Iftach Spector - Loud and Clear

Later, when we got to night flying, Goldie had a tough time. For some reason his Harvard went wild time and again in the darkness. Sometimes he would run out of runway while landing, go off into the fields, and flip over. By dumb luck, Ami was not injured on such occasions. In one of those accidents, when he crawled out from under the upended airplane among the smoking gooseneck kerosene lamps that served for runway lights, the boss was waiting for him with a long face.

“What was it this time, Goldstein?”

The small man, covered with mud, giggled. “Suddenly the Harvard growled at me, like a wolf.”

“So what did you do?” asked Maj. Harry Barak, our commander, in his heavy Australian accent. This was the moment of truth—Harry was going to determine Goldstein’s fate, whether he would continue with us or go back to the ground troops.

“I growled back at him, like a bigger wolf.”

The flight instructors around Harry howled with laughter, like wolves, and he was fascinated. He decided to give Goldie a few more lessons. Finally Goldie got night landings figured out, too.

Goldie was purposeful and charming. We all knew that before any of us would be toddling, Goldie would already be running. And as Goldie finished his presentation to the Scorpions and returned to his seat, one almost could hear the “click.” Goldie was already one of the gang.

ZBB, ZUR BEN-BARAK, was no doubt the smartest of us, and a heavyweight by any measure. In spite of his cumbersome body and his flat-footed goose gait, he was quick in biting. From the dark, wrinkled, almost old face shone amazing eyes, gray-green and alive, that saw everything. And there was a brain behind the bright eyes that recorded and cataloged to the minutest detail, and retrieved at the appropriate moment for use, though not without adding a little extra something wicked. Zur’s brain was a rare calculating tool, sharp and acute. It lost no item of information. He was in love with details, remembered them, knew how to caress them into a whole picture and to produce witty, surprising inferences. He had mastered numbers and was fond of demonstrating his exceptional ability. Even though he was the best pupil in the class—an able painter with notebooks full of elaborate drawings in dimensions and colors—he was slow to grasp the mechanics of flight. But he improved his performance daily, not repeating any mistake. The flight instructors appreciated this and were competing to teach him.

His body was another problem.

In the evenings he was torn by intense desires. Restless, he would drag me along to the soldiers’ mess to watch him undressing the girls with his eyes. He would weigh breasts, legs, and buttocks, evaluate and analyze them. He would approach the girls, court them and flatter them, distribute cigarettes and chocolate—a rare item that was given to us air cadets as a nutrition additive—then corner two or three girls with his body against a wall. I was an innocent; I hated this approach and was ashamed of such behavior. All I wanted was to go back to my room to study or sleep. But Zur needed a squire and was trying to teach me.

“Why did you volunteer for pilot training? Huh?”

I was both scared of and attracted to him.

There was something mysterious in ZBB, something similar to my mother, Shoshana. Like her, he had a frightening quality that enabled him to know things he had no way of knowing. Those bright eyes could, at times, be like an X-ray machine. This capability to assemble banal details and produce unexpected generalizations—to infer the missing piece of the puzzle—sometimes seemed magical. On occasions he caught a glimpse into the future.

Once I invited him to join me in an Independence Day event at my kibbutz, Givat-Brenner. We arrived a little late, and the festival had already begun. It was a golden spring afternoon in mid-May. The sun was a great orange ball lowering behind the Sereni building, the community hall of the kibbutz. Hundreds of the kibbutz members and their children, all in white shirts and blue trousers, were crowded on the vast lawn in the golden light. Above us fluttered our national white-and-azure flags together with the red flags of the workers’ movement.

A trumpet sounded and everyone became quiet. The kibbutz choir began singing, and many members joined in. Then, from the second-floor veranda, a boy and a girl recited “The Silver Tray,” a poem about the youth who were the tray upon which independence was given to the Jewish nation. The words poured from their lips like silver. The trumpet sounded again, and we all stood at attention. The kibbutz’s spokesman read aloud the name of each of the fallen in the struggle for statehood. He read the name of my father, Zvi, and at that moment I saw my mother sitting by herself, smoking a cigarette. The choir went on in four-part harmony, and we all followed and sang together, in one mighty voice, the anthems: “Hatikva” (The Hope), the anthem of the State of Israel, and then the “Internationale.” The air was full of positive energy.

When the event was over, families began gathering to continue the festivities. I was about to approach my mother, and suddenly ZBB elbowed me. I turned toward him. He indicated with his eyes, and when I followed his look, I saw the girl I was falling in love with. She stood apart from us, slender and slight, part of a covey of girls her own age. Zur grinned at me. I felt a heavy blush heat up my face. How in the world could ZBB have known that this was the one I wanted? There were a lot of girls around, some of them very good-looking. But Zur saw something, and somehow he knew.

After the grand feast with the entire kibbutz in the public dining room we had to leave and return to base. We parted from my mother and the lit, flower-filled hall and walked in the dark to our Willis. Zur drove the pickup; he never gave the wheel to anybody else. And I sat looking at him from the corner of my eye, confused, as if he had somehow found a way to control me.

IT TOOK ME YEARS TO BE ABLE to explain in logical terms how he had done it. Life taught me also, gradually, how to fill in the missing pieces in the puzzles put before me. First it happened in aerial combat and then in commanding men. Time and again I was faced with situations where the facts available to me were only part of a larger whole, and some of them were questionable, too. Still, these were the premises upon which I had to decide and act. Under pressure, I learned to see—that is, to infer and create a complete picture. It was necessary to do it that way, though it was a delicate and even dangerous act. In combat flight, which is—like playing jazz—a fast performing art form based on deep culture and improvisation in varying situations—the necessary base for creativity and invention is the ability to collect diverse pieces of information and fill the missing parts with imagination and association, to create a multidimensional mental picture. This is the meaning of seeing. Finally I came to realize that seeing does not come just from the outside. A major part of it wells up from the inside. Zur knew how to see.

Only after this event did I get up enough courage to propose friendship to this girl. Ali, in her direct way, answered with a short note that ended, “Yes, I accept.”

YES, ZBB WAS BOTH SCARY and attractive.

What made it easier for me in his company was this clumsy and anxious body of his that caused him so much suffering. He trembled when we were about to train at being taken prisoner by the enemy. This is the toughest part of the training in the flying school. We knew we were going for a hike in the mountains, that we were to try to hide and escape, but there was no chance. Somewhere along the way, we would be caught and taken to an unknown location, where interrogators would exert physical and mental pressure to extract information from us. Zur was pitiably frightened of this. He felt he would be unable to stand the physical pressures and the abuse, and believed he was going to bring shame on himself and on his father, Itamar, who was a high-ranking and respected officer in the reserves. So he began to try to toughen up. He wanted me to box with him and to punch him in the face. I didn’t want to do it, so he pushed me by banging his head into a light pole.