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Before leaving the country, Cohen returned to Tel Aviv. It took him a few days to get his head in order and disentangle himself. In this time, according to his manuscript, he methodically violated the halfhearted vow of chastity he’d taken on the plane over—in Room 8 at the Gad Hotel with one woman, then on the beach, then again in Room 8 but with someone else.
33. I hang out in Tel Aviv cafes for a few days until I make myself sick.
34. I decide to leave Israel, but I must go to Jerusalem first. I will walk to Jerusalem. I get lost in the outskirts of Tel Aviv and find myself back on the street with all the cafes.
He gave up on walking to Jerusalem and instead took a bus. He was reunited one last time with Asher and Margolit, the couple he’d met on the plane to Israel, the ones who represented commitment to this place, and this tribe, and to each other. Margolit’s pretty sister was also there. At dinner Asher said, continuing the theme of their dialogues, “You must decide whether you are a lecher or a priest.” Cohen didn’t want to be a priest.
The owner of a hummus joint in downtown Jerusalem, Meir Micha, remembers seeing Cohen in the street. Meir was also just back from the front and recognized Cohen because he’d seen him play in Sinai. Meir doesn’t remember what he sang, just that he smoked Gitanes, blue, with no filter—“a cigarette with a message, the artist’s cigarette.” Jerusalem gets cold by early November. The limestone buildings glisten in the rain. He remembers Cohen walking alone, hands stuffed into the pockets of a long coat. Meir was too shy to approach him. But others did, as Cohen wrote: “People stop me and thank me here and tell me never to leave Jerusalem.” But he left, of course.
The literary manuscript, which he typed after his return, ends with him back in the white house on the island with Suzanne and their child. “That is the end of the story,” he wrote,
except to tell you how she became beautiful, as if I knew. The wind keeps slamming my shutter and then throwing it open in order to expose to the night the pathetic sight of me at my table. Twice I’ve had to chase a thin dog away from the garbage. It is a fierce night. There is no question that the moon will survive the clouds. As surely as the brain can clear, she has become beautiful. As surely as the war is a dream and the wounded men can’t remember why, she has become beautiful.
The manuscript wasn’t published, or even finished. After that Cohen rarely mentioned the war. The silence was not only a feature of interviews but also of private conversations, according to his close friend, the American writer Leon Wieseltier: “Leonard spoke about his most private experiences but never about his public ones,” Wieseltier said. “He never talked about his participation in public or historical events.” The reason, he thought, was that “it would have sounded vainglorious.” That sounds right, though the answer might also lie in the belief that his poetry would be reduced by a connection to real events. It’s also possible that Cohen’s appearance on the Israeli side in the war contradicted his desire for independence from any side at all, and his suspicion of political programs—“Just according to whose plan?” And it’s true that attitudes toward Israel were changing in the years after the war, in part because winning, which Israel had just done at great cost, makes you less sympathetic. The politics became more treacherous.
The only interviewer who seems to have published anything of significance on the topic was the British music writer Robin Pike, who met Cohen in London less than a year later, in September 1974.
PIKE: You mentioned that you went back to Israel at the time of the last war and you sang. Can you say a bit more about that? How did you actually take part?
COHEN: I just attached myself to an air force entertainment group. We would just drop into little places, like a rocket site, and they would shine their flashlights at us and we would sing a few songs. Or they would give us a Jeep and we would go down the road toward the front and wherever we saw a few soldiers waiting for a helicopter or something like that we would sing a few songs. And maybe back at the airbase we would do a little concert, maybe with amplifiers. It was very informal and very intense. Wherever you saw soldiers you would just stop and sing.
PIKE: It strikes me as being rather dangerous. You didn’t feel any personal anxiety about being killed?
COHEN: I did once or twice. But you get caught up in the thing. And the desert is beautiful and you think your life is meaningful for a moment or two. And war is wonderful. They’ll never stamp it out. It’s one of the few times people can act their best. It’s so economical in terms of gesture or motion. Every single gesture is precise, every effort is at its maximum. Nobody goofs off. Everybody is responsible for his brother. The sense of community and kinship and brotherhood, devotion. There are opportunities to feel things that you simply cannot feel in modern city life. Very impressive.
PIKE: Obviously you found that stimulated you. Did you find it stimulated your writing at all?
COHEN: In a little way. But not really. I wrote a song there.
PIKE: Wars have in the past been times when people have written great things after or during.
COHEN: I didn’t suffer enough. I didn’t lose anyone I knew.
A month later, speaking with the Spanish writer Jordi Sierra i Fabra after a concert in Barcelona, the subject came up again. Here he’s less patient.
FABRA: Why did you end the concert with a military salute? Why do you do this after each concert you give?
COHEN: Because I don’t consider myself a civilian. I consider myself a soldier, and that’s the way soldiers salute.
FABRA: But…a soldier? On which side? In what sense?
COHEN: I will leave that to your imagination. I am a soldier. That’s all. I don’t want to speak of wars or sides.
FABRA: Nonetheless, “Lover Lover Lover” is dedicated to your “brothers” in the Arab-Israeli war, and besides, you were there, singing for them. This indicates you’re taking a side, and in a way, fighting for it.
COHEN: Personal process is one thing. It’s blood, it’s the identification one feels with their roots and their origins. The militarism I practice as a person and a writer is another thing.
FABRA: But you worry about war, and for that reason it would be logical that you would be concerned about both sides.
COHEN: I don’t want to talk about war.
After that there’s barely a reference to the experience in interviews, or any consideration by Cohen of what it meant to him. Anyone hoping for a hint had to be paying enough attention to his work to notice the song “Night Comes On,” which appeared a decade later on the album Various Positions. By that time Cohen seemed like yesterday’s man, and his American label famously didn’t even bother releasing the album, though it included not only the enduring “Dance Me to the End of Love” and “If It Be Your Will,” which might be his best song, but also “Hallelujah,” now one of the most popular songs on earth.
Each verse in “Night Comes On” notes a chapter in the poet’s biography: the death of his mother a few years before, unhappy domesticity, the wondrous arrival of his own children. It’s a song about Cohen’s intimate life with the people closest to him. Amid all of this, after a conversation with his mother at her snowy grave—
We were fighting in Egypt when they signed this agreement
That nobody else had to die
There was this terrible sound, my father went down
With a terrible wound in his side
He said, try to go on, take my books, take my gun
Remember, my son, how they lied
And the night comes on, it’s very calm
I’d like to pretend that my father was wrong
But you don’t want to lie, not to the young.
Nathan Cohen fought in the Great War as a lieutenant, one of the first Jews to be commissioned an officer in the Canadian army. He died when his son was nine, and Leonard Cohen really did treasure his books and his gun, a .38 revolver. Nathan’s death came many years after his war was over, and the cause was illness. But here Cohen links it to the war that “we” fought in Egypt, which he seems to consider worthy of inclusion in a short list of momentous events in the life of his family.
Decades later, when Cohen’s biographer Sylvie Simmons was working on her 2012 book, I’m Your Man, she asked him about the war. Cohen was in his seventies and less guarded. Now he spelled out, for the first and possibly the only time, the importance of the events of October 1973. The quotes didn’t make it into the published biography, and Simmons was kind enough to allow me to publish them here.
“You seemed to have been drawn to violence,” she said to her subject.
At times you seemed to be looking for a war—your journey to Cuba, or trying to join the Israeli army in the Yom Kippur War.
COHEN: Yes, I did. Just because of the sense of cowardice that drives people to contradict their own deepest understanding of their own natures, they put themselves in dangerous situations.
SIMMONS: As a test?
COHEN: A kind of test, and hoping for some kind of contradiction about your own deepest conviction.
Simmons asked about the impact on his life afterward. He said:
After I’d been in this little war, which had a big effect on me, when I came back to Hydra after the war, and the experience of seeing what happens to people in war, I thought I’d try to make a go of it, of this situation. There was a little child, there was a nice house in Hydra, there was Suzanne, we had a history. And there was so much death and horror in the world, you know? I’m going to tend the little garden. It may not be the garden I wanted and exactly the flowers I planted, but it’s my little garden and I’m going to do my best.
That might be what Cohen meant when he wrote at the end of his manuscript that his wife is beautiful again. The year after the war, Cohen and Suzanne had a second child, a daughter, who they named Lorca, after the Spanish poet.