“I’m not remotely interested in working for the navy that killed my fiancé. We were going to get married this October.”
“Hear me out.”
“What kind of job could your navy possibly offer that would make me want to be part of it?”
His tone turns persuasive: “We want you to take over some complicated, highly classified tasks that are too confidential for me to outline right now. Also to act as a liaison with our foreign contacts.” He examines her face. “We are about twenty Israelis living there, some with families. A warm little community. You might find the change of scenery refreshing.”
Sharon stands up. “Thanks for thinking of me. I’m flattered and horrified to have been the subject of such an extensive investigation. I can’t imagine leaving Israel while I’m waiting for a funeral—nor having anything to do with your navy.”
Equally, she’s scared of traveling abroad, of the unknown. Grief has become a familiar landscape.
After Yarden departs, Savta tiptoes in. She wipes her hands on her apron. “What did he want?”
“Apparently, the naval brass met me at the Golans’, did some digging about me, and came up with a ridiculous idea to get me out of here—for reasons I’m yet to figure out.”
“Out of here to where?”
“France, but not Paris. Some job in a remote port.” Sharon pauses. “I’m surprised that they have a rehabilitation program for fiancées, not just widows.”
Savta sits next to Sharon on the sofa and takes her hand. Her brown irises are almost hidden under her drooping upper lids. Sharon reminds herself to pluck Savta’s two stubborn chin hairs. “Listen to yourself,” Savta says. “When did you become so cynical? This is a chance to change atmosphere, to see the world.”
“It’s not seeing the world. There are just cows and boats there, not the Paris Opera.”
“Nothing is happening for you here. You’ve missed the university’s registration deadline. While you’re waiting for the Dakar to be found, you need to do something. Anything. Just don’t spend more months sitting on the Golans’ couch. It’s killing me to see you so defeated by grief.” Savta tucks a stray strand of hair behind Sharon’s ear. Her glance shifts to the photo on the wall. “Even though you were a newborn then, you carried their loss in your heart. When you were little, you used to speak to them, tell them about your kindergarten friends.” Savta’s eyes redden. “You played your flute for them and twirled around to show them every new dress I sewed for you. Now Alon’s death has broken you. What is there to do but pick up the pieces and soldier on? I lost a son, the apple of my eye. God forgive me, but Amiram was my favorite of the seven I was blessed with. I had to learn to breathe again. You helped—you gave me a new purpose. You’re only twenty years old; the world is open for you. Find a purpose. You have choices that women of my generation never even dreamed of. Open yourself up to opportunities. Say yes to life.”
Sharon lies down, pulls up her knees, and rests her head on Savta’s ample thighs. How can she leave her grandmother? Savta strokes Sharon’s now-dry hair, and tears that have been dammed behind Sharon’s lids soak Savta’s skirt.
“To be a Jewish woman is not to accept defeat,” Savta says.
Chapter Two
Sharon
Tel Aviv, Israel
July 1968
In bed at night, with only the streetlamp’s light seeping into the room, Sharon stares at Alon’s photo. A cat meows, and the cover of a trash can clatters onto the concrete. The neighbor above drops his work boots upon his return from his late shift at the electric company. Sharon’s mind churns with possible explanations for the Dakar’s disappearance. These obsessive speculations have plagued her from the start, but she never dares raise them in the Golans’ presence. Could Alon still be alive somewhere, captive? But even the rabbis—so pedantic when it comes to identifying the body of a missing husband before they release a woman from her marriage—now accept the men’s deaths. They are contorting their halachic logic to free the agunot, the women “chained” to their marriages. If not declared widows, the wives of the lost officers and sailors would forever be forbidden to remarry. Should they bear children, their offspring would be labeled mamzers, bastards.
At seven in the morning, Sharon is in the kitchen brewing coffee. Her eyes burn from lack of sleep. She places on a tray buttered toast, half a grapefruit, and a cup of coffee with a sugar cube in its saucer. She’s about to take the tray to Savta in bed when the phone rings. Sharon vaults toward it; at this unusually early hour, it might bring the news she’s been waiting for—and dreading.
She’s disappointed to hear Commander Daniel Yarden’s voice.
“I’m not far from you, heading to the central bus station. Would you join me for breakfast?”
“I won’t change my answer.” Despite Savta’s encouragement, Sharon is certain that saying yes to traveling abroad—or to the navy—is not an option.
“Just a friendly chat in a café,” he says. “We can’t discuss yesterday’s topic in a public place.”
She understands his new tactic. She’s used it herself. She recalls the night during the Six-Day War when an eleven-year-old Arab girl was brought to the tent that served as Sharon’s field office. The girl had been found wandering in an olive grove. The soldiers, who had almost shot her in the dark, didn’t know what to do with her. The girl wore a long dress, and her single possession was a hand mirror with a painting of a veiled belly dancer glued to its back. Sharon turned off the interception equipment she was using to listen to Arabic chatter and assured the girl that she was safe. She made her a chocolate-spread sandwich and gave her a glass of milk. The girl clutched the mirror in her right hand and used her left to eat and drink, which was odd, as Arabs always ate with the right hand. Although the girl seemed wise, she said she didn’t know her name. By two a.m., her lids were drooping with fatigue. Sharon unrolled a mattress, tucked her in, and sang her an Arabic lullaby. When the girl was asleep, Sharon gently took the mirror and pried open the back. She discovered a list of people, their code names, and a hand-drawn map of their locations. She was furious. Someone had sent a child across enemy lines in the middle of the night. She could have been killed.
But Sharon’s intelligence unit had obtained crucial information.
“Hello?” the commander says on the other end of the line.
“Sorry. I—” Sharon is about to repeat her refusal when it occurs to her that she can ask him the questions that have been torturing her. “All right,” she says.
In this busy neighborhood filled with wholesale shops and small factories, it’s hard to find a quiet spot in the café. The commander has secured a table in a corner next to a large window overlooking a city-block-long park where an old man scatters seeds for the birds. Soon, mothers will show up with their toddlers; Savta used to bring Sharon here.
Every station on the radio plays “Jerusalem of Gold” throughout the day. Sharon can’t address the commander by his first name even when he is wearing civilian clothes; his khaki pants and button-down shirt are so neatly pressed that among the other café patrons in shorts and T-shirts, he might as well have been wearing his uniform. His prescription glasses have been replaced by aviator sunglasses, and she can’t see his eyes.
They order breakfast, and the waitress brings them coffee. Sharon realizes that this is the first time she’s sat at a café since it happened. Life streams on. She puts two spoonfuls of sugar in her coffee and stirs. “Since you know so much about me,” she says to the commander, “how about if you tell me about yourself?”
“I’m a kibbutznik from Ayelet HaShachar. Unmarried. I attended the naval academy in Acre. Additional training in Toulon,” he adds, mentioning the large French maritime center on the Mediterranean.
“Neither the kibbutz nor the naval academy teaches French. How do you manage in that Umbrellas city of yours?”
“Actually, I was born in France. I was brought here by the Youth Aliyah. My new family made sure that I kept up my French.”
Sharon gasps. She sets down her cup carefully, trying not to show her excitement. Youth Aliyah was the immigration organization that, twenty-two years earlier, had brought her mother from France to Palestine—and that is practically all Sharon knows about the woman who arrived here at age seventeen, married at eighteen, gave birth at nineteen, and was killed six weeks later.
When Sharon was little, every year her grandparents drove her up north to the annual memorial service for the fallen heroes of the Battle for the Galilee. She recalls her growing panic at age six as she circulated among the adults, all of them wearing the unofficial Memorial Day uniform of a white shirt over blue pants or a skirt, their faces solemn. “Did you know my mother?” she asked each of them. She received nothing but soft strokes on her head and sad looks. “I’m sure she loved you very much,” some said. “She was a true hero” and “She watches over you from heaven,” others said. “How do you know if you didn’t know her?” Sharon responded, her throat constricting as she held back tears, intent on her mission to find at least one person who had known Judith Katz.
Finally, Grandpa Nathan gathered her into his arms and sat her on his knee. “The entire group was killed in the battle,” he whispered. “These people are here to honor their sacrifice and their memory, even if they didn’t know any of them personally. ‘In their deaths they willed us life,’” he said, repeating the line carved on the earth-toned marble memorial they were facing and that she could read herself. “You have one thing that these people don’t know about.”
“What is it?”
