13
“We drove hundreds of kilometres in a Volkswagen van, double-cabin, with combat rations,” Pupik recalled. “Desert without end.”
On one road near the canal, Pupik sat in the back of a truck, bumping around in the dust and noise. He doesn’t think Cohen was with him this time. A plume rose ahead of the truck, “as if someone kicked the sand with his foot.” Then another one. They were being shelled, so they turned the truck around and raced back, stopping at an intersection where they all got out to pee from relief until a few soldiers pulled up in a jeep and screamed at them that the Egyptians were zeroed in on all the intersections, so they jumped back into the truck and sped further back behind Israeli lines. You had to be careful, but even if you were, it wouldn’t necessarily help. There was one rising star, the singer Roman Sharon, twenty-three years old and handsome, who was leaving a show at the Refidim air base when an army semi-trailer hit his truck and killed him.
Cohen requested no special treatment. When the performers reached a base they’d just throw sleeping bags on the floor of the PX or some other room, but they thought Cohen might have different standards and offered to find him a real bed. He said no. He slept on the floor and ate combat rations like everyone else. That meant something to the Israelis. “I was so impressed by him that I treated him with awe. We didn’t talk like friends,” Pupik remembered. “I tried to open a door to get to him, but he didn’t open up, maybe just a crack. But he was someone who gave off an aura of good-heartedness, of unusual humanity.”
Pupik was a member of the Tel Aviv bohemian set centred on the charismatic degenerate Uri Zohar, an actor, and the singer Arik Einstein. The kibbutz socialists of the founding generation had discarded Jewish tradition, and young people like Pupik weren’t interested in socialism or the kibbutz, or in ideology of any kind, so what was left was just sunshine and the beach and whatever urge struck you. After the Yom Kippur War some of them realized this wasn’t enough, they needed a reason for things, and fled the emptiness back to old-time religion. It was partly the shock of the war, and partly the post-sixties hangover that began to be felt across the Western world, and partly because they were getting older. Eventually even the ringleader, Uri Zohar himself, disappeared into the world of black hats in Jerusalem and remains there to this day. But Pupik was one of the first to go. He gave up on secular life right after the war, hanging up his flamboyant striped bell-bottoms. When I met him in his small apartment in Jerusalem, he was known as Rabbi Mordechai Arnon. He had a big black skullcap and a long grey beard through which it was barely possible to see the face of the sprite from the old photos.
Cohen was interested in Judaism, he remembered, and knew a lot about it. Pupik didn’t. He knew so little about his own civilization that he “wasn’t a Jew.” He knew songs and parties, the life of the new Israelis freed of the hang-ups and nightmares of their parents. And he knew hashish, which everyone smoked, but which he says he smoked more than everyone.
On Yom Kippur, Pupik was back home with his parents at their scrappy agricultural collective. Pupik saw significance in the following story, which he told me carefully. You can hear the hoarse laugh of history somewhere in here, just out of reach. Leonard Cohen would get it.
Pupik still had no interest in religion but thought the fast would be a good way to kick his smoking habit, because that was also forbidden on the Day of Atonement. He was unhappy with his life and wanted to regain control. So he was in synagogue for the first time in years, and after the prayer of Unetaneh Tokef and the famous list of the many ways to die, after the end of the midday service and before the Book of Jonah, he was out on the street and a man came up to him.
The man was in his fifties. He asked in Yiddish for a cigarette. The comic had come here to stop smoking, and the man was looking for a cigarette on Yom Kippur! But Pupik wanted to help, so he took the man over to his childhood home, where his parents were resting before the afternoon service, and gave him a pack of cigarettes. The man ducked his head behind the balcony wall so he couldn’t be seen from the street, lit up, and inhaled. He said, still speaking Yiddish: I’ll tell you why I smoke on Yom Kippur.
We were eighteen, the man said, when the world war broke out. We were drafted to fight in the Red Army. What’s the first thing you take? Mahorka, bags of tobacco to roll. So we’re riding in the troop train, singing songs to keep the spirit up, and I’m smoking a cigarette, when one of the other Jewish soldiers, a righteous Jew, suddenly bangs on the wall and shouts in Yiddish, raboisai! Gentlemen! Today is Yom Kippur! It was the holiest day of the year, a fast day, and here he was on his way to a war, spitting in God’s face by smoking.
Since then, the man said, exhaling, I can’t let Yom Kippur go by without smoking a cigarette. He wandered off, and Pupik never saw him again. An hour later came the siren and the war started.
Later, when the comic found faith, he came to see divine intervention in the war’s outbreak on Yom Kippur of all days. It’s the only day of the year when Israel’s roads are completely empty, which allowed the army to deploy quickly. That was the first miracle of the war, the first of many. “God is watching us to an extent that’s unbelievable,” said Rabbi Mordechai Arnon when we spoke forty-five years later. “All you need to do is open your eyes.”
Back then he couldn’t talk to Cohen about Judaism, but he did know something about astrology, so they talked about that. The Israelis spoke among themselves about music or philosophy, or sometimes just amused themselves with rambling, associative nonsense in keeping with the surreal life of those weeks. Cohen would sometimes sit out in the desert and look up at the stars. We don’t know what the singer thought about his conversations with Pupik or the other Israelis, because he doesn’t mention them in his writing. In fact, he doesn’t mention the musicians who travelled with him at all. In Cohen’s account he was there alone.
This might have something to do with Matti Caspi’s response when I asked him about the tour. Of the four Israelis in the improvised band, Caspi was the most talented and the most successful later on. He’s an icon here, like Cohen. It was Caspi who accompanied Cohen in the shows, and there’s one photograph from the desert in which you see Cohen, uniquely, not playing but listening closely to someone else, and it’s Caspi. I had found some of Caspi’s written recollections but hoped he’d say more. He wouldn’t. “I don’t have anything to add about Leonard Cohen,” he replied, “because no close connection was formed between us, and I don’t like filling holes in the air.”
The Israeli performers with Cohen were an interesting crew in their own right, and a few notable songs came out of their time together. Oshik, the balladeer, was carrying around a collection by the Hebrew poet Leah Goldberg, and somewhere on the road in Sinai he gave the book to Caspi, who selected “For Some Time,” a poem that isn’t about war at all, but about a woman’s loneliness. Caspi wrote music, Oshik recorded it after the war, and the song is still famous. Caspi also managed to write a song about how the only honest response to a war is to say nothing. “We Have No Words” has an ironic, catchy tune so an audience can clap their hands and sing along:
We have no words
And we have no tune
That’s okay, we can always just sing “la la la”
There’s footage of the four Israeli members of the band performing “We Have No Words” for soldiers after the ceasefire. It’s the closest thing we have to footage of the tour itself. By this time Cohen’s gone, but Matti Caspi is there with his odd, impersonal gaze; Rovina with her sculpted blond helmet and theatrical stance; Oshik with his shaggy hairdo and white turtleneck; and Pupik, cracking jokes from the side.
At the time, Pupik saw himself as a kind of comic warrior, sallying forth four or five times a day, indoors, outdoors, day and night, for people at the worst moment of their lives, some desperate for distraction, others wishing they were anywhere but at the show. When he improvised skits, he was like a trapeze artist. The crowd below wasn’t just wondering if he’d fall, but hoping he would. “Every show is a battle,” he said. “You have to defeat the audience.” Cohen’s onstage persona at this time couldn’t have been more different than that of the antic comedian, but he had a similar idea about performing. A year after the war he was asked by a Spanish journalist about his “severe attitude onstage,” his resistance to cracking a smile. “There are those who sing laughing, who prance around and make a show,” Cohen said. “I sing serious songs, and I’m serious onstage because I couldn’t do it any other way. I think that a bullfighter doesn’t enter the ring laughing. Rather, he enters thinking that he is betting his life against the bull.”
They were driving through the desert in the Volkswagen, Pupik told me, down miles of empty highway, when they stopped near an improvised structure with poles and a burlap roof. They sat in the shade to eat and were immediately beset by flies. They weren’t sure why, until someone said, “Hey, look at that.” Sticking out of a little pile of sand was a boot. It was attached to a leg. They were surrounded by corpses half-covered in sand.
14. We sang wherever men were gathered, sometimes in halls for hundreds, or beside anti-aircraft guns for tens or twenties. Sometimes there were lights, other times they would shine flashlights at us. We sang wherever we were asked.
15. Calluses developed on my fingertips. There were suggestions here and there that I was useful.
16. The only Replacement for a DC3 is another DC3.
17. Men were getting killed. I began to end our show with a new song. The chorus was: Lover lover lover lover lover lover lover come back to me.
18. I said to myself, Perhaps I can protect some people with this song. I would keep it going for a long time.