An Improbable Friendship Read online

  “That’s Moshe and me in 1936,” Ruth told me. My eye drifted to an oil painting, next to the eye-patch, of mesmerizing sensuality. It was a portrait of Yael, done just after the Six Day War in 1967 when her father conquered the old city of Jerusalem and the West Bank. “She’s stunning,” I said.

  “Well, back then she sure was. A bit wild, too.”

  Gently leading me by the arm, she took me around the apartment, pointing out framed photographs. One was of her parents in the 1920s looking like anthropologists crouched with Bedouins. She then showed me a photo, the perfect image of harmony, of her three children taken when they were young. “Moshe and I were so happy back then,” Ruth said pointing especially at Assi. “It was just after the war in Europe. The kids drove us around the bend, and we were poor farmers, but happy.” I still had no idea why she asked me to drop by. “So Mrs. Dayan . . .”

  “Call me Ruth. Everyone does.”

  “Ruth, you said something about a secret.”

  “Yes, well you cannot tell that story,” she said raising her voice slightly and smacking her lips, “if you don’t have some Levantine spice inside you. A chili pepper or two. You just can’t. I’ve given other writers a crack at it and they failed.”

  Which seemed like a challenge. “Hmmm. What’s the nature of the story?” But before saying any more, Ruth assured me she’d already “checked me out. You’re a ghostwriter, right?”

  I knew a thing or two about haunting other people’s lives, I replied. “Does this secret of yours have something to do with General Dayan?” Was she going to tell me he was still alive, living under a pseudonym in the jungles of South America?

  “Oh, him,” she uttered under her breath and raised her eyes to the photograph of her poetry-reading lover on the wall. “No, no, no. Everyone already knows his story. I have . . . let’s say, a different yarn for you.” At this point Ruth came out with one of her phrases that tend to pop up innumerable times in the course of any conversation with her. It was “To cut a long story short,” a sure sign that an elaborate tale was to follow.

  Ruth pulled out a pack of discount Israeli cigarettes, tapped it until one emerged, and offered me the pack. No thanks, I told her. She lit up and inhaled deeply. “The book I want you to write has been cooking on the back burner for years. With the clock ticking. . . . Do you have any idea how old I am? Ha, talk about living on borrowed time!

  “Here, I want to show you something.” In front of her, next to a knitting basket, was a large square object covered by a camel hair rug similar to ones Muslims kneel on during the call to prayer. Reaching down, she pulled away the rug: Abracadabra, this is my life! It was a box brimming over with cassette tapes. She went on to explain how for years she had been recording story after story, hundreds of hours worth. If there was a secret buried somewhere in those tapes, I thought to myself as she picked them out of the box one by one and piled them on her lap, it would take an eternity to find.

  While she was fishing through the box, the phone rang and I heard Ruth pipe up, “Oh Raymonda, yes. He’s here. Let’s talk after he leaves.”

  The only Raymonda I’d ever heard of was Raymonda Tawil, a militant journalist famous in the 1970s and ’80s for using a tape recorder she dubbed her “Kalashnikov” to interview ex-prisoners, grieving mothers, and dissident Israeli officers. (One can imagine Vanessa Redgrave or Jane Fonda playing her part in a movie.) In her glory days she was the most prominent—and hands down sexiest—feminist among the militants, a woman whose intellectual, erotic, rebellious sparks not only attracted people but got others building bombs—she was eventually run out of the West Bank when someone, either an Israeli or a Palestinian, attached a bomb under her Opel sedan. This was before her daughter Suha married the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a man well over twice her age and considered by most Israelis to be a bloodthirsty killer, the Palestinian version of Hitler. But why in hell would the first wife of Dayan be talking to dead Arafat’s mother-in-law?

  Ruth wanted to inventory the tapes but I was more interested in talking about Raymonda, if indeed we were talking about the same woman. “Raymonda Tawil, was that SHE?”

  One of Ruth’s quirks is the way she screws open her eyes when she’s about to come out with a bombshell. Yes, she nodded, adding that their friendship was the best “secret” in the box, a “dangerous one,” too. She turned her attention back to the box and, without looking up, said, “You have to promise not to breathe a word about this to anyone. She tells me she’s on some sort of mission.” Ruth hesitated, looked up, swiveled her head in my direction, and swept her eyes around the living room, as if she was afraid of snooping ears. “Just don’t ask me what it is.” She made it sound as if Tawil was on a search for the Holy Grail.

  “A mission?”

  “Yes, that’s right. A mission. She’s always on some sort of crusade. She’s a dyed-in-the-wool feminist. I have an email.”

  Ruth read it out loud: “Whatever writer you choose will have to have the patience to go deep in the complicated, perplexing Middle East conflict . . . no, even more. We need someone to dig into the souls of two enemies.”

  “That’s from Raymonda? What does she mean by ‘we need’?”

  “We’ve been friends for forty years. She’s a very special lady.”

  “The email says you’re enemies.”

  “We are. We love each other. Enemies can be friends and friends can be enemies in this country.”

  I was still trying to wrap my mind around her relationship with a “dyed-in-the-wool feminist” and mother-in-law of the Palestinian answer to the one-eyed Moshe, with rumpled combat fatigues and a keffiyeh instead of an eye-patch, when Ruth began talking about the book she wanted me to write. She wanted me, preferably as her ghostwriter “but that’s up to you,” to dig through her tapes and come up with a book, a book that somehow also featured Raymonda’s “mission,” whatever it was, and their shared belief that Jews and Arabs can live together without borders and walls and suicide belts and “all that nonsense.” Which was the last thing I expected to hear from the widow of the great warrior. “My story . . . our story has plenty of drama, and if you look hard enough,” she said kicking the box, “you’ll find a murder mystery or two.” With that, she crushed her cigarette into an ashtray and looked me over from head to toe as if sizing me up.

  “Why?” I asked, meaning “why me?” For half an hour Ruth sang the praises of the various characters she has known in her life, from Ben-Gurion to Leonard Bernstein and Eleanor Roosevelt. According to her, she simply stumbled by chance into the lives of the most extraordinary characters of the twentieth century. The thought never occurred to her that she, too, was a member of this special club.

  “And Raymonda?”

  You’d think she was talking about Joan of Arc or Gloria Steinem. “You know the magician . . . what the hell’s his name . . . David Copperfield? That’s what she’s like. My God, with her tongue she can go through walls and cut through stone. The New York Times . . . or the Washington Post, one of the two once printed up a caricature of her as a tigress. ‘The lioness came out of the cage.’ She was the first Palestinian to talk to us Israelis, to understand us and not let her pain get in the way. Raymonda’s the real star of our friendship. I’m just her sidekick, her Sancho Panza,” she said with a smile.

  Sancho Panza? This would turn Raymonda into a Don Quixote. Now that’s a story, I mused: Yasser’s mother-in-law on her noble steed swooping down on windmills with the general’s widow, on her mule, struggling to keep up.

  “Oh, here comes lunch.”

  Ethel arrived from the kitchen carrying a platter of food. “I hope you’re hungry,” Ruth said, lighting up another cigarette and blowing out a perfect blue halo of a smoke ring. As she would every time I visited her over the coming years, she wanted to feed me. With each successive trip Ethel piled the dining table with typical Ashkenazi fare with a heretical twist. There was chicken soup with matzo balls, a small plate of chopped liver, some boiled po
tatoes, and a pork chop smothered in crushed black pepper.

  We ate on TV trays so Ruth could continue pawing through the box of tapes while regaling me with highlights of her friendship with Raymonda—how they met in Nablus after the Six Day War; the time Raymonda and Yael, who already knew Arafat, introduced her to the Palestinian leader, and he kissed her three times, right cheek, left cheek, right cheek. “Yasser was so excited, you just can’t imagine.” What I gleaned from her other stories was that she and Raymonda have a lot in common. “Like two peas in a pod,” despite the more than twenty years age difference and that Raymonda wrote about being enemies in the email even though they love one another.

  “Time is of the essence. And with these bastards”—I assumed she was talking about right-wing Israeli settlers and Hamas thugs—“driving our two peoples into this killing frenzy, we don’t have a moment to lose.” She stamped her bare foot on the prayer rug. Ruth, a live wire of energy, was effervescent.

  Ruth spent much of her childhood in Imperial London and still prefers reading English to Hebrew. In her library in the back of the apartment, she started rooting through the shelves looking for materials that might help me understand the sort of writing project she had in mind, all the while pointing at books as if they were people standing before us in flesh and blood: she came out with personal anecdotes about Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jackie Kennedy, Yitzhak Rabin, and Albert Schweitzer. “Oh, look at this one.” She held up to the light of the lamp the novella Return to Haifa by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. “I never met him because . . . well, we blew him up.”1

  “You have to try to think of things from their perspective,” she was saying, her hands grasping for books. “It wasn’t easy for Arabs like Raymonda. To lose everything.”

  Her eyes were suddenly red. I approached her to give her a peck on the cheek when she set the books on a desk and asked me to follow her to her bedroom. She sat on her bed with stacks of materials and newspaper clippings spread out like tarot cards. “Come here,” she commanded, patting the quilt with her hand. “Don’t worry—I won’t vamp you.” To write her book I would have to go through her letters, extracting the gems, she explained. “Who knows? Maybe my kids will chuck the stuff out when I’m dead.” I took a deep breath: a dedicated team of researchers would need a year to plow through those letters, mostly in Hebrew, and cherry pick materials from the mountain of cassette tapes.

  Ruth held up a fistful of love letters from nineteen-year-old Moshe to her as a love-struck teenager of seventeen. Suddenly she was beaming as she read out some of the letters. “Just listen to this one. I think I know what you think about Moshe. Some sort of John Wayne character, a cowboy with his six-shooter gunning down the natives.” Well, think again. “Moshe was a farmer at heart. How else could he have written this?” It was a letter about grafting new shoots in an orchard: “‘I remember every one,’” she read from the letter, “‘when it was done and when it will blossom, and I feel toward each like a father to a son.’”

  “Now isn’t that lovely?”

  I headed back to Jerusalem and spent most of the night and the next two days reading and taking notes and doing some online research: I learned, for instance, that the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin used to get visitations from God, each time at 3 a.m. sharp, prompting him to fire off telegrams to both Arafat and Dayan. And the Italian journalist and iconoclastic feminist Oriana Fallaci once depicted Arafat’s dark sunglasses as a counterpoint to “his archenemy Moshe Dayan’s eye-patch.”

  I ended up making innumerable trips down to Tel Aviv, and Ruth took me on frequent forays back to Nahalal where she and Moshe lived for the first years of marriage. She and I spent so much time together that my snickering friends likened my relationship with this extraordinary woman born the same year as my grandmother to something out of Harold and Maude.

  I never became her ghostwriter; I was more of a shadow following the lives and friendship of two women who defy everything usually said about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ruth and I carried on a separate line of communication, over email and Skype, with Raymonda. The first time the three of us spoke, they at once began discussing people I had never heard of. “Raymonda,” I finally said, interrupting the flow of their stories. “Tell me about your mission. Ruth tells me . . .” I found myself groping for words. “She mentioned something about a mission.”

  Raymonda threw back her head and burst out in a cackle, blowing a kiss in Ruth’s direction. “She’s my mission.”

  “Ruth?”

  “Somehow, yes. I’m hers, too, I suppose.”

  Part I

  1917–1956: Of This Tormented Soil

  1

  “The Happiest Day of My Life”

  For most of the family, friends, and guests gathered for the wedding held at the isolated farming village called Nahalal in the fall of 1935, the pair seemed badly mismatched: here was Ruth Schwarz, the daughter of university-educated Jerusalem lawyers, a girl raised with Victorian novels and dance and piano lessons, teaming up with Moshe Dayan, a twenty-year-old farmer, rough around the edges, who looked like a tough Bedouin warrior.

  The novelist Arthur Koestler described the area around Nahalal in northern Palestine—a country Jews referred to as Erez Yisrael—as “desolate marshes cursed with all the Egyptian plagues.” Ruth’s parents Rachel and Tzvi, the only ones at the wedding to arrive in a private car, came up in their brand-new Morris “8” with wire wheels and a honeycomb grille.

  Travel was arduous and risky in those days. Rachel navigated the car through the dusty paths that passed for roads. Another daughter, nine-year-old Reumah, sat in the back seat, goggle-eyed at the wild countryside. The other passenger was Prussian-born Arthur Ruppin, the head of the Jewish National Fund (JNF), wearing pince-nez glasses and a dark wool suit made by a Berlin tailor.

  The only people who weren’t surprised at Ruth’s choice for a husband were members of the Bedouin el-Mazarib tribe. Many of them armed, they didn’t notice the subtleties of class and social differences. For them, all of the Jews were strangers from a far-away world. Nor did they seem like the other conquerors that had been passing through Palestine for centuries. The Jews came with spades, not guns. One of the tribe’s young hotheads had recently clubbed Moshe over the head; and, by attending the ceremony, they wanted to show the “Jewish Bedouin” their respect for being strong enough to spring back so quickly from a nasty thrashing.

  Under the wedding chuppah stood Ruth dressed like a milkmaid in an embroidered Romanian blouse and a peasant dress a friend had made from a bed sheet. (She had proudly turned down her parents’ offer to buy her a proper wedding dress.) Moshe, with the purple knot on his head and a black eye, wore khaki pants, an open-necked shirt, and a sweat-stained cap. The bride and groom, like everyone else that day, were furiously swatting away flies and mosquitos.

  The moment the rabbi, who had arrived in the back of an oxen cart from a nearby settlement, pronounced Ruth and Moshe man and wife, the el-Mazarib warriors fired off rounds of bullets into the air, and several musicians, sitting on their haunches, played darbukas. The Jewish guests, including stolid Dr. Ruppin in his beautifully tailored suit and tie, danced traditional Bedouin debkas. In the midst of the merrymaking, while everyone was still dancing and swaying with home-brewed grapefruit wine, Ruth slipped off to the stalls. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy as I was at that moment,” she would recall nearly eighty years later, “squatting next to the cow, holding its teats. Yes, it was the happiest day of my life.”

  Before the First World War, Ruth’s family had joined a wave of idealists and dreamers from Eastern Europe, who traveled to poor, desiccated Palestine.

  Ruth’s maternal grandfather Boris came from the Russian village of Kishinev, ruled by a malevolent feudal lord who made a sport of unleashing ferocious dogs from his castle on his Jews. It was on Boris’s front porch that the great Hebrew poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik wrote his dirge, “In the City of Slaughter,” on the Kis
hinev pogrom, and what he perceived as a cowering Jewish weakness in the diaspora: “The heirs of Hasmoneans/ who lie in the privies and jakes and pigsties/with trembling knees.”

  Though Boris was European to the fingertips, he resolved to flee from this ungrateful continent with its “privies and jakes and pigsties.” After finishing his studies in chemistry at the Sorbonne in the 1890s, where he attended Marie Curie’s lectures, he moved to Palestine in 1903 and opened up a small business producing grease for the Ottoman Hajaz railroad.

  Beautiful Rachel, his daughter, met Ruth’s father Tzvi at the famed Herzliya high school-gymnasium—where what would become the military, political, and intellectual elite of the Jewish state sat in the same classrooms. In their free time, they were busy discussing how best to create a new society. Rachel and Tzvi, both sixteen-year-old rebels out to overturn social taboos and crusty power structures, committed the unheard of sin of moving in together. It was Rachel’s idea, of course.

  Ruth came along in 1917. Five years later, the young family headed to London because Rachel and Tzvi enrolled at the London School of Economics, a hotbed of socialist thought, where George Bernard Shaw and Beatrice and Sidney Webb still haunted its corridors.

  One of Ruth’s strongest memories of Edwardian London was the wedding of the Duke of York in Westminster Abbey, the first public royal wedding in five centuries. Dressed in her Skinners’ Girls School uniform and sucking on a purple lollipop, wide-eyed little Ruth sat on the pavement. “I was reading about kings and queens and royalty in my fairy-tale books, and now there they were: men in powdered wigs and ladies in long, flowing gowns, the bells, and horses, and the gilded royal carriages.” Her socialist mother, naturally, didn’t approve of such “sentimental rubbish,” but her little girl went on dreaming of her own prince, with badges and a noble sword at his side.