20
Cohen and the band had flown across the canal into Egyptian territory that had just been captured, almost to the front line. The war was at its climax.
25. A helicopter dropped us on the African side of the Canal. This airport had been taken a day or two before. We sang in a concrete hangar. There was an Egyptian calendar on the wall and they had also left some food behind. I happened to be trying to get some sleep beside these tin cans. One of the cans, a giant-sized can of mashed potatoes said, A Gift from the People of Canada.
26. We had to take cover now and then.
27. Feeling good in the desert. War is ok. People at their best. As my friend Layton said about acid on his first ‘trip’: They’ll never stamp this out.
In Shlomi’s memory, on the night he saw him, Cohen was illuminated by the lights of a small truck. He had no audience and was strumming to himself. Maybe he was just waiting to be taken somewhere else. Or maybe he was trying to play but the soldiers were too exhausted or depressed to listen, or didn’t notice he was there.
The Israeli knew who it was because he’d actually seen Cohen twice: first in concert in New York during one of his trips there with the airline, and then on an Athens–Tel Aviv flight before the war. When Cohen carried a guitar onto the plane, the flight attendant didn’t recognize him and tried to make him stow it, and Shlomi intervened. They struck up a conversation, though the singer seemed guarded. “You feel that he’s travelling in worlds that belong to him,” Shlomi said. “His sentences were not constructed in the ordinary way. Sometimes he’d focus, but you didn’t always feel that he was with you.”
Here in the desert, Cohen gave no sign of recognition and didn’t seem talkative. Shlomi was so surprised to see the singer in the war that he said nothing. He tried to call his friends, but they were hungry and tired and didn’t know Leonard Cohen. So he just listened along with two or three other soldiers who drifted over.
Though Shlomi can’t say exactly when this happened, or where, he knows what Cohen was singing: a version of “Lover Lover Lover” with a verse that identified with the Israeli soldiers. It touched him to hear those lines, to know that someone like Cohen had come all the way to Israel and travelled to Sinai and even crossed the Suez Canal to be with them.
The Arab states were arrayed against Israel, and most of the countries of Europe were now refusing even to allow supply flights to refuel on their way here. Israelis had a feeling of acute isolation. Cohen wasn’t a plane full of weapons or reinforcements, but he meant something. The singer said a few sentences to his tiny audience. In Shlomi’s memory it was, “You’re all together, and you’re here for one another, and it’s so rare and touching to see it. It’s amazing to be here with you and see how you’re together without asking questions.” Shlomi remembers those last words in particular, “without asking questions,” which echo something Cohen once said about why he’s drawn to armies. “I don’t really have any desire to shoot anyone’s face off,” he told an interviewer. “But, given how lazily undisciplined, wild and greedy we all are, when you actually manage to get a few people organized into clean clothes, graceful marching patterns and a habit of discipline and obedience, I guess it’s really some kind of miracle. And those are exactly the same kind of methods used in monasteries, or in any form of training. That notion of training has always interested me, and the army has traditionally been a place where young men are trained.”
After that, Cohen left the encampment and drove off into the desert. A year or two later, after “Lover Lover Lover” was released, Shlomi heard it on the radio. “But the bastard changed the words,” he said. The part identifying with the Israelis was gone.
Over the years, Shlomi tried to remember exactly what the words were. But it was nearly five decades before he heard them again, when I read him the verse I found in Cohen’s notebook, the one where the poet calls the soldiers “my brothers” and says he’s come to help them fight. When I was done, Shlomi was quiet for a few moments. He’s always wanted to know why those lines were erased, he said. The change doesn’t make him angry, just sad. He wants to love Leonard Cohen, and this interferes. He thought Cohen was really there with them, unlike the other artists who came to play, even the Israelis. Shlomi owns a bar in Tel Aviv and has spent his life dealing with performers. He thinks little of most of them. “A lot of people say they sang in the war,” he said, “but actually it was just air force bases, and the next day they were back at Café Casit. Not Leonard Cohen. He was really there. He ate a combat ration with us. I opened a can for him. He was a human being.”
That’s why it hurt when Cohen pulled back. The man Leonard Cohen was on the Israeli side, and the song was written at an Israeli base, but the poet Leonard Cohen thought his words had to be bigger than the Israelis and bigger than the war. Later, when Cohen performed “Lover Lover Lover” onstage, he’d acknowledge where he wrote the song. But he’d tell the audience it was for soldiers “on both sides.” At one concert in France he even claimed to have written it for “the Egyptians and the Israelis,” in that order.
The nighttime encounter with Cohen is a strange memory. Isaac and Patzi, who were in the same encampment, have no recollection of it. The show everyone remembers happened shortly afterward, possibly the next day, at an intersection near the captured air base at Fa’id. Sharon had set up his divisional headquarters here as the army pushed into Africa and began to cut off the enemy forces who were now stranded on the Israeli side of the canal. No one remembers how Cohen arrived, just that he was suddenly there. Isaac got it on film.
In one of the photos, Cohen is singing with Rovina and Caspi:
And then just with Caspi:
Because this was Sharon’s headquarters, and because the general attracted attention, there were a few cameras in the crowd. That’s why, if you’ve ever seen a photo from a Cohen concert in Sinai, it’s probably from this one. There was also a technician from Army Radio who can be seen recording the show; it’s not clear what happened to the tapes. The photos help us imagine the many undocumented shows of the war tour—the guitar case on the sand with the name Matti in chalk, belonging to Matti Caspi; Cohen’s military garb; the soldiers huddled around the singers.
Isaac photographed Cohen while crouching close to the singer. The best photo was taken by another soldier, Yakovi Doron, who was standing further away and caught the sweep of the scene. Doron was an artillery spotter who’d driven down from the hills, where he’d been radioing coordinates to the big guns dropping shells on the Egyptians below.
In this frame, General Sharon is to the left of Cohen, speaking to Rovina, who’s standing behind the singer. The photo shows the concert, Doron told me, but not what was around them in the desert. Before seeing Cohen, he’d come across a unit of Egyptians who’d just been killed in battle, fifteen or twenty of them lying near a burned-out truck. He still remembers the smell. He snapped a few shots because he wanted to remember how awful everything was. They were on the same roll of Kodachrome slide film that he used to take photos of the concert, but he doesn’t know where those photos are now.
The soldier next to Caspi, with the skullcap and his hand touching his mouth, is Eli Kraus, who was twenty-one. On the day that Cohen appeared, he recalled, there was a pause in the action and someone came over with word that entertainers had somehow reached their camp. Many of the soldiers were too tired to get up, or didn’t feel like hearing music. Eli was attached to Sharon’s headquarters as part of a burial team commanded by an army rabbi. The team’s job was to go to the battlefields and pick up the dead. He’d already been at the Chinese Farm, one of the worst battles of the war, and in the bombardment of the canal crossing. At one point he drove a jeep all night from the front across the Sinai desert back to his kibbutz in southern Israel to see his wife. They’d been married for five months. On his way, outside a different kibbutz not far from home, he stopped at an army graveyard to drop off a body he had in the back. When Eli heard about the singers, he walked over to see. He didn’t know who Leonard Cohen was, but was excited to recognize Matti Caspi. An army photographer caught Cohen, for once, in the audience:
Cohen described it like this:
29. We drive toward Ismailia. We stop at the most advanced position. Desert landscape, tanks the only architecture. I am introduced to a great general, ‘The Lion of the Desert.’ I pay homage to his vitality and silently demand, ‘How dare you?’ He does not repent.
30. Men form a circle around us and we sing for them.
Sharon’s first name, Ariel, means “Lion of God.” There’s a slightly different version of this encounter in another draft of the manuscript:
I am introduced to a great general, “The Lion of the Desert.” Under my breath I ask him, “How dare you?” He does not repent. We drink some cognac sitting on the sand in the shade of a tank. I want his job.
It’s unclear if Sharon knew who Cohen was, or cared. The episode doesn’t appear in his memoir, and his son Gilead can’t remember his father ever mentioning it.
In the audience, taking in the songs along with Sharon and with everyone else, was Patzi, fresh from the battlefield, not running the war like a general but fighting it with his hands. In this moment he and Cohen are two human archetypes, or two sides of our nature—“man of peace and man of war,” as Cohen put it in “Story of Isaac.” The singer who called himself “Field Commander Cohen” and his band the Army, for whom war was a metaphor or an ironic pose; and the blond field commander, for whom war was fresh terror and the corpses of real people, both friends and foes, lying in the sand nearby. The poet, the connoisseur of beauty and morality; and the man who employs violence to create the bubble of safety where poets can be oblivious to those actions or even condemn the people who have to take them.
“Israel, and you who call yourself Israel,” wrote Cohen a decade later in Book of Mercy, his take on the Book of Psalms, “the Church that calls itself Israel, and the revolt that calls itself Israel, and every nation chosen to be a nation—none of these lands is yours, all of you are thieves of holiness, all of you are at war with Mercy. Who will say it?” he asks in a kind of prophetic rage, and without the self-mocking that makes most of Cohen’s critiques tolerable. Cohen would probably reject the idea of any political context for the poem at all, but it was published after Israel’s Lebanon war of 1982, when the country’s image became more Goliath than David, and when the Western left began to turn against it in earnest. “Therefore you rule over chaos, you hoist your flags with no authority, and the heart that is still alive hates you, and the remnant of Mercy is ashamed to look at you,” he goes on, working himself up. Years before, as a young and rebellious poet in Montreal, he’d condemned the empty ritual of the Jewish synagogue and was now condemning the empty politics of the Jewish state. “You decompose behind your flimsy armour, your stench alarms you,” says the prophet. The heavens are angry “because you do not wrestle with your angel. Because you dare to live without God. Because your cowardice has led you to believe that the victor does not limp.”
Patzi has little patience for war nostalgia or military histories. Today, as you’d expect, the field commander isn’t a man of teary recollections. It’s possible, without special effort, to imagine him taking over an infantry company at eighty. Decades later, it couldn’t possibly matter which tank company went where, he told me, or which general said what. He’d never heard of Leonard Cohen before that day in 1973 and doesn’t listen to his music now. So I was surprised to hear him say that seeing Cohen meant a great deal to him, and that he’s never forgotten it.
I had hesitated when explaining what I was writing about, afraid he’d dismiss the idea as frivolity. Instead, he said he thought it was the only kind of thing worth writing about a war.
“What touched me very deeply,” said the old soldier of that late afternoon in Africa, as the war entered its final week, after many horrors and before many more, “was this Jew hunched over a guitar, sitting quietly and playing for us. I asked who he was, and someone said he was from Canada or God knows where, a Jew who came to raise the spirit of the fighters. It was Leonard Cohen. Since then, he has a corner of my heart.”