Hesh Kestin - The Siege of Tel Aviv

Named for the original Davidka—Little David—a crudely assembled mortar that became a key weapon in Israel’s War of Independence, the technology is far from that of the homemade weapon of 1948. But the stakes are just as high, if not higher. At least 1200 functioning tubes are required. After three days of full-scale assembly, the total ready for deployment is ninety-seven. Somehow eleven hundred more must be manufactured in six days.

While Pinky’s staff unsuccessfully struggles to devise a Plan B to provide the same results—the efficient transfer of 1200 Jordanian Challengers to Israel’s armored corps, whole, undamaged, fully fueled, and ready to roll—Misha turns up at Peri Military Industries to ask a simple question.

“What exactly does it take to assemble these things?”

Peri had been going twenty hours a day, and now must answer stupid questions from a gangster. But because he was once strapped to a chair on the gangster’s yacht, and certainly because Misha Shulman has proved himself as Minister of Police, he turns from the microscope he uses to examine each fuse before it is assembled in its brass tube, and answers the question with a minimum of visible impatience.

“Weeks of training,” he says. “The assembler is not working with his eyes, because the parts are so tiny, but with his fingertips. He’s like a surgeon doing microsurgery without the benefit of computerized tools and a monitor showing him what he is doing. The best assemblers are not intellectuals, because this is not a job for thinkers. You think about what you are doing, it’s all over, because then you get totally confused. Once the sequence is learned, it’s all in the fingertips.”

“So it can done in the dark?”

“In theory. But most people are not comfortable working in the dark.”

“Correct,” Misha says. “Let me tell you something from my past. As you may know, yours truly spent some time on enforced vacation in several camps in Siberia. At one of them was a special facility for assembling fine electronics. Amazing, in the middle of Siberia. But it turns out my Soviet masters were not entirely stupid.”

“Is this going somewhere?”

“Give me six hours and I’ll have your assemblers.”

“Very good,” Peri says, turning back to his microscope. “I need three hundred of them, maybe four. Even so, it will be tight. And while you’re at it, I’d like a steak sandwich and a draft beer. Goldstar if you can get it, very cold. And lights, and air conditioning. And if you can part the Red Sea, I’ll have some of that.”

Six hours later, Misha Shulman returns with four hundred and twenty-two men and women collected from every corner of Ghetto Tel Aviv, all willing, all sensitive in their fingertips.

“Blind,” Misha tells Peri. “A whole camp in Siberia for political prisoners who were blind. Even then, it made me think: for every problem there is a solution.”

Peri pulls his assemblers off their workbenches and turns them into instructors, each with ten students. “You know what Ben-Gurion said?”

“The airport?”

“The first prime minister of Israel, for which it was named.”

“I knew he was something like that.”

“In 1948, when the state was declared and eight Arab armies invaded, he said it. It’s in every history book.”

“Alon, please don’t make me regret I didn’t once upon a time break your legs.”

“‘The difficult we do immediately,’ Peri quotes. “‘The impossible takes longer.’”

AN OLIVE-GREEN CADILLAC BEARING Egyptian military plates and flying a huge pair of white boxer shorts emblazoned with a schematic Israeli flag in red lipstick might have stopped traffic in Tel Aviv less than a month before, but in Ghetto Tel Aviv there is no traffic to stop. The city is eerily empty of cars and trucks, other than those still as roadside monuments for want of fuel.

Cobi drives westward into the northern suburbs, passing on his right the bombed-out clifftop headquarters of the Mossad and on his left the towers of Ramat Aviv, once among the city’s most desirable neighborhoods. At the top of each high-rise the vegetation that adorned penthouse terraces is shriveled and brown, the streets below mostly deserted except for the ever-present tent camps shaded in the lee of buildings. It is already tortuously hot, the sun climbing up over the city like the angry muttering of a crazed neighbor, always there, always threatening.

“This is bad,” Cobi says. He drives slowly, as though out of respect, the way people drive in a cemetery. Only weeks earlier, on this same road, he pushed his motorcycle, a present from his reluctant parents upon graduating high school, to ninety miles per hour, weaving through traffic with the casual athletic heedlessness of adolescent males everywhere. “So bad. I didn’t know.”

“I thought I did,” Abed tells him. “There was talk. I thought, well, Tel Aviv. It’s Tel Aviv. A metropolis, thriving, a beehive. Now…” Abruptly he changes his tone, but not his topic. “Your father is Yigal Lev?”

“How do you know?”

“Google.”

“A truck, a television, and a computer?”

“Your condescension is underwhelming. Cobi, my wife has a blender. And a microwave. Also one of those devices that shoots water to clean between the teeth. At home there is no shortage of power.”

“Not here.”

“Cobi…”

“Look at that. People living in the street. Every street.”

“Cobi, are there a lot of Yigal Levs?”

“It’s not an uncommon name.”

“That run a company called Isracorp.”

“Only one.”

“My young friend, what I am about to tell you may come as a shock.”

“After seeing this, I’d be surprised.”

“Your father is the prime minister.”

Cobi takes his eyes off the road. It is not dangerous. The two have not come across a vehicle since dropping Alex off with the captain and his squad, and that vehicle was some sort of bicycle rigged to pull a wagon. The wagon had a small plastic tank on it, like the water tanks over the outdoor sinks in temporary army encampments. “What do you mean, prime minister? Prime minister of what?”

“The State of Israel.”

“The prime minister of Israel is Shula Amit.”

“Killed.” Abed considers. “Probably. Missing, anyway. They’re all missing. The whole government.”

“That’s crazy. Who says so?”

“The soldiers who rode with us.”

“You’re saying my father is prime minister of the State of Israel?”

“That’s what I’m told.”

“Who elected him? He’s not a politician. He’s…”

They pull up before the villa in which Cobi lived all his life. Sandbags are piled three feet high all over his mother’s flowerbeds. The lawn is gray. Military vehicles surround the house, and beyond these, on the beach, two Chariot tanks.

“Stay in the car,” Abed says. “It may be that two Arabs approaching the prime minister’s house in a car with Egyptian military plates and flying these stupid boxer shorts may spook someone. But if I have to sing Jerusalem of Gold again, I’ll throw up. I don’t even like Jerusalem.” He pauses. “Too Jewish. But I used to love Tel Aviv.” Cobi stays. Abed has guided him safely this far. From the driver’s seat, he watches the Bedouin walk with exaggerated calm slowly down the path, his hands in the air, in one of them his Israel Defense Forces ID. Immediately three soldiers are on him. He watches the Bedouin point to the car, then to the house. One soldier checks Abed’s ID. The soldiers consult for a moment, then nod. There are smiles. One of the soldiers slaps Abed on the back. Even from where he sits, Cobi can see, or perhaps only imagine, a puff of dust rising from Abed’s robes. They have been on the road for almost a week.