21
Cohen next surfaces at the Sharm el-Sheikh airfield, near the radar station that was destroyed by Egyptian missiles on the first night of the war, and then attacked by mistake by Israeli tanks. The girls from the station, the ones who appear at the beginning of this book, were now in huts down by the runway, trying not to think about their friends. The rumours that the radar station had been captured, and the women raped, were still circulating and had reached their families at home. That wasn’t true, but it was true that seven soldiers had been killed. Not all of their families knew. So many Israelis were dying that the army’s burial and notification apparatus was overwhelmed.
A popular singer with long blond hair, Miri Aloni, arrived at the airfield with a few other travelling musicians and played “Song for Peace,” a Hebrew protest song that includes the lines “Don’t look back / let those who are gone go.” That infuriated Pnina, the senior girl from the radar station. How could you say, “Let them go”? She gave three friends slices of cheesecake in their guard post, walked away, and never saw them again. These performers didn’t know what the soldiers had been through. She never forgave Miri Aloni.
Ruti, the popular soldier who ran the telephone switchboard, the one who was friends with the dark-haired poet Doron, kept taking calls from Doron’s mother and sister. They became more frantic as the days passed. No one was telling them anything, and the switchboard number at the airfield was the only one they had. Where was he?
He wasn’t there right now, she answered, as instructed. She’d let him know they called. She said it again and again until someone must have told them, because they stopped calling.
Ruti kept writing in her diary and sending notes to her parents on army-issue postcards. These postcards had cheerful cartoons unrelated to what was actually happening in the war—a cheeky Israeli soldier looming like Godzilla over the Syrian capital, Damascus, or churning the Arab armies in a meat grinder. Ruti describes her young self as “very militaristic.” She believed in the Israel Defense Forces. She wrote optimistic notes reassuring her parents:
I don’t have much to write. We’re working hard and barely sleeping, but the feeling of self-sacrifice is so great that we don’t feel tired. In general, you have nothing to worry about. You have to trust the soldiers and the pilots and this whole wonderful army. Things will be okay, I promise!
The night before, in her diary, she’d written:
I miss the ones who were killed.
In another postcard she informed her parents:
I forgot to tell you that right next to my office is the huge tail of a MiG-17.
This was one of the enemy planes shot down in the dogfight on the first day of the war.
I have a camera that I brought from home, and we’re planning to take pictures next to the MiG in a thousand poses, because there’s no satisfaction greater than that, than seeing things like that. When I saw it, the first thing I did was spit on it. By the way, the body of the Egyptian pilot is lying here near the base and it’s—
Here the military censor has blacked out a few words, which she thinks were “broken into pieces.” The last line reads:
Today Leonard Cohen is playing.
Ruti’s postcard is dated October 20, the fifteenth day of the war. The truth is that Ruti didn’t care about Leonard Cohen. She was more excited about the Israeli stars who were coming through the base almost every day. But Orly, the radar operator who copied poetry on her Perspex table, was so thrilled by the news that she fought to get out of a shift so she could see him.
The hall at the base could hold about two hundred people and it was packed. Orly was entranced. This was the first time she’d seen someone as famous as Cohen, someone unattainable, all the way from America. “He had this charm,” she said, “you couldn’t resist it, I think women can’t resist it at all. He had something about him, something dark and mysterious.”
Her most vivid memory of Cohen isn’t from the concert but from her bed in the girls’ barracks. It was a simple iron cot of army issue, over which she’d tacked a few poems by Rachel and a drawing of a mother and child by Ruth Schloss, the Israeli communist painter, which she cut out of a book.
One of the officers at the base, Tammy, came to her that afternoon and asked where Cohen could rest before the show. “I was dying for him to sleep in my bed,” Orly told me. “Not with me, but in my bed. I wasn’t there.” She offered her bed nonchalantly, so that the other girls wouldn’t understand what it meant to her, so no one would steal Cohen and offer him their own bed. She and Tammy brought clean sheets.
She sees Leonard Cohen’s head on her pillow, underneath the drawing of the mother and child. Orly was nineteen at the time, and a grandmother when she told this story. “I didn’t want any of the other girls to know who I had in my bed,” she said. “I had his songs in my ears.”