enough to cancel a training session ten days before the parade! I have seen how you fly…” And so on and so forth. The pilots around watched me with pitying eyes.
I decided to cut this short.
“Ran, excuse me. Just a minute! Yes, I made a mistake. I’ll fix it. Tonight I’ll return to Hatzerim, and tomorrow morning we’ll train—” He slammed down the receiver, and I began looking for a volunteer to leave his home in the North on a weekend and fly to Refidim to replace me. The commander of the Fighting First, Marom, finally arrived after midnight with a Mirage, and I returned in it to Hatzor. At four o’clock in the morning I arrived by car at Hatzerim, shaved, and at six o’clock we performed the aerobatics drill over the base. When, after landing, we entered my office to debrief the flight, yesterday’s voice was already booming from the intercom.
“No, this time I have no complaints about the aerobatics, but now I’m going to teach you a lesson about irresponsibility.”
The intercom is an irritating machine—there is no way to shut off the loudspeaker and talk privately; everybody in the room hears everything. I signaled to the six pilots that the debriefing was over. When the door closed, I dialed the telephone to Ran’s office. The intercom over my head kept rattling on and on.
His secretary picked up.
“Tell Ran I am coming to his office.”
A short pause. The intercom went quiet.
“Okay. Ran says he is waiting for you. He said to come in full uniform.”
Every soldier understands the meaning of “come in full uniform.”
I STOPPED AT MY HOME at base housing to take off my sweaty flight suit and boots and put on a clean uniform. The house was empty and cool. Ali was in Beer-Sheva, at work. Etay and Omri were at kindergarten and nursery. I drank water from the tap, tried to think, and when I went out to the sunny street, I felt my heart beating rapidly. I breathed deeply. Then I decided to go for a moment next door to see Nissim, a close friend since the Scorpions, before I went to the commander’s office.
I found Red as usual, lying in bed. His bandaged hand and foot were hooked up in traction. He had multiple injuries after being returned just a short time before from a four-month stint in an Egyptian prison. They showed him a really good time there, and now he was in the middle of a series of operations involving most of his body. He was on pain pills, but every hair in the brush on his head and mustache stood redly erect, his Bulgarian accent cutting, and his black eyes direct and sharp as ever.
IN THE THREE YEARS of the War of Attrition, eighteen of our soldiers became POWs in Egypt and Syria. Most of them were pilots who were shot down in battles over enemy territory. A few of them were returned after some months of captivity, but most prisoners—some of them seriously wounded—stayed in an Egyptian or a Syrian prison almost four years and were returned only after the Yom Kippur War of 1973. After interrogation, which included torture, they were put in one room and for some years they established there a “society” of their own, and lived as if out of time. Sitting in prison was hard, but after it another punishment waited for them, even harsher. While they sat there, the outside world went on. Each of them had had his future and plans, and each had a family at home, parents, wife, and children, whose lives changed during his absence. In some cases the cracks that opened could not be mended anymore.
In the Jerusalem Talmud there is the story of Khony, who fell asleep in a cave for seventy years. During that time the holy temple had been destroyed and rebuilt again, and Khony didn’t recognize the world. When the prisoners of war emerged from whatever hole or prison cell they were kept in, and returned to the world, each of them was a changed person and met a different reality. For some of them their temples, and their whole lives, were ruined.
Becoming a prisoner of war. This was in the background all the time, like a droning in all of us who continued to fly and fight. The thought of it became the horror of my life.
WHEN WORLD WAR I BROKE OUT, Ali’s grandfather Moshe Felzen, of Berlin, was conscripted into the Kaiser’s army and became a POW on the Eastern Front. He spent six years in Russia, and definitely didn’t imagine that his fatherland, for which he had fought and suffered, was already planning factories to make soap out of him and his family. After the end of the war Felzen returned to a hungry Berlin, where his wife and daughters didn’t recognize him.
After time, I saw in Ali’s family album a strange photo post card from the time of captivity of her grandfather Moshe Felzen in World War I. A soldier is standing in the snow. He is wrapped in a heavy military jacket, collar up, and with two lines of buttons on the front. The coat is large and calf-length. The sleeves hang down, empty-ended. Behind the soldier there is a massive doorway between walls made of heavy logs. One could only guess what waits inside.
The face of the soldier is square and pale. A black, thick mustache falls from his wide nose down on the contracted jaw, under a helmet that shadows his face. From this shadow gaze two white eyes. The picture was taken in a dirt crevice of a deep trench, and the blanket of snow turns the dirt white, shades and subshades of white, and only around the soldier’s feet a large, round stain, like a black puddle, sprawls as a mass of strange shadow in that totally black-and-white world. It seems the soldier was marching in place for long time.
But once you narrowed your eyes, that weird picture would turn, in a magical way, into something else: the dark puddle would turn into some black hole forming its center between the two boots like a thin leg, and over it the dark wall widens and resembles a black wineglass on the snowy background. The soldier stands imprisoned in his black glass, handless, and only his white eyes gaze dumbfounded from it.
I have no idea how Moshe Felzen’s picture was taken there, and in what conditions. But this picture, imprisoned in the snow, came to me in my dreams and became my nightmare.
“WHAT’S UP, YEFFET?” Nissim got right to the point. There are no sick visits in the daytime, so something must have happened. I told him everything.
“That’s it,” I told him. “Tomorrow I’m out of here.”
For some time we remained silent together. Then my friend Nissim said, “Look, Yeffet (that is how he nicknamed me a long time ago, when we were flying Super Mysteres), I can’t tell you what to do, but I’ve known you a while. Just stay cool, take it easy. You’ll find a way out.”
When I left, he sent his voice after me, “And be strong. Tomorrow you’ll still be here.”
On the stairs up to the commander’s office I stopped, and thought that the cellars at the prison in Cairo, with interrogators messing with the open breaks in your limbs and beating the soles of your feet with bamboo canes, were much harder than anything I could expect here. So I took a deep breath and calmed down. Nissim helped me as much as one can help a friend in need.
I KNOCKED ON THE DOOR. Ran got up to meet me. He was as ready for a fight as a rooster, but this time I was, too. Before he began speaking, I cut him off. “Sir, just so you know. From here, I’m flying directly to Tel Aviv.”
He was surprised. “To Tel Aviv? What’s in Tel Aviv?”
“I’m going to see General Hod, to remind him about the question I asked him in the Hatzor cinema. He still owes me an answer.”
Ran looked at me for a long time in silence and then said, “Go back to work, Spector. Enough of this nonsense.”
I rose and stood facing Lieutenant Colonel Pecker, hesitating. Nothing was settled. We looked at each other for long time. At the end I made my decision, saluted, and turned toward the door. At the door he said, “And work more on that responsibility, Spike.”
And so it ended. Our relations became friendly again, and since then, I’ve had no further run-ins with Ran Pecker. But when I left his office I knew well that I had compromised on something very deep. I returned to instructing on the Fougas under Ran and tried not to think of what Toledano would have done instead, or what Shosh would say had she known, and I kept it all inside.
I treasured the only real asset I received from Ran Pecker: his personal example as a fighter and leader in battle. I added to my internal book the rule he taught me, that the courage and integrity of a warrior is measured by
