“Your mommy’s beautiful face.” He kissed her cheek. “And her cutest dimple.”
Sharon would never know her mother, but the second-best thing would be talking to people who’d lived through her mother’s experience of Youth Aliyah. That never came to be. Growing up in a city, she never met any of the tens of thousands of rescued children—all older than she—because they had been, like the commander, absorbed in kibbutzim and agricultural youth villages.
Treading cautiously, she asks him, “What happened to your parents?”
“I don’t know. It was during the Nazi occupation of France.”
“Who took care of you?”
He shifts in his seat. For the first time, she sees him lose his composure. “Maybe the underground at first. Then I was adopted by a French couple.”
“What underground?”
“A French network of anti-Nazi men and women hid Jewish children. When things heated up, they transferred the kids to a new hiding place.” His tone turns more energetic. “It’s all in the past. I focus on the future. We face an existential threat not only from our Arab neighbors but from Russia. After centuries of official anti-Semitism, they’ve found partners who share their sentiments outside the Soviet borders—and right on our own.”
She knows all of that, but his words remind her how self-centered she’s been these past few months, as if losing three people means she’s sacrificed enough. Except that their deaths haven’t brought security. The threat of a second Holocaust, another genocide committed by Israel’s neighbors, forever lurks about.
The electric fan above Sharon’s head lets out a small screech with every turn. For a while, neither she nor the commander speaks. Outside, light saturates everything it touches, although it fails to brighten her mood.
Their breakfast of chopped salad and fried eggs arrives. Sharon restarts the conversation by mentioning the names of Alon’s officers who graduated from the naval academy. The commander knows them and recounts a three-month voyage to India on a commercial tanker he’d taken with one of them the summer after he graduated and before he enlisted.
“I want to ask you something I can’t bring up in Alon’s parents’ presence,” she finally says. “What if the Dakar didn’t plunge to the bottom of the sea but was seized by Egyptian or Russian forces, and the crew is not dead but captured?”
“International diplomatic channels have plowed through such a possibility.”
“Here is another scenario.” She takes a deep breath. “Isn’t it possible that the American navy sank the Dakar in retaliation for the USS Liberty?” The American destroyer was hit in the middle of last year’s Six-Day War when Israel mistook it for an enemy ship. Explanations and apologies failed to placate the enraged Americans. “I mean, not officially, not by a US government order, but by some low-level officers to avenge their brothers?”
The commander pushes his plate to the side and places both his elbows on the table. “Sharon, rumors are bound to float around. There’s absolutely no basis for such a theory.”
“I learned in Intelligence that until there’s a solid explanation, all possible theories are valid.”
He smiles. “One more proof of how well you’ll fit in on our project. By the way, did I tell you that a civilian’s salary is on the French union scale, not the Israeli government’s? That’s quite a bundle.”
Sharon doesn’t show that her interest is piqued. Savta is struggling financially after Grandpa Nathan’s long illness, which depleted their assets. Sharon hasn’t yet contributed since her military basic pay covered only the cost of mascara. She’d planned to seek office employment between her expected release from the military in February and the start of the university semester in November. Even if she had done that, she couldn’t have mentioned her intelligence service. With no formal work experience other than some drafting and billing at her uncle’s factory during school breaks, she would have started at the lowest end of the pay scale. She is flattered that the commander views her potential through her qualifications, not her nonexistent work history.
“Sounds good, but it’s not about money,” she tells him.
He rises, pays the bill, and motions with his head toward the garden. “Shall we take a walk?”
The outside air wraps around her like a wet, hot towel. Dust rises from the path at her first step. It will be another blistering summer day. Sharon contemplates taking the bus to the city pool for a long swim and is jolted by the notion that she is considering doing anything other than joining the Golans on their couch.
“Look,” she says to the commander while her mind digests her sudden craving to dive into cool water. “You’re wasting your time on me.”
“I don’t think so. You care deeply about Israel’s security.” He pauses. “Do you know that the Eilat was hit by a Russian-made Egyptian missile? It was the first such missile ever shot at our ships, and it proved how dangerous its range and accuracy were.”
Sharon’s heart lurches. She’s transcribed the minutes of enough intelligence meetings to understand that, given the missiles’ improved distance and accuracy, it is only a matter of time before one of them hits the spot where she now stands, in the middle of Tel Aviv.
A bus puffs out black soot, and its acrid smell wafts toward the garden. The swallows chirping in the treetops are shocked into a momentary silence before they pick up their song again. These small, valiant birds, Sharon thinks, have adjusted to the urban pollution instead of seeking a greener neighborhood. When she’s not floating in her bubble of grief, she notices the world. She cares—and worries.
If only it weren’t the navy that was asking—and expecting her to travel into the unknown.
“I’d like to make it clear,” the commander says, “the Saars project is highly classified. You may not share our conversation with anyone.”
“How can it be classified if it was in the media when we ordered the boats, and five are already in Israel, docked in full sight?”
He raises his fingers to tick off the reasons. “One, they have special features that are, let’s say, unique. Two, our team’s presence in Cherbourg is not reported anywhere—not in France or Israel. Three, the Saars’ final designated use is the issue. They are being built as oil-exploration boats. No weapons are being placed on them.”
“In that case, the arms embargo shouldn’t apply,” she states. President de Gaulle’s arms embargo, reinforced by the recently elected prime minister, Pompidou, was a blow to Israel. France had formerly been a friendly supplier of tanks and planes—it had even helped in the development of Israel’s nascent nuclear power. But after tiny Israel was attacked by four mighty Arab nations and won the war in a mere six days, France chose to side with the Arab states. The fifty French Mirage airplanes that Israel had fully paid for were not delivered. With France refusing to sell Israel spare parts for its French-made tanks and planes, the nation’s military vehicles and aircraft are fast going out of commission. The country is being choked, and the defeated Arab countries are gearing up for another round of war.
“The arms embargo is not supposed to apply to boats built as platforms for oil exploration,” the commander tells her. “But these Saars are constructed of steel, not wood, and they are too fast, sophisticated, and expensive to serve a civilian purpose. That leaves a gray area for France’s interpretation—and ours.” He removes his sunglasses and looks at her. “If you were the French minister of defense, what would your take on it be?”
Why is the commander testing her when she has no intention of joining his team? “I would wonder why the Israeli navy is directing what is supposed to be a commercial enterprise,” she replies. “In which case, the Saars operation must be conducted in secrecy even in France?”
A small smile quirks his lips. “Let’s say, under the radar.”
They pass by the sandbox, where a woman empties a bag of plastic toys for two little boys. Sharon watches her. What kind of a mother would Judith Katz have been? Her name was so common that Sharon’s efforts to locate information about her in the Youth Aliyah’s messy archives had been futile. Was Judith funny, introspective, impatient, reserved, shy, giving? All Savta could tell Sharon about her daughter-in-law, whom she’d met only twice, was that during the Holocaust, Judith’s family lived in France. They had been deported and had presumably perished. Orphaned, bewildered, and homeless, Judith was seventeen when an Israeli team searching the countryside after the war for lost Jewish children found her. She helped care for a group of rescued youngsters and accompanied them on an immigrants’ ship to what, two years later, would become Israel. Amiram, four years older than Judith, met her on her arrival.
“What do you remember from your Youth Aliyah voyage?” Sharon asks the commander.
He chuckles at the turn of the conversation. “I was fascinated with the ship and the sight of endless water. I hung around on the bridge and bombarded the captain with questions. He spoke no French, but he let me hold the helm. That’s when I fell in love with the sea.”
That’s not the anecdote she’s searching for. “Do you remember others on the journey?”
He looks at his watch. His tone is bored when he says, “It was so long ago.”
She will dig for more if she gets the opportunity. The commander thinks he knows all about her. He can’t imagine that she will make herself useful to him only so she can probe his Youth Aliyah memories. For the first time in Sharon’s life, a window has opened for her to learn something about her mother’s experience. All it will take is chutzpah—daring and audacity.
They stop in the corner leading to the street. A horse-drawn farmer’s cart slows the heavy morning traffic. Irritated drivers blow their horns. The horse lowers its head as it tries to pull faster, harder. Sharon feels bad for the poor beast.
