17
No one in Tokyo knew it was Yom Kippur. Isaac isn’t sure he knew. He was as far as he could go from Israel and Jews and his kibbutz and Almond Reconnaissance, from hunting infiltrators on the Gaza border. He was done with the army and out in the world, past the outer limits, selling paintings on the underground—Ginza Line, Marunouchi Line, Toei Line 1. Kyobashi Station, Toranomon Station, Akasaka-mitsuke. White-gloved conductors. Neon reflections on wet asphalt. Schoolgirl braids and Elvis haircuts.
He had no plans to go home. But when the news came, Isaac knew his friends would be in the thick of it, and the need to be with them overruled everything else. He took his little Toyota to a garage and left it there with a note asking the mechanic to send him $600 to Israel, but never got the money. Then he took the little he had saved and tried to get a flight from Japan heading west.
Isaac had a friend from Almond Reconnaissance named Shlomi, who was on the other side of the world in London, working as an air marshal for El Al. In the Israeli army, the unit called Almond is a legend from the old days, when there were still wild units operating outside the rules. The soldiers from Almond had their own goat herd. They took turns on shepherd duty. They were mostly kids fresh from the fields of the kibbutzim, educated in practical communism and the ideals of secular humanism, and good at war. The unit didn’t believe in taking prisoners. If you fought Almond Reconnaissance either they died, or you did. The spirit came from the Bedouin fighter Abd el-Majid Hidr, who’d decided to be someone else, changed his name, and became the Israeli commander Amos Yarkoni. He had one arm. It’s a long story.
Isaac and Shlomi had served under an officer who was blond and a bit crazy, one of the best young field commanders in the army. No one used his real name, which was Amatzia. Everyone called him Patzi. There are lots of stories about Patzi. Once, a few years before the war, the Almond soldiers were on a raid deep in Jordan and fought their way back to the Israeli border, but just barely. They were about to cross to safety when Patzi stopped the whole force in enemy territory. He reminded everyone that it was Purim, the raucous festival of masks and inebriation, and forced them all to stand there and sing Purim songs to his satisfaction before he agreed to lead them home.
Some of the Almond stories sound like Irish ballads or country songs. There was one incursion into Jordan where the soldiers killed a mare by mistake. They laid an ambush for guerrillas and the horse surprised them. In the morning they discovered a beautiful red foal grazing near its mother’s body, and being farm kids, they lassoed it, brought it grass, and took care of it in the house where they were holed up. When the unit returned to Israel, one of the lieutenants snuck the foal over the border in a half-track and took it to live on his kibbutz in the north. He left the army when he got his girlfriend pregnant, went for a stint of reserve duty along the Suez Canal, and was blown up by an Egyptian mine, leaving a baby daughter and the Jordanian foal. After that (so the story goes) the lieutenant’s father never said much. He moved his bed into the stable and raised the red foal like a son. The horse’s descendants still canter around northern Israel.
From Tokyo, Isaac managed to get a flight to Rome, where the El Al desk was mobbed and turning people away. But they were letting infantry officers through. That’s how he made it all the way from Japan to his kibbutz, Evron, which is on the coast near the border with Lebanon. He’d been away for a long time and hadn’t expected to be back. No one knew he was coming. He walked through the gate and up the road to the factory that made irrigation valves. That’s where he was, with his shaggy traveller’s beard and his backpack, when his father pedalled by on a bike, busy with his work, steering with his right hand and holding a wooden ladder with his left. His father didn’t see him.
Isaac’s father, Michael, was a small man who’d been an executive at a department store in Budapest. Michael had another family before Isaac was born, a wife and two daughters, who were two and four. All three were killed by the Germans, but Michael survived in a forced-labour unit whose members were sent to walk through minefields. If you lost a foot, the Germans just shot you. He ended up living to 102.
Isaac’s mother was married to another husband before the war and had another child. She survived alone. It wasn’t a rare story in Israel in those days. Michael had been reduced by immigration, losing his status and employment prospects in this harsh new country. He became a house-painter on the kibbutz. Isaac’s mother, who was beautiful and glamorous, left him for someone else when Isaac was small. Isaac was Michael’s only son, and all he had left.
Isaac wasn’t a professional photographer yet, though he’d become one later on. But he already had his camera, a Nikon F2, in his hand much of the time. He was holding it as his father rode by. This became the first image of Isaac’s remarkable photographic account of the war:
After he snapped the picture, Isaac lowered the camera and called out.
Michael was overjoyed to see him. No one had known exactly where Isaac was, or if he was going to make it back. Other young men from the kibbutz had been arriving and disappearing into the war, and it seemed there were questions being asked about the ones who still hadn’t shown up. Maybe not even asked aloud, but implied. These kids had been raised to fight. It was what the Jewish people required, so that what happened before couldn’t happen again. Were they going to do what was expected?
Michael wasn’t just happy to see his son again, he was relieved. He said something that Isaac never forgot, and which he repeated to me in a little kibbutz house a few hundred yards away from where this moment had happened forty-seven years before. He’d repeated the sentence, turning it over in his head, many times. His father said, “I’m so happy you came to the war.”
Isaac loved his father until his death. He keeps a large photograph of him, one he took himself, on the wall. But he never forgot those words—the way his father was willing to sacrifice him, the idea that there were things more important than his only living son. It’s an unsettling story, one of our oldest, from Genesis. If this were a novel, the character of the boy would have to be named Isaac, but in a novel you wouldn’t dare call him that. It would be too much.