plan it for me and then show up late. Do me nisht ken taives."

Derek translated the Yiddish for them in the gazebo. "Don't do me any favors."

His aunts argued and squabbled constantly. It was a never-ending show they put on for whoever was present. And Lolly loved a good show. She was once an actress.

"A chorus girl," Anna scorned.

"Nothing wrong with that," Lolly retorted. "It was vaudeville. Got lots of curtain calls, I did. Very popular I was."

"She could dance and sing gloriously," Derek said to his friends. "Then one day it all ended."

The new assistant manager at the hotel in Florida where Lolly spent the winters to be near her sister, phoned his manager, who was in New York for a business conference, to say that Molly Feinstein had passed away while sitting in the lobby reading "True Confessions". A heart attack, apparently. "Don't worry. I'll take care of it," the smartest manager in the world told his new assistant, before calling Anna who hadn't yet left for Florida.

So it was the manager himself who told Anna, in his customary comforting tone, that her sister had died and he would be much obliged if she would arrange to have the body removed that day. "Not good for business, I'm sure you understand."

Anna organized the funeral, sorrowful, naturally, but also delighted that she had proved Lolly wrong about outliving her, and that she could set up the one appointment Lolly was certain to keep.

She called Morris, her friendly Brooklyn funeral director, who had buried Uncle Vinny beside Anna's three husbands, the graves all lined up in a row with space reserved for Lolly, for Anna and for anyone else in the family who cared to drop in. Anna, however, now had other ideas.

Morris was to phone his brother who was a funeral director in Florida, have him pick up the body immediately, that very day, place it in his most expensive coffin, and bring the dear departed to Morris in Brooklyn who was to prepare services for the day of its arrival.

Anna notified cousins, uncles, aunts, Lolly's burlesque friends, few of whom were left to see her off, and other friends Lolly had collected over the years, and asked each to make additional calls. More than four hundred persons showed up at the funeral parlor. The former chorus girl and vaudeville star could still draw a crowd.

Except for Aunt Anna who, late as ever but, this time, through no fault of her own, was stuck in a mammoth traffic tie-up caused by a fearsomely strong and continuous rainstorm. She decided to go directly to the cemetery where at least she would see Lolly put under.

"Thanks to my advice to Anna," Derek said, "Lolly was to be the first person buried in what was once your money losing 18-hole championship golf course."

"Too bad she didn't play golf."

"Lolly or Anna? Surely you're not complaining? Now you have a profitable nine-hole course, a profitable convenient cemetery, and a strong demand for the only homes up for sale: those belonging to the recently departed."

Despite the driving rain, Anna arrived at the cemetery long before the cortege. Morris had hired a new hearse driver who started out from the funeral home leading a long convoy of buses and cars, but turned left instead of right as soon as he was out of sight of Morris, and lost his way.

For an hour the cavalcade wound like a Chinese dragon in and around Brooklyn, tying up traffic as it streamed indiscriminately, headlights on, through red, yellow and green lights, until coming to a sudden, unexpected, accordion style halt, causing one car after another to collide bumpers, immediately eliminating all space between cars for people to cross the road.

The driver had stopped to ask directions from several angry police officers who arrived, sirens blaring, to disentangle the procession. With a no- nonsense "Follow us", they led it through the Lincoln Tunnel, where they turned it over with thankful warning advice to the New Jersey police who thereupon refused to let it roam out of their sight.

Eager as Derek's partners were to hear the end of the story, tennis, as always, came first. so they played through the third set, then hurried back to the gazebo to drink and listen.

"Four hundred mourners braved the pouring rain to assemble by the graveside where Aunt Anna, who had been waiting alone, unrepentantly early, and therefore doubly furious, reestablished her authority by refusing to allow the interment until she had viewed Lolly for the last time."

With mourners milling around under their umbrellas, impatient to be off but respecting a sister's wish, the lid of the casket, never opened since leaving Florida because Morris got queasy looking at corpses, was pried loose and Anna peered inside.

The solemnity of the occasion was marred by a long, outraged gasp followed by words no actor could have enunciated more clearly.

"Since when did Lolly have red hair?" Four hundred mourners pushed closer.

"When did she get a face lift? She doesn't look a day over fifty. Who - is - this - woman?"

Clearly the body was not that of Aunt Lolly.

Anna pushed through the grieving throng of delighted lamenters who were convinced that Lolly had kept her threat, expecting Anna to be late even for Lolly's funeral, and had fixed her good and proper in front of the largest crowd she could muster. Anna barked at the driver of the hearse. "Take that body back to Morris and tell him it's the last funeral he directs for me."

Imperiously, she turned to the crowd. "You want to follow me to Florida? Up to you."

"Some did. Me, I did," said Derek. Anna and I and a few other close relatives and friends caught the next flight out of Newark. We weren't going to miss the last act of the Lolly comedy." His listeners leaned closer.

"There she was. Lolling on a deckchair, sipping a lemonade, like she was cruising, and reading "True Confessions", which Molly Feinstein no longer needed, visibly thrilled to see so many of her friends and relatives."

"Is it my birthday?"

The smartest hotel manager in the world apologized weakly. "It was Molly Feinstein died. I thought my assistant on the phone said Lolly Vinestein. A natural mistake, you understand. Lolly is so old. Who ever expected young Mrs. Feinstein to go like that?"

"Aunt Lolly did die that winter," Derek said over his friends' laughter. "And this would be the end of the story were it not for the fact that she hadn't quite finished with Aunt Anna. So there we were back again at the yet empty grave, and, guess what. Notwithstanding the rain that had been teeming down all day, (it was the wettest winter on record), Anna arrived late, twenty minutes after the already gathered mourners were fuming at their unsuccessful efforts to turn inside-out umbrellas back to outside-in.

"I'm late, Lolly," she announced proudly, insisting on opening the casket, even while windswept raindrops drizzled on the rich mahogany despite the wobbly, trembling blue canopy that, in attempting to cover the grave, appeared likely, at any moment to soar away over the cemetery onto the nine-hole golf course.

"Just to make sure," she said, quickly dropping the top shut again, at least caring that Lolly should not depart wet through.

Aunt Lolly was lowered into the rain-soaked grave. The bleak winter wind howled through the branches of the leafless trees as the gravediggers shoveled in the sodden earth. The dark sky, the thunder, the sudden lightning flashes, the drenching rain hastened the departure of family and friends.

Pity. They missed out on Lolly's last performance.

Anna chose to remain by the grave, treasuring those moments with a sister she had loved more than she would ever admit. Then they heard it. All over the community.

The noise of the storm was minor compared with Anna's fearful screams. The mound of earth covering the newly-filled grave slowly broke up. Muddied dirt squelched upwards and to the sides, sloshing at Anna's feet, until the casket itself rose from the depths, a silent, formidable notice from Aunt Lolly that she was not about to go to her eternal rest without a final curtain call.

With that, the canopy flew free of its moorings to ascend high in the sky, and, according to Anna, taking Aunt Lolly's spirit with it. Anna moaned and collapsed into the arms of a gravedigger.

"Matter of gravity," he said. "Grave's soggy from all the rain. Pushed up the coffin, you see." Derek said, "She carried out her threat to Anna. Anna's never been late since. Not for anything."

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Chapter Three

### The Gang's All Here

Golda Meir came to St. Louis to speak at an Israel Bonds dinner. One thousand guests filled the Chase Hotel ballroom to listen to Golda, buy Israel Bonds and honor Abe Molasky, leading pornography publisher in St. Louis, and the city's largest buyer of the Bonds. Golda gave a rousing speech, spoke highly of Abe's faith in the future of Israel, awarded him a plaque on behalf of the State of Israel, and, much cheered by the subsequent flow of substantial Bond purchases, all immediately paid by the ecstatic audience, congratulated the director on the most successful Israel Bonds function she had attended anywhere. She then retired to her room where an anonymous telephone message awaited her.

She had a six o'clock morning flight to catch. The director accompanied her to the airport. He should have stayed in bed. Golda's sharp tongue reprimanded him for causing her to honor a pornographer and for bringing the State of Israel to a moral low. It was a scolding to remember, but which National office, after also experiencing Golda's thorny needle, promptly ignored and cashed Molasky's million dollar check. Nor was it the last of his checks. Despite his unorthodox business, or perhaps thanks to it, his many unconventional associates consistently joined him in supporting Israel.

They were no less supportive of Israel than their counterparts in the Mafia. This was in the months when the British were leaving Palestine and Arab gangs were roaming the country. A Jewish organization employee in New York, Jacob, answered a mysterious phone call inviting him to meet in a local pool hall with someone who wanted to help those "fightin' brave Jews." At the appointed time, Jacob sits alone in a booth, watching the door. Two men come in. One is a little guy, the other a big, heavy, ugly looking bruiser. They look around, then move into the booth, the big guy squeezing our mild mannered associate against the wall. The little guy sits opposite, removes his hat, places what looks like a gun underneath it, and comes to the point.

"Listen. Your guys in Palestine, they're having a rough time. We want to help. Just tell us who you want us to take care of. We're organized. We can do it. Whoever you want."

Jacob nods his head, too startled at first to say anything. Then whispers, "You mean bumped off?"

"Yeah. That's right. Though we don't like to use that kind of language, you understand. You see, we can help. We've got connections. Overseas, too. Someone getting in your way? You tell us. This is a time we Jews have to stick together. Right?"

"Right." Jacob is ready to leave. He's heard of the Jewish mafia. Even knows a few names like Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Lepke Buchalter. He begins to sweat. Time to get out of there. "Let me get back to you on this. I aint got no authority." My God! He's starting to talk like them. "I'll speak to the boss. Where can I reach you? Phone number? Name?"

"Nah. No names. No phones. We'll call you."

The guy said no names. So why does Jacob give him my name? True, I'm his boss, and there's that whole incident with Golda I had the sense not to mention to Abe Molasky. Only one thing to do. Arrange for Jacob an immediate transfer to the West Coast.

"We'll call you." And they did. Only this time, Sydney went. With instructions for thanking them for their attractive assassination intentions, but maybe some other time. However, it wasn't necessary. Their original proposal was withdrawn, as was the original meeting place.

Never meet in the same place twice. This time it was a large room above a garage on the Lower East Side. Assembled were six well-dressed, hearty gentlemen, several of whom Sydney recognized from their pictures in the newspapers and in police bulletins. Invited to sit beside the chairman, Sydney was welcomed to the august gathering as the representative of the new State of Israel come to thank them for their help.

At this, the chairman pointed to each man present in turn, addressing him only by his nickname. In response, each tossed a large bundle of hundred dollar bills onto the table in front of Sydney. The chairman then added his bundle, swept the lot into a laundry bag by his side, shook Sydney's hand, advised him that there was a car waiting in the garage to return him with his laundry to his office, and thanked him for coming. The league of mobster gentlemen stood, approached our man from Israel, said "God Bless You" or "Be strong and of good courage" ("Hazak v'ematz" in Hebrew), shook his hand, and left. Sydney, who mostly smiled and nodded his head, told me he was mostly silent from the moment he entered the garage until he sat opposite me in the office. Then I couldn't get him to shut up.

### Chapter Four

### Shock Waves

As the warning siren ceases, the roar of a German V-1 rocket is heard, its noise increasing as it comes closer. Heads turn anxiously. Pedestrians walk faster. Others run to the air raid shelter. The rocket's engine shuts down. In the momentary silence, Private Randy McKabe, walking proudly in his Jewish Brigade Group uniform, and a graceful girl, Heather Abrams, cheerful, pleasant face, but now showing some concern, are about to enter the shelter. She is in army uniform, a lieutenant, with War Correspondent shoulder flashes.

Heather trips, almost falls as she bumps into Randy at the shelter entrance. He catches her in time. The rocket explodes close by. The shock wave blasts Randy and Heather inside.

Blown off their feet, they pick themselves up and dust off.

"You all right?" he asks. "That was close."

"Sure was. Yes, I'm fine."

"We blew in together. Must mean something. There's a pub nearby. A drink'll do us good."

She smiles. "Yes, all right. I could use one. Must mean something."

So starts another wartime date. Who knows? It may indeed come to something. It's the spirit of the times. To carry on, come what may.

"That's my second one," he says to her in the Regent Street pub where they are sitting close together in a booth.

"Second drink?"

"Second doodlebug." One night after-hours, he says, persuaded into a pub-crawl with three of his buddies, he was walking home, somewhat high, from Finsbury Park underground station, the sole pedestrian in the long, dark, unlighted street, when the familiar wail of air raid sirens warned that more V-1 German rockets were threatening London. One always listened for the distant sound of a V-1 and then, for the sudden deathly quiet when its engine ceased, waiting for the explosion which always followed 15 seconds later. This time, however, the grinding, rasping motorbike roar of the piston engine grew increasingly louder. "My impulse," Randy continued, "was to race for the air raid shelter at the end of the street. I turned to look behind me, not expecting to see the doodlebug, but there it was, its tail aflame as it rushed toward me out of the darkness, hunting me down like the sound of baying hounds pursuing a fox."

Heather's eyes widened. "My God. What did you do?"

"I ran. Not toward the shelter. Away from it. Toward the rocket. Weaving unsteadily from side to side as if that would help dodge the blighter. As long as I heard its engine, I was safe. When, seconds later, it thundered overhead, I continued running, now lengthening the distance between us. Then the engine stopped. I dived to the pavement. Seconds later came the explosion. At the end of the street. Where the shelter had been. The smell of powdered brick dust and plaster from the devastated shelter and the surrounding homes filled the air, even as I escaped the full force of the blast that stripped the leaves off the trees in the once lovely street, and left me trembling, like the leaves themselves quivering down around and over me."

"You're so dramatic - and poetic," Heather said placing her hand over Randy's. It was warm and tender like her smile, of which he took full advantage, placing his free hand on hers.

"I leave for Italy tomorrow."

"We've just met," disappointment clear in her voice. "Not tomorrow?"

"Monty's called on us to help finish off the Gerries."

"The Jewish Brigade versus the German army. You make it sound like a football match."

"In a way, Heather. It's the cup final."

" But you'll be in Italy in the real war, while I'm writing for 'Blighty' about soldiers in London. It doesn't seem quite fair, does it?"

"Be glad you're out of it."

"I suppose so."

"You want to cover a war? After this one ends, and the Brigade is demobbed in Palestine, we'll probably have war with the Arabs. I'll be there. Come join me. I'll wait for you." Leaning toward each other, propelled by a desire neither one tried to explain, their open mouths met in possibly the longest kiss the patrons of the Fox and Hounds had ever witnessed, and didn't hesitate to applaud as the bartender brought them two foaming steins of Guinness stout.

"We heard that. You off to Italy tomorrow? This one's on us. Cheers, soldier. Good luck to both of you."

A few weeks later, the Germans assaulted Londoners with the explosive firepower of supersonic V-2s. They arrived travelling at 3,000 miles an hour. If you were far enough away not to be injured by the explosion when one slammed into its unprepared target, then it's the explosion you heard first, followed, only then by the sound of its engine, sound that traveled slower than the rocket, until finally came its sonic boom from the upper atmosphere from whence it had come. It was all topsy-turvy, weird and alarming, frightening thousands. At that time, Randy, in Italy, prepared to exchange firepower with the German 42nd Yager Division on the Faso-Vetro Canal, but it was Heather, 2nd Lieutenant Heather Abrams, War Correspondent, who had wanted to cover the war, who never heard the delayed sonic boom of the V-2's explosion that killed her.

~~~~

~~~~

### Chapter Five

### Shore Patrol

Time for a yarn of the sea, writes our uncle Lieutenant-Commander Joe, long since dead, whose extraordinary notebook was recently discovered tucked away on a shelf in the home of his nephew, Vic. Close to 95, Vic, who was awarded two DFC's as a B-25 bomber pilot against the Japanese in WWII, was bombing his bookshelves with the same resoluteness, when down came Joe's notebook, evidence of his determination to make the most of his career in the U.S. Navy. As battleship Executive Officer, he was, along with other tasks, chief Shore Patrol officer in Shanghai and along the Yangtze River in the early 1920s. This was long after two Opium Wars when treaties conceding lands were given over by China to the occupying powers, United States, France and Great Britain. The first such treaty, signed in Nanjing in 1842, ceded Hong Kong to Britain. These Concessions, as they were termed, led to a massive expansion of trade with the Far East, and to a considerable increase in the work of naval shore patrols at ports of call.

Joe's many activities and interactions in Shanghai with prostitutes, opium facilities and nightclubs, included efforts to save sailors from themselves. These sometimes had unexpected results. Suzette was one of these.

"The evening had been unbelievably dull," writes Joe. "I had sent all but one of my riot squad to round up those on duty and return to our quarters at the YMCA for the night. Dull, it was. Not an argument with the police. Not a fight with British or French sailors. Nothing. Not even a reported argument with a ricksha coolie, and those were normally a dime a dozen. My chief boatswain's mate and I were slowly cruising about in our ricksha, double checking before turning in, when, near the borderline of 'No Man's Land', the street on the other side of which was China proper, we saw a girl in a ricksha, followed by a drunken American sailor in a second rickshaw. They were just a half block from the forbidden line and heading for it. I told my coolie to step on it. The girl saw us and urged her coolie on. With her head start, she got to the door of her place, helped the sailor out, dragged him inside and slammed the door literally in our faces. I rang the doorbell, we knocked gently at first, then thumped on the heavy wooden door hard. Judging from lights in some of the windows, many people were inside. We continued banging until a window on the ground floor opened and a heavy Russian-accented voice said "Get away before I call the police. We don't want you here."

"I explained who we were and that we would leave them to their unholy peace if they would send that sailor out immediately, but, with another order to leave, the window snapped shut. We pulled out our brass knuckles and went to work on the Yale-type lock. That was the first time I saw demonstrated the terrific force and damage that a pair of knuckles could do. In U.S. territory the Shore Patrol was equipped with automatic pistols. However, according to international law, troops in foreign countries, under which heading we came, cannot go ashore with arms. In most places in the States carrying brass knuckles carries the same penalty as carrying a gun. This may have been true in the Concessions as well. I never inquired because it was to our advantage not to know.

"Taking turns at the lock, we finally kicked the door in and fell to the floor. We no longer had the protection of the Concessions and anything might happen. Keeping close to the ground, the chief felt about quietly, found the light switch, and suddenly the room was full of light. There was the Russian in bed with his head under the pillows. I slipped my hand in under the pillows and sure enough, the devil had a gun but lacked the courage to pull it. He protested that there were no sailors in his place, a rather low brothel with about a hundred girls. We didn't argue but forced him in his pajamas to precede us from one cubbyhole to another, turning on the lights as we went. It was surprising what and whom we saw: an important British Concession police officer; a prominent American businessman who was one of the mainstays of the American Club; and revolting sights which could be duplicated only in Marseilles and Port Said. We found the sailor, drunk, struggling to take off his shorts. Chief took him in charge.

"The girl was on the bed, nude. With a leap and a cry of fury, she came at me clawing, yelling in Russian and bad English, and weeping in furious anger. I slapped her face, at which she collapsed and sank onto the bed. She was the most beautiful female animal I had ever seen.

"I made her put on a kimono and come downstairs with us. The sailor was sobered by the excitement, and the Russian whoremaster was backed into the far corner of the drawing room where we gathered, nauseated by its nude statues and the most disgustingly erotic painting I have ever seen. Amid tears, and an occasional attempt to hide her face in shame, the girl said she had been without food for several days and was given a job in this place that very day, on a strictly commission basis. I had snatched her very first client from her. I took her along with us, assuring her she was not under arrest.

"I am certain the chief believes to this day that I had ulterior motives. We took her to the Jew's Place, as it was known, a restaurant operated by a Jewish couple from Newark. I asked them to care for her for a few days and let her wait on tables. Knowing me, and asking no questions, they took her upstairs, gave her a room where she could stay, and outfitted her with a white apron. Minutes later I saw a new Suzette emerge, nod her thanks to me, and start waiting table on a couple of sailors. Here is her story, most of which was verified by me and by the American Consul in Vladivostok.

"Suzette's father owned the largest jewelry store in Petrograd, now Leningrad. At the time of the Red revolution of 1917 she was a girl of 16 at a boarding school. Her seven-year old brother was tutored at home. Since there had been numerous cases of the Bolsheviks murdering priests and nuns, and raping young girls in convents and schools, she was to remain at home on the family estate. In the event of an emergency she was to go to the huge barn where the horses were stabled and where, in the floor of one of the stalls, were hidden the most valuable of the store's unset jewels. These she was to hide in her clothing and make her way to some safe place. Mischka, the head groom, a giant of a fellow, no longer young but with the strength of a bull, was devoted to the family and could be depended upon to help her and her brother escape.

"The warnings came none too soon. She was out in the woods with her brother when the rioters attacked the estate, slaughtered her parents as they ran from the house, and burned down their home. Mischka rescued the children, dressed them in peasant clothing, and taking horses and a droshky, led them east through northern Russia. When they reached a station on the Trans-Siberian Railway, the peasant with his two children boarded the train for Vladivostok. Almost at their destination, two drunken rowdies came aboard and one tried to make free with Suzette. Mischka gave the man a terrific beating, but was knifed by the other man. Exhausted, he didn't realize he was bleeding internally, lay down to sleep and never woke up. The two children were now alone. Fortunately, they were in Vladivostok.

"With sad hearts at the loss of Mischka, but, with some confidence in the future, they set out in quest of a place to live. Inquiring the way to the business district, Suzette followed a dignified sign to law offices, searched along the second floor corridor for a name she thought she could trust, and entered a door prominently inscribed as the office of Alexander Kosloff, the same name as one of her classmates at boarding school. The lawyer was all that she had hoped to find.

"He was courtly in his manner toward them and heard Suzette's story. He insisted that the daughter of a family such as hers was not to be lodged in some common boarding house or hotel where she would not have the protection a young girl of her age needed in a city as wild as Vladivostok. After a phone call in a language she did not understand, he said that his staff would prepare a separate apartment in his huge house for her and her brother. She would have her own bedroom and her own maid to serve her. However, she mentioned having a packet of stones. No home nowadays was safe for any valuables. His were in the vault of the largest bank in the city and he suggested that he deposit her parcel there also. He would give her a receipt for the package and make this deposit the next day. Modestly, she turned her back and, untying the cord of the leg of her drawers, produced the package which she handed to him. His receipt bore no date, specifying nothing more than that she had given him a parcel. He placed the parcel in his office safe.

"His imposing home was set within a walled structure. The interior gave evidence of being the home of a man of taste and wealth. The servants were quiet and helpful. The two young people were installed in a suite of rooms. After a bath and a meal served in their quarters, bed seemed such a heavenly place. It was noon.

"When Suzette awakened it was past ten at night. The quiet of the afternoon was now broken by shrill laughter and loud voices of, perhaps, a birthday party in full swing. She ventured upon her small balcony. Looking to the right, she could see into a room on the floor below. She saw a man and a woman actually making love. She rang for her maid.

"Kosloff arrived, apologized profusely, obviously very angry. His newly married nephew and wife had arrived only that day. But surely, in their ardor, they should have had the decency and common sense to draw the curtains. Suzette understood. After all, she was 16. The truth was, as she learned later, this was an expensive brothel.

"Kosloff told her he had lost everything in the revolution and, retaining part of his large home for himself and guests, had leased the major part to what he thought was an honorable couple, only to find that they were brothel keepers and that he could not break the lease. Clearly, Suzette would not want to remain there. He then pressed his advantage. He pleaded her to marry him. He would then take her and her brother to a small place he owned in the suburbs. True enough, he was older than she was. Once married, she would have the protection of his powerful name and could enter into the social life of the community. He would send her brother to the finest school where he could continue his studies. She was confused. She appreciated his statement that this was all so sudden and that marriage was a most serious matter, that she would grow to be more affectionate toward him with time, and that, after marriage, her security and that of her brother would be an accomplished fact. It was a week before she gave her reply. The magic word that decided her was "security" for herself and her little brother. She gave her consent and they were married.

"After the marriage, he asked her to sign some papers which were his will she was witnessing so that in the event anything happened to him she and her brother would be well cared for. She signed whatever papers were placed before her and felt a warm feeling of gratitude toward this man who was, after all, a complete stranger until a very short time ago. What she did not know was that she signed away any rights she had to the jewels she brought, as well as to her father's estate and even to the control of her brother.

"Some weeks later she learned more about her husband. He was the sole owner not only of the brothel where she was first put up, but also of a string of brothels of different categories in Vladivostok and in the small communities surrounding the city. He was the brains and financial director behind the opium and smuggling rackets for all of eastern Siberia. He was hand in glove not only with members of the old regime but also with the Bolsheviks. All this she heard from the servants who hated and feared him. This was beyond her ken, until she learned that he had not one, but two mistresses. For the latter she reproached him, and for his sadistic, erotic habits and desires against which she fought, and was consequently beaten time and again. She was miserable, especially when she learned that she had given up all rights over her brother, and was even forbidden to visit the boy until she knuckled under and did as he wished, including receiving his friends in her bedroom.

"She lost weight to the extent that the Russian doctor feared for her mental and physical condition. He informed her husband that unless she could get away for a couple of months before the hard winter weather set in she would not survive the winter. It was not compassion that made Kosloff give in, but strategy. He was not yet finished with her usefulness. His idea was to open a deluxe brothel with his wellborn and beautiful wife as the madame. Playing it safe, he said she could see her brother again only on her return from Shanghai, from where she took ship in late August. He supplied her with plenty of money and gave her a list of persons in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Manila to whom she could go for more money. These were his associates in the narcotics, white slavery and smuggling operations.

"Suzette could not believe in her liberty. She took deluxe quarters at the Palace Hotel in Shanghai, soothed the feminine soul by shopping for clothes, but made no effort to make friends other than with the Russian chambermaid who did her room. She soon noticed, however, that whenever she stopped to look in shop windows, reflected in the glass was the same man who always followed her wherever she went. He made no effort to speak to her. His presence was to remind her of Kosloff's warning on the day of departure, that if she were untrue to him she would never see her brother again, dead or alive. When she travelled by ship to Hong Kong and Manila to replenish her funds, then back to Hong Kong and Shanghai, her husband's watchdog was always there. She stayed at the Palace until her funds ran out and then heard from her sources that they were very sorry but could not let her have any more. One of them ascertained how much she owed the hotel. He called to say he would give her enough to pay her outstanding expenses. He then handed her a ticket on a ship that was sailing that afternoon for Vladivostok and was ordered to go aboard immediately. She was whipped. At the last minute, as they started to remove the gangway, she bolted back to the Palace, leaving all her luggage on board, and also her watchdog, because he was no longer to be seen.

"Having been such a good customer, she was able to buy and charge complete outfits hoping that somehow she would be able to pay. The hotel, too, was not concerned about the bill she was running up. Here was a woman of culture and wealth living in a suite. Naturally, her credit was very good. After two months, however, she was asked to call at the office of the manager. There she broke down and confessed that she had run out of money and that her husband would send her no more. She was asked to relinquish her quarters. The hotel would not prefer charges but would be grateful if she would remember the debt when she found herself again in funds. The shops closed in on her demanding either payment or the return of the clothes and shoes. Reduced to what she had on her back and destitute of funds, with not even a place to sleep that night, she returned to the hotel where the manager gave her a small room over the kitchen for two nights. The bar and dining services were cut off.

"She was walking down Nanking Road, looking as wretched as she felt and weeping softly when she was stopped by a Russian woman who realized that this well dressed lady was in difficulties. Over a bite and cup of hot coffee, she broke down completely. The woman explained that a Russian woman in Shanghai, alone and without funds, but with Suzette's youth, good looks and fine clothes, could make a lot of money as a prostitute, which the woman herself was. Suzette saw no choice. She accompanied her to the brothel just across the line from the Concessions. And that is where we found her and had robbed her of her first client and her first earnings.

"For three days the chief and I called at the Jew's Place to speak with Suzette. Her worry was what her sadist husband would do to her brother when the ship docked and she was not aboard. Then, also, without a considerable amount of money she could do nothing about getting her brother away.

"On the fourth day she asked me to take her for a walk before the restaurant got busy. As we walked down the Bund, she stopped, looked me straight in the eye, her face flaming with the shame of what she was proposing, and said slowly that she was actually, in conscience and in thought, a prostitute, since she had already entered such a house of her own free will. If only she could enter a decent such house where she could earn enough to make it possible to bring her brother to her. She insisted that in my work as Senior Patrol Officer I must know of such places which were not vulgar, such as where I had found her, and where she would be well thought of by the clients who came there.

"Well, what was I to do? Without knowing it, she was describing Bessie's place. How could a decent sort of young man deliberately put a wellborn girl into a brothel? I gave her what was left of my month's pay that would be enough for a cheap room and cheap food for a couple of weeks. I thought of taking up a collection for her, but I would not be believed, and was being taken in by a clever young tart. I discarded the idea. But the threat to her young brother was real. I finally went to Bessie and laid it all on the line straight from the shoulder exactly as it was told to me. The answer was no! Russian girls were too temperamental, wanted to be treated as if they were princesses, and tried to give everyone orders including Bessie herself. NO! Then, I said, she must go back to Kosloff. "Who?" demanded Bessie. That was the first time his name was mentioned.

"Bring her around for tea tomorrow."

"She knew Kosloff of old on the occasional trips he made to Shanghai. The last time he was beaten to a pulp and thrown into the street by the doorman and other guests because he was drunk and his sadistic impulses were such that he almost killed Merry, one of her girls. She would befriend anyone who, as an alternative, had to go to Vladivostok to live with that beast.

"Suzette came with me to have tea with Bessie. Bessie's maternal instinct overwhelmed her, and she said it was the first time she had felt that way about any girl in her place. She was kindness itself. She took Suzette to the quarters she was to occupy, explained the routine, gave her some money for decent additional clothes, and told her she should not entertain any client for a week or so unless Suzette herself requested it, and there would be no charge for her room during that time. Then I took my departure. Suzette kissed me on the cheek when I said goodbye. Bessie saw me to the door, and with tears in her eyes, also kissed me on the cheek. I believe I was the first and only friend who was so treated. She suggested I not come to the house for about two weeks, it being best for Suzette to not have a shoulder to weep on when she thought of her brother.

"As for that, she said that McGonigle, who was supply officer of the Navy cargo ship, had been in the night before and told her that in a few days he was to make a run to the island in Vladivostok harbor to deliver the last load of supplies to the radio station we manned there before everything was frozen in. I went to Mac's ship in the river, told him the whole story, and made it apparent that the danger to the boy was real. Emotional Mac cleared his throat, wiped his eyes and said "By God, something has to be done!" I left the ship with the feeling that Mac would try to do whatever he could when he got north.

"Within a day or two after that, the annual dry-dock repair work on my ship had been done and we were ordered up the river. In the eight months that I was away from Shanghai I thought often of Suzette and her brother. I wrote her, and Bessie, several times, and received not a word from either. But mail going upriver at low water season was always difficult.

"Then I was ordered back to Shanghai to join another ship. It was with a wide grin that Bessie's doorman greeted me. Bessie's greeting was warm - and cagey. I asked how Suzette was.

"Suzette? What Suzette? She had no one in the house by that name. I went along with what I thought was a joke, but Bessie persisted that she knew nothing about Suzette, especially not Russian girls that I knew she would never have in her place. I knew I was not balmy. What the hell was going on?

"I phoned Juanita, a Spanish girl who danced like a summer breeze, and she agreed to have dinner with me at the Carlton, a huge restaurant above the Opera House with a wide staircase. At the head of the stairs one was received with a formal deep bow by a white-tie member of the staff, who would call you properly by name and rank. No one would think of coming to the Carlton in other than black tie or uniform, and the ladies were always dressed for the evening. As I proudly mounted the stairs with the beautiful Juanita on my arm, I glanced up the stairs. Coming down was Suzette on the arm of a handsome elderly man, obviously Russian, he in dinner coat and she magnificently dressed. We saw each other the same instant. Her warm smile changed instantly to an expression almost of fear. She kept her eyes downcast as she passed us. I am certain neither her escort nor Juanita noticed the by-play of expressions.

"I knew that something was amiss. Perhaps "amiss" is the wrong word. There was a conspiracy of some sort. I had a delightful evening with Juanita and mutual friends who joined us for champagne and dinner with me as host. After all, I had been up the river eight months, far into the interior of China where one could not spend much money and I therefore had plenty of it. We had fun. But after saying goodnight to Juanita, I immediately went to Bessie's. She knew I had seen Suzette from the expression on my face.

"From the day Suzette entered Bessie's she was a prime favorite of not only Bessie and the other members of the place, but with the clientele. From the day, three weeks later, that she was seen by a wealthy, elderly widower, who was also Russian, something emotional seemed to click. It was felt by everyone in the house. Suzette became introspective and quiet, not like her usual, ebullient self. During two weeks after their first meeting, this Russian gentleman came every evening to see her. The two weeks ended by her leaving to live with him in his home. About a week after that, they were married. Suzette had been married now for about six months. I could attest from her expression when I had seen her that she was very happy. The look of fear was exactly that: fear that I would speak to her and perhaps spoil something precious that she now had.

"I learned from Bessie that when a girl had the good fortune to marry, the moment she left the house she was a complete and total stranger to them all. The principle was that the girl has that one in a million chance for happiness, and the girls were not going to do anything to jeopardize that chance. Everything connected with her former life has been erased completely and effectively. I began to understand and to admire. But what about the brother? Suzette had become explosively and radiantly active and conversant, Bessie told me. She couldn't sit still. Every part of her vibrated with happiness and elation. McGonigle, God bless him, had brought the boy back with him.

"When Mac arrived in Vladivostok he made discreet inquiries with the Russian ship's chandler who supplied U.S. Navy ships with food. When Kosloff's name was mentioned, he exploded. Kosloff was in jail and would be for a long time. He had entangled a young lady in his white slave racket. Unknown to him, she was the niece of the general commanding the Red Russian troops in the area. The investigation which followed brought to light that he was smuggling and depriving the then government of funds, was trafficking in narcotics as well as women, and was not paying his taxes. Mac also discovered that his so-called marriage to Suzette was a farce and not legal. He sent the ship's chandler to the school the boy attended. They had heard of Kosloff's predicament and were wondering who would pay tuition for the next semester. Posing as his uncle, the chandler took the boy out of school for the time being, and passed him over to Mac, who smuggled him aboard his ship. The stowaway was ordered ashore at the first port of call, which happened to be Shanghai, and where fortunately there was a relative there who could care for him."

Joe's notebook yarn ends with "Finis, to a completely true and heartwarming story."

### Chapter Six

### When You Wake

Early in the morning of Sunday, the 31st of the month, Daniel Graham's wisdom tooth, the one on the left that had been annoying him for the past two weeks, declined to be ignored any longer. Several sharp pains shot through him in such quick succession that he bolted from his bed to stand shivering with fright in the hallway. His eyes searched for a nightmarish figure of a hooded executioner who was about to remove Daniel's head with a large, heavy, serrated toothbrush. It was the day before he was to start work on the city's morning paper where he had been hired as a cub reporter, thanks to having been editor of his school's newspaper.

It had to be a Sunday. Phone calls to dentists went unanswered except for one who reluctantly agreed to see him. Outside the run-down apartment house where the dentist had his practice, a broken sign read, in barely legible letters, Dentist – Third Floor.

Even more reluctant than the dentist had been to receive him, Daniel approached the bleak, dank-smelling stairwell and slowly climbed the crumbling cement stairs to the third floor, gripping the grimy wooden banister for support as the light from below dissolved into deepening gloom. He crossed the landing to the far end where a door bearing a filthy lopsided sign, similar to the one in the street, proclaimed his destination. One look at the dark, menacing door and he was backing away, the toothache miraculously gone, until he reached the top of the stairs, when a stabbing twinge reminded him why he was there. With hand pressed over aching mouth, he rushed back to the door, jabbed at the doorbell, and, not hearing it ring, knocked loudly, twice, desperately. From inside, the door chain rattled, the door opened a crack, and an unshaven, hirsute old man in a tunic, once white, now stained and dirty, stared expressionlessly, a blank look in his bleary eyes. A powerful stench of stale beer and whiskey stole into the corridor, adding to the odiferous smells that pervaded the building. Daniel shuddered and took a step back.

"Who are you? What do you want?"

Stuttering a reply, he admitted he was the one with the toothache, the one who'd phoned him. Grudgingly, old grizzly released the chain, grasped the resisting hand that was again pressed against Daniel's aching mouth and yanked him forward before closing the front door quickly and restoring the chain. He pointed to the half-open door of his clinic, gesturing to proceed within, and still, without a word, ushered his victim toward the dental chair with its rusting drill hanging above it like the sword of Damocles.

Fearfully, Daniel eased himself into the old-style dental chair with its narrow footstool and rinsing basin by the side. The stains on the dentist's cloak complemented the brownish-red spattering of dried blood around the bowl. In no way was this encouraging, not with the man standing over Daniel, his unshaven face terrifyingly close. Waving his finger in an upward motion, he indicated for the patient to open his mouth, and when he did, thrust in his hand and the tiny mirror it was holding, and shook his head. Daniel groaned, placed a finger on the other cheek, tried to say 'This side' which came out 'Ish-ide', and felt the hand and mirror move accordingly.

A grunt from the dentist who, leaving the mirror hanging from Daniel's mouth, retreated to climb three steps of a ladder leaning against a wall of bookshelves from where he extracted a thick, dusty volume, whose title could not be discerned from the chair. Brushing the dust off with the hand that had recently been in his patient's mouth, he thumbed through several pages, and, on finding what he was looking for, returned to Daniel, put the book in his lap, and, upon the patient gesticulating to his mouth while making queer sounds, removed the still dangling mirror, before pointing to the art work to indicate the problem.

A sketch of a badly infected tooth, in such an advanced state of decay that it seemed about to discharge itself from the page, was followed by three words of instructions in large, bold capitals on how to use a pair of pliers (pictured) to remove it. These, the dentist went to get. Flipping to the beginning of the book, the title page read Modern Dentistry with the publication date, 1882. Another look at the illustration and the three words "GRIP AND PULL" was enough.

Daniel was out the chair and at the front door, jerking desperately to free the chain, stammering to the befuddled dentist that he had to go, he was late, he'd return tomorrow, sorry to have bothered him. Not waiting for an answer, Daniel flew the coop, flying down the stairs, running home, the pain gone.

The Monday newspaper reported that neighbors had heard a shot and called police who broke into an apartment in the old part of town to find the tenant, a dentist, apparently a suicide. There was no indication of foul play, although fingerprints on a book, open to extraction procedures, and a hand tool with two hinged arms and serrated jaws, found by his surgical chair, were being investigated.

Blurting out his misadventure to his new boss, and castigating himself for having stupidly postponed seeing a dentist for two weeks, he was sent off to a surgeon, (paid for by the newspaper), and, as the last person to see the suicidal dentist alive, ordered to write the first front page news story by a cub reporter. In the next day's paper, a proud mother read his report underneath his by-line, confirming her oft said truism "When you wake up in the morning, you never know how the day will end".

### Chapter Seven

### Drinks on the House

There's this Royal Mile that leads down to Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. Maybe you've walked it. The Queen settles in once a year for a week but it's unlikely she walks the Mile to make the pub crawl I did with some friends the evening prior to my nightmare. I think what brought it on was the extra drink on the house proffered by the numerous barmen glad to welcome a carousing band of inebriated Scotsmen into their taverns. When Canada Dry plastered the neighborhood, and most of Scotland, with posters and billboards inviting us to "Drink Canada Dry", we planned to arrive in Canada with the full intention of doing just that, but stayed home when we found out they were promoting nonalcoholic beverages. The evening's binge was to make up for our disappointment. We sang "When I get a couple of drinks on a Saturday, Glasgow belongs to me," though it wasn't Saturday and we weren't in Glasgow, and we toasted Harry Lauder with a rousing "Bottoms Up", gave the rebel yell "Up Yours", and danced the Highland Fling, before moving on to the next pub for another drink on the house and several rounds of intoxicating beers. We ended up at the Palace gates where a stern guard, refusing to join us, called on the police to lock us up for the night. The Queen was not amused. Neither was I when, in an uncomfortable, crowded cell, with my thumb in my mouth like a baby to comfort myself, I finally drifted off to sleep, to begin my nightmare. It wasn't new to me. I'd been having the same one for years, only, until that night, I never knew why.

I'm reading a letter. Ever since it arrived, I'm up nights thinking about it. I'm not up, of course. I'm dreaming that I'm up nights reading a letter but can't remember what it's about. Doesn't matter. I'm at it again with the mind twirling around, trying desperately to settle on one specific paragraph, one incident. Then I can sleep. For now. Before it begins all over again. They'll let me sleep. Surely they'll let me sleep, won't they? Try again. Think. One incident. What was it? What? What?

That sunny day? When we strode the boardwalk together, hand in hand, two children smiling into the lens of a tripod-fixed box camera, accepting the photographer's card, his invitation to acquire the picture on the morrow. I'm supposed to remember. I don't. Someone did. The photo's in the album. I should look at it again. It's enshrined somewhere in one of the albums. Which one? Where are the albums? There. Squeezed together, clinging to each other, fused memories, hoarded treasures, scrapbooks of life past. Frenziedly, I turn pages in my nightmare, swiftly, one album after another, not permitting other pictures to divert me, desperate to spot it glaring at me shamelessly, trapped between decaying, brittle corner snags making their last effort to clutch the prints of yesterdays entrusted to their care. The photograph remains hidden, eluding me as though it understands its story is not timely. Not yet. I leave the albums cast indiscriminately on the floor and wander off, my head abuzz, searching, searching for the one answer I must find to liberate me from the letter's grip.

Am I going crazy? An inadvertent chuckle, a laugh, a chortle. It builds to hysteria until I am laughing uncontrollably, at absolutely nothing. An incident? Yes, that would stop them. Unexpected. I'd never hear from them again. Them. Who are "them"? Then it comes to me. The suddenness of the memory explodes within me, snuffing the hysteria like a snapped out candle flame. The imaginary letter, the boardwalk together, the photograph, then - - . Now I remember. The drive home from the seashore The thumbprint of my life. Her thumb. The blackened thumb. Her screams! In the cell, I yelled it out, loud, clear enough to waken me from the nightmarish depths of my besotted drunkenness. "Look at her thumb! I did that! I slammed the car door on her. I didn't mean to! I didn't see her!" I was sobbing now. "I was five. Five!" I yelled. My four-year-old sister's screams reverberated in the cell, but they were coming from me.

### Chapter Eight

### The Upper Crust

Volunteering allowed Sol Karno to pick the service branch he favored. The Fleet Air Arm was the elite branch of the navy that, despite the war, did not yet accept conscripts, only volunteers. When he applied, he was a typical immature youth dazzled by the thought of himself as a navy pilot, handsome in his Air Arm uniform. The Fleet Air Arm's 'volunteers only' policy had not yet changed, as it did later when the war lengthened. There was also another policy that was rumored, but which he chose to ignore. It also was forced to change later as the war dragged on.

He couldn't wait to open the envelope from the Admiralty inviting him to Whitehall for an interview. Marching into Whitehall as though he were an old Navy hand, Sol soon sobered up, becoming increasingly nervous during a three-hour wait and occasional conversations with other candidates in a chilly anteroom, before finally being ushered into the intimidating presence of five King George V bearded naval officers imposingly seated behind a long, massive oak desk. One solitary straight-back chair faced them.

"Please be seated, Mr. Karno." The rear-admiral (or so he surmised, counting the braid on his sleeve) was polite. "You've been waiting sometime, I believe?"

"Outside? That's all right. Yes....sir." He tried to hide the Scottish accent. The admiral's was so very uppa English.

"It was intentional, you know. You were being observed."

"Oh. I didn't know. But then, of course, I wouldn't, would I?" Sol's tongue was running off with his mouth as he wondered what he had said to fellow applicants. "I spent the time interviewing some of the others who were waiting, sir." He added the 'Sir' this time. He was talking too much. Nervous, that was it. He clamped shut.

"Did you now? You've had experience at interviewing?" The admiral (rear) was smiling.

"No, sir. I was making a joke, sir." The admiral's smile was gone.

"Were you? Karno? That's an unusual name. Is it French?"

"No, sir. Jewish. My grandfather changed it from Karnovsky. And the Sol was Solomon. He was a tobacconist. 'Solomon Karnovsky' . His name was too long for the shop sign." Why couldn't he keep his mouth shut? 'No, sir' would have been enough.

"Ah, Jewish are you? We don't have many Jews in the Fleet Air Arm."

That's when Sol recalled the rumor, about there being an unofficial restrictive policy in the navy's elite, upper crust service. The off-hand remark riled him. He answered more impudently than intended. "Is that so? Well, we're in a war now......sir."

The admiral harrumphed. "Yes. Quite."

A question came from the lowest ranking officer at the end of the table. Unexpected. From out of left field. It floored Sol with its viciousness. Added to the Jewish question, it diminished and demolished him. "You do play rugger, of course, Mr. Karno?"

His brain was in overdrive. No pause. Flash the answer. He bluffed where truth was required. How admit soccer was his game, the sport of the lower classes? He'd never played rugby in his life, didn't understand the game, but saying he played could be the key to being accepted. "Yes, sir. Absolutely, sir."

"What position, Mr. Karno?"

Position? . "Er, in the back, sir."

"Back?"

Sol's face flushed. He could feel his knuckles whiten as his grip tightened on the cloth of his trouser legs. The five beards pointed accusingly, awaiting an answer. Out of the depths he dredged up something recalled from the sports pages. "Three-quarter, sir." He was confused. Wasn't that American football, another sport he knew nothing about? He may have bluffed a soccer player. Not a rear-admiral. Or the others, all obviously Oxbridge men.

A few more questions, none unobjectionable, one about cricket, which he played well, another concerning his soccer abilities, an offhand remark that he was "quite the athlete", and his fevered response that he also played tennis, drew a crushing finality from the rear-admiral. "That will be all today, Mr. Karno. We'll let you know our decision. Thank you for giving us an opportunity to meet you." The tone was sarcastic.

For days afterwards, Sol flushed recalling the shame of the experience. He stumbled into the waiting room, averting his eyes from the remaining candidates, all of whom obviously played rugby.

He was to spend a year more in the office of the munitions plant from which he had hoped to escape. Thankfully, he hadn't mentioned to anyone there his intention to volunteer.

A month after the interview, a letter from the Admiralty advised that inquiries at the plant had revealed that he was in a currently reserved occupation and, much to their regret, could not be accepted into the Fleet Air Arm at present. However, if his employment status were to change, the Admiralty would be pleased to hear from him without delay since he had passed the entry interview and qualified for voluntary induction.

Go figure. The plant manager was an old Cambridge man. Sol asked him about rugby positions. Turns out that for the three-quarters' group one needs speed, agility and tactical sense.

### Chapter Nine

### Tractorial Delights

In the early days of the kibbutz there was a large water tower, much admired by visitors unaware that the water came from a deep well in Kadoorie, the agricultural college two miles away. From there it was pumped into a mobile water tank, then to the water tower, from where it flowed to the communal kitchen, laundry and showers. It was water water everywhere but no more so than on the day it rained buckets.

Carried on a wagon hitched to a tractor, the water tank, as big as a ship container, took several hours to fill. In wet weather Gershon Gordon tried to palm the pleasure off on one of the other tractor drivers, but all were always unavailable. It was his responsibility to see that the water level in the tower never fell below the low mark, indicated by a descending red marker on its outer shell. One week, several days of unremitting rain kept him from his appointed task. With the water level dangerously low, he had to abandon the pleasant assignment of rearranging bales in the warm, dry barn, to go haul the tank wagon to the supply well at Kadoorie.

Summertime, he often took the longer way via the main road so that he could stop by the fruit-laden age-old fig trees at the bend of the road where it turns off to Kadoorie. Sticky and sugary, the large, juicy, purple figs gratified his sweet tooth but had the incidental effect of making him more regular than he wished. The longer way to and from Kadoorie would have been the shorter way in the end on this particular rain-swept day.

Although Gershon made good speed driving there over the muddy dirt track, the return journey, towing the now heavy tank filled with swishing, sloshing water, was a nightmare. The green John Deere tractor, not the yellow Caterpillar that he should have taken, skidded on its large rubber tires from one side of the mud-slick dirt road to the other as he fought the gravitational pull of the constantly moving water. Struggling to prevent the mechanical monster from lunging off the road into the overflowing ditches was like trying to stop an alligator slithering off a river bank.

Approaching the kibbutz entrance, a final vigorous heave on the joystick to keep the load on the road, knifed the tractor sharply to the right. The water in the tank, like a tsunami striking an island, surged in the opposite direction, propelling the wagon's two left wheels into the ditch, the entire weight of wagon, tank and water smashing through and severing the main water tower pipeline, the pipeline that carried water to every outlet in the kibbutz, and that crossed beneath the ditch at that precise point.

Futile attempts to back up, straighten out, and then jerk rapidly forward at full throttle, failed to persuade the wagon to leave its harbor. It was stuck in swirling water gushing from the broken pipeline into a ditch already inundated from the day the first rains fell. Cursing volubly in Arabic, Hebrew being devoid of suitable swear words, Gershon got down off the tractor to do battle with the connecting pin in a strenuous effort to unhitch the John Deere from the wagon. One foot in the ditch, one on the mud-choked road, he tugged and twisted the accursed pin until, suddenly, it shot upwards in his tightly closed hand, releasing the packed fist to smack hard into his jaw, tumbling him backwards into the overflowing ditch. But the tractor was free. Covered with mud, soaking wet, dispirited, Gershon drove it, wagonless and tankless, into the yard. The sight of men and women framed in the doorways to the showers, scantily wrapped in towels, soaped up from head to wherever, cheered him momentarily. Unnecessarily, they shouted that he couldn't shower, dirty and wet as he was, because there was no water.

"I know. I know. Don't worry. I know what to do." Acknowledging their mistrustful rude remarks with a half-hearted Queen of England wave, Gershon headed for the sheds, switched from the John Deere to the Caterpillar and, encouraged by the cheers and jeers of the great half-washed, returned, with plumbers, pipefitters and other assorted kibbutzniks, to mend the pipeline and rescue the wagon with its precious load, bringing what remained of it to the water tower where, after pumping from tank to tower, the red marker indicated that what had been lost to the burst pipe required replacing. This time, even with the Caterpillar, he took the long way back from Kadoorie.

Gershon spent the next week away from tractors, working in the sheep pens. There weren't many sheep in the kibbutz and they didn't graze the fields, spending their lives coralled in pens, well fed and encouraged to breed. Their milk was sufficient to keep the farmers in cheese and his job that week was to milk the lucky blighters.

Sitting on a low stool behind the placid beasts, not by the side of, as with cows, with his head pushed against their rear ends and exposed to their fragrant vapors, Gershon grasped their tiny tits between thumb and forefinger and squeezed, directing the flow of milk into the bucket beneath. The excitement of having their tits squeezed by an inexperienced newcomer caused them to urinate unexpectedly, at which point he was supposed to whisk the bucket out of the way of the wrong liquid before it mixed in with the milk. Not always quick enough, he learned from the master sheepherder that it didn't really matter as long as he evaded most of it, since it was from this concoction that the kibbutz made the popular Bryndza, a cheese with a delectable piquancy. Marinated in brine for four months, the rich, creamy, salty result is marketed to a public that has no factual information of whisking efforts.

A separate table was reserved at the back of the dining hall for those resourceful, felicitous men and women employed in the cowsheds, the chicken coops and the sheep pens, their penetrating aroma preferred at as far a distance as possible from the other tables, and, as Gershon quickly discovered, not entirely eradicated by long, hot showers. It was time to return to the great outdoors where the air was fresh and the breezes cool.

The 80 kibbutzniks farmed their 1,000 acres of wheat, barley and oats, with plows, harrows and cultivators, three tractors, the John Deere, Massey Harris and Caterpillar, and one combine, They had 100 head of sheep, chicken coops with 1,500 chickens, 30 beehives, cowsheds with 20 cows and calves, one satisfied bull, and an ever growing daily milk production of 75 gallons, a vegetable garden for their own use, a stable with mules for labor and two horses for patrolling the fields, a truck to carry produce to market, a pick-up for smaller loads, a metals workshop, and a growing operation for manufacturing roof tiles for their own use and for sale to other kibbutzim and to contractors in nearby towns.

The kibbuutz tractor drivers, the tractorists, on changing the afternoon shift, rode horseback to the farthest fields. Gershon reveled in the long gallop, leaning over the horse's mane, half-standing in the stirrups, derriere in the air, wind whistling in his ears, shouting encouragement at the top of his lungs to the speeding beast beneath, praying it wouldn't suddenly halt and send him flying over its head. It was the best part of the day.

The worst, the loneliest, was the night shift when the tractor's headlights barely illuminated the edge of the previous furrow. On one such night, Gershon plowed up and down a never before cultivated, virgin field, turning over furrow after furrow, the hours passing slowly, interminably. Occasionally, he stopped to refuel from the supply drums brought each morning on the pick-up truck. Refueling himself with a sandwich and a chunk of halva, he stepped a distance away from the drums to relieve himself, spraying the new furrows in a long, satisfying swing before returning to his mind-numbing job.

When he first started driving a tractor and working the soil, he relished having so much undisturbed time to think. What to think about, he hadn't yet decided. Specific subjects eluded him. But the repetitious, monotonous cultivating, instead of freeing the mind for intelligent reasoning, cluttered it with endless daydreams. Mechanically, hypnotically, he reversed course at the end of each furrow, impenetrable cactus thickets preventing him from otherwise driving on.

On this night, shortly before dawn, eyes beginning to close, he paused for a few minutes shut-eye, slumping gratefully in the seat. A half-hour later, at first light, he awoke to find he had stopped the tractor on the rim of a deep crater. With the traumatic realization that one more furrow plowed before he rested would have carried him headlong, tractor and all, into the depths, his shocked gaze revealed the barely exposed fins of a World War II unexploded bomb. A British Army bomb disposal squad showed up later in the morning for some spiffy target practice before successfully blowing up the bomb and creating an even bigger crater for Gershon's comrades to fill while he slept back in his room.

Those were the times when the British ruled Palestine, trying to keep the peace between Jews and Arabs, not particularly loving either one but inclined more to favoring the Arabs. Like when Gingy, the kibbutz truck driver, was stopped at a British police checkpoint. The revolver he carried to protect himself was confiscated and he was jailed over the weekend when the judge fined him 50 Palestine pounds and released him. Without his revolver.

Gershon was with Gingy on a previous occasion when they were returning from Afula after buying seed that Gershon was scheduled to sow the next day. It was nightfall. Curfew hour. They should not have been on the road. In a land where day makes an abrupt about-face to night, repudiating the soothing mitigation of twilight, the swiftly gathering darkness was minimally illuminated by the crescent of a new moon and the truck's headlights. Mindful that they could be stopped by British police for traveling during the government's night curfew hours, they stared ahead, tense, silent, watchful.

Imposing curfews was a security measure to prevent Arabs and Jews from harming each other and to thwart both sides from harming the British who were failing in their effort to keep the promise of the Promised Land.

To have the truck needlessly searched for arms, to be jailed overnight, and perhaps longer, and fined for ignoring the curfew, concerned them more than the off chance that an armed Arab gang, reputedly prowling Lower Galilee, might ambush them. Kibbutz instructions were to leave early enough to reach home during daylight or to spend the night in Afula. Heavy traffic on the way out of town slowed them down, and now Gingy was driving fast, close to home, but not close enough to make it before the last light of day was extinguished. They met no police, only Arabs, hiding in a ditch by the side of the road where it passed over a culvert.

Seeing the lights of the approaching truck, the marauders rushed to place dynamite sticks in the culvert under the road, swiftly playing out the fuse and ducking back with it into the ditch. The momentary movement of something rushing away from the road, quickly disappearing, attracted their attention.

"An animal," Gershon said.

"Never assume," Gingy muttered. Slamming the accelerator to the floor, he gripped the steering wheel hard and leaped the truck across the culvert bridge. Bullets blazed through Gingy's open window and out the passenger side missing Gershon. Gingy took one in the shoulder as, a second later, the culvert exploded behind them into shattered chunks of asphalt and concrete.

Next day, the seed, which almost cost them their lives, Gershon set out to sow. Despite his known skills as a tractor driver, no one had thought to check his map-reading skills, with the result that he sowed the wrong field, to the immense satisfaction of the neighboring kibbutz whose field it was. Gingy, recuperating from his wound, growled that if Gershon had been shot instead of him the kibbutz could have saved three bags of best quality seed.

Gershon, never one for accepting blame, criticized inaccurate mapping of the fields. The neighbors suggested he learn map-reading, thanked him for the day's work, and, generously, replaced the seed. The following day, escorted to the correct field, he sowed again.

Gershon had long come to know that Sefi was the glue holding the kibbutz members together. In his quiet, efficient, patient, inoffensive way, in his practical solutions to a multitude of problems, both individual and as a group, he was a true leader, commanding the love and respect of everyone. Sefi could work miracles, which was also why he held the most important post of administrative secretary.

Gershon's new girl friend, Shoshki, told him he needed condoms and that he could get them from the person in charge of such small supplies as soap, toothpaste, shoelaces, safety pins, cigarettes and, of course, condoms. Asking a previous girl friend, the "Small Supplies" boss, for a bar of soap is one thing. Asking for condoms is downright embarrassing and he wasn't going to do it. "It'll be easier for you to ask for them," he told Shoshki.

"You're asking for it, Gershon, and in more ways than one."

They were at an impasse but that was only because he didn't quite know what she was planning when she said "You'll get them after the weekly meeting Friday night."

The vote at the meeting was unanimous. Gershon was elected in charge of "Small Supplies". That solved the immediate problem with Shoshki, but created another. He could not, would not, listen to marital problems. "Nor do I want to know who's sleeping with whom and when, nor do I want to make wild assumptions, nor do I care for whispered requests, even when no one else is within a hundred meters of the "shop". as he called the tiny storage room. His immediate reaction was to seek a creative solution. He nailed a suitable box with a lid to the outside wall, filled it with condoms, and chalked on the wall: Help Yourself. Problem solved.

By mid-week, the kibbutz was in an uproar. Only Sefi was laughing. Gershon's girl wasn't talking about it to anyone. And he's in the doghouse. No one wanted to be seen approaching the "shop". Sometimes, at dark of night, a form could be spotted creeping silently toward the forbidden box, to change direction immediately at any unexpected sound. Criticism was rampant. "We have visitors." True. "Some visitors help themselves." True. "The girls are upset." He knew that to be true. They avoided looking at him. "The supply isn't keeping up with demand." That's also true. He suspected that whoever was taking them makes sure he, or she, didn't have to visit the box too often. Sefi laughed and solved the problem, guaranteeing that he'll be reelected secretary. Sefi took down the box and gave Gershon an assistant: Gershon's previous girl friend who had always shown a lively interest in condom requests.

When the subject of cigarettes came up at the weekly general meeting, Gershon Gordon sat back to enjoy the discussion, until he realized that he was involved. Why were some kibbutzniks smoking the more expensive Kent, Matossian and Dubek cigarettes? Where were these obtained and was it with kibbutz money or were they gifts from the family, and, if the latter, why were they not shared with the other smokers? If kibbutz money, then, unless it was a vacation subsidy, it was an improper use of allotted funds by those who were on outside work in other kibbutzim. It was agreed that due to the limited budget, only the cheapest Latif and Jasmine cigarettes would be purchased and be available at Small Supplies on a rationed basis. That involved Gershon. When a member came during "business hours" to ask for a pack, Gershon gave it, and had even been known to open for business at a special time when the shopper sounded desperate. When the supply ran low, he distributed half packs, and told Sefi, the kibbutz secretary, that he was running out of cigarettes. Treasurer Eliyahu, with Sefi's approval, would give Gingy, the truck driver, money to buy more next time he was in Afula or Haifa. Gershon restocks and everyone is happy. Except Sefi, who saw a developing problem. At the meeting, Gershon, a non-smoker, spoke about the benefits of not smoking, proposing that everybody not smoke for one day a week, and after one month, for two days a week, then three, and so on until this becomes the only kibbutz where nobody smokes. This brilliant idea is hooted down, with a great deal of laughter when someone suggested the same approach for condoms. Final decision, when put to a vote, was for Sefi to set a monthly smoking budget, that expensive cigarettes, no matter how obtained, be turned into Small Supplies for equal redistribution, and that heavy smokers be asked to cut down, an arrangement that didn't really solve the problem but satisfied the kibbutz share and share alike principle.

A stiflingly dry, grainy hamsin wind from the desert blew across the country. A tractor driver , looking much like our adventurous Gershon, wearing only a cotton hat (something like a tennis hat), and shorts, no shirt, and sandals, has a canvas canopy stretched over the driver's seat, affording the only protection from the fierce sun and none at all from the windblown sand and dust. There he is, on a field adjacent to the kibbutz yard, contentedly churning into the ground the yellow stubble from the summer reaping, reciting loudly, above the roar of the engine, Robert Burns's, 'To a Mouse'. As he comes to the line 'Till crash! The cruel coulter past /out thro' thy cell', the cruel plow literally stirs up a hornets' nest patiently constructed beneath the straw. Terrible to see is their rage as they rise to the attack like a swarm of kamikaze pilots. The canopy is no defense. He jumps from the moving tractor, and runs.

That no longer guided heap of metal, that undeterred John Deere, that escaped robot on wheels, crashes through the kibbutz fence, crosses the yard and rampages toward the chicken coop when, seconds away from turning squawking birds into fertilizer, it is boarded and stopped by the frantic kibbutz chef-at-large, with whom Gershon is having an affair, who foresees her hefty basket of newly laid eggs turn into omelettes beneath the cruising monster.

Back at the field, our desperate tractorist zigzags dementedly on foot, unable to avoid the maddened bombers. Helplessly, he falls prone to the ground, absorbing the stings, frenziedly heaping protective straw over his bare body. The buzzing fiends celebrate their furious victory with a last fly past over their moribund victim before returning to rebuild their wrecked home. Near death for several days, running a towering temperature of 105º, hallucinating wildly, poor sod Gershon barely understands the doctor who treats more than 100 stings and warns that one more sting in the future could kill. He swears to avoid hornets forever. The kibbutz chef-at-large proposes he avoid tractors forever. No other proposal is forthcoming.

### Chapter Ten

### Three Gilbert & Sullivan's For The Parody Minded

_Based on the Major-General's song in The Pirates of Penzance._

I am the very pattern of a modern professional.

I've information Internet, audio and digital.

I know to search with Google, and I quote from Wikipedia-l.

My documents in Word, I save, in order categorical.

I'm very well acquainted too with matters understandable.

I understand the weaknesses of students constitutional

About their inabilities absorbing such a lot of new....

Lot o' new....Lot o' new?

And many helpful facts about that very Word I wish they knew!

Chorus:

And many helpful facts about that very Word we wish they knew!

I'm very good explaining Word to any senior resident.

I know just how to make Word clear to educate a president.

I am the only teacher who's setting such a precedent

Encouraging my students to avoid their being decadent.

I add up all the credits to establish a diploma;

I acknowledge their attendance though they sleep like in a coma.

But once they concentrate again on monitor's corona....

Corona ....corona ?

I recognize their steadfastness and award them a diploma!

Chorus:

He recognizes steadfastness and awards them a diploma!

Based on "The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring" from The Mikado

Computers that work really quick....Tra la!

Breathe the promise of effortless joy.

As we merrily surf and we click....Tra la!

We welcome the mouse for its trick....Tra la!

Of arrowing in to deploy.

Of arrowing in to deploy.

And that's what we mean when we say that the trick

Is to love our computers that work really quick.

Chorus:

Tra la la la la la Tra la la la la la

Computers that work really quick.

Computers that work really quick....Tra la!

Can frighten us out of our wits

As we press the wrong keys or we click....Tra la!

Our work disappears at a lick....Tra la!

But backing-up saves duplicates

But backing-up saves duplicates

And that's what we mean when we say that the trick

Is to love our computers that work too damn quick

Chorus:

Tra la la la la la, Tra la la la la la

Computers that work too damn quick

Computers that work really quick....Tra la!

Bring grandkids avisiting fast

They'll sit and play games the day long....Tra la!

Ignoring our questioning song....Tra la!

Of how they are getting along

Of how they are getting along

And that's what we mean when we say that the trick

Is to love our computers that work really quick

Chorus:

Tra la la la la la, Tra la la la la la

Computers that work really quick.

Based on the Tit Willow song "On a Tree by a River" from The Mikado.

As he sat by his Desktop a fragile old wit

Sang "Dotcom, Dotcom-O! Dotcom-O!"

And I said to him "Young fellow, why do you sit

Singing Dotcom, Dotcom-O! Dotcom-O?

Is it weakness of intellect, chappie?" I cried,

"Or a rather tough Web site you cannot abide?"

With a shake of his balding gray head, he replied.

"Oh, Dotcom, Dotcom-O! Dotcom-O!"

He slapped on the mouse as he sat by the screen

Singing "Dotcom, Dotcom-O! Dotcom-O!"

And a cold perspiration bespangled his bean.

"Oh! Dotcom, Dotcom-O! Dotcom-O!"

He groaned and he sighed, and a gurgle he gave.

Then he banged on the keyboard when he failed to save

And the page he'd been searching went off to its grave

"Oh! Dotcom, Dotcom-O! Dotcom-O!"

Now I feel just as sure as I'm sure that my name

Isn't Dotcom, Dotcom-O! Dotcom-O!

That 'twas blighted affection that made him exclaim

"Oh! Dotcom, Dotcom-O! Dotcom-O!"

If you are bewildered and very confused,

Then the Web will just leave you forever bemused,

And you probably blamed In-ter-net as you cruised.

"Oh! Dotcom, Dotcom-O! Dotcom-O!"

### Chapter Eleven

### Recollections

To Vic on his birthday

There was a young pilot named Victor

Who fought old Japan 'til he licked 'er

With two DFCs

It's no wonder that he's

A danger to everyone's sister.

For a hangar permit he applied.

Not to build his own planes, he denied.

For boatbuilding only

He assured the Board boldly.

So he lied, so he lied, so he lied.

A helicopter first on Vic's list

Checked out with everything kissed.

Every screw was examined

Then strengthened and fastened

And took flight without an assist.

With a B-25 to revive

Vic mustered his crewmates alive

To assemble from start

That beat up old cart,

Then travel the circus and thrive.

As a kid he took over the basement,

A wash-machine motor and casement

From bits and more pieces

And wrenches and wheezes

He assembled the first ever motor vehicle that got stuck on the stairs - -

and no easement.

We'll not forget Gretty in all this romance

A dashing young lover Vic claimed the first dance.

She hemmed and she hawed

'Til resistance was thawed.

They wed, had two kids, one for knickers, one pants.

And all of it done without later recants.

Now ninety plus Vic's ever so bright

For sore eyes he's a marvelous sight

He attracts the young ladies

Much younger than he is

Watch out, ladies. You're in his bombsight.

To a Sister

Wee gracious, lovin', caring sister

O, how I never could resist 'er!

'Twas a time I couldna face her,

For bickering battle!

Were I loath to run an' chase her,

With murderin' pattle?

I'm truly sorry Mum's dominion

Had broken childhood's social union,

An' justified that ill opinion,

Which made thee startle

At me, thy poor, young pram companion,

All for a rattle!

I had no doubts that you would scream;

If you could speak then, you'd blaspheme!

When from the pram, my eyes agleam,

I shoved you out:

An' got a hiding, full of steam!

How Mum did shout!

Now that's a tale that I'll be ruin',

An' can't accept it's not a new 'un.

'Cos none o' that was I adoin'!

I shoved you not!

An' you'll admit, ere memory's strewn,

You too, forgot!

We've seen the years run past too fast,

An' children growin' up ablast;

An' cozie here, you're blessed at last

With grandkids swell!

Who not too long will soon amass,

Their own cartel.

Be not surprised to hear a tale,

Of young 'uns, once again, derail

Their siblings from their pram, and wail:

"She took my rattle!"

But you now know they'll soon prevail,

An' end the battle!

For, Sister, thou art not alone,

In proving love has never flown

for we're no farther than the phone,

An' relish well

The times we'll spend, the times we've known,

Afore we bid farewell.

Yes, we are blest, we lucky two!

Our partners give us blessings too.

An' backwards as we cast our view,

There's mostly cheer!

An' forward, though we can't review,

We shall not fear.

Toki, the Golden Retriever

Matoki is what he was named,

A monicker quickly disdained.

Since Dad's dog was Pokey,

We called our dog Toki,

The eleven years plus that he reigned.

Always friendly though not even called,

Without asking, upon us he sprawled.

His weight was so drastic

you'd think we were spastic

So his pleasure was often forestalled.

At table-tennis he often excelled

Retrieving the balls we repelled

When we shouted and hollered

He'd dodge until collared,

Gripping balls until physically quelled.

At the beach he'd swim into the sea

To save us from drowning, you see.

He'd push one ashore

Then go back for more;

He never gave cause for ennui.

We mourned when he gave up the ghost;

His life's end for us was last post.

Soon time to leave home

To make out on our own,

Was the message when Toki's life closed.

### ~~~~

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### Chapter Twelve

Haganah Train

The railroad tracks ran through the middle of the busy army docks in Dieppe. Ships tied up at the wharf, hundreds of army trucks engaged in loading and unloading, and half a dozen trains shunting back and forth on the sidings, contributed a bedlam of noise and disarray to a scene which expressed in motion the British genius at muddling through. Chugging slowly toward the docks was the Haganah* train, diverted temporarily from the Jewish Brigade Group which, with the war ended in Europe, was stationed in Holland and Belgium.

An M.P. directed it to a siding.

"What's the procedure, Sergeant, after we park the train?" Lieutenant Eli asked him.

"Go to the adjutant's office and he'll tell you where to billet. He'll give you a date for unloading." He looked at the train. "I don't know what he'll do with all this though. Where's it for?"

"England."

"England? Why?"

Eli shrugged his shoulders. Orders are orders. You're ordered to take a load to Dieppe, you take a load to Dieppe. That's the army. No questions asked, none answered. The M.P. saluted and strode off to direct another train.

Barnea groaned. "It'll take a month to get unloaded in this mess. What are we going to do? They won't hold those lorries for us too long."

"Where are they?" Eli asked.

"In a wood, outside a village, 15 miles east of Dieppe. We've already lost a week in Paris thanks to your insisting on going the wrong way."

"It was a good week. Our Dutch engine driver didn't complain. You can't complain."

"The Haganah can. Anyway, I can't see those Royal Engineers waiting more than another few days. They don't want to be reported AWOL. I'd better go find them and tell them we're here."

"No. You wait. I'll see if I can't speed this up."

Lieutenant Eli left the train in charge of Sergeant Barnea and strode off to locate the C.O.

The colonel was an easy-going Scot who believed in delegating as much responsibility as possible to his adjutant and staff. Consequently, they ran the day to day work of the port, and the adjutant reported back two or three times a day. This way, the colonel had a clear picture of daily developments, could suggest solutions to serious problems, and was able to devote his time to keeping his pipe lit and writing his memoirs: D-Day – Before and After.

Lower ranks did not normally intrude upon the peace and quiet of the C.O. in his office on the top floor of the old quay building, but, on this day, Eli reported at a time when the offices were empty, the staff gathered at the NAAFI. He walked in on the colonel, saluting smartly at the door, following it with "I'll be damned!"

"Eli!. Well I'll be blowed!"

MacAllister, feet on the desk and kilt creeping up to his navel, waved a cheery hand at Eli. "Come in, come in, you old devil! What are you about? Thought you were with the Jewish army, old chap."

"Ian, you're a sight for sore eyes! I'd no idea the regiment was in Dieppe."

"Och, aye. It'll be the last stop before we get to go home and back to civvy life. Have you come back to us?"

"No, not that. I'm still with the Jewish Brigade Group."

"Is that so. I heard you boys did a great job in Italy."

"How'd you hear that? It couldn't have been that big news."

"Aye, well, my Dad wrote me. Said your father was proud of you. Anyway, let's have a drink on it."

MacAllister leaned over to open a bottom drawer, resurrecting two glasses and a bottle.

"What the dickens is that?"

"French Scotch. It's not too bad. Here. And grab a chair. Take a load off your feet. Bottoms up."

They drained their glasses and the colonel filled them up again.

"My toast," Eli said. "To Colonel MacAllister, who got to be colonel before me because he played rugby. What position, by the way?"

MacAllister grinned and drank. "Scrum half. Eli, listen. You'll stay here with me. There's a spare room at my digs."

"I'm not staying over. I need to get unloaded quick and move out. I brought a train in from Eindhoven and lost a week because we took the wrong tracks and ended up in Paris."

"Lucky bugger."

"Right. I wouldn't have missed it."

"I'll see what I can do. What have you got and where's it going?"

"German tanks. They're for England."

"What the hell for? We've got more German tanks here in Dieppe than I know what to do with. What idiot sent them here? And none of them are going to Blighty. Not unless England's planning to invade Scotland."

"Shmulik."

"What?"

Eli sighed. Haganah commander Shmulik's scam. Get a load of tanks by train to Dieppe so you'll have a train equipped with flatbeds to bring back stolen trucks. Safer than driving the trucks by road where the military would be looking out for them. He wondered who had cooperated with Shmulik in sending the tanks. Why, indeed, would the army want German tanks in Dieppe?

"Nothing, Ian. I need to get those tanks unloaded fast and get out of here."

"How many are there?"

"Thirty-four."

"Eli, forget it. You're asking me to clutter up the port with 34 tanks? It'll take all day and into tomorrow to unload them. They'll snarl up a whole section of the port and then they'll have to be towed away somewhere and dumped. I can't do it, Eli. Love to help and all that sort of thing, but forget it. Turn around and take 'em back."

"You know I can't do that. Come on, Ian. I don't care if you ship 'em to England or dump them, but I can't take them back."

"I can't believe you were ordered to bring them to Dieppe. No one is shipping German tanks anywhere, except for scrap."

"Didn't you say you've already got a lot of German tanks in Dieppe?"

"Sure. But they weren't shipped in. We shot them up when we took the city, and they're all over the place. I'm supposed to haul them to a central point for scrap, not advertise for more."

"How about if I take the train to your scrap yard and unload there?"

"Jesus, Eli. I don't have a bloody scrap yard yet. We've been too busy with more important things. Maybe you want to start a scrap yard for me?"

"If that's the only way to unload them, I'll do it."

"No, forget it. Take 'em back where they came from."

"If I take them back, I'll be the one tossed on a scrap heap. Look, there's a place about 15 miles east of here where I can dump them. All I need is a mobile crane and..."

"You know a place? How the hell do you know a place? You've never been here before. Or have you?"

"No. I happened to notice a likely spot on the way into Dieppe. I could've dumped them there but I'd need to have a crane. How about it?"

MacAllister eyed Eli quizzically. "You know, friend, I'm looking at that Jewish Brigade flash on your shoulder, and I'm thinking why anyone would move German tanks here which are good only for scrap. It doesn't make any bloody sense. Unless you need the train with its flatbeds for something else. Is that it? You're smuggling something into Dieppe? Right?"

"I don't go in for smuggling." Eli's protest was hardly convincing. "Ian, if I told you the Haganah wants to get these tanks off the train pretty damn quick, would you do it?"

"PDQ, eh?" MacAllister finally removed his feet from the desk top, got up and stepped around the desk to clap Eli on the shoulder. "You old son of a gun. Why didn't you tell me? Of course, we'll do it right away. And you say you know a place 15 miles east? Sounds as good a place as any. You've got it." He picked up the phone. "Send Duncan in here. Not around? Well, find him. In the NAAFI? At this time of the morning? Oh, everyone's there. You just came back? Nice of you. Find him, lass. Now." He turned to Eli. "What kind of fucking army is this, taking NAAFI breaks when I've got 34 bloody tanks on my hands? You've got some men with you?"

"A sergeant and five other ranks."

"I don't want to know what you're doing. Better I don't. We've known each other a long time. If you tell me it's for the Haganah, that's good enough for me. As soon as Duncan gets here, we'll take care of things. Your men can go to the mess hut and you'll have lunch with me in the officers' club. And you'll get to see some of your old chums. How's that?"

"Sounds good. I'll go talk to my sergeant and get back to you in about half-an-hour."

Lunch at the officers' club reunited old friends, MacAllister pleased as punch when he saw the warmth with which Eli was received. When they parted later, he took Eli's hand and held it, unwilling to let go.

"You tell those Haganah people I'm with them all the way. Maybe something good'll come out of this damn war. You hear? Take care, old boy. Don't do anything I wouldn't do."

"That means I'd be asking for trouble."

"Damn right it would!"

The train crawled along the tracks away from Dieppe, keeping pace with the mobile crane Duncan had assigned to them, Barnea and Eli afraid to let it out of their sight for fear the operator would act independently and forsake them for some less industrious client.

At the rendezvous point they were hailed by a sergeant of the Royal Army Engineering Corps who flagged the train to a halt. Eli greeted him enthusiastically. "Good afternoon, Sergeant. Sorry to have kept you waiting."

"You've got that right, Sir. Tomorrow will be a week we've been here, on and off."

"On and off?"

"On and off. Sometimes on, sometimes off. 'Fraid it's going to cost you. We couldn't all stick around here, you know. Had to get some extra men involved."

"Yes, I see that. However, Sergeant, you've already been paid. We don't have any additional money for you."

Barnea interjected. "No. We don't. No one said we might not arrive late. Or that we might not arrive altogether. We're here. You're here. We trusted you with the money. Let's have the lorries."

"Hey, okay sonny boy. No need to get hot under the collar. Like you said, a deal's a deal. Good you brought along the crane, though the farmer's not going to be happy with all those tanks parked on his land."

"That's rare scrap iron. He ought to be pleased. Where are the lorries?"

"In the woods," pointing to a wooded hill in the distance.

"Let's go take a look at them."

"They're all there. Neatly painted, exactly as you wanted, name an' all. Each one serviced good as new. That wasn't in the deal, but we did it anyhow. Call it our contribution. Drive 'em on to the flatbeds and away you go."

By the following morning, a long line of immobilized German tanks was strung out alongside the railroad tracks, presenting a fearsome picture from the distance and either a major headache or a magnanimous gift for the French farmer. The crane operator returned to Dieppe wondering why his CO started a scrap yard so far from base.

The Royal Engineers and Eli's men worked royally to load the stolen 34 British army trucks, fully equipped with benches on the sides, ideal for ferrying illegal immigrants to safe harbors on their way to Palestine. Each flatbed was uncoupled in turn from the train and a loading ramp positioned, up which a truck was driven, wood blocks jammed in place against the wheels, and the flatbed recoupled. By evening of the next day, the train was ready for the return journey to Holland.

Outside Eindhoven, they were met by Haganah members of the Brigade who unloaded and drove away 34 newly-painted vehicles of the "Amsterdam Transit Corporation, Limited". The ferrying of Jews from the concentration camps to French and Italian ports, onto ships taking them to be smuggled into British -mandate Palestine, was back in business.

*The Haganah was the paramilitary defense force of the Jewish community in British -mandate Palestine.

### Chapter Thirteen

### Reporters At Large

When Cameron McKenzie arrived to cover the Six-Day War for Reuters he hadn't planned on staying longer than it would take Israel to win it. Nor had he planned on events sweeping him into the arms of an American war correspondent who arrived on the same plane. Pinned down together in a jeep under Egyptian crossfire at El-Arish, he blamed her for talking him into taking the office jeep to the front.

"We get out of here alive, I'll bed you and wed you," he threatened.

"Don't do me any favors. I've no intention of living in Israel with a Scottish name," Debbie Cohen informed him.

"You'll be lucky living at all," he said, a barrage of bullets whistling past the jeep.

The Six-Day War ended, and theirs started after agreeing Israel was where they'd raise their family. Refusing to consider Cameron's suggestion of El-Arish as the family name, Debbie proposed Kinneret, good Hebrew for the Sea of Galilee. Cameron liked the sound of it but insisted on making it Scottish. "As the McKinnerets we'll found a new Scottish-Israeli clan." He stood firm on not changing Cameron, proposing that she change her name to Mary, as in Queen of Scots.

"You're the Scot, not me. Maybe you'll be happy with Virginia, as in Holy Mary?"

"Bit late for that, aren't you?"

"Thanks to you. Anyway, what's wrong with Debbie?"

"Reminds me of biblical Deborah. Always judging."

"That was her job. Your Mary had her head chopped off."

So it was that they became Cameron and Debbie McKinneret. For the wedding, Debbie designed their own tartan, a mixture of crisscrossing red and black on the bright blue of the Kinneret. Journalists, political and army friends celebrated their wedding with a fancy dress ball at the Artists House in Jerusalem , for which, to his kilt, Cameron attached a sporran of a hot water bottle filled with brandy, much enhancing his popularity.

Their work frequently took them out of Israel. Being much in love, they travelled together reporting the world, including two years covering Debbie's America from their temporary base in Princeton.

Neither one of them could go to Terre Haute one weekend when Debbie was invited to her 15th high school reunion. Cameron was scheduled to play a tennis match at the university and Debbie was organizing an outdoor bazaar for the local Israel Defense Forces chapter. A thunderously wet weather forecast cancelled both events, in time for them to drive post haste to Terre Haute. The reunion organizer said she would try to reserve a room for them at the Hilton since the reunion hotel was full, but neglected to call back to report all hotels full thanks to the International Liars Club 72nd annual convention.

While Debbie was at the Hilton reservations desk finding out that she didn't have any, but did have a message from her reunion organizer advising that the nearest available hotel was in Indianapolis, Cameron sat on their luggage in the lobby, surrounded by a madhouse of Liars Club delegates, where he overheard that the Most Excellent Arturo Martinez, the Peruvian delegate, had been detained for falsification of his income tax return and wouldn't be coming.

Just then Debbie plunked herself down on the luggage beside him, complaining that she'd been searching for him half-an-hour and how could she expect to find him in this mob when he's sitting on the floor.

"I thought you went up to our room," he said hopefully. That's when she told him the bad news he'd been half-expecting. Fortunately, as a foreign correspondent, he had experience extricating himself from awkward situations.

"I can fix it," he said. "You wait here." At the Liars check-in desk, the secretary, overburdened by scores of Liars clamoring for her attention in dozens of languages, handed Cameron the royal blue folder for the Most Excellent Arturo Martinez. The folder included information about convention sessions, workshops, and special tours for spouses, including to the Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute, where he expected Debbie would end up after he informed her that she was now Mrs. Martinez. Also in the folder were tickets for meals, the all important room number and two of those baffling computerized room keys, which hotels use everywhere to aggravate their guests.

Minutes later, giggling sinfully, trying not to howl with laughter, Debbie said "We'll have more fun here than at that stupid reunion."

" You're so adaptable."

"One has to be in Peru. Especially if you're Arturo's wife." Unpacking her reunion dress, she called to Cameron already heading for the shower: "Lima is the capital, isn't it?"

"Yes. What else do we know?"

"Their income tax people are tough on cheaters."

"Peruvians speak Spanish," Cameron pointed out.

"We don't, do we?"

"I do. A little."

"Then how about you being Peru's Honorary Consul in New York?" Debbie always had imaginative suggestions for him. He observed that that would be an untruth.

"I wouldn't worry about that. It's a liars' convention. You're supposed to lie."

"Good. But I'm not going to impersonate the Most Excellent Arturo Martinez."

"You just did. We're in his room."

"We can't get away with it. Some people know Martinez here. We'll tell them the truth, that we're the McKinnerets and that Martinez was unavoidably detained."

"Fair enough," Debbie said. "If they ask why he couldn't come?"

"You know why. He was detained for income tax evasion."

"They won't believe it."

"That's a good one."

They were seated at table 22 for dinner. Three rows back from the head table, four rows off center. Not too close, not too far back. Tiny flags of the delegates' countries marked the seating arrangements. Having no idea what the Peruvian flag looked like, they walked slowly toward 22, waiting for others to sit first. Belgium, Guatemala and Australia with their wives. Four places left. Two flags. One flag unnerved them. It was Israel's. Locating the two Peruvian places was no longer a problem. The Israelis were not there yet.

Being thoroughly assimilated Israelis, they expected to recognize them. If not, they anticipated their peculiar Israeli name would be remarked upon. Also, they would surely have friends in common. It isn't like there are six degrees of separation between Israelis. Two or three at most. Here they were, hoping to enjoy the excitement of their first International Liars Club dinner, and already they risked exposure as interlopers.

Then there was the mysterious case of the ILC. That Cameron had never heard of the club in America was not too extraordinary. There are thousands of small clubs and organizations across the land, familiar mainly to their members and to local newspapers. In Israel, no such anonymity is possible. The country is too small; curiosity, intense; politics, a national diversion; eccentricity, a given. Yet, as journalists with contacts everywhere, they were totally unaware of the existence of an Israel Liars Club, let alone the international one.

Intentionally concealed? A secret intelligence-gathering group? Cameron's newsman's antenna was quivering, more so than that of Debbie, who exhibited a pleased smile when Ehud and Tamara Rafael came to the table to complete their circle.

Introductions all round. At the name McKinneret, a puzzled acknowledgement from the Rafaels, and a thankful cut-off of conversation when the club president welcomed the delegates in a booming voice attributable to an imperfectly balanced sound system.

The reason for Terre Haute's selection for the auspicious international gathering was revealed. The previous year's winner for the tallest tale in the world was a congressman from Indiana. With his champion's scales, a late 19th century grocery scale weighing Truth against Lies, he had also earned the honor of hosting this year's convention in his hometown of Terre Haute. Somehow, the fact that a politician had won failed to surprise anyone at the table.

Several workshops to be held during the following two days were announced. Delegates were obliged to attend at least two where they would be challenged to fabricate narratives according to the themes of the workshops. These were elimination contests, each workshop group voting for the three storytellers who spun the best perfectly believable, but entirely outlandish and untrue tales. The winners then competed at the wind-up dinner, with the champion liar elected by secret ballot to avoid politicizing the convention.

Workshop themes included stories of garage mechanics and car owners, alibis as told by suspects to police, airline reasons for delayed flights, corporation explanations to consumers, politicians' promises to constituents, and anything to do with lawyers, golfers and fishermen.

"You live in Peru?" Ehud Rafael asked in Hebrew.

There was no point in pretending he didn't understand. So Cameron lied. After all, that's why they were there. "I'm Peru's Honorary Consul in New York," he answered in Hebrew. The others at the table probably thought they were talking Peruvian, or whatever language they talk there.

"I expected to see Arturo. We're good friends."

Cameron explained Arturo's unfortunate circumstances. Then repeated it in English, not to be impolite to the others at the table.

"Your accent? Scottish?" Tamara asked him.

"Yes. You've a good ear."

"Also Israeli?" Ehud queried.

Debbie laughed, then added, "Also Peruvian and American."

"You're all four, right?" Tamara confirmed.

Cameron nodded, then changed the subject by asking Ehud how it was he didn't know there was an ILC branch in Israel.

"It's top secret. Mossad."

"You expect me to believe that? And, if so, why are you telling me?"

"Because I don't want you to believe me." Everyone at the table laughed.

Truth at ILC meetings was out the window. Neither one of them was given to straight answers. Cameron questioned what his superiors in the Mossad would say if Rafael won the championship.

"Sorry, but that's confidential. What will they say in Peru if you win?" Ehud countered.

Until then, Cameron hadn't considered that possibility, but the idea intrigued him. "I expect they'll promote me to ambassador," he replied, resolving to attend the workshops while Debbie joined a group visiting the penitentiary.

He invented such believable, but untrue tales, that he amazed even himself. Hard as it is to credit, he carried right on doing so to the final evening when, with Debbie, the Rafaels and their other table companions cheering him on, Cameron won the championship for Peru. Ehud pulled him aside for a word in private.

"Some of our best agents around the world come out of this organization," he said.

"How can you trust them?"

"The good liars we can trust."

"Is that what you're doing here? Recruiting"?

"We've never had someone with four legal passports." Ehud wasn't kidding. He wanted Cameron working for the Mossad. But not in Peru. Cameron was flattered. Well, who wouldn't be? If Abdel Nasser's son-in-law could work for the Mossad---. He smiled, nodded, and returned to Debbie.

"What did he want?" she asked.

"Nothing really. Just to say Mazal Tov."

A perplexed but appreciative government made him an official Honorary Consul, and invited Debbie and Cameron to visit, which they plan on doing next year for the Liars Convention to be held, of course, in Lima. With all the publicity, that Most Excellent Arturo Martinez paid only a hefty fine and returned, amid ribald cheers, to Parliament. The Peru Liars Club insisted Cameron keep the champion's scales that now grace their dining room bookshelf and are a perennial subject of conversation with visitors.

Hanging on the wall, in a large frame above the scales, is Arturo's somewhat disgruntled congratulations, written on Parliamentary letterhead paper; beside it is Cameron's Honorary Consul appointment written by hand on handsomely decorated letterhead vellum and signed by the Peruvian Foreign Minister; next to that, a letter from Ehud, typed on insignificant Israeli office paper, no address, no phone number, no letterhead, welcoming Cameron to the "Office". Deployed in a glass-covered display case beside the scales, a copy of this account is open at the page you are now reading. From first word to last, it is this perfectly believable (you believed it), absolutely untrue tale never told at any Liars Club convention, never held in Terre Haute, and for which the first-prize scales were, in fact, won by the author's wife.

~~~~

### ~~~~

### ~~~~

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### Chapter Fourteen

### Don't Get the Breeze Up

The summons ordered him to present himself for jury duty at the Superior Court in New Brunswick six weeks hence. He was offered two alternative dates if the original was inconvenient.

Since all three dates were inconvenient, he settled on the remotest, thereby postponing the inevitable for seven months, a period of time during which anything could happen to cause further delay, perhaps earn a full reprieve. His common-sense missus accused him of procrastinating as usual and he agreed. Acknowledging her comment that maintenance of law and order required proper administration of justice, and that jury service was among the highest duties of citizenship, he insisted that he was simply too busy now that he had retired.

"You spend far too much time at that computer," she told him. "You need to get out the house, exercise more." Winter tennis was down to three days a week.

"Sitting on a jury's not exactly exercise," he said. "Anyway, you're the one that needs more exercise after your operation. Doctor said you should walk a lot so you don't stiffen up." She had been in pain for more than three months.

"I will, as soon as the weather gets better."

Winter blew itself out with a final gust of windswept rain; spring shook itself dry, encouraging her to lengthen her neighborhood walks, and suffusing a pleasant warmth through the window when she looked at her hard working retiree, happily rewriting the fiftieth version of his, as yet, unpublished novel.

Another jury summons confirming his May date darkened his mood. He consoled himself with the probability that his chances of being chosen to actually serve were minimal and that he would be released by the end of the first day.

His optimism was reinforced when he entered the crowded hall at precisely 8.15 a.m. on his birthday and saw the many persons available for the limited number of jurors generally required.He wasn't one for celebrating birthdays and anniversaries with big parties. On their 50th wedding anniversary, they toured Denmark, Sweden and Norway, a more practical idea than spending the money on a party, and certainly a more memorable one. That night, they would go out to dinner. There would be a funny birthday card from the missus, and that was it. Maybe the kids would remember and would phone to sing "Happy Birthday". Nevertheless, jury duty on his birthday was not what he had in mind when he opted for May.

After obtaining his juror badge and validating his parking ticket, he settled down to read the Times, the magazines and book he had brought with him. He enjoyed the documentary film the prospective jurors were shown explaining their role in the justice system, but when the lights came on again and the first numbers were called, he gripped his newspaper tighter as they climbed slowly toward 072, the number of his summons and on his juror badge. At 042, the clerk stopped.

Well, that that was that for the day, he figured. Forty-two jurors were surely enough to satisfy the cases before the court. He read and dozed intermittently for the next hour, to be startled awake when the clerk began a new list, ending, pitilessly, with 072. He sighed, stashed his newspaper, book and magazines into a file cabinet drawer as directed, and proceeded to the elevator where he and 29 other reluctant jurors were crammed in and hoisted to the fifth floor, there to be escorted into the court room of Judge Emily Brown.

"This case," she explained after greeting them, "is not to examine guilt or innocence. That has already been determined by a previous jury verdict. You, the eight jurors selected, will be asked to listen to the evidence in order to decide on the amount of damages to be awarded the plaintiff."

At her request, the plaintiff stood, turned to the prospective jurors, grinned, turned back, grinned at Judge Brown, and sat. The judge then introduced the plaintiff and defendant's attorneys who turned and bowed ever so slightly to the contemplated jurors. The defendant was not in court. Having lost the case, he depended on his attorney to secure the least amount of damages.

The judge further explained that witnesses would be called and that she expected the case to conclude in two or three days.

The groans greeting her remarks drew a swift frown from Judge Brown, enough to silence all but a few whispered additional mutterings about "if the plaintiff had already won, why did they need to hear witnesses again, and why didn't the system allow for the judge to set the monetary award instead of wasting the time of 30 good and true men and women?" One voice, louder than the rest, asked the question, to be told, in the reprimanding tone of a schoolteacher, that it all boiled down to judgment by one's peers.

The clerk of the court spun her lottery box and picked a number until eight prospective jurors sat in the jury box. He was not one of them. Breathing easily again, he listened to the jurors being questioned by the judge. Number one juror was either playing dumb or was really hard of hearing because the judge had to repeat each question. He almost laughed aloud when the juror was asked if he had ever had any knee problems.

"No. Most of my problems are old ones."

"Knee," Judge Brown repeated. "Not new. Knee." Her final question to each of the jurors was whether he or she could render an objective, impartial judgment, to which each had answered in the affirmative.

He was not surprised when the plaintiff's lawyer rejected the first juror. After all, who would want a partially deaf juror sitting on his case? What did surprise him was when "072, please" was called instead. Shaken, but no longer overly concerned, he strode across the courtroom to the jury box. He looked forward to bantering with the judge.

"What do you do for a living?" she asked of him, as she had of the other jurors. All were employed, some with interesting occupations, such as the woman who raised frogs to supply French restaurants, the gentleman who was a molecular biologist, the lady who composed advertising jingles, and the wrestler who apologized for overflowing onto his neighbors' chairs.

"I am retired."

"Look how happy he is," Judge Brown remarked to the 21 unselected jurors who could expect to be released soon. "You have plenty of time then to be on our jury, don't you?" she asked maliciously. Jurors, apparently, were a necessary adjunct to her courtroom. He sensed the undertone in her remark. This was a judge who believed trials by jury often end with mistaken verdicts, directly opposite to how she would have ruled. But perhaps he was reading too much into her remark.

"Not really," he replied. "I'm very busy, as a matter of fact."

"Are you now. With what?"

"I write short stories."

"Well, perhaps you'll have a story here."

"I believe I will."

"Do you really?" frowning. Then, coming back to the reason they were all in court, "Have you had any knee problems?"

"No."

Framing her last question, the one he was waiting for, she began "And do you believe...."

He interrupted, playing trump. "My wife had two knee replacements."

Judge Brown looked grim. "Do you believe you can give an objective, impartial judgment?"

"I doubt it. But I'll try. I know how painful...."

The defendant's attorney was already on his feet when she scolded this impertinent prospective juror who had clearly outmaneuvered her. "This is a serious question."

"I know." he nodded in deference. "Of course it is."

"I want this juror excused," the defense lawyer blurted.

"You're home early," was his welcome home. "Did they take you?" She sounded disappointed. "And why are you singing that stupid British song?"

He didn't answer. Just kept singing the popular old English music hall song all the way to his computer. "Knees up Mother Brown / Knees up Mother Brown / Under the table you must go/ Ee-aye, Ee-aye, Ee-aye-oh/ If I catch you bending/ I'll saw your legs right off/ Knees up, knees up / Don't get the breeze up / Knees up Mother Brown."

### Chapter Fifteen

### Love Story

Havivah came into Aric's life at the kibbutz in the summer of '48 as a war correspondent for Coronet magazine. She was incredibly attractive in her khaki skirt, her military jacket with the War Correspondent flashes, and her hair in bangs. She wore the uniform as though born to it. In a sense, she was. Her three uncles served in the U.S. Navy in World War 1 when it was then known as the Great War, and the youngest of them reenlisted in WWII; her eldest brother invented a new way to attach wings to airplanes and was immediately hired by Lockheed in California, and her other brother was a B-25 bomber pilot against the Japanese.

The kibbutz had never seen her like, neither had she seen theirs, nor anyone so handsome and tanned like Aric, who was someone with whom she could talk easily in English. Fate, and her adventurous mother Rose, brought them together.

Rose, the leader of her town's small Jewish community of 100 families, was an active Zionist, but, nevertheless, would have been unlikely to meet Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist leader, had he not always visited Rose whenever he came to town, which he did frequently.

A large portrait of Weizmann hung in the main lobby of the town's Commercial Solvents chemicals company which produced acetone, a vital ingredient in the manufacture of artillery shells, an ingredient that Weizmann, at his research laboratory in Manchester in World War I, developed from corn. The British appreciated Weizmann's important work to aid the war effort. His close connections with Britain's leaders since the beginning of the war in 1914, placed him in position to refuse a personal reward and, instead, request the famous Balfour Declaration with its promise to the Jewish people of a national home in Palestine. Without those connections, and Weizmann's skill in representing himself as spokesman for the Jewish people, there would have been no Balfour Declaration and Aric and Havivah would never have met. Although Arik's father fought the four years of the Great War on the Western Front, his only connection with Weizmann was when those acetone shells flew over his head. on their way to the German trenches, for which he was eternally grateful since, without them, German shelling might have overcome the British trenches, probably putting an end to Aric's father's hope of fatherhood.

Rose visited Palestine in 1936 where, through Weizmann, she met Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi who had founded and ran a girls' agricultural school in the outskirts of Jerusalem. Rachel was also a founder of the Hebrew Gymnasium high school in the Rehavia quarter of Jerusalem. When Rose returned home, she raised funds for Rachel's agricultural school, for many years supporting the school with equipment such as bunk beds and refrigerators. Rose and Rachel maintained a lively correspondence, and, when Havivah was starting high school, Rachel suggested Rose send her to the Rehavia school and that she live in the Ben-Zvi's simple home in Rehavia. World War II put an end to that idea.

Rachel was the wife of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi who became Israel's second President on the death of Weizmann. After their son, Eli, was killed defending his kibbutz, Rachel asked Havivah to visit there. She, who, throughout her life, has rarely, if ever, denied requests people make of her, with the result that she is constantly involved in all kinds of activities, and is forever saying 'No more' and that she needs time for herself, acceded to Rachel's request, albeit reluctantly.

Before she showed up at the kibbutz for what she intended as a few hours' visit, she was invited by Rachel to accompany her to her agricultural school, located in an area of Jerusalem open to Jordanian snipers and across a minefield. None of this Rachel thought necessary to tell Havivah, until, approaching the minefield, she said they would have to crawl on their knees across the minefield because of the snipers, and that Havivah should follow exactly in Rachel's path because she knew where the mines were.

Ready to forget the whole thing, visiting an agricultural school not being an acceptable subject for a typical Coronet article, no matter how much of a scoop it may be, Havivah, unwilling to admit to the heroine in front of her that she was scared, followed obediently on her hands and knees with her eyes glued to Rachel's swaying rear end. The snipers restrained themselves, enamored, no doubt, by the refreshing view of two ladies' bottoms bobbing up and down. On arrival at the school, she announced that that was it. She would remain at the school, forever if necessary. An armored police car, was available to take them back, otherwise she may never have arrived at Eli's and Aric's kibbutz.

When she did, Aric persuaded her to stay a few days. Or perhaps it was on seeing him that she persuaded herself. Whatever it was, Coronet magazine in New York, where she was an associate editor, was in danger of losing a war correspondent. For there was yet another peril Havivah never expected to confront.

How he found her is not clear, but, late one evening, her old flame, Leo, from New York, arrived looking for her. Havivah was shocked, clearly disturbed, refused, at first, to see him, but finally acquiesced, asking Aric to leave them alone to talk. Not pleased with the answers he was getting, Leo, hands on her throat, threatened her with violence if she refused to return with him to New York. She screamed, managed to get away and rushed out to Aric, waiting nearby, beseeching him to see that Leo left the kibbutz immediately.

Leo refused to go, approaching the kibbutz secretary for permission to remain and willing to work for his keep. Dying to see how it played out, riveted by the unfolding drama in their midst, permission was given for the disturbed suitor to stay as long as he wished. The hour was late. Shown to a room, he bedded down for the night.

Aric didn't wait for morning, making it clear to the kibbutz secretary, and others among the more influential members, that either the homicidal lover was on the first bus in the morning or Havivah and he would be on it, never to return. Heedful that Aric was adamant, they gave in.

Parked at the cabin door, wagon hitched to tractor, engine roaring loudly to awaken a dozen bloodthirsty amorists, Aric signaled to Leo to climb aboard the wagon. This he did without fuss, strangely calm and subdued, accepting his dismissal, aware that he had gone too far, and that Havivah was lost to him forever. Aric drove him down the hill to the main road where he boarded the early bus to Tel Aviv, the first stage on his way back to New York. Leo's only remark as they parted was 'You must be very important here'. Aric nodded. He wasn't important. His friends had merely come to their senses before it was too late.

A few weeks later another suitor showed up, setting the kibbutz abuzz again. This one, army major Binyamin, was in his 30's, a former commander of the Irgun, the pre-State underground militant organization whose policies of violence against the Mandatory government were anathema to the majority of the Jewish community of pre-State Palestine. He was the least likely person to show up at a kibbutz, where he was immediately recognized, though hardly welcomed. Havivah had met him at the Ben Zvi's. If Leo started the soap opera, Binyamin starred in the second Act.

Though Havivah hadn't intended to set his heart on fire, she had started a conflagration so great 'tis a wonder it didn't melt the large box of chocolates he brought her. Beautiful Havivah, with her full, genial laugh, her warm, generous spirit, her kind, honest nature, and her nurturing disposition has been setting hearts ablaze all her life. Especially Aric's.

Binyamin declared his love for her, was gently rebuffed, met Aric, said he was a lucky guy, and departed manfully in his army jeep, without killing Havivah first, leaving the happy couple to chug around the farm under the canopy of the John Deere, Havivah handing out the chocolates when she could rescue the box from Aric.

Act III: Aric doesn't recall when exactly, after Havivah rejected both Leo and Binyamin, that he proposed, but perhaps because 'third time lucky' was why he asked, or perhaps it was why she accepted, but, to make certain, had him repeat his proposal, less hesitatingly, twice more. Knowing this was the final act, he asked, she accepted, and, after a hug and a kiss, this editor and war correspondent went back to her daily grind in the kibbutz laundry, while the man she'd agreed to marry drove off, in a daze, to a distant field where he waited for the stars to fall on his tractor, and imagined the waves of displeasure emanating across the Atlantic from her mother, Rose.

On the other hand, Havivah did mention that Rose had married a fireman, John, so maybe the waves wouldn't be too stormy. John, Havivah said, was the kindest, sweetest man in the world. When Aric came to know him, he couldn't agree more. In the meantime, he sat on his relatively comfortable tractor perch, and dreamed of life with his laundry girl. He knew it couldn't last. He was right. Today, he's the one does the laundry.

In rooms of four at the kibbutz, they each shared accommodation with another three persons in the 'Train', a long hut with eight contiguous rooms. Two hundred yards away were the showers, the laundry and the toilets, the latter, far enough on a stormy night to daunt the hardiest of pioneers, male and female. One would peer out the door into the rain, glance left and right to verify one was alone, and, confirming the moment's solitude, add his or her foaming contribution to the splashing rain. Occasionally, a voice whispering 'G'night', usually delivered with an unkindly titter, betokened mortifying coincidental timing. Those were moments when wishes peaked for an early home on the Sheb hilltop which overlooked the kibbutz's temporary home.

Although primitive compared with today's comfortable kibbutz homes, the houses on the Sheb had indoor toilets, showers and washbasins. But that was later. For interminable months there was no piped in water. Toilets were sheltered pits in the ground, and showers involved going back down the Sheb, and, of course, until everyone moved up, meals were served and meetings held in the old dining hall. Even without full amenities there were those who preferred the privacy of their own homes on the unfinished Sheb to the communal rooms of the 'Train'. Personal libraries of a dozen or so books were shelved on wooden planks laid across concrete blocks; dishes, collected from the communal kitchen, found a place in a small cupboard in the kitchenette, and an extra bed was placed in the living room alcove to serve as a couch, or to be reconstituted as a guest bed when the need arose.

New homes were consecrated with cake and wine. Everyone came and sang songs into the late evening, when they all trooped back down the hill leaving the first tenants, Aric and Havivah, alone on the Sheb. Gradually, as homes were completed, the long cabins were abandoned, until, finally, the kibbutz was out of its temporary quarters and established in perpetuity on the Sheb. The one building still left standing on the old base camp was the children's house, a reminder of where this kibbutz started and where, from the Sheb, it was once besieged for four months by invading Arab forces determined that Israel would never exist.

Meanwhile, Arik's newspaperwoman wrote home to say she would be marrying a tractor driver. Mentioning her assignment to the communal laundry, she described how she salivated when the bell rang for lunch, and how, before she could eat, she first had to finish hanging wet shirts, forcing them between strands of twisted rope because there were no clothes pegs to grasp them. As he has learned through their years together, Havivah is wont, if it is a few minutes past mealtime, to utter a plaintive 'I'm hungry' wail that moves Arik to immediate action.

On a mission to save Havivah came, posthaste from the banks of the river Wabash, the community's religious head, the Reform rabbi. He stayed the day, declined their hospitality, couldn't reform Havivah, and wrote her parents to say that she was adamant.

Not so Arik. How sure was he that he was doing the right thing? How sure was he that she was doing the right thing? He knew already that she wanted them to leave the kibbutz and move to town. How would they manage in town? A former BBC Drama Department member, maybe he'd get a job with Voice of Israel, Kol Yisrael, the Israel broadcasting service? What else was he equipped for? Kibbutz life offered lifelong security. Was it a risk to give it up? What if one day she wanted to return to America? She had a good job at Coronet. She hadn't immigrated. Had come only for a brief visit to cover Israel, never expecting to stay, let alone marry an Israeli. She wouldn't be the first to have come for a short visit and remained. More often it was the Zionist idealists who found reality of life in Israel not for them and returned to the countries from whence they came. So many questions chased each other on a perpetual merry-go-round, keeping him awake at nights, while the cause of it all slumbered peacefully by his side. They were marrying. This was serious. How could she sleep?

They were young and in love. But perhaps she wanted to think it over for, say, six months? He suggested it. Havivah, as scared as Aric was at getting married, burst out with "What a wonderful idea!" Ever realistic, steady-going and true, she, who would never consider pinning someone to her who wasn't fully committed, had agreed instinctively, while he, whose instincts were working double-speed, realizing he may lose her, speedily retracted the offer. They laughed at their fears, and let love, in the green fields of the kibbutz, conquer all. Confidence restored, he wrote home to allay a mother's worry that her dear son was marrying --- an American!

Havivah's mother, Rose, came. She stayed at the kibbutz overnight, met Aric, disapproved, and was additionally miserable at having to use the outside toilet in the middle of the night. She declared she would never understand her daughter, on whom she had lavished a university education, marrying a farmer, not only that, but a poor, penniless farmer. She left to visit Rachel in Jerusalem, who advised her to accept the inevitable. Rose and Rachel were not only old friends, they were both level-headed, wise women. Rose, albeit reluctantly, agreed. Rachel must have done some heck of a talking. Deep down she may have been thinking of Eli; to have her close friend's daughter marrying into Eli's kibbutz, had to be good. As for Rose, her reluctance changed into full speed ahead. She offered to pay for the wedding if they would marry while she was in Israel. To buy a wedding ring, there being no time for an engagement ring, Aric and Havivah, dazzled, if not stupefied, by Rose's unforeseen surrender, were unwillingly granted the day off by the kibbutz secretary, who would have preferred to wait for the weekly general meeting to vote on such a monumental decision that was likely to establish a precedent.

Since Havivah was the only one of the two with any money, and only a little of it at that, she splurged four dollars on a thin gold band, which they continue to prize today, 65 years later. Who would have thought?

### Chapter Sixteen

### Presidential

Their home, in the well-to-do Rehavia quarter, was an austere, large, two-storey, wooden cabin in keeping with the simple, unaffected lifestyle of the two veteran Zionists. All new homes and other buildings in Jerusalem built after World War I were concrete faced with Jerusalem limestone, giving the city its unique character (apart from the Old City, unique in itself). The construction ordinance for the limestone facades was promulgated by the military governor of Jerusalem, Sir Ronald Storrs, appointed by General Allenby after the capture of the city from the Turks in 1917. Storrs founded the Pro-Jerusalem Society whose one goal was to beautify the city, and he traveled abroad raising money to support his efforts. Thanks to him, and to enlightened men like Mayor Teddy Kollek, who established the Jerusalem Foundation with similar aims, and, like Storrs, traveled abroad raising funds for his projects, Jerusalem is today a beautiful city.

Yet the home of Yitzhak and Rachel Ben-Zvi was of wooden construction without stone facing, special permission having been granted to allow one home in Jerusalem to reflect the country's kibbutzim. This was the cabin, originally a British Army construction, which Ben-Zvi, who had served in the army in World War I, asked the army for in 1924. He purchased land in Rehavia, and had the cabin erected there on Ibn Gvirol Street. It is now located in Kibbutz Beit Keshet as a memorial to their son, Eli, and the six who were killed with him that terrible day of the Arab ambush.

When Ben-Zvi became president of Israel in 1952, he and Rachel continued to live there in the same unaffected way they had before, permitting the trappings of the presidency to intrude only where necessary, such as in the living room with its floor to ceiling bookshelves and its oriental rugs, a room where they welcomed distinguished guests. A sentry box was established in the lane behind their home, and an official entrance opened through a public garden at the side. While the presidency involved changes in their daily routine, the couple, nevertheless, continued their habit of strolling Jerusalem's sidewalks to the dismay of their security guards and the delight of the citizenry.

The young newly-wed couple, friends of the Ben-Zvi's, invited by Rachel to stay with them until they could find a place of their own to rent, snuggled into bed at two o'clock one morning after putting the next day's newspaper, The Palestine Post, to bed. Almost asleep, the lass shook awake her snoozing husband to whisper that someone was at the open window, which was protected only by a screen from flies and mosquitoes.

"You're dreaming. Go back to sleep," he grumbled, turning his back to her. But when she insisted, he got out of bed and pressed his nose to the screen. Peering out into the dark, his nose touched another nose with only the thin netting separating one unhealthy sniff from another. Emitting an earsplitting soprano scream, joined in operatic duet by a startled high tenor holler from the other side, he jumped backwards into the room, tripped over a chair and crashed headlong back onto the bed. At the same time, heavy boots pounded the ground, the thudding quickly fading as the shocked intruder dashed down the paved walkway, distancing himself from the residence into the blackness of the night.

Rachel came to investigate the hullabaloo and called the police. Three men appeared within minutes. Two officers ran off to look for the prowler while the other, in a joyous reunion with his old headmistress, sat at the kitchen table munching cookies, drinking tea, and telling Rachel his life story since leaving the agricultural school where he was one of her pupils.

Half an hour later the police returned with a suspect who could not be positively identified. "'Have him run away from the window," our brave young lover suggested. "Maybe I'll recognize the thudding of his feet."

The police officers, who must have been from Chelm, Sholom Aleichem's imaginary city of fools, agreed to this inane scheme. The suspect ran, followed by the lover's yell. "That's him!" But the suspect was gone, to prowl again some other home, some other night.

Ben-Zvi slept through it all. At breakfast, when told about the intruder, his only concern was that his research papers on the Karaites, a 7th - 9th century Jewish religious movement, were safe.

Our young couple eventually found a home with the Granots, but even that was to be only until the Granot's daughter returned from America where she was studying, and, unbeknownst to her parents, getting pregnant. Every Friday before the Sabbath, Mrs. Granot, who was president of the Hadassah organization in Israel, called to them to come upstairs in a voice that pealed from afar like the bells of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The summons was not to dinner, but for the weekly hot shower.

Rooftop tanks were filled once a week from the meager municipal supply, the hot water boiler upstairs was switched on, and, when the water was hot enough for them to shower, the call rang out. Eight minutes each was the allotted time, the result of water rationing in Jerusalem.

It was a time when there was no oven, when food was cooked on a primus stove. It was like cooking around a campfire, only in the middle of the kitchen. The wife away one afternoon, the lord of the manor decided to surprise her by baking a cake on the primus, throwing into the mixture whatever likely, and unlikely, ingredient was at hand. The result was a wonder to behold. The cake rose beautifully, as all good cakes should, and separated flawlessly from the sides of the pan. She was impressed. In great good humor, holding a knife together as when they cut their wedding cake, they watched in open-eyed astonishment as it sank slowly into the cake with increasing resistance, until it touched the bottom of the pan, whereupon the knife bounced dramatically back to go flying from their grip. Grasping the cake at one end and lifting it bodily from the pan, the baker in chief waved it over his head like a standard bearer carrying a flag into battle.He had invented the Israel version of foam rubber. Unfortunately, he couldn't recall all the ingredients nor quantities, so was unable to manufacture a second sample and become rich from the patent.

Those days in 1949 were days of Tzena, when everything was severely rationed. A can of sardines was a gift par excellence when invited out. No one ever opened the can. It was a travelling treasure, a welcome present, carefully put aside by the hostess to await an invitation to other friends. Sometimes it would complete the circle, coming home to roost, if that's what sardines do, only to make the rounds once more. The circulating sardines were almost as well known as the infamous salami sandwich: a thin sliver of salami drawn slowly between two slices of bread. Who cared? Our newly-weds were young, they were strong, were healthy, were pioneers in their new State, and encouraged each other when especially hungry, by singing Tzena, Tzena loud enough to bring Manna down from heaven (Exodus 16).

Tzena did weird things to people. Professor Doljansky invited them over for tea one afternoon. The table was set with crackers and a dish of some kind of spread. Leaving them alone for a few minutes while she brewed the tea in the kitchen, they helped themselves to crackers and spread. Then again. And again. And again. When she returned, a few crackers were left, but the dish with the spread was wiped clean. Embarrassed at their impoliteness and gluttony, they apologized for their inability to control themselves. "It's all right. Your young bodies needed it. I do understand. You see, the spread was fat, pure fat."

Granot's daughter unexpectedly announced she was returning home, pregnant. With our young bride also pregnant, and with no time to find another home, there was no alternative than to return, temporarily, to mother in America. As the two planes passed each other in mid-air, the flight attendants would have had fits had they known those girls were both in the late stages of their ninth month. Their husbands remained behind, one in New York, one in Jerusalem, both house-hunting, both with the same problem: lack of adequate funds and family additions on the way within days, if not hours. And you wonder why men go bald.

### ~~~~

### ~~~~

### Chapter Seventeen

### Branbucket's Chair

Professor Elias Flighbottomley was a remarkable man when it came to his course on Supernumerary Quadrilatic Parquarks. Although it was not as well attended as expected when he accepted the prestigious Tristan Branbucket Past Particles Chair at Princeton's Institute of Subversion Side Sciences, his three students appreciated him for the scholar they believed he was, and he returned their homage by confronting with equanimity their sketchiness with the McCarter Equation, equating it with their hazy inexperience of life.

Inviting them to join him on his annual two-week sojourn at Angusfrithan with the Rackelswithian Society, he warned his students that they must come to terms with the Equation by the end of the fortnight. The implied threat may be the reason for what followed.

Some explanation for the professor's peculiar behavior on the day preceding their departure is necessary, but we will delay that to describe the students who were, according to the evidence, instrumental in Flighbottomley's subsequent disappearance, though some reports have him still on campus.

Abraham Doppelswatter, known to his friends as Doppy, was a tall, awkward young man with a bad case of acne, black, streaky hair partially covering large, fan-shaped ears, and with thick glasses jammed on to a bulbous nose above a broad heavy lipped mouth. The overall impression was that of a gas mask hanging loose on a coat stand. His voice was like the chiming of bells in a waterlogged tunnel, a sort of gurgling boomeranging reverberation requiring the closest attention of the listener interested in what Doppy had to say. Of these, there were none too many, apart from the professor and the other two students, one of whom was his girl friend.

Gladys Pearlbody was a knockout. Golden, flaxen hair crowned a high cheek-boned face inset with eyes the color and shape of pecans, and a slightly upturned nose over a sweet, delicatessen mouth reminiscent of a pastrami sandwich. When she laughed, Gladys displayed a perfect set of ivories, and the sound was as though Mozart were playing on them. Her figure did justice to her name. She was a charmer, loved by all, but returning it, inexplicably, only to Doppleswatter.

The third student, Dickson Cartwright, didn't have a chance with Gladys. Perhaps because he was as handsome as she was beautiful. But Dicky didn't seem to mind. His devotion was solely to past, present and future particles, and to his deity, the Tristan Branbucket Chair, if not exactly to its current occupant.

Flighbottomley, as noted, was a remarkable man. For one thing, in reality he cared not a hoot for past or other particles, aware that only one person in several million could understand the subject. For another, he had absolutely no idea what Supernumerary Quadrilatic Parquarks were, and was only astonished that Doppleswatter both understood the concept and could argue vehemently against it. This Doppy did, more for the for the sake of playing devil's advocate than to persuade Gladys and Dicky that the professor was a specious sophist, and that it was Flightbottomley who had somehow convinced that magnanimous donor, industrialist Tristan Branbucket, to establish the Chair.

A further remarkable feature about Flighbottomley was his capacity for writing innumerable papers on his subject and having them published in obscure scientific journals nobody ever read but which were subscribed to by the university in support of faculty seeking tenure and who were constantly encouraged to publish, publish, publish. The professor, however, hadn't reckoned with Doppy who read with the same voracity he gobbled fast food, neither of which, food or books, impinged on his capacity to absorb more and more.

But the more Elias Flighbottomley published, the more Doppy doubted the quadrilatic part of the theory. Until the professor threw the McCarter Equation into the pot. That was when Doppy knew he had to do something about him.

Inducing Gladys and Dicky to assist him in reducing the Princeton faculty permanently by one, especially since Doppy himself was the only one besides the professor who could argue both sides of the SQP theory, was no easy task, primarily because they had trouble interpreting Doppy's gurgling English which is what they supposed it was. There was no way they could know that Doppleswatter had his eye on the Branbucket Chair for himself, a true visionary even though his doctorate was as yet some distance away. Light years away as far as Dicky was concerned.

Outlining his plan to them at the Princeton Fried Fish & Chips Shoppe, he was overheard by the professor himself, who was seated in the screened off Welsh Rarebit smoking section. Although he was flattered to hear Gladys's dismay at Doppy's proposal, she didn't actually refuse to support it, insisting only that any action first required a full understanding of the McCarter Equation.

This may have led to Flighbottomley's erratic actions the day before the Rackelswithians were to depart, but were surely more due to Doppy's plot against him than to the incongruities of the McCarter Equation, which, undoubtedly now, was the principle factor in his disappearance.

For the reader who considers himself, or herself, intellectually capable of following this Equation, permit a digression.

Simply stated, the McCarter Equation proves that all forms of matter are molecularly designed to progressively disintegrate and that the relative velocity of their decomposition is equal to and dependent upon the Supernumerary Quadrilatic Parquarks existent at the precise moment of their genesis.

Doppleswatter's plan was to remove the quadrilatic feature from the Equation, an action, he hazarded, that would send Elias Flighbottomley into an emotionally arresting state of unrecoverable shock.

However, being expectant of the worst, the professor's response was to take control of Gladys, for whom he had developed an overriding affection, sending her on a special mission to Branbucket's Industrial Pathology Laboratories where she was to ask Tristan for extra Supernumeraries. Branbucket knew this to be the code for "All is discovered" or, as he preferred, "Take her, she's ours", and immediately flew off with her in his private plane for a destination known only to himself and the professor.

With Gladys secured, Elias felt so entirely liberated that he commandeered a bicycle outside Nassau Hall. Pedaling faster and faster, he whizzed across the green lawns of the campus, rushing past Prospect Mansion where he bumped into Princeton's president as if he were a mere freshman, and dashed madly around the Henry Moore and Picasso's "Head of a Woman", until he tumbled off the bike, picked himself up, promptly forgot about the vehicle lying forlornly in a bush, and made off for the Institute, frolicking and skipping like a young buck on a spring day, where Branbucket's stretch limousine was waiting to carry him off before the startled eyes of Dickson Cartwright and Abraham Doppleswatter, and where he missed out on seeing Doppy going into his own conception of an unexpectedly emotionally arresting state of unrecoverable shock.

With the collapse of funding for the Branbucker Chair, Dicky developed other Equations no one has yet heard of, while Gladys, Elias and Tristan live together in Rackelswithianshire where they support Chairs and encourage research in other universities as yet unaware of their proclivities for exaggerated ethnocentrisms.

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### Chapter Eighteen

### Rain

The rainy season in Israel starts in November. Sometimes December. Sometimes not until January. While everyone waits anxiously for the first rains, the secular say "Pray God it rains," but depend on the religious to do the actual praying. A winter season with little rain lowers the level of Lake Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, primary source of Israel's water, and reduces the purity of water from the aquifers in the hills.

In the 1960's, ATA was Israel's largest vertical apparel manufacturer with a country-wide chain of clothing stores. They are no longer in business. But that is now, and this was then, when they looked to their advertising agency to make of their raincoats, best-sellers, with the additional hope that an early rainfall promised a wet winter.

It was a challenge that the agency's creative director faced, looking more haggard and miserable than usual as he roamed the office corridors, paced the streets of Tel Aviv, and finally disappeared toward the blue Mediterranean where he tramped the sands, scared the occasional swimmer and, where it was said, though never verified, he lived and slept for days on end. Until, one day, the head of ATA, Amos Ben-Gurion, son of the prime minster, descended to the beach to waylay the roving director, forcing him to divulge the unconventional solution that he knew was right but lacked the nerve to suggest. Failure would embarrass Amos, ridicule the agency, and make editors wary of future impractical, half-baked advertising ideas. But Amos loved it. "Israel," he said, "has taken bigger risks than this." That was true.

So it came to pass that in the time of Amos, the creative director set out to convince the advertising heads and their hard-headed editors of the feasibility of his idea, securing their reluctant agreement to discard, at the very last minute, three full columns of front page news in favor of a dark cloud approaching land, in the faint hope that it would disperse its rainwater before crossing the narrow, nine mile waistline of Israel to open up over Jordan.

The advertisement itself was simple and clear, showing a man in a raincoat, arms raised and outstretched, face looking up to heaven. The banner head was Pray for Rain. At the bottom of the ad, with the familiar ATA triangle logo, the copy read Today, at all ATA shops.

No big deal? Not today perhaps, when accurate weather forecasts are the norm. But then? In the Middle East? In the 1960's? The only accurate forecast was that the next day would come. Even that wasn't certain for far too many.

Having spent the night stretched out on the uncomfortable sofa in his office, the creative director was up with first light, attending the window, searching the skies for a cloud, any cloud. Seeing but one, he climbed to the roof, raised his hands to that solitary cloud, prayed as he never had before, and was splashed by a sprinkle of wet, caressing drops, sanctifying the morning papers as they were being delivered to homes and to newsagents across the land.

ATA and the agency won the Advertisement of the Year award, not for the ad alone, but for its perfectly distinctive placing and timing, on the front pages of all the leading newspapers. From top to bottom, covering three columns, it was truly the news of the day. Amos said his father was amused.

### Chapter Nineteen

### The Rova

With the end of the Six-Day War, we moved, for the umpteenth time in our married life, this time into the dust and hammering of homes being rebuilt, renovated and restored after 19 years of destructive Jordanian occupation. From where Jordanian snipers once fired over the ramparts of the Old City at our children going to school, we faced east to rejoice at the changing sunrise and sunset colors of the mountains of Moab, and blessed our good fortune at being in Jerusalem. "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning." The ancient covenant was our pact with the future.

Our home in the Jewish Quarter, the Rova, was built in 1545. There were four apartments surrounding a small, attractive courtyard, the entrance secured by a self-locking wrought iron decorative gate. Considerably damaged during the war, the two apartments on the east side of the courtyard were reconstructed to retain the original architectural design and were faced with Jerusalem stone to comply with the city's building code, formulated in 1918 by the British Mandate's Governor of Jerusalem and Judea, Sir Ronald Storss, a code which continues to remain the law in Israel, greatly accounting for the beauty of the city. Our apartment was on the upper floor of the west side. It was retained by the archaic walls of the mid-16th century, a five-foot thick combination of mud, straw and gravel strengthened by an iron girder firmly bolted into the wall as if to fortify the building against an invading enemy, or to prevent it falling on top of him.

Archways that, with mathematical precision, needed no other support than their own curvatures meeting at a wedged center keystone, divided the rooms and framed the windows. The largest archway decorated the south wall of the living room. Within it, I erected my own hand-made bookshelves, starting with a short one beneath the tiny high window near the domed ceiling, and continuing with longer and longer shelves until the bottom one, inches above the floor, extended all the way across the wall. This inexperienced carpenter opted to use only the best, warped wood, arguing that the curves and waves of the heavily laden shelves added their own charm to the originality of the room and contributed a soothing ambience to the apartment despite their threatening collapse should we dare add one more book.

Ours, and the apartment below, formed the original 1545 structure that continued westward up Or Hahaim Street, named for one of the great figures of the oriental Jewish community, Rabbi Haim Ben Atar. A winding, paved alley, it was so narrow that the tall, red-haired Arab milkman, sired by a former British soldier, perched on the back of his donkey on his daily orbit, managed to scrape the walls of homes on both sides with his two swinging milk cans. The adjoining section of our building housed the Museum of the Old Yishuv, exhibiting the way people lived in the Rova a century earlier. Rivka Weingarten lived above the museum. She was the authority for the history of this unique building owned by her family for generations.

Our new home consisted of four rooms, each with a domed ceiling. The dome of the center room, which was the living room-cum-kitchen, reached a height of 21 feet, presenting a problem of some magnitude when the wife decided to hang a parchment lampshade from an iron ring embedded in the middle of the dome. Our agile son-in-law, balanced precariously on the top rung of a painter's borrowed ladder, contrived to thread electric wire and brass chain links through the ring, establishing a precedent for immediate employment in a family emergency.

My wife is an inveterate gardener. Up the stairs, from the courtyard to the balcony, and all along the top of the balcony wall, she grew plants and flowers in a series of clay pots. Morning glories and climbing roses spread-eagled themselves across the west wall and along the top of the front door, while the balcony overlooking the courtyard was festooned with a prolific display of flowers and plants.

Two herring barrels, hauled in our Peugeot from the Mahane Yehuda open market to the Armenian Quarter, where the car was parked, were rolled down to 10 Or HaHaim and yanked up the stairs to the balcony where they were rinsed twice daily for ten days to get rid of the fishy smell. They were then filled with earth, and planted with a lemon tree and a mauve rose bush. Her garden was written up in the national garden magazine and was the only one in the Rova mentioned in guide books. Tourists were encouraged to peek through the wrought-iron gate of the courtyard and direct their gaze upwards to view the colorful blooms and hanging plants that stretched over the balcony rail as if inviting Romeo to climb their vines to kiss his Juliet. It was like living in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Sweet smelling flowers and herbs with the fragrances of mint and tarragon, basil, oregano and thyme, mingled in the Jerusalem air. Every year that passed, the small lemon tree grew heavier with miniature fruit, its flowering blossoms, heralding the new lemons, adding their bouquets to the soft, warm winds stealing into the Rova from the Judean wilderness. When the lemons were frozen solid in the freezer, they were grated, peel and all, to be added to many of the delectable dishes prepared with virtuosic enthusiasm by our queen of Jerusalem.

The beauty of the garden disguised the fact that the walls wept. More than 400 years had elapsed since their construction. They must have wept then and the weeping hadn't stopped. Some spots were damp where the whitewash flaked like a scabrous disease; in other parts, dry, crumbly, white fungus grew like penicillin in Fleming's laboratory.

Brother-in-law, an aeronautical engineer, suggested feeding thin pipes into the walls to leach out the water. Another brilliant idea was to continue heating the apartment throughout the summer. A further suggestion, perhaps the most practical, was to find an antidote to the bacteria in the walls. For that, basically, is what the fungus growth was.

We were not alone in despairing of these afflictions. The apartment below us suffered the same scourge. The Company for the Rehabilitation and Development of the Rova invited an architect professor from Venice to come cure the sickness. He came, he saw, shook his head sadly, and returned to Italy proposing that we, our downstairs neighbors, and other similarly discomfited homeowners, vacate their homes temporarily while thick layers of tar were applied to the inside walls. We preferred the eccentricities of our apartment to enduring the powerful smell of tar familiar to all in the city during the annual pothole repairs. We elected to live with bacterial growth, occasionally scraping it away so that it wouldn't take over the house, and, once a year, patch-painted the damp, peeling areas.

No antidote to the bacteria was found, but repainting the walls helped alleviate the damp. Once, when we visited Bruges, we toured a centuries-old house at the riverfront and felt immediately at home seeing the great thick damp walls and the white powdery fungus. We recommended a good waterproof paint job.

Our downstairs neighbors decided on tar. They were given an apartment elsewhere in the Rova for three months where they waited for the smell to dissipate, returning only when they concluded that it was a healthy aroma good against pneumonia and other respiratory ailments. During the winter, when the kerosene heaters were kindled, they were careful not to touch the tarred walls that tended to stickiness. We savored the smell sometimes when it wafted upstairs, but, by then, we were immune to the health-giving fumes. The thick walls of the building retained heat in winter and kept the house cool in summer. Air-conditioning was never required.

The downstairs neighbor, the one with the tar, was a plain-clothes detective attached to the Kishle police station inside Jaffa Gate. He afforded a feeling of security that, nevertheless, did not prevent us, together, adding an all-steel door to close off an alcove near the gate where the central gas balloons invited possible terrorist action.

Across the courtyard lived the mayor of Jerusalem's daughter and her current young man. It was always known when he was in favor because His Honor himself would visit. Sometimes, though, when there was a new gentleman, one didn't see Teddy Kollek for months. This was the daughter who bought our 30-year-old Hoover, a machine older than the serviceman who gave it its annual cleaning and lubrication. It had a cloth bag that, when full, was emptied into the garbage bin by plunging an arm inside the bag to withdraw clumps of clinging gray dust. When a short story I wrote brought in some extra money, we splurged on a new vacuum cleaner. The antique was sold to the mayor's daughter for a paltry 20 shekels. It was worth much more as an antique than as a working machine, but she asked for it and what are friends for? Delighted at owning her very own Hoover, that cost us more than ten shekels to have specially serviced for her, she disconnected the irreplaceable bag to give it its first ever washing. It was an error that left her with a shrunken replica of a bag and that, like the shrunken heads of Ecuador and Peru, no amount of stretching could ever again bring to fit the body.

Above her lived the third neighbor, opposite us, whose cheery morning welcome across the courtyard from her open window competed effectively with the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer from the third holiest site in Islam, the Al-Aqsa mosque on Temple Mount.

An unused mosque, the only mosque in the Jewish Quarter, stands forlornly opposite the bottom of Or Hahayim, a silent rebuke to the rabbis of 200 years ago who refused burial on the holy Mount of Olives to a convert who had given up his Moslem religion to marry a wealthy Jewish widow who lived in the Rova. Infuriated by the decision of the rabbis, she built the mosque with her own money on her own land in the middle of the Jewish Quarter, where it remains as a monument to her husband, protected, to the chagrin of today's rabbis, by the religious freedom laws of Israel.

Religious freedom did not extend to everyone in the Rova. Opposite us, across Or Hahayim, lived an American rabbi, his beautiful wife and their 13 children. While he studied daily, she owned and ran a dress shop for orthodox women in the Mea Sha'arim neighborhood. As required by the orthodox, to discourage attracting men by her ravishing beauty, she covered her own hair with a wig. Wearing her strawberry-blond wig, possibly more gorgeous even than her own hair, and with her marvelously slim figure, despite the 13 children, together with her open, cheerful manner, she was a sight for sore eyes and brightened Or Hahayim whenever she walked there. Yet, despite their orthodoxy, for some reason known only to the ultra-orthodox, they were rebuked and castigated publicly with graffiti painted on the Old City wall inside Zion Gate. The defamatory message declared that they played the radio on Shabbat, the Sabbath! There was, as yet, no television in Israel. So much for religious freedom and irresponsible listening. We were the ones playing music. It wasn't Israel radio, which, in religious homes, was switched off from the beginning of the Sabbath on Friday night until its end with the first stars on Saturday eve. Respecting our neighbors (up to a point), on Shabbat we ran our records, playing Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, Broadway musicals, and more, enjoying them with the windows open, perhaps a trifle loud, but with good, revengeful reason. After all, the rivalry was unabated. Five o'clock every morning, yeshiva bochers, students from the yishivot, (the seminaries), in Mea Sha'arim, came charging down Or Hahayim on their way to the Western Wall, singing lustily, caring not at all for the sleeping occupants of the homes on either side of the narrow lane. But never, in protest, would we ever think of desecrating the Old City wall inside Zion Gate.

That first year in the Jewish Quarter, 40 percent of the residents were secular, and we defended our civil rights as much and as often as necessary. Over the years, the percentage changed until today less than two percent are secular. The intention of the government was to retain the original ratio, but the harassment of the non-believers by the increasing tides of religious encouraged many secular residents to move out and discouraged others from moving in. When those moving away sold, the only buyers they could find were religious.

A major problem in the Rova was parking, one that has yet to be adequately resolved. We parked our Peugeot 404 in the adjacent Armenian Quarter, becoming friendly thereby with some of the churchmen. This helped when the wife rear-ended the car of the Armenian archbishop inside Jaffa Gate. She was not to blame. The Archbishop's driver apologized profusely and the Archbishop said he would pray for her. She should have asked him to pray for a permanent parking spot. It was a five minute walk downhill to our home from the Armenian Quarter which was a shlep when there were groceries and other bulky items to carry, or even to wheel in a grocery cart. Lugging suitcases uphill was a strain.

While we were not worried about coming home late at night from visiting friends in the city, our friends, on the other hand, looked on the Rova as if it were overseas, declining to visit at night, even though the streets were well lighted and the Kishle police station always ready to provide an escort when asked.

A pipe burst under our bathroom floor off the master bedroom, dripping water into the neighbor's apartment below. The Rova company accepted responsibility. On com. ng to fix it, they discovered that all the pipes in the house had corroded and needed replacing. They obviously hadn't been touched in 400 years. The floors from the main bathroom, across the living room and into the master bedroom and bathroom were torn up, new pipes installed, paint-dated with the month and year, and floors relaid, not to be replaced for another 400 years. The Old City of Jerusalem has a reputation to uphold.

### Chapter Twenty

### Come In, Please

The open curtain affirms no one is inside, so come in, please, pull the curtain closed after you to allow for some privacy, sit down on the narrow, slightly uncomfortable bench and stare at what purports to be an automatic camera. Arrange your face to meet your requirements, generally a beatific smile, but, depending on your mood, or on the reason for you being cloistered altogether in these humbling quarters, maintain a straight, serious look, or ferocious scowl, or a sad grimace, accompanied by a tear if you can manage it. Insert that quarter, you've been gripping tightly, into the slot provided, prepare for the buzzer or red light, and... "flash" from the camera. One picture taken. Three more in quick succession to catch your bewildered look, and that's it. Sit back, breathe deeply, wait out several minutes of mounting anxiety, until, lo and behold, you are presented with four stunning photographs of some idiot, wondering if this is what he really looks like.

"No good being on my own," Rupert mutters, staggering out into the sunlight of Coney Island's Boardwalk.

"Same as I was thinking," says the sad young lass, holding the curtain back for Rupert. "Maybe a good picture'll cheer me up." With that remark, whispered more to herself than to the emerging sad sack, she enters the booth, drawing the curtain closed.

Rupert stands outside looking again at his pictures, then rips them up, jamming the shreds into a jacket pocket. Glumly, he begins to walk away, thinks better of it and parks himself on a nearby bench where a young couple snuggles closer to make room for him. Rupert ignores them, absorbed in his own despair, not even noticing when they get up to go in the booth as its present owner comes out to sit in their stead and examine her pictures.

"Not much good, are they?" she asks.

Rupert, about to sink deeper into what's referred to as a "trough of despair", is nudged aware to the presence of the girl, her hand holding the pictures held glumly before him.

"D'you say something?"

"No. Sorry. Talking to myself. Crummy pictures though, aren't they?"

Rupert sees them for the first time. Then looks at the girl. Sees her for the first time. "I don't know you."

"No. Me neither." She begins to cry. A few sobs. Not many.

"I mean I don't know who you are."

Her sobs increase. "It's the pictures."

"They're good pictures. Look just like you."

Now she really begins to bawl. "I know. I'm so plain."

Rupert, finally aware of the girl's despondency, is deflected from his own of minutes earlier. Attempting to cheer her, he mutters, without much sincerity, "No, you're not. You're beautiful. So are the pictures."

She stops crying. Stares at him. Then angry: "Why do you say things that are not true?"

Startled, Rupert slides away, distancing himself on the bench from this girl he's never met before. Then it hits him. He starts to laugh. "You're right," he says, and can't stop laughing. "I'm you. You're me."

She's quieted down. "You're nuts," she says, putting her pictures in the little blue purse she carries.

"You should see my pictures," he says, emptying the shreds from his pocket.

Immediately sympathetic, she asks "Why did you do that?"

"I'm not exactly good-looking. I hate myself."

"Why do you say that? I like your looks."

"And I like yours. That's what I meant. I'm like you. You're like me."

She began laughing. So did he. "I'm Rupert," he said.

"I'm Cecily."

They sit quiet, studying each other. Rupert says "What we need is our picture together."

The couple in the booth exit, holding hands, smiling.

Rupert stands, extends his hand to Cecily who hesitates a moment before taking it, to step with him toward the photo booth.

### Chapter Twenty-One

### In Defense of the Realm

A dependable soldier in the reserves, Yuval reported to the Israel Defense Forces that he had moved back to Jerusalem, and was now commuting daily to his work in Tel Aviv. Showing their appreciation, the powers that be, deciding he should no longer be taking pot shots at enemy tanks in case he accidentally hit one, transferred him to the IDF's Haga (civil defense) division, in which he would serve until retired from the army at the ripe old age of 55.

About those pot shots, Yuval actually never got the chance. With the 1967 war threatening, he was in Totchanim, the IDF's anti-tank division. Totchanim reserve duty started off at two months a year and gradually reduced to one month. His anti-tank unit trained rigorously, but when it came to the war, all it did was take up positions facing the menacing Jordanians who, to the unit's disappointment, failed to test its heavy cannon preparedness.

An incident during the three weeks prior to the Six-Day War, when all of Israel was in a state of depression, knowing that Egypt and the other Arab countries were preparing to attack, and Yuval was away in the army readying for the expected invasion of Jordanian tanks, was when his wife was at home in Ramat Hasharon with the children, ready to rush to the bomb shelter in the garden if the Jordanian artillery began shelling. Their house and garden bordered on strawberry fields where Israeli Arab women were picking the fruit. It was a frightening time, not helped when one of the women, seeing Yuval's wife looking over the honeysuckle fence, drew her finger menacingly across her throat. This was no idle threat. In the event of a successful invasion of Israel, Israeli Arabs have few options other than to join with the woman in the strawberry fields.

Yuval's civil defense duty involved patrolling those areas most likely to attract terrorists, such as open-air markets and entertainment centers, and boarding buses to check for packages without owners. Army command explained that terrorists could be easily spotted if you looked one straight in the eye and he, or she, started sweating or tried to avoid your gaze. None of the many terrorists whom Yuval looked straight in the eye ever sweated or avoided his gaze. On the contrary, they would smile and offer up their shopping bags to be checked for hand-grenades and other home-made explosives. He appreciated their consideration for the tough job he had, and arrested nary a one.

Several times over the years, stationed at the army base in the Jordan Valley near Jericho, he did his month's service at Allenby Bridge, the border crossing between Jordan and Israel. Examining luggage of returning Israeli Arabs, or searching through truckload after truckload of flat sheets of dried pressed apricots for smuggled weapons, were fruitless efforts, but the Arab awareness of the punctilious searches no doubt helped reduce the number of terrorist incidents in Israel proper.

Reporting for annual reserve duty was always a hassle, especially when the quartermaster liked to speed things up, and was also a personal irritation to officers and other ranks alike.

First task on reporting, always, was to pick up your fatigues at the quartermaster's store. This is where the quartermaster sizes you up and slings pants, shirts and socks at you, notes your name, number and rank and yells "Next!"

Nothing ever fits. So the buddy exchange system takes over. If your pants are too short or too tight, you look for a short, slim guy whose pants are up to his chin. Exchange is the name of the game. You never, never go back to the quartermaster's store. Yuval did, and insisted on getting the right size pants, giving back the short, tight pair. Again, name, number and rank were noted.

Friday. Three o'clock. End of the month's service. Time to go home. "Sir. Where's the other pair?"

"What other pair? I returned them. You didn't check them off?" Nothing Yuval could say, helped.

"You've got five minutes. Five minutes, that's all. After that, if you don't return them, it's a court-martial, -- Sir."

"I never got two pairs of pants, I keep telling you."

Court-martial at 6:00, long after every man on reserve duty has gone home before the Sabbath set in. The company commander, who had no more liking for the quartermaster than anyone else, and who believed Yuval but could not exonerate him without shaming his quartermaster, ordered the QM to count all the pants in his store, and report back at the beginning of the week. Yuval, grinning, was free to go. The quartermaster fumed but had no recourse to his enemy, the CC.

During dinner, late because of the court-martial, the phone rang. Yuval answered with a loud and healthy "Shabbat Shalom."

"Shabbat Shalom. This is the Chief of Staff."

"Who? Listen. I didn't take the pants." Straining to identify the voice of the joker, slowly it clicked that it was a decidedly familiar army voice.

"This is Zvi Tzur. Chief of Staff."

"The...Chief...of...Staff! Sir!" Snapping to attention. "I didn't take the pants, Sir!"

"Pants? What pants? I'm calling about that American carpet you're selling. The one you've advertised in the paper. It is you, isn't it?"

"Sorry, Sir. Yes, Sir. My wife, Sir. One moment. Please, Sir."

Whispering: "It's for you. It's the Chief of Staff. About that carpet you hate. Give him a good buy. I may need him next week."

Tzur didn't buy the carpet. Wrong color. Yuval wasn't home when he came. As for the QM, he was on the carpet before the CC for not keeping better track of the company store.

At Yuval's retirement party, after 20 years army service, not including the Jewish Brigade Group in WWII and the Haganah prior to the State of Israel, everyone was there from the battalion commander to the lowliest private. A commendation certificate was awarded, demobilization papers signed, and drinking glasses raised to the officially demobbed. It was a typical IDF shindig: orange juice and cookies, and the Israel version of "a jolly good fellow". You don't want to miss that.

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### Chapter Twenty-Two

### A Fishy Story

A hand shaking Gershon's foot through the thin blanket awakened him at 4:30 in the morning. Assured that he was getting up, the night patrol guard left him alone to dress quietly without waking the other three in the room. A quick visit to the toilet, a fast hand and face wash, and ten minutes later he joined others of the fish pond detail who were already in the dining hall. The kitchen night shift had prepared hot coffee and tea for the early risers. Halva, cheese sandwiches and oranges were hastily eaten or added to the breakfast box for later. At five o'clock, the fish pond crew of eight boarded a tractor-drawn wagon for the ride out to the ponds. It was still dark, with no moon to brighten the way, but, as they left the lights of the kibbutz and approached the ponds, the night sky was ablaze with stars that appeared so close one could but gaze in wonder, and delight at the magic of the universe.

They donned waterproof leggings that enclosed and protected work boots and went up legs and over shorts to be tied tight across their waists. Waterproof capes, tucked into the top of the leggings, completed the process of turning them into something resembling fishermen, a look somewhat defeated by their blue 'tembel' soft hats. A shot of brandy to warm their insides was exactly the right prescription before wading into the pond, together dragging a huge net, with the fish pond manager taking the middle position, and the others lined up on either side of him along the length of the net. The procedure was simple. The net was weighted so that it dragged along the bottom of the pond when hauled from the starting end across the pond to the opposite end. The manager warned that as the carp were caught up in the net, it would get heavier and heavier until it would take all their strength to gather it in.

No swimmer, Gershon, not eager to lose his balance and fall in with the fish, entered cautiously, but was soon up to his groin in the cold water, feeling the tug of the net as the first trapped carp thrashed about, searching their way out. Progress slowed as the net got heavier and now, instead of pulling the net behind them, they turned around to continue the drag, walking backwards toward the shore. The men at both ends of the net began to close the trap, moving gradually toward the center until they climbed onto the bank, fastening the net onto hooks in the ground. The carp, crowded together, jumped madly in the little water left to them as they were fished out in hand-held strainers, and dumped into large containers of water. Among the carp were a few catfish that were thrown out of the nets onto the soft earth. Smaller carp were also rejected, to be tossed back into the pond to flourish and grow fat.

"We don't want catfish in there," one of the men said to Gershon. "They get into the ponds from the river and feed on the smaller carp." With the net emptied, the process was repeated until, near the end of the third haul, two trucks arrived to transport the fish to the wholesale fish markets in Haifa and Tel Aviv. Once again, the hand strainers were in use, this time transferring the fish from the temporary containers to the deep water tanks on the trucks.

Carp should be cooked fresh which is why they swim in a small tank when purchased from the fishmonger, and which is why, though one may buy carp on Tuesday and not prepare it until Friday for the Shabbat dinner, it swims around in the bathtub at home, and will happily wait in a bucket while the cook has her/his bath or shower. The only trouble with carp is that they are full of bones and even a good filleting job is rarely good enough. In those days carp was definitely a Jewish fish but has since gone out of fashion, replaced by St. Peter's, a small delectable sweet fish farmed in many of Israel's ponds today.

Before the trucks drove to market, the morning's work was celebrated with a carp and catfish cook-out around a campfire, with potatoes tossed in among the embers until they were properly blackened, and with each man extending his own fish, speared on a long fork, over the flames. A finjan, Arabian pot of coffee, strong and black, rounded off the meal. Then the nets were gathered in, holes made by desperate fish knotted and strengthened, and the nets set aside for the following morning. Gershon loved the fish ponds for the work, the good-fellowship and the fact that the rest of the day was free, to shower, to catch up on his sleep, to shower, to eat, to shower and again to shower until he accepted the lingering fishy smell of the ponds as a badge of honor, acknowledging membership in an important kibbutz industry.

### Chapter Twenty-Three

### Sinai

After the Six-Day War, when Israel occupied all of Sinai, the delightful southeastern part of Sinai along the shores of the Red Sea became the new vacation site for Israelis who crowded the beaches, setting up tent and trailer camps, playing volley-ball in the sand and paddling (like me) or swimming among some of the world's finest corals. In the years between 1967 and 1973, Dassah and I, with some of our Jerusalem friends, Aharon and Rita Remez, Bobby and Ophra Reisman, Leo and Sylvia Krown, Moshe and Leah Hellner, and Ovad and Ada Angel, always camped at the same spot by the Red Sea, 25 miles south of Eilat, twice a year, for the Passover and Succot holidays. We were a gay, convivial bunch, regaling ourselves in the evenings around a campfire, singing the Hebrew popular songs we sang in our younger days when we were pioneers building the land.

The Peugeot 404 was a car that served us well. When we went to Sinai it was jammed to the roof inside and piled high on the roof rack as well, with only one place left for our most important item, a night time in-tent toilet, a large, plastic rubbish bucket lined with a disposable plastic bag and with an abandoned toilet seat on top. When I drove the six-hour trip, Dassah sat beside me with the bucket between her legs.

During our stays, we'd drive into Eilat to pick up fresh vegetables, eggs, bread, and other necessities. Without refrigeration, we kept essentials fresh by laying them out in flat cartons and covered them with large, wet dishtowels, easy to keep wet by dipping them in the sea only a few feet away.

The camels of the Bedouin in Sinai roamed near the tents at night, poking their heads into the garbage bins, tearing open the plastic bags, munching food not intended for camels. It didn't seem to do them any harm, and the Bedouin didn't care. Long camel caravans bearing spices, hashish and colorful garments crossed the Sinai behind our campsite, adding an exotic charm to the pink mountain ranges through whose ravines they swayed and wove. The Bedouin opened fish eateries in large open tents where we dined on fresh-caught mullet, conger eel and lantern-fish, as well as on two or three rare species too epicurean to name.

Zeke and Jerry Youcha came all the way from New York to be there with us one festival season. That was when Zeke asked why I didn't swim. I protested that I never learned how, despite trying many times. Zeke, a psychoanalyst, got me talking about my father and what a great sport Dad was, and Zeke said how proud Dad would have been of me if I could swim, and I broke down and cried. I didn't know why I was crying, and ran into the sea and swam underwater, and when I came up, I couldn't stop laughing. Zeke did that.

### Chapter Twenty-Four

### Amen

Much as Rehavia was the well-to-do Jewish part of West Jerusalem, Talbieh had been the similar Arab part. In Israel's 1948 War of Independence their abandoned homes were taken over by the Custodian of Abandoned Property, the key-money paid going into an account to be available for compensation payments when Israel and its Arab neighbors signed a peace treaty. The many empty lots in Talbieh were rapidly developed and new homes were occupied by young Israeli couples and new immigrants.

The apartment, on the ground floor of the Touring Club building, had a large, gated yard, providing a permanent parking place for a small Fiat 600. There were two bedrooms, a big bathroom, a large storage room, and a living room and kitchen. A restorer of abandoned Arab homes designed and constructed a long open bar between the kitchen and the living room so that food prepared in the kitchen was served at the bar, with never a lull in conversation from one section of the room to the other.

The Touring Club occupied the first floor. It was a mecca for celebrations including weddings and bar mitzvahs, and for frequent tourists, and was a magnet for the neighborhood children, including our own, who had an advantage over their chums in that they could speak English, with the result that none of the rascals rarely were home in time for lunch, coming when they did, stuffed with cakes, cookies, chocolates and ice cream, and looking with disdain on their mothers' servings of healthy meals. Parental warnings that they would get fat and be easier targets for the snipers, didn't help.

Snipers, from the walls of the Old City, which at that time was still occupied by Jordan, sometimes took pot shots at children on their way to and from school. Beit Ha'yeled elementary school was at the bottom of a hill in Talbieh. Halfway down the hill, enclosed by high walls and secured by a guarded gate, was a hospital for the mentally ill. When the Jordanian soldiers let loose, the kids had a choice: either run to school or take shelter in what was then termed a lunatic asylum. They ran. The hapless demented scared them more than the happily demented Jordanians. That lovable old philosopher, Martin Buber, lived across the road. They could have run into his garden but they'd been taught not to run across roads. Anyway, the Jordanians were lousy shots.

Bad as the snipers were, men, walking in the neighborhoods, faced other dangers, for that was where small, one-room synagogues were scattered. Careless walking, such as on the wrong side of the street, could result in being "caught for a minyan". The irreligious could not refuse an urgent request from nine men gathered together to pray. It took ten, a minyan, for prayers to resonate upwards where God was allegedly waiting impatiently. Non-believers were not required to pray, just so long as ten men were present, although an 'Amen' now and again, delivered in a convincing voice, was a welcome contribution. Some retirees became regular minyanites whenever a break was sought from nagging wives or from home chores. Going out for a few minutes walk-about could easily mean an hour's disappearance, explained away with an "I was caught for a minyan."

The requirement for women converts and about-to-be brides to be dunked in the mikvah was a ritual many non-religious tried to escape. With the orthodox rabbinate controlling marriage it was no easy matter to decline the spiritual cleansing of mikvah dunking. Some determined women searched high and low to find a compassionate conservative rabbi who would not insist.

Even conservative rabbis in the new State of Israel were unable to free Mary Livingston who converted to Judaism when she married Harry Berger. The final conversion act was the mikvah dunk. Harry assured her it was nothing. Like being baptized. What could be bad about it? You go in the water a Christian and come out Jewish. Mary put on her best swimsuit, stepped down several steps into the unexpectedly deep wading pool where the cool water came up to her chin, and shivered, as the old lady in command, placing her gnarled hand on Mary's head, asked politely if she were ready. Mary hardly got to nod affirmatively, an unfortunate motion that splashed her eyes, before her head was shoved into the depths so that only her hair remained flowing on the surface. The hand relaxed for a moment, up bobbed Mary's head, and down it went again with less than a second to catch her breath. Up once more, and down again for the third and last time. Mary, of course, didn't know it was the last time, and screamed, loud and clear, words never before uttered in a mikvah: "Jesus Christ! She's trying to drown me!"

### Chapter Twenty-Five

### The Bridge Group

Originally they were a group of eight independent thinkers who gathered together twice a week in each other's homes to discuss the latest world events in which they played no part but about which they held decisive opinions. They had denied their menfolk the privilege of their company on these occasions, so that the men were none the wiser of the breadth of their discussions, but perhaps wiser for the lack of it. Solving the problems of the world within the few minutes before the eighth one showed up, the women settled down to the more serious matter of bridge, each putting five dollars into a kitty every time they met, with the proviso that only the last one to remain in the group could win the kitty, putting it toward their hearts desire. Forty dollars twice a week over the years could add up to quite a sum, figured these financial geniuses.

Phoebe was the youngest of the group, and the only one permitted to bring her husband at times when they were one short at a table. He earned the honor because he was a superior player, holding classes for those truly interested in improving their game. Unfortunately, Danny was the first of the group to die, and, while Phoebe was next, she was no longer a member, having moved to join her children in Baltimore. No new member replaced her.

Not that it mattered much because, soon after, another member's husband died, with the result that she set off for Florida where she soon developed that aging disease, whose name I forget, and shortly thereafter joined her husband.

It wasn't long before three other members moved to Assisted Living where they started a new bridge group which is prospering mightily, although their contribution to the original kitty is sadly missed.

The group of eight friendly women was now reduced to four. Their bridge meetings became less and less frequent until one moved to Florida where she's living it up with a new husband, while I pitched in on a contingency basis, until another unexpectedly died in the middle of a hand, meaning that I, to my relief, was no longer needed. The two remaining members added two new residents who keep the bridge flowing, but not the jackpot. This was closed out by the two golden agers who decided to contribute the by then considerable sum to one of six charities selected blindly from a mixing bowl by one of the new players.

I still play occasionally when one of the four fails to show, usually for medical reasons, but, between you and me, it's only for the opening discussions of the world's problems and the opportunity to display my practical solutions that I remain. Bridge never was my long suit.

### Chapter Twenty-Six

Treatment for a Screenplay by Alec Aylat

The Consequences of Randy Mckabe

Logline

There are consequences when a Scottish volunteer for the Jewish Brigade Group of General Montgomery's Eighth Army is smuggled into British -mandate Palestine.

Synopsis

A BBC radio actor, RANDY McKABE, volunteers for the British Army's Jewish Brigade Group fighting the Germans in Italy. When the fighting ends, and the war in Europe is over, he is active with SHMULIK and ARNON in a Haganah* created unit of the Eighth Army about whose existence the army is totally unaware. Transferred to the Army Broadcasting Service when the Jewish Brigade is returned to Palestine for demobilization, he deserts the ABS, following a plan by Shmulik, and is smuggled into Palestine with the Brigade. Awaiting forged ID papers, he falls in love with red-haired ARIELA, a platoon leader of the Haganah's Palmach commandos. He and she are arrested in a combined British army-police raid searching for weapons, illegal immigrants and Haganah members, but are released after a month of interrogations. Ariela goes off on Palmach maneuvers. Randy participates in constructing an unlawful bridge across the River Jordan, enabling the overnight establishment of a kibbutz on Jewish-owned land; (a Mandate law prohibits founding kibbutzim without authorization). The new kibbutz is violently resisted by a small volatile group, led by YOUSSEFF from a neighboring friendly Arab village, leading to unexpected consequences for Randy, Ariela, Shmulik, Arnon and Yousseff.

*The paramilitary defense force of the Jewish community in British -mandate Palestine.

The Consequences

LONDON, 1944. Double-decker buses, taxicabs, army jeeps, crowded sidewalks, civilians, and men and women in uniform. Signs on Oxford Street mark Regent Street and Portland Place. Up Portland Place is BBC's Broadcasting House. A large sign indicates Air Raid Shelter. Air raid warning siren sounds. Traffic stops. Vehicles empty out. People head to the shelter. Among them is a soldier, Private Randy McKabe, who, in his erect stance and face, reflects the eagerness, the joy, the confidence of a young man who knows who he is. His uniform has Jewish Brigade Group shoulder flashes, with a yellow Star of David on a blue/white sleeve patch.

As the siren ceases, the roar of a German V-1 rocket is heard. Its noise increases as the rocket comes closer. Heads turn anxiously. People walk faster. Some run. The rocket's engine shuts down. Momentary silence. Randy and a graceful girl, HEATHER ABRAMS, proud, cheerful, pleasant face, but now showing some concern, are about to enter the shelter. She is in army uniform, a lieutenant, with War Correspondent shoulder flashes. Heather trips, almost falls as she bumps into Randy at the shelter entrance. He catches her in time. Rocket explodes close by. Shock wave blasts Randy and Heather inside. Unharmed, they pick themselves up, recognizing each other from when they called on Churchill to form a fighting Palestinian Jewish unit in the British army (Brief Flashback). He is on his way to a farewell party at the BBC. She agrees to wait for him. They will spend the night together.

Randy, an actor with the BBC's radio drama department, attends the BBC party given for him and Major DEREK STONE who is also leaving the department for the British Army Broadcasting Service. Randy is sailing the next day for the Italian front where he will join up with the newly formed Jewish Brigade Group (thanks to Churchill) facing the German forces.

SENIO RIVER, ITALY. Along the riverbank, Brigade soldiers face the German bunkers. "Lilli Marlene" plays on a scratchy gramophone from a bunker. Sergeant ARNON and Lieutenant AMOS are listening. Private Randy, nearby, is sent to help set up pontoons crossing the river.

At first light, wave after wave of bombers thunder across the Senio. explosions rock German positions. Bombing ends with the distant roar of planes departing. Then silence. The only sound heard is "Lilli Marlene". It is drowned out by the whoosh of shells as artillery opens up on the German lines. Shelling ceases. In the sudden quiet, the order is given to advance all along the line. Soldiers yell, holler and whoop as they rise and rush across pontoon bridges that sway hazardously as the men try to avoid German machine-gun fire. Some fall. Most make it. The advance continues. German mines explode as the men climb the riverbank to cut through barbed wire to reach the first bunkers.

Arnon leads his platoon with Randy near him. They clamber atop the "Lilly Marlene" bunker. Arnon shouts in German "Out, pigs. The Jews are here". Arnon, later, is wounded. Randy helps him, then continues with the advance which ends with the German surrender. At a field cemetery several days later, Arnon, on a stretcher, with Randy standing by, meets with Private SHMULIK DOVRAT, whose broad shoulders, and wise, craggy face, radiate power and vitality. He heads the secret Haganah in the Brigade.

FLASHBACK to the cowshed at KIBBUTZ NA'AN in Palestine where YISRAEL GALILI, the incoming head of the Haganah, introduces Shmulik (about to leave for Italy) to his goddaughter ARIELA, a milkmaid at the kibbutz and a Palmach _(Haganah commandos_ ) platoon officer. Galili mentions how Shmulik narrowly escaped death earlier when Arabs ambushed his vehicle.

(BRIEF REVIEW of Arab ambush led by YOUSSEFF).

Shmulik gives Ariela the lucky bullet which (in the BRIEFF REVIEW) misses him and lodges in the passenger door. He asks permission to call on her when he gets back.

END OF FLASHBACK.

ITALY and HOLLAND. Randy becomes an active member of Haganah's TTG, supposedly a unit of the British army, but about the existence of which the army is completely unaware. "TTG" is a mix of Yiddish and Arabic for "Up Your Ass".

(Note: With the end of the war in Europe, the Haganah was instrumental in saving hundreds of thousands of Jews in the concentration camps and enabling them to enter Palestine "illegally", subverting the British decision to curtail visas to 100,000).

Randy, with Arnon, and ordered by Shmulik, participates in TTG actions. These include stealing brand new trucks presented by the British army to the reorganized Dutch army, which now become TTG-marked trucks, with Randy as a "British Lieutenant" leading convoys into the American zone to bring out concentration camp children.

Army HQ, finally aware that the Brigade is spreading throughout Europe organizing illegal immigration into Palestine, orders its demobilization. The Brigade prepares to return to Palestine.

Randy is advised by his company commander that the army has ordered that British volunteers in the Brigade be reassigned to other units.

He meets with Shmulik to propose that he be smuggled to Palestine with the Brigade. Shmulik says that no one deserts from the Brigade. They agree that Randy be reassigned and then desert from his new unit to return to the Brigade at the embarkation point (Toulon) where he will change places with a Haganah member of the Brigade who will remain in Europe to work with the refugees.

Now Sergeant McKabe, thanks to Shmulik, Randy is posted to British Army Broadcasting Service in Hamburg where his old colleague Major DEREK STONE is CO, and where there are also a number of his other BBC friends. His transfer papers include a Home Leave authorization from his Brigade commander which Stone acknowledges. It allows him adequate time to visit home and arrive in Toulon before being posted as AWOL by the ABS.

KIBBUTZ NA'AN. Demobilized in Rehovot, Palestine, under the name of the man he replaced in Toulon, Randy arrives in Kibbutz Na'an where Ariela is appointed to help him settle down for the few weeks it will take for a forged identity card to be ready in another new name, before it will be safe for him to travel the country. It's love at first sight for both Ariela and Randy. But they have barely enough time to consecrate it.

Before daybreak, Na'an is surrounded by paratroopers and police, searching for illegal immigrants, Haganah members and hidden weapons.

Some 700 hundred persons, among them Yisrael Galili, Ariela's godfather, now head of the Haganah, new immigrants awaiting forged IDs, and men, women and children of Na'an, refuse to cooperate. In an altercation with the soldiers, Randy is slightly injured, others more seriously. All 700 are herded into a field, encircled by barbed wire and armed soldiers, and ordered to give their names and background information. Including little children, they have one, singular answer and name: "I am a Jew from the Land of Israel."

With the Brits caring more for cows that need milking than for children, Galili escapes dressed as a milkmaid. Ariela, though a milkmaid, opts to stay with Randy. He suggests she give him Shmulik's lucky bullet. Maybe it will save him from being returned to England and an army jail for desertion. No need, she assures him. The Haganah won't let that happen.

RAFAH. Similar army-police operations are carried out across the country, affecting kibbutzim, towns and villages. Three thousand persons, including those from Na'an, are detained in the Rafah police detention camp in the south, near Gaza, where police begin intensive interrogations, with no greater success than achieved in Na'an.

Randy and Ariela are separated in men's and women's areas, but manage to converse across a barrier. There he learns that Haganah detainees are already receiving smuggled-in orders from Haganah headquarters and that there will be no cooperation until a list of questions to be asked the detainees is given. Until then, the only answer is as before: "I am a Jew from the Land of Israel".

Refusal of the questions list results in a campwide hunger strike. Meanwhile, illegal immigrants, including Randy, undergo intensive Hebrew lessons, and, somewhere, ID cards are prepared not only for them, but for detained Haganah members who may need new identities.

PARLIAMENT is in an uproar. Members criticize government repressive policies in Palestine, no longer acceptable after the Holocaust.

The list of questions to be asked is finally presented to the detainees and answers in Hebrew quickly learned. Randy is interrogated by the CHIEF INSPECTOR. Impossible to hide his Scottish accented Hebrew, especially from the inspector's Scottish POLICE SERGEANT who is questioning him in Hebrew, Randy sticks to his story that he was born and lived in Germany during the war. The inspector tries everything to trick him but does not succeed.

KFAR BLUM. Slowly, releases begin. At the end of a month, both Randy and Ariela are released. Immediately, she is called up to Haganah maneuvers, and he, with his new ID, leaves for Kfar Blum in Upper Galilee, where he is officially inducted into the Haganah by the northern area commander, his old friend Shmulik, and appointed to help construct a prohibited bridge across the Jordan River.

A police officer and army major arrive, together with the MUKHTAR and his son YOUSSEFF from the neighboring Arab village, to announce that the bridge is against the law and must be removed. They are informed that the bridge is only temporary to allow Kfar Blum tractors to plow their own land on the other side before the winter rains which, anyway, will destroy the bridge when the Jordan is at full flow. The mukhtar agrees that the land the kibbutz intends to work is indeed Kfar Blum's. Yousseff objects but is overruled. (In the earlier "Brief Review" Yousseff was the leader of the Arab marauders who shot at Shmulik).

A woman approaches the bridge from the kibbutz. Seeing Randy, she waves to him. She is the former London war correspondent, Heather Abrams. She explains finding him with his sister's help. Reluctantly, but being the gentleman he is, Randy invites her to stay with him. Ariela is "somewhere on maneuvers."

With completion of the bridge a few days later, Shmulik assembles in Kfar Blum two hundred men and women from the kibbutz and from other kibbutzim and villages in Upper Galilee. They bring with them all the essential construction equipment required to set up a new kibbutz across the Jordan, that night.

At the assembly, Shmulik appoints three armed Palmach platoons to oppose any Arab interference. One, guarding the bridge, is led by Randy's friend Arnon, member of an Upper Galilee kibbutz; another, led by YOEL is posted near the Arab village to prevent any attempt to reach the police (there is no phone in the Arab village); the third, led by Ariela, is positioned near the base site to prevent an unlikely Arab attack.

Ariela, who has arrived late at the assembly, greets Randy with hugs and kisses, ignoring Heather standing beside him. Randy, embarrassed, introduces them. Neither one is warm to the other. Neither one is stupid.

. Neither is Youseff, who stations his brother, ACHMED, on watch near the bridge. When the movement of workers and equipment crossing the bridge is well under way, Achmed runs to report the details. Youseff persuades his father to send for the police. The mukhtar, however, insists that nothing more than that be done, stressing the friendship that exists for many years between their village and Kfar Blum, and noting that where they are building is Kfar Blum land.

The mission to the police is barred by Yoel's platoon.

Late in the night, when Youseff realizes the police are not coming, he organizes a small group of seven to attack the base by blowing up the water tower under construction. Two of his men, ACHMED and YASSIR, succeed in penetrating the base site and placing dynamite under the tower. They are interrupted by the COFFEEMAN who is moving around the base providing coffee to whoever wants. He pours it elegantly from an oversized Dallah with a long spout, which extends from over his shoulder, into small cups. He tells them he is a former acrobat, and leaves them to climb the girders of the water tower, amazingly balancing his coffee pot and tray of cups, to bring coffee to the men at the top.

Ariela spots the Yousseff group of seven early, but later, noticing it is reduced to five, sends a runner, ARIK, to warn Shmulik that the site has been penetrated by two Arabs. She also delineates Youseff's group's exact position.

Shmulik sends Arik to bring Arnon's platoon in on the other side of Youseff, and, on his way, to pick up Randy, who is helping connect a telephone line to Kfar Blum. Arik takes Shmulik's rifle to give to Randy.

Heather, always the journalist covering a good story, is with Shmulik as he tries to figure out what the objective of the two Arabs inside the site would be. She suggests the tallest structure, the water tower. Told to remain where she is, she doesn't. They both run toward the water tower, Shmulik shouting all the way to the men on the tower to leave. He spots the now lighted fuse to the dynamite. Shouts "Bomb! Bomb!"

Arnon and Randy have spotted Yousseff's group. They all see and hear Shmulik. Yousseff stands and raises his rifle to fire at Shmulik. Randy stands and shoots Youseff who fires a shot as he staggers and falls dead.

At the last moment, the dynamite fuse is extinguished by the Coffeeman from high up the water tower girders, pouring coffee onto the fuses with the same elegance he pours coffee into cups.

Now, from the screenplay script, the concluding consequences of Randy's being smuggled into British-mandate Palestine.

UNDER THE TOWER: Shmulik sits, panting, out of breath. Heather, breathing easily, stands beside him. Ariela runs in.

ARIELA: Shmulik, you're alive? Thank God. Their leader aimed at you. He got off one shot. We had to shoot.

Arnon and Arik arrive, carrying Randy. They lay him down gently. His eyes are closed.

ARNON: It was Yousseff. Shot at you but it went wild. Hit Randy. Yousseff's dead. Randy's...

SHMULIK: ...No. No. Not Randy.

ARNON: Lie down, I shouted to him. Did--n't obey. Did--n't obey.--Did--n't obey.

Heather clutches Ariela. Holds her tight.

ARIELA: Oh, Randy, I'm carrying your child. You didn't know.

Randy's eyes open. He is very weak. Manages to whisper.

RANDY: Now--you--tell--me.

EXT. A SMALL KIBBUTZ CEMETERY -– DAY

SUPER: 30 YEARS LATER

Shmulik, now age 70, reads a tombstone inscription.

RAANAN MACCABI (RANDY McKABE)

Born Scotland, June 12, 1925

Killed Founding This Kibbutz, November 12, 1946

Served with Honor in the Jewish Brigade Group and Haganah

AN UNWAVERING IDEALIST

SHMULIK: Thirty years already. You'd be proud of your son. Raanan Maccabi-Dovrat.

He's high up in the Mossad these days.

Ariela (50) and RAANAN MACCABI-DOVRAT (30) approach. He is the image of his father, except for his red hair, like Ariela's. They and Shmulik place stones on the grave.

RAANAN:I wish I had known him.

ARIELA:Even at the end he had a sense of humor.

SHMULIK: He didn't have a lucky bullet.

ARIELA: He wanted yours. I did--n't \--did--n't.--didn't give him it.

Ariela cannot hold back her tears. The three stand long minutes, holding each other. Then link arms to walk through the cemetery gate together.

The Mukhtar, older by 30 years, is on a bench by the path.

SHMULIK (in Arabic): Good afternoon, Mukhtar. It's a sad day to remember.

MUKHTAR: Sad indeed. Thirty years. I'm sorry for your loss.

SHMULIK:And I for yours, dear friend.

FADE OUT

THE END

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Twenty Years of Computer Club Press Releases

What in the world can be interesting about computer club press releases, especially when said club is made up of old fogies who know as much about computers today as they did when they were first introduced to the world? Computers, not the old fogies, although it probably holds true for both.

This club that I'm writing about now has more than 250 members. Starting out with five, two of whom were knowledgeable technicians, two others, including me, who believed that computers could one day take over the world, and the fifth, who didn't want to be left behind, and who was the inspiration in calling us together, founded the "club", although we didn't know at the time that a club was what we were. He persuaded the Board of Governors to allot us a hole in the wall, an old broom and bucket cupboard, where we could assemble two computers the technicians no longer used, and it was there that we met twice a week to determine our future in the gated retirement community where we discussed how to proceed, inspected the insides of the two computers, and studied their problems (computers always have problems), until we felt competent enough to invite others to join us. We jumped from the original five to fifteen within a few weeks when, the broom closet no longer able to accommodate us, the BGs grudgingly allowed us the use of the old sewing room out of which 24 busy ladies had recently graduated.

At this time the two technicians, within a few days of each other, unexpectedly departed this world, leaving the three remaining founders to lead the newcomers into the future with not the foggiest idea of how to do it. Obviously we needed a program chair and a press agent, the first to search for speakers who could inculcate the members with the factual perception of how to become computer mavens, and the other to make our presence regularly known to the larger community wherein we lived. Our inspirational leader took the chair, I volunteered to put out a monthly press release (I once was a copy boy on a small-town newspaper), and our third founder was responsible for coffee at the monthly meeting. We were off and running.

Two months later, the first press release hit the stands in the community bulletin. "We are extraordinarily pleased to announce that Mr. Duncan Swift of Swift Computer Repairs will address Computer Club members in the Sewing Room at 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday next. Donuts and coffee at 10:00." I had originally written "Duncan Donuts" but the Program Chair didn't approve my sense of humor. I almost quit then, but decided to give him another chance.

Which is just as well, for now, twenty years later, I'm still writing those damn press releases, squeezing in a touch of humor wherever I can, but mostly humoring my old friend the Program Chair who somehow manages to come up with a new speaker to exasperate me the day after my deadline.

-30-

Cover design of "Come In, Please" is by Lucio at Visual Persuasion. Photobooth shots of the author.

Editing by Hadassah at Home. Love of the author.

About the Author

Alec Aylat's remarkable journey from radio drama associate with the British Broadcasting Corporation under one name, to being smuggled into British -mandate Palestine under another, to detention by the British army and police in Palestine under a third name, to investigation for spying by Israel's Shin Bet security under a fourth, to writing a weekly newspaper column under a fifth, are only highlights of his exciting life.

Former Reuters correspondent and editorial staff writer and reporter on The Palestine Post, now The Jerusalem Post, Aylat, a Scottish Israeli American, earned accolades and awards for acting and directing, and for creative copywriting. Fated to be in Israel's founding generation, he served in the Jewish Brigade Group of the British Eighth Army in Italy, joined the first kibbutz of the Palmach*, and fought in Israel's War of Independence.

From farmer, fisherman and quarrier, to bridge builder across the River Jordan for a new kibbutz, and from serving in an Israel Defense Army anti-tank unit in the Six-Day War, Aylat moved on to be an advertising executive, marketing consultant, fundraiser, lecturer and teacher.

The love of his life, war correspondent Hadassah, whom he met in Israel, landed him at the Israel-Consulate General in New York, inspired him to be City Manager for Israel Bonds in St. Louis, then attracted him to Canada for Haifa University, and brought him back to the U.S. to represent another Israel organization. They now commute back and forth from near Princeton to Israel, where their son and grandchildren live, and to New York where their daughter and son-in-law run a thriving business.

* The Palmach was the striking force of the Haganah, the underground defense army of the Jewish community in British-mandate Palestine before the establishment of Israel.

### Another book by this author

Please visit your favorite ebook retailer to discover another book by Alec Aylat: "This One" .It is also available in a print edition.

Taking a small but appealing place in the history of the Palmach (see above) Alec Aylat's "This One", is a personal report by the former Reuters News Agency correspondent. "This One" was endorsed by the Palmach Museum in Tel Aviv and placed in its library. You will laugh at the anecdotes and thrill at the adventures of the author with his five (and a half) identities. As for that half identity, this memorable report twists and turns to a surprising conclusion.

###
