“Hello to you too,” Sharon says to the pair as she wiggles out of her dress. Rather than spending another day at the Golans’, she should stay home on Friday and help Savta cook the meal for whichever family members show up—usually about twenty. Since Grandpa’s long illness, Savta can’t afford the daily Arab maid.
When Sharon steps into the adjacent shower stall, she realizes that for a whole three minutes, she hasn’t thought of Alon’s torturous death.
The uniformed visitor is tall, almost gangly, and wears rimless glasses. He politely refuses Savta’s offer of coffee and a slice of poppy-seed cake.
The living room has a frosted-glass door and he asks Sharon’s permission to close it. He pulls over a chair to face her while she settles on the sofa. Her long hair is still wet from the shower, and the dampness spreads across the back of her cotton frock.
He leans forward. His face is long, like the rest of him, and pleasing, except for the bulbous tip of his nose. His green eyes are enlarged by his glasses. A shadow in his cleft chin hints of a hidden stubble. He appears to be around twenty-seven. “Sorry to press you for this meeting, but I am about to go overseas.”
“Spill it,” she says. “I can’t imagine what this is about.”
“What are your plans for the coming months?”
“Are you serious? I’m waiting for you guys to find the Dakar—if you’re even bothering to look for it any longer.”
“I’m so sorry for what you’re going through. The Eilat and then the Dakar hit us all very hard.”
The destroyer Eilat was sunk last October by Egyptian missiles; forty-seven men were killed and a hundred wounded. Alon had trained with some of the Eilat’s seamen, and she accompanied him on shivah visits to the bereaved families. At least they had the consolation of burials. At least many of the boys who were injured survived. How could she have imagined that four months later she would be similarly devastated? The two stupendous losses extinguished the exhilaration over the unprecedented victory of the Six-Day War.
“Is that what you came to talk about?” Sharon asks.
“Indirectly, yes.” His eyes meet hers. “We are rethinking naval warfare, overhauling the navy.”
Why is he looking at her as if she has anything to do with naval warfare? Since he is, Sharon can give him a piece of her mind.
“I never understood the strategy of defending our long shoreline primarily from the air, treating the navy as a bastard child.” Her tone heats up. “Which is also evident in the way you stopped searching for the Dakar.”
“For the record, the navy and air force have not given up, but this is outside my work. I am in the process of recruiting people for another project.”
She shoots out of her seat and paces the room. “Not me, that’s for sure. First, I finished my IDF duty. Second, the only women in the navy are secretaries, and I can’t type. Third, if you don’t mind my being blunt, I hate your navy.”
“Just listen, please.” He gestures for her to sit down and waits until she lets out an impatient groan and settles against the sofa’s cushions. “We’ve checked you out. You graduated from Alliance Française.” Sharon nods, perplexed at the mention of her French-language high school. He continues. “We know that in Intelligence, you worked in Arabic, which we don’t need at the moment. Besides English, don’t you also know some German?”
She crosses her arms. Why is any of that this commander’s business? Her eyes are drawn to the framed photo on the wall behind him: her parents on their wedding day. They stand in front of Grandpa Nathan’s synagogue, the svelte bride holding a bouquet of white anemones against her straight, buttoned, and belted dress. The fabric is cream-colored, not as blinding in the sunny black-and-white photo as Amiram’s white shirt. Savta told Sharon that Judith had no relatives and was attended by only one girlfriend. Relieved for two days of their duties at the kibbutz, the couple and the friend had taken the hours-long bus ride to Tel Aviv for the wedding.
Who was this woman, her dead mother, the Holocaust refugee? She must have had a knack for languages too, because when Amiram brought her to meet his parents a mere seven months after Judith Katz arrived in Israel, Savta was astonished at how fast the newcomer had learned Hebrew. Her mother must have also been musical; Sharon’s musical talent certainly didn’t come from her father’s tone-deaf family.
How had her mother’s touch felt on her six-week-old skin, the last time she’d held Sharon?
Sharon is stroking her own exposed arm as the commander’s words pull her back. “The results of your psychometric exams before you joined Intelligence were later confirmed by your performance there,” he says. “You are extremely resourceful, you work well independently, and you are detail-oriented without being bogged down by minutiae. You’re able to juggle several pieces of information while assessing a situation. What others might call intuition seems to have led you to uncover crucial intel during the Six-Day War, right?”
Blood rushes to her face. Isn’t she a civilian now with the right to privacy? “Presumably, my unit’s projects were highly confidential. How did the navy get access to them?”
“We didn’t. Only to the personnel file. And we spoke to your commander.”
“Why? Are you recruiting a Mata Hari?”
His laughter is rolling, pleasant. “It’s only the Cherbourg project.”
“What’s that?”
“The Saar boats being built in France.”
Of course. When the twelve boats were ordered a few years ago, there were some write-ups in the newspapers. Sharon only noticed that the first five had arrived because Alon pointed them out to her when they drove past the Kishon port on the way to Carmel Mountain.
A familiar surge of grief swells in her at the memory of that picnic in the forest. They’d made love on a bed of dry pine needles and fallen asleep to the music of the breeze rustling in the treetops. The pines’ resinous aroma now rises in Sharon’s nostrils. Doesn’t this commander grasp that she is too distraught—and angry—to care about the revamping of his fleet?
She collects herself. “Cherbourg, as in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg?” she asks. The musical film starring Catherine Deneuve was a bore, yet it and its theme song had become international sensations.
“That’s the one. It’s a port city in Normandy. The Titanic sailed from there.”
“Normandy has lots of cows,” she says, recalling her introductory French textbook.
He laughs. “Sheep too.”
She scratches her cheek. “Let me get this straight, Commander Yarden—”
“Call me Danny.”
She won’t fall for this tactic of familiarity. “Are you offering me a job in France in the middle of nowhere?”
“I didn’t get to that yet, but yes, except that it’s a lovely place—and only a five-hour train ride from Paris.” He grins as if aware of the absurdity of touting such a long distance as a plus. “Most important, the navy needs you for a very interesting position.”
His audacity infuriates her. “Are you kidding me?”
His left eyebrow arches. “Why else would I be here talking to you?”
