Legends

Instead of answering, Benny sniffed at the air, which was growing chillier as the car climbed into the hills. Martin kicked himself for having asked. He grasped what professional interrogators took for granted: Each time you posed a question, you revealed what you didn’t know. If you weren’t careful, the person being interrogated could wind up knowing more about you than you did about him.

Benny delicately changed the subject. “Does your leg give you trouble these days?”

“I got used to the pain.”

A grimace appeared on Benny’s prize-fighter’s lips that looked as if they had been in one fight too many. “Yes, pain is like the buzzing in an ear—it’s something you learn to live with.”

As Benny shifted into second and turned onto a narrow road that climbed steeply, the small talk gave way to a comfortable silence that exists between two veteran warriors who have nothing to prove to each other. Benny had the car radio on and tuned to a classical music station. Suddenly the program was interrupted and Benny reached to turn up the volume. The announcer delivered a bulletin of news. When the music came back on, Benny lowered the volume.

“There was another pigu’a,” he informed Martin. “That’s a terrorist attack. Hezbollah in the Lebanon ambushed an army patrol in the security corridor we occupy along the border. Two of our boys were killed, two wounded.” He shook his head in disgust. “Hezbollah makes the mistake of thinking that we’re all hanging out in Tel Aviv nightclubs or raking in millions in our Israeli Silicon Valley, that prosperity has drained the fight out of us, that we’ve grown soft and fat and are not willing to die for our country. One of these days we’ll have to set them straight …”

The outburst took Martin by surprise. Not knowing how to respond, he said, “Uh-huh.”

Twenty-five minutes after picking Martin up near the shouk, Benny drove into what looked like a rich man’s housing project filled with expensive two-story homes set back from the street. “We’re a kilometer inside the West Bank here,” he noted as he eased the Skoda to the curb in front of a house with a wraparound porch. Martin followed him through the metal gate and along the porch to the back of the house, where Benny pointed out the low clouds in the distance drenched with saffron light. “It’s Jerusalem, over the horizon, that’s illuminating the clouds,” he said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“No,” Martin shot back; the word escaped his lips before he knew what he was going to say. When Benny looked quickly at him, Martin added, “It makes me uneasy.”

Benny asked, “What makes you uneasy—cities beyond the horizon? Clouds saturated with light? My living on the Palestinian side of the sixty-seven border?”

Martin said, “All of the above.”

Benny shrugged. “I built this house in 1986, when Har Addar was founded,” he said. “None of us who came to live here imagined we would ever give this land back to the Palestinians.”

“Living on the wrong side of the green line must be something of an embarrassment for you.”

Benny punched a code into a tiny number pad fixed on the wall to turn off the alarm. “If and when we agree to the creation of a Palestinian state,” he said, “we’ll have to adjust the frontier to take into account Israeli communities like this one.” He unlocked the door and let himself into the house. The lights came on the instant he crossed the threshold. “Modern gadgets,” he explained with a snigger. “The alarm, the automated lights are Mossad perks—they supply them to all their senior people.”

Benny set out a bottle of imported whiskey and two thick kitchen glasses on a low glass table, along with a plastic bowl filled with ice cubes and another with pretzels. They both scraped over chairs and helped themselves to a stiff drink. Martin produced a Beedie from a tin box. Benny provided a light.

“To you and yours,” Martin said, exhaling smoke, reaching to clink glasses with the Israeli.

“To legends,” Benny shot back. “To the day when they become war surplus.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Martin declared.

Martin glanced around, taking in the framed Hockney prints over the sofa, the brass menorah on the sideboard, the three blown-up photographs, each bordered in black, of young men in army uniforms on the wall over the chimney. Benny noticed him noticing. “The two on the left were childhood friends. They were both killed in action on the Golan, one in sixty-seven, the other in seventy-three. The one on the right is our son, Daniel. He was killed in an ambush in the Lebanon a year and a half ago. Roadside bomb hidden in a dead dog blew up as his jeep went past. His mother … my wife died of grief five months later.”

Now Martin understood the source of the pain that Benny had learned to live with, and why he had grown melancholy. “I’m sorry,” was all he could think to say.

“Me, also, I’m sorry,” was all Benny could trust himself to answer.

They both concentrated on their drinks. Finally Benny broke the silence. “So what brings you to the Holy Land, Dante?”